Conspiracy Theory

by Jane Haddam

  Gregor put the cup with the tea in it in front of her place at the table. He put the cup with the coffee in it in front of a chair on the other side. He put down cream and sugar and spoons. He didn’t think Bennis could have asked any more of him, although Lida could have, and would have, if she hadn’t taken over the enter tea ceremony herself.

  “Well,” he said. “Why did you come here instead of going to the police? And you do realize I’ll send you to the police, eventually. If you’ve got some information, you have to talk to them, whether you like it or not.”

  “Oh, I know. And I do have some information, although possibly not the kind of information they’ve been looking for. One of the things I do, at Adelphos House, is take pictures of the johns.”

  “The johns actually come to Adelphos House?’

  Anne shook her head. She was going to let the tea steep until the water was black. “No, of course not. Some of the pimps do, to try to get the girls back, but not the johns. I go downtown, to the streets where the girls walk, and take pictures there. Of men at the doors of cars. Of men getting into cars. Sometimes even of men getting blow jobs in cars. I’ve got a telescopic lens, and I’ve got some equipment that’s supposed to make it possible to take pictures in the dark without a flash—which doesn’t work too well, for some reason, maybe because I don’t really understand how to use it. I can’t use a flash because it tips them off, and then they chase me.”

  “I’ll bet,” Gregor said. “Have you been doing this for long?”

  “Three years.”

  “Then I’d say it was a damned miracle you haven’t been killed.”

  “I don’t believe in miracles,” Anne said. She took the tea bag out of her cup, tasted the tea, and nodded. “Red Rose. Excellent. Where was I? Oh, yes. I don’t believe in miracles. I don’t believe in faith healing. I don’t believe in God. But most of all, I don’t believe in politicians who’ll talk for two hours about their deep commitment to religious faith and never say one concrete thing about what they’re going to do if they’re elected. I’ve made it my mission to get one politician in this city to come right out and say, ‘we’re going to start arresting the johns and prosecuting them.’ If he says that, I’ll sit still and listen to how his life turned around when he accepted Jesus Christ as his Lord and savior.”

  “Had a bad year with Philadelphia politics, did you?”

  “With Philadelphia politics and the national kind, both. Don’t even get me started on the national prayer service after nine-eleven. Or faith-based social services, unless you’re talking about Catholic Charities. And yes, I know what the Catholics got caught doing less than five years ago. But then, I could go on and on about the fashion magazines and the movies too. Do you know what we’ve done, Mr. Demarkian? We’ve redefined beauty in women to mean a body type only found in human females at the start of adolescence. Grown women don’t have tiny waists and narrow hips, not usually. Eleven-year-olds do.”

  “Right,” Gregor said.

  “I’m ranting.” Anne stood up. “Give me a second here.”

  Gregor watched her as she went back into the living room. She fussed with her coat, which she’d left on the couch, and came back carrying a small manila envelope.

  “Here,” she said, throwing the envelope down on the table. “Take a look at these. I took them the night Tony was killed.”

  Gregor opened the envelope and drew out a thick stack of color photographs. They might as well have been black and white. He saw a car. He saw a girl who looked the way actresses did when they tried to look like children. He saw bits and pieces of a man’s body. A leg. An arm. Once or twice, he got the side of a face, but the pictures were blurry. He couldn’t make out the man’s features.

  “The girl’s name is Patsy Lennon,” Anne said. “We first found her on the street about two years ago. She had just turned eleven. We’ve handed her off to child services half-a-dozen times. She hates foster care and runs away, or they try to reunite her with her family, which is a disaster. Her mother is a drug addict who turns tricks for dope, and she’s always got a pimp who wants Patsy peddling her ass. Patsy runs away and finds a pimp of her own.”

  “The pictures of the man aren’t helpful,” Gregor said.

  Anne laughed. “No, they’re not. I told you I was a lousy photographer. But I saw him with my own eyes. I saw him get into that car with Patsy Lennon. I saw him get a blow job from Patsy Lennon—”

  “And you didn’t try to stop it?”

  “I couldn’t have stopped it. I know. Back when I started, I wasted a lot of time trying to stop blow jobs. I got beat up a couple of times. But I saw him do it. And then he put Patsy back on the street and took off, and I followed him. I had the Adelphos House car and I followed him all the way out to my brother Tony’s house. Not that that was difficult, by the way. He wasn’t exactly tearing up the road.”

  “Who is he?”

  “His name is Ryall Wyndham. Or he says it is.”

  “And you don’t believe him?”

  Anne shrugged. “There are dozens of people like Ryall Wyndham all across the country, all across the world, maybe. They worship Jackie O. They desperately want to be part of Society, as if Society still existed in the way it did in the thirties. Oh, I’m not saying that it doesn’t exist at all. There are still in people and out people, and there is still ‘social standing,’ if that’s the kind of thing you’re interested in. They’re interested, so they change their names and find some way to connect to the people they think are important—people like Charlotte, to be frank about it.”

  “But why question the name?”

  “Because Ryall is a family name. It’s a New York family name, not a Philadelphia one, but still. We all know each other. If he was really a Ryall, I would have heard of him.”

  “All right,” Gregor said. “He paid a prostitute and then he drove out to your brother’s party and you followed him there. Which means he must have had an invitation to your brother’s party. Or am I being dense? Was he going to gate-crash?”

  “No,” Anne said. “He definitely had an invitation. Charlotte wouldn’t leave him out. He’s a social columnist. He writes a column once a week, invoking the spirit of The Philadelphia Story.”

  “And?”

  “And nothing,” Anne said. “He went through the gates and I didn’t. I could have. The guard was Tony’s regular one, with some reinforcements in the background. He would have known who I was. I just, I don’t know. I didn’t want to be part of the fuss. When Ryall went through, the place was pretty close to deserted except for the guards, but then I sat there for a while and all sorts of people started showing up. There were a lot of cars on their way in. It was a huge ball. Charlotte was fund-raising for the UN. And then something odd happened. The guards closed the gates, even though there were cars there. Later on, I thought that that must have been when Tony was shot. At the time, I thought it might just be the first lady. I’ve been through security lockdowns like that, in my former life. I didn’t see any point to being part of it, so I took off. I came back to Adelphos House, and Father Kasparian had just left.”

  “This Ryall Wyndham. Was he driving himself, or was he being driven?”

  “Oh, he was driving himself. I don’t think anybody would let his driver take him to a prostitute. Or maybe they would. To me, it’s like asking to get convicted. You’re giving the prosecution an eyewitness.”

  “I see what you mean,” Gregor said. He hadn’t touched his coffee. By now, it was probably cold. “Do you think this is connected? Ryall Wyndham’s encounter with a prostitute and your brother’s murder?”

  “I have no idea. At first, I wondered if Wyndham was what Hemingway called a pilot fish, one of those people who scope out the territory so that the rich people won’t have to take too many risks. That maybe one of the people in that group was looking for fresh meat, so to speak. And maybe that’s it.”

  “Do you think it was your brother Tony?”

  “Good Lord, no.
It’s not sisterly affection, Mr. Demarkian, it’s just that I knew Tony. He channeled his sex drive into his work. He was one of those people. Charlotte used to complain about it, but always in code. God, all those people talk in code.”

  “You’re one of those people.”

  “True,” Anne said. “But I made my escape. Anyway, I just wanted to tell somebody this, and I’ll tell the police if you want me to. I really don’t understand the relevance it has. I’m only sorry I didn’t get better pictures. The police won’t arrest the johns, and as long as they don’t, the prostitution will continue. Sometimes, if you get evidence against somebody prominent enough, you can get it into the media and then the police have to pay attention, at least for a little while. My Holy Grail is a crackdown on the johns only. I’m not going to find it.”

  She gathered the pictures up in a stack again. Gregor looked at the face of Patsy Lennon, who was supposed to be thirteen years old. She didn’t look thirteen years old. She looked forty-two. Anne put the pictures back in the manila envelope.

  “They get old fast,” she said. “Patsy will have to move on to rougher trade in another year. I’m not kidding myself that I’m somehow going to save her. Most of them don’t get saved.”

  “Then why do you do what you do?”

  “Because it called to me,” Anne said. “And don’t ask me to explain it, because I can’t. I just woke up one morning next to my husband, who was a perfectly nice investment banker who’d become completely convinced that poor people were delinquent adolescents who had nobody to blame for their misery but themselves, and my entire life suddenly seemed completely ridiculous. Then about two days later, I found myself paying twenty-thousand dollars for an evening gown to wear to the April in Paris Ball in New York, and the whole thing was so asinine, I couldn’t keep a straight face. I had to have them messenger the damned dress to me, because I couldn’t stand to touch it. So I hacked around for a little while and landed back in Philadelphia and started Adelphos House. You can do a lot of things with trust funds.”

  “Obviously.”

  “I’ve got to go,” she said. “Write down the names of those detectives and I’ll call them.”

  2

  Gregor Demarkian waited until he saw Anne Ross Wyler emerging from his own front door onto Cavanaugh Street before he admitted to himself that he was just too jumpy to sit still, and then he spent two straight minutes trying to talk himself out of doing what he had been thinking of doing for the past four days. Crime scenes had to be kept clean, he knew that. The question was whether or not Holy Trinity Church was a crime scene. The church board had been given permission to go in and look around. Plans were already underway for rebuilding, if you could call tearing the place down and putting up something entirely new on the same spot “rebuilding.” Whatever. At least it would be a church and not a new apartment building or a water-treatment plant or whatever it was they committed urban renewal in the name of nowadays. Ca-vanaugh Street didn’t need to be renewed. It didn’t even need to be cleaned. At least once a week, the older women and the women who had just come from Armenia went out and hosed down the sidewalks. It wasn’t the famous scrubbing the Swiss were supposed to do, but it did insure that debris didn’t collect in the gutters and that the sidewalks were clear of the sort of stains dogs left in spite of the pooper-scooper law. He was, he thought, avoiding the issue, as he almost always avoided the issue these days. He found it much easier to deal with the death of Tony Ross than he did the destruction of Holy Trinity Church. The death of Tony Ross was both sensible and explicable. At the end of the day, they would find one of the usual suspects: a disgruntled employee; a jilted lover; his wife. Maybe his wife had hired a hitman. From what Gregor had seen of Charlotte Deacon Ross, he wouldn’t put it past her.

  He got his coat out of the foyer and went downstairs. Tibor still wasn’t back from the hospital, and nobody was in Bennis’s old apartment on the second floor. Grace was still playing upstairs. This time, it was music he couldn’t identify at all, although since she played with a chamber group that specialized in Baroque, he expected it was some of that. He got down to the first floor and saw that there was a note on old George Tekemanian’s door asking the old man to call Sheila Kashinian as soon as he got in. That was new since Bennis had dropped him off. Gregor wondered what Sheila Kashinian wanted, besides a new fur coat every fall and a vacation in the Bahamas every winter. It was remarkable how predictable people got as they got older. He wondered if it had happened to him as well.

  Out on the street, he didn’t feel depressed, or pessimistic, or frightened. If you face your fears instead of run from them, they’ll be easier to bear, his mother used to say, when he was growing up on this very street, in the days when the buildings were all divided up into tiny apartments and most people’s parents spoke English badly and never at home. He turned up the street toward the church and the Ararat. He still went to the Ararat for breakfast every morning. That meant he’d been passing the church at least twice a day since the explosion happened. He’d been passing it on the other side of the street, deliberately, in a way he never would have only a month ago. It was too bad he hadn’t been on the bomb investigation squad at the Bureau. He’d had the standard training in explosives, but that had been in his training year, and after that he’d never had any cause to use the information. Use it or lose it. Bennis said that about something other than information.

  He got to the church and crossed the street so that he could stand on the sidewalk directly in front of it. The yellow barrier tapes were still up, warning him of danger and the illegality of trespassing. He stepped over the one nearest to him and walked up the shallow steps to what used to be Holy Trinity’s front door. That was gone, and so was the wall that had divided the vestibule from the sacristy. He could look right down the center aisle to the altar. The pews were covered with junk. The roof was only half standing. Near the front to his right, it had caved in entirely. Toward the middle on the left side, there was a large hole like a ragged skylight. Rain had come through it and spread water stains across the pews.

  He was thinking that it would not be ridiculously dangerous if he walked up to the altar and assessed the damage for himself, when he realized he was being watched. There was somebody behind him, staring at him. In the worst-case scenario, it would be a reporter—but there wasn’t really any danger of that. As long as the Tony Ross case was front-page news, very few reporters would bother with coming down here. In the best-case scenario, it was somebody from the street, maybe one of the Very Old Women, waiting to lecture him on taking foolish chances. He turned around to see who was stalking him and stopped, confused. The person standing on the sidewalk in the place he had just left was nobody he had expected at all.

  The man who was standing behind him was very tall, and very broad, and very tired—tired in the way only immigrants are tired, with that bone-weary defeatedness that comes from struggling every day to do the very simplest things. Gregor was sure he’d seen him before, but he couldn’t for the life of him remember where. He was sure he wasn’t one of the new Armenian refugees Tibor and the women of Holy Trinity found room for every week. The man saw Gregor watching him and shifted slightly on his feet. He was wearing a heavy jacket that was worn at the hems and the elbows but still serviceable, the kind of thing that had been expensive once because of its utility, not its elegance. Gregor cocked his head.

  “Yes?” he said. “I wasn’t going to disturb anything, if you were worrying about that. I was just looking around. I suppose I shouldn’t have been.”

  “You are Mr. Gregor Demarkian?” the man asked.

  “That’s right.” The accent was indecipherable, Gregor thought—not Armenian, surely. Possibly Russian. Possibly from one of the old Soviet Republics. “Can I help you?”

  “I am Krystof Andrechev,” the man said.

  Gregor thought—yes, right, Russian.

  “I have now the store there.” The man jerked his head down the road.

 
; Gregor brightened. Now he knew where he’d seen him before. “The newsstand? The one Michael Bagdanian used to own?” Gregor never went in there. He had his paper delivered, and he didn’t read magazines unless Bennis subscribed to them or he got stuck in an airport.

  Krystof Andrechev shifted again. “Yes. I have bought this store from Mr. Bagdanian. I have—you will come with me, please? I have now in my store something, something—” Gregor didn’t know if he was straining for words or for courage, but whatever it was, he didn’t find it. “I have now in my store a very large problem, a difficulty. You will come with me, please, and see this thing?”

  “Sure.” Gregor came back down the front steps and stepped back over the yellow barrier onto the sidewalk. “Are you all right? You look—”

  “I am upset,” Krystof said. “I am also angry. I do not know what to do about this, and I am being afraid it will make me—make me—” He threw his hands into the air, frustrated. They were walking down the street toward the newsstand. Gregor could see some of the women looking out their windows at what was going on—after all, Krystof was their mystery man at the moment. They all said he never talked, and wondered who he was, and where he came from. Now that they’d seen Gregor with him, he’d never get any peace.

  “I am hearing that in this country you trust the police, but I am not sure this is sensible. I am not sure. You understand?”

  “Yes,” Gregor said. “I do understand. If you want my opinion, you should usually trust the police, but you should always make sure you’ve got your ass covered.”

  “Ha.” Krystof smiled, and stopped moving. They were at the front of the store. It was shuttered as if he had closed it for the night. It was also locked. “Covering my ass, yes. This is what I was looking to do. I was not sure how it could be done. I go for a walk. I see you standing there. You are an investigator, no?”

  “No,” Gregor said firmly. “I work as a consultant for police departments on homicide—murder—cases, when I’m asked.”