Living Witness

by Jane Haddam

  “I was guessing, that’s all,” Gregor said, as a girl came over with an order pad. When he looked a second time, he realized she wasn’t a girl. She was a middle-aged woman and she looked exhausted. “I’ll have a cup of coffee to start, and then I’ll look at the menu,” he said.

  The woman went away without a word. Gregor wondered what she went back to when she left the diner for the night. Then he wondered which side of the evolution/Intelligent Design debate she was on, or if she even knew there was a debate.

  “If it makes you feel any better,” he said. “I’m now close to certain that there’s no domestic terrorism, or any kind of terrorism, happening here. I think what we have is a plain old-fashioned murder, for plain old-fashioned motives.”

  “I don’t know,” Evan said. “I was beginning to think things were looking up. At least domestic terrorism would give us something to do. I don’t think we’ve ever been so bored.”

  “Well,” Gregor said, “you could always tell Kevin O’Connor that I thought there was a good possibility of domestic terrorism. In fact, I’d appreciate it if you would say that, because I need you to do something for me. This place simply doesn’t have the resources to do the kind of investigation I need. And I don’t have them, either.”

  “What do you need?” Molly asked.

  Gregor reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and came out with a folded piece of paper. He had written it carefully when he was still in Annie-Vic’s house. He had wanted to make sure to get all the spelling right. He pushed the paper across the table.

  “I want you to find out as much as you can about those three things,” he said. “Specifically, I want to know everything I can about how those three things are connected to the Snow Hill Board of Education.”

  Molly Trask opened the paper and looked at what was written there. “Well,” she said, “Dellbach Construction. I’ve seen that name somewhere.”

  “They’re doing the new school complex,” Evan told her. “They’ve got a big sign out there on the road. We pass it nearly every day.”

  “Ah,” Molly said. “But this other thing—this other thing. Isn’t this a teachers’ union you’re talking about?”

  “The local branch of the American Federation of Teachers,” Gregor said. “Absolutely.”

  Molly Trask pushed the paper away. “For God’s sake,” she said. “We can’t investigate a teachers’ union. Not without authorization from somebody a lot higher up than you. I don’t think even Kevin could okay it without getting permission from Washington practically.”

  “Well, I’m not interested in the union, per se,” Gregor said. “I’m interested in whoever the local person is who’s doing the negotiating on this latest teachers’ contract.”

  Evan Zwicker shook his head. “It doesn’t work like that,” he said. “The national office will send somebody out to do the negotiating. That’s part of the reason for joining a big outfit like the AFT. They’ve got lawyers. They’ve got ombudsmen. They’ve got professional negotiators. If you’re saying you think there’s something corrupt going on with those negotiations, we have a big deal here.”

  “Because it wouldn’t just be the one guy, if you see what I mean,” Molly said. “They’ve got checks and balances, these unions do. They have to. The Justice Department doesn’t trust them as far as it can throw them, so they’ve all got procedures, ways of checking on their people, that kind of thing. Which means that if something is going on, it’s almost certainly going on all the way to the top. They’re either clean or they’re shot through with corruption.”

  “All right,” Gregor said, filing that one for later. He reached over to the piece of paper and tapped on the item at the bottom. “With that one—I’m not sure just how you should go about it. The school district keeps a textbook fund somewhere. I don’t know where. There must be a bank account, bank records, that kind of thing. And the district gets operating money, too. I need the bank information.”

  “Well, that’ll be easy enough,” Evan said.

  “We may need a warrant,” Molly said.

  “We can get a warrant,” Evan said. “But we might not need one. A lot of districts these days operate with sunshine rules. They publish their stuff at least once every year or two. The first thing we ought to do is look through the local paper and the local records. Everything you want could be right out in public like that, or it could have been sent as a report to every household in the town. Then all you have to wonder about is whether the accountant is honest.”

  “Can we check that out?” Gregor asked.

  “Sure,” Molly said. “You know, I hate to say it, but this is the best I’ve felt since we got here. It really has been boring. I mean, in spite of all the things people say, there just doesn’t seem to be any real craziness going on here over that lawsuit. Unless, you know, that’s what the murders are about, and there really is somebody willing to kill other people because they believe in evolution.”

  The middle-aged waitress was back, with her order pad.

  Gregor didn’t bother to look at the menu, which he had already seen several times in the last two days. He just reminded himself not to order anything fried or with a sauce, and opted for a turkey sandwich on toast with the vain hope that it would not come covered with enough mayonnaise to float the Queen Elizabeth II.

  TWO

  1

  By the time the police cars and the cable news vans got back to Main Street, Franklin Hale was scared to death—except that he never thought of himself as scared, so he decided he had to be angry instead. And he was angry, on some level, angry at the way his town was being torn apart by all this crap, and at the way nobody in those cable news vans really cared about anything or anybody that was actually here. That was what Franklin had figured out, long before all this started. The people who ran cable news companies, the people who went to Washington to be representatives and senators, the people who wrote books and articles for magazines—all those people lived in their own special world, where all the people they met and all the people they knew were just like themselves. The other people, the people who made up most of the country, the people left behind in small towns and small cities and second-tier suburbs, Franklin’s people, well those people might as well not exist. They were only important once every few years, when it came time to vote. Even then, they were more like animals in a zoo than real people, which was why people like Chris Matthews and Anderson Cooper could spend Sunday mornings nattering on about The Mind of the Swing Voter instead of talking about anything serious.

  Franklin Hale hated Chris Matthews, and Anderson Cooper, and Bill and Hillary Clinton. He hated Barack Obama and John McCain. He hated Chelsea Clinton and Susan Sarandon and all three of the Dixie Chicks. He hated Barbara Walters and all the women on The View. He hated both his senators and his congressman, and most of all he hated every single faculty member of every single university in the Ivy League. But here was the thing—his hate was simply a mental tic he paid very little attention to, as long as all these people stuck to the bargain. That was what was really wrong with the country. It wasn’t that hotshots at Harvard thought gay guys should marry each other or that snooty little Hollywood starlets looked down their noses at him because he believed in what God Himself had set down in the Bible, instead of all this Darwin evolution crap. No, that wasn’t the problem. That kind of thing had always been true. He remembered it from all the way back in his childhood, the way people like Annie-Vic rolled their eyes at the stupidity of the local yokels, the way people like David Suskind pontificated about the mental weaknesses of the ordinary voter.

  No, Franklin thought, that wasn’t the problem, that was just life. But up to now, up to just the past twenty years or so, there had been a bargain. Those people lived in their world, and Franklin lived in his own, and neither world told the other world what to do. They had no right, those people, they had no right to come in here and tell him and all the good people of Snow Hill that they had to live the way Hollywo
od wanted them to live, that they had to think the way Harvard wanted them to think. They had no right to crowd into the nooks and crannies of American life and suck up all the air. That was what it felt like. They sucked up all the air, and more and more, Franklin Hale felt as if he couldn’t breathe.

  No wonder Marcey was a wreck. No wonder his own home life was an endless saga of pills and liquor and that Ferris wheel of Marcey’s mood swings. They sucked up all the air, those people did. They turned the entire world into their backyard, where all the standards were theirs, where all the judgments were theirs, where nothing counted as success unless they wanted it to. That was what was wrong, Franklin knew. If their kind of success was the only kind of success there was, then everybody else was a failure. Everybody.

  The cars in front of the police station now included some from the state police. Franklin pressed himself up against the plate-glass window of the Hale ’n’ Hardy Tire Shop and watched. There was Dale Vardan, who thought he was God’s gift, and a lot of people Franklin didn’t know. There was Gregor Demarkian, wearing a good winter coat over what looked like a good winter suit. What was it with these guys, that they never seemed to own parkas, like sensible people. There was Gary Albright. There were half a dozen people from those vans. Franklin hated those vans. He’d seen what they produced, Snow Hill on the news, night after night, the story of a bunch of hillbilly hicks who still thought the earth was flat.

  There was a cough behind him, and Franklin turned to see Louise Brooker hovering near a large pyramid pile of snow tires. Why did they have the snow tires out? It was nearly past the snow season—nobody would put snow tires on their car now. Franklin took a deep breath. Louise looked apologetic.

  “It’s your house,” she said. “It’s your sister Lynne. It seems that Marcey—”

  “Yeah,” Franklin said. “She was that way when I left. That’s why I called Lynne.”

  “Yes,” Louise said. “I think you’d better talk to Lynne. She seems to think that Marcey may have, I don’t know, may have taken, uh, may need to go to—”

  “—the emergency room,” Franklin said.

  “Maybe you’d better talk to Lynne,” Louise said again.

  Franklin turned back to look at the cars and the vans, at Gregor Demarkian still standing out there in the wind, talking to the newspeople with the cameras set up. Why wouldn’t these people wear hats? They didn’t wear parkas, they didn’t wear hats, they walked around in the cold and never seemed to catch anything. How did Alice McGuffie put it? It was as if they had a secret, and they wouldn’t share that secret with anybody else. People thought Alice McGuffie was stupid, but Franklin Hale knew better.

  “Franklin,” Louise said.

  “I don’t care,” Franklin said. Then he looked up at the ceiling. There was nothing there, except those foam panels they’d put in to help with the noise, but it was as good a place to look as any. He’d told the truth. He didn’t care if Marcey lived or died. He didn’t care if she went to the emergency room and got caught by every cameraman from New York and Atlanta. He didn’t care. It had all been going on and on and on this way for as long as he could remember, and he thought he was done.

  “I don’t care,” he said again. “I don’t care what Lynne does about her. I don’t care if the whole town knows about it. The whole town knows, anyway. There aren’t any secrets in places like this. I don’t care.”

  Franklin could hear Louise behind him, shifting from one foot to the other, hesitating, not knowing what to do. He didn’t care about that, either. He looked out across Main Street and wondered suddenly what went on in the head of a man like Gregor Demarkian. They said he’d been in the FBI; that he’d met Presidents, if only in an official capacity; that he was going to marry some rich woman from the Main Line who’d gotten even richer writing stupid novels about elves and unicorns. That was the kind of thing Marcey knew. That was the kind of thing she threw in his face at every opportunity.

  “You with your crap about how God wants you to prosper,” she would say, spilling lemonade all over the table because she’d taken too much of that stuff to keep her muscles under control. “God wants you to prosper. God wants you to fulfill your dreams. He wants them to prosper more than you, doesn’t he? He wants them to get so rich they can swallow you whole.”

  “Franklin,” Louise said yet again, sounding desperate now. “Franklin, you’ve got to—”

  “I don’t got to do anything,” Franklin said, moving away from the window. “I don’t. I don’t have to deal with this. Tell Lynne I don’t give a shit if I come home and find Marcey dead on the bathroom floor. It’s where she wants to be anyway, it’s where she’s wanted to be for years. I’m going out.”

  “You don’t really mean this,” Louise said, “you know you don’t. If something happens, you’ll regret it.”

  “No, I won’t,” Franklin said, and he made his way through the pyramids of tires to the store’s glass front door. Everything about the Hale ’n’ Hardy was glass. Everything was display. You had to put things out there and make them look tempting. You had to get people in the mood to buy. You had to go after them, day after day, week after week, with a smile pasted across your face and a tone of voice that said that your customer was the most wonderful human being who ever graced the planet, your customer was God, your customer was so wonderful he couldn’t really do without this stuff you were selling him, he ought to buy more of it, he ought to buy more and more of it, he ought to buy so much of it that his garage at home was filled with tires he would never use.

  Franklin stepped out onto the sidewalk. The vans were still in place, but the cameramen were packing up. Gregor Demarkian had finished talking. People all over the country, maybe even people all over the world, would have heard him speak.

  The wind was coming down Main Street like a bowling ball in a bowling alley. Franklin realized he’d forgotten his parka and his hat.

  2

  Gary Albright had never seen an impromptu press conference or a press conference of any kind, from behind the scenes. He decided that the process interested him very much. If this had been a formal press conference, there would have been a table with microphones. Since this was just off the cuff, Gregor Demarkian had made a point of standing still and with his hands at his sides. The trick was to assume an air of authority, to look like someone official, which Gregor Demarkian definitely was. Dale Vardan was also someone official, but he never looked it. He always came off as if he were intimidated by the reporters. The art of looking like you were not intimidated would be a good one to learn.

  The reporters had not been interested in asking Gary questions, and Gary had not minded. He was not someone who needed to be front and center. He was not interested in being famous. He watched Gregor Demarkian talk, and then he watched the cameramen put their equipment away, and then he looked up and saw Franklin Hale coming at him across the street.

  “Franklin,” he said.

  Franklin brushed past him. None of the reporters or camera people noticed him. Gary was glad of that. He went into the police station the way he would have gone into the Snow Hill Diner, as if it was the most natural thing in the world, as if the last thing on his mind was doing something important. Gary thought that maybe it was not important. It was hard to remember that other things were going on in Snow Hill these days besides the murders. Maybe Franklin had had a shoplifter in his store. Maybe Marcey had been caught stealing stuff again from the IGA.

  Gary looked at the vans. They were nearly all packed up. The reporters were wandering down the street toward the diner. He wondered what their lives were like at home. Sarah probably knew something about it, from women’s magazines, but it was not the kind of story he paid attention to. He didn’t really pay attention to much except sports and the presidential elections. Even the Congress and the Senate couldn’t hold his attention for long, although he’d been interested enough when he’d had Rick Santorum to vote for. Men like Santorum didn’t last long in politics. Godly men d
idn’t last long at anything that required them to be popular. That was what Christ had promised. He would bring not peace, but a sword, and His disciples would have to suffer and die for His sake. That was something Gary did understand. It was why he had liked the Marines as much as he had. It was not that he wanted to suffer—nobody wanted to suffer. But he knew that the Suffering Servant was the only one that counted.

  It really was too cold out here, much too cold, and there was another woman dead. Gary gave one last look around—he had no idea what he was expecting to find, but he was always expecting to find something—and then went into the station. The big anteroom was crowded, because there were so many staties wandering around, doing nothing useful. Gary had to push people to get to the counter.

  Franklin Hale was standing at the counter by himself, pounding on it a little. “I want to talk to Gregor Demarkian,” he was saying. “I don’t give a shit who you think you are. I want to talk to Gregor Demarkian.”

  “Gregor Demarkian,” Dale Vardan said.

  That was when Gary realized that Franklin was not actually alone. It was just that Dale was shorter than Franklin and than most of the men around him. There had once been a rule that all state policeman had to be at least six feet tall. The idea was that a man had to be at least six feet to be able to intimidate without actually, deliberately intimidating. Sheer physical presence was a useful weapon in keeping the peace. That rule was gone now, though. It had made it practically impossible to “diversify” the state police. Women were almost never six feet tall, and Latinos weren’t very often. Gary hated the whole idea of “diversity,” the whole idea that superficial things like race and gender should count more than ability and talent in deciding who would get hired to do a job.

  “I want to talk to Gregor Demarkian,” Franklin said again.