Conspiracy Theory (17 page)

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 fifty 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.”

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. She 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.”

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.”