Wanting Sheila Dead (24 page)

“Wait,” Gregor said. “Go back to the last one.”

Tibor obligingly clicked again, and the screen was filled with a black-and-white photograph of the last murder scene in Engine House, a picture of Robert Hannaford's dead body lying across the hearth.

Gregor wasn't looking at the body. He'd seen the body up close and personal when it had been lying on that hearth for real. Instead, he looked up the photograph at the big mirror over the fireplace. He sat forward. Then he sat back. Then he sat forward again.

“I knew it,” he said.

“Knew what?” Tibor asked.

Gregor's phone began to beep in the way it did when he got a text message. He pulled it out of his pocket without looking at it.

“I knew you couldn't see the body in the mirror,” he told Tibor. “Today, you could see the body in the mirror. I saw the body in the mirror. But when Robert Hannaford's body was in the same place, all you could see was stuff on the opposite wall of the room.”

“This is important?” Tibor asked.

“I don't know,” Gregor said, looking down at his phone and clicking the little button that would allow him to read the text message.

He expected it to be from Bennis, wanting to know what they were going to do about dinner, but it wasn't.

MEET ME 745 AM DEXMALI CITY AVE
, the message said.
IT'S ABOUT THE GUN. DAVID
.

Gregor tapped his fingers on the arm of his chair. He hated text messages. David Mortimer should have called.

Olivia Dahl was not afraid of Sheila Dunham's rages, even when they were public rages. She'd been with this circus long enough to realize that the rages were always at least half calculated. Even when they seemed to be both spontaneous and off the wall, there was some part of Sheila's brain working in the background there, little hamster elements among the synapses making the world go round. The image was so compelling, Olivia was having a hard time getting it out of her head—Sheila's skull full of hamsters, all furiously pumping on wheels.

At the moment, Olivia was mostly worried about getting the legal pads placed on the table in front of the chairs where Sheila expected the other judges to sit. It was a ridiculous gesture. The judges were not corporate heavyweights or government heads of departments about to attend a meeting that would change the lives of thousands of people forever. They were just a small collection of D-list celebrities whose careers were long over, trying to look both important and unintimidating for a television audience that didn't care about them in the least.

Olivia knew the numbers that were important to this show. She knew them even better than Sheila did, and Sheila was surprisingly
coherent on the subject of numbers. What the viewers of this show wanted to see was the eliminations, which girl would go home this week, who would be caught on camera crying or fuming as they dragged their bags into the night.

Olivia had not been in favor of renting Engine House for this show. It was a wonderful place; she understood why rich and reticent people had lived here. But that was the thing, wasn't it? The people who had lived here were the kind of rich people who had no interest in being famous. That was why they'd tucked themselves out in the country where almost nobody was likely to drive by.

All the pads were on the table. Next to each pad were two ballpoint pens and a water glass. Three carafes of iced water were standing on trivets in the middle of everything. The tablecloth was gone. This was not a conference room. It was the Engine House formal dining room. Dinner parties had been held here, and in the distant past there had been dinner parties with a hundred people at them. Olivia thought that would have been something to see.

Sheila was standing near the baize door to the kitchen, leaning against the wall just next to a portrait of a woman in a gauzy long dress. She was not having a fit or a meltdown. She was just standing there.

“I don't like this picture,” she said. “Do you? It looks like she's wearing a prom dress instead of a ball gown. I hate prom dresses.”

“I think it was the style of the time,” Olivia said.

“I hated the prom, come to think of it,” Sheila said. “But then, nobody asked me. I had to ask a boy I knew from drama club, and you know how that kind of thing works out. He's some kind of enormously important gay rights activist in San Diego now. Did you go to your prom?”

“We've been through this,” Olivia said. “I went to my prom with a boy I'd dated since the seventh grade. He went off to college. I went off to secretarial school. That was the end of that, and there isn't anything interesting about my life since. How could there have been? I've been working for you for nearly twenty years.”

Sheila pushed off from the wall and pulled out the chair she was supposed to sit in for the meeting. It was at the head of the table. It couldn't have been anywhere else. She sat down.

“It's a long time, twenty years,” she said. “Don't you ever want to get up and go someplace else? Take another job? Take a vacation?”

“I took a vacation once,” Olivia said. “You had a nervous breakdown in O'Hare Airport and I had to come back.”

“You didn't like coming back.”

“I don't like a lot of the things you do,” Olivia said. “We got all that straightened out a long time ago, too. We don't have to like each other to work together. I like this job. I like the perks it brings. You wouldn't know how to break anybody else in. We go on with it. I should get the judging panel. If we wait much longer, Deedee's going to be too drunk to stand up. She's not doing all that well even now.”

“Do you know who that girl was, the one that died in the study today?”

Olivia was looking down the table again, counting the pads and water glasses. “No,” she said finally. “I don't. I didn't know who she was back at the Milky Way Ballroom. It doesn't matter who she was.”

“It must matter to somebody,” Sheila said. “She must have family, or friends, or people she worked with. She wasn't a hooker, or a bum. You could see that by looking at her.”

“Maybe she was mentally ill,” Olivia said. “A lot of people walk around mentally ill without being diagnosed until they finally do something too odd to ignore. Maybe this was
her
too-odd thing.”

“She also didn't kill herself,” Sheila said.

“Didn't she?” Olivia said. “Did the police tell you that?”

“The police didn't tell me anything,” Sheila said. She was sitting aslant in the chair, stretching out her legs under the table. “They didn't tell anybody anything. Your Mr. Demarkian didn't, either. But I did overhear things.”

“She must have killed herself,” Olivia said. “Why else would she be dead? None of us knew her. Why would any of us want to kill her?”

Sheila picked up the ballpoint pen and twirled it through her fingers. “I thought you were going to get that Mr. Demarkian to look into all this for us.”

“I'm trying, Sheila. He doesn't usually work for private individuals. He works for police departments as a consultant. He does take private cases sometimes, if he's interested in them. So I've got my fingers crossed, and I'm going to get in touch with him tomorrow.”

“Good,” Sheila said. “Because I think he's the only person who might actually get this through your thick skull. And your skull is thick, Olivia. You're an excellent assistant, but your mind works at the speed of molasses.”

“Is that supposed to mean something? Or are you just insulting me for the hell of it?”

Sheila sat forward. “That's supposed to mean that I do know what you're trying to do, and you aren't going to get away with it. That wasn't Mallory on that study floor. Believe it or not, I haven't been completely cut off from Mallory all these years.”

“Haven't you? And I didn't think it was Mallory.”

“No, I don't think you did,” Sheila agreed. “But I think you expected me to think so. Or maybe you just expected me to suspect. But I saw Mallory only last year. I know where she is. I know what she's doing. I know what she looks like.”

“I thought the two of you didn't speak.”

“We don't,” Sheila said. “You don't have to speak to someone to see them. What I want to know is who that girl is, because no matter what you say, I think you do know. I think you have to know.”

“Don't be ridiculous,” Olivia said.

Suddenly, she was having one of her rare fits of anger. It wasn't very useful, getting angry at Sheila Dunham. It didn't make a dent, and Sheila was too good at using it against you. Still, this made Olivia furious, and it was all she could do to stop herself from taking one of those pitchers of ice water and pouring it over Sheila's head. Wouldn't that be something for the camera footage? There were a good six cameras
in this dining room. They'd catch the whole thing, and there would be YouTube videos for a month.

Olivia looked down at her clipboard. Counted nothing in particular, just to give herself a chance to calm down, and then said:

“Why don't you sit still for a minute and I'll get the others.”

It was not a question. Olivia did not expect an answer. She went to the door on the other side of the room, the one that led to the living room, and opened it. They were all out there in a little cluster, milling around and eating little finger things that Olivia had had put out on a tray. That was whistling in the dark. She'd hoped that if there was enough food, Deedee's trips to her pocket flask would have less effect than usual.

It hadn't worked. Deedee Plant rarely ate anything, because she thought that would keep her from getting fat. She was a middle-aged woman, though, and she looked it, thick around the middle even without having gained any significant weight. She didn't have the money for personal trainers and liposuction. Either that, or she spent all the money on the pocket flask.

Olivia looked up and across the living room and saw the yellow crime-scene tape still up across the study door. There was a uniformed policeman sitting on a chair just outside it. She had no idea how long that was going to stay up or when they would be able to get back to their lives. She did know that none of it would interrupt the filming. They had no time to allow themselves to be interrupted.

Olivia stood back and held the door open. “Come right in,” she said. “Sorry to call on you all in the evening like this, but we have some things to discuss. I've got water waiting if anybody wants it.”

“It's a terrible thing,” Deedee Plant was saying to Johnny Rell. “Somebody dead and right here. Right on the set of the show. And it's funny, too, isn't it? I'd have thought that if there was a dead body on
America's Next Superstar,
it would have been Sheila.”

“Everybody wants Sheila dead,” Johnny said. “That's why she's going to live forever.”

Down at the far side of the dining room, Sheila was still sitting in her chair. She was leaning back in it and stretching out her legs. And
she had gone back to twirling the pen through her fingers. Olivia did not like the look on her face, or the way her body moved.

Something was coming. Olivia knew it. She always did.

It was Ivy Demari's idea to listen in on the meeting, and some of the other girls were not happy with the idea.

“Of course I want to know what's going on,” Grace said, “but I'm already in trouble. This will get all of us in trouble if we get caught. And you know what she's like. You must know what she's like.”

“Everybody knows what she's like,” Alida said. “I don't see any reason for putting ourselves in jeopardy for nothing that concerns any of us. We didn't know this girl. She wasn't even cast in the show. She was just some crazy person looking for publicity.”

Ivy looked out at the group of them, spread out in the hall outside their bedroom doors. There were still fourteen of them, and would be for another week. They should have been spending the evening doing individual camera interviews to be used in the show to break up the action. None of them looked like they were competing on a reality show that required them to be glamorous. None of them looked entirely dressed.

Ivy tried to think of a way to put it. “Here's the thing,” she said. “It's not just that that girl died here, it's who killed her. Because somebody must have killed her.”

“Don't be ridiculous,” Alida said. “She committed suicide. I heard Miss Dahl say so.”

“Olivia Dahl may have said so,” Ivy said, “but it isn't true, and if you think about it, you'd know it isn't true. I looked into that room. I could see the body and I could see it again in the mirror. She had three holes in her chest.”

“So?” Alida said.

“So,” Grace said, “people who commit suicide don't usually shoot themselves in the chest?”

“Well, usually is usually,” Alida said. “That doesn't meant it couldn't happen.”

“It couldn't happen three times.” Ivy was trying, trying very hard, to be patient. She was not Grace, or Alida. She didn't look down on these girls because so many of them seemed never to have gotten a good education, even on the elementary level, or because they were from places that weren't very sophisticated. Still, she thought, you'd expect they'd be able to think their way out of a paper bag.

“Look,” she said. “If this girl had managed to shoot herself even once in the chest, the pain would have been excruciating. She'd almost certainly have dropped the gun. She wouldn't have been able to shoot herself two more times. And then there's the issue of the gun, too. If she shot herself, the gun would be there, in the room, wouldn't it? Did you see any gun?”

Nobody said anything. Grace and Alida looked angry. They always looked angry. The rest of the girls looked miserable.

“The gun wasn't there in the study,” Ivy said. “I stayed as close to that Mr. Demarkian as I could, and I heard him talking with one of the police officers. The gun wasn't there where the body was, so somebody must have taken it away. Somebody murdered this girl, whoever she was. Somebody murdered her while we were all out.”