Conspiracy Theory (39 page)

“I still say we ought to be careful,” Susan said, flipping her blond hair from the front of her shoulders to behind. She had had the top of it cut short and curled into ringlets. She reminded Kathi of Tonya Harding at her worst. “I know Michael is a genius, and I know he's in charge of this operation, but we're talking about a serious weapons charge here—”

“There won't be any weapons charge,” Kathi said. She was trying to sound patient. She only sounded panicked. “There won't be any arrests. We're not supposed to be arrested. We're supposed to end up dead.”

“Then maybe the smartest thing for us to do would be to run,” Susan said. “Let's take off. We've got those fake identities—”

“What if they've been found out?”

“We've got them,” Susan insisted. “And from what I understand, it isn't that hard to get more. Why don't we take off and go into hiding? You may look forward to an all-out gun battle against the United States government, but I don't—”

“We can't run,” Kathi said. She was feeling not only panicked, but desperate. “They know who we are. They know what we look like. They know we were involved—”

“I wasn't involved. I had no idea ‘we' were involved.”

“Do you think it would matter?” Kathi said. “Do you think they care who really killed Tony Ross or blew up that church or did any of the rest of it? Or that—FBI agent? Did you know he was an FBI agent? Michael knew.”

“Yes, Michael knew,” Susan said. “And he told us. And we expelled him from the group. And now they've found his body. That's a problem in and of itself, don't you think?”

“They don't care who does what,” Kathi repeated stubbornly. “It isn't about law and order. It isn't about truth and justice. It isn't about murder. It's about control of the world and a One World Government that will put an end to freedom once and for all. They're moving in. You can see it. They're not just moving in on us. They're moving in on the whole country. The homeland security czar—they even call him a czar. And those people in Washington. They think they have the country fooled, because they call themselves Republicans, and people think only Democrats want to turn the United States into a police state.”

“How did we get to homeland security from this?” Susan asked. “I'm talking about this. I'm talking about the simple fact that if we do what you're suggesting we do—”

“I didn't suggest it. I don't suggest anything. I'm not smart enough to plan. It's Michael who suggested this.”

“Fine. It's Michael who suggested this. I think Michael is smart too. But I don't think he's God, and that's what you're treating him as. I think this is nuts, and so would you if you thought about it for only a couple of minutes. What have we actually done that could get us in trouble? Nobody is going to believe that a couple of middle-aged women—”

“Ethel Rosenberg was a middle-aged woman,” Kathi said. “They gave her the electric chair. That woman who died after the assassination of Lincoln was a middle-aged woman—”

“We haven't been collaborating in the assassination of a president,” Susan said. “We haven't been doing much of anything except going to lectures and listening to speeches and, okay, working with a couple of wiretaps. But they don't execute you just for wiretaps.”

“It's not the wiretaps, and you know it. It's Anthony Ross. And his wife. And that—the FBI agent.”

“Right. Yes. I understand. They like to pin their own crimes on the people because that keeps the people divided, and we're it at the moment because we're here and available and—”

“And because we're dangerous to them,” Kathi said. “Never forget that. We're dangerous to them.”

“Yes, right. We're dangerous to them because we tell the public what they're doing, the way they're all subverting the Constitution, the Republicans and the Democrats both, the way they're trying to stamp out freedom and make us all part of a single dictatorship that will rule the whole world. We know what the UN is really for and what they're doing. We know the way the courts really run. We know who they are. But what good do you think it's going to do if we get blown away on some backstreet in Philadelphia and they can go on the network news and tell everybody how we were a bunch of domestic terrorists plotting to blow up churches from one end of Pennsylvania to the other? What good did it do Timothy McVeigh?”

“Timothy McVeigh is a martyr. He was a plant, but he was a martyr. They sacrificed him.”

“Yes,” Susan said. “He's a martyr. He's also dead and a dirty word to practically every ordinary American. Make sense for a little while, will you please? What is it that you think you're playing with here?”

“I'm not playing.”

“No,” Susan said. “And neither are they. They've got tanks, and mortar, and nuclear bombs. We talk about the Second Amendment and about how the right to bear arms means that we'll be able to defend ourselves against the government if they ever come after us, but that's not true. They've got stuff we couldn't get our hands on if we tried, and couldn't conceal if we got our hands on it. Howitzers. Grenades.”

“We've got grenades.”

“We do? Good. But it doesn't change anything. They can put together an army to storm this place if they want to. How are we going to protect it? How is Michael going to protect it? I'm not saying he's completely wrong. I can see his point. That—FBI agent. Yes. I can see how that's going to get us into a lot of trouble, but the smart thing to do in that case is to run, take off for Idaho or Montana or one of those places where we'd be impossible to find. Go to Alaska. Go to Canada—”

“I've got a headache,” Kathi said. “I've got to get an aspirin.” Susan leaned forward and picked up her Diet Coke. The curls on the top of her head looked fake. The thin chain bracelet around her left wrist made her arm look too plump. Her eye shadow was smeared. She had not been laid off her job. She had taken a sick day to be here now. Kathi walked away from her, through the small dining room, into the kitchen. It was the middle of the morning now, but the world was still grey. She had begun to feel that the world had been grey nonstop all her life. Even when she was growing up, there had never been any sun. That was ridiculous. She had to be careful. It was far too easy to go off the rails when you were under this much pressure.

She went to the cabinet next to the refrigerator and got out her bottle of aspirin—generic, bought at Price Heaven for half the price of name-brand aspirin. That was one of the ways Americans could figure out what was going on in their country, if they were willing to pay attention. The health care crisis was a sham, cooked up by the insurance companies and the hospitals and the big government health care centers to make Americans think they had to have socialized medicine if they were going to have health care at all. It was just one more thing, one more signpost on the way to tyranny. Once they got control of the health care system, they would be able to impose all kinds of rules. Never mind the rules against smoking, which were unconstitutional and tyrannical as they stood. They could force people to change their diets to grains and rice instead of meat and potatoes. They could make daily exercise a requirement for every citizen. They could fine people for doing things like eating at McDonald's or sleeping in on Sunday mornings.
If society pays for it, society should be able to make the rules for how it is used
. How would Americans feel when
that
little precept was applied to the very food they ate and the hours they spent asleep in bed?

Kathi got a glass from another cabinet and went to the sink and filled it with water. Then she went to the wall phone. She didn't need to look up the number. She knew it by heart, and had, for over two years. It was really true that she was not good at planning. She was not good at making decisions, either. She never liked to do anything drastic without consulting somebody with better information. The phone on the other end of the line rang and rang. Her head ached. Suddenly, the line was picked up and a recorded voice said, “We're sorry. The number you have called is not in service at this time.” Kathi hung up and stared at the phone. She was sure she couldn't have dialed a wrong number. This wasn't a number she had to look up. Still, she was nervous. She could have made a mistake. She dialed again and listened to the ring again. The line was picked up and the recorded voice repeated,

“We're sorry. The number you have called is not in service at this time.” Kathi hung up again. She got two aspirin out of the bottle and took them. She bit her lip and tried to think. Everything was on the move, now. Michael was on the move too. He must have canceled his phone service and started to go into hiding already. By tonight, they would all be in hiding. There was nothing to worry about. She just hadn't realized it was all happening so fast. Even though she'd been stressing speed and urgency to Susan, somewhere at the core of her she had still been tied to the old rhythms, when there had been no emergency. She had still been thinking the way she thought before Anthony Ross was dead.

She put the cap back on the aspirin bottle and the bottle back in the cabinet. She went to the big drawer she kept hammers and screwdrivers in and opened it up. She had a .357 Magnum pistol in there. It was twenty years old, but it had never been used, and it was fully loaded. She had put it in there only last night, when the word had come from Michael that they were about to be attacked and that she had to start getting ready for what was likely to be a very messy operation. She'd lain in bed for an hour, wide awake, thinking about all the guns and the explosives and the ammunition stored all around the house. None of it was easily accessible. She hadn't even left herself a handgun for self-protection. Finally, she hadn't been able to handle it. She'd gone down to the basement and opened up one of the wall panels and found herself this and loaded it. Then she'd had second thoughts—Michael had been adamant; she was not to start getting ready until the morning; she was to leave everything in place until then— and left the gun down here. It had felt safe where she'd put it. She had no idea why.

I'm really not good at making decisions
, she thought now. Then she took the gun out and took it off its safety. It felt heavy and cold in her hand, very different from the way it had felt when she'd been handling it before. She had fired similar weapons on firing ranges. That hadn't felt like this, either.
Everybody has to grow up sometime
, she thought, and then that didn't make much sense, so she let it go. She was all grown up. She was part of an underground organization whose purpose was to defend the freedom and sovereignty of her country against the forces of darkness. She was, in a way, really more of a soldier than a civilian.

She felt the weight of the gun in her hand. She went out of the kitchen and through the dining room. She stood in the arch there, watching Susan sipping Diet Coke.

“I'm just trying to be reasonable,” Susan said.

Kathi Mittendorf raised the gun in both her hands and fired.

It was a question of making lists, and making sure everything was in its proper place in line, and not getting blinded to the obvious by the obscure but interesting. Gregor Demarkian didn't think he would have expressed it like that to anybody, but that was how he felt. The first thing he did when he woke up on the morning after the Philadelphia police found the body of Steve Bridge was to get on the phone with the Lower Merion police, and for once he did not feel guilty for getting anybody out of bed. The whole thing was beginning to feel more and more wrong to him, not because he expected another murder— he was fairly sure that this murderer would not kill again, unless something very unusual happened, or unless he was cornered in the wrong way, which Gregor prided himself on knowing how
not
to do—but because some of the elements in motion here were not under anybody's control, and never had been, no matter what they'd looked like a week ago. He did not examine the fact that he got a great deal of satisfaction out of waking the director out of a sound sleep to get information that he could have gotten by asking Walker Canfield. He never had examined his feelings for directors of the Federal Bureau of Investigation generally. It would have been embarrassing to admit that he had never entirely recovered from his deep, abiding, and well-founded hatred of J. Edgar Hoover. It would have been even more embarrassing to admit that he now somehow held the office of director as tainted, as if Hoover was haunting it.

“I could have faxed you this from the office if you'd waited an hour,” Frank Margiotti had complained as he reeled off the one list Gregor really cared about.

Gregor hadn't answered him. There was no point. He wrote the list down carefully. He made notations next to two or three of the names. Then he hung up.

By ten o'clock, when Bennis came back from Donna's house after a morning of consulting on What to Do About Tibor—as far as Gregor could tell, Tibor was doing fine, and busily involved in planning the building of a new church, which is what he ought to be doing—Gregor had sheets of paper full of lists spread out all across the kitchen table. His coffee was in a mug on one of the kitchen counters, because he didn't want to spill any. He'd put together a plate of toast and forgotten about it. He heard her come in and grunted in her direction. A second later, it occurred to him that he was behaving as if they were married.

“So,” she said, “what exactly is this?”

He took the paper out of her hand. “This is a list of all the people on the grounds at the time the gates were closed just after the shooting.”

“Not at the time of the shooting?”

“No, there's no way to know that. If the secret service had already arrived in force, we'd be in better shape, but as it is we have to rely on Tony Ross's security, which was goodish but not really what I'd call professional. Also, it wasn't blanket, and wouldn't be until the federal officers got there. That means that the shooting happened and there was a window of about three minutes when all kinds of things could have happened.”

“Three minutes isn't very much time.”

“It is if you just want to step back across a gate you're not very far from, especially if the guard was distracted.”

“Was he?”

“Well,” Gregor said, “according to Margiotti, he wasn't. The guard says he wasn't. Which is what the guard is going to say. And I haven't talked to him myself. However, I do have something else here—the times people say they came in.”

“And that would be accurate?”

“No,” Gregor said drily, “that would indicate that there was, at the time of the shooting, a fairly heavy load of traffic coming through that gate. I thought rich people were supposed to be fashionably late.”

“Really rich people are never late,” Bennis said. “Punctuality is the courtesy of kings.” She picked up the list. “All these people were there? Why didn't I see them?”

“They weren't there, as in at the party,” Gregor said. “They'd either just come in at the gate or were on their way down the drive. That's my point. If you were really going to control who came in and who came out of that place on the night in question, you didn't need a guard on the gate. You needed six, and you needed a couple of backup people to police the perimeter.”

“Oh, Gregor, for God's sake. They've got one of those fancy Victorian gates out there, wrought iron with the arrow spikes on the top for decoration. There's no way to climb them except maybe to throw a mountain-climbing rig over the top horizontal bars and pull yourself up, but if you tried it you'd probably pull the gate over. It wasn't meant—”

“To protect against serious danger, I know,” Gregor said. “You still would have needed some people policing the perimeter, because you have no idea the kinds of things people can think up to get around security.”

“Well, did anybody think of anything this time?”

“I haven't the faintest idea. You forget, the problem isn't just with the murderer. Lots of other people might have had reason not to want to be at that place in the middle of a police investigation, or what was going to become a police investigation. Even perfectly innocent people are often very anxious to stay out of the way of the police or to make sure their names aren't connected with a scandal or a crime, even as innocent bystanders.”

“Does it
matter
that somebody might have got in or out of the gates?”

“It depends on how the prosecutor presents the case in court,” Gregor said. “A rich man with a rich man's lawyer might be able to argue that the place was a sieve and for all we know the real murderer could have been climbing over the gate and on his way to Canada while the Lower Merion police were annoying his client. Which, of course, was the reason for all this incredible nonsense. I should have realized that the times didn't match up.”

“What times?”

“Let me ask you something,” Gregor said. “Look at this list. Is there anybody on it you don't know?”

Gregor sat back as Bennis took the paper back again, and frowned.

“Well,” she said. “It all depends on what you mean by ‘know.' I mean, there's you and me. Obviously, I know us. And there's Charlotte and Tony. And I know them. Knew them. Ryall Wyndham. I know him slightly. Margaret and Hamilton Cadwallader. Lee and George Foldenveldt. Alison and William Pomfret. Virginia Mace Whitlock. David Alden. Martin Cameron. Where were all these people? I don't remember any of them at the time Tony died, and as for later—”

“As for later, there were a lot of people milling around and you weren't paying too much attention,” Gregor said. “Most of the people on that list had just come through the gates and were headed down the drive to the party. Do you know them?”

“Slightly,” Bennis said. “You know what I mean. I've been to parties where they've been to parties. I ran across most of them while I was growing up. God, the Main Line doesn't change much, does it? I never did understand how all those people could stand it to see nobody else but each other. I mean, you'd think you'd get bored seeing the same faces day after day without a break for fifty years.”

“Of course, there's one person who isn't here,” Gregor said. “But I'm willing to bet she was inside the gates when the shots were fired and just managed to get out again in the ensuing confusion.”

“Who?”

“Anne Ross Wyler.”

“Annie? Oh, Gregor. You can't really think Annie shot her own brother. I mean, for goodness sake, it's not like she needed his money, at least not unless she's been incredibly stupid over the last thirty years, and I don't believe it when it comes to Annie.”

“No,” Gregor said. “I don't think she killed her brother. I think she thinks she knows who did.”

“Who does she think it was?”

“Lucinda Watkins.” Bennis was obviously drawing a blank. Gregor shook his head. “You never pay attention when I talk to you,” he said. “Lucinda Watkins is—”

“The social worker at Adelphos House,” Bennis said suddenly. “I remember her. She's a very strange woman. I mean, to look at her, you'd think she was—” Bennis flushed.

“Trailer trash,” Gregor said firmly. “I know. I think she was, once. That that's what her family was. And I agree with you. In some ways, she's a very strange woman. My guess is that, philosophically, she isn't much different from Kathi Mittendorf. But she didn't kill Tony Ross.”

“But Annie thinks she did? Why?”

“Because at the time her brother was killed, Anne Ross Wyler was following Ryall Wyndham into that party. She says she only went as far as the gate and stopped, but I'm about ninety-nine percent certain that wasn't true. You see that name on the list—Virginia Mace Whitlock?”

“What about it? She's a real pain in the ass, but I don't think she's sinister. I mean, she's just trying to be a legend in her own time, if you know what I mean. Buys her clothes at Price Heaven. Makes a fetish of being cheap. There are always people on the Main Line like Virginia, they're just—”

“The reason why there's a star next to her name,” Gregor said, “is that at the time of that party, Virginia Mace Whitlock was in the hospital in Boston having a hip replacement.”

“Oh,” Bennis said.

“My guess is that Anne Ross Wyler simply gave the wrong name at the gate. Like I said, the security was very uneven, and there were a lot of people arriving, and I'd guess that the single guard on wasn't being all that careful. It's easy to look back now and talk about how important it was for Tony Ross to have real security in place, but you know what life is like. None of us think we need real security in place. Most people get annoyed with security in no time at all, unless they're very fearful people. Would you say Tony Ross was a fearful person?”

“Of course not,” Bennis said.

“What about Charlotte Deacon Ross?”

Bennis snorted. “She was one of those women who would have offed the burglar in a split second if there had ever been one stupid enough to enter her house. And she probably had the arms in that place to do it.”

“So,” Gregor said, “trust me, neither one of them would be likely to put up with anything like real security for long, because real security is a pain in the ass. And in fact they didn't, and we know they didn't. Margiotti and Tackner commented at the time on the fact that there was less of that sort of thing than they'd expected there to be, although I don't see why. I can't imagine that most of those houses in Bryn Mawr are tricked out with a full array of security devices. Three quarters of an hour later, of course, it would have been different, because the first lady would have arrived and the feds would have been there in force.”

“But you still haven't said,” Bennis said. “Why does Annie think Lucinda Watkins killed her brother?”

“Because at the time of the shooting, the murderer was wearing Lucinda Watkins's clothes, or something very much like them.”

“What?”

“And standing in a tree,” Gregor said. “I didn't realize what was going on until I actually saw Lucinda Watkins. And heard her. I'd expect Annie Ross has spent a long time listening to Lucinda's tirades about the evils of the upper class, or however it is she puts it when they're alone and she can really let loose. With me, she was a little strained.”

“I can bet. Where did the murderer get Lucinda Watkins's clothes?”

“From Lucinda Watkins's closet.”

“So who's the murderer? Annie Ross?”

“Michael Harridan,” Gregor said.

Bennis sat down. “Listen,” she said. “You've spent the last week telling me that Michael Harridan doesn't exist—”

“Not exactly.”

“And that the killing of Tony Ross had nothing at all to do with America on Alert and domestic terrorism and conspiracy nuts—”

“Not exactly,” Gregor said. “It's like that thing you said about ‘knowing' the people at the party. What does ‘know' mean? Well, what does ‘have to do with' mean?”

“I'm beginning to think you need medication.”

“What I need is my coat,” Gregor said. “Jackman is due to pick me up in five minutes.”

Even with Bennis there to keep him company, Gregor couldn't sit still in his apartment to wait for John Jackman. It was odd how that worked. He'd been in situations where time really mattered: where there were hostages; where the murderer was waiting to strike again; where evidence would be destroyed if it wasn't secured quickly. As far as he knew, there was now no urgency. He was a little concerned about Kathi Mittendorf and the other strongly committed members of America on Alert, but not very, because as far as he could tell, they never did anything without Michael Harridan's having commanded it first. He didn't think Michael Harridan was in the mood to command any more murders, or church bombings, or violence. In fact, he was willing to bet that Michael Harridan did not usually think of himself as a violent man. It always amazed him how many men
did
think of themselves as violent, though— as if violence were the hallmark of virility, or a kind of merit badge. The Michael Harridans of this world tended to sign on to Asimov's famous dictum.
Violence is the last resort of the incompetent
. It was true too. The people who blew up churches, the people who gunned down other human beings, the people who flew commercial airliners into the sides of skyscrapers on sunny late-summer mornings, were marked first and foremost by their inability to cope with the day-to-day necessity of practicing decency in ordinary life. Michael Harridan wouldn't see himself in that, either, but it was as true of him as it had ever been of Charles Manson. People who were able to earn money and respect and position did not need to kill for it.

Gregor went downstairs and onto the street in a frenzy of sheer restlessness. He walked up to the church one more time, but the scene had ceased to have the power to depress him. Maybe it was because he had seen Tibor this morning and it had become obvious that the scene had ceased to have the power to depress Tibor too, and all along it was what was happening to Tibor that had most concerned him. He stood for a while and looked at the rubble and then through the rubble to the icons and the pews and the ceiling that really was going to come down in a day or two. Then he walked up the street a short ways and bought a copy of the morning paper at Ohanian's Middle Eastern Foods. If Mary Ohanian had been manning the cash register, he would have stopped to talk. Mary, however, was away from home at her freshman year at Harvard, and the cash register was being manned by her younger brother Jared, who gave new depths to the word
surly.
Gregor could not remember if he had been that morose and sullen at the age of fifteen. Psychologists and women's magazines were always harping on the idea that sullenness was natural to teenaged boys, but Gregor had the idea that if he'd behaved in public the way Jared was now behaving, his father would have beaten him to a bloody pulp and his mother would have followed that with a month of guilt trips, resulting in a teenaged Gregor with all the hearty cheeriness of Mickey Mouse greeting visitors to Disney World. He took the paper and looked without much interest at the front page. There was a story on the finding of the body of Steve Bridge, but it had been beaten out from the top spot by the story on the Price Heaven collapse, which seemed to be total and threatening to put a thousand people out of work in the Philadelphia greater metropolitan area alone.