Conspiracy Theory (32 page)

There was something there, right at the edge of his mind, and he couldn't get hold of it.

Always, in the detective novels Father Tibor Kasparian insisted on pressing on him when he had a cold, the detective—usually a professional private investigator, but sometimes a little old lady living on her own in a village or a haute cuisine caterer active in the gay rights movement or a cat—would sit down halfway through the book, outline the details of the case, and know, immediately, not only who had done it and why, but how to catch the murderer in the way most likely to result in either an arrest or a suicide. Gregor did not remember a book in which the detective had arrived at the halfway point without actually knowing what the crime was. He had no idea if he was now at what would be the halfway point if this were a book, but he did know that the only thing he was sure of was that he wasn't sure. Tony Ross was dead. Charlotte Ross was dead. Holy Trinity Armenian Christian Church had been half destroyed and rendered completely unusable. All those things might go together or not, might say something about each other or not, might help find a solution or not—but he had no way of knowing, because he had no way of organizing all the elements into a coherent whole. It would have been much easier if he could have assigned the Ross murders to a straightforward money motive. The daughters wanted the money. The sister wanted the money. Then he could have put the bombing of Holy Trinity definitively aside, separate and not in need of being included in anybody else's mosaic. As it was, he was going around in circles. If he'd been asked to explain the case to someone coming into it new, he would have had to say: Which of several possible cases are you referring to?

John was not, of course, at the table when Gregor got back to it, so he drank Perrier poured over lime and looked around for something to scribble on. He couldn't scribble on the napkins here. They were cloth, and elegantly monogrammed. It was no wonder that great books were always conceived in bars and cheap diners. They had paper napkins their patrons could write on. Gregor went through his pockets and came up with another issue of
The Harridan Report
. He seemed to have dozens of them, stashed all over himself and the apartment back on Cavanaugh Street. He got out his pen and started to write names and draw lines and arrows. He filled up one sheet of paper and went on to another. He was on the third by the time Jackman did show up, and he was no better organized. On the third sheet of paper he had a list, although not a definitive list. His head hurt.

John sat down and asked the waiter for a Perrier of his own. Gregor thought idly that if they were in Italy, John could have had a glass of wine at lunch with nobody thinking anything of it. John looked at the paper upside down.

“What is that?” he said.

Gregor shrugged. “It's a list.”

“A list of what?”

“I don't know.”

“That won't do, Gregor. It can't be a list of you don't know. You're not allowed not to know anything.”

Gregor pushed it across to him and shrugged. John Jackman picked it up.

“Tony Ross,” he said. “Charlotte Deacon Ross. Father Tibor Kasparian. Ryall Wyndham. David Alden. Anne Ross Wyler. Michael Harridan and people connected to Michael Harridan. Krystof Andrechev. All right. Everybody who has anything to do with either of the cases you're looking into at the moment. That's what you were making a list of.”

“In a way,” Gregor said.

The waiter was back. John already knew what he wanted, which made sense, since John did not suggest restaurants for working lunches unless he was already comfortable with them. Gregor ordered something that sounded as if it might have beef in it.

“Why do you always go to these places where you can't identify the food?” Gregor asked. “What's the mania for cooking things in pastry crusts?”

“You'll love it. Don't worry about it. What else can this be if it isn't a list of everybody connected to the two cases you're looking into.”

“Well,” Gregor said, “for one thing, I doubt if it's everybody. It's just the people who have surfaced in connection to the two. There may be dozens of others.”

“Right,” John said, “that's true enough. So?”

“So, then there's the question of Michael Harridan. Who he is. If he is— no, no, don't say it. I know there must be at least somebody who is playacting at being Michael Harridan, but it would be nice to know if there's somebody who's Michael Harridan full-time, or somebody who is someone else on this same list who is Michael Harridan only for publication. I talked to that woman today. Kathi Mittendorf.”

“And?” John looked interested.

“And it was like talking to a schizophrenic, although she obviously isn't one,” Gregor said. “Everything was the script. But I'd bet my life that she was hiding something in that house.”

“Like what?”

“Guns, explosives, something like that,” Gregor said. “I could just smell it. And yes, I know you can't get a search warrant on the basis of just smelling it. But she exhibited all the signs. If I had to guess, I'd say they were stashed in the basement somewhere. That's what she couldn't stop looking at. Not at the basement, you know, but at the floor.”

“You know, Gregor, it's a whole different ball game if we can prove they're armed. It's one thing to be a kook living off conspiracy theories, but the feds do not take kindly to large caches of weapons and explosives. Almost nobody collects that stuff without intending to use it.”

“I know. What can I say? Get some decent intelligence in there and check it out. Except that decent intelligence has been nearly nonexistent in this case almost from the beginning. I talked to Walker Canfield too.”

“Who's Walker Canfield?”

“One half of the team the Bureau sent out to infiltrate America on Alert,” Gregor said. “I told you about him. And his partner, who has now been missing for almost two weeks. It was almost like talking to Kathi Mittendorf. Is it just me, or have people become less and less rational in the last ten years? Or maybe I mean in the last ten days.”

“Well, your Mr. Canfield is not my problem. He's Lower Merion's problem, and from what I've heard, they're welcome to him.”

“Except that, just like us, he's concerned with America on Alert. Everybody is concerned with America on Alert. Have you noticed that? And that idiotic newsletter is everywhere.”

“That idiotic newsletter has been everywhere for months,” John said. “You haven't noticed it because it's not the kind of thing you notice, but those things have been floating around forever. And there's a Web site too, that's been up for a while. And some of the guys who say the same things have been at it for years. David Icke. A-albionics. In spite of all the hysteria these groups put out about storm troopers and black helicopters, we don't usually pay much attention to them unless they shoot somebody, and most of them don't.”

“I'd have noticed if somebody stuck one of those things in my mailbox,” Gregor said, “or if Tibor had them piled up in his apartment. I do pay some attention to my environment. My point isn't that
The Harridan Report
hasn't been around for a while, only that it's suddenly become far more intrusive into the lives of people who aren't exactly its target audience. Charlotte Ross had an issue of it in the room she was sitting in right before she went out on the walk and died—and then there's that. Why did she go out on the walk?”

“I don't know,” John said. “It's not my case, remember?”

The food was arriving. The waiter put a large plate of something that looked like fish buried under grapes in front of John Jackman. Gregor seemed to be staring at a gigantic beef rose on a celery stalk. The waiter murmured anxious wishes for their satisfaction, half in French, and then disappeared.

“You're a sensible man,” Gregor said. “I really don't understand your attraction for this sort of thing.”

“Maybe it's scar tissue from a legacy of discrimination and oppression. Maybe, deep down, I need to go to all those places that wouldn't have served a black man at lunch even if he had a million dollars. Maybe—”

“Can it,” Gregor said.

“The fact remains,” John said, “that it really
isn't
my case. There's nothing I can do about the death of Charlotte Ross. There's nothing I can do about the death of Tony Ross, either. I can probably get you information, if you think the Lower Merion police are holding out on you, but that's about as good as it's going to get.”

“Could you do something else? Could you follow through on that idea of yours and get one of your people to get a good picture of Kathi Mittendorf that we could show to Krystof Andrechev?”

John looked surprised. “Sure. Do you think that's the explanation for that? I've got to tell you that our people are inclined to believe that there was no mysterious woman with a gun, that Andrechev—”

“Is somehow involved with the bombing of the church,” Gregor said. “Yes, I know. And it's a sensible first impression. But there was no need for Andrechev to come to me with that story. There was no need for him to do anything but sit tight and keep his mouth shut. We might never have noticed him.”

“We would have noticed him eventually,” John said. “The investigators on that case have interviewed most of that neighborhood already. They'll get to everybody before they're done.”

“Did they check out the gun?”

“They're working on it.”

“My guess is that they won't find anything on it. It'll be completely clean. New. Never used for anything. Which brings us to the question of why Kathi Mittendorf went all the hell way across town—way, way across—to deliver it to Krystof Andrechev.”

“You're that sure it was Mittendorf?”

“Yes,” Gregor said. “The description fits. And, I don't know how to put it, it sort of fits the kind of thing I'd expect her to do, under the right circumstances.”

“What are the right circumstances?”

“Michael Harridan telling her to,” Gregor said.

“Why would he tell her to?”

“I don't know,” Gregor said.

“Look,” John said. “This scenario has the same problems as the one where she just shows up and gives him the gun. There's no reason why. Especially if the gun is clean. If the gun had been used in a crime, we could say she was trying to ditch a piece of material evidence. But as it is, there's no reason at all—”

“Don't you wonder what would have happened if Krystof Andrechev had actually said something?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well,” Gregor said, “they're all hyperpatriots, aren't they? America on Alert and all its members. And Andrechev is a Russian. He's ashamed of his English, so he doesn't talk much, and he was listening to this woman give him a lecture on how evil foreigners were, so he didn't talk at all while she was in his store, but—and it's not a small thing—if he
had
said something, she would have known immediately that he was an immigrant, and given his accent, she'd have had a fair chance of knowing he was Russian. Maybe she would have taken the gun away without giving it to him.”

“And?”

“I don't know,” Gregor said.

John threw his fork into his plate. “You're impossible this afternoon, do you know that? Look, you've got a problem on the home front. Somebody blew up your church. We're going at it in the way most likely to find the perpetrators, and the chances are that the bombing has nothing at all to do with what was going on out in Bryn Mawr. Is going on, I should say, since people seem to still be falling like flies. But it just doesn't make sense to put them together the way you're doing. What happened out in Bryn Mawr has all the characteristics of a professional job, and you know it. Professional-grade marksmanship, for one thing. Carried out under conditions of tight security—”

Gregor straightened up a little. “Maybe not,” he said.

“What? You told me yourself—”

“Yes, I know, but—” Gregor said. “Sometimes I think we've all read too many Tom Clancy novels.”

“I've never read a Tom Clancy novel in my life.”

“Seen too many Harrison Ford movies, then,” Gregor said. “Never mind. Did you clear your afternoon the way I asked you to? I want to get out of here.”

“Technically,” John said, “I shouldn't be going anywhere. I live behind a desk now, and a big desk. So—”

“Did you?”

“Yes.”

“Fine,” Gregor said. “The best instructor I ever had at Quantico used to tell us, nonstop, that the worst enemy we had was the things we thought we knew. And it's true. Let's go.”

“I haven't finished my lunch.”

“That isn't lunch,” Gregor said. “That's performance art.”

“Well, it's performance art made with Dover sole, and I'm fond of it.”

By now, Gregor Demarkian had heard so much about Adelphos House—from Father Tibor, from John Jackman, from the newspaper articles Bennis and Donna had taken to leaving for him after the church decided to provide volunteers for Anne Ross Wyler's project—that he thought of himself as having already been there. As soon as they turned onto the six-block stretch of street that Adelphos House called home, he knew it wasn't true. There was nothing unusual in the fact of neighborhoods changing quickly in Philadelphia. Turn a corner, and you might go from ethnic Italian to upscale shopping to African-American to something very much like a strip mall. What surprised him was the utter and unrelieved devastation of this place. This was not a rundown street in a city with too many of them. This was not the kind of area urban renewal claimed. This was a burned-out hulk. Better than two-thirds of the buildings he saw were abandoned. Windows were gaping holes without glass. What glass there was was on the streets. The buildings that were inhabited had boards put up over theirs, almost as if they feared that disappearing win-dowpanes were a communicable disease. Bricks were everywhere, along the sidewalks, even in the street. It was a good thing they had John Jackman's driver to take them where they wanted to go. Gregor didn't think there was a cab driver in Philadelphia who would be willing to come here, even in broad daylight. He couldn't imagine what it would be like after dark. The vision he got was from one of those old
Twilight Zone
episodes that were supposed to take place after a nuclear holocaust. Whatever would hunt you here might not be human. Gregor could see no signs of humans. The abandoned buildings gave every indication of being empty. There were no homeless people pushing carts of clothes and debris along the blocks. There were no empty soda cans or bottles in the gutters. There were no bus shelters. There were no stores. There weren't even any television antennae. Gregor supposed that these days everybody who had television had cable, but lots of buildings in other parts of the city had antennae on their roofs left over from the days when cable hadn't yet been heard of, and he didn't think it was likely that the cable people would be willing to come out here to hook somebody up, even if their agreement with the city said they had to.