Wanting Sheila Dead(91)

“I can call a taxi.”

“It costs a million dollars,” Bennis said. “Which makes me wonder. How did you get out there to begin with?”

“I called a taxi,” Gregor said.

“Oh, for God’s sake. I’m going to go get Donna.”

The connection went dead. Gregor looked at the phone and sighed. He didn’t like cell phones in general, and he really didn’t like this thing where people could hang up on you and all that happened was no sound at all. He closed the phone—it slid up and down, sort of like the old iPhone case, but not, and it was green—and put it away in his pocket.

If he’d been more awake, he would have kept his eye on the door to the living room. He hoped the policewoman was doing that, and he knew Olivia Dahl was, although that was not a perfect solution. Gregor thought Olivia Dahl was probably in his top five possible suspects. The policewoman did, however, seem to be doing what he had asked her to, so he let it go.

Then he looked up and Sheila Dunham was standing next to him, just at the other side of the stair railing. She was not yelling or screaming. She was not posing for a camera, or for a fan line at a red-carpet event. She was just standing there, and the first thing Gregor thought was that she looked very old.

He blinked a couple of times. Sheila Dunham was not old. She was younger than Bennis by about a year, but she looked a hundred and three.

“Hello,” he said.

“Somebody shot at me,” she said.

“Theoretically,” Gregor said.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“That’s supposed to mean,” Gregor said, “that if I had shot at you from a distance of, what was it, maybe six feet? Anyway, if I had shot at you from that distance, I’d have hit you.”

“So she has bad aim. And I suppose that ‘she’ is legitimate. There wasn’t anybody there but women.”

“There were men on the crew,” Gregor said. “I assume some of those men must have been at the Milky Way Ballroom.”

“They all were,” Sheila said. “We hire crew for the run of the season, absent their doing something to get themselves fired. Which doesn’t happen very often, and hasn’t happened this year. Not everybody in the entertainment industry is crazy. The tech people tend to be very—well. Down to earth.”

“Right,” Gregor said.

“You didn’t answer me,” Sheila said. “I said somebody shot at me. You said theoretically. I asked you what you meant.”

Gregor took another deep breath. It was all he could do not to yawn. Hell, it was all he could do not to fall asleep.

“Well,” he said, “they didn’t hit you. And they were close. Even the tech people, as you call them, were reasonably close. They might have been as much as ten feet away from you. But whoever it was not only didn’t hit you, he or she didn’t even hit anything that could have hit you.”

“What?”

“The stone hearth,” Gregor said. “If the bullets had hit the stone hearth, they would have bounced off. And a ricochet of that kind would have done some damage. It could have hit you. It could have hit one of the girls sitting or standing in front of you. It could have broken a window. But there was no ricochet. I would have heard it.”

“If you don’t mind my saying so, Mr. Demarkian, it doesn’t look like you’re in any shape to hear anything at all.”

Gregor nodded. “You’re right. I’m a complete mess this morning. I couldn’t sleep last night. But I do this for a living. And a ricochet is a noticeable noise and it’s not usually quiet. There was no ricochet. When the police get here, they’ll find the bullets in the walls, maybe, or in the painting. There’s a painting over the fireplace in there, isn’t there?”

“I don’t remember.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Gregor said.

He looked around the foyer. All the girls seemed to be there. All the tech people were there. All the administrative assistants with their clipboards were there. This was, Gregor thought, the show in its entirety—but, no. The judges weren’t there.

“Why is it,” he asked, “that the other judges never seem to be around?”

Sheila looked at the crowd. “They don’t need to be around,” she said. “Why would I want them to be around?”

“Aren’t they supposed to be judging things?” Gregor said. “Don’t they have to watch the girls do, what do you call them—”

“The challenges.”

“Right. Don’t they have to watch those and then judge them? Isn’t that the point?”