Wanting Sheila Dead(68)

“Of course, Krekor. You want to see just one frame?”

“I want to see the picture the police took of Robert Hannaford’s body on that floor. There is a picture like that. I remember it.”

“All right, Krekor. You will give me a minute and I will find it. In the meantime, you will tell me what is going on with Sophie Mgrdchian.”

“Nothing much is going on with Sophie Mgrdchian,” Gregor said. “I talked to her doctor. She gave me a list of the medications Mrs. Mgrdchian was taking. They didn’t amount to much. A lot of vitamins. Some painkillers for the rheumatoid arthritis. One of those medications to help with high blood pressure. The police even had the stuff analyzed. There was nothing in it that could cause a semicoma, or whatever is wrong with her. And the two women have been separated for days. Lily—Karen—whoever it is, can’t be feeding Sophie Mgrdchian some kind of voodoo poison when she doesn’t have any access.”

“Voodoo?” Tibor said.

“Something Dr. Halevy said, “Gregor said. “That Sophie Mgrdchian’s condition is practically like voodoo.”

“So what will happen to, what shall I call her, Krekor? Mrs. Mgrdchian? If she is Marco Mgrdchian’s wife—”

“Widow,” Gregor said. “At least, as far as I could tell before her lawyer got me out of there. At the moment, nothing is happening to her. She was bound over for a four-day psych evaluation, so she’ll be in the hospital for a four-day psych evaluation. After that, it’s anybody’s guess. I can’t see that they’re going to be able to hold her. There isn’t actually any evidence that she did anything to Sophie Mgrdchian. If she really is the sister-in-law, there’s no reason not to think that it’s probable she was invited in. Then the two of them had some kind of physical breakdowns, or something, coincidentally at the same time—”

“Tcha,” Tibor said. “Everybody in this country always assumes that when someone is old, it only makes sense that they have physical breakdowns. Look at the Very Old Ladies. They could probably walk to Washington, D.C., from here if they had a good reason to. Being old does not necessarily mean that you are falling apart.”

“For most of us, it does,” Gregor said.

Tibor had been paging through a big black carrying case for DVDs. There were hundreds of them all placed in clear plastic pockets, one after the other, page after page. Now he had stopped on a particular page and was tapping through the possibilities.

“This one, I think,” he said, taking a DVD out of one of the pockets. “I should label these more clearly, but most of them have all the information you need on the disk itself, so there doesn’t seem to be a point. Have you met this woman, this Sheila Dunham that everybody talks about? Is she as awful as they say?”

“She’s very rude,” Gregor said. “But I wasn’t all that impressed. I’ve met rude people before.”

Tibor put the DVD in the DVD player, fiddled with his television set, got a blue screen, then got the DVD to play. It was a really magnificent television set, and a really magnificent set of equipment to go with it. When the parish had replaced Tibor’s apartment, they had defined the word “replaced” the way most people would define “upgraded.”

Tibor had the DVD started. He held up a remote and stopped the action. “Here is what we can do,” he said. “We can go through the scenes as if they were still pictures, and you can tell me the one you want me to stop on to look at. Will that work?”

“I think so,” Gregor said.

Tibor sat on the couch, aimed the remote at the set, and started clicking. It was like watching somebody turn the pages of a photo album. There were pictures of Bryn Mawr, the self-consciously “quaint” downtown, and the wide roads winding through the estate areas. There were pictures of Gregor himself, and of various members of the Hannaford family. It took a while to make it through to what he wanted to see. Then, there it was, on the screen.

“Wait,” Gregor said. “Go back to the last one.”

Tibor obligingly clicked again, and the screen was filled with a black-and-white photograph of the last murder scene in Engine House, a picture of Robert Hannaford’s dead body lying across the hearth.

Gregor wasn’t looking at the body. He’d seen the body up close and personal when it had been lying on that hearth for real. Instead, he looked up the photograph at the big mirror over the fireplace. He sat forward. Then he sat back. Then he sat forward again.

“I knew it,” he said.

“Knew what?” Tibor asked.