Wanting Sheila Dead (37 page)

“So Andra Gayle is your stage name.”

“I guess.” Andra didn't know what a stage name was.

“Why did you want to change your name?”

For a split second, Andra thought about spilling the whole thing right here: her mother the crack addict; the years of “and then” when she was a child; the bar fights; the sleeping in abandoned buildings. Now that would be a personal interview that would definitely make it onto television.

“I want,” she said instead, “to be something else. To be someone else. To be something I wasn't born to be.”

“And you don't think there's anything wrong with that? You don't think it's better to be yourself?”

“It depends on who ‘yourself' is.”

“According to our investigation,” Sheila said, “you've been arrested at least a dozen times, all for acts of violence.”

“They weren't acts of violence,” Andra said quickly. “I didn't jump people or anything like that. I didn't go out and try to hurt people. It's—where I come from, if somebody disrespects you, you gotta do something about it. You can't just let it go. So I got into a few fights. I never hurt anybody bad enough to put them in the hospital, even. Not for overnight. I never killed someone.”

“Did you ever own a gun?”

“No,” Andra said. “That was my number two.”

“Your number two what?”

Andra looked down at her hands. There was a barking noise from the other side of the lights. She looked up again. She was supposed to look at the camera the whole time. She couldn't see where the camera was.

“When I was growing up,” she said, “I made a list. I made a list of all the things I would never do. I would never own a gun or live anywhere there were guns in the house. That was my number two.”

“What was your number one?”

“I would never go out on the street and sell it,” Andra said. She was sweating. She could feel the thick wash of it around her neck. It confused her a little, because she did not feel especially stressed. She was just sweating.

Nobody was saying anything. Andra hated the silence so much, she wanted to shout.

“It was what my mother did,” she said finally. “My mother sold herself for as long as she could, and now she's too old and she just stays wherever. Home, if she's got one. She doesn't care as long as she's high.”

“And do you get high?”

“No. That's number three.”

“Did you shoot at me at the Milky Way Ballroom?”

“No, I told you. I don't touch guns.”

“Did you shoot at me here?”

“No.”

“Did you kill that girl who was found dead in the study?”

“No.”

“Do you know who she was?”

“No,” Andra said, and now she was just tired. “I didn't even get a good look at her at the casting thing. Everything happened so fast and then it was over and the police were there, and I was sort of nervous. But it didn't happen the way I thought it would. They didn't, you know, search everybody, or arrest anybody, or whatever.”

“And you were afraid of being searched?”

“No,” Andra said, but she wasn't thinking about that.

She was thinking that it must be a very odd thing to live a life where you didn't just automatically expect the police to arrest you, if they were there and you happened to be around.

When Andra came out of the interview room, she almost looked like she was in tears. Mary-Louise was impressed. Andra always looked so tough that Mary-Louise didn't think she ever cried. Olivia Dahl, on the other hand, always looked either disapproving or furious, and she was looking furious now. When she called Mary-Louise's name, Mary-Louise came forward and did her best to smile.

“This shouldn't be bad,” she said. “We don't get judged on this.”

Mary-Louise wanted Olivia Dahl to say “of course not,” or something like it. Mary-Louise really wanted to be sure. It was a little off-putting, the idea of having Sheila Dunham here. Sheila Dunham did a lot of yelling, and she'd already yelled at Mary-Louise once.

Mary-Louise went across the room and sat down in the empty chair. She crossed her legs at her ankles and folded her hands in her lap. They had been instructed to fold their hands in their laps during interviews. You didn't want to wave your hands about, because if you did it made a distraction and the tape wasn't worth using. You wanted the show to use your tapes, because then you would get more time on the air, and the more time you got the more famous you would be. You had to let America get to know you. That had been in the lecture Olivia had given right before—well, before.

Mary-Louise smiled. She didn't know why she was smiling. She always smiled. It was something people did.

“So,” Sheila Dunham said. “Your name is Mary-Louise Verdt, and you're from Holcomb, Kansas.”

Sheila pronounced the name as “VerD.”

“Actually,” Mary-Louise said, “you say my last name as ‘VerT'. As if the ‘d' wasn't there.”

“Verdt,” Sheila Dunham said, pronouncing it wrong yet again.
Mary-Louise let it go. She didn't want to embarrass anybody. “Tell me,” Sheila said, “about Holcomb, Kansas.”

Mary-Louise was ready for this. When she was first trying to get on the show, the little brochure they had sent her about how to try out had had a list of things that could help her chances, and one of them was writing an application letter that made her sound “interesting.” Mary-Louise did not think she was a very interesting person, but she came from an interesting place, and she was proud of that.

“Holcomb, Kansas, is where the
In Cold Blood
murders happened,” Mary-Louise said happily. “That was the murder of a whole family in their farmhouse in the middle of the night. Their names were the Clutters. They had a big farm, and a pretty big house, out in the middle of nowhere, really, and then one night this guy who'd worked as a hired hand for them came with another guy he'd met in prison and they robbed the house, and tied up the Clutters, and killed them. It was a really big deal.”

“Was it?” Sheila Dunham said. “I don't remember hearing about it on the news.”

“Oh, I don't, either,” Mary-Louise said. “It happened before I was born. It probably happened before you were born, too. November 15, 1959. It was really famous at the time, but what made it more famous and the reason everybody has heard about it is that this writer named Truman Capote wrote a book about it. It's called
In Cold Blood.
There have been two movies made of it, and then another movie was made about Truman Capote that was sort of about it, about him writing the book about it, but it wasn't a very good movie. I mean, I tried to see it in the theater, but I couldn't keep my mind on it. It was one of those floaty movies, if you know what I mean.”

“So this interests you? Murders?”

“Well, you know, it's interesting that it happened where I live,” Mary-Louise said. “Holcomb is just a farm town, really. There are lots of them all over the state. They're not anything special. But we're special, because that happened to us.”

“Do you play video games?”

“Excuse me?”

“Do you play video games,” Sheila said. “You know—”

“Oh, no, I do know,” Mary-Louise said. “No, I'm sorry. I didn't think for a minute. I like some games, sort of. I guess you can call them video games. I like Bookworm.”

“What's Bookworm?”

“It's where you spell things and if the words aren't long enough, red tiles come down and they can make you lose. I'm pretty good at spelling.”

“Do you like any other video games?”

“Not really,” Mary-Louise said. “I mean, you know, I've got a computer at home, but my parents want me to use that for school. They don't like it when I just goof around with it. And a lot of the boys have those game systems things, like Nintendo, you know, but it's all just blowing things up, so I don't think that's very interesting.”

“Why did you try out for
America's Next Superstar
?”

“Really?” Mary-Louise said. “Well, I guess I tried out for the same reason everybody does. Because I wanted to win. And because I wanted to get away from home. I mean, you can get away from home by going away to a fancy college, and my parents would probably have paid for that, but I didn't do all that well on the SATs. And, you know, it's not that I'm a great singer, or a great dancer, or anything like that. But you don't have to do all that, from what I can see. You just have to be a personality. And I've got a lot of personality.”

“Did you expect to be cast when you were asked to come in and audition?”

“I didn't think I'd get asked to come in and audition,” Mary-Louise said. “You really wouldn't have believed it when I got that letter. I went running all over the house, just screaming. And all my girlfriends were jealous. They really were. The girl who's cheer captain this year sent in a tape and didn't get asked. I laughed so hard, I thought I was going to explode. Not that she was a friend of mine or anything, or bad to me, you know how that goes. It's just that I'm not the kind of person who wins things, and there I was. It was wonderful.”

“Did you shoot at me in the Milky Way Ballroom?”

“Oh,” Mary-Louise said. “No. No, of course not.”

“Did you see who did?”

“Well,” Mary-Louise said, “I was standing in the middle of the crowd, you know, when you started talking. And after we heard the shots, I looked around and, right near me, there was that blond girl and she had the gun. But I thought that was a little funny, because I didn't hear anything. I mean, I was standing so close, I should have heard something. And then later one of the girls here told me that that wasn't actually the gun that fired any shots. I heard the shots today, though, when they went off. They were really loud.”

“Did you know the girl who died?”

“The little blond one?” Mary-Louise said. “No, I didn't know her. I mean, I didn't know who she was or where she came from. But I'd seen her before, you know, in the Ballroom. And before that, too.”

“Before that?”

“I was the first in line, so I didn't notice her in line, because she must have been behind me,” Mary-Louise said. “But she was in the pink room, the same one with Grace. I know because I saw her come out of there and go to the place where the panel was. You know, the judging panel, where we all came and talked to you guys. Then they called my name and I went in and when I came out she wasn't there anymore. I have no idea where she went.”

“Have you ever been arrested?”

“Oh, of course not.”

“Have you ever owned a gun?”

“We've got a shotgun at home,” Mary-Louise said. “It belongs to my father. He uses it because of the animals, you know, the ones that get into the yard.”

“If I asked you which of the girls you would choose as the one who had been firing shots at me, which one would it be.”

“Oh,” Mary-Louise said. “That's easy. Everybody in the whole house says it's Coraline who's doing these things, and that it's Coraline who killed that girl, too. Grace says Coraline is a religious fanatic
and she'd kill anybody for God, but it doesn't make much sense to me. Coraline seems like she's all right. Most of the girls do. It's that Ivy person who really makes me get the hives. I don't understand her at all.”

By the time Gregor Demarkian got to Sophie Mgrdchian's hospital floor, there were several uniformed officers and two homicide detectives as well as Billie Ormonds and David Mortimer already there. Dr. Halevy was also there, yelling at nurses in what sounded like Arabic. Gregor went to the door of Sophie's room and looked in. She still looked like she was sleeping.

Gregor went up to Billie Ormonds and tapped her on the shoulder. “So?” he said.

Everybody turned to look at him at once.

Gregor cleared his throat. “I take it I'm not crazy,” he said. “I take it giving blood pressure medication to somebody without a blood pressure problem, or a low blood pressure problem, can cause what we've been seeing.”

Billie looked back at Dr. Halevy and the nurses. “I don't think
they
even know what she's saying. She's livid, by the way. People didn't write things down on charts. People didn't double-check other people.”

“The problem,” Mortimer said, “is that this still won't get us what we want.”

“Meaning an excuse to keep Karen Mgrdchian locked up,” Billie said. “We've got homicide here now, and we can start treating this as an attempted murder, but the simple fact of the matter is that we can't really prove it was one. Sophie Mgrdchian had this other woman's pills in her own pocket—well, they're old ladies, aren't they? They could have become confused. They could have picked up one another's medication by accident.”

“She's not Karen Mgrdchian,” Gregor said. “She's the wrong type, if that makes any sense.”

“That's not exactly enough to go on,” Billie said. “And you've got the fact that this woman was in Sophie Mgrdchian's house. Her friends on the street say she wasn't disoriented or going into dementia—”

“As far as they know,” Gregor said. “Sophie Mgrdchian hasn't been running around being social for years.”

“Even so,” Billie insisted. “You have to at least assume that the woman would have been able to recognize her own sister-in-law.”

“No,” Gregor said. “She hadn't seen the woman in decades. Literally decades.”

“Again,” Billie said. “Not enough to go on. She was in Sophie Mgrdchian's house. There's no evidence that entry was forced, and in fact we know it wasn't, because we know she was there for some days. Are you trying to say that this woman calling herself Karen Mgrdchian forced her way into the house and stayed there by—what? Threatening Sophie? But Sophie has been in and out of the house since the woman arrived there; she could have broken free any time. There isn't a child to be held hostage, is there? Or even a pet. And yes, I do know that sometimes kidnap victims end up collaborating with their kidnappers for all kinds of weird psychological reasons I can't understand, but there's no indication of that here.”