Wanting Sheila Dead (25 page)

“But it wasn't me,” Coraline said suddenly. Then she burst into tears. “It wasn't me. It really wasn't.”

“I didn't say it was you,” Ivy said.

“I know you didn't,” Coraline said. “Nobody says it, but they've all got to be thinking about it. The police and everybody. I mean, I was here. I was in the house the whole time. I didn't go to the restaurant.”

“You were here,” Alida said.

“But I've got no reason to want to kill anybody,” Coraline said. “I didn't even know that girl. I wasn't even one of the people who talked to her at casting. And I thought she was in jail, anyway. We all thought she was in jail.”

Ivy closed her eyes and counted to ten. She opened her eyes again. This was really very simple, and they were all wasting time.

“You were here but you were upstairs,” Ivy said. “You didn't hear anything because—well, because you can't really hear anything in this house. It's huge, and the walls are all six inches of plaster instead of drywall or whatever it is that modern houses use. And we don't know about the gun, you know. It might have had a silencer. That would explain why none of the staff heard anything—”

“None of the staff heard anything because they were all out back smoking cigarettes.” Alida made a face. “I've seen them. They all go out in the back courtyard near the garages and smoke. Anytime anybody is not looking.”

“I guess,” Ivy said, “but it still comes back to what I said. She was here, and somebody murdered her here. Either she found out that we were here and came on her own, or somebody told her where we were and asked her to come. We can't just ignore the fact that somebody murdered her. And that means it's really important for us to know what's going on down there at that meeting.”

“Why?” Grace demanded.

“Maybe they're going to cancel the season,” Mary-Louise said. “Do you think they would do that? There's been a death. That's a big thing. Maybe they just won't want to go on with it.”

“They'll go on with it,” Ivy said. “It's expensive to do something like this. If they don't do the season, they don't make the money they're expecting to make, and they'll still have to pay all these bills. I'm not worried about them canceling the season. I'm worried about what they're going to do about the murder—oh, I don't know. Security measures, maybe? More background checks for the bunch of us? Guards?”

“Do you have something to worry about from a background check?” Alida asked.

“No,” Ivy said. “I don't. But there's another consideration that none of you seems to have thought of. She was murdered here. Maybe there's somebody here right now—”

“It doesn't have to be somebody here right now,” Coraline said frantically, bursting into tears again. “It could be somebody from the outside. It could. Somebody could have come in and done it, somebody
who has nothing to do with the house and nothing to do with the show. Maybe somebody just snuck in here and—”

“Oh, for God's sake, make sense,” Grace said. “You're such an idiot. Really. Of course it has to have something to do with the show. It's always about the show. It's at casting. Now it's here. Why would that girl have been at casting and here if it hadn't anything to do with the show?”

“Maybe somebody is just using us,” Janice Ledbedder said. Ivy felt sorry for her. She was so obviously working hard to say calm, and to sound reasonable. “Maybe somebody who knew the show was going to be filmed out here, maybe they convinced this girl to come, and then they called her out here. I know, they could have said they were somebody from the show, and told this girl that there was a place—”

“And then what?” Grace demanded. “Then this girl got to casting and decided to shoot Sheila Dunham because there wasn't a place? Where did she get the gun? She had a gun at casting, in case you don't remember.”

“Maybe,” Mary-Louise Verdt said, “maybe she
was
somebody who didn't get called in for an interview, and she was upset about it. That would work, wouldn't it?”

“It would work for the shooting at casting,” Ivy said, “but it doesn't make so much sense with her getting murdered here. If she was a girl who sent in a tape and didn't get asked in for an interview, I could see her coming in and shooting Sheila Dunham because she was angry about it. I can even see her coming out here to try it again once she got released from jail. What I can't see is somebody shooting her once she got here.”

“Maybe it was self-defense,” Janice Ledbedder said. “Maybe she came out here, with a different gun, I guess, because I don't think the police would have given back the gun, would they? Anyway, maybe she came out here and somebody found her in the library and she tried to shoot them and—”

“And now we've got two guns,” Ivy said.

“I'm sorry,” Janice said.

“The thing is, it just seems so sensible, doesn't it?” Ivy said. “A lot of people want Sheila Dunham dead. She's such a terrible woman.”

“True,” Grace said.

“Look,” Ivy said. “At the very least, they're likely to discuss what they know about what the police are doing at that meeting. All we have to do is to go to the end of this hall and use the attic access. I've already scouted it out. You go up, then you go over to the left a little, and then the ceiling is lower and you sort of have to go down, and you end up in this little space right above the kitchen, which is right next to the dining room. And there's a vent.”

“You don't even know if you can really hear anything from there,” Alida said.

“There are a lot of vents,” Ivy plowed on. “If we all go, we can team up and listen at all the vents, and some of us can go a little farther in the access space. It could even be me. I wouldn't mind crawling. Then we'd be right there, and we'd be able to hear at least something. And that would give us some idea of what's going on around here.”

“Well, I'm not going to do it.” Alida said. “The rest of you can all jeopardize your chances of winning this competition if you want to, but I've never been that stupid.”

“She can't throw us all off the show at once,” Ivy said. “If we all go together, we'll be pretty safe.”

“We'll be nothing of the kind,” Alida said. “You know what she's like. We'll all get in trouble at once, and then she'll pick one of us to unload on. Well, it's not going to be me. I don't care what the police are thinking.”

Alida stood up, and turned her back to them, and marched back to her room. She did not slam the door, but she closed it with such a determined
click
that she might as well have.

Mary-Louise, who was Alida's roommate, blushed. “Sorry,” she said. “She's always like that, really. She's always angry all the time.”

Ivy looked from one girl to the other in the hall. There were still so many of them. The schedule called for two weeks of filming before the first elimination, in order for the crew to get in enough individual
interview time and challenge time to give themselves some backup in case one of the later weeks got a little thin. Over time, some of these girls would become more sophisticated. Some of them just needed a chance to get away from home, to be on their own at last. Ivy wondered if she should tell them the other thing that had occurred to her, and decided that, no, that wouldn't be helpful.

But it was always a possibility. There was a girl dead. They didn't know who she was or where she came from, but that wasn't really comforting. Ivy knew that if they didn't know those things, they also didn't know why she was dead. And if they didn't know why she was dead, they didn't know why somebody wanted to kill her. And that meant, of course, that they didn't know that there wasn't somebody out there who still wanted to kill one of them.

Ivy stood up.

“Come on,” she said. “We can at least find out something about something. It'll make us all feel better.”

“Until Alida turns us in,” one of the girls in the crowd said.

Then somebody giggled, and somebody else started to cry.

Ivy thought her head was about to explode.

Andra Gayle did not think her head was about to explode, but she was cold all over, and feeling sick, and nothing she did could make it go away. She was not like these other girls. She had seen dead bodies before. In the neighborhoods were she had grown up—and there had been so many neighborhoods, she found it hard to keep them straight in her mind—dead bodies were a fact of life. Dealers got into turf wars, or just got tired of some guy stiffing them for the money they were owed. Users got frantic because they had no money to buy dope. There were always old people around. Old people were easy to hit when you wanted to pick up a little cash. The Korean grocery stores were less easy to hit, but they had more money.

The rest of the girls were making their way to the attic access place
on the landing, and for the moment, Andra was following them. She was not as interested as they were in knowing what the police were doing. She did not trust the police. She did not trust that other detective, the one who wasn't the police, which was something she just couldn't figure out. These girls did not understand how things like this worked. It wasn't hard to get a gun. It wasn't hard to get a dozen guns. If you had the money, you could pick up anything you wanted on any street corner in the Bronx on any day of the week. Even if you didn't have much, you could get something, although it was usually something foreign that wasn't made very well and jammed.

Once, when Andra was six years old, she had gone with her mother to a neighborhood where all the houses had been abandoned. She hadn't understood that at the time. She had only known that the houses all looked empty. They had gone up to one of the empty houses and gone inside, and her mother had talked to a man for a long time. Then her mother had grabbed her by the wrist and pushed her in the man's direction, and then—

But there was no “and then.” Andra remembered what had happened. She remembered exactly, and she remembered that that was the split second when she knew she was going to do something else with her life, that she was going to get up and get out some day. She did not think about the “and then” unless she had to, to keep herself motivated.

What she was thinking about now was what had happened after the “and then.” The man had pulled her dress back down over her body and then pushed and shoved her until they got to the front door. Then he'd opened the door and had almost thrown her down the steps to the street. Andra's mother was there, sitting on the bottom step of the stoop, so high she couldn't keep her head up.

“Fuck it,” she'd said, looking at Andra up and down. “Nobody killed you. You're all right.”

Then there was the sound of a car in the street, and Andra looked up just as something rackety and loud pulled up to the curb. It was full of people, and the radio was on so loud it hurt her ears.

Then one of the doors popped open, and there was a noise, and suddenly there was something right there on the sidewalk in front of her—a dead body, a huge dead body, a man who had to be a million feet long, with his throat cut and the blood pouring out of him.

Andra's mother had looked up, and blinked, and said, “Fuck it.”

There was a message from Dr. Halevy on Gregor's voice mail when he got up the next morning, and it was just the kind of message that was likely to put him in a bad mood for the rest of the day.

“I'm very sorry I couldn't take your call when it came in,” she said. “I was hoping you could answer the same question. We don't know who Sophie Mgrdchian's regular doctor was. The police couldn't find any information that would help us. We know what medications she is taking regularly because she had one of those plastic pill organizers on her when she came in. As I said before, it wasn't much. Arthritis, high blood pressure—she's in pretty good shape for a woman her age, or she was, or we think she was. If someone you know has information on her doctor, though, we'd appreciate it.”

Gregor sat on the arm of the couch and looked at his cell phone. Nothing was likely to put him in a good mood today. He went back into the bedroom and shook Bennis awake.

“Wake up,” he said. “Listen to me for a minute.”

Bennis sat up in bed. She was one of those women who looked good
woken out of a sound sleep. Gregor wondered what the evolutionary adaptability of that was. Then again, he didn't.

Bennis turned on the light and looked at the clock. “Are you all right? Are you not feeling well? Should I call nine-one-one?”

“I want to know if you know how to get into Sophie Mgrdchian's house.”

“What?”

“Well,” Gregor said reasonably, “there must be a way. I've lived on this street long enough to know that none of you has the sense God gave a squirrel when it comes to security. It's not like you hire outside experts to make sure your places are impenetrable. There must be a way to get into that house.”

“It's four o'clock in the morning.”

“I have an early meeting downtown.”

“But why do you want to get into the house?” Bennis asked. “I mean, what's the point? That woman isn't back yet, is she?”

“No, and I don't know if she's coming back. I don't know what's going to happen to her once they let her out of the hospital. I had a voice mail overnight from Dr. Halevy.”

“Who is—”

“The doctor who's treating Sophie Mgrdchian at the moment,” Gregor said. “I called her to ask if she knew the name of Mrs. Mgrdchian's doctor. She didn't. Mrs. Mgrdchian had a pill organizer on her when she was brought in. That's how the hospital knows what medication she's taking. Other than that, they don't have a clue. Apparently, the Very Old Ladies don't, either.”