Wanting Sheila Dead (11 page)

“They'll just want to,” Ivy said. “We can change the name of the show. We can call it
Wanting Sheila Dead
.”

Janice giggled and allowed herself to be led back to her room, where her clothes were carefully hung up on one side of the closet and her slippers were still sitting side by side under her bed. She wished she could be sure that she would never be the one that Sheila Dunham was yelling at, but nobody could be sure of that.

Sheila Dunham even yelled at the girls who won.

There had been a murder on Cavanaugh Street once, years and years ago, and Hannah Krekorian had been suspected of committing it. Gregor remembered that almost as well as he remembered moving back to the street after his first wife died. Cavanaugh Street was a place where odd things happened, but the odd things were almost never bad. Donna Moradanyan Donahue decorated things for holidays when she wasn't too pregnant to stand on stepladders. She'd once turned the entire brownstone building where Gregor lived—and where she had lived herself before her marriage—into a gigantic Christmas package, complete with a bow. She'd decorated the street for Gregor's and Bennis's wedding, too, although she'd had several helpers for that one, and it had included long lines of white ribbon running down the sidewalks. It was a good thing John Henry Newman Jackman was mayor of Philadelphia. If there had been a stranger in that office, Donna would have been arrested and fined on a regular basis.

There was nothing decorated up and down the street now, although it was close to Easter. At least Howard Kashinian hadn't dressed himself up as the Easter Bunny this year. Even John Jackman hadn't
been able to keep Howard for getting arrested for that one, although it had been mostly a matter of the police thinking they'd discovered a peculiarly flamboyant pedophile. The truth was, Howard was no more a pedophile than he was a decent attorney. He was just an idiot.

There was enough rain to prompt banalities about Noah and his flood. Gregor made his way through it, holding an umbrella very carefully over his head, and went down the small, clean alley to the back of Holy Trinity Armenian Christian Church. When they'd rebuilt here after the old church had been destroyed, they'd been careful to have everything done exactly right. The “alley” looked like one of those small pedestrian paved streets in London, and they didn't leave its maintenance to the city. They hired a firm to come in and clean it and the two courtyards at each end of it, and another firm to dig it all out of the snow, when the snow came.

Gregor went into the courtyard and saw that Father Tibor's apartment was lit up as if it were midnight. The apartment above it, being empty, was dark.

Gregor rang the bell and waited to be let in. He had no idea why he did that, since Tibor didn't actually expect him to, and Tibor also never kept the door locked. Gregor had talked to him about that a million times, but it did no good.

Tibor came to the door and opened up. Gregor put his umbrella down, shook it off, and dropped it into the umbrella stand just inside the door.

“I have them all here, Krekor,” Tibor said. “And I have all the papers I could find on the kitchen table. Watch the books. I made the stack the night before last and I meant to put them away, but I forgot.”

The books included the usual collection:
Areopagetica
by John Milton; Dan Brown's
Angels & Demons
; something in Greek. Gregor was careful going around them.

“I wish we'd find somebody for that apartment upstairs,” he said. “I don't like it sitting empty. I know it's not the usual sort of thing, but there's always a danger of getting squatters in there. Or worse.”

“We're not going to get squatters in,” Tibor said. “And if we did I think it could be argued that we had the responsibility to serve them. That is what a church is for, Krekor, not just a beautiful liturgy but to help us live as Christ lived. That is more books, Krekor. Be careful.”

There were indeed more books, dozens of them, stacked against the wall between the small dining room and the kitchen. There were books stacked on every wall. The parishioners of Holy Trinity had built this apartment particularly for Father Tibor. They had put built-in bookshelves on every available inch of wall space, including in some of the bathrooms. It hadn't been enough. There would never be enough wall space for Tibor's books. He read everything—in six languages.

Tibor swung back the door to the kitchen and Gregor went through to find the three Very Old Ladies sitting together at Tibor's kitchen table, drinking coffee that looked like black mud and probably had enough caffeine to keep the entire United States Army awake for a year. They had brought their own coffeemaker. Gregor could see it sitting on Tibor's kitchen counter next to the microwave, which was virtually the only kitchen appliance Tibor could operate without setting it on fire. On the other hand, Tibor had set the microwave on fire once. Gregor remembered it. Gregor wondered which of the Very Old Ladies had brought that coffeemaker from Yerevan, and which of her grandmothers it had once belonged to.

The women looked up when he came in, but they didn't stand. Gregor got the small folder he'd been carrying out from under his arm and dropped it on the table. Then Tibor motioned him to a chair, and he sat.

“I will make you some coffee, Krekor,” Tibor said.

Mrs. Vardanian looked skeptical. “Better have some of ours. That stuff he makes tastes like dirty water.”

Gregor looked into Mrs. Vardanian's small cup. Black mud was putting it mildly. The stuff was—Gregor didn't know what. Alive, maybe.

“I don't think my blood pressure can take it,” he said. He opened the folder in front of him and looked at it. He didn't have to look at it.
He'd spent the morning talking to the police, and the hospital, and David Mortimer, and he knew everything he was about to say.

“Well,” he tried. Tibor put a cup of something down in front of him. Tibor's coffee did taste like dirty water. On the other hand, it wouldn't actively kill him. “First,” Gregor tried again, “you might already know, Mrs. Mgrdchian is not dead. She wasn't dead when we found her, and she's not dead now.”

“Is she conscious?” the smallest of the three Very Old Ladies said.

“Of course she isn't conscious, Marita,” Mrs. Vardanian said. “If she was conscious, he would have said so. And he wouldn't have needed to talk to us. Isn't that so?”

“Ah, sort of,” Gregor said. “Even if she was conscious, she might not remember anything. And there could be other reasons to want to talk to you. The police are definitely going to want to talk to you, eventually.”

“I don't see why they don't want to talk to us now,” Mrs. Vardanian said.

“Well,” Gregor said, “at the moment, there's no real proof that a crime has been committed. We found Mrs. Mgrdchian unconscious, but the woman was very old, and you said she'd been reclusive for years. She could have been in poor health—”

“We're all in poor health, Krekor,” Mrs. Vardanian said. “We don't go passing into a coma in our front foyers and having strangers in the house in the meantime. Who was that woman? Do they know what she was doing there?”

“No,” Gregor said. “She says her name is Lily, but we know that from the other day. She's not saying much else that's making any sense. They're having a hard time identifying her—”

“DNA,” the fat little Very Old Lady said.

“Oh, Kara, don't be ridiculous,” Mrs. Vardanian said. “The world isn't made of episodes of
CSI.
Why in the name of God would the police department have samples of this woman's DNA?”

“Fingerprints then,” Kara Edelakian said.

“Ah, yes,” Gregor said. “There's always fingerprints, but the police
haven't been able to come up with a clean set. Lily's—I suppose we'll have to call her Lily—Lily's fingertips are badly damaged. The best guess at this moment is that she's a homeless woman. The homeless often have hands that have been significantly damaged. It comes from being out in the very bitter cold for a long time—”

“It comes from putting your bare hands on metal in the very bitter cold,” Mrs. Vardanian said matter-of-factly. “Then when you try to pull them away, the skin tears. You don't have to treat us like a pack of virgins, Krekor. We've all been around long enough not to be surprised by life.”

“And we watch television,” Kara said helpfully. “And not just
CSI. Law and Order.
”

“Yes,” Gregor said. “Well, you do have to understand that real police departments can't actually do most of the things you see on
CSI
. I mean, they sort of invent technology . . .”

“I have the parish records, Krekor,” Tibor said.

Tibor pushed a little stack of papers across the table, and Gregor looked down on them. He made out the name “Mgrdchian,” and the names “Sophie” and “Viktor.” Everything else was in Armenian.

“Well,” Gregor said.

“There isn't much here,” Tibor said. “I know I don't have the same training you do, and I know it would be better if you could actually read these on your own, but I don't see what you'd find. Viktor Mgrdchian came to the United States when he was six. Sophie Karnakian came when she was four. That was the same year. Their families came right here to Cavanaugh Street. They married when Viktor was nineteen and Sophie was seventeen. Viktor was in the Army then. There was one child, born dead, about six years later. Viktor was a tailor. He died when he was only fifty-six of a heart attack at work. And that's it.”

“Brothers and sisters?” Gregor asked. “For either of them?”

Tibor nodded. “Sophie had two sisters, Leia and Marietta. Leia died in a flu epidemic when she was three and a half years old. Marietta never married and died a few years ago—”

“Eleven,” Mrs. Vardanian said. “We went to the funeral. That was the year before Father Tibor came. It wasn't much of a funeral.”

“Did Viktor have family,” Gregor said.

Tibor searched through the papers. “Two brothers,” he said. “There was Marco and Dennis. Both younger than he was, both married, and then they left the street. Left the state, I think. This must be where the niece comes in, or whatever she is, Krekor. It must be the daughter of one of the brothers.”

“There was only the one?” Gregor asked.

“We're not sure,” Tibor said. “We've been talking about it. The boys moved away, you see, and they never came back except for the funerals.”

“Were they back for Marietta Karnakian's funeral?” Gregor asked.

“Not for Marietta's, but they came for Viktor's,” Mrs. Vardanian said. “I remember distinctly. The brothers came, Marco and Dennis, and they brought wives. Sophie had a dinner, you know, afterward, for people to come to. It's custom. But they didn't come, the brothers.”

“Sophie said they didn't feel comfortable,” Marita Melvarian said. “Only I don't think that was the word she used. But she said something about how they didn't know us anymore, and—”

“No,” Mrs. Vardanian said. “Dennis came, and Dennis's wife. They didn't stay for long, but they came. She was Armenian. It was Marco and his wife who didn't come. She wasn't Armenian. I remember that. They weren't married in the Church.”

“I think they weren't married in any church,” Kara Edelakian said in a hushed little voice. “I think they were married by a justice of the peace. Can you imagine that? How could anybody do something like—
ouch.
You didn't have to kick me, Viola. And Krekor wasn't married just by a justice of the peace, he was married right out here in front of the church, even if it wasn't in it, so it isn't the same thing.”

Gregor cleared his throat. “The problem,” he pointed out, “is to find out who this woman was, this Lily, who was in Sophie Mgrdchian's house. Even if it turns out that there was no foul play of any kind, and I'm not expecting any, there's still the problem of this
woman and how she came to be there. Did any of you recognize her? Could she have been the wife of one of the brothers?”

“She couldn't be an Armenian wife,” Mrs. Vardanian said. “You saw her, Krekor. She didn't look Armenian at all.”

“But she didn't look familiar to any of you,” Gregor said.

“If she had, we wouldn't have called you in the first place,” Mrs. Vardanian said. “We came to see you because we didn't know who she was. And she was in that house for a very long time. Days and days.”

“Almost two weeks,” Mrs. Edelakian put in.

“You keep changing the time frame,” Gregor said.

“We weren't really keeping track,” Mrs. Melvarian said. “We were just watching her. And at first we just sort of saw her around, you know, through the windows, and—”

“You're going to make Krekor think we peep into people's windows,” Mrs. Vardanian said.

“Well, we do peep into people's windows,” Mrs. Edelakian said. “We have to, don't we? Nobody talks to us anymore. We're just the Very Old Ladies.”

“The point” Mrs. Vardanian said, “is that that woman was there for a while. And then we didn't see Sophie anymore. And that was a few days ago.”

“If Sophie Mgrdchian had been in that state for several days,” Gregor said, “she'd be dead. Dehydration alone would have killed her, I'd think. Did you tell me the other day that you'd knocked at the door?”

“Of course we'd knocked at the door,” Mrs. Vardanian said. “What do you take us for?”

Gregor had an answer for that, but he wasn't going to say it out loud. “What happened when you knocked?”

“Nobody answered,” Mrs. Vardanian said. “One day we went and knocked and knocked, and it was as if nobody was home.”

“But somebody was,” Mrs. Edelakian said. “We could hear someone moving around.”