Wanting Sheila Dead(75)

“You think Sophie Mgrdchian had a cell phone?”

“Why not?” Gregor said. “I have a cell phone. Old George Tekemanian has a cell phone.”

“You have one because I gave it to you, and old George has one because his nephew gave it to him. As far as we know, Sophie Mgrdchian didn’t have any family in the area.”

“She has that niece.”

“Who isn’t in the area,” Bennis said, “and if she was, she’d have come forward by now, wouldn’t she? And if there’s a reason why she wouldn’t—oh, never mind, Gregor, I’m getting confused. Aren’t we going to get into trouble going into the house by ourselves at four o’clock in the morning?”

“I don’t see who we could get into trouble with. It’s not a crime scene. There’s no family in the vicinity. Sophie Mgrdchian is in the hospital and needs our help, so if she wakes up and decides she’s mad at us for looking through her house, I’d say we have a defense. Do you know how to get into that house?”

Bennis sighed. “We could climb through a window,” she said. “I’m surprised somebody hasn’t done that already. Really, Gregor, if you could just wait until daylight.”

But Gregor didn’t want to wait until daylight. He was the closest he’d ever been to being completely fed up.





2


It was surprisingly cold in the dark. Gregor found himself thinking that he had never understood weather. He should have put on a jacket other than his suit jacket. He should have dressed in something other than a suit. Bennis sometimes said that the only clothes he owned were suits, and that he sat on the sand in Jamaica in wingtips and a tie.

Gregor thought about his honeymoon, which had been very good, really, with the house borrowed from friends and the privacy and the utter lack of feeling like he wanted to kill somebody. It was the kind of thing that would make a sane man want to retire, but sane men didn’t retire because work was bothering them. Sane men retired because work was boring them. He was not bored. He was just exasperated.

“There’s a reason,” he said, as they chugged down the street, past the dark church, past Lida Arkmanian’s town house, past the closed-up Ararat. “There’s a reason I work as a consultant to police departments. It’s one thing when the police ask for your help. And even then, there are going to be a lot of people who aren’t happy with you. But when the police haven’t asked for my help, everybody is mad at you, it’s virtually impossible to get information in any coherent, cohesive, or complete way, and—”

“But I thought the police did want your help,” Bennis said. “I mean, they’ve certainly been asking for it. And it’s not even as if we know there was a crime here. You’re the one who said it was just as likely that there was a perfectly innocent explanation for everything and it would all turn out to have been just . . . um . . . I think you said ‘unfortunate.’ ”

“I know what I said,” Gregor said. “I’ve changed my mind. And it wasn’t those police I was thinking of anyway.”

They had reached Sophie Mgrdchian’s house. It was close to the very end of the neighborhood. In the block just past it, Cavanaugh Street became a different kind of place—emptier, dirtier, less comforting. Gregor looked up at the tall facade, at the stone steps leading up to the front door. The place looked haunted.

“I remember this building from when I was growing up,” he said. “Three families lived here, but that was the good news. That was far fewer than in most of the others. There was a boy here named Mikail. He was my brother’s age. He died in Korea the same week my brother did. I can remember the funerals.”

“She lives here all by herself now, doesn’t she?” Bennis asked.

Gregor nodded. “I don’t know when that happened. I don’t know when most of the transformation of the street happened. I wasn’t living here then. I suppose a spare key under the doormat isn’t likely.”

“There isn’t a doormat,” Bennis said. “What police were you talking about, if you weren’t talking about these?”

“The Bryn Mawr police,” Gregor said, climbing the steps to the front door very carefully. There was no light on over the door, of course. It was still too early in the year for there to be dawn before six. “Maybe the Merion police, too, for all I know. I haven’t talked to any of them yet. But there I was, right in the middle of this guy’s murder investigation, and he did not want me around. Do you ever feel like life is spinning completely out of control?”