Conspiracy Theory (10 page)

“I don't think he writes letters to the editor,” Bennis said.

“How about the Internet?” John tried again.

Gregor looked quickly at Bennis, and then away. He always forgot about the Internet, because he used it so seldom himself. “I forgot about the Internet. He does talk politics on the Internet, but not the way you'd think. He goes to this chat room—”

“It's not a chat room, it's a newsgroup,” Bennis said. “A Usenet newsgroup. And it's not about politics, it's about mystery stories. Rec.arts.mystery.”

John Jackman took out his pen. “Repeat that for me, please. WWW …”

“No,” Bennis said. “It's not a Web site. There's no
www
. It's a newsgroup. I'm not sure how you get on it usually, but on AOL you do
control-K
. Then you type in
newsgroups
. Then you can find it by clicking on
search all newsgroups
and asking for it. I'm probably not making much sense. I could show you if we got to a computer.”

“Don't worry about it. We've got guys in the department who know all about this stuff. Rec.arts.mystery.”

Bennis spelled it for him. “It's his favorite thing to do when he isn't reading.”

“Mystery stories doesn't sound like what we're looking for,” John said.

“Oh, they discuss everything,” Bennis told him. “And I do mean everything. Mystery stories, and theology and, yes, politics sometimes. I've forgotten all about it. He's been in the hospital for days, and nobody's told them. They get all involved with each other. They'll be concerned.”

“One of them could be something else than concerned.”

“I suppose.” Bennis did not look happy. “It would be terrible if all this ended up being connected to RAM.”

“What?” John said.

“RAM,” Gregor repeated. “Rec.arts.mystery. RAM.”

“Oh.”

Linda Melajian was coming back with their breakfasts. Gregor's took up two-thirds of the tray. John and Bennis each had a small round plate with a pear in the middle of it. The pears were stuffed with Danish blue cheese. Bennis stared at hers and went back to her coffee.

“Well,” John said. “There's no use worrying about it now. Let me look into this stuff. Then I'll get back to you. And don't the two of you forget. You're going out to Bryn Mawr to talk to Frank Margiotti. I don't care if you talk to the FBI or not.”

Lucinda Watkins had been working with Anne Ross Wyler for six years, and never once in all that time had she been able to forget the differences between them. It was not, at all, the way she had expected that to be. Annie didn't sound Upper Class, the way that fool William F. Buckley did on that television program Lucinda had once found as fascinating as a disaster area. Annie didn't use a lot of big words or dress up no matter what the time of day or night, either. It was usually Lucinda who ended up fussing about clothes, because Annie quite literally didn't notice what she wore. She was more than capable of going into the living room to meet a reporter dressed in baggy jeans and an oversized T-shirt that said
Bite the Wa x Tadpole
in big red letters. The worst was when she had shown up at a Congressional hearing on child pornography wearing a T-shirt that said
Friends Don't Let Friends Vote Republican
, and Lucinda had only had forty-five seconds to exchange blouses with her so that she didn't end up alienating the entire United States House of Representatives. Later, Annie had lectured her endlessly on the fact that the
entire
United States House of Representatives was not Republican, but Lu-cinda had stuck to her guns that time, and with good reason. They were in enough trouble, on a day-to-day basis, without offending Newt Gingrich.

Where Lucinda saw the difference, and couldn't avoid it, was in things. Annie did not have a lot of things, and she didn't seem to care about having “nice” ones, but what she had she was entirely indifferent to. Lucinda couldn't break a plate or stain a tablecloth without experiencing deep feelings of guilt and panic: guilt because she had ruined something that she had had the responsibility of taking care of; panic because such an accident almost always meant an expenditure that would be difficult to make and injurious to the family budget. She could still remember her grandmother sitting down at the kitchen table working out the figures with pen and paper. So much out of the grocery money; so much out of the bus money; so much out of the money put aside each week to buy the papers: all this, just to get enough together to replace a toaster or a dress that was supposed to last the whole school year but that Lucinda had ripped on the playground the very first day. Life was counting, addition and subtraction, rigidity. A broken milk pitcher was a week with two days of greens, no meat. A ruined pair of shoes was a month without snack money for school and the two meatless days a week on top of it. The only money that never got cut was the money for books. Grandma Watkins insisted on buying them all a book a month, a real one, not from the racks at the drugstore but from the one bookstore in Jacksonville that the owner wouldn't look down on her in. That had been a ritual as solemn and unbending as the rituals of the Catholic Church, which they did not belong to because the Catholics did not praise the Lord with enough joy, and because it was bad enough being poor in Mississippi without being Catholic on top of it. Lucinda had never, in all her life, ruined a book, and she couldn't imagine herself doing it. Even the ruin of really bad books made her ill. She had tried and failed to join the Progressive Conference of Philadelphia, because at her first meeting a man had stood up and ripped apart a copy of
The Bell Curve
. Once, finding a copy of
A Wake Up Call for the White Race
getting rained on on the ground just next to a bus shelter, she had picked it up and wiped it off and put it in a dry, although suitably out of the way, place. It was not that she did not understand the power of hate, but that she felt the power of books more strongly, and the power of the need to preserve all things and waste nothing, against the day when you had nothing at all.

Annie's basic attitude to things was not to notice they were there. If they broke, and she had to notice them, she got annoyed at them and threw them away. Then she went out and bought another of whatever it was. Lucinda had known, from the beginning, that Annie was rich, but this approach to possessions had startled her from the beginning, and still did. It was bad enough when Annie swept away a load of broken crockery that had been smashed on the dining room floor—the girls, when they came to stay, were often angry; they screamed; they ranted; they broke things—and drove down to Price Heaven to buy three or four more sets of dinner plates or coffee mugs. At times like those, Lucinda could tell herself that she was being neurotic. A rich woman like Annie didn't have to worry about the price of a few cheap plates. When it came to the cameras, Lucinda could not convince herself so easily that she was the one who was crazy. Cameras cost money. The cameras Annie bought cost hundreds of dollars, in one case over a thousand, because they were equipped to take night shots without an ordinary flash, to take shots at odd angles, to do all kinds of things that an ordinary off-the-shelf camera couldn't do. Annie was no more careful about the cameras, or worried about their breaking, than she was about the plates. At least twice a month, she came back with one of the cameras smashed. The johns hated being photographed. If they thought they could get away with it, they leaped out of their cars and chased her. Sometimes it was the cops who took the cameras and ruined them. “Never underestimate the power of a cop on the take,” Annie always said, and Lucinda had come to understand that this was true. Lord only knew, Annie was right to say that the wholesale prostitution of twelve-and fourteen-year-olds would not continue to thrive if
somebody
wasn't looking the other way.

Standing at the door to the darkroom, Lucinda hesitated. The red light wasn't on, which should mean it was okay to go in, but Lucinda had the feeling that Annie wasn't always careful about the lights. Finally, she knocked. There was the sound of metal things being moved around—what went on in a darkroom Lucinda didn't know—and Annie said, “Come in.”

Lucinda went in. Annie was sitting on a swivel stool. Print after photographic print was spread out on the long, wide worktable in front of her. She had her retractable art light trained right over the ones in the middle. Lu-cinda closed the door behind her. In spite of the art light, the room was dark.

“Well?” she said.

Annie shook her head. “Ambiguous. Far too ambiguous, unfortunately. And yet I know it was him. I recognized him as soon as I saw him.”

“I still don't understand why that isn't enough.”

“It isn't enough because he's got friends in high places and they're not about to let him go down in a way that will make him look bad. Even if he really isn't one of our own.”

“This is the Main Line stuff you're always talking about? One of our own?”

“Something like that.”

“I'm beginning to wish you hadn't taken the car that night. If you hadn't taken the car, you wouldn't have been able to follow him.”

“It was too cold a night not to take the car,” Annie said. Then she pushed her stool back until she could reach the switch on the back wall and turned on the overhead lights. In the now bright light, Lucinda could see that Annie was wearing that
Freedom FROM Religion
button she'd taken to putting on since the national prayer service after September 11. “Crap,” Annie said. “I don't know what to do about this at all.”

“I don't suppose you could let it drop.”

“No,” Annie said. “I saw the man pick up a thirteen-year-old girl and pay her twenty dollars to blow him. You know who it was? It was Patsy Lennon.”

“Good Lord,” Lucinda said.

“Yeah, I know. That kid has more issues than
National Geographic
. She's a complete mess and an addict besides. But there he was, and there she was, and all I got a picture of was Patsy's head and his hand on top of it. Maybe I'll go looking for a telephoto lens. Maybe if they think I'm not there and can't see them, they'll go back to being out front about what they do.”

“It's too bad you didn't take pictures later, when you got to that party. It seems like everybody in the world is looking for whoever it is who shot your brother.”

Annie sighed. “I was invited to that party, did you know that? Oh, Charlotte's never been able to stand me, I'm everything she hates about everything, but Tony always insisted. I've got the invitation upstairs. I should have gone. I could have stood around at the buffet table buttonholing political hotshots and financial wizards and reciting chapter and verse about their forays onto the Strip. Except that I wouldn't have gotten anybody but the second-raters. Did you know that? The people who really run things, the people like Tony, know better than to even try something like this.”

“He's not one of the people who run things?”

“No,” Annie said. “He's—” She let her hands flutter in the air. She looked, Lucinda thought, incredibly tired. “I've often wondered if some of them don't indulge, anyway. I know the attraction exists. Maybe what people like that do—” She pointed at the photograph in front of her. Lucinda couldn't see anything in it but blur. “Maybe what they do is find suitable companions for the people who can't find them for themselves. Can't because they don't dare. Can't you see the headlines?
Presidential Friend Linked to Child Prostitution. Head of International Bank Arrested for Soliciting Sex with Minor.
The major papers wouldn't run them, but the rags would. Thank God for the
National Enquirer
.”

“So?” Lucinda said. “Does it go on?”

“I don't know. On one level, it seems to me inevitable that it would. On another, it seems to me just as inevitable that it wouldn't.”

“And I thought you'd know, growing up with those people,” Lucinda said.

Annie laughed. “In my day, there were some things they didn't tell daughters. There probably still are. I just wish I knew what all that was about. There's only one reason to rush off for a quickie blow job from Patsy Lennon on the way to the biggest charity ball of the season, and that's because he's got the bug and he's got it bad. He has to be completely out of control. Which poses a lot of interesting questions.”

“Maybe your brother knew about it,” Lucinda said. “Maybe your brother was going to make a public stink about it. So this guy—”

“Shot him? Over that? I doubt it.”

“Somebody shot him,” Lucinda pointed out. “And you were there. I mean, Annie, think of the timing. You were
right
there. You must have seen whoever it was go right through the gates in front of your nose.”

“I know.”

“And he went through the gates, before your brother was shot. Didn't he?”

“Yes.”

“Well, then,” Lucinda said, but she didn't know what she meant by it. Well, then, you should go to the police and say something about it. Well, then, you should start tracking this guy and see what else you can find. Well, then, you should take care of yourself and butt out. Annie was staring down at the best of the prints, the one with Patsy's head with the hand on top of it.

“Well, then,” Lucinda said again. “You might just consider covering your ass. Go to the police and get this over with. Because if you don't, and somebody noticed you there, you're going to get yourself in a huge amount of trouble.”

Annie sat up a little straighter in her chair. “I've got a better idea, better than going to the police. I should have thought of it before. Do you have a volunteer that can cover for you this morning?”

“No,” Lucinda said. “Not until this afternoon. Why?”

“I want you to go with me. We'll go this afternoon. I should have thought of this before.”

“Thought of what?” Lucinda said, but it was no use. Annie was packing up her prints, bustling around, cleaning up, as if nothing more unusual had happened in the last several days than that one of the johns had actually been arrested. It was impossible to talk to Annie when she was like this. At least, this time, whatever she had on her mind was unlikely to cost a great deal of money.

Annie put the prints in a big manila envelope and the envelope in the locked top drawer of her filing cabinet. Lucinda went out into the hall and thought about calling child protective services to let them know what Patsy Lennon was up to, again. There were some people who never seemed to be doing anything but learning to be dead.

Kathi Mittendorf had been holding her breath ever since the night Anthony van Wyck Ross was murdered, and since she'd known about that murder long before most other people in the city, she was beginning to feel light-headed.

“You know what they're like,” Michael had said when he'd called, his voice sounding muffled as always and surrounded, this time, by wind. “They're going to look for the first likely candidate to pin it on, and we may be that candidate. We've got a lot of literature out there. We've been making a lot of noise.”

More to the point, Kathi thought, there was the problem of all the explosives, and of the guns and ammunition in the basement. She had no idea what kind of a gun Anthony van Wyck Ross had been murdered with, but she had some of nearly everything on the premises, each piece bought separately and by seemingly unconnected people over a period of nearly three years. Even with warning, she knew she wasn't going to be able to get rid of it all on short notice. There was the problem with the licenses too. Everything she had was li-censed—except, of course, for the explosives, which were straightforwardly ille-gal—but none of it was licensed to her, and no two pieces of it were licensed to the same person. It was easy as cake getting around the licensing laws if you knew what you were doing, which Michael did, but it was not so easy explaining where you'd gotten everything if you got caught. There was also the problem that one stockpile led to another. They tried very hard to construct the kind of organization the Illuminati themselves had pioneered, with small cells isolated from other small cells, nobody knowing more than three or four of the others, most hermetically sealed off from the rest, but it hadn't worked out. They needed each other too much. It was hard being among the very few who knew what was really going on in the world. It was too easy to panic when you realized what you were up against: the assembled forces of the great in the world, the banks, the foundations, the armies. Even now, after all this time, Kathi found herself waking up in the night in a cold sweat, sure as hell that every noise she heard was one of
them
tapping his way into her house, bugging her phones, filling the air of her living room full of hypnotic gas. The one thing Kathi feared more than any other was that she'd become like those people who drifted into the movement and then drifted out again. Either they saw the truth and didn't want to believe it, or they were gotten to, nobody knew how or why. Kathi thought it was a little careless of them to hold their meetings in public and to advertise them, even if only in the little local weekly papers.
They
were everywhere, and
They
did not take chances. America on Alert was so open, it almost had to be infiltrated. Someone in the membership had to be working for Them.