Wanting Sheila Dead(90)

The girls all seemed to nod in unison. Gregor looked across the big clustered knot of them. They all looked very somber.

Sheila stood up. “But none of you should be thinking about elimination now,” she said, making her voice deliberately and, Gregor thought, unbelievably peppy. “Right now, you should be thinking positive, and keeping in mind—one of you is going to be America’s Next Superstar!”

The girls all started jumping up and down at once, thrusting clenched fists in the air and yelling “hooo!” at the top of their lungs.

And right in the middle of it all, two shots rang out.





PART III




The past is always to some extent a fiction of the present.

—David Bentley Hart





ONE



1


He got them all out into the hall. He got the doorway to the living room blocked off as best he could, meaning not really blocked off at all. There was no door to it, as there was a door to the study, but the policewoman was still there. She’d come running when she heard the shots, and then she’d gone running back almost immediately. The chaos was almost complete. The girls were running all over the place, screaming and crying. He’d seen that sort of thing on TV, but never quite like this. The policewoman held her post and kept looking suspiciously everywhere. Gregor turned back to look at the living room and saw the gun, lying right out in the middle of everything, right next to the couch.

He went across the foyer and got the policewoman.

“I’m sorry to bother you,” he said, “and I know you’re supposed to stay put, but I need a witness. There’s a gun lying on the floor in the living room, on that Oriental carpet right next to the big couch they have set up in front of the fireplace. All I want is for you to just see it.”

The policewoman looked at him doubtfully, and frowned. Then she turned around, closed the study door, and came with him across the hall.

“Right there,” Gregor said.

“Yes, I see it.”

“It looks to me like a thirty-eight,” Gregor said. “You wouldn’t happen to know if the bullets that hit the wall at the Milky Way Ballroom were from a thirty-eight.”

“No,” the policewoman said.

“Well,” Gregor said, “I can practically guarantee you they will have been. And I can practically guarantee you that that’s the same gun. But that’s not the point now. Did you call this in and get them to send somebody out?”

The policewoman looked puzzled for a moment. Then her face cleared. “Oh,” she said. “Did I call headquarters? Yes, I did. They’re sending somebody.”

“With sirens blaring, probably,” Gregor said.

The policewoman went back to her post. When she did, she opened the study door again. Gregor took note of it for later, because he was too tired to work it out now. He sat down on the staircase, four steps up from the bottom, and got out his phone.

It rang six times before Bennis picked it up. Gregor suddenly realized that she must have been asleep.

“Hello?” Bennis said.

She had definitely been asleep. Gregor took a deep breath. “I’m sorry to wake you. I didn’t think.”

“It’s all right. Are you all right?”

“I just thought of the phrase ‘shots rang out.’ I mean, not just. It must have been a good fifteen minutes ago now.”

“Shots? Where are you? Who’s shooting at you?”

“I’m at Engine House. Nobody is shooting at me. Somebody was shooting at Sheila Dunham. At least presumably.”

“Are you hurt? Is somebody else dead?”

“I’m not hurt, and nobody else is dead. Nobody is so much as injured. I’m a little dizzy. I think it’s from lack of sleep.”

“Are the police there?”

“Not yet.”

“Did you call them?”

“There’s a policewoman on duty at the crime scene from yesterday,” Gregor said. “So I suppose that means that the police are here, except there’s just one of them. But there are others coming because she called them. Am I making any sense here at all? I’m too old to stay up all night, and I’m about ready to pitch the kind of fit everybody else in the world gets to pitch and I never do. And in about two or three minutes, Borstoi is going to come running through that door, and all I’m going to get out of it is to be stared at. Remind me never to listen to you again when you say you just want me to do something to keep busy.”

“I never said anything of the kind.”

“You meant it. I don’t think I’m completely recovered from Jamaica.”

“I think I’m going to call Donna and have her go out there and get you,” Bennis said. “If the police are as fed up with you as you say they are, you’re not going to be able to do anything there anyway. She can bring you home.”