Conspiracy Theory (33 page)

“Tell me Adelphos House isn't really on this street,” Gregor said. “Tell me we're just driving through on our way to someplace more sane.”

“Nobody drives through this neighborhood,” John Jackman said. “Except the cops. And they're armed. I wouldn't come out here myself at night without backup.”

“Well, now I understand something Annie Wyler told me. She said they had two cars at Adelphos House because they
had
to have cars. I remember thinking at the time that it was a typical rich-girl attitude. Nobody in Philadelphia
has
to have a car. There's always public transportation.”

“Not out here, there isn't.”

“Yes, I see that. Why is Adelphos House here? Surely there had to be other neighborhoods, closer to what Adelphos House does. They couldn't all have been too expensive. Do hookers work this street? Who do they sell to?”

“Hookers do not work this street,” John Jackman said as the car began to slow up. “From what I remember—I was working out on the Main Line at the time—she tried to buy something closer to the strip where the girls work, but she ran into all kinds of trouble. Zoning problems. Permit problems. Building code problems—”

“This sounds like a setup.”

“It probably was. I don't have to tell you that there have indeed been some members of our esteemed city government who have been known to patronize underage prostitutes. Not that they admit to knowing the prostitutes are underage, you understand. But that hardly matters. And Anne Ross Wyler was a pain in the butt to those people before she ever opened Adelphos House.”

“Was she taking pictures back then too?”

“Uh, yeah,” John Jackman said. “She even landed in the hospital for it once. I don't know how many cameras she's lost over the years. This is it. Notice the windows—no boards. We've tried to tell her that junkies have no consciences because they aren't really conscious, but she won't listen. We haven't told her that the people she annoys aren't above and beyond taking potshots at her at home, but she probably already knows it. She won't listen to that, either.”

“Has anything ever happened at Adelphos House?”

“From the outside, no. There have been a couple of incidents of the girls losing it. She lets girls stay if they want. She puts them back in touch with their families if they want. That isn't always possible. Sometimes, the families sold the girls into prostitution to begin with. Don't you just love junkie culture?”

“I think it's wonderful,” Gregor said.

“That's why I think we should end the drug war,” Jackman said. “Make it all legal. Let them kill themselves with it. I don't give a damn. But free up police resources to go after things like child prostitution. We spend millions of dollars every year in this city chasing potheads, and there isn't enough left over in the budget to even try to put an end to the people who put eleven-year-olds out to peddle their asses on the street.”

The car had pulled to a stop at the curb. “I never thought of junkies having a culture,” Gregor said. John Jackman climbed out onto the sidewalk. Gregor climbed out too.

“Everything has a culture these days,” Jackman said. “Mollusks have a culture. They probably also have an indigenous language they're trying to protect from the cultural imperialism of the squid.”

Adelphos House was in one of those brick buildings—like the one Gregor lived in on Cavanaugh Street—that was built right up next to the sidewalk, so that all it took to get from the street to the front door was to go up a few small steps. Gregor went around the car to join John Jackman on the sidewalk. As he did, Aldelphos House's front door opened and a gigantic woman stepped out, her hair pulled back in a bun, her flowered dress floating in the stiff cold wind. For a split second, Gregor was confused. His first impression was that he was looking at Kathi Mittendorf again, but that passed, and then he didn't know why he'd thought it. Kathi Mittendorf was lumpy, but this woman was obese. Gregor wondered how she managed to get up and down even this small set of steps every day. Kathi Mittendorf had hair dyed so falsely blond it hurt to look at it. This woman seemed to be content with her salt-and-pepper natural, pulled back against her skull and pinned untidily at the back of her head. Besides, Gregor thought, Kathi Mittendorf would never have been caught dead in a neighborhood like this one. It would have been far too threatening, far too close to being the thing she was most afraid of happening to her life.

“Lucy,” John Jackman said, holding out his hand. “Go back in the house. It's got to be nine degrees out here. You're going to freeze.”

“I've been freezing for an hour,” the woman said. “The heat's out. We've got the oil company wheezing and whining and trying to get out of coming out here, even though they know they have to come out in an emergency, and this is surely an emergency. Is this Mr. Demarkian? Annie told me all about you.”

“I'm Gregor Demarkian, yes,” Gregor said.

“Lucinda Watkins,” the woman said.

“Let me get to a phone,” John Jackman said, “and make a few calls. Maybe we can straighten out your heat problem for you while we're here.”

“That's why it's good to know an honest policeman,” Lucinda said. “Too bad they're not all like you.”

Gregor cocked an eyebrow. Jackman shrugged. “Some of the men on the force have been known to, ah—”

“You know you've got men on your force who are visiting child prostitutes?” Gregor said.

“No,” John Jackman said sourly. “Once I know who they are, I find a way to get rid of them. But I know there are always some. Christ, Gregor. How do you think that strip keeps operating?”

Lucinda Watkins had retreated into Adelphos House's front hallway and left the door open. John Jackman followed her and Gregor followed John Jackman. Inside, the ceilings were high, but the house itself was not impressive, and never had been. This had not started out as a fashionable neighborhood, the way so many poor neighborhoods did. The people who had lived here had not always been poor, but they had never been the kind of people to go regularly to the opera or the art museums. If Gregor had had to peg it, he'd have said turn-of-the-century and mostly in the possession of Catholic immigrants, Italians and Poles. There was a discolored place on the wall of the front hallway in the shape of a cross. Gregor had no problem imagining a crucifix hanging there, with a shallow cup of holy water underneath it.

Lucinda scuttled behind him and shut the door. “I'll go get Annie. She's having a nap. She's up all night with that stuff, and then she's up early in the morning. It's insane. She runs herself down. She gets a dozen colds every winter. And she won't let anybody help.”

“I thought you were getting some volunteers,” John Jackman said.

“Oh, she'll let people help with that sort of thing,” Lucinda said. “It's the trawling the strip I'm talking about. She's out there every night, rain or shine, it doesn't matter what the weather is. She won't let me go because she says I'll be too conspicuous. I
am
very conspicuous, I know that. I know what I look like when I look in the mirror. Last time I had a physical, I weighed three hundred pounds. But still. I'm fast. You've got to admit I'm fast. And nobody would pay any attention to me out there. Nobody ever pays attention to middle-aged fat women. They pay attention to
her
.”

A door along the hallway popped open, and a young woman dressed in jeans and a heavy cotton sweater came out. Lucinda looked up and smiled.

“Melissa,” she said. She turned to Gregor and John Jackman. “This is Melissa Polk, one of our volunteers from Bryn Mawr College. Bryn Mawr provides us with a lot of valuable help during the school year. Melissa, listen, this is Mr. Jackman and Mr. Demarkian. Mr. Jackman is the commissioner of police. Mr. Demarkian—”

“Is the Armenian-American Hercule Poirot,” Melissa said politely.

Gregor winced. Lucinda ignored it. “Would you mind running up and telling Annie they're here?” she said. “She's lying down for a while. I'll take them in to the living room.”

“No problem,” Melissa said.

Lucinda began shooing them toward a door. Gregor had forgotten how houses used to have all their rooms walled off from all the others, with doors that shut. He allowed himself to be pushed through this door into the smallish living room. He walked over to the bay window and looked out on the abandoned street.

“I'm surprised nobody's ever broken this,” he said. “I'd think it would be the perfect target for a certain sort of person in a certain kind of mood.”

“What sort of person in what sort of mood?” Lucinda Watkins said. “There isn't much of anybody on this street anymore. What little population there is is junkies, bad junkies, the nearly dead ones. They can't work up the energy to throw rocks, not even when they're out of dope. They just collapse.”

“Somebody broke the other windows,” Gregor pointed out.

“Years ago,” Lucinda said. “When this neighborhood was disintegrating, but before it actually died. When you had buildings full of angry young men with nowhere to go. You've got to wonder why they threw rocks at the houses in their own neighborhoods. If I was in their position, I'd go out to Society Hill or Chestnut Hill or the Main Line—”

“It's not so easy to get out to those houses on the Main Line,” John Jack-man pointed out.

“There are trains,” Lucinda said. “There are cars to steal. It wouldn't take so much. I've driven out there myself a few times. It's not that complicated. You have to wonder—”

“What?” Gregor said.

Lucinda shrugged. “Oh, don't mind me. I'm always on a tear. Just ask Mr. Jackman. There's just a part of me that doesn't understand why all this stays up. All those people out there, like Annie's brother, living in thirty-thousand square feet when the girls we serve don't have a room to themselves and the space they do have has cockroaches crawling all over it. Thomas Jefferson thought that the country should be made up of farmers and artisans, small businessmen, small craftsmen. He thought that the country would be ruined if there were any men richer or more powerful than that. Maybe he had a point.”

“Thomas Jefferson was a rich man who owned a plantation and slaves,” John Jackman said drily. “What's this all about, Lucy? I didn't realize you'd gone Communist on me while I was busy elsewhere.”

“Oh, Lucinda would never go Communist,” Anne Ross Wyler said, coming into the room with her hair so completely a mess that it looked like she'd put a wig on backwards. “She thinks the Communists are as bad as the capitalists, they just put a different name on doing the same old stuff. Hello again, Mr. Demarkian. Hello, John. Is there a reason for this visit in the middle of the day?”

“Ask him,” John Jackman said.

“I wanted to get a look at the place,” Gregor said. “And I wanted you to show me the cars. Where they're kept. How they get in and out of the property. It hadn't occurred to me before I saw this place up close, but you must have a certain amount of worry with the cars. You have two, don't you?”

“Two, yes,” Annie said. “A station wagon and a two-door. Why?”

“Which one did you have on the night your brother died?” Gregor asked.

“The two-door,” Annie said. “The deal is to park inconspicuously, although I'm not very inconspicuous anymore. Still, a small dark car isn't very intrusive.”

“They painted her trunk orange once while she was in some convenience store,” Lucinda said. “Annie likes to pretend it was just kids, but I know better. They were trying to mark her. They managed it for about a day.”

“Less than that,” Annie said. “Why do you think we'd have trouble with the cars?”

“With people stealing them,” Gregor said. “It's one thing to break windows or not to break them, but a car is a valuable piece of property. And there are car thieves all over this city who wouldn't think twice about coming into this neighborhood if they thought they could get a decent vehicle without much trouble.”

“Maybe,” Annie said, “but they haven't yet.”

“We keep the cars in a little garage around the back,” Lucinda said. “We've even got a driveway. She bought a house just around the corner and had it demolished. She cut the driveway through and had the garage built. You wouldn't believe what trouble we had getting all the permits.”

“It wasn't as if anybody was ever going to live in that house again,” Annie said. “There wasn't much more left of it than stray bricks and loose asbestos. This whole neighborhood is full of asbestos. And no, we don't lock the garage, Mr. Demarkian. There isn't any point. In the middle of the night, when we sometimes have to go out, we tend to be in a hurry.”

“They pick up the girls if they call,” John Jackman explained. “The ones who get scared by a john or who've just gotten beaten up by a pimp.”

“They go back, though,” Lucinda said. “You wouldn't believe it. It's like they've been brainwashed.”

“What kind of car is the station wagon? What kind of car is the two-door?”

“The two-door is a Honda,” Annie said. “I don't know what kind of Honda. I don't pay attention to that sort of thing. The station wagon is a black Volvo Cross Country. I know because we just bought it maybe six months ago, and the guy who sold it to us insisted on giving us the brochure.”

“He was just doing his job,” Lucinda said.

“I don't know why everybody on earth seems to think his job is to sell me something,” Annie said.

There was a faint buzzing. John Jackman stuck his hand inside his jacket and came out with his cell phone. “Excuse me,” he said, retreating back into the hallway.

Gregor looked around the living room. It was a pleasant space, not too large, not too small, newly painted, newly carpeted, dusted to within an inch of its life. On one wall, there were bookshelves. On another, a plain brick fireplace. The furniture was serviceable and comfortable, but not extravagant.