Wanting Sheila Dead (41 page)

“If she did, the police can deal with it. And as far as I'm concerned, the police can deal with you. I'll have your bags brought to the jail so you won't have to come back to get them.”

“Bitch!” Alida said, and she was beyond shrieking now, she was beyond everything. Olivia didn't think she'd ever heard a sound like that before. It was as if she wanted to turn her voice into a weapon. Some people had voices that could shatter glass. Maybe Alida had a voice that could shatter eardrums.

“Bitch!” Alida shrieked. “Bitch! Bitch!”

Sheila Dunham stepped right up to her, and spat in her face.

They went out to Engine House in Len Borstoi's unmarked police car, with Gregor riding up front in the passenger seat and Borstoi's partner—who had never said a word, as far as Gregor could tell—riding in the back. The partner sent text messages, seemingly compulsively. Bennis sat in a chair at an empty cubicle in the police station while they all got ready to go, playing solitaire on her phone.

“I don't go out to Engine House,” she told Gregor once again, when he asked her if she was sure she didn't want to come along for the ride. “And I'm really not going out to Engine House to talk about a murder. That other murder meant we almost didn't end up together, did you know that?”

“I did, to tell you the truth.”

“I remember the day they executed her,” Bennis said. “I was with Christopher, and we went to a bar, and sat on stools, and watched the television there. And that was the news. It was all the news. They went over and over it. Did I tell you I don't approve of the death penalty?”

“Yes,” Gregor said. “Sometimes I approve of it, and sometimes I don't.”

“Did you approve of it in her case?”

“I thought it was beside the point in her case,” Gregor said. “The woman murdered for money, and she wasn't likely ever to get out of jail. But if she did, I think there was a good chance she'd murder again. I think you know she would have. In a way, she wasn't much different than the woman who is now calling herself Karen Mgrdchian. She killed to ensure that she had the money she wanted and thought she needed. There didn't seem to be anybody she wouldn't kill.”

“The woman calling herself Karen Mgrdchian is a psychopath,” Bennis said.

“So was she,” Gregor said. “And it's like I said. I think you know that. I think you have known it at least since your father was murdered, and I think you could have known it earlier if you'd been paying any attention to the person who murdered him. But you never did pay her any attention.”

“No,” Bennis said. “Nobody ever did.”

“That's part of the explanation, too,” Gregor said.

He kissed the top of her head. “Don't go anywhere. We'll be back in a bit. Don't run your battery out. I may need to call you.”

“I've got a charger in my bag,” Bennis said.

And then, since that seemed to sum up Bennis absolutely precisely, Gregor let Len Borstoi lead him out to the car. It was nowhere near as nice a car as Bennis's, but it was bigger. Gregor didn't have to wonder if his legs would fit in it. He waited for the partner and was ushered into the front seat. He buckled his seat belt and thought about the first month or so after the seat-belt laws were passed, when he had deliberately refused to wear it because the government wasn't going to tell him what to do. It had made absolutely no sense. He always wore a seat belt even when it wasn't required. It was sensible to wear a seat belt. He believed in wearing seat belts. He thought human psychology was a very strange thing.

“Are you all right?” Borstoi asked him.

“I'm fine. I'm thinking about seat belts.”

Borstoi let that pass. “What was all that you were talking about some woman calling herself something or the other.”

“The woman calling herself Karen Mgrdchian,” Gregor said. “Don't worry if you can't pronounce the name. You should see how it's spelled. It's something going on in Philadelphia. There's another woman, Sophie Mgrdchian, who's lived in her house since—well, I'd guess she's lived in one house or the other of a four-block area for all her life. And she's over eighty. Anyway, she was found a few days ago, lying comatose on the floor of the foyer of her house, with another woman with her. At the time we found them both, the other woman seemed to have dementia of some kind, and Sophie was an old lady, so she went off to the hospital and this other woman also went off to a hospital, for observation.”

“All right,” Borstoi said cautiously. “That sounds okay. Two old ladies in a house. One of them has dementia. The other of them has—what?”

“Good question. Nobody knew. The police looked through her house. I looked through her house. There was nothing to tell us who her doctor was. Or doctors. Somebody with the police checked with Medicare. She didn't seem to have been registered anywhere. But when she was found she had one of those plastic pill organizers in her pocket, and she had some fairly expensive prescription medication.”

“Okay,” Borstoi was growing ever more cautious. “That kind of things happen sometimes. It gets hard to find stuff out, even though it ought to be easy.”

“Well, when the other woman got to the hospital,” Gregor said, “it turned out they couldn't take her fingerprints, because the pads of her fingers were all scarred up, like they'd been injured or gone at.”

“Now it's beginning to sound wrong,” Borstoi said.

“It's definitely wrong,” Gregor said. “It isn't hard, but it's wrong. It's just that we don't think of old people as people who would do—things. If that makes sense. First, it turned out that the pill organizer we found in Sophie Mgrdchian's pocket didn't belong to Sophie Mgrdchian, which was significant because one of the prescriptions in that organizer was for a drug to control high blood pressure, and
Sophie didn't have high blood pressure. She sometimes suffered from low blood pressure.”

“Ah,” Borstoi said, “and the hospital, not having anything else to go on, was giving her that stuff because they figured that if she had it on her, then it must have been prescribed for her. And somebody else in the hospital wasn't doing the checkup and follow-up they should have, so they didn't notice—”

“That she was still comatose and they didn't have an explanation?” Gregor asked. “They did notice that. They've taken her off the medication now. With any luck, she'll come to, and she can just tell us what we need to know. But before we figured it all out about the medication, the other woman suddenly started behaving as if she was perfectly normal, and that's when she said her name was Karen Mgrdchian. If she was Karen Mgrdchian, that would make her Sophie's sister-in-law, the wife of Sophie's only surviving brother-in-law, Marco. And with Sophie unconscious, we had no way of knowing she wasn't.”

“But she wasn't?”

“No,” Gregor said. “Oh, I just dumped all this in the lap of the police over there, and they'll have to verify it, but I'm pretty sure that this is a con woman we have our hands on. I think she somehow made friends with or otherwise got herself into the life of the real Karen Mgrdchian, who lives in Cleveland, and that she probably took her for everything she was worth and then killed her. The Philadelphia police are going to ask the police in Cleveland, or wherever it is, to go look in the basement of Karen Mgrdchian's house. If there's a body, that's where it is. This is an old woman we're talking about. She isn't likely to have been strong enough to do anything complicated with a dead body, and why would she bother? The basement would be there, if the house has one, and the house probably does. Anyway, I think this woman took Karen Mgrdchian for whatever there was to be had, killed the woman, dumped her body in the basement, and then either ran out of whatever it was she'd stolen or got to the point where she couldn't continue without getting caught. If it's the first, then either
she wasn't able to get hold of Karen Mgrdchian's bank card, or Karen Mgrdchian didn't have her social security checks direct deposited.”

“And that would matter, why?”

“More difficult to get the checks cashed,” Gregor said. “I don't know what the real Karen Mgrdchian looked like, but my guess is that she didn't look much like the one we've got.”

“Then the other woman, the Sophie woman, must have known she wasn't really her sister-in-law,” Borstoi said.

“Not necessarily,” Gregor said. “According to the women on the block who did know Sophie, the last time Sophie saw Karen Mgrdchian was in the nineteen eighties, when Sophie's husband died, and his brothers and their wives came in for the funeral. That's a long time ago. Almost thirty years. People change a lot in thirty years.”

“I guess,” Borstoi said. “I still think I'd be able to recognize them, once I knew who they were supposed to be. But maybe Sophie didn't know this Karen very well.”

“Hardly at all, I think,” Gregor said. “But, to get back to it, I think this woman calling herself Karen Mgrdchian killed the
real
Karen Mgrdchian and shoved the body in the basement. My guess is that the police will find she hit her on the head or something. She wouldn't be likely to have as good a dodge as the one with the blood pressure medication. But whatever it was, she killed Karen Mgrdchian, and then when the money started to run out or she was about to be found out, she decided to take off. She probably heard about Sophie from Karen. Maybe she heard that Sophie had a big house on an expensive street. Whatever it was, she came out here and moved in with Sophie.”

“And these women who knew Sophie from the neighborhood, they didn't think anything of it?”

“Oh, no,” Gregor said. “You should see these women. We call them the Very Old Ladies. They're that. They'd also make Miss Marple look like somebody who can mind her own business. The Very Old Ladies were up in arms in no time, and they were convinced that Sophie was being murdered in her bed. They kept trying to get in to see Sophie, but no one answered the door. Mind you, Sophie was not a social sort.
She kept to herself most of the time. It wasn't necessarily all that odd that she wasn't talking to people, except that this woman was there. So they came and got me, and I went and rang the doorbell. And when the door opened, there was Sophie, lying comatose on the floor. And there was this other woman, acting as if she had dementia.”

“Did she have dementia?”

“I don't know,” Gregor said. “She might have had a mild stroke. It was her blood pressure medication she was feeding Sophie Mgrdchian. I think that if we hadn't gotten there when we did, she'd have shoved Sophie's body into the basement and gone on living in that house until she started to feel it wasn't safe anymore. But Sophie would have been dead. I'm going to have Bennis remind me not to turn into a recluse in my old age. It's a good way to get yourself victimized.”

“And the fingerprints,” Len Borstoi said, “that's because her prints are on file somewhere. She didn't want to get caught at this and have it come back that she had a sheet.”

“Well, have you ever known a con artist who started as an old lady?” Gregor asked. “And have you ever known any con artist who worked for forty or fifty years, who never got caught even once? I'd be willing to bet just about anything that this woman not only got arrested a few times, but that she got convicted at least once. But we'll see how it works out. At the moment, we're in the position of not having a real reason to hold the woman. Sophie Mgrdchian hadn't woken up the last time I checked, so she can't tell us anything. And just yet, there's no sign there's ever been a crime. So—”

“It's like what happened with that Emily Watson,” Len Borstoi said. “We got her in jail, then we checked out the gun and there was no ammunition in it. Did I tell you that before? It wasn't blanks. There was nothing in it. The gun was absolutely clean. It hadn't been fired. At all. Ever. So, when push came to shove, there wasn't a whole lot we could charge her with, and the judge wasn't going to let us hold her when the charges we did have didn't amount to much. So, the next thing we knew, she was out on the street.”

“Yes, well. We don't want the fake Karen Mgrdchian out on the street. If she makes a habit of this, she's a serial killer as well as a con artist.”

“And our guy here isn't?”

“No,” Gregor said, “she's killed only this once. But it was cold as hell. And I wouldn't like to speculate about what she would and wouldn't do for the rest of her life.”

“If you can really prove this, she'll spend the rest of her life in jail.”

“You're the one who's going to prove it,” Gregor said. “That's my usual deal with police departments. I come in. I consult. I go home. They get the credit.”

“Well, I wouldn't have thought of looking for this stuff if you hadn't suggested it. I give credit where credit is due.”

“There seems to be some kind of riot going on in Engine House.”

Riot wasn't really the word. The front doors of the house were open. People were spilling out onto the front steps, all kinds of people. Uniformed police officers were backed up against their patrol cars. There were lights on everywhere.

“Damn,” Len Borstoi said.

He pulled the car into the roundabout and stopped it. Gregor looked out the windshield at the action in front of them. Then he opened his door and the noise hit him. Somebody was crying hysterically. Somebody was shrieking. Somebody was just plain yelling, and he knew that voice. That was Sheila Dunham in her best end-the-universe-now mode, reading the riot act to somebody she expected to just lie down and die. Apparently, this time, she was mistaken. Nobody was going to lie down and die.

Gregor got out of the car. So did Len Borstoi and the partner, who finally stopped texting and put his cell phone away. Nobody was paying any attention to them. Gregor looked through the crowd and counted quickly. All the girls seemed to be there. There were also a lot
of people from the crew. It seemed odd to him that they would be there this late at night. He saw Olivia Dahl, holding a clipboard clutched to her chest and looking dazed. He saw a couple of people he thought must be the staff for the house. He didn't recognize them, and they didn't look like they belonged with a television crew.