Wanting Sheila Dead (34 page)

“Why would she want to wreck the show?” Janice asked. “Don't be silly, Grace. She's just as much involved in the show as any of the rest of us.”

“She may seem like she is,” Grace said, “but she's one of those born-again people, isn't she? They're all a little off-balance, if you ask me, and a lot of them are violent. They get crazy. That's why they believe in God.”

“Oh, come on,” Mary-Louise said. “I believe in God. Everybody believes in God.”

“I don't,” Grace said, “and not everybody believes in God in the same way. Some people believe in God and they're very sensible about it. But the born-again types aren't sensible about it. They're fanatics. I think she's trying to wreck the show. I think she thinks it's sinful, or something, and she's trying to shut it down.”

“By killing somebody none of us knows and who wasn't even supposed to be in the show?” Linda Kowalski said. “And anyway, that other girl had a gun, didn't she? At the Milky Way Ballroom? There were shots and she was there holding the gun, and that was why the police arrested her.”

“Well, guns can be planted,” Grace said.

“In somebody's hand?” Ivy said.

Grace hadn't heard her come in. She didn't think anybody had. They all turned to look at Ivy's green hair streak and then looked away again. Grace didn't like any of the girls in this competition, but the longer they lived together, the more the one she liked least was Ivy Demari. It wasn't just the tattoos or the weird hair. It was the attitude.

“Guns can be planted,” Grace said again. “They can be. And I don't
know about in somebody's hand, but that's still not to say the gun wasn't planted. After all, they let that girl out because the gun she was holding wasn't the one that fired the shots they got out of the wall at the Ballroom. I heard that police detective talking to Gregor Demarkian about it.”

“We're all hearing entirely too much about what the police detective said to Gregor Demarkian,” Ivy said, “and you've got to stop this now. You've got poor Coraline on the edge of a nervous breakdown as it is. I can't get her in here to eat something, and she should eat something. She's going to collapse.”

“Good,” Alida said. “Let her collapse. Let them send her home. Get her out of here. Then I can go back to sleeping at night.”

“She could do it again,” Deanna broke in. “The next victim could be any of us.”

Grace thought Ivy was going to slap somebody. “Why would it be any of us?” she asked. “It's Sheila Dunham somebody has been firing guns at. It's Sheila Dunham somebody wants to kill. And no, I don't think that somebody is Coraline, and neither do any of you.”

“Speak for yourself,” Grace said. “I think that somebody is Coraline. And wanting to kill Sheila Dunham makes even more sense. It is a religious thing. Sheila Dunham has to represent the worst kind of cultural depravity as far as somebody like Coraline is concerned. She probably looks like an agent of the devil. Maybe Coraline thinks she can wipe out depravity and sin and get us all back to God if she just gets rid of Sheila Dunham.”

“And the other girl?” Ivy asked.

“Sheila Dunham has a daughter,” Janice said suddenly. “I heard about it. They don't talk to each other anymore. Maybe the girl who died was Sheila Dunham's daughter, and—”

“And what?” Ivy said.

“Oh,” Janice said. “I don't know. I'm sorry. I don't think Coraline did it, either, you know, because, well, she isn't that kind of person. She's very nice.”

“For God's sake,” Grace said.

Ivy took a plate from the stack on the sideboard and started loading it with food. “I'm going to take this to Coraline,” she said. “She's sitting out on the stairs. She doesn't want to go into the living room and she really doesn't want to go into the study. I think the entire pack of you are first-rate bitches, I really do.”

“Somebody has to make sense in a situation like this,” Grace said. “Somebody has to do something to protect us from getting hurt, and the show doesn't seem to give a damn. I think they ought to post a guard in here to make sure she doesn't go off her nut again and kill somebody else.”

“I think that if anybody dies, it's going to be you,” Ivy said, “and I'm going to do the killing.”

Then she took the full plate, and a fork and a knife, and marched out of the dining room.

Grace watched her go, and the rest of the girls watched with her.

It didn't matter what Ivy thought. Grace knew as much as she needed to know about what was going on around here now.

For Gregor Demarkian, Len Borstoi's announcement that he was to consider himself hired, or on the case, or whatever the man had said, felt unreal. That was not how he was hired to consult on cases. First there was a letter, or a fax, or a phone call from the chief of police or the mayor. Then there was a discreet little talk about money. Then there was the advance prep, lots of paperwork with forensic reports and detective logs scattered through it. This was more like the sort of thing that would happen in dreams, except that Gregor never had dreams about work. His dreams always had to do with Bennis and Elizabeth meeting, sometimes for lunch, sometimes in the afterlife. He'd talked to Father Tibor about that once, but neither one of them had been able to come up with a satisfactory explanation.

“You love both your wives,” Tibor said. “You hope that if they met, they would get along.”

In the dreams, Bennis and Elizabeth always did get along, but Gregor wasn't sure they would have if they'd met in real life. They were opposites in ways that weren't supposed to matter much, but always did: Bennis had grown up rich on the Main Line while Elizabeth
had grown up poor in a tenement in a poor neighborhood in Philadelphia; Elizabeth had been very traditional about marriage while Bennis had treated marriage like a poison she'd be lucky if she managed to escape; Elizabeth had believed in women being homemakers and Bennis had the career from hell.

Of course, they had both gone to Vassar, about ten years apart, so there was that. But maybe not. Gregor himself had gone to the University of Pennsylvania for his undergraduate work, and he could remember better than he liked to, the divide between the live-at-school, come-from-Ivy-League-families crowd and the students who, like him, commuted from home and had really large scholarships.

It had been years since Gregor had thought so much about Elizabeth, who had died of cancer before he'd ever moved back to Cavanaugh Street. He didn't really know why he was thinking about her now. He was married again, yes, and just back from his honeymoon—but it wasn't like that was a sudden thing. He'd not only known, but been practically living in Bennis's lap for years. Thoughts of Elizabeth had never bothered him before.

Donna pulled Bennis's car to the curb in front of Gregor's building and cut the engine. “I've got to go put this back in the garage,” she said. “Can you believe that Bennis spends three hundred dollars a month just to keep this thing in a garage?”

“If it was mine, I'd probably put it in a vault,” Gregor said. “It's not the kind of thing that blends into the background.”

“Oh, I know,” Donna said. “And I know it's supposed to be silly to have a car like this when you live in the city. But it's a lot of fun to drive.”

“Why don't you get one?”

“Well,” Donna said, “I've got a son and a daughter. And there are going to be tuitions.”

“True,” Gregor said.

He looked up and down the street. When he'd first moved back here, Donna had had a habit of decorating the entire neighborhood for any holiday that came up. She'd once wrapped the entire building
in which he lived—and where she then had the top floor floor-through apartment—in shiny stuff and a bow that made it look like a Christmas package. With this last pregnancy, she seemed to have given that up. He was sorry to see that go.

“I miss the decorations,” he said. He sounded abrupt even to himself.

Donna laughed. “You're not the only one. I've just got a lot to do these days. Maybe I can convince the youth group to help me out and we can decorate for the Fourth of July. That's not too far away. Listen, Bennis is up there practically hanging out of the window. She's very worried about you.”

“I know she is,” Gregor said. “There's really nothing to be worried about.”

Donna gave him the kind of look that said she didn't believe him for a minute, and Gregor got out and started walking up the steps to the building's front door. He was light-headed, but that was just exhaustion. What bothered him was that he still felt the nagging half panic that had bolted him awake at four o'clock in the morning, but it wasn't strong enough to keep him in gear. He wanted to sleep, and he wanted to sleep even though he felt that something awful was about to happen any second now, and that he was the only one who could stop it.

He let himself into the foyer and saw that the door to old George Tekemanian's apartment was closed and locked. He supposed George was out somewhere with Tibor or Lida and Hannah or somebody. If there had been something wrong, if old George had gone to the hospital or had an accident or any of that kind of thing, Donna would have known and told him.

Gregor started climbing the stairs. There were a lot of them. If he had owned this entire building, instead of one of the apartments in it—two, if you counted the one Bennis owned, since they were married now—he would have put in one of those little elevators.

He got to the second-floor landing feeling winded. He got to the
third-floor landing feeling dead. He now had old George on his mind as well as everything else.

“You look like hell,” Bennis said. She was standing in the doorway of their apartment, holding the door open. “Have you had any sleep at all? Are you crazy?”

Gregor went through the door and into his own foyer. He took off his suit jacket and dropped it on the floor. He never dropped clothes on the floor. He heard Bennis come in behind him and pick it up. He kept on walking into the living room, made his way to the couch, and sat down. Or lay down. It was hard to tell which. He had half sprawled across it. He didn't think he could move again.

Gregor heard Bennis close the door, and then her footsteps as she came into the room. She was standing right behind him. He could feel it.

“Do you want me to make you some coffee?” she asked him.

“No,” Gregor said. “Definitely no coffee. I've had enough coffee.”

“I could make you milk and honey,” Bennis said. “I'd like to say that was what my mother made me when I couldn't get to sleep, but you knew my mother. It wasn't the kind of thing she did. On the other hand, it is the kind of thing Lida does, and she told me all about it.”

“I just need to relax for a minute,” Gregor said.

Bennis came around the couch and sat down on one of the chairs. She was a beautiful woman. She had been a beautiful woman when he first met her, and she would be a beautiful woman if she lived to be a hundred and six. That was because there was no part of her beauty that was dependent on age. She was not beautiful the way that, say, somebody like Christie Brinkley was beautiful, with that perky blond evenness that indicated an age of twenty-five, and looked strange ever afterward. Bennis's face was angular and strange. It looked like nothing else on earth. It also worked.

She leaned closer to him and said, “Is there something wrong? Is there something I should know about? I think I always worried that if we ever actually got around to doing it for real—”

“We got around to that part years ago,” Gregor said.

“I meant getting married.” Bennis made a raspberry. “I was always worried that it would freak you out. That we were all right being not-married married, but we wouldn't be all right being actually married.”

“Not-married married,” Gregor said. His eyes were half closed now. “That's a good way to put it.”

“So I thought I'd ask,” Bennis said, “whether the way you're behaving has something to do with me. Because you're behaving like a lunatic.”

Sleep was a foreign country, but Gregor was right there, at the border. He could see the little guard station and the little guard. He could see the gumdrop houses and cotton-candy mountains. This was the silliest line of thought he could remember himself having in all his life.

He forced his eyes open. “It's not you,” he said. “It's time.”

“What?”

“I'm in the middle of two things, and they're both sensitive to time,” Gregor said. “There's only a short amount of time, and if we don't get them right then something bad is going to happen. Well, it is definitely in the one case, and it could be in the other.”

“Which case?” Bennis asked.

Gregor made himself sit up just a little. “Sophie Mgrdchian,” he said. “She's still lying in a hospital bed, but they've been through just about everything they can think of, and it's been, what, two days? And they don't have any reason why she should be in practically a coma. So they can't hold this woman—”

“Karen Mgrdchian,” Bennis said. “That's Sophie's sister-in-law, isn't it? Didn't you tell me that?”

“She says she's Karen Mgrdchian,” Gregor said, “but I'm pretty sure she isn't. In fact, I know she isn't. But I can't prove she isn't, and nobody can prove that anybody did anything to Sophie Mgrdchian to put her in the state she's in, so there we are. The court handed this woman over for a psychiatric examination, but that's limited to four days. By the end of the week, they're going to have to let her out of
there, and if they do, I'd be willing to bet she'd find a way to kill Sophie Mgrdchian in no time flat. Either that, or Sophie will die of whatever this is before she ever leaves the hospital.”