Wanting Sheila Dead(66)

“Yes, of course I knew it,” Bennis said, getting the top back on the coffeemaker and plugging it in. She turned around to face him and leaned back against the sink. “I feel like a complete idiot, if you want to know the truth. It’s been more than a decade since all that happened. If you’d asked me yesterday, I’d have told you I was over it. Or over the worst of it, if you know what I mean.”

“People don’t usually get over it,” Gregor said. “I think it changes people, the first time they see a dead body. Any dead body. I think it’s worse when the body is somebody they know, and worse yet when it’s violently dead. You can’t honestly expect to be ‘over’ the sight of your own father’s dead body. Especially considering the shape it was in.”

“I didn’t like my father. And he had no use for me.”

“He was still your father,” Gregor said. “And it was still a shock.”

“If you feel like this about every dead body you’ve seen,” Bennis said, “then I don’t know why you’re not in an insane asylum.”

“You get more used to it over time,” Gregor said. “And the dead bodies I see are almost never of anybody close to me. We don’t talk about all that, you know. I don’t know if we should, but we don’t. If you ever do want to talk about it—”

“No,” Bennis said. “Really. I don’t even talk to my brothers about it. Christopher called, by the way, when he heard the news. And yes, it’s already been on all the networks and the cable news stations. Or I think it has. It’s Sheila Dunham, I suppose. She’s a draw for the press.”

“She’s a piece of work,” Gregor said. “Did your brother Bobby call? Or Teddy?”

“Nobody knows where Teddy is at the moment,” Bennis said, “which is par for the course. And of course Bobby didn’t call. This is Bobby we’re talking about.”

“It’s just that there’s something I need, and I don’t want to ask you for it.”

“What do you need?”

The coffee was going crazy. Gregor watched Bennis turn around and take a pair of mugs out of the cabinet next to the sink.

“I need to sit down with somebody who was there at the time—at Engine House when your father died—to help me go over what the scene looked like when we found the body.”

“Ah,” Bennis said.

“I really don’t want to ask you to do that,” Gregor said. “I’m not an idiot. I know that you won’t be all right with it.”

“But you are an idiot,” Bennis said. She put the coffee mugs on the kitchen table. “You don’t need to talk to anybody. You can do better than that. There are pictures.”

“Well,” Gregor said, “yes. But I’m not sure—”

“The City Confidential TV program,” Bennis said. “There were pictures of the study, and my father’s body, and that silly bust of Aristotle—anyway, I think they were still pictures and they were in black and white, but they were there. We watched that together. Don’t you remember?”

“I remember that we shouldn’t have watched it,” Gregor said. “Or you shouldn’t have.”

“It doesn’t matter now. Tibor’s got the complete set of all those City Confidential and American Justice and Snapped things you’ve been in. All of them. On DVD. All you have to do is go over there and get him to play them for you. It’ll be a lot better than talking to my brothers. Christopher won’t remember much, and Bobby will embellish what he does know, and if you could find Teddy, he’d just lie.”





2


Gregor Demarkian did not call ahead to make sure Father Tibor was at home. Father Tibor was always at home at this time of the evening, unless he was having dinner in the city, and if that had been the case, he would have mentioned it at breakfast. Gregor walked up the street toward Holy Trinity Armenian Christian Church, crossed in the middle of the block, and then made his way down the alley and to the back where Tibor’s apartment was. This was a new apartment, just as the church was a new church, both having been rebuilt only a few years ago. The alley had been spruced up, too, and decked out in security lights. The whole thing reminded Gregor of those little side streets in London where traffic was no longer allowed to go.

Gregor made his way into the courtyard and knocked on Tibor’s front door. Overhead, the second-floor apartment that had been built in the hopes of finding Tibor a priest assistant for the church was still empty, dark and a little forlorn looking. It was not shabby, because the women on the street made a point of keeping it up, but it still looked wrong.