Wanting Sheila Dead(120)

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

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





SEVEN



1


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.”