Conspiracy Theory (18 page)

“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.”

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.”

“Fine. You know the police. They know you. Everybody here—” Krystof looked around Cavanaugh Street. “Everybody here thinks you are a good man. So with you I cover my ass. I do not know who this woman was. I never see her before. Come inside.”

Krystof finished unlocking the door and swung it back on its hinges to let Gregor in. When they were both in, Krystof shut the door and locked it again.

“I do not want somebody coming in,” he said. “It would be dangerous. See there on the counter next to the cash register.”

Gregor went to the counter. Even in the gloom, it took no time at all for him to see what Krystof Andrechev was worried about, and to think that, if it had been him, he would have been worried too. The gun in front of him was enormous, black and polished and deadly-looking—a .357 Magnum, possibly, or one of the knockoffs that had flooded the black market a few years ago.

“Good God,” he said. “What are you doing with that thing? Do you have a permit for it? Having something like that in a neighborhood like this can be—”

“No, no. You do not understand. This is not my gun. I own no gun. This she left here, this woman who came today. I have not touched it. Not once. Not even with a handkerchief.”

“What woman?”

Krystof shrugged. “An old woman. Nothing much. Past the time of being pretty but not, what do you say, not hunched over. Not near dead.”

“Middle-aged,” Gregor said.

“She comes in maybe two hours ago. There is nobody in the store. She comes up to me and asks me if I know what is going on in this neighborhood. Of course I know what is going on in this neighborhood. The women are bringing food to each other all the time, up and down the street, day after day. It is very strange not everybody here is very fat.”

“That's a point,” Gregor said.

“I do not answer her,” Krystof said, “except I make a noise, you know. I do not say words. I do not like to talk much because my English is not good and my, what do you call it, my voice—”

“Accent.”

“Accent, yes. It gives me away. I did not know, when I came here, that everybody would be from Armenia.”

“They're not. Most of them were born in the United States. What do you have against the Armenians?”

“I have nothing against anybody. But I am from Russia, and Russia and Armenia have not always been, what is it? Allies.”

“True enough. I doubt if anybody here will care.” This was not exactly accurate. The Very Old Ladies might care, but they might not, since their enmity was still fixed on the Turks.

“So,” Krystof said. “She comes, and I say nothing, and she talks. She talks for a long time. About how here on this street they worship the Devil. They worshiped the Devil in this church up here where the explosion was. I know this is not true. This is only an Orthodox church. I think she is very stupid and very ignorant, and I wish her out of my store, but I say nothing. Even hello and good-bye I mostly do not say to the people who come here.”