Again, he shook his head. “Didn’t have any money I know of. I seriously doubt Angela would have done anything to warrant revenge. And I don’t think Psyche would actually kill her for love of yours truly.” He flashed Jury a smile.
“Competition?”
“Well . . . ” The syllable trailed off. “She’s been watching us, you know, ever since you sat down.” But he didn’t look in that direction and neither did Jury. “A real bitch.”
“Yes, you’ve mentioned that before.”
“Have you got the Santa Fe Institute on your little list? There’s some guy, some scientist over there, who seemed to know her pretty well.”
“Anders. But I haven’t talked to him.”
Malcolm rubbed his temple. “I still feel like shit.”
“Hasn’t been ten minutes yet. Trust me.”
“Oh, I do, I do,” he said without conviction.
For a few more minutes they sat there, Malcolm with eyes closed, slouched in his chair. Jury looking directly across the street into the shadowy face of Sukie Bartholomew. He waved. The face quickly disappeared.
“Hey.” Malcolm suddenly opened his eyes. “You’re right; it’s mostly gone.”
“Good. Well, I’ll be off.” Jury got up, pocketing the remaining plastic bags. Looking down at the one labeled “N,” he sighed. “Wouldn’t happen to have a cigarette, would you?”
“I don’t smoke.”
“Thank God.”
TWENTY-SEVEN
If ever a photograph didn’t do justice to a person, it was the dust-jacket photo of Nils Anders. It had not, among other things, given any indication of the man’s intensity, although the book itself would probably have conveyed that. He was considerably more handsome than the photo allowed, and was, in person, as engaging as he appeared in the opening pages of his book. Jury stood inside Anders’s office at the Santa Fe Institute thinking that if the man had decided to become a priest, a missionary, or a guru he’d have had no trouble in winning apostles. If he’d become a serial killer, God help us all.
On women, he must have wrought absolute havoc.
Certainly, the woman talking to Anders when Jury entered was one who had fallen under his spell, given the way she was looking at him. Jury hung back in the doorway and heard her extending a dinner invitation.
To which Anders replied, “I don’t think I can make it, Dolly.”
“Even you have to eat,” she said, as if he were generally thought of as someone more than mortal.
It was clear to Jury that Dr. Anders wasn’t aware of his effect on this woman, or of his turning down her invitation. Her face, when she turned to leave, was a mask of woe. Jury stepped aside as she swept through the door, barely glancing at him. He smiled. She didn’t.
Anders offered Jury a molded plastic chair and sat himself down on a wooden swivel chair. As Jury told him his reason for being there, Anders swung backwards and forwards, slowly, rhythmically. Then he stopped and the chair creaked a little.
“Angie.” He shook his head briefly, looked down at nothing and then past Jury, again at nothing.
That he said nothing else surprised Jury, for Anders struck him as a man who would be in constant motion, charged with energy that he could release only in act or words. But instead, Anders sat for some moments, having uttered the name only; Jury was rather glad to hear it shortened, as that bespoke a kind of closeness. But Anders neither verified nor denied that closeness.
Jury went on. “I understand you were a very good friend of hers, Dr. Anders.”
“I was, yes.” Then Anders looked at him, slightly surprised. His changeable eyes darkened. “You mean sexual?”
Jury shrugged slightly. “It’s just a question. You don’t have to answer it, certainly.”
Anders’s look dismissed such a possibility. “I don’t have much time for women, Mr. Jury. Love affairs are too consuming.” He paused and looked off into that space again. “I was in love once. . . . ” His voice trailed off; his tone a little wondering, questing, quizzical, as if recalling a poorly formulated hypothesis, an inconclusive experiment—something he might still be turning over in his mind and wondering where it had gone wrong.
“Why do others seem to think the two of you were lovers?”
“I don’t know.” Anders laughed. “You’ll have to ask them, won’t you?”
He rocked in his swivel chair. His smile was such that Jury had the uncomfortable sense he was serving as a source of amusement for Nils Anders, who then asked, “Why’s it important, either way?”
“I don’t know, Dr. Anders; that’s the truth. I’m just trying to get a fix on Angela Hope. What her life was like.”
Anders nodded, clasped his hands behind his neck, tilting sideways slightly. It was a boyish gesture, as if he might be about to zoom off, pretending he was an airplane. He said, “That’s reasonable. Assuming, of course, it’s reasonable you’re here in the first place.” He flashed Jury a smile, totally disarming.
It was a point in his favor, Jury thought, that he wasn’t at all interested in who had given Jury this impression.
Then more soberly, Anders said: “Angela. Yes.” The eyes literally appeared to cloud over, blue evaporating to a wintry gray. “Don’t think my attitude trivializes Angie’s death. That left me feeling very empty. Angie was someone I really liked, liked to be around, liked to talk to. There aren’t many people I feel that way about. They’ll waste your time, give ‘em half a chance, in mind-numbing social chat. Angela didn’t do that; when she talked, she talked about things that were important to her.”
“May I ask what they were, those things?”
It was snowing now, flakes as big as stones, and looking heavy as them too, in their weighty descent. Anders’s eyes were fixed on a point out there somewhere and Jury felt impelled to follow the direction of his gaze.
Nothing except big flakes of snow drifting onto the winding road that had probably once divided empty land but which now twisted through million-dollar properties. Jury waited, but Anders didn’t answer.
“Dr. Anders?”
“Hm? Oh. Sorry. I was just looking at the snow. It looks backlit, doesn’t it? Angela. Hmm.”
Jury followed his gaze. “It reminds you of Angela?”
“Not directly. But then, few things are direct, are they. Light is my, ah, thesis, I’d guess you’d say. Focus. I wrote this book—”
“I saw it, on Angela Hope’s shelf.” He didn’t tell Anders he’d borrowed it.
“The title is just another way of saying ‘scattered consciousness.’ ”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning . . . meaning. It’s too simple to say ‘lack of focus.’ But that’s the best I can do at the moment.” He smiled. “My mind’s muddled today.”
Meaning, really, that Jury’s probably was. The human condition. Jury smiled, too. “What things was Angela interested in, can you tell me?”
“Sure. Besides her work, the culture of the Hopis, the Anasazi, myth, ritual, the land—I mean, this country. It’s very beautiful, isn’t it?” Jury nodded; he went on. “She thought it all had something to do with personal salvation. Hers.”
“In what way?”
“It’s very difficult to understand somebody else’s ‘way.’ I’ll tell you one thing; she had a lot of respect for silence. That’s tough for people. Well, not for me; I’m off in one world or another, in one of my fugue states. An irritating habit, I’ve been told more than once, by more than one. Angie had a sort of mystical turn of mind. . . . ” He paused, frowning. “But, to tell the truth, well, I hate to be patronizing, but it was the trendy sort of mysticism. You know, reciting mantras, or praying in a corner given over to icons and candles. That sort. Not muscular.”
Although Anders didn’t actually scoff, Jury imagined it was only because Angela Hope had been a good friend. “ ‘Muscular’? What do you mean?”
“The sort of mysticism you have to take to the gym and exercise until you sweat buckets. Saint John of the Cros
s. T. S. Eliot. That kind.”
“Four Quartets was in her bookcase. She certainly appeared to have given it a good thumbing through.”
“Uh-huh,” said Anders, noncommittally.
“Was she enthusiastic about your own work?”
He laughed. “Would have been, I’m sure, if she’d understood it.”
Jury smiled. “I read a little of the book. I guess I opened it somewhere in the middle. I have to admit, it’s too deep for me.”
“Never start in the middle. Never.”
“How do I look at a circle, then?”
Like everything else about him, Anders’s laughter was engaging. “Okay, dammit, you’ve got me.”
“I wish I did. I wish I could understand this sort of abstract thinking.”
He snorted. “Surely, you’re not going to tell me your thinking is all evidential?”
“Yes, I expect it is.”
Nils Anders started ticking points off on his fingers: “You don’t know Angela Hope, you don’t know why she died, you don’t know if you’ll learn anything in Santa Fe. Yet here you are, five thousand miles from home, sitting in that chair.”
“No, you’re wrong. There is evidence to indicate I should be here, sitting in this chair.” Jury smiled, told him about the connection between the three women, the notebook, the whole strange chain of events.
“That’s not evidence; that’s inference. Abstraction. Because there’s a shadow, there must be a man. Plato’s cave, though that wasn’t Plato’s point.”
Jury shook his head, smiled. He relaxed even more. He was up for a game. “Actually, I expect the reason I’m here is a friend of mine, another cop, looked at the deaths of Angela Hope, Helen Hawes, and Frances Hamilton and made a wild surmise.”
“Yes!” The other man’s fists shot into the air, like some kid who’d just hit the jackpot on the fruit machine or won the pools. “ ‘Wild surmises’ are precisely what I mean. Life is a wild surmise as far as I’m concerned. Trouble is, most of us refuse to entertain that idea; it’s too frightening. We refuse to see that a so-called totally irrational hypothesis is more dependable than a conclusion drawn from demonstrable premises—”
Jury interrupted him before Anders could get too caught up in his theories. “The reasons for murder are not so philosophical. They’re more straightforward.”
Nils Anders’s eyebrows seemed to orbit. “Oh? Are we talking about murder?”
“I think so.”
Then, with a slightly self-satisfied air, he folded his arms, said, “Okay, I’ll bite.”
Jury laughed. “I’m not sure I want to be bitten by you.”
“I want to hear the straightforward reasons.” He had reached behind him and pulled down a copy of his book, plucked a pen from his pocket, and scribbled something on the flyleaf. That task finished, he picked up a sheet of paper and started folding the corners neatly.
“Money, revenge, unrequited love, greed—well, money again—rage. And so forth.” Jury felt slightly uncomfortable.
Anders stared at him. “That’s your idea of ‘not philosophical’? Hey, hey—” his hand shot out for the telephone—“let’s call Plato, let’s call Kant.” He dropped the receiver back on the hook. “Mr. Jury, your terminology is not exactly slam-dunk, not precisely the ball thunking through the hoop. Leaving aside your odd understanding of the term ‘philosophical,’ where did you ever get the idea that the other term, ‘straightforward,’ was its antithesis?”
“Look, Dr. Anders.” Jury felt his own tone and smile were a trifle condescending. “I mean ‘clear.’ You know what I mean.”
Dangerously condescending, he decided when the other man’s fist came down and made the papers on his desk jump. “Like hell I do!” Anders leaned forward and fixed Jury with blue eyes so intense they might have nailed him to the wall. “People are always saying ‘you know what I mean.’ How can I, when you don’t know what you mean.” Then he sat back and smiled. The three-second fit having dissipated completely.
Jury shook his head. “This cop—divisional commander, he is—would love you.”
“The wild surmiser?”
Jury nodded. “He’s been driving me nuts talking about concepts like ‘deep time.’ The thing is, I’ve always regarded him as the paradigmatically rational policeman. Yet, myself, I’ve always thought of as operating more on emotion and instinct. Seems I’m wrong. I seem to be the more rational one and the more superficial in my thinking.”
Nils Anders sighed as if the student were being a deliberate dullard. “Mr. Jury, ‘rational’ has nothing to do with depths and surfaces. And it’s not the opposite of ‘emotional,’ either. Why do people persist in that belief?” Anders’s face took on an expression of genuine puzzlement, as if the stubbornness of humankind was totally beyond his ken. “What we’re given to call ‘emotional’ can have its own underlying ‘rationale.’ Look at human behavior. Completely Janus-faced.” He finished creasing his paper airplane. “I’ve decided there are four kinds. Two are benign—let’s say the ‘I love you’ that means ‘I love you,’ and the ‘I hate you’ that means just that. Two are malignant—the ‘I love you’ that means ‘I hate you,’ and so forth. And all of these have their own rationale.” He smiled at Jury. “And superficial, you are not. I know.”
“How?”
“Because you’ve been sitting here—” Anders sailed his paper airplane over Jury’s head—“for over a quarter of an hour, talking to me. Most people cut and run after five. We here at the Santa Fe Institute are definitely not the first choice of hostesses to fill in at dinner parties.”
“Too bad. You might make the damned things more bearable.” Jury tried to recall the last time he’d ever been to a dinner party. In Bradford, in Yorkshire—hadn’t that been it?
“Thanks.” His expression sobered, his tone became somber. “You think Angie was murdered?”
“It’s possible. Accident’s more likely, I expect.” Jury shook his head. “Did she strike you as suicidal?”
Anders gave a disbelieving little laugh. “If you thought that, you wouldn’t be here.” He picked up a sheet of paper and started folding it as he had the other one, making a paper airplane. To his working fingers he said, “I would think Scotland Yard would do a lot of demystifying.” The plane sailed from his fingers, was borne by a current of wind around in a circle, and finally landed by a filing cabinet. He regarded its fall and sighed. Then handed the book he’d written in to Jury.
“Well—thank you.” Jury opened it, read the inscription. He smiled. Then he said, “The pathology report suggests Angela’s health was delicate. Did you know if she had a heart condition?”
Anders shook his head. “I know she caught every virus that came down Canyon Road. Also had migraines.”
“Oh? In that case she might have had a lot of medication at her disposal.”
“Forget it,” said Anders, laughing. “Not unless you can OD on ginseng or slippery elm or goldenseal. Angela didn’t take the stuff. An overdose of Tylenol 3? Nope. The only time she’d ever take medicine, she said, was ‘in extremis.’ Dolly’s worst customer.”
Jury was momentarily confused. “Whose worst customer?”
“Dolly. The one who didn’t wait to be introduced. The one who was in here when you came. She’s a pharmacist. Dolly Schell.”
Jury was surprised. “You mean Dolores Schell?”
Anders nodded. “I forgot. The police had her over there to identify the remains. That’s right. That must’ve been hard.”
“I rang her last night; she wasn’t in. I want to talk with her.”
“Try the pharmacy. It’s on Old Pecos Trail. ‘Worst customer’ because Angie hated doctors, so she didn’t have prescriptions to get filled. I think maybe she blamed the medical profession for her mother’s condition. Breast cancer, a too-late diagnosis.”
“The parents died in a plane crash, the Santa Fe police told me.”
“Yes, but her mother was close to death as it was. The late diagnos
is—maybe that was her mother’s own fault. Angela was very bitter about doctors, I can tell you.” He shrugged. “But that was probably just an excuse to keep from going to one. Most people think up excuses for fear, don’t they?” He seemed to be concentrating on the paper plane, disappointed in its performance. “You haven’t talked to Mary, have you?”
There was a change—a change of tone, a change of atmosphere. It was charged with something Jury couldn’t put his finger on. He looked at Nils Anders, but the man had his eyes down.
“Not yet. I don’t know where she is.”
“School.”
“It’s Saturday.”
“No kidding? Well, Mary’s got her own agenda. Angela spent a lot of time looking for her.” Anders laughed. “She found her once out in the middle of a stretch of desert about a mile from their house, out there with her dog, sitting on a rock. She asked her what she was doing. Mary said ‘Nothing.’ Angie said, well, she had to believe her. She’s got this dog whose name is Suma—”
“Mr. Corey told me about it. He thinks it’s a coyote, not a dog.” Jury smiled.
Nils Anders smiled. “I bet it is. Mary claims it’s mostly German shepherd because people don’t look too kindly on coyotes at their heels. Anyway, it goes everywhere with her. Its nickname is Sunny. I love that.” He started laughing. “I can’t get over that, you know. The dog has a nickname.”
“You like her, then?”
Anders looked surprised. “Mary? Hell, yes, of course I do. Who wouldn’t?”
“I can name two people.” Jury did.
His tone was scoffing, his hand waving that double-opinion away. “Sukie Bartholomew is a bit of a bitch.” There was no rancor in the tone, though. He might have been stating a natural law.
Jury laughed. “Well, there you share the opinion of Malcolm Corey.”
“Him. Mary isn’t your stereotypical thirteen-year-old. I suppose if a kid loses two parents, both together . . . ” He paused. “They had money, the parents, I mean. She inherited, he made it. The Darks—the mother was Sylvestra Dark—had a bit of money. Martin Hope had more. But you don’t see any evidence of it in Angela or Mary. They live pretty simply.”
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