Wanting Sheila Dead (20 page)

“And in the room where this girl took a shot at Sheila Dunham,” Gregor said. “How many people were there?”

“There were thirty girls—well, thirty-one, with this one—and Sheila and the judges and the camera people, and that kind of thing. We were filming. Those would have been the first group of girls that would get air time during the show. The usual procedure is to pick those final thirty, then run a few of what we call challenges, then whittle those down to twenty, then run a few more challenges, then whittle those down to fourteen. It's the fourteen who come here and live in the house. Or whatever house we have. And usually we do it all in two days. That day when we pick them, and then the next when we do the
challenges. Except, of course, we couldn't do it that fast this time. The police were involved.”

“So you did what?” Gregor asked. “What happened to those original thirty girls?”

“We put them up in a hotel for three days,” Olivia said. “It cost an arm and a leg. Sheila was livid. But we just couldn't go directly to filming with all the trouble. Eventually the police got whatever it was they wanted, and we got a day to film and sort and do the first big eliminations. And then we moved out here.”

“With fourteen girls.”

“That's right.”

“What happened to the sixteen who didn't make it?”

“They went back to wherever they're from,” Olivia said. “That's how it works. You compete, and if you're eliminated, you go home. In the meantime, we get a lot of film of you talking, we do on-camera interviews, we have cameras filming everything almost all the time, and we edit that footage and use it on the show to punctuate the challenges and things. Sometimes I think we could skip the entire thing and go directly to eliminations. It's eliminations that the audience likes to see.”

“When you say you're filming them all the time, what do you mean?”

“Oh, we've got stationary cameras everywhere, running nonstop,” Olivia said. “We've got them in the bedrooms, in the kitchen—there are two here in the hall; if you look up you'll see them. The whole point of a reality show is to have as much raw, unscripted footage as you can, and this is a reality show in spite of the fact that it's also a kind of game show. Sheila says it's a game show for women, because women like all the drama.”

Gregor looked around. There really were two cameras in the foyer, fixed up near the ceiling and pointing down. He saw another one near the ceiling on the landing to the stairs.

“Are there cameras in there where the body is?” he asked.

David Mortimer did not show up at Engine House by accident, or by epiphany. Gregor called him as soon as he realized what a royal mess of jurisdiction he was about to get himself into. The police arrived first, with sirens blazing and lights whirling, as if this were an inner-city neighborhood instead of one of the quietest and most discreet in the county. Gregor waited by the door to the study until the tech crews had come in.

“I didn't want people wandering in and out,” he said to the taller of the two plainclothesmen who came in.

He didn't want himself wandering in or out either. It was bad enough to look into that room. There is always something wrong about a dead body. It never looks as if it were sleeping. Then there was the blood, everywhere, blood that Gregor hadn't noticed at first. The bullets had gone through her and out the other side. There was blood not only on the carpet and the wall and some of the furniture, but on the ceiling.

When David Mortimer arrived, Gregor had left the professionals to their work and gone to wander around the hall by himself. He was familiar enough with this house to make the walk difficult. It is always hard to observe properly when you know what you expect to see. Even so, he didn't think there was anything to see. The foyer was, as always, broad and high ceilinged and highly polished. Whatever else was wrong with Bennis's brother—and he thought a lot was wrong with him—he obviously kept up the house. The people belonging to the show were less easy to read. The two judges, Mark and Johnny, both looked a little sick. Sheila looked as if she wanted to hit somebody. The girls were mostly crying, except for one Asian girl who seemed to be almost as angry as Sheila herself. Only Olivia Dahl was behaving the way Gregor expected the bystander at a murder scene to behave, and he had the feeling that she was doing it from force of will.

Mortimer did not arrive in a police car with the sirens blasting, but
he did arrive in a car that was driving very fast, too fast to negotiate the Engine House drive with anything like equanimity. The car screeched to a halt behind half a dozen police cars and Mortimer got out of the back. Gregor found himself wondering if he'd had a lot of trouble convincing his bosses that he needed a car and driver to get out to Bryn Mawr, or if John Jackman's office had simply assumed it. Whatever it was, Mortimer took the front steps two at a time and then fairly sprinted through the foyer to the murder scene.

He was back in a moment with the tall plainclothesman in tow.

“Gregor Demarkian,” he said, “this is Detective Borstoi. Len Borstoi, Gregor Demarkian.”

Gregor held out his hand. He was thinking that his life was about to be a nightmare of competing police forces. He wondered who had handled the attempted murder in Merion.

“I've heard of you,” Borstoi said.

Gregor made a noncommittal noise.

“I thought you only worked for police departments,” Borstoi said.

“I do only work for police departments,” Gregor said. “As a consultant, usually.”

“Are you working for a police department now?”

“I'm not working for anybody.” Gregor glanced toward the study. By now, most of the people going in and out were doing lab work, collecting fibers, taking pictures, sampling blood. “There's been an, ah, incident. Back in Philadelphia, where I live. Anyway, I was looking into that when Miss Dahl here asked me to look into the shooting in Merion last weekend. But I said I wasn't interested. And then—”

“What?” Borstoi said.

Gregor shrugged. “Curiosity, I guess. I thought I'd come out and talk to her. I investigated a murder in this house once. A long time ago.”

Borstoi gave him a long stare. “Did you solve it?”

“I helped to solve it. John Jackman was the detective on that case at the time. John Jackman who's now the mayor of Philadelphia.”

“Did he solve it?”

“I think both of us sort of contributed something,” Gregor said.

“Look,” Mortimer said. “The mayor—”

“He's not my mayor,” Borstoi said, “and I don't understand what business he's got messing around in this. This is a reality show going on here?”

“Yes,” Gregor said. “
America's Next Superstar.
”

“Oh, that one,” Borstoi said. “My wife loves that one. I can't stand it. This girl was one of the contestants?”

“Definitely not,” Olivia Dahl said, suddenly thrusting herself into the conversation. “She was pretty enough, but she was just too—it was almost as if she didn't have a personality.”

Len Borstoi seemed to consider this. “If she's not a contestant,” he said reasonably, “what's she doing here?”

Gregor took a deep breath and explained the whole thing as far as it could be explained: the shooting in Merion during casting, the girl's arrest and subsequent release, presumably on bail.

“But I don't know that much about it,” Gregor said, “because I really was not investigating it. I was just sort of wandering around poking into things because I was bored, and later I was doing it because I was frustrated. I only came out here because I thought I'd talk to Miss Dahl here and get my mind off other things.”

“Nobody knows how she got here,” Olivia said. “Nobody has the faintest idea. She didn't bring a car. There isn't an extra car parked anywhere that I saw, anyway. And besides, if she had a car, the police in Merion would have been able to figure out who she was. There would have been a registration, or a rental agreement. Instead, all we know is that she told one of our girls here that her name is Emily, and then—well, you'd have to talk to the Merion police about then.”

“Which of the girls?” Borstoi said. “Which one did she talk to?”

“Janice Ledbedder,” Olivia said.

“Is this Ledbedder girl here?”

“Of course she's here,” Olivia said. “She's either in the living room or upstairs. Some of the girls went running up to their rooms after we found the body. They were upset. Do you want to talk to Janice Ledbedder?”

“Yes,” Borstoi said.

Olivia looked at him, and then at Gregor, and then at David Mortimer. Then she turned around and headed for the living room.

Borstoi was staring at the floor. Gregor realized what it was that was bothering him. He wanted Len Borstoi to be doing something with his hands. You didn't smoke around crime scenes these days. Most police departments frowned on officers smoking on the job at all. Maybe Borstoi should have had a lollipop in his mouth, like Telly Savalas on that old television show.

“It wasn't a Greek name,” Gregor said.

Len Borstoi gave him the kind of look police detectives like to give people they think are probably crazy.

“Kojak,”
Gregor explained. “It was a television show that was probably before your time. The detective was supposed to be Greek, but Kojak isn't a Greek name. I wonder if they'd have made that kind of mistake these days.”

“I don't think we really have to go into a jurisdictional war here,” David Mortimer said. “Whether we like it or not, pieces of this thing seem to have happened in different townships. We can't just ignore the pieces just because they didn't all occur in one place. I'm sure the Mayor's Office would be glad to—”

“Why don't we just leave the Mayor's Office out of it?” Len Borstoi said. He looked toward the study. “Does anybody know what happened here? You came, Mr. Demarkian, and you discovered the body—”

“No, I didn't discover the body. It had already been discovered. I came in through the front door and there were people milling around. The door to the study was open and the body was inside.”

“Were there any people inside?” Borstoi asked.

“No,” Gregor said, “not when I first saw the room, but I'd be very surprised if there hadn't been some traffic in and out beforehand. It's
natural, really, to go up to a body and see if it's really dead. There's always the chance that there's something you can do about it, some help you can give, or that if you called an ambulance you could revive them.”

“But this body was dead,” Borstoi said.

“As a doornail, as the saying goes,” Gregor said. “I knew it as soon as I saw it. But I'm used to seeing dead bodies. These people aren't.”

“And you don't know who she is?”

“No,” Gregor said, “and the impression I get is that none of the people here do, either.”

“But the Merion police will know,” Len Borstoi said.

“You'd think,” Gregor said. “I really mean it when I say that I haven't been investigating this. All I know I heard from Miss Dahl, the woman we were just talking to, and the last I heard, this girl wasn't talking. At all. To anybody. She was just sitting in jail and keeping her mouth shut. More than that must have happened or she wouldn't have been released, but I don't know about it. I don't think anybody here, including me, even knows her real name.”

“She gave a false name?”

“I couldn't tell you. She did apparently tell this girl she talked to, Janice Ledbedder, that her name was Emily. Whether that was true or not, I have no idea. Whether Ms. Ledbedder is remembering correctly or not, I also have no idea. But there is one thing you ought to be aware of.”

“What?”

“This is a reality show,” Gregor said. “If you look up toward the ceiling, you'll see that there are cameras mounted practically everywhere. They film these girls twenty-four seven. They film everything they do.”

“Really?” Borstoi said.

He looked up at the foyer ceiling and spotted two of the cameras. Then he went to the door of the study and looked around.

“There seems to be only one in there,” he said, coming back. “But it is aimed at the door.”

There was a sound on the stairs. They all turned to look. Olivia Dahl was leading a sobbing girl by the hand, practically tugging her to get her to come downstairs.

“It's not the end of the world, Janice,” she was saying. “It's just Mr. Demarkian, and the Bryn Mawr police. You talked to the Merion police without going to pieces.”

Janice Ledbedder had never seen a dead body before today, and she was already sure she never wanted to see another one. She'd known it was a dead body, too, as soon as she'd set eyes on it. It didn't look at all like anything she'd seen in the movies or on television. It didn't even look like the pictures of the real dead bodies she had seen on shows like
Cold Case Files
and
City Confidential
. It was unmistakable even so. She had come running into the house, laughing a little because it was fun to try to outrace the rain. She had skidded a little in the foyer. Then she had started to take off her jacket, and when she'd done that she'd turned, and there it had been, right near the fireplace, where anybody could see it.

Now she came down the stairs, being led by Olivia Dahl. She could see a lot of men standing in the foyer, and to the left of the stairs, where the study was and the body was, there were people going in and out in with strange equipment and things on wheels.

One of the men standing in the foyer was somebody Janice had seen before—Gregor Demarkian, who was some kind of important detective, and who was sometimes interviewed on those true crime
shows. She didn't know if she was pronouncing his name right in her head. She thought she could get away with not actually saying it as long as he was right here. The other girls were standing in the doorway to the living room—or most of them were. Janice looked around for Coraline and didn't see her.