Wanting Sheila Dead (38 page)

“Didn't Bennis give you the message about looking in the basement for bodies?” Gregor asked.

“Well,” Billie said, “she gave it to me, but I thought it was mostly metaphorical. Are you trying to tell me you know where bodies are buried?”

“I think so,” Gregor said. “I'll admit, it's mostly a guess, but I'm pretty sure it's only a guess about where, not about if. If I was the woman calling herself Karen Mgrdchian, and I'd killed the real Karen Mgrdchian, I'd have put the body in the basement. It's the most logical place, if I'm working alone and I'm an old lady. It's out of the way, so that the chances of a smell permeating the immediate area are slim for at least a while. And it's easy for me to get to and get done.”

“I thought there was a daughter,” Billie Ormonds said.

“There is,” Gregor said. “I don't know anything about her. That's why I said it was a good idea to look for two bodies, or even for three. I know Marco Mgrdchian is dead, but not when he died or how he died. Assuming that was natural causes, though, and a bit back, that leaves the mother and the daughter. If the daughter was in the habit of coming over to the house, if she lived close by, if she was responsible and not sick or addicted in some way—then my guess is that you'd find two bodies in the basement and not one.”

“Why?”

“Because the daughter hasn't called,” Gregor said. “And even if she didn't have the numbers of the people on Cavanaugh Street, if the address book at that house is missing as the address book is here, then there's the fact that she hasn't reported her mother missing. I've checked every source I can think of. I've looked on the Internet. There's no missing person's report on Karen Mgrdchian.”

“Maybe,” Billie said, “the reason for that is that Karen Mgrdchian isn't missing. She's here, and her daughter isn't worried about her because her daughter knows that she's here.”

“If she was Karen Mgrdchian,” Gregor said, “she wouldn't have done that to her fingerprints.”

“It doesn't matter what she does to her fingerprints,” Billie said, “there are no fingerprints on file for Karen Mgrdchian. We really did check.”

“I'm sure you did,” Gregor said, “but I'm willing to bet that there are fingerprints on file for whoever this woman really is. Because this is not some brand-new, supercreative secret plot. This is an old-time
con game. And I'm going to be shocked if it turns out she's never been picked up for it before.”

“You mean you think the woman calling herself Karen Mgrdchian has been—what? Convicted of murder?”

“No,” Gregor said, “convicted of fraud, or, if not, then arrested for fraud. The only reason to destroy your fingerprints is that you don't want the police to be able to connect you with something you've already done, the only reason to destroy your fingerprints is because they're on file somewhere you don't want anybody to know about.”

“People do sometimes destroy them accidentally, no matter what you think,” Billie said.

“Not people like Karen Mgrdchian,” Gregor said. “We need to pinpoint the place where this woman lived and have the local police go out there with a search warrant. And I'm sure they'll be able to get one. We've got an elderly woman, incapacitated under suspicious circumstances, and another elderly woman we've got reason to be suspicious of. They'll be able to find a judge.”

“But you don't actually know what the address is,” Billie Ormonds said.

“Someplace in or around Cleveland,” Gregor said. “The Very Old Ladies seem to be convinced of that. That would be the best place to start. I'll ask Father Tibor, to go over the parish records again. They may have a mailing address, although I did have him look once before and he didn't come up with anything. I wonder what the story is there. Cleveland isn't all that far away.”

“So?” Billie asked.

“Armenian families tend to stick together,” Gregor said. “They visit for holidays. I don't know. Maybe they didn't get along, and after Viktor died, they didn't see each other because they didn't want to. I wish we had that address book. It would tell us a lot of things.”

On the other side of the room, Dr. Halevy had stopped speaking Arabic and was onto English. She sounded beyond livid now, and possibly ready to do violence.

“The patient is old,” she said. “We have all kinds of fancy terminology
for it, but that's what it amounts to. The patient is old. We could have killed her. Didn't it occur to anybody, anywhere, that—never mind. Never mind. I want somebody in here twenty-four seven. I want her every breath monitored. And I want you to come and get me if she so much as sneezes.”

Dr. Halevy broke away from the group of nurses, and came over to Gregor and Billie and the police. She was red in the face and short of breath.

“Yes,” she said, “yes. Screwups happen in hospitals. They happen all the time. It's a scandal. But this is really egregious. One of those women over there said she thought the low blood pressure readings she was getting were normal, because Mrs. Mgrdchian is in a coma, and that's the kind of thing comas produce. Of course, very low blood pressure can
give
you a coma. She doesn't seem to have thought of that.”

The two homicide detectives came forward and introduced themselves as Allejandro and Kennedy. Dr. Halevy said hello to everybody but didn't really take them in.

“What we need to know,” Gregor said, “is whether or not this could have killed Sophie Mgrdchian if it had been done on purpose. If somebody had given her medication to lower her blood pressure when she didn't need it, could that have resulted in death?”

Dr. Halevy sighed. “You can kill anybody with any kind of medication,” she said. “It's just that some things would take larger doses than others. In this case, it would have been mostly a matter of time. If this had gone on for another, I don't know, week or so, with the patient this elderly and somewhat frail—yes, it would have resulted in death. And as a murder method, it wouldn't be bad. It would be hard to pin down.”

“How do you mean, pin down?” Billie asked.

“Well, you've probably all talked about it already,” Dr. Halevy said, “but you know how people are with the elderly. The same way they are with children. If I was the doctor on the case, and I had an elderly patient who died from taking the wrong medication—well, I'd just
assume there'd been a mistake, or an accident. That the patient had become confused or forgetful. Two old women in a house, both of them have pill organizers, one of them picks up the wrong one.” Dr. Halevy shrugged.

“Exactly,” Billie said.

“Except,” Gregor said, “that this is an experienced con woman. I'll guarantee it. She made friends with the real Karen Mgrdchian, got all she could out of her, found out about Sophie and the chance that Sophie had something worth stealing—”

“Does she?” Billie asked.

“Well, she's got a house in one of the most expensive neighborhoods in Philadelphia,” Gregor said. “And my guess is that you'll find it without a mortgage. She almost certainly had money, and social security income if nothing else. She wasn't starving. The house was in good enough repair. She must have been paying somebody for that, or for some of that. If Sophie hadn't lived in the same neighborhood she'd been in all her life, and if there hadn't still been people there who had known her for years, this woman would have been able to move into the house and take over. That's what she almost certainly did with the real Karen Mgrdchian. Moved in, took over the house, then either ran through the money or started to feel she'd be better off getting out of town. So, having heard about Sophie and her house from the real Karen Mgrdchian, she came out here.”

“Just like that?” Dr. Halevy asked.

“I think we'll start looking for where this Karen Mgrdchian lived,” Billie said. “We've got twenty-four hours, as far as I can tell, and then it's over. And I hate to tell you this, but as things stand, I'm not sure we can stop her from going back into that house. There aren't any relatives, you see, to say she isn't welcome there, and what she says is that she was invited in to live there permanently. Or, you know, that's what her lawyer said she said.”

“That's all right,” Gregor said. “Whoever this woman really is, she isn't interested in going back to Sophie Mgrdchian's house.”

By the time Gregor left the hospital, it was pitch dark. There were still a lot of people on the street, but most of them looked hurried. He walked a few blocks and tried to stay oriented. This was not a part of the city he knew well. The trouble, he thought, was that the two cases had so many odd similarities—women who claimed to be other people than they really were, for instance, and who simply stayed quiet and shut up and wouldn't say anything except to their lawyers. But that was a little thing. There was also the problem that both cases looked terribly complicated when they were really terribly simple—

No, Gregor thought. That was not quite right. The case of Sophie Mgrdchian actually looked simple when it was really very complicated. It wasn't complex. There was nothing complex about a con game. Of course, newspapers and magazines and television shows liked to call con games “elaborate,” because that made them sound more plausible. Nobody likes to think he'd fall for the simplest and most obvious little lie. Everyone likes to think he'd see through the nonsense right away.

In real life, though, con games were absurdly, stupidly obvious, and people fall for them anyway. Bernie Madoff confidently tells his clients that he can get them 17 percent a year on their investments, year after year, good markets and bad—and virtually none of them go, “but that's impossible, there must be something wrong here.” Then there was all that Nigerian nonsense, and the idiocies with “Australian lotteries” on the Internet. You go to your e-mail. You open one that announces that the writer has heard such wonderful things about you and knows that you are trustworthy, and therefore he's willing to pay you five million dollars to help him get his money out of Nigeria. All you have to do is send him $2,500 or so to pay the bank fees so that he can get the money out of the country.

The first time Gregor had heard about the Nigerian Internet scam, he'd been dumbfounded that
anyone, anywhere
had ever fallen for it.
Did people really know so little about the way banks worked to think that this thing even began to make sense? And what about the people who fell for the same scam, except it's presented as the declaration that they'd “won” a lottery? Didn't it bother them that they'd never entered that lottery? There were lotteries in the United States. Surely, people knew that they didn't have to fork over money before they were allowed to pick up their prize? Weren't there enough specials on brand-new lottery winners that demonstrated at least that much? Gregor remembered a man in Pennsylvania only a few years ago, who had bought a lottery ticket with his last dollar. He'd been out of work for months and was living, with his wife and two young children, in his car. It had to be obvious that he hadn't been required to spend a couple of thousand dollars to get his money. If he'd had a couple of thousand dollars, he'd have had a place to take a shower.

What the psychologists said, when you asked them, was that people believed what they wanted to believe. Most of us would be happy to get five million dollars. Many of us desperately want the money. Then there are the very old, who may not always be thinking straight.

Gregor still thought that the phenomenon was bizarre. No matter how much you wanted to believe, there had to be some part of your brain that was telling you it was all a lot of crap. And that was the word for it. Crap.

He looked around to see where he was, and found he wasn't sure. It was a nice stretch of city, with a few small restaurants offering pizza and a few shops already closed for the evening. He went into one of the pizza places and looked around. There had to be dozens of places like this across the United States. There were a few, but only a few, wooden booths along one wall. There was a counter with a glass top and two big pizza ovens beyond it. Most of the business seemed to be in takeout and delivery.

Gregor sat down at one of the booths. It had started to rain again when he wasn't paying attention, and his hair was wet. He took out his cell phone and punched in the number 3, which is where Bennis had placed herself. He still didn't understand the logic of the numbers
she assigned to speed dial. If it had been up to him, he'd have put 911 first and not worried about the rest.

Bennis picked up and asked him where he was.

“Give me a minute,” he said. He went up to the counter and looked at the menu. Then he read off the name of the place and the street address. “They sell slices. I thought I'd get myself some. Unless you haven't eaten.”

“I've been picking all afternoon. I'm fine. Can you get a cab from there?”

“I could,” Gregor said, “but I was hoping you might come get me. I need a ride out to Bryn Mawr.”

“Gregor—”

“I know,” Gregor said. “You don't go to Engine House anymore. I don't blame you. But I don't need a ride out to Engine House. I just need a ride out to Bryn Mawr. If I can set this up the right way, you can take me to the police station. And you can wait for me there if I do have to go out to Engine House. The trick, you see, is that you must always concentrate on what in fact happened.”

“You're making absolutely no sense,” Bennis said.

“It's Agatha Christie. I told you that Tibor gave me those books. I read them on our honeymoon. According to Hercule Poirot—”

“And you're the Armenian-American Hercule Poirot?”

“Don't be like that. I'll do something drastic. It's a good point. What you have to deal with is what actually happened. Not what you think happened, or what you think must be the case because it makes sense. You have to deal with what happened.”