by Jane Haddam
“Why? This is not a criticism, Krekor, of course I will come. But is there a reason?”
“You’ve been listening to the news, you said. What did you think of Drew Harrigan’s widow?”
“Ah, the blond woman with the screechy voice. Her I did not listen to, Krekor, because she had such a screechy voice, it was impossible to listen. Also, she is one of those people. She is profoundly stupid, so profoundly stupid that she lies when it is not necessary, and if you listen to her you spend all your time trying to figure out where the truth is. There is no point.”
“Yes, well. Listen, I’ll tell you all about it when you get here. Meet me at that coffee shop as soon as you can. Tell the cabbie to take you to the DA’s Office and just walk across the street. I’ll be there. And yes, we could have this discussion on the phone, but I need to get out of here before I go crazy. I’ll see you as soon as you can get here.”
“It will be about half an hour, Krekor. Traffic is like that.”
Tibor hung up. Gregor turned off his phone and folded it back into the even smaller shape it had to fit into his pocket. He looked up. The receptionist did not seem to have noticed him making a call, or if she had, she didn’t seem to have heard what he said. There was nobody else in the waiting room to hear. He felt a little silly. He wasn’t a prisoner. He wasn’t making a break for it. It just felt as if he was. Even so, he waited, as patiently as he could, for fifteen minutes before he stood up and went to the receptionist’s desk.
“I’m going to run across the street for some lunch,” he told her. “If Mr. Benedetti is looking for me, he can find me there. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
The receptionist gave him a big smile and wrote it all down on a jumbosized Post-it note. Gregor turned his back to her, walked down the hall, and pushed the button for the elevator. Nobody followed him. Rob Benedetti didn’t come careening into view, demanding that he sit still and wait until they were off to do whatever it was they were supposed to do. Gregor almost resented the ease with which he was able to get away. He’d only been sitting in that damned waiting room because Rob Benedetti had said it was important.
The elevator hit the ground floor and let him out. He went through the plate glass doors to the street and only then remembered what the day was like. The wind hit broadside, forcing up the hem of his coat until it billowed around him like a cape. He saw a homeless man with his possessions in a shopping cart slip into the narrow alley between two buildings, so narrow he thought the cart wouldn’t make it. Then he headed toward the coffee shop at a run. Philadelphia wasn’t supposed to be this cold. The New England delegates to the Constitutional Convention had referred to it as a “Southern” city. He wondered where homeless people found the carts they used to carry things around in. The most sensible answer was that they stole them from supermarket parking lots, but there weren’t that many supermarkets in downtown Philadelphia, and supermarkets usually marked their carts in one way or the other. He turned into the coffee shop and blessed whoever was to be blessed for the existence of hot air heat.
2
Tibor was five minutes later than he said he would be, and by that time Gregor had managed to drink two cups of coffee and read an entire copy of USA Today. He’d have bought the Inquirer, but he’d already seen it, or the New York Times, but there weren’t any left. His only other choice had been the Wall Street Journal, and he wasn’t ready for that yet. Their editorials gave him headaches. All this coffee was giving him a headache, too. From where he sat, he could see the street and the people going by on it, bent against the wind, wrapped up in coats and hats and gloves. The Inquirer this morning had had a little advisory on the front page, warning people that it wasn’t safe to go out without every inch of skin covered. Frostbite could happen faster than you thought.
A cab pulled up outside, and the door opened, and a small man in a long black coat, black gloves, and three different-colored scarves got out. Gregor watched as Tibor paid the cabbie and came across the sidewalk to the coffee shop. If he hadn’t known Tibor for so many years, he would never have recognized him now. The scarves were red, yellow, and bright royal blue. The bright royal blue one was pulled up over his mouth and nose, as if he were about to rob a bank.
Tibor came in, looked around, and spotted Gregor in one of the booths at the side. He came down next to the counter with its chrome-accented swivel stools and threw his hat on the empty bench.
“Tcha, Krekor, it’s impossible. In weather like this there ought to be an emergency. Business should stop. The city should close down. And then I see there are people on the street, living there in the cold. You did not wait lunch for me, Krekor? I ate hours ago.”
Tibor unwound the scarves and put them on the seat, too. Then he took off his coat and hung it on the shiny rack that rose up at the side of the booth. Then he sat down. The waitress was there in a flash. Gregor had the guilty feeling that she had been hovering in the background for a while, watching him take up one of her booths without ordering much of anything. On the other hand, there were plenty of empty booths. Nobody was being prevented from having lunch because he was there.
“Krekor?”
“Nothing,” Gregor said. “I’m having an odd day. I keep going into fugues. Could I have a Philly steak big meat with extra cheese and some french fries? And, uh, water, I guess, and more coffee.”
“I will have only coffee, please,” Tibor said.
The waitress gave them both murderous looks, and stomped off. Gregor shook his head. “I forgot about the cold. I should never have asked you to come out. I was just being held prisoner, or something. Rob Benedetti wants me around even if he has nothing for me to do, and I was tired of waiting until he wanted to move.”
“I was getting tired of Hannah and Lida talking to me about wallpaper for the children’s center,” Tibor said. “They are good women, Krekor, but they make everything into a production. Buy wallpaper in cheerful colors and make sure you can wash it when children draw on it with crayons, what else do they need to know? But they have to discuss things. So there I was.”
“And now here you are. I’m glad you came. I thought you might provide a little insight where I need it. Did you hear any of the news about the screeching woman at all? She came to the police and gave them a list of all the people she thought had motive, means, and opportunity to kill her husband.”
“How does she know they had opportunity?”
“Good question. I expect that she’s just guessing. But the thing is, there’s the list, and she’s going on television to announce it, and now we’re stuck taking the list seriously. But it’s an odd list. And there are a number of very odd people on it.”
“Like who?”
Gregor took a folded-up copy of the list from the breast pocket of his jacket and handed it over. “Look at the fourth from the top.”
Tibor counted down four, and blinked. Then he counted down four again, although why that mattered, Gregor didn’t know. Tibor put the list flat down on the table and sat back.
“Well,” he said.
“Exactly,” Gregor said.
“Dr. Richard Alden Tyler,” Tibor said.
“I think people call him Jig.”
Tibor brushed this away. “Tcha, Krekor, what can I say? With some people it might only be a nickname, but with him it is an affectation. Like that man in England, who gave up his title so he could sit in the House of Commons and pretend to be a member of the working classes.”
“Tony Benn.”
“That’s right. Lord Anthony Wedgwood Benn. Or Anthony Wedgwood Benn, Lord Stansgate. Or something. I am sorry, Krekor, but my memory is fuzzy. In both cases, it is an affectation. In Dr. Tyler’s case it is more than an affectation. It is a joke.”
“You don’t think Jig Tyler really believes the things he says politically?”
“I think that Dr. Tyler believes that the world is full of people so stupid they can be hypnotized by an advertising jingle,” Tibor said. “He says he is a socialist,
but that is not the case. He is not a socialist. He is a Platonist.”
“That’s a political party?”
“It’s a political attitude,” Tibor said. “The world should be ruled by philosopher-kings, because they are so much wiser than the rest of us, and they will make good decisions for us because we cannot make good decisions for ourselves. This is the real political divide in the world, Krekor. It’s not between conservatives and liberals or between left and right or between Republican and Democrat or between capitalist and socialist. The real political divide in the world is between the people who think that if you make a decision they think is stupid, you must be too stupid to make decisions, and the people who think that every man has a right to make his own decisions about his own life. The second kind of people understand that we are not free to make decisions unless we are free to make bad ones. It’s like seat belts.”
The waitress was back with Gregor’s sandwich and fries and a coffee cup for Tibor. The sandwich was the size of a small Tiger shark and just as thick. When they said big meat in this place, they meant it. They both sat back while the waitress returned to the counter for the coffeepot. Then Tibor began putting sugar and milk into his coffee. He used a lot of both. Gregor thought he was going to end up with a coffee milk shake, and more milk than coffee.
“Seat belts,” Gregor said helpfully.
“Yes,” Tibor said. “Seat belts. It is a very stupid thing to ride in a car without seat belts. There is nothing to be said for deciding not to do it that would hold weight with any rational person. This is a fact, yes? But it is also a fact that some people do not like to wear seat belts, and won’t wear them. So…is it a good thing to pass laws to require you to wear them, or not?”
“We did pass a law to require us to wear them.”
“Yes, yes, Krekor, we did. But why? Because those of us who have come to the conclusion that not to wear seat belts is stupid have no respect for the people who came to the opposite conclusion. We don’t need to treat them like adults who have a right to make their own decisions. We instead treat them like children who have to be forced for their own good. That’s the key, Krekor. Laws should never be passed to save people from themselves. When you begin to do that, you threaten to bring democracy to an end.”
“You want to repeal the seat belt laws,” Gregor said, not sure he was understanding this.
“The seat belt laws are trivial, Krekor, the principle is not. Democracy rests on the principle that ordinary men and women are fully competent to know their own best interests and make their own decisions about their own affairs. When we pass laws against things people do that hurt only themselves, we say that democracy has failed. It didn’t work. Ordinary men and women do not know what’s good for them, so we have to have smarter, more rational people force them to live in a sensible way. Seat belt laws. The drug war. Laws against pornography in print and on the screen. Laws against giving birth control to unmarried people. These proposals to tax people who are too fat or who won’t exercise or who insist on eating food like that,” Tibor looked dubiously at Gregor’s sandwich, “rather than green salads with low-fat dressing. And Dr. Richard Alden Tyler, who would legislate those things and a great deal more.”
“Well,” Gregor said, “we’re back to Jig Tyler. But I think you’ve been surfing the Libertarian Party Web site again.”
“No, Krekor, I don’t surf the Libertarian Party Web site. I do go to the Reason Foundation, which is run by serious people. The Libertarian Party went off the deep end of ideology long ago. So did Dr. Tyler, only in the opposite direction.”
Gregor considered his sandwich, which, apparently, somebody wanted to tax to keep him from eating. Or something. He took an enormous bite off the end of it and thought that Philly steaks were the one thing he had really missed in all those years living in Washington. He missed them every time he went out of town, too, because when people made them other places, they didn’t make them absolutely right.
“So,” he said. “I thought, since you were the only person I knew who had ever met him, you could tell me whether it made sense to have Jig Tyler’s name on this list. If you thought he was capable of murder.”
“Most people are capable of murder, Krekor, under the right circumstances.”
“The kicker in that one is the ‘under the right circumstances.’ Most people will kill in self-defense, instinctively. A minority of people will kill under the influence of alcohol or drugs just because they lose all inhibitions. I’m not talking about situations like that. I’m talking about cold-blooded murder. Fill the pills with arsenic. Hand them over. Is he capable of a murder like that?”
Tibor considered it. “Yes,” he said. “Under the right circumstances.”
Gregor threw up his hands.
Tibor shook his head. “No, Krekor, listen. Not that kind of under the right circumstances. When I met Dr. Tyler, we were on a committee to set up a help service for new immigrants. It was a year and a half ago. The purpose of the committee was to put in place a group of trained professionals who could help new immigrants with their problems with the immigration authorities, with finding a place to learn English, with applying for naturalization, with finding employment, with dealing with regulations if they want to start a business. The committee was put together by Reverend Kim at the Korean Baptist Church. His church was helping many more people than it used to, because there have been many more refugees from North Korea in the last few years. He looked around and saw a need, because many of the immigrants who come here do not come to existing communities and must handle things on their own. He put out a call for help and money; he got lots of help and only a little money. Dr. Tyler put in forty-five thousand dollars.”
“Well, that’s not to his discredit,” Gregor said. “That’s very good of him.”
“Yes, Krekor, it was very good of him. He is a relatively wealthy man. His books sell well and the Nobel Prize brings about a million dollars with it. But he is like many wealthy men in these enterprises. He gives, but he expects to get in return.”
“And what did he expect to get?”
“Our agreement not to attempt to block, or even to protest, legislation that would have made the pastors who practice faith healing liable to criminal prosecution for practicing medicine without a license.”
Gregor sat back on his seat. It was, he thought, not all that ridiculous an idea. He could even see a couple of ways around the constitutional problems somebody was bound to bring up, probably the ACLU.
“You’d argue it as a kind of fraud protection,” he said. “You’d say there is no evidence that faith healing works, ever—is there?”
“No,” Tibor said. “It is my personal opinion that if God wanted to cure all our ills with prayer, He wouldn’t have given us the minds to invent modern medicine. I am not saying that God does not sometimes heal us when we ask for healing in prayer. Yes, He does that. I am saying I know of no properly corroborated case of a cure through faith healing. There are stories, of course. People claim things. Some of the things they claim might even be true. But they can’t document them, and if they can’t document them, then the proper response of rational people is to think it probably did not happen. But here, you see, is the difficulty. Not all people, not even all rational people, have the proper response. They hear the stories, and they find the stories more compelling than the hard evidence. And they go to faith healers anyway. Sometimes they give these people a lot of money they cannot afford to give. Sometimes they do things that make their conditions medically worse. Diabetics throw away their insulin, for instance, and some of the ones who do go into comas and some of the ones who go into comas die.”
“I’m surprised nobody has thought of this before, if it’s that bad,” Gregor said.
“People have thought of it before,” Tibor said, “and it’s worse than you realize. Jehovah’s Witnesses will not have blood transfusions, even to save their lives. Christian Scientists do not consult conventional doctors or use conven
tional medicine. They use Christian Science practitioners instead. Christian Science practitioners pray with the sick person, but do not use medicines or medical technology. There have been cases involving the death of children—”
“—Good God.”
“Yes, Krekor, good God. There are states that have passed laws requiring parents to seek conventional medical care for children in spite of their religious beliefs, and those hold up when they are passed, because the child itself is not making the decision and the parent who does make the decision is not hurting only himself. And this is fine with me, Krekor. I have nothing at all against such laws to protect children. But I do have something against such laws to stop the adults involved in these religions from refusing medical care they deem to be sinful or inappropriate. Do I think they’re stupid to do this? Yes, dear God, yes. I think they are stupid almost to the point of criminality. But I also think that it must be their choice, and their decision, on their terms, and not mine.”
“And Jig Tyler, I take it, didn’t feel that way,” Gregor said.
“Dr. Tyler expressed the opinion that anybody who could look at the evidence and still think faith healing was a rational choice was not, in fact, rational, and that we do not allow mentally incompetent people to run around making decisions they are unable to make and hurting themselves in the process. If a person is mentally ill, we have hearings and commit him to a mental institution. If people persist in irrational and harmful behavior, we make laws against the irrational and harmful behavior. Like seat belt laws. He brought up the seat belt laws. That’s why I was thinking of them.”
“And that’s why you think he is capable of committing a cold-blooded murder?’
Tibor looked into his coffee cup. It was empty. “Krekor,” he said. “You have to understand something. Dr. Tyler is a serious person.”
“You mean he doesn’t have much of a sense of humor?”
