Wanting Sheila Dead (12 page)

“One person or two?” Gregor asked.

“I couldn't tell,” Mrs. Edelakian said.

“It was one,” Mrs. Vardanian said. “Sophie might not have been as badly off then as when we found her, but I'd bet anything she was completely . . . completely—”

“Incapacitated,” Mrs. Melvarian suggested.

“That woman did something to her,” Mrs. Vardanian said. “I know it.”

Gregor sighed a little. “First, let's find out who the woman is,” he said. “Then maybe we'll have a better idea of what was going on in there for the last couple of weeks. And once we know that—”

The sounds of “Louie Louie” burst into the room.

Gregor put his hand in his pocket and pulled out his cell phone.

“ ‘Louie Louie'?” Tibor asked.

“Bennis set it as my ring tone for her. She sets all my ring tones,” Gregor said. He answered the damned thing—this one slid instead of flipped opened; he didn't understand why phones couldn't just act like phones.

“Yes?” he said.

“You'd better come back as soon as you can,” Bennis said. “There's a woman in the apartment who says she's not going to leave until she talks to you.”

It was still raining when Gregor went back across the street and down the block to his own apartment. He came in the front door and saw that old George Tekemanian was out for the day, again. Old George was as old as the Very Old Ladies, or older. Lately, Gregor had thought he was looking tired, or maybe worse.

Gregor stopped in the hallway for a moment and looked at old George's door. There was that little
I'M AWAY!
sign on it that made Gregor convinced that George was trying to get himself robbed. George would have said that he was only attending to what was important. His great-niece had made him that sign, in kindergarten. It had pink
Teddy bears on it, and if you lifted the flap there was a smiley face and in big green letters,
HAVE A NICE DAY!

There ought to be some law against doing that to children in kindergarten, Gregor thought. But of course, it was too late to do anything about old George's great-niece. She had to be in high school by now.

He climbed the stairs toward his apartment and thought again about a point Bennis kept on making. It would be a lot better for both of them, especially if they intended to stay on the street for the rest of their lives, if they found someplace that didn't automatically require them to climb stairs as soon as they came in the front door. The problem was that there were no empty renovated town houses left on Cavanaugh Street. Old buildings became empty and people bought them and fixed them up, like Lida Arkmanian had done to the place across the street, and Donna and Russ had done with their place near the end of the neighborhood. Nothing was coming empty on Cavanaugh Street very soon, and the one place that was already empty was . . . ah . . .

“Too much of a project,” Gregor said out loud, as he reached what had at first been Bennis's landing.

Bennis had occupied the second-floor apartment while he had occupied the third; they had knocked them together and put in yet another staircase. Bennis was standing just outside their door now, looking at him.

“What did you say?”

“I said that the old Zaroubian place is too much of a project,” Gregor said, reaching her. “I was thinking of your thing about finding a house. Are you all right? Who's this person who's shown up?”

Bennis looked behind her, but there was nobody standing in the doorway, and there was nobody to be seen beyond it in the apartment.

“Her name is Olivia Dahl,” Bennis said. “And she's, well, she's Sheila Dunham's personal assistant. Or something. I'm really not too clear on the title. And I know you said you didn't want to talk to them, Gregor, but it's really not my fault. Bobby gave her my address and she just showed up.”

“I'll talk to her,” Gregor said. “You should try talking to the Very Old Ladies. Or Tibor should. They seem to be determined to find a murder whether there is one or not.”

“You mean there isn't one?”

“Well,” Gregor pointed out, “nobody is dead. There's that. And the last I heard from the hospital, there was no evidence anybody could find of foul play. Where did you put this Dahl woman? And how do you spell her name? Doll? Like those Barbie things?”

“Dahl, like the guy who wrote
Matilda,
” Bennis said.

Gregor had no idea what
Matilda
was, but he followed Bennis into the second-floor apartment. The apartments in this building were all the same, except for old George's on the ground floor. They each had a small foyer, and then beyond that a large living room with a window that overlooked the street. To the left and through a door was a kitchen large enough for a table to eat at. To the right and down a hallway was the bedroom. At the end of the hall that led to the bedroom was a bathroom.

Olivia Dahl was in the living room, sitting on the couch with her back to them. The room was very neat and impeccably dusted, because it was not the one Gregor and Bennis actually used. When they'd first knocked the apartments together, they had intended to use it, to make the public rooms on this floor and private ones upstairs. It just hadn't worked out that way, except for now.

Olivia Dahl was a very thin, very straight middle-aged woman with hair that had probably been dyed blond but didn't look it. When Gregor and Bennis came in, she turned a little on the couch and smiled at him. It was, he thought, a mechanical smile, a mark of courtesy and not emotion.

“Mr. Demarkian?” she said, standing up and holding out her hand as he came around the furniture into the room itself.

“It's Ms. Dahl, Bennis tells me,” Gregor said.

“Just Miss,” Olivia Dahl said. “I get a little crazy with all that trendy nonsense. I sent you a letter last week.”

“You sent me a letter four days ago,” Gregor said. “By messenger.
And I answered it. Also by messenger. I'm sorry you're having trouble on your television show, Miss Dahl, but this really isn't my kind of thing. I generally work as a consultant to police departments.”

“On murder cases,” Olivia said. “Yes, I know. Would you hear me out, please? We've got a rather unusual situation.”

“It really wouldn't make any difference,” Gregor said.

“That's because you think we staged the whole thing,” Olivia said. “Oh, I've got my contacts, too. But even if I didn't, I'd know that was what you were thinking, because it's what everybody is thinking. But I can one hundred percent guarantee it isn't true.”

“You can?” Gregor asked.

“Don't look like that,” Olivia said. “Yes, I can. Mr. Demarkian, if we were going to stage something like that, I'd have to be the one to stage it. Do you know why? Because I'm the only one organized enough to pull it off. Even to pull it off badly. Sheila couldn't do it herself. Not only is she addled most of the time, and drunk part of it, but she's got no sense of discretion and she's completely incapable of keeping her mouth shut. As for the other judges—well. The other judges. Sometimes I think they made it a requirement in the eighties. If you wanted to be a celebrity, you had to have an IQ in single digits.”

“Damn,” Bennis said. “I always kind of liked Pete Waldheim.”

“Oh, Pete is all right,” Olivia said. “But sometimes I think Deedee Plant really is a plant. I mean vegetation. I've known broccoli better able to produce linear thought. And as to Mark and Johnny—whatever. Neither Sheila nor any of the twits we have on that panel was capable of putting something like this together.”

“Possibly,” Gregor said. “But you've admitted yourself that you were, and it wasn't put together all that badly. There may be a lot of rumors running around that you staged this thing, but as far as I know, nobody's been able to prove it. And nobody knows who this mystery girl is. Or do they?”

“No,” Olivia said. “No, they don't. Although, it's really odd. She looks so familiar, and I can't put my finger on why. I thought she might have been a contestant on one of the shows, an early one, maybe—somebody
who didn't make the house. But I've looked at all our records, and I can't find her.”

“Do you even know what her name is?” Gregor asked.

“One of the girls who is in the house this cycle says she talked to her, and the girl said her name is Emily,” Olivia said. “It's not all that unusual a name, but we've only had three Emilys even at auditions, and I called around and found all of those. And she's—well, I don't know how to put it. She's sort of like wallpaper. She just fades into the background. I can't imagine that she'd make an audition tape good enough for us to call her in for an interview.”

“She's not on your interview list, either, I take it,” Gregor said.

“No, she isn't,” Olivia said. “As far as I can figure out, she just came to the building on that day, stood in line, and walked right in. I realized once the trouble happened that it wouldn't even be hard. You came into the Milky Way Ballroom through the front doors, you went up to a desk and gave your name, you got your waiting room assignment, and then you went there to sit. But there wasn't really any security. All she had to do was not bother to go to the front tables, to just sort of drift off to the halls on the sides and find a room to sit down in. There was such a crush of people, nobody would have noticed.”

“And you're contending that nobody did,” Gregor said.

“There really was a crush of people,” Olivia said. “And there is all the way along. You go from your interview room to the ballroom itself. We had it tricked out with curtains. You sat in a little waiting area until it was time to talk to the panel, then you went through those curtains and talked to Sheila and the rest of them. But there were always five or six girls waiting to be interviewed. All she had to do was sit down in one of the chairs. And then, you know, when nobody was looking, she could follow a girl leaving the interview for the room with the first round of contestants in it. I mean, I counted the girls, but this one girl was out of the room in the bathroom and so my count came out all right but it shouldn't have. I'm sorry I'm not making much sense.”

“You're making perfect sense,” Gregor said. “I'm not sure I believe
it. You're saying that anybody could just have wandered through into the competition, being filmed all the while—”

“Oh, yes,” Olivia Dahl said. “We've got film. We've got a lot of it. The police have it for the moment.”

Gregor waved this away. “You're trying to tell me you had no security at all, on a show hosted by a woman who is notorious for being a world-class, first-rate bitch on wheels, who gets death threats on a regular basis—”

Olivia blushed. “Everybody gets death threats,” she said. “You can't be a celebrity in this country today without having some people decide they want to send you mail saying they want to kill you. There's never been a credible death threat against Sheila in spite of the way she behaves. Or maybe because of it. The woman is a complete loose cannon. Maybe even the crazies are afraid of her.”

“Are you afraid of her?” Gregor asked.

“No,” Olivia said. “Mr. Demarkian, I'm very good at what I do. I get a dozen offers a month to move. I could go anywhere if I wanted to. If she fires me, I'll be in another job before the night is over. But she isn't going to fire me. I'm the only one who knows how to keep the whole thing moving. And she's getting worse.”

“What does that mean, worse?”

Olivia shrugged. “She's going off like a bottle rocket more and more often. It used to be deliberate. I'd know when the crap was coming, because I'd be able to see her thinking about it. She's not thinking about it anymore. She just seems to explode. This morning, she did something I'm pretty sure is going to get us sued by at least two people, and may get her arrested for assault as well. And it's on camera. Of course it's on camera.”

“I don't actually know what you want with me, you know,” Gregor said. “I'm not a private detective. I don't follow people. I consult with police departments on murders. You don't have a murder, and what you do have isn't the kind of thing I deal with. The police will do a good job of finding out who this young woman is and why she shot at your boss.”

“Yes,” Olivia said. “Well. The thing is . . .”

“What?”

“I'm pretty sure there's going to be a murder if I don't do something to stop it,” Olivia said. “And I don't mean that Sheila's going to murder somebody.”

Andra Gayle had a roommate named Marcia Lee Baldwin, who made her very uncomfortable. Maybe the truth was that any roommate would have made her uncomfortable. Even somebody who was just like her, who was from her own kind of neighborhood, who had her own kind of history—but it was impossible for Andra to accept the idea that anything like that could happen. Girls with her kind of background and her kind of history did not end up on
America's Next Superstar
unless they had somehow managed to overcome all the signs of being who they were. It wasn't that the show was prejudiced against black people. There had been two black winners and three black runners-up over the course of only nine cycles so far. It wasn't that the show was prejudiced against people whose families were nothing like the
Leave It to Beaver
sort of thing. What Andra thought the show was prejudiced against was ghetto, by which she meant a way of talking, and a way of behaving, that was so natural to her she was still having trouble convincing herself that people could be any other way. And yet, that was something she'd known before she came here. That was something she had worked on long and hard when she'd been making her audition tape.

The problem with this particular arrangement—with this spectacular house on the Philadelphia Main Line, which was a place only rich people had lived in forever—was that there was no place within walking distance that she could get to to do anything useful. If she looked out the windows she saw grounds, huge wide swathes of them, all green and wooded with no buildings anywhere, and no roads. There was a front drive, which was not only paved but, according to Marcia Lee, was made especially so that it melted any snow that fell on it. Andra would have really liked to know how that worked. It sounded impossible. The drive didn't seem to go anywhere, though. It went around in a circle in front of the front doors and then it went off through trees. Andra supposed there had to be a road out there somewhere. But she didn't think there would be stores and public phones and the other elements of real life.