Conspiracy Theory (31 page)

Less than you ought to be
, David thought, turning to look out the windows again, through the narrow streets around Wall, toward the towers that weren't there anymore. He thought about Charlotte on the walk in front of the house, the back of her head gone, the grey-pink spatter of brains on the windows next to the front door. He thought about Tony with his face blown away. He should have known at the very beginning. All the signs were there. It simply hadn't occurred to him.

Now that it
had
occurred to him, he had no idea what to do about it.

Lucinda Watkins finished doing the dishes at eleven. The house was still almost as quiet as it had been in the early morning, except for the thumps and giggles coming from the second-floor drawing room where there was an encounter therapy session in progress. The day outside was grey and getting greyer. The kitchen was cold. One of the things Lucinda wanted to do, as soon as they had the money to do it, was to completely overhaul the heating system. It didn't make any sense to her to keep the house freezing cold when so many of the girls came here to get in out of the weather. If it was always warm and glowing and comfortable here, maybe more of them would come.

She went down the narrow hall to the front of the house where the living room was and looked out the front windows at the street. That
was
deserted. Even hookers didn't walk here, no matter what the time of day or night. She wondered if it was ever possible to find a hooker in the morning, on a business basis. She'd never thought about it before. They were so concentrated on the night in this place. Annie went out at night. Those pictures she was always bringing back were always taken in the dark. The windows of the cars that cruised the strip were sometimes tinted black too, although that was only for the men who could afford that sort of thing, or had the foresight to rent it. She wondered how many men rented cars to go trawling for tail. Then she winced at the phrase, even though she hadn't spoken it out loud. It was Annie's phrase. It sounded all right when Annie said it, just as it sounded all right when Annie said
fuck
or
cunt
as if she meant them. Annie could get away with anything. Lucinda didn't think even Grandma Watkins would have disapproved.

She was restless, and agitated, and tired. She knew she had to go out, but she hesitated to do it. She didn't want to leave and not get back by the time Annie did. She didn't want to wait until Annie got home, either. She wondered how many people out there, how many ordinary, everyday people, really knew what people like Annie were like. Before she'd come to Adelphos House, Lucinda had been like everybody else. She'd only been able to guess, and her guesses had been made up of too many viewings of
The Philadelphia Story
and a few desultory forays into the fiction of Dominick Dunne. She'd been convinced that people like Annie—that people like Tony and Charlotte—were “all prim and proper,” as the saying went in her childhood, and that they only listened to classical music and went to Shakespeare plays. The truth was, she'd never heard anybody swear the way Annie did on a regular basis. Even the greaser boys of her adolescence, who'd made a fetish of their motorcycles and their violence, had had mouths less foul than Mrs. Wyler's over breakfast and the morning paper. She thought of Charlotte, dead on the walk in front of her house, but it was hard to get a clear picture of the woman. Lucinda hadn't known her very well. The few times they'd met, they'd said very little to each other, although it had been easy for Lucinda to see what Charlotte was thinking:
trailer trash, cheap flash, vulgar
. It was all well and good for Annie to fret over how paranoid and ridiculous
The Harridan Report
was, but it had a point, all the same. Those people really were different from you and me, if not different in the way the movies portrayed them as being. They didn't watch television. They didn't go to malls. They didn't play the lottery. Of course, Lucinda didn't do any of those things either, but that was different. She didn't do them because she was here, working, and it was too expensive to keep more than two televisions on the premises, with cable, so there always seemed to be somebody using the one she wanted to use to watch
Friends
or listen to the news. And she didn't play the lottery because she had sense. Every time she went home, or anywhere near it, she found her family and all their friends knee-deep in lottery tickets, hundreds of dollars of lottery tickets, and all of them losers.
Learn to count
, she wanted to scream at them— and then another happy-happy television commercial would come on for the Pennsylvania lottery, and it was like watching an ad for angel dust. The girls all played the lottery too, of course. They bought their tickets at the convenience stores they passed on their way downtown to work. They hid them where they hoped their pimps wouldn't find them. Well, Lucinda knew, if one of them won, her pimp would find her soon enough. There was something
The Harridan Report
got exactly right. If the lottery wasn't a plot of the rich to drain the blood of the poor, Lucinda didn't know what it was.

She paced around the living room, aimless. She stopped at the window again and looked out again and saw nothing again. She thought about getting out the prospectus for the foundation Annie was setting up to fund Adelphos House. It was only a draft prospectus. The banks and the lawyers were still haggling over the details. Once the provisions were in place, Adelphos House would have a constant stream of income that would pay the bills and pay the taxes and pay the salaries of herself and two other full-time people, complete with benefits. Lucinda didn't understand why it was taking so long to put it all together. Couldn't you just take your money out of the bank and do what you wanted with it? There was something
else The Harridan Report
got exactly right. The money the rich had was different from the money ordinary people had, and not only because there was more of it. She wondered how banks stored their money. Were there vaults with gold under the rubble of the World Trade Center? Were there secret passages in Switzerland full of silver and precious stones? Surely, at some point, money would have to stop being paper for
somebody
. It couldn't all just be a matter of blips on a ticker tape or pulses on a computer screen or those green oblong things everybody carried in their wallets and nobody thought about. Lucinda had seen French paper money once. It was odd how obvious it was that “money” was just paper when you looked at foreign currency, which you weren't used to considering real.

Marvelous
, she thought.
I'm not only losing my mind, I'm working overtime at it
. She didn't want to look at the draft prospectus. She didn't understand it, except for that bit about Adelphos House finally being set up to run independently of Annie's writing checks. Of course, it would still be a matter of Annie's having written a check, but a big one, so that they wouldn't have to go back to her for more checks two and three times a week. She didn't want to think about
The Harridan Report
, either. It gave her a headache, and then it made her feel a little resentful for being what it was. On one level, she couldn't help thinking it was a work of genius. Only somebody truly plugged in to the way people think could have produced it, and that meant plugged in to the way they
all
think, the Annies as well as the regular people. She didn't want to think about Adelphos House, either, which this morning felt like an oppressive weight. Sometimes it was like that. The whole history of human misery was wrapped up inside it and given a new name every hour: Patsy Lennon; Amy Margerbrad; Susie Kell.

She went back out into the hallway and back down to the other end of the house and got her coat out of the closet there. It was a big, heavy, thick wool thing that she'd bought at Price Heaven after a long summer of saving up. Annie would have given her the money to buy a better one. She'd have called it an “advance on salary” and then forgotten all about it. Lucinda had had no intention of asking. It was the kind of thing Annie did where she meant well, but it only made people angry.

Lucinda went back down to the front of the house. She could hear the encounter group rollicking away upstairs. Sometimes they screamed and cried for the whole two hours, but today they were laughing. She let herself out onto the street and looked around. Before she'd come to this place, she'd never believed that a city street could be utterly and irrevocably deserted, as if no human beings existed anywhere anymore, anywhere on the planet. She tried the door to make sure it locked. She turned left and began to move up the block as quickly as she could manage it with her weight. The wind was coming down between the abandoned buildings like swiftly flowing water through a shunt. It whistled and rattled and moaned. What glass was left in the windows around her shimmered in the very faint sunlight that emerged once in a while from the blanket of clouds. Annie said that she could feel the vampires who were buried here. Annie may have thought she was exaggerating for effect, but Lucinda knew she was exactly right. This neighborhood was full of vampires, and werewolves, and the shape-shifters that lived where no living thing could—and it had been a mistake for them to put Adelphos House here. They should have bought a building on a better street, closer to the action. They could have been right around the corner from the strip. Being where they were meant they were miles away from everything, even their own work—miles away emotionally, if not physically. Most of the time when they wanted to go anywhere, they had to use a car. That meant they had to keep two, just to make sure there was always one available at the house when Annie wanted to do her photographing. The wind sounded like children crying. The cold felt like glass. Lucinda knew there was no danger of it getting dark. It was still only late in the morning. She picked up speed anyway. The last thing she wanted to do was to be caught on this street on foot after nightfall, when the vampires came out to feed and the werewolves began to wait in the shelter of the empty buildings that were just one small step from being shape-shifters themselves.

She made a right, past two vacant lots and a big building that might once have been a factory or a warehouse. She made another right, into the first faint stirrings of what could be called a neighborhood. She felt the muscles of her back ease a little, but only a little, because she knew she couldn't stop here. She was too close to home.

In another three blocks, there was a street with some life on it. People sat on stoops. People went in and out of stores. People minded their own business. There was a big pharmacy there with pay phones in the back near the candy counter, old-fashioned ones with wooden booths. She would feel much better once she had made her call. History was an engine. It ground everything in its way to dust. If she wasn't careful, they would all be dust too, and blood and skin and bone, lying out on the pavement, like those two people in Bryn Mawr.

Murder, Gregor Demarkian had been told, when he was in training at Quan-tico, is the one crime without a reliable perpetrator profile. Every other crime—robbery, rape, assault, embezzlement—had its attractions for a certain segment of the population, a certain personality among all the possible personalties occurring among Americans in the twentieth century. Only murder was a wild card.
Some
murderers could be profiled. That was what the Behavioral Sciences Unit was all about. Serial killers were a definite personality type, more alike than different across the spectrum, and predictable, to a certain extent, because of it. The ordinary murderer was something else again. Go to any death row in any large state—go to Texas, Gregor thought sourly— and what you found was a hodgepodge of motives, social classes, educational backgrounds, religious convictions, car makes, tastes in books and coffee. The majority of the prisoners awaiting death would be what would be expected by anybody who spent significant time watching Bruce Willis movies. They would be poor, male, violent, senseless, addicted, the kind of people for whom nothing would ever be a deterrent if it required thinking. They would have killed their victims in robberies that hadn't required anybody to die, or beaten their girlfriends or their girlfriends' children into insensate pulps in an anger they were no longer able to explain. They were really rapists, or batterers, or thieves. The murders were side issues they never could quite figure out how to explain. Somewhere on that death row, or somewhere else in that prison, blessed with life instead of death because of their age or youth or status, there would be other murderers—the Diane Downses, the Charles Stewarts, the Jean Harrises, the middle class and the well-off, the envious, the resentful, the hateful, the cold. That was what they'd meant at Quantico when they told agents in training to be very careful about murder. It was far too easy to ignore the true perpetrator in a futile search for a mythical criminal type, hulking and monstrous, as if real human beings never hurt each other at all.

Gregor felt the taxi pull up to the curb and looked out to see that he was right in front of Le Demiurge, where he was supposed to meet John Jackman for lunch. His watch said that it was barely noon, and Jackman, being Jack-man, was always at least a little late. That had been true even when he hadn't had the excuse of being commissioner of police to explain the habit away. Gregor got out a small clutch of bills and handed them to the driver. He got out of the cab and looked around at a pleasant but mostly unassuming neighborhood. He had no idea where John found these places. Even Bennis, who looked on eating out as a sacrament, hadn't heard of most of them. This one had one of those arched canvas awnings stretched out across the sidewalk. Gregor had always wondered what the procedure was for getting the city to allow you to put one of those up. It was the kind of thing he thought about when he wasn't able to get to sleep at night and he didn't want to wake Bennis by getting out of bed and starting up the computer. Of course, she never worried about that sort of thing when it came to him, but she never woke him up, either.

The problem with Quantico's dictum on murderers was that it was only about 90 percent right. Even those murderers who seemed to have nothing in common did have something in common, if nothing else the fact that they'd killed someone. It went deeper than that. Gregor thought he could say with certainty that virtually all murderers actually killed the person they had intended to kill. Those plots that showed up in crime fiction sometimes, where bodies were strewn across the landscape by mistake until the perpetrator finally got it right, were implausible. The key was to pay attention to who had actually died. In this case, that meant paying attention to Charlotte Deacon Ross, and not just to Tony Ross alone. The danger was in the possibility that they would find an explanation they liked so much for that first murder that they would do whatever they had to do to shoehorn the second one into it. It didn't do to assume that all murders after the first, if there were more than one, occurred because somebody or the other “knew too much.” It happened. Gregor had seen it happen. Most of the time, it didn't happen. If Charlotte Deacon Ross
and
Tony Ross were dead, it was because somebody had a reason to want Charlotte Deacon Ross
and
Tony Ross dead. That seemed to leave out America on Alert. Gregor was sure that Kathi Mittendorf considered Charlotte Deacon Ross to be a mind-controlled sex slave of the Illuminati, but he'd have been very surprised to find out that she thought Mrs. Ross was one of the people who ran the world. It also seemed to rule out a whole host of motives, like sex and jealousy. The kind of lover who might want one of them dead would be unlikely to want them both dead. The most obvious avenue of investigation would be the daughters. Gregor was sure they must stand to inherit something, and possibly a great deal. The problem was that Gregor couldn't remember a case of murder for inheritance on the Main Line—ex-cept for one, and that had been an extremely odd and bizarre situation brought on by a paterfamilias who had a mind as warped and paranoid as Howard Hughes's had been at the end. No, now that he thought about it, it was really remarkable. With all that money floating around, there should have been a fair amount of violence at the edges of that group of people, but as far as he knew, there had not been.

The other way in which all murderers were alike, every single one of them, was in that odd tunnel vision that allowed them to see only themselves as human.
Me me me
, Gregor thought. Then he looked around at where he was. He hated people who stood on sidewalks talking on cell phones, but he wasn't really happy with the ones who sat at restaurant tables talking on cell phones, either. Bennis said that in London, bums on the street sat in doorways and talked on cell phones. Gergor went into Le Demiurge and gave his name to the hostess at the desk. She checked him off a list and began to show him to a table. John was not, of course, there. John would not be there for at least another fifteen minutes. A waiter came by to ask him if he wanted something to drink. Gregor ordered a Perrier and lime and asked where the pay phones were.

“I could bring a phone to the table,” the waiter offered helpfully. “Most of our patrons these days prefer their own cell phones, of course, but—”

“No, no,” Gregor said. “I don't want to have this particular conversation in the middle of a restaurant. Are there pay phones?”

There were pay phones, in the narrow back hall near the men's and ladies' rooms. Gregor hoped to find the kind with a booth that could be closed, but had no luck. This restaurant was too new. It had only those weird wall cubicles that were supposed to surround the speaker's ears, but were always too low on the wall to manage it. Gregor went into the men's room and looked around. Nobody was there. He got out his phone and dialed Bennis's number.

“Live goat escort service,” Bennis said, picking up. “We supply the billy to suit your lifestyle.”

“Jesus,” Gregor said. “What do you think you're doing when you pull something like that?”

“Scaring off telemarketers,” Bennis said. “The national ones don't faze no matter what you do, but the locals just freak. We've had three calls from some company trying to sell us vinyl windows. Where are you calling from?”

“It's called Le Demiurge. It's one of John Jackman's restaurants.”

“That ought to be good. If you like it, we'll go. Tibor's out with the architect Russ Donahue hired, walking over the rubble and outlining the requirements for floor plans. Russ thought it would cheer him up, to be doing something about all this instead of just brooding.”

“Is it working?”

“Hard to tell,” Bennis said. “He looks solemn enough, but he walked out of here telling the architect that he'd have to lend him a copy of
The History of the Theology of the Church in Armenia
. I've seen it. It weighs about forty pounds.”

“It
is
working,” Gregor said. “I want to ask you something. Why aren't there more murders on the Main Line?”

“What? There are murders on the Main Line. You said so yourself. You said—”

“No, no. I don't mean those kinds of murders. I mean murders among people like your family. All those rich families out in Bryn Mawr and Sewickly and Radnor. Millions of dollars at stake. Sometimes hundreds of millions of dollars. The sheer law of averages says there should be a certain number of murders for the inheritance money, and I don't believe that Main Line debutantes are any less rapacious than anybody else—”

“They're probably more,” Bennis said. “But they wouldn't kill for the inheritance money. I mean, what would be the point? Most of them wouldn't inherit anything.”

“Are you trying to tell me these people don't pass their money down to their children? Or are you just saying that your father was typical, and they don't give their daughters anything?”

“My father was never typical, on any point. No, I mean that if you've got serious money, you don't leave it around in bank accounts or whatever to be handed over to your children when you're dead. One of these days, George W. Bush or somebody will manage to get the estate tax repealed, but in the meantime, dying with a lot of money in the bank just means your heirs are going to hand a whole lot of it over to the government. So you don't do that. You take care of that before you die.”

“You give your money to your children before you die? What do you live on yourself?”

“You give your money to your grandchildren before you die,” Bennis explained patiently. “You live on the income until you die. It's called a living trust. I think. Ask somebody who knows about this stuff. But anyway, that's what you do, and then you put other money in regular trusts so that your children have something to live on themselves. But most of these people die with very small estates, relative to what they were actually worth, or in control of. And the children and the grandchildren have their money affairs set up so that they don't usually see any significant change just because somebody died. If you see what I mean.”

“Vaguely,” Gregor said. “Is that what the Rosses did? They've got four daughters.”

“Are you thinking that one of the Ross girls killed her parents? Well, I suppose the oldest one could do it, but the other three have IQs like miracle golf scores. I couldn't see them doing the planning.”

“But they can all shoot, can't they?” Gregor said. “You told me that—or somebody did. They weren't talking about the girls, but what I remember was that all these people belong to some gun club—”

“I'm sure they all shoot,” Bennis said patiently. “I'm sure they're all good at it too. They'd make a point of it. They probably all ride, as well, and they're probably good at that too. Have you ever paid attention to who competes in the equestrian events at the Olympics? But that still doesn't mean that they're capable of planning a rifle murder in the middle of a charity ball. I should think that took an enormous amount of planning and forethought.”

“Maybe.”

“Only maybe?”

“I think we've been putting too much stress on the planning and forethought. There are other explanations. It might have been a matter of opportunity. Somebody happened to be there and saw his chance—”

“And where did he get the gun?” Bennis sounded impatient. “That place was crawling with security that night, and not just the firm Charlotte hired. And it's a good firm. It had to be, given Tony's position. But the secret service was there, for God's sake.”

“I know. But something tells me there had to be a way. There were guns in the house, weren't there?”

“I'm sure there were, but I'm also willing to bet almost anything that they were locked away in gun cabinets. They were at Engine House when I was growing up, and even after we all grew up. It's just common sense.”

“Still,” Gregor said. “It keeps bothering me. That there's something obvious, or close to obvious, and I'm just not getting it. What about the sister? Would she be likely to inherit money when her brother died?”

“Her brother, yes, but not Charlotte,” Bennis said. “Not unless something very dramatic has taken place in that family without anybody telling me about it. Charlotte and Annie hated each other practically as a matter of principle. Charlotte thought Annie was ostentatious. Annie thought Charlotte was a twit.”

“I've met Mrs. Wyler. She didn't look ostentatious to me.”

“When you buy your clothes at Price Heaven and wear them to places where everybody else has Chanel, you might be accused of being ostentatious. I don't see why you're so off the original theory. I thought it made a lot of sense that they'd been killed by some conspiracy group who thought Tony was bringing on a one-world satanic government, or whatever it is this week.”

“And killed Mrs. Ross—why?”

“I don't know,” Bennis said.

“I don't know either,” Gregor said. “And that's my problem. Never mind. I'd better go find out if John has arrived, or if I'm going to be left drinking Per-rier at the table until almost dinnertime. There
is
something about all this, though. Some organizing idea. I must be asking the wrong questions. I wish I knew what the right ones were.”

“Just don't order everything with cream sauce,” Bennis said. “Are you all right? You sound depressed.”

“I'm not depressed, I'm annoyed. I'll talk to you later. If you think of anything, write it down. Maybe this place serves that crème brûlée stuff you got for me a few weeks ago.”

“I'm never in my life going to feed you anything again but steamed vegetables,” Bennis said.

Gregor switched the phone off. The men's room was still empty. No one had come in in all the time he'd been talking to Bennis. He put the phone away in his pocket and then—for no reason he could have put in his words—washed his hands.
Remember who actually died
, he thought, and then,
me me me
.