“I do only work for police departments,” Gregor said. “As a consultant, usually.”
“Are you working for a police department now?”
“I’m not working for anybody.” Gregor glanced toward the study. By now, most of the people going in and out were doing lab work, collecting fibers, taking pictures, sampling blood. “There’s been an, ah, incident. Back in Philadelphia, where I live. Anyway, I was looking into that when Miss Dahl here asked me to look into the shooting in Merion last weekend. But I said I wasn’t interested. And then—”
“What?” Borstoi said.
Gregor shrugged. “Curiosity, I guess. I thought I’d come out and talk to her. I investigated a murder in this house once. A long time ago.”
Borstoi gave him a long stare. “Did you solve it?”
“I helped to solve it. John Jackman was the detective on that case at the time. John Jackman who’s now the mayor of Philadelphia.”
“Did he solve it?”
“I think both of us sort of contributed something,” Gregor said.
“Look,” Mortimer said. “The mayor—”
“He’s not my mayor,” Borstoi said, “and I don’t understand what business he’s got messing around in this. This is a reality show going on here?”
“Yes,” Gregor said. “America’s Next Superstar.”
“Oh, that one,” Borstoi said. “My wife loves that one. I can’t stand it. This girl was one of the contestants?”
“Definitely not,” Olivia Dahl said, suddenly thrusting herself into the conversation. “She was pretty enough, but she was just too—it was almost as if she didn’t have a personality.”
Len Borstoi seemed to consider this. “If she’s not a contestant,” he said reasonably, “what’s she doing here?”
Gregor took a deep breath and explained the whole thing as far as it could be explained: the shooting in Merion during casting, the girl’s arrest and subsequent release, presumably on bail.
“But I don’t know that much about it,” Gregor said, “because I really was not investigating it. I was just sort of wandering around poking into things because I was bored, and later I was doing it because I was frustrated. I only came out here because I thought I’d talk to Miss Dahl here and get my mind off other things.”
“Nobody knows how she got here,” Olivia said. “Nobody has the faintest idea. She didn’t bring a car. There isn’t an extra car parked anywhere that I saw, anyway. And besides, if she had a car, the police in Merion would have been able to figure out who she was. There would have been a registration, or a rental agreement. Instead, all we know is that she told one of our girls here that her name is Emily, and then—well, you’d have to talk to the Merion police about then.”
“Which of the girls?” Borstoi said. “Which one did she talk to?”
“Janice Ledbedder,” Olivia said.
“Is this Ledbedder girl here?”
“Of course she’s here,” Olivia said. “She’s either in the living room or upstairs. Some of the girls went running up to their rooms after we found the body. They were upset. Do you want to talk to Janice Ledbedder?”
“Yes,” Borstoi said.
Olivia looked at him, and then at Gregor, and then at David Mortimer. Then she turned around and headed for the living room.
Borstoi was staring at the floor. Gregor realized what it was that was bothering him. He wanted Len Borstoi to be doing something with his hands. You didn’t smoke around crime scenes these days. Most police departments frowned on officers smoking on the job at all. Maybe Borstoi should have had a lollipop in his mouth, like Telly Savalas on that old television show.
“It wasn’t a Greek name,” Gregor said.
Len Borstoi gave him the kind of look police detectives like to give people they think are probably crazy.
“Kojak,” Gregor explained. “It was a television show that was probably before your time. The detective was supposed to be Greek, but Kojak isn’t a Greek name. I wonder if they’d have made that kind of mistake these days.”
“I don’t think we really have to go into a jurisdictional war here,” David Mortimer said. “Whether we like it or not, pieces of this thing seem to have happened in different townships. We can’t just ignore the pieces just because they didn’t all occur in one place. I’m sure the Mayor’s Office would be glad to—”
“Why don’t we just leave the Mayor’s Office out of it?” Len Borstoi said. He looked toward the study. “Does anybody know what happened here? You came, Mr. Demarkian, and you discovered the body—”