Wanting Sheila Dead(76)

“Not lately,” Bennis said.

“There are dozens of people involved in these two things,” Gregor said. “There are police officers and witnesses and suspects and it’s more like Cecil B. DeMille than The Thin Man. A cast of thousands. And none of it makes sense.”

“It’s not going to do us much good just standing here in front of the door,” Bennis said. “Why don’t we go back home and wait until daylight, and then you can call that guy from John Jackman’s office and maybe he can get the police to let you in. At least that would make a certain amount of sense.”

Gregor got some tools out of his pocket—his file, his miniature wrench. “Burglar’s tools,” the police always called them, but they were ordinary items that anybody might have around a house. He was fairly sure the door would not be bolted. There was nobody inside to bolt it. He tried fiddling with the lock for a while, but it didn’t budge.

“Do you actually know how to do that?” Bennis asked him.

“No,” Gregor said. He looked around again. “What about a back door?” he asked. “Do these houses have back doors?”

“Of course they do, Gregor. There’s an alley back there where they keep the garbage cans between pick-up days. Do you think the back door is going to be any easier?”

“I think Sophie Mgrdchian was an old woman,” Gregor said. “I think the back door might just be open.”

Bennis made a noise. Gregor ignored her. He went back down the stairs and around to the side of the house. In some places, the sides of the houses were right up next to each other, with no space in between. In others, there was a small walkway. He picked the wrong side the first time. The second, he found a walkway so narrow he almost thought he was going to have to go through it sideways.

“I hope you’ve got your phone,” Bennis said. “I can just see us getting trapped in here.”

They made it through to the back, where the space was much larger, but also much darker. There were actually lights back here, but not on Sophie’s house. The house across the alley had one trained on its own back door, and the houses to either side seemed to have light coming from them one way or the other. Gregor found the back door and went up to it. It was locked.

“Well, that didn’t work out,” Bennis said.

The locked door was behind another door, a rickety one with screens. Gregor propped that back with a rock he found in the alley and went to work with the file. It was too bad that trick with the credit cards didn’t often work.

“Both of these things,” he said, working away, “are wrong. They’re just wrong. I saw two bodies lying on the floor this week, and both of them were wrong. Sophie Mgrdchian wasn’t technically a body, since she wasn’t dead, but it was still wrong. And the body of the girl at Engine House—well . . . all right. That one I know for certain was staged.”

“How do you know it was staged?” Bennis asked.

“Because the mirror on the wall was tampered with—listen to me. How do you tamper with a mirror? Never mind. That mirror usually sits flat against the wall. Somebody changed it so that it was leaning just slightly forward, just enough so that the body could be seen in it from the doorway. And the only reason to do that was to make sure that whoever saw the body had it drilled into their heads that the body was where it was as it was.”

“Okay,” Bennis said. “But Mrs. Mgrdchian? Why do you think that was staged?”

“I don’t know,” Gregor said. He got the file between the door and the door frame. He thought he might have splintered some wood.

“Do you think this woman, this sister-in-law, or whoever she is, do you think she did something to Sophie Mgrdchian when she was out cold?”

“I think,” Gregor said, “that there should have been an address book in this house. Sophie Mgrdchian is an old woman. Old people have doctors, pharmacists, maybe physical therapists. They’ve got all kinds of people keeping them going. And they don’t have the kind of memory to hold it all in their heads. They’d have to write it down.”

“So we’re going to find the address book?” Bennis said.

“No,” Gregor said, as the door popped open under his hand. “We’re going to search through the house and discover that no address book is here. Because it isn’t here. If it had been, the police would have found it.”

“And this required coming out at four in the morning?”

“I couldn’t sleep,” Gregor said.

That was literally the truth.





3


Gregor arrived at Dexmali thinking he should have known better. Even on City Ave, a place with that kind of name was likely to be a shining example of the New Philadelphia. Gregor had very little use for the New Philadelphia. He understood that time did not stand still. He understood that having a metropolitan area full of “creative class” types—who in the name of God ever took “creative class” seriously, besides Richard Florida—anyway?—was better than being Detroit, a city that was dying out from under you. On the other hand, creative class types seemed to come along with pretentious art and precious enterprise. Nothing could be named Joe’s Diner anymore, unless it was a forties-retro shining chrome dining car that served things like Macaroni and Cheese Florentine.