Living Witness (10 page)

“Because,” John said, now nearly pushing Gregor into the office, “he's one of Tyrell Moss's boys. Father Tibor introduced me to Tyrell Moss. Tyrell Moss introduced me to this kid, and the next thing we know, we're rehabilitating him.”

“He's got a sheet?”

“He's got several. About the size of
War and Peace
. Including one armed robbery and six years in juvie for a gang fight. Don't worry about it. We look good giving troubled kids a second chance, and Cynthia makes sure he doesn't get out of line. She made him get his tattoos removed. And there were a lot of them.”

“I always thought it must hurt to get tattoos,” Gregor said.

“It hurts worse to get them off,” John Jackman said. “Come inside. Sit down. Let us talk to you. Get rid of that awful coat. You're not going to get married in that coat, are you?”

Gregor considered telling John that if he really wanted to run for President one day, it might be a good idea to go a little lighter on the
Armani everything, but it was the kind of comment there was really no point in making.

He allowed himself to be shoved into the middle of John's very large office. The door shut behind him. He looked around and saw that a young man—not so young as the one in the outer office, and white instead of black—had gotten to his feet and was waiting politely. The young man had been sitting on a big wing chair at one side of what was probably called a “conversational grouping.” John Jackman had a desk, but it was over on the other side of the large room, near the windows that looked out on the city. The “conversational grouping” was in the middle of the room. It consisted of two wing chairs and two small couches around a glass-topped coffee table. The coffee table had a tray on it, with a cups and saucers and spoons and everything else needed to actually have coffee.

The young man was so still, Gregor didn't notice it until the last minute: a prosthetic leg. The young man did not seem to pay attention to it.

“Ah,” John said. “Let's get the introductions done. Gregor Demarkian, this is Gary Albright. He's the chief of police of Snow Hill, Pennsylvania, which is a little town—”

“About an hour's drive north,” Gregor said. “I know.” He had his attention on the young man. “Army?” he asked, pointing to the leg.

“Marines,” Gary Albright said. “But that's not what happened to the leg. The only time I got wounded in the Marines, some idiot got drunk and threw his boots at me. Gave me a black eye that lasted for a week.”

“Yes,” John Jackman said. “Well. Sit down, won't you? Both of you? Gary here has a problem, and he thought you might be able to help. It's a case of attempted murder.”

“It may be murder any time at all,” Gary said. “She's an old woman, the woman who was attacked. I can't believe she's lasted this long, under the circumstances. She was pretty badly beaten up.”

“If you need help with a homicide investigation, wouldn't you normally just go to the state police?” Gregor asked. “Haven't you had a homicide investigation before in Snow Hill?

“We've had several,” Gary Albright said. “There's drugs up where we are just the same as anywhere else. And domestics. We get a lot of those. But these circumstances are different, and I don't like the statie I've got to deal with on this kind of thing.”

“What makes the circumstances so different?” Gregor asked.

Gary Albright was sitting down by then. The prosthetic nature of his leg was more obvious when he was sitting, because it settled at an awkward angle. Gary Albright smiled.

“Well,” he said, “there the little problem of me. I'm one of the chief suspects.”

 

There was something about this man that went farther than the obvious military experience. There was something calm and centered and straightforward about him that was also, in an odd way, innocent. Gregor's mind rebelled at the word. Most people used “innocent” when they meant naive, and he was willing to bet almost anything that Gary Albright was not naive. No, what he had was not a lack of experience or sophistication. What he had was . . .

There was no word for it. Gary Albright was sitting across the glass-topped coffee table, waiting, quiet, still. That waiting stillness was part of the thing that Gregor couldn't put a name to. The man was not fidgety. He was not nervous. He was just waiting.

“So,” Gregor said, trying hard not to sound like he was clearing his throat. “That's a little unusual, I'll admit. How do you even know you're a suspect, if you're the one who's investigating the case? Or do I have that wrong?”

“No, you have that right,” Gary Albright said. “But I know, and everybody in town does, too, and that's a problem there's no easy way around. I could call in the state police, but I don't want to. I don't like the way they behave, and they don't like me.”

“Gary . . .” John Jackman said carefully.

“. . . is a Christian,” Gary finished for him. “And I mean it. I'd like
to have somebody I can trust come in and look at this. Especially because I'm not the only Christian on the suspect list. In fact, everybody on the suspect list is somebody who at least calls himself a Christian. As to whether or not they are really are Christians, I've got a pastor who says that's up to God and not me to judge.”

“Ah,” Gregor said. “Well, that's unusual too, isn't it? That everybody on the list would call himself a Christian. It would be unusual here in Philadelphia, unless you were including Catholics under the term ‘Christian,' which I take it you're not.”

“No,” Gary said. “And it would be unusual even for Snow Hill these days. We've got a chapter of the American Humanist Association now. Well, we always did have it. Henry Wackford started it years ago, before I was even born, but it's got a lot of members now. Something like thirteen. There are new people. People who've moved in to work at the high tech firms. That's the governor's big idea on how to improve the economy of Pennsylvania.”

“All right,” Gregor said. “But the chief suspects are all Christians, by which I'll assume you mean evangelical Protestants of some kind. Why?”

Gary Albright made a quick look of distaste. It would be the only time Gregor would see him break his impassivity during this conversation. “There was a deception,” he said. “A big one.”

“What kind of deception?” Gregor asked.

“End of last summer, we had elections for school board,” Gary said. “School board is a big deal in a place as small as Snow Hill. It's where we play out all the drama the town has. School board and town council. There was a school board election. The board that was sitting at the time of the election had been in place for something like a decade, maybe more. Henry Wackford had been chairman for more than that. Some of the other individuals might have gone in and out. Anyway, some people were unhappy with the way the board was conducting business. I was.”

“You were unhappy, why?” Gregor asked. “You didn't like the curriculum? You didn't like the teachers they were hiring?”

“I didn't like the confusion,” Gary Albright said, “and I wasn't the only person in town to feel that way. Things were sloppy. They didn't get done on time. We're building a new school building, for instance. A junior high school building. The project's been going on for years and it's stalled. Then there was the library at the high school. It was in such poor shape we got put on probation by the accreditation committee. So, when Franklin Hale asked me if I'd run for the board, I said I would.”

“And who is Franklin Hale?” Gregor asked.

“A son of a bitch,” Gary said, but he was still impassive. It was as if he were imparting a matter of fact. “He owns a tire store, tires, auto parts, whatever. In town. His prices suck lemons, if you ask me, but lots of people from the development don't know enough about cars to get them started in the morning without a manual, so they go to Franklin and he babies them through whatever they need and then he charges them through the nose. He was running for board chairman. He got a few other people to run, including me.”

“And I take it you won,” Gregor said, “and displaced the old school board?”

“Yeah, we did,” Gary said, “except that one of the displacers wasn't one of Franklin's hand-picked slate of candidates. All the old members of the board were forced off, but one of the seats on the board went to a woman named Ann-Victoria Hadley, who was, well, what can I say? Not Franklin Hale's favorite person.”

“Not yours, either, I take it,” Gregor said.

“No,” Gary Albright said. “I have to admit there's something admirable about that woman. I hope I'm in half as good shape at ninety-one. But no, I don't like her much. Her family's been the town's wealthiest since forever. She went off to Vassar College. She thinks she's smarter than everybody else and she's even more than half right. But she's arrogant and she's not a Christian.”

“Does she belong to, what did you call it, the American Humanist Association?” Gregor asked.

“I don't know,” Gary said. “But I'd be surprised if she agreed to belong to anything Henry Wackford was running. Anyway, Franklin had
asked this guy named Holman Carr to run, and Holman didn't make it. Holman goes to our church. The Baptist Church. So does Alice McGuffie. Everybody Franklin asked goes to our church. I should have realized something was up. Especially since Holman—let's just say Holman isn't the kind of guy you'd expect to be on a school board.”

“Wouldn't expect, how?” Gregor asked.

“Wouldn't expect because he's barely got a high school education,” Gary said, “and he isn't exactly a self-taught genius. Come to think of it now, that's true about Alice, too. But it didn't occur to me. I thought it was a good idea, getting the old board out. I still think it was a good idea. It was just that Franklin had an agenda he didn't apprise me of.”

“And that agenda was?” Gregor asked. He noticed that John Jackman had suddenly started to stare at the ceiling. Gary Albright was looking down at his hands.

“He wanted to change the science curriculum to teach Creation Science as well as evolution in biology classes. Starting with what I'd guess you'd call middle-school science.”

“Ah,” Gregor said.

“You've got to understand,” Gary said, “I think the idea of teaching Creation is just fine. More than fine. I don't think Darwin's theory has a leg to stand on, logically or scientifically. And the real problem is the way it's used, used to convince people that there's no such thing as morality. So, you know, if Franklin had broached the idea to me, I wouldn't have been against it. Necessarily.”

“Necessarily?” Gregor asked.

“Yes, well,” Gary said. “I'm studying nights, you know. I'm thinking I'd like to be a lawyer, so I'm doing courses to get me into law school. It's not very interesting, being on the police force when I can't get around in the field. I had a course in Constitutional law last fall that covered a lot of the cases having to do with evolution and Creation in public schools. I knew as soon as I heard Franklin's proposal that we were going to get sued, and we were going to lose.”

“So you opposed it?” Gregor asked.

“I opposed the original proposition,” Gary said, “but later Franklin
scaled it down some, and we decided that what we'd ask for was a disclaimer in all the biology books, saying that Darwin's theory was just a theory, and not a fact, and that any student who wanted to investigate a different view could go to the school libraries and take out this book,
Of Pandas and People
, that told about Intelligent Design. There hasn't been a case yet about intelligent design.”

“I'd never even heard of it,” John Jackman said.

“It relies on the fact that some biological structures are irreducibly complex,” Gary said. “That means that they work the way they are, but if any part of them is missing they don't work at all. So they couldn't have evolved in little steps, you know, because none of the steps would have made any difference in their ability to reproduce. That's what Darwin's theory says. That traits get passed down because they make the animal more likely to reproduce.”

“I think it's a little more complicated than that,” Gregor said.

“There hasn't been a case about Intelligent Design, as far as I know,” Gary repeated. “I tried looking it up. And I went along with that proposal, because I thought it was the right thing to do. I thought we had a good chance of getting a general agreement, because the whole thing was completely noncoercive. Nobody had to learn about intelligent design unless they wanted to, or their parents wanted them to. The idea was to get the whole board to vote for the policy unanimously. But that didn't work out, because of Annie-Vic.”

“She voted against the policy,” Gregor said. “All right, from what I've heard about her, that makes sense.”

“She didn't just vote against it,” Gary said, “she joined the lawsuit against it, which started up less than a month later. Henry Wackford brought it, with a bunch of people—”

“Wait,” Gregor said. “Henry Wackford. That's the man who was the old chairman of the school board? The one who was displaced by Franklin Hale.”

“That's right,” Gary said. “And I do think that there's more than a little revenge going on here. He's a lawyer, anyway. He filed suit with a bunch of different co-plaintiffs, Annie-Vic, some of the parents
from the development. That's where most of the new people live. In the development. And Franklin, you know, was furious. But mostly he was furious about Annie-Vic, because she was breaking ranks.”

“Did Franklin Hale expect her not to break ranks?” Gregor asked.

“It's hard to know what Franklin expects,” Gary said. “There's part of me that sometimes wonders if he doesn't have a drinking problem that he's hiding pretty well. Maybe he did expect her to go along, at least with the second policy, the one we actually voted in, because when she didn't he had a fit. And he kept hounding her. He wanted her to resign from the board.”