Wanting Sheila Dead (19 page)

“No, Krekor, you can hardly blame her. You do not want to talk to Bennis yourself?”

“I'll talk to her when I get home. I'm in a cab.”

“In a cab coming home?”

“It's a long story,” Gregor said. “Would you mind going ahead with all of that? There's just something—I don't know.”

“All right,” Tibor said. “But possibly you should make the cab bring you home. I don't like the way you sound.”

Gregor closed his phone and put it back into his pocket. They were way out into the suburbs now. The first time he had come out here, Bennis's father had sent a car for him, complete with a driver in livery. It was incredible the way some people lived, right through inflation and taxes and all the rest of it. Bennis had shown him a picture, once, of her coming-out party—the real one, not the public cotillion that was apparently just for show. There was the terrace and the back lawn decked out in lights, and two bands, and a champagne bar. Bennis was wearing an ice blue dress and a necklace that looked like it should have come with bodyguards.

Gregor wondered what had happened to the necklace. Bennis had not inherited it, because Bennis had not inherited anything. There had been a little something from her mother, but that was all.

The cab was slowing down. The driver opened the privacy shield and said, “Is this it? Engine House?”

The name
ENGINE HOUSE
was engraved on a plaque bolted into a rock next to the tall gate. It had once been engraved directly onto the stone, but erosion had taken care of that. The house was close to a hundred and fifty years old. It was a little unnerving to think that there were houses in America like that.

“This is it,” Gregor told the driver.

The gate was open. Gregor wondered if that was usual, either for Bobby Hannaford or for these television people. Gregor watched as long columns of trees went by on either side, towering up into the air and blocking out the sky. It was an already dark day. It felt spooky. He'd witnessed the effect at night. It was spookier.

They drove up into the roundabout in front of the front door and stopped. Gregor got out and handed the driver what felt like all the money in the world. The driver handed Gregor a business card.

“Call me if you have to get back,” he said.

Gregor thanked him and put the card away. The ride had cost an arm and a leg, but it had gotten him where he wanted to go. He had to make allowances if he didn't want to drive himself and he didn't want to ask Bennis to drive him. He never wanted to drive himself. He thought it must have been five years since the last time he'd tried it. He never wanted Bennis to drive him, either. She thought of speed limits as minimums and brakes as largely unnecessary.

He looked around. He could hear the cab retreating up the drive. There was a black limousine off to the side, in the direction of the garages. There was still rain coming down. The house felt empty and looked it, but he knew that didn't mean anything. Houses this large often felt and looked empty when they weren't actually full of people.

He pressed the doorbell and waited. The door was opened a few seconds later by a very young girl who looked as if she had been crying. Gregor didn't think she was a maid. She wasn't dressed for it. She wasn't acting like it, either.

“Excuse me,” Gregor said. “I've come to see a Miss Olivia Dahl.”

All of a sudden, the door was pulled back in a jerk and Olivia Dahl was standing there, looking a little disheveled and completely wild.

“My God,” she said. “It's Gregor Demarkian. I can't believe it. I really can't believe it. Get out of the way, Coraline. What do you think you're doing?”

Olivia Dahl grabbed the crying girl and jerked her out of the way. Then she grabbed Gregor Demarkian by the wrist and pulled him into the house.

The foyer was full of people, most of them young girls, many of them hysterical. Gregor wondered why he hadn't heard any of it when he was standing on the step.

Then a tall, thin, black-haired woman walked up to him and grabbed his lapel. “Get in there,” she said. “What's the good of you anyway, if
you can't prevent something like this? Don't you see somebody's trying to kill me?”

“For God's sake, Sheila,” Olivia said.

“Somebody is trying to kill me,” Sheila Dunham said. “That's the truth. It really is. Do you honestly think that anybody cares about whoever that is? And what's she doing out, anyway? She was in jail. She was supposed to stay in jail. How do you live with yourself if you let dangerous criminals out in public when you're supposed to keep them in jail?”

“Sheila, make sense,” Olivia Dahl said. “This is Gregor Demarkian. He's not part of the police department. He's—”

“One of these filthy little whores is trying to kill me,” Sheila Dunham said, “and you're all standing around talking about it.”

“It's over here,” Olivia said, pulling Gregor toward the right of the foyer.

That was when Gregor Demarkian got the oddest feeling of déjà vu. There was the door to the study. There was the study. When they opened the door to the study they would find a man on the floor in front of the fireplace, his head bashed in with a bust of Aristotle, his wheelchair pushed back a little toward the desk.

But that was not, of course, what they did find. Olivia opened the door and there was no man and no wheelchair and no bust of Aristotle.

There was a small, thin blond girl lying across the stone hearth.

She had been shot at least three times in the chest.

 

It is never right to do wrong.

—G. K. Chesterton

By the time the police arrived, Gregor Demarkian had managed to get himself past the point where he felt that he was living in one of his own nightmares. He even called Tibor to talk about it, twice.

“I can't call Bennis,” he pointed out. “I mean, she wanted me to come out here and talk to these people about what happened in Merion, but you'll notice she didn't come out here herself. She never comes out here. I thought, after Bobby got the house back—well, I thought with childhood memories, and that kind of thing. But it didn't happen. She hates it out here.”

“This is not surprising, Krekor,” Tibor said. “Her father was murdered there. It doesn't matter that it was many years ago now.”

“I know,” Gregor said. “And I also know that unless Bobby Hannaford committed this murder himself, the weird correlations have to be just coincidence. The study. The body in front of the hearth. It's still very unnerving. And I don't like the fact that she's going to hear about it. And she
will
hear about it. She can't keep herself off the news shows.”

“She will be fine, Krekor. Bennis is not an irrational woman. Are you going to investigate this murder that is there now, then?”

“I don't know,” Gregor had said.

And he didn't know. He really didn't. He had forced all the people from the show into the hall and left the room untouched, but not until he had walked around the body once or twice. He had always been glad that he had not been the kind of law enforcement agent that has to deal daily with the results of violent death. By the time his unit of the FBI had come in on a case, the bodies were in the morgue or buried, and he had only pictures to look at. Still, he knew how to study a corpse if he had to, and he had looked over this one.

The three entry wounds were unmistakable. Gregor didn't know enough about pathology to know if those would turn out to be the only ones, or if somebody had pumped God-only-knew how much lead into this tiny young woman. There were the three, and he could see, just by looking around, two of the bullets, both lodged in the wall next to the huge fireplace. He walked around the room a few times. He thought that whoever had done the shooting had done it from the direction of the delicate French secretary near the tall arched windows—whoever had done the shooting had been
all the way inside
the room, and not standing in the doorway.

He went out into the hall and looked around. Some of the young women had left, he presumed to go upstairs to their rooms and lie down, but most of them were still milling about, as were Olivia Dahl and Sheila Dunham. Except that Sheila wasn't milling as much as she was pacing, and wasn't upset as much as she was furious. That might be just her way. Gregor had known people who could only show upset as anger.

“I want to know what's going on around here,” Sheila was saying, stalking from one end of the broad foyer to the other. “This is ridiculous. Why is that girl even here? And don't tell me I should call her a woman. All that crap went out in the eighties, and she's not a woman, she's a damned twit. And she's here.”

Olivia made a sour face and shrugged in Gregor's direction. “I'm sorry,” she said. “It just occurred to me. You've been here before, haven't you? You've investigated another murder in this house.”

“That's right,” Gregor said.

“I should have realized. I'm sorry I didn't think of it to begin with. It was a long time ago, wasn't it?”

“Over a decade,” Gregor said.

“And it was somebody you knew—your wife's father, or something like that.”

“My present wife's father,” Gregor said. “I hadn't met her at the time. Well, I met her in the course of that investigation.”

“I should have realized,” Olivia said again. “I do remember that case, and when we decided to rent this house for the show, I looked into it. You have no idea the kind of nonsense we have to put up with with all of this. I had to make sure I could fend off any paranormal phenomena—”

“What?”

“Not real paranormal phenomena,” Olivia said. “But the girls, you know, they get—I don't know how to explain how they get. But I wanted to know enough about what happened here so that if one of them decided she was seeing ghosts, I could head it off at the pass. And of course I talked to Mr. Hannaford about it. He hasn't ever seen any ghosts. At least he says he hasn't. And I don't believe in them.”

Gregor looked back toward the study. “Do you still not know who that is?” he asked. “She doesn't look familiar to you in any way?”

“Really. She does in a way, but it's not anything I can put my finger on,” Olivia said. “I suppose it's just possible that she sent in an audition tape at some point or the other and I just don't remember it. We send back the ones we aren't interested in if they come with a self-addressed stamped envelope. We throw away the ones that don't. But I do know she was never in consideration for casting, because we keep copies of all of those.”

“And you've looked through them all?”

“Oh, no, I couldn't,” Olivia said. “For one thing, I don't have them. They're on file back in California. But there aren't that many of them, and I'm sure I would have remembered.”

“What's not that many of them?”

Olivia looked at the floor. “We ask three hundred people to interview,” she said. “I know that sounds like a lot, but it really isn't. We routinely get over ten thousand tapes when we put out a call for them. Of course, we didn't get that many at first. In the first couple of seasons, we were really straining to find girls to cast, in some ways. We could always have just taken whatever we happened to get, but those first two years there weren't necessarily enough girls we thought were plausible. So in those days we went out looking for girls. We went to malls. We went to small towns and set up shop in the local theater. There aren't as many theaters on Main Street anymore as you'd think there'd be.”

“I suppose it would be safe to say that this girl wasn't from those first two seasons, because those you might have remembered.” Gregor didn't know if this would be true, but he knew it was what Olivia believed, and he wanted to move forward. “What about the girl herself. Is she a plausible candidate?
Could
she have been invited to an interview?”

Olivia looked back to the study door. Everybody was avoiding it. The girls who were still downstairs were either in the living room or sitting on the stairs. Sheila Dunham was still stalking. The two gay men Gregor had been told were judges were leaning against the wall next to the front door, looking tired.

Olivia looked away. “I don't know,” she said. “She was certainly pretty enough. I remember thinking that the first time, in the first incident, back in Merion. Pretty is a consideration. Beautiful would be better, but it's unusual to find really beautiful girls who haven't figured out how to make that work for them without us. Really beautiful girls have options, if you know what I mean.”

“Yes, I do.”

“When we get the really beautiful ones, it's usually because they're from very small towns. Rural South Dakota. Godforsaken places in Wyoming. But she wasn't that kind of beautiful. She was pretty enough, though. It would have depended on the audition tape. You
have to do more than look good to work on television. You have to have some kind of spark, and the camera has to like you. Some girls are too stiff, and some of them are just too retiring. They fade into the background.”

“Is that what this one did, fade into the background?”

“Well,” Olivia said, “she must have. I know we talked about what happened in Merion, but it was very odd. This girl must have just walked in with the rest of them and skipped the sign-in table. It just didn't occur to me that anybody would bother. To be interviewed, you had to be on my list. In order to be on my list, you had to check in at the table. Just doing what this girl did and wandering off to sit in one of the waiting rooms wouldn't get you, well, it wouldn't get you anything—”

“It got her access to Sheila Dunham,” Gregor pointed out.

“Oh, I know it did,” Olivia said. “But I wasn't watching for that. It did occur to me that some girls might try to sneak past the sorting system and get interviews when we'd rejected their tapes, so we had a rather elaborate system worked out to make that impossible. And this girl seems to have drifted in, gone to a waiting room, then went from station to station and just blended in with the crowd. Some of the girls remember seeing her, on and off, and didn't think anything of it. Why would they? It was a huge casting call.”