Wanting Sheila Dead(32)

“No,” Mrs. Vardanian said. “Dennis came, and Dennis’s wife. They didn’t stay for long, but they came. She was Armenian. It was Marco and his wife who didn’t come. She wasn’t Armenian. I remember that. They weren’t married in the Church.”

“I think they weren’t married in any church,” Kara Edelakian said in a hushed little voice. “I think they were married by a justice of the peace. Can you imagine that? How could anybody do something like—ouch. You didn’t have to kick me, Viola. And Krekor wasn’t married just by a justice of the peace, he was married right out here in front of the church, even if it wasn’t in it, so it isn’t the same thing.”

Gregor cleared his throat. “The problem,” he pointed out, “is to find out who this woman was, this Lily, who was in Sophie Mgrdchian’s house. Even if it turns out that there was no foul play of any kind, and I’m not expecting any, there’s still the problem of this woman and how she came to be there. Did any of you recognize her? Could she have been the wife of one of the brothers?”

“She couldn’t be an Armenian wife,” Mrs. Vardanian said. “You saw her, Krekor. She didn’t look Armenian at all.”

“But she didn’t look familiar to any of you,” Gregor said.

“If she had, we wouldn’t have called you in the first place,” Mrs. Vardanian said. “We came to see you because we didn’t know who she was. And she was in that house for a very long time. Days and days.”

“Almost two weeks,” Mrs. Edelakian put in.

“You keep changing the time frame,” Gregor said.

“We weren’t really keeping track,” Mrs. Melvarian said. “We were just watching her. And at first we just sort of saw her around, you know, through the windows, and—”

“You’re going to make Krekor think we peep into people’s windows,” Mrs. Vardanian said.

“Well, we do peep into people’s windows,” Mrs. Edelakian said. “We have to, don’t we? Nobody talks to us anymore. We’re just the Very Old Ladies.”

“The point” Mrs. Vardanian said, “is that that woman was there for a while. And then we didn’t see Sophie anymore. And that was a few days ago.”

“If Sophie Mgrdchian had been in that state for several days,” Gregor said, “she’d be dead. Dehydration alone would have killed her, I’d think. Did you tell me the other day that you’d knocked at the door?”

“Of course we’d knocked at the door,” Mrs. Vardanian said. “What do you take us for?”

Gregor had an answer for that, but he wasn’t going to say it out loud. “What happened when you knocked?”

“Nobody answered,” Mrs. Vardanian said. “One day we went and knocked and knocked, and it was as if nobody was home.”

“But somebody was,” Mrs. Edelakian said. “We could hear someone moving around.”

“One person or two?” Gregor asked.

“I couldn’t tell,” Mrs. Edelakian said.

“It was one,” Mrs. Vardanian said. “Sophie might not have been as badly off then as when we found her, but I’d bet anything she was completely . . . completely—”

“Incapacitated,” Mrs. Melvarian suggested.

“That woman did something to her,” Mrs. Vardanian said. “I know it.”

Gregor sighed a little. “First, let’s find out who the woman is,” he said. “Then maybe we’ll have a better idea of what was going on in there for the last couple of weeks. And once we know that—”

The sounds of “Louie Louie” burst into the room.

Gregor put his hand in his pocket and pulled out his cell phone.

“ ‘Louie Louie’?” Tibor asked.

“Bennis set it as my ring tone for her. She sets all my ring tones,” Gregor said. He answered the damned thing—this one slid instead of flipped opened; he didn’t understand why phones couldn’t just act like phones.

“Yes?” he said.

“You’d better come back as soon as you can,” Bennis said. “There’s a woman in the apartment who says she’s not going to leave until she talks to you.”





2


It was still raining when Gregor went back across the street and down the block to his own apartment. He came in the front door and saw that old George Tekemanian was out for the day, again. Old George was as old as the Very Old Ladies, or older. Lately, Gregor had thought he was looking tired, or maybe worse.

Gregor stopped in the hallway for a moment and looked at old George’s door. There was that little I’M AWAY! sign on it that made Gregor convinced that George was trying to get himself robbed. George would have said that he was only attending to what was important. His great-niece had made him that sign, in kindergarten. It had pink Teddy bears on it, and if you lifted the flap there was a smiley face and in big green letters, HAVE A NICE DAY!