Wanting Sheila Dead (32 page)

Len Borstoi was still staring at him. Gregor thought that this was the worst part about his incredible tiredness. The very air around his head felt as if it had texture. Everything pulsed a little. Everything glowed.

“I know you think I shouldn't be here,” Gregor said, “but I am here, and I think I know a couple of things. It couldn't hurt to listen to me, and if you want to, I'll absolutely promise to act as if I had nothing to do with it. Hell, I always prefer to act as if I had nothing to do with it.”

“The press likes to write as if you had everything to do with it,” Borstoi said. “The Armenian-American Hercule Poirot. The master detective showing all us poor dumb slobs how it's done.”

“I'd be willing to bet just about anything,” Gregor said, “that the gun lying on the carpet in there is the gun that fired the shots at the Milky Way Ballroom. You may not want to talk to me, but the Merion police are apparently not so close with information. The gun the girl was holding at the Milky Way Ballroom wasn't the gun that fired the shots there. It wasn't even loaded with live ammunition. When the Merion police got the bullets out of the wall, they were bullets from a different gun. Then, when you got the bullets from yesterday's murder to the lab, they turned out to be bullets from the same gun. And now, I'm pretty sure that the gun lying in there is the gun in question. In fact, it has to be. Nothing else makes any sense.”

Len Borstoi was looking at the ceiling over both their heads. “How did you know about the bullets from yesterday?” he asked.

Gregor shook his head. “I've got people in and around the city of Philadelphia who tell me things like that,” he said. “I've got some kind of minder over in the Philadelphia Mayor's Office who's got even more people to tell him things like that. The bullets that hit the wall at the Milky Way Ballroom and the bullets that killed that girl yesterday were from the same gun, and, like I said, that gun in there is probably the gun in question. I'm not trying to get publicity at your expense. I'm really not. I'm just bumping up against—things.”

Borstoi was still not looking at him. Gregor thought he might be looking through the door of the study. It was hard to tell.

“Did these people hire you?” he asked, waving his hand around to indicate the present company.

“No,” Gregor said. “They did ask me to look into things, but I didn't make them any promises, and I didn't agree to be hired. I don't usually work for private individuals. I consult for police departments. That way I'm not stepping on people's toes and I can't be charged with hindering a police investigation.”

Borstoi looked back at the door to the living room. “All right,” he said. “Consider yourself attached to this investigation. I'll get you paperwork later. My bosses all think you walk on water, in case you're interested.”

“I don't walk on water,” Gregor said. “I'm just less distracted than most police officers. I only work on one case at a time.”

Borstoi looked at Gregor for the first time. “Come with me,” he said.

And suddenly, Gregor had a second wind. Or a fourth one. He had no idea how long he'd been this tired. The two uniformed policemen were rounding up members of the cast and crew of
America's Next Superstar.
The policewoman was sticking to her post.

Gregor followed Len Borstoi through the living room door. The gun was still lying on the floor. The crime-scene people would pick that up and bag it later. Gregor looked around. There were no signs of
bullets in the plaster wall around the fireplace. There were no signs of bullet holes in the couch. Borstoi pointed at the floor, and Gregor saw them—just two, right there, dug into the hardwood.

“She had to be aiming down,” Gregor said.

“She?”

“Sheila Dunham had a point,” Gregor said. “Everybody around her was female. There was the crew, but—”

“You don't think it's possible for the crew to have wanted to kill Sheila Dunham?” Borstoi asked. “From what I hear, everybody on the planet wants to kill Sheila Dunham.”

“Maybe,” Gregor said, “but the crew wasn't here yesterday when that girl was found dead. At all. They were at some restaurant in downtown Bryn Mawr. I suppose one of them could have remained behind, but my guess is that he'd have been noticed. If you've listened to the girls, you know that one of them was left behind, but she supposedly went upstairs where she couldn't hear anything. So she could have committed the murder, or one of the girls in the cast could have committed the murder at the last minute, by running in when they were about to take off—”

“Did anyone do that?” Borstoi asked.

“At least three of them did,” Gregor said. “The Asian girl called Alida came back for her umbrella. The one called Suzanne came back for her purse. Janice came back to go to the bathroom. And then there's when they came back.”

“Do you think that's likely? First in the house?”

“No,” Gregor said. “Well, maybe. It's hard to get the timing straight. But there were no judges here today, so that leaves the judges out. Did you ever get that Emily girl to talk to you?”

“It wasn't me,” Borstoi reminded him. “I have talked to the Merion police. They brought her in. She gave her name as Emily Watson, got an attorney appointed, and just shut up. Then when it turned out that she hadn't actually fired any bullets, and her gun wasn't the one that did, well—”

“There was nothing to hold her on.”

“Something like that,” Borstoi said.

Gregor walked over to where the bullets were and knelt down. He was not a lab technician, or a forensics expert, but he didn't need to be one for this. The bullets were buried deep in the wood. It wasn't that somebody had fired at Sheila Dunham and missed. It was that somebody had fired at the floor. He stood up and backed off.

“Well,” he said.

“I know,” Borstoi said. “And I know there are cameras in this room, security cameras, and there were cameras filming what was going on here. But I get the feeling we're going to be in the same shape with this as we were with the murder yesterday.”

“The security camera didn't do any good?”

“It had been turned off,” Borstoi said. “Or, to be specific, it had had its wires ripped out at the wall.”

“There were live cameras in here today as well,” Gregor said.

“Yes, there were,” Borstoi said, “but I don't think they're going to be any more help than the stationary ones, and you don't think so, either. Do you walk on water? Do you have any idea of what's going on here?”

“Well,” Gregor said. “There is one thing. And I'm not trying to sound conceited. There's the mirror in the study, the one on the wall above the fireplace there.”

“What about it?”

“It's been moved. Specifically, it's been allowed to lean very slightly forward. I've been in this house before, you know. My wife grew up here, and when I was first back in Philadelphia—”

“Oh, the Hannaford thing. I remember. I was still in a uniform then.”

“I went and looked at some of the pictures of that. The mirror always hung flat against the wall. When you looked into it, from whatever part of the room, you could see a lot of things, but you couldn't see what was right under it on the hearth. But yesterday, the first thing I noticed was that you could see the body on the hearth in that mirror, at least if you looked at it through the doorway. And the body had been—how should I put this? It was as if it had been arranged.”

Len Borstoi looked impressed. “That's very good. It had been moved. How did you know that? Or was it one of your sources of information?”

“No, it was a guess,” Gregor said. “I just assumed that it was highly unlikely that the second murder I should see in this house would end up damned near replicating the first one.”

“You mean, you think somebody arranged the body so that it was in the same position as the body of old Mr. Hannaford?”

“Well, it's like I said. That, or a really incredible coincidence.”

“And the mirror?”

“So that I couldn't mistake what I saw. So that from far off, as soon as I looked at the scene, the first thing I'd notice was the resemblance.”

“All right,” Borstoi said. He looked half amazed and half amused. “Was there a point in doing that kind of thing? Why would anybody want to go through all that trouble?”

Gregor looked at the wall, and the floor, and the ceiling. He looked at the bullets embedded in the hardwood.

“I think,” he said, “the idea was to take my mind off whatever was actually going on there. To distract me from the obvious.”

“And what's the obvious?”

“Well,” Gregor said, “the most obvious thing is that Sheila Dunham is not dead.”

The other girls were avoiding her. They had been avoiding her since yesterday. Coraline had taken a long time to come to that conclusion, but now she found it inescapable. Only Janice was being nice to her, she felt, and that was probably because Janice was nice to everybody. She couldn't help it.

The yellow tape was coming down from across the door of the study. Police were walking in and out of the foyer. People in lab coats had gone into the study again and then come out, and now people in lab coats were in the living room. That Gregor Demarkian person had left, fetched by a girl who looked young enough to be his daughter and who drove the kind of car Coraline had only heard about. It was a tangerine orange two-seater convertible Mercedes-Benz.

Janice had explained it. “That's not the woman it belongs to,” she'd said. “I've seen a picture of the woman it belongs to in magazines. She's some kind of writer, I don't know. I never could read much, you know what I mean? Anyway, she's his wife now, and she's a lot older than that. She must have loaned the car to whoever that is.”

Coraline didn't really care who it was. She had gone into the interview with the police and Mr. Demarkian feeling like she was about to be arrested at any moment. She was the one who was in the house all yesterday afternoon. She could say she was in her bedroom, crying her eyes out over Sheila Dunham and her torn T-shirt, but there was no way to prove that. And if she had been in the house, shouldn't she have heard the shots? Of course, the gun could have had a silencer, but she hadn't heard anyone talking about a silencer. She'd been listening, too.

She thought it had been wrong for her to come here. It was all well and good for her mother to talk about providing a Christian inspiration, but this was not a Christian place. Most of the other girls didn't even like Christians, and when Coraline tried to provide a Christian inspiration, they told her she was a bigoted jerk. They'd only just started, and she'd already found it easier to sit still and keep her mouth shut.

When the police had asked to talk to her, Coraline had gone into the living room and sat down on a chair across from the fireplace. The room was so large, police technicians could be working on it at one end and interviews could be going on at the other, and nobody got in anybody else's way.

“Show us where you were standing,” Gregor Demarkian had said.

Coraline had looked around and blushed. Of course, she'd been standing right there at the end of the couch, just a little behind Faith Stackdopole, who had the silliest name she'd ever heard. But she'd wanted to stand behind somebody. She'd wanted to be where Sheila Dunham couldn't see her. And that, of course, had been the wrong decision. The gun had been there. Right there. When it was all over, Coraline had seen it lying on the ground.

“I was right behind Faith,” she'd said, as carefully as she could. She was trying so desperately not to seem guilty. “And in front of me to my left was Suzanne. And next to me and behind me was Janice. And I was thinking that if I wasn't so afraid of Sheila Dunham, I'd have been able to sit on the couch, and that would have been better. You
could see the girls on the couch. On camera, I mean. They're the ones who are going to get noticed when the show airs.”

Coraline had no idea if the show would air now that there had been a gunshot, but maybe it would. Maybe that would make “good television.” People around here were always talking about good television.

“Could you tell where the gunshot was coming from?”

All right, that was true. There had been no silencer today. The gunshot was very loud. Everybody had heard it.

“It just happened,” she had said, threatening to break into tears again. “It just did. We were all sort of jumping up and down, and yelling ‘yay' and ‘dynamite,' and that kind of thing. We were all just making noise. And then there were those sounds, you know, and everybody stopped.”

“Everybody stopped completely? They stopped moving around as well as talking?”

“Well, no,” Coraline had said. “There was a lot of moving around. And then, you know, people were making noise. And other people, people from the crew, were running around. We all thought somebody had been hurt.”

“But nobody had been.”

“No. No. That was a good thing. I hate it here. I want to go home. I didn't think it would be anything like this.”

Now Coraline stood in the door of the study and thought that she had completely lost track of who had asked her which questions. She knew one was Detective Borstoi and one was Mr. Demarkian, but she wasn't paying attention to either of them. She'd just wanted to cry, and to go to her room and hide, except that she wasn't sure she was welcome in her room. Last night, her roommate, Deanna, had gone down the hall to talk to people and never come back.

Coraline went into the study and looked around. There was still blood in places. There was blood on the hearth, and on the wall, and on the ceiling—only a little of it on the ceiling, just a drop or two. She went to the mirror and looked up at it. It did tilt a little forward—who
had she heard talking about that? Somebody. If you looked at the back of the mirror you could see there was something like a ribbon there, or two ribbons, and the mirror was hanging on them. Coraline didn't think anybody had done anything about the mirror on purpose. If that was how it was fastened to the wall, it would be easy for it to just come loose a little and let the mirror hang forward. Maybe it would come so loose that the mirror would crash to the ground, and then there would be shards of glass everywhere.