Conspiracy Theory

by Jane Haddam

  “The social worker at Adelphos House,” Bennis said suddenly. “I remember her. She’s a very strange woman. I mean, to look at her, you’d think she was—” Bennis flushed.

  “Trailer trash,” Gregor said firmly. “I know. I think she was, once. That that’s what her family was. And I agree with you. In some ways, she’s a very strange woman. My guess is that, philosophically, she isn’t much different from Kathi Mittendorf. But she didn’t kill Tony Ross.”

  “But Annie thinks she did? Why?”

  “Because at the time her brother was killed, Anne Ross Wyler was following Ryall Wyndham into that party. She says she only went as far as the gate and stopped, but I’m about ninety-nine percent certain that wasn’t true. You see that name on the list—Virginia Mace Whitlock?”

  “What about it? She’s a real pain in the ass, but I don’t think she’s sinister. I mean, she’s just trying to be a legend in her own time, if you know what I mean. Buys her clothes at Price Heaven. Makes a fetish of being cheap. There are always people on the Main Line like Virginia, they’re just—”

  “The reason why there’s a star next to her name,” Gregor said, “is that at the time of that party, Virginia Mace Whitlock was in the hospital in Boston having a hip replacement.”

  “Oh,” Bennis said.

  “My guess is that Anne Ross Wyler simply gave the wrong name at the gate. Like I said, the security was very uneven, and there were a lot of people arriving, and I’d guess that the single guard on wasn’t being all that careful. It’s easy to look back now and talk about how important it was for Tony Ross to have real security in place, but you know what life is like. None of us think we need real security in place. Most people get annoyed with security in no time at all, unless they’re very fearful people. Would you say Tony Ross was a fearful person?”

  “Of course not,” Bennis said.

  “What about Charlotte Deacon Ross?”

  Bennis snorted. “She was one of those women who would have offed the burglar in a split second if there had ever been one stupid enough to enter her house. And she probably had the arms in that place to do it.”

  “So,” Gregor said, “trust me, neither one of them would be likely to put up with anything like real security for long, because real security is a pain in the ass. And in fact they didn’t, and we know they didn’t. Margiotti and Tackner commented at the time on the fact that there was less of that sort of thing than they’d expected there to be, although I don’t see why. I can’t imagine that most of those houses in Bryn Mawr are tricked out with a full array of security devices. Three quarters of an hour later, of course, it would have been different, because the first lady would have arrived and the feds would have been there in force.”

  “But you still haven’t said,” Bennis said. “Why does Annie think Lucinda Watkins killed her brother?”

  “Because at the time of the shooting, the murderer was wearing Lucinda Watkins’s clothes, or something very much like them.”

  “What?”

  “And standing in a tree,” Gregor said. “I didn’t realize what was going on until I actually saw Lucinda Watkins. And heard her. I’d expect Annie Ross has spent a long time listening to Lucinda’s tirades about the evils of the upper class, or however it is she puts it when they’re alone and she can really let loose. With me, she was a little strained.”

  “I can bet. Where did the murderer get Lucinda Watkins’s clothes?”

  “From Lucinda Watkins’s closet.”

  “So who’s the murderer? Annie Ross?”

  “Michael Harridan,” Gregor said.

  Bennis sat down. “Listen,” she said. “You’ve spent the last week telling me that Michael Harridan doesn’t exist—”

  “Not exactly.”

  “And that the killing of Tony Ross had nothing at all to do with America on Alert and domestic terrorism and conspiracy nuts—”

  “Not exactly,” Gregor said. “It’s like that thing you said about ‘knowing’ the people at the party. What does ‘know’ mean? Well, what does ‘have to do with’ mean?”

  “I’m beginning to think you need medication.”

  “What I need is my coat,” Gregor said. “Jackman is due to pick me up in five minutes.”

  2

  Even with Bennis there to keep him company, Gregor couldn’t sit still in his apartment to wait for John Jackman. It was odd how that worked. He’d been in situations where time really mattered: where there were hostages; where the murderer was waiting to strike again; where evidence would be destroyed if it wasn’t secured quickly. As far as he knew, there was now no urgency. He was a little concerned about Kathi Mittendorf and the other strongly committed members of America on Alert, but not very, because as far as he could tell, they never did anything without Michael Harridan’s having commanded it first. He didn’t think Michael Harridan was in the mood to command any more murders, or church bombings, or violence. In fact, he was willing to bet that Michael Harridan did not usually think of himself as a violent man. It always amazed him how many men did think of themselves as violent, though— as if violence were the hallmark of virility, or a kind of merit badge. The Michael Harridans of this world tended to sign on to Asimov’s famous dictum. Violence is the last resort of the incompetent. It was true too. The people who blew up churches, the people who gunned down other human beings, the people who flew commercial airliners into the sides of skyscrapers on sunny late-summer mornings, were marked first and foremost by their inability to cope with the day-to-day necessity of practicing decency in ordinary life. Michael Harridan wouldn’t see himself in that, either, but it was as true of him as it had ever been of Charles Manson. People who were able to earn money and respect and position did not need to kill for it.

  Gregor went downstairs and onto the street in a frenzy of sheer restlessness. He walked up to the church one more time, but the scene had ceased to have the power to depress him. Maybe it was because he had seen Tibor this morning and it had become obvious that the scene had ceased to have the power to depress Tibor too, and all along it was what was happening to Tibor that had most concerned him. He stood for a while and looked at the rubble and then through the rubble to the icons and the pews and the ceiling that really was going to come down in a day or two. Then he walked up the street a short ways and bought a copy of the morning paper at Ohanian’s Middle Eastern Foods. If Mary Ohanian had been manning the cash register, he would have stopped to talk. Mary, however, was away from home at her freshman year at Harvard, and the cash register was being manned by her younger brother Jared, who gave new depths to the word surly. Gregor could not remember if he had been that morose and sullen at the age of fifteen. Psychologists and women’s magazines were always harping on the idea that sullenness was natural to teenaged boys, but Gregor had the idea that if he’d behaved in public the way Jared was now behaving, his father would have beaten him to a bloody pulp and his mother would have followed that with a month of guilt trips, resulting in a teenaged Gregor with all the hearty cheeriness of Mickey Mouse greeting visitors to Disney World. He took the paper and looked without much interest at the front page. There was a story on the finding of the body of Steve Bridge, but it had been beaten out from the top spot by the story on the Price Heaven collapse, which seemed to be total and threatening to put a thousand people out of work in the Philadelphia greater metropolitan area alone.

  He walked back up the street, past the Ararat, past the church, to his own front steps. The Ararat was mostly deserted. It was too late for breakfast and too early for lunch. The church was still what it had been when he’d looked at it a few moments before. He thought about buying one of those posters of the Twin Towers lit up at night and having it framed, the way Bennis had had one framed for Tibor. He was in the oddest mood, and not one he trusted. He felt as if he had arrived at the unified field theory of all existence. He knew not only the meaning of life, but the combination code to unlock its intelligibility.

  It’s a good thing I d
on’t drive, he thought, letting himself recognize that the mood he was in was very much like being on a drunk. It had been years since he’d been on a drunk, or even been a little bit tipsy. Drinking was the kind of thing you did in the army and then were a little ashamed of afterward, mostly because it was hard not to recognize what an idiot you’d been while indulging. He wondered if things would be different if young men were required to go into the army as a matter of course, the way the men of his own generation had been. He wasn’t really in favor of a peacetime draft, or of any draft. He wasn’t sure that a draft did much of anything for the country except give the worst of its leaders the means to wage war when no war was necessary. Still, he wondered what would have become of Michael Harridan if he’d had to spend two years practicing military discipline, in an environment where, in the best cases, there were neither distinctions nor excuses. Maybe the answer was that Michael Harridan would have become exactly what he did become. Tim McVeigh had been in the military. It hadn’t recruited him to the defense of civilization.

  John Jackman’s car pulled onto Cavanaugh Street—not the official limousine this time, but the black Cadillac two-door he kept for personal use. It was a tribute to Jackman’s finely tuned political sense that it was a Cadillac and not a Mercedes. Gregor grabbed the passenger-side door as soon as the car began to ease up along the curb. He had the door open and was climbing inside before Jackman had actually stopped.

  “What’s the matter?” John said. “We can’t go up to your place and talk in peace?”

  “I’m too antsy for my place.”

  “How about the Ararat?”

  “For Christ’s sake,” Gregor said.

  John pulled the keys out of the ignition and dropped them in his pocket. “I never understand you when you get like this,” he said. “Why not just tell us who it is and get it over with? Let our guys pick him up, or let Lower Merion pick him up—”

  “I don’t have the faintest idea where he is this morning,” Gregor said. “But what I said to you on the phone holds. I’m ninety-nine percent certain. I want to clear up the other one percent. Did you bring what I asked you to?”

  “A picture of Kathi Mittendorf, a picture of Susan what’s-her-name, and four more pictures to create a diversion, yes. You could have waited for this, you know. I told you yesterday that I would get the boys on it and I had gotten them on it, they were just—”

  “Doing business as usual,” Gregor said. “Yes. I know. I’m not criticizing. I’m just in a hurry. What about the rest of it?”

  Jackman reached inside his coat and took his notebook out of his pocket. “One, yes, Ryall Wyndham owns stock in Price Heaven. It’s registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission and he votes in stockholder elections. Oh, and he’s taking a bath. A big one. He bought at a hundred and two. The stock is now trading at seventeen. There’s no indication he got out in time on any of it.”

  “Excellent,” Gregor said. “What about Anne Ross Wyler?”

  “Lower Merion did that one. Sent that guy, Frank—”

  “Margiotti.”

  “Yeah, him. Sent him out there in the middle of the night last night. Not to Lower Merion, he was already there, but out to the Ross estate. Did not go over too well with the eldest daughter, Marianne. Anyway, Margiotti found the guard and showed him the picture. He ID’ed it. Sort of. It was dark. He was busy—way busier than he should have been. Like that. But we got a tentative positive that it was Mrs. Wyler in at least one of the cars. He doesn’t specifically recall which one. He doesn’t really remember what the woman calling herself Virginia Mace Whitlock looked like.”

  “In other words, that one’s a wash,” Gregor said. “Of course he can identify Anne Wyler. She was Tony Ross’s sister. She was probably on the premises a number of times. All right. I don’t think that will matter too much. I wasn’t really convinced he’d have noticed her anyway. She must have done at least a little to disguise herself, since there was always the chance he’d recognize her then. I just hate not having the loose ends tidied up. What about the clothes?”

  “That one we’re going to need a search warrant for,” Jackman said. “According to Margiotti, the eldest daughter is a cross between Medea and a nuclear warhead. Anyway, she isn’t having any. No police in the house. Nothing. You’ve got to wonder what these people are thinking sometimes. Her parents are dead, killed within a week of each other, and she won’t cooperate with the police? It’s a good thing she was well out of town at the time of that first murder, because if I were still on the force in the ordinary way, I’d be ready to suspect the hell out of her right now.”

  “Maybe we can make this part a little easier for everybody,” Gregor said. “I don’t think it’s necessary to send detectives in to do the searching. Ask Ms. Ross to ask her laundress if she’s found anything that doesn’t belong to the house in the wash. My guess is that we’re looking for a black skirt, long, jersey-knit, that kind of thing, something cheap and in a very large size. Also maybe a black cardigan, or some other kind of button-up top, also in a large size, also cheap.”

  “So what did Michael Harridan do?” Jackman asked. “Stuff the clothes with pillows so that he looked like Lucinda Watkins?”

  “No, of course not. That would have been unwieldy as hell and it would have taken far too much time. He wasn’t trying to look like Lucinda Watkins. He was just concerned to wear something dark, so that he couldn’t be spotted, and large, so that he’d be well-covered, and belonging to somebody else, so that it couldn’t be traced back to him. It was just an accident that Annie saw the clothes and thought she’d seen Lucinda as well. If the two of them had been physically closer or the light had been better, Annie would never have made the mistake. My guess is that there’s a little nugget of doubt in the back of her mind even now.”

  “There’s a little nugget in the back of my mind,” Jackman said. “It’s not just that you’re crazy. It’s that every time I have to work with you, everybody is crazy. I hope to hell that this guy has a motive that won’t sound idiotic to a jury.”

  “He’s got the best motive in the world,” Gregor said. “Don’t worry about it. And there’s always the chance that somebody on Cavanaugh Street will recognize him. He was here, after all. I realized when I was talking to Kathi Mittendorf that he must have planted the bomb in Holy Trinity Church all by himself.”

  “Why? I thought you said she was a complete true believer conspiracy nut.”

  “She is. But even complete true believer conspiracy nuts have their codes of ethics, and in this case she’s got an interior image of herself, and of America on Alert, that tells her quite firmly that they are not the kind of people who bomb churches. I wonder how long it took him to discover what somebody who’d run into these people before would have known all along. They may be irrational, but they’re not illogical. They may be some of the most logical people on earth.”

  “Right,” Jackman said. “Yes. You’ve said this before. Lots of times. Over the years. I’ve always thought it was proof positive you were nuts.”

  “I’m not nuts. I’m not nearly logical enough to be nuts. Get those pictures and let’s go see Andrechev.”

  Gregor popped his door open and climbed out of the car. He hated bucket seats. Jackman got out on the driver’s side and carefully locked up. Jackman was always careful about cars. The only reason he didn’t park them across two spaces was because he knew how angry it got people and how prone angry people were to scraping the sharp edges of their car keys across the paint of offending cars. Jackman put his notebook back in the inside pocket of his coat. He got the pictures out and held them in his hand.

  “Okay,” he said. “Here they are. If he doesn’t identify any of them, we’re screwed.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Gregor said.

  He was right too. They went down to the far end of the next block where Krystof Andrechev had his newsstand and, less than three minutes later, came out again, with a positive identification. Andrechev
made the identification so quickly, he didn’t even have time for his usual struggle with the language. Jackman laid the pictures down across the counter, one right after the other. As soon as Kathi Mittendorf’s picture went down, Andrechev picked it up.

  “That one,” he said.

  To Gregor, all the pictures looked more or less alike, except the one of Susan, which was there only in case he was wrong about which of the two women Harridan used to throw his smoke screens. Jackman put the rest of the pictures down on the counter and insisted on Krystof looking at them all. Krystof looked, but he didn’t change his mind. He pointed again and again at Kathi Mittendorf, as if he’d memorized her face.

  “It is not a thing you forget,” he said, “when a woman comes and puts a gun down in front of you and is not for robbing you.”

  Jackman picked the pictures up again. Gregor thanked Krystof Andrechev. Jackman and Gregor went outside.

  “Now what?” Jackman asked. “You want to go out to see Kathi Mittendorf again?”

  “Yes,” Gregor told him. “Absolutely. But I want to make one more stop along the way.”

  “As long as it isn’t a stop at the zoo,” Jackman said. “If it is, I’m going to be very tempted to have you locked up.”

  Gregor said nothing to that, and got back into Jackman’s car. It felt good to be doing something, anything, that was not brooding on the evils of human nature.

  3

  Gregor Demarkian had no sense of direction, and he never drove, so explaining to John Jackman how to find Henry Barden’s town house could have been a challenge. It wasn’t because Jackman had been a beat cop in Philadelphia before he’d been a detective there—and in other places—and before he’d risen to the exalted heights of commissioner of police. It also wasn’t difficult to find because it was not an obscure address.