Wanting Sheila Dead (45 page)

“Well, of course you didn't need him to tell you that,” Kara Edelakian
said. “None of us needed him for that. But he did all the other things, you know, and—”

“And he got that woman arrested,” Mrs. Melvarian said. “And we didn't get killed in the process, which I was sure was going to happen. I mean, that woman was a murderer, wasn't she, she did it all the time, and I don't see why not—”

“I want to know how you found out who she was,” Mrs. Vardakian said. “She had done something to her fingerprints. She wasn't carrying her birth certificate.”

“No,” Gregor said. “She wasn't.”

“So,” Mrs. Vardakian said. “What did you do? How did you discover her?”

“This isn't,” Gregor started. Then he stopped. “It wasn't as hard as you'd think,” he said. “It wasn't a matter of intelligence, just of boredom. She made her fingerprints unreadable, but she still had her face.”

“I don't understand,” Mrs. Vardakian said.

“She hadn't had plastic surgery or anything like that,” Gregor said, “not on her face, at any rate. And a woman like that gets arrested a lot. And Susan Lee Parker had been arrested a lot. And every time you get arrested, you get your picture taken. So, it was just a matter of circulating mug shots and waiting. Finally, one came in that had to be the right one. There was a little back and forth, some cops from Lincoln, Nebraska, came in to see if they could make a positive identification, and once we had that it was just a matter of following the paper trail. When you get arrested a lot, you leave a big paper trail.”

“Ah,” Mrs. Vardanian said.

“I think it's brilliant,” Mrs. Melvarian said.

“I think it is disappointing,” Mrs. Vardanian said. She turned her black eyes on Gregor, looked him up and down as if he were a prime piece of red meat, and shook her head. “This is not how a Great Detective behaves, Krekor. This is not like Sherlock Holmes. This is the kind of thing that could have been done by a secretary with a fax machine.”

Then she turned her back to them and stalked off, headed for her usual table. The other two hurried after her, fluttering.

“Well,” Gregor said.

“Don't worry, about it, Krekor,” Tibor said. “They're not impressed with me, either.”