Wanting Sheila Dead(102)

“Isn’t that odd?” Bennis asked. “I mean, Sophie Mgrdchian is in the hospital, away from this woman. If she was being poisoned, or something, shouldn’t she be getting better? With nobody around to poison her anymore?”

“There is that,” Gregor said. “And, of course, that’s one of the reasons why it’s going to be nearly impossible to hold this woman calling herself Karen Mgrdchian after the observation order. Especially now that she’s acting like a perfectly normal human being. But she can’t be Karen Mgrdchian. She just can’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because she destroyed her own fingerprints,” Gregor said. “And I’ve been telling that to everybody who would listen since this thing started. And what I hear is that lots of people destroy their own fingerprints accidentally. But Bennis, you know, they don’t, they really don’t. I can’t think of a single case among all the people I’ve known in my life. Not one. Junkies do it sometimes, if they’re playing around with, I’m sorry, I can’t remember the name—the gas in industrial-sized canisters of whipped cream. Nitrous oxide? Anyway, people who play around with those sometimes get their hands stuck to them and frozen solid and then the fingertips have to be cut off to get the canister off, but does this look like a woman who uses nitrous oxide?”

“The day we found her,” Bennis said, “she was acting like she was on nitrous oxide.”

“Yes, well, I still can’t see it. Anyway, homeless people do it to themselves sometimes because they grab metal, a metal bar, a metal railing, they’re just trying to steady themselves and it’s freezing cold and they get their hands stuck, and then they pull them off and there you are. But ordinary human beings do not do that, and we all know it. And I’m sitting here trying to figure out what could possibly be causing Sophie’s condition and what I could possibly say that would make the Philadelphia police look at this differently than they do, and I keep running up against brick walls. I told David Mortimer this morning about searching the house and not finding an address book or refrigerator magnets with doctors’ names on them or a cell phone or anything. And Billie Ormonds said that from what the police have been able to figure out, Sophie Mgrdchian wasn’t even on Medicare. How the hell could she not be on Medicare?”

“She didn’t sign up?” Bennis suggested.

“The doctors would have signed her up,” Gregor said. “Or their nurses would have. Doctors like to get paid. And she has to have been seeing doctors. You need doctors to get prescriptions. I need to convince them to go search that house.”

“Sophie’s house? Haven’t they already searched it?”

“No, the other house,” Gregor said. “The Mgrdchian house in wherever it is. Cleveland? I can’t remember. That house.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m fairly sure there’s at least one body in the basement.”

“What?”

“Maybe two,” Gregor said. “In a worst-case scenario, maybe three. But that’s getting ahead of myself. I’ve got to get some sleep.”

“I can see that,” Bennis said.

“Do me a favor,” Gregor said. “Get my phone, and look at that address-book thing . . . Then there’s Billie Ormonds.” She spells it like Billie Burke, you remember, that actress who was Glinda in The Wizard of Oz. Tell her who you are and then tell her I need to talk to her, later this afternoon, as soon as she’s got a minute to give me. I’d do it now, but I’m—”

“In no shape,” Bennis said. “I can see that.”

“See if you can’t get an appointment for me to talk to her, to see her face to face, I don’t know. Invite her to the Ararat for dinner or something. She’s not a homicide detective. There isn’t any homicide as far as anybody knows, and there isn’t anything we know that could make it a suspected homicide, in spite of the fact that—”

“Don’t go into all that again. You’ll fall over.”

“I’m okay. I’m fine. I’m getting up. Do that for me, if you don’t mind. I’ve got to—”

“You’ve got to get at least a few hours of sleep,” Bennis said. “I know. Go ahead.”





2


Going to sleep was not always the best idea in the world. It wasn’t always the second best idea in the world. Gregor threw himself out of his clothes and into his bed as if he were diving into water. When he hit the mattress, he thought he might have passed out, but it was an odd kind of passing out. He couldn’t count the number of stories he’d heard about people who were supposedly in comas—or who really were in comas—who could actually hear and see and understand everything that was going on around them. He remembered the story of one woman who had laid in bed day after day, listening while her family and her doctors and her nurses had all argued the pros and cons of taking her feeding tubes out and letting her “die with dignity.” There was some kind of a show on that one—Oprah, maybe, although he wasn’t sure. The woman had written a book about her experiences. The television shows had gone looking into it all and found out that the phenomenon was rare, but not vanishingly rare. There were a couple of dozen people out there, now alive and well, who had been through the same thing.