Wanting Sheila Dead(121)

“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.”