Conspiracy Theory

by Jane Haddam

  The Price Heaven documentation was spread out in front of him in variegated stacks of paper, freshly printed out this morning so that he could get a physical sense of what was happening here. Actually, there was no doubt what was happening here. Price Heaven was in free-fall. Even the drastic measures David had outlined to Tony might not suffice to correct it. If they didn’t, Price Heaven would file for bankruptcy—real bankruptcy, David thought, not just Chapter 11—and then the shit would truly hit the fan, because the bank was exposed on this one big-time. David had done the calculations a dozen times. There was no way around it. In all, the bank had loaned Price Heaven something close to a billion dollars outright, and provided spot financing and stock-price support in a myriad number of small ways. The small ways were adding up.

  The door to the office opened. David looked up from where he was sit-ting—on the floor, with his legs spread out in front of him and his jacket tossed onto the couch behind him—and saw Paul Delafield coming in. Paul Delafield was executive vice president in charge of development, a fancy way of saying the man who found new projects for the bank to invest in, the man who had brought Price Heaven to the bank. Paul Delafield looked pale, as he had been looking pale for weeks. If he was mourning Tony’s loss, there was no evidence of it on his face.

  Paul came over to the little sitting area and dropped down on one of the chairs. “Well?” he said. “Should we all batten down the hatches?”

  “At least.” David thought about getting up, but didn’t see the point. There were people he had to fear in the bank, but Paul Delafield wasn’t one of them. “The good news is that it’s not Enron. There’s no evidence of accounting fraud.”

  “And the bad news?”

  “We’re going to be lucky as hell of they don’t implode completely. And I mean completely. Chapter eleven bankruptcy. Public liquidation.”

  “Shit.”

  “I agree.” David bent over the papers again, but he couldn’t keep it up. He didn’t have his heart in it. He already knew what was here, and now that he’d spent a few hours making the reality physical—turning it into stacks of physical paper so that he could visualize it—he had a knowledge of the internal workings of Price Heaven far more complete than its own directors ever had had. Which was a good part of the problem. Price Heaven might not be in the mess it was in if its directors knew what they were doing. It completely amazed him that so many people rose to the heights of American business with IQs in the single digits, and not because they were hereditary legacies, either. The chairman of the board of Price Heaven was Jerry Poldawicz, who grew up in Levittown and did his undergraduate degree at SUNY New Paltz. The CEO was Tom O’Hay, whose father had been a bricklayer and mother a nurse. There were probably a dozen Price Heaven employees running cash registers in Price Heaven outlets who could have done a better job of managing a company than either of those two.

  “So,” Paul said. “Where do we go from here?”

  “Don’t ask me,” David said. “I just make recommendations. I have no power at all about what recommendations the board will decide to follow.”

  “What recommendations do you intend to make?”

  David sighed. “All the layoffs we discussed last week, before Tony—before Tony. Then we need to close at least a third of the stores. They’ve got stores in the oddest places, small outlets that have been doing next to no business for years. It’s bizarre. Once they opened a store, nothing could get them to close it. And I do mean nothing. So they’ve got little hole-in-the-wall places in small towns off the highway that nobody can get to because nobody knows they’re there, but nobody would want to get to even if they knew, because there’s nothing at the end of the ride but a kind of mom-and-pop novelty place with not much to buy. Some of them were opened in the 1940s. They should have been closed or moved to malls years ago. It’s insane.”

  Paul Delafield looked away, out those big windows that looked over lower Manhattan. He didn’t seem to be seeing anything. David had always found it interesting to see who was and who was not emotionally affected by the World Trade Center collapse. Some people—Paul Delafield—seemed to live in an emotional vacuum.

  “She’s not going to like it,” Paul said.

  “Who isn’t?”

  “Charlotte.”

  “She’ll just have to live with it, then,” David said. “There’s really no way around this. We should have done something a long time ago. We’re sicken-ingly exposed, and we don’t have the excuse we have with governments, where we can say we loaned Argentina all this money to make sure nobody starved or their economy could keep running. This is Price Heaven. It’s an old but mostly derelict company that under other circumstances would have been run underground by Wal-Mart long ago.”

  Paul turned around in his chair, put his elbows on his knees, and leaned forward. “She’s been on the phone to me all morning, Charlotte has. She thinks it looks bad, laying off all those thousands of people right before Christmas.”

  “Everybody stages layoffs right before Christmas. That’s the end of the fiscal year. It’s that or your paper looks awful when the accounting gets done.”

  “She says she thinks it’s that kind of thing that got Tony killed. She got something in the mail, some piece of literature, she called it. Something that said that Tony was ripping off the proletariat, or something like that.”

  “Somehow, I can’t imagine Charlotte reading Communist propaganda.”

  “Still.” Paul Delafield was stubborn. “She’s going to be able to sit on the board, you know that. She’s going to have control of a tremendous amount of stock, both her own and whatever Tony’s left her—”

  “Tony may have left the estate to his daughters. Or to the oldest one. It isn’t as if Charlotte is in any need of money.”

  “Even with just her own stock, she could make a lot of trouble. Wouldn’t the daughter side with her? Or is it one of those Greek tragedy things?”

  “I don’t think I’d go that far,” David said, “but I don’t think the daughter and the mother see eye-to-eye on much. Marianne, that’s what her name is. Sorry. My mind goes blank sometimes.”

  “Charlotte says it looks bad when companies lay off thousands of workers right before Christmas, like they’re all interested in being Scrooge. She thinks we should wait until after the first of the year.”

  “Price Heaven can’t wait. If it tries, it will collapse completely.”

  “There’s the Christmas buying season. We’re right in the middle of that. That could help them instead of hurt them.”

  “Christmas is in five weeks. The only things that make that kind of money in five weeks are fantasy movies. Too bad Price Heaven didn’t produce Fellowship of the Ring.”

  “It does look bad,” Paul said. “I can see her point. And don’t think the public doesn’t know the banks are behind those things when they happen. Then all the stories come out. Tony Ross made thirty-two million dollars in salary and bonuses last year, and what he got the bonus for was making sure Price Heaven laid off a bunch of minimum-wage salesladies who aren’t going to be able to go on making the payments on their daughters’ medical treatments. And then it will come out that Price Heaven hired practically everybody part-time, so most of their workers didn’t get health insurance, not even crappy HMOs, and at the same time the Price Heaven executives and us here at the bank all have top-of-the-line fee-for-service plans that pay for everything from extracting ingrown toenails to having yourself cloned.”

  David sat back, curious. “So?” he said. “What about that? That’s the way the system works, isn’t it?”

  “Of course it’s the way the system works.”

  “Do you want to change it?”

  “Of course I don’t want to change it.” Paul Delafield looked disgusted. “The system does work. You know that. People have to expect a few dislocations. They have to expect—”

  “What? Working seventy hours a week at two different part-time jobs and bringing down three hundred and fif
ty dollars gross before taxes and no benefits?”

  “That’s not my fault. They should have stayed in school. They should have learned useful skills for the marketplace.”

  “Just as a matter of curiosity,” David said, “what do you think would happen if they all did stay in school and learn some useful skills for the marketplace? What do you think would happen if they all went to Harvard and Wharton?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Paul said.

  David laughed. “Tony was smarter than you are about these things. At least he got the point.”

  Paul Delafield looked like he was pouting. “Still,” he said. “She’s got a point. With all the things that have been happening. That out there.” He jerked his head in the direction of the window, in what he thought was the direction of the rubble of the World Trade Center. “And Tony dying. Being murdered. There’s a lot going on. People are … restless.”

  “What’s the matter, Paul? Are you expecting someone to shoot you in your bed?”

  “Maybe we ought to give that possibility more consideration than we do,” Paul said. “It doesn’t hurt to be intelligent about the way we go about things. It doesn’t hurt to be careful.”

  David looked across the stacks of papers on Price Heaven. All of a sudden, he felt as if his head were going to explode. Paul Delafield was a profoundly stupid man. All the years he’d spent at all the right schools—Hotchkiss, and Yale, and Wharton—had left no mark on him at all. He might as well have been born ten seconds ago with a program tape playing in his head and nothing else alive in him but the instinct for self-preservation. Suddenly, David had to get out of there, out of the bank, out of New York, out of his life. He pushed aside the stack of papers he’d been working on and stood up. He wished he were taller than Paul Delafield. For some reason, he thought that that would be a moral victory.

  “Charlotte isn’t going to like it,” Paul repeated.

  David turned his back to him. “It doesn’t matter what Charlotte is going to like,” he said. “I’ll take care of Charlotte.”

  FIVE

  1

  Gregor Demarkian had intended to be home when Tibor came back from the hospital. In fact, he’d been planning Tibor’s arrival for at least two days, going over and over in his mind what he wanted to say and what he didn’t, how to impart news of the investigation without saying the most pessimistic thing— which was that, since the police had the Tony Ross murder to worry about, they weren’t going to spend too much time on one little bombing that would surely turn out to be the work of a small-time brain-dead fanatic who committed hate crimes for the fun of it. Gregor wasn’t much in favor of singling out “hate crimes” from other crimes, or giving them harsher sentences, but he knew one when he saw it. Still, the simple thing was, the Philadelphia police had bigger things to worry about, even if Tony Ross had been murdered in Bryn Mawr instead of in the city. The feds were descending in droves, and so were the reporters. To paraphrase Bette Davis, it was going to be a bumpy ride. He was getting out of his tie and finding a sweater in the mound of sweaters the top of his bureau had become—Bennis, the most organized person in the world when it came to her work, went at the job of putting clothes away in drawers like a dyslexic Tasmanian devil on amphetamines—when the doorbell rang. He thought it was Bennis, home early, and for some reason he was able to get down the hall, across the living room and into the foyer without realizing that if Bennis was home this early, she’d been traveling at the speed of light, or faster. He had a sweater in his hand, but his shirt was unbuttoned halfway down his chest. He reached out to straighten the framed square picture of flowers he kept above his mail table next to the front door. Then he opened up, and found himself confronted by the most nondescript middle-aged woman he had ever seen in his life. She was shortish, no taller than Ben-nis. She was thickish, not exactly fat, but not slim, that odd solid that some women got at menopause. Her hair was grey and cut short. She was wearing no makeup. Her clothes looked like they’d been picked up at Price Heaven, but Gregor was willing to reserve judgment on that. These days, it could be very tricky to judge clothes. She held out her hand and said, “Mr. Demarkian? I’m Anne Ross Wyler. I’m Tony Ross’s sister.”

  Actually, now that he knew, the resemblance was easy to see. She had the same high forehead and narrow, Grecian nose. To go along with them, she had enormous almond-shaped blue eyes. Gregor thought she had been pretty once, when she was young. She would be pretty still, if she took care of herself, which she obviously didn’t bother with. He stepped back to let her in. She walked into the foyer, shed her coat, and handed it to him. That’s when he saw the big round pin on her knit tunic, placed up near the left shoulder: Freedom FROM Religion.

  She saw him looking at the pin. “Does it offend you? If it does, I’ll take it off. I don’t usually, but I’ve come to ask a favor. And I’m actually not quite so militant as all that.”

  “No, no,” Gregor said. “That’s fine. I’m used to people who need to make statements, so to speak. I didn’t see you at the party the night Mr. Ross died, did I? I know we weren’t being introduced to each other at the end, and there was quite a crush, but somehow I think I would have noticed you.”

  “Because of the clothes? I have very decent evening clothes in the back of my closet somewhere. I was debutante of the year the year I came out, according to some magazine or other, I don’t remember which. I probably still wouldn’t be wearing makeup, though.” She looked around the foyer. “Do you mind if I come all the way in? I’ve got a little problem and I don’t know what to do about it.”

  “Does the problem relate to your brother’s murder?”

  “It might.”

  “Then you ought to go to the police with it,” Gregor said. “There are two excellent officers on the case, Frank Margiotti and Marty Tackner. I could get you their phone number.”

  “I’d like to talk this out first, if you don’t mind. My instinct, under the circumstances, is to keep my mouth shut. Not because I give a rat’s ass about the gentleman involved, you understand, but because I’m afraid it might jeopardize my work, and my work—”

  “Your work is what?” Gregor asked. “What do you do?”

  Anne Ross Wyler looked surprised. “I’m sorry. I thought everybody knew. You must read even fewer newspapers than I do. I run a safe house for child prostitutes. Adelphos House.”

  Gregor straightened up abruptly.

  “You have heard of it,” Anne said. “We really do get a lot of publicity, on slow news days. It is almost impossible to find anybody who hasn’t at least run across our name.”

  It wasn’t that, Gregor thought. Of course he’d heard of it before. He just hadn’t made the connection. From the first moment he’d heard of the explosion at Holy Trinity Church, hours after it happened, because when the church blew up he was busy witnessing the murder of Tony Ross, he’d been trying to find a connection, and now, out of the blue, here it was.

  “I’ve heard of it around here,” he said. “One of the church groups was going to do volunteer work there. I’m not sure of the details.”

  “And Father Kasparian came to see us on the night Tony was murdered, yes,” Anne said. “We’re always desperately in need of volunteers. We’ve got children living in the house. We’ve got a whole contact and ID thing going. We have to contact the families, even though many of them are abusive. Then we have to protect the girls when the families want them back.”

  “Girls?”

  “Most child prostitutes are girls between the ages of eleven and fourteen, yes. They learn to make themselves up in a way that the johns can make the excuse that they certainly looked eighteen. Although the johns know, of course. I’m sorry. I’m afraid I tend to lecture. Most people think of child prostitutes as eight-year-olds, and there is some of that, but not as much as the media might make you believe. Do you think we could go somewhere and sit down? I’m afraid I’ve had an exhausting few days.”

  Gregor waved her toward the living room. Sh
e went in and looked around, without seeming to take much in. This was a woman who did not waste time on appearances. “Sit where you like,” Gregor said. “Would you like some coffee?”

  He had those coffee bags that worked like tea bags. Bennis had bought them for him so that he could offer coffee to people while she was out, and not be in danger of killing somebody.

  “I’d prefer tea, if you have any,” Anne said.

  Gregor went into the kitchen and got the Red Rose. Then he put the kettle on to boil and took out two cups with saucers. If Bennis were here, she’d put the whole mess on a tray and bring it in like a maid.

  Anne Ross Wyler appeared at the kitchen door. “Why don’t we just sit in here? You won’t mind, will you? I spend all my time at Adelphos House in the kitchen.”

  “I won’t mind,” Gregor said. He was actually relieved.

  Anne sat down at the kitchen table and looked around. “Very nice. We have a mutual friend, don’t we? Bennis Hannaford.”

  “You know Bennis?” The kettle was already whistling. Gregor poured water into cups.

  “She knew Tony better than she ever knew me,” Anne said. “I was better acquainted with her sister Anne Marie. That was a mess, wasn’t it? I do manage to read the papers some days. Maybe my problem is that I always read them on the wrong ones.”