Wanting Sheila Dead(21)

“No, no,” Mrs. Vardanian said. “It’s not the house. It’s Sophie Mgrdchian.”

“She’s the woman who owns the house,” one of the other Very Old Ladies said.

Sometimes Gregor could not keep the Very Old Ladies apart in his head, except for Mrs. Vardanian who was easy to remember because she had a lot in common with the bogeyman of his childhood.

Gregor tried to think of what he was supposed to say here. “Is she a friend of yours?” he asked.

“What difference does it make if she’s a friend of ours,” Mrs. Vardanian said. “Of course she is, or she used to be. She doesn’t go out very much, not even to go to church these days. Her husband Viktor died—”

“In 1984,” yet another of the Very Old Ladies put in. “I remember the funeral. It wasn’t a very big funeral. There’s a niece, I think, in New York somewhere.”

“It’s California,” the first of the Very Old Ladies said.

Gregor was beginning to feel a little dizzy trying to remember who was saying what.

“Here is what we want you to do,” Mrs. Vardanian said. “We want you to find out what has happened to her.”

“Has something happened to her?” Gregor asked.

“Yesterday,” Mrs. Vardanian said, “I saw a woman come out of this house and leave the neighborhood. She came back in a taxi half an hour later with grocery bags. It was not Sophie Mgrdchian.”

“Maybe it was the niece,” Gregor said, “or, I don’t know, the sister? Brother? Whoever had the niece?”

“It’s a niece,” one of the Very Old Ladies said. “Sophie’s two sisters are dead. It was a terrible thing, really, there were practically no children. One of Viktor’s brothers had a daughter. But the niece can’t be more than, I don’t know—”

“Forty,” Mrs. Vardanian said. “She’s probably younger. This woman looked as old as Sophie. And she was—”

“She was messy,” the third Very Old Ladies said.

“She was dressed in layers,” Mrs. Vardanian said positively. “The way homeless people dress. And she wasn’t Armenian, not even close. And she was too tall.”

“Tall,” Gregor repeated.

“Sophie was barely five feet,” one of the Very Old Ladies said. “This woman had to be about five seven or eight.”

“So,” Mrs. Vardanian said, “what we want you to do is find out what happened to Sophie Mgrdchian. I know we haven’t seen much of her in the last fifteen years or so, but that doesn’t mean we’re going to stand by and let some strange woman kill her off and steal her house.”

“You think somebody has killed Mrs. Mgrdchian and stolen her house because you saw somebody you don’t know bringing groceries there yesterday?” Gregor said. “Maybe it’s a friend. Maybe she’s got a visitor. Maybe—”

“She doesn’t have a visitor,” Mrs. Vardanian said. “I know every single person Sophie could have as a visitor, and it wasn’t any of them.”

“We weren’t just watching yesterday,” one of the other Very Old Ladies said. She sounded a little sheepish. “We’ve been, well, we’ve been—”

“We’ve been watching for a week and a half,” Mrs. Vardanian said flatly. “We’ve been staking the place out, the way they do on the television. And this woman has come in and out, and there’s been no sign of Sophie. Not a sign.”

“Why didn’t you just knock on the door and ask what was happening?” Gregor said.

“We did,” one of the other Very Old Ladies said. “Nobody answered.”

“And she was in there at the time, that woman,” Mrs. Vardanian said. “I could hear her moving around.”

Gregor didn’t say that he’d thought for years that Mrs. Vardanian was deaf as a post, because it was only half true. He didn’t understand why these women thought that whoever was in that house would be more likely to answer his knock than theirs.

He sighed a little and went up the steps past Mrs. Vardanian. He stopped at the door. It needed to be painted. He rang the bell. He could hear the bell sound in the hollow spaces beyond the door. Nothing happened.

“You can’t just leave it at that,” Mrs. Vardanian said. “You’re a policeman. You can go into the house.”

“I’m not a policeman,” Gregor said, “and even a policeman can’t go barging into people’s houses for no reason. He has to have probable cause to believe a crime has been committed, or he has to have a warrant, and I’ve got neither.”