Wanting Sheila Dead (29 page)

“If you're asking if I'm a lesbian,” Grace said, “the answer is no.”

“You're the one who went to Wellesley, aren't you? That's still all women. I thought all those places were full of dykes.”

Olivia was looking at her clipboard. “You've got the notes there,” she said to the small blond woman. “She's going under the name Grace Alsop—”

“Her real name's Harrigan,” Sheila said. “Her father does entertainment news for Fox. He's a right royal prick, too.”

Since Grace actually agreed with this, she let it go. Olivia hurried away, and somebody said “Action.”

The small blond woman turned to the camera and smiled. “Good evening! This is Deirdre Damien with
Entertainment News Tonight,
and I'm here with the latest winner of the phenomenally popular reality show,
America's Next Superstar
! Our guest beat out literally hundreds of other girls just to make it on air, and then she beat out another
thirteen to take home the top prize. Here's Grace Alsop, and I'm very excited to have her!”

Deirdre Damien, Grace thought. What a name. She turned to the camera herself. It was very important not to leave dead air. Not ever.

“Good evening, Deirdre,” she said. She smiled.

“Well,” Deirdre said. “Let's start at the beginning. Your name isn't really Grace Alsop, is it? That's your stage name.”

“That's right,” Grace said. “My original name is Grace Harrigan.”

“Well, now,” Deirdre said. “There are some people, quite a lot of them really, who say you changed your name so that people wouldn't know that you're your father's daughter. Your father is the entertainment news director for Fox, isn't he?”

“That's right,” Grace said. “But I don't think I was hoping nobody would know. It isn't a hard thing to find out. I was just hoping to be judged on my own merits and not because my father is important in the industry.”

“Was it his importance in the industry that bothered you,” Deirdre said, “or the fact that Fox is known to hire only very bigoted people to work for it? Is your father a homophobe?”

“What?” Grace said.

“Or maybe it's race,” Deirdre said. “I know a lot of people at Fox are supposed to favor a return to segregation. Didn't your father once say that President Obama looked like a monkey with a Harvard accent?”

“Not in front of me, he didn't,” Grace said. Somewhere in the back of her mind, she was trying desperately to think. She had expected to be accused of being a spy. She hadn't expected this. She had no idea where this was going to go.

“A lot of people are concerned that America's most popular reality show has thrown up a winner who may not be open to the aspirations of all Americans,” Deirdre said. “I'd like to know what you're going to do to make sure that people know you aren't really like that. Do you intend to do some outreach? Some community service? Maybe you'd be interested in dating an African American man.”

Grace had been watching entertainment news all her life. She knew
that it never threw up interviews like this one. It didn't even come close.

“Actually,” she said, “I've got something else I'm working on at the moment. I don't know if you know it, but there was a murder during our filming for this show.”

Deirdre looked confused. Grace shot a look at Sheila Dunham. Sheila was sitting far forward on her chair. Her hands were knotted together. They looked like claws.

“I'm committed,” Grace said, “to proving that the police and the public are wrong. I've started a crusade to prove that Sheila Dunham did not murder that girl, and that she'd never kept her in a house in Malibu as a slave.”

It was the lack of sleep, Gregor thought, that was making him behave so . . . erratically. It didn't sound to him like the right word. He emerged onto City Ave like a night flying bat suddenly thrust into daylight. Everything looked too bright, even though it wasn't bright at all. It wasn't raining, but there were clouds covering the sky, black ones, promising even more rain. He didn't used to be subject to insomnia. Even during his earliest days at the Bureau, he had been able to sleep at night. There were people who thought he was a little odd that way. How could you sleep after you'd pulled the body of a kidnapped twelve-year-old out of a back-road ditch at four o'clock in the morning? How could you sleep when you knew there were children missing, girls dead in basements, piles of paper supposed to be full of leads piling up on your desk and falling off it in the night?

The FBI handles more than one kind of crime, and when Gregor had first joined it he had signed on to work on the financial stuff. That made sense, because in those days special agents were expected to be either lawyers or accountants, and Gregor had been an accountant. It would be better to say he had trained as an accountant, at the
Harvard Business School. He'd never actually worked as one. Still, given his background, he had expected to be put to work on organized crime and fraud investigations. Instead, he had found himself working on kidnappings. He could still remember going home on the night he had received his first assignment—going home to his first wife, Elizabeth, and being completely astonished at what he was expected to do.

“I think it sounds better than bank fraud,” Elizabeth had said at the time. “At least there's a human element to it. It isn't all numbers.”

Elizabeth was buried in an Armenian cemetery in Philadelphia. Gregor went there once or twice a year, even now. He had, however, stopped doing that thing he had been so addicted to just after she had died. He didn't talk to her anymore, aloud or otherwise. He couldn't remember when he had stopped doing that. It was before he had started seeing Bennis with any seriousness, he was sure of that, but it might have been quite a bit before. Bennis seemed to know that they had been seeing each other long before he had become aware of it.

He was really very tired. Too tired to be where he was, walking along a street, in the middle of the morning rush, with traffic everywhere. He was getting too old for this. There had been a time in his life when he had been able to stay awake for a couple of days at a time and still function. He could get by for a couple of days more with just a few half-hour catnaps here and there. Now he had to sleep for eight hours and roll carefully into the day just to be coherent, and he hadn't done anything like that this time. He'd even woken Bennis from a sound sleep. She'd probably gone back to bed after he'd left, after first going to Donna Moradanyan Donahue's house and complaining about the entire night.

He was in a neighborhood he did not recognize. It was not a bad one. There were stores, and none of the storefronts were boarded up. There were places to eat, mostly pizza and Chinese food. Gregor remembered growing up in Philadelphia. There had been pizza and Chinese food even then, but there had been more little hole-in-the-wall diners that served always exactly the same kind of food: hamburgers; cheeseburgers; diet plates. The “diet plates” were always the same, too.
They consisted of a single hamburger patty without the bun, a little collection of lettuce and tomato, and a big round scoop of macaroni salad thick with mayonnaise. Some diners had a variation that included the macaroni salad and the lettuce and tomato, but that substituted a big round scoop of tuna salad—also full of mayonnaise—for the hamburger patty. The tuna salad had had as much mayonnaise in it as the macaroni salad. Had anybody ever really thought she could lose weight by eating that kind of thing? Gregor's mother hadn't been the kind of woman who had tried to lose weight. It was the girls he grew up with who were worried about that, and he'd never seen any of them eating in a diner.

He came to a little open area in front of a small collection of stores that had been set just a little back from the sidewalk. He really had no idea at all where he was. He couldn't even remember why he'd wanted to walk instead of take a cab. The little open area had two stone benches in it. One of the benches was taken up by an old woman with six or seven layers of clothing and the rest of her things in black plastic garbage bags piled in a shopping cart. Gregor sat down on the other bench and wondered where all the bag ladies got their shopping carts. The shopping carts were always in good repair. He couldn't imagine that they were sold down at the Goodwill store. The bag ladies had to take them from supermarket parking lots, and they had to be good at it, because these days the supermarkets locked them up in chain guards that cost twenty-five cents to open. On the other hand, it was only twenty-five cents. Even a bag lady could come up with that much at least some of the time.

He got his cell phone and his notebook out of his jacket pocket. He looked up to see a woman standing behind the plate-glass front window of one of the stores, staring at the bag lady and looking furious. It had to be difficult for shopowners. It was a public space, after all. They couldn't just ban parts of the public because they didn't like them. Gregor wondered what they did do, and then what the bag ladies did when they were finally told to move along.

He looked through his notebook until he found the number he
wanted. He tapped it into his phone and put the phone to his ear to hear it ringing. He missed the sound of phones ringing. These days people had ring tones, which weren't tones at all, but entire musical performances, often annoying.

I'm getting to be an old fart,
Gregor thought. Then somebody picked up on the other end of the line and said, “Ormonds.”

Gregor got a picture of Billie Ormonds in his mind and almost smiled. “Gregor Demarkian,” he said. “I just talked to David Mortimer. I thought I'd better call you.”

“Why?” Billie said. “Is the office of the mayor about to try to get me fired?”

“Not that I know of. Listen, I'm sorry if I sound a little incoherent. I haven't had any sleep. Something occurred to me in the middle of the night, and then I couldn't let go of it.”

“I do that sometimes,” Billie said.

“The police searched Sophie Mgrdchian's house,” Gregor said. “I'm right about that, aren't I?”

“From the notes I got, you were there.”

“Yes,” Gregor said. “Yes, I was. But here's the thing. I've talked to Sophie's doctor, the one she has now that she's in the hospital. Who is not her regular doctor—”

“We don't know who her regular doctor is,” Billie said. “We did try—”

“I'm sure you did,” Gregor said. “But you didn't find any information on one, which is really very odd. There should have been an address book in that house, or refrigerator magnets, or a little stash of business cards. Old women like Sophie Mgrdchian don't keep things like that in their heads. I don't suppose you checked for a cell phone.”

There was silence on the other end of the line. “You know,” Billie said slowly. “I don't know if they did. Not everybody has a cell phone, and—”

“Yes, right, and old ladies aren't likely to,” Gregor said. “Let me apologize again. I really am running on fumes here. I broke in to the house.”

“What?”

Gregor was just tired enough to wonder if that was the only response anybody in Philadelphia was ever going to have to his breaking in to Sophie Mgrdchian's house.

“It made me feel thirty years younger,” he said, “and I told David Mortimer about it this morning. I kept thinking about all this, and it kept bothering me, so I broke in to the house at four or five this morning and looked through it myself. There was no address book. There were no refrigerator magnets except the plastic fruit kind. And I didn't find a cell phone. And all that's not possible.”

“I see what you mean,” Billie said.

“It occurs to me,” Gregor said, “that you could check her bank, and that might tell you if she had a cell phone. There would be records of payments, at least if she was paying her own bills. Some of the older people on Cavanaugh Street have things like cell phones and cable that they don't pay for, because they've got children or grandchildren who pay for them instead, but from what I can figure out about Sophie, she wasn't in contact with her family, she didn't have children of her own, and she doesn't seem to have seen this niece of hers for a long time. So if she had a cell phone, she paid for it herself. You could find that out from the bank. The cell phone company would have had records of her calls. You could probably get the name of her regular doctor from that.”

“Very good,” Billie said. “I'm beginning to feel like an idiot here.”

“Even if she didn't have a cell phone,” Gregor plowed on, “she certainly had a landline. I saw it. The landline company would have records, too. Sophie must have called her doctor at some point in the last three months. She's an old lady. They call their doctors.”

There was a little pause on the other end of the line. “She didn't have insurance,” Billie said finally. “We checked with Medicare. There's no record of her. If she has a doctor, she's paying out of pocket.”

Was it possible that Sophie Mgrdchian didn't know she was eligible for Medicare? Wouldn't her doctor have told her? Gregor wished his head would clear.

“If she paid out of pocket, she'd almost certainly have written a check,” he said. “There would be records of that at the bank, too.”

“Good thinking,” Billie said.

“This doesn't make sense,” Gregor said. He tried to remember what Dr. Halevy had told him, and couldn't. He looked in his notebook and found mostly squiggles. “Listen,” he said. “Dr. Halevy said they found a plastic pill organizer on Sophie when she was brought into the hospital. Did she by any chance give you a list of the medications that were in it? I'm pretty sure she gave me one but I can't—”

“I've got it right here,” Billie said. “Motrin—I think that's ibuprofen. Levatol—that's a beta-blocker, for high blood pressure. Lipitor. That's to lower cholesterol. Bayer low-dose aspirin. Amoxicillin.”