Conspiracy Theory

by Jane Haddam

  Where Lucinda saw the difference, and couldn’t avoid it, was in things. Annie did not have a lot of things, and she didn’t seem to care about having “nice” ones, but what she had she was entirely indifferent to. Lucinda couldn’t break a plate or stain a tablecloth without experiencing deep feelings of guilt and panic: guilt because she had ruined something that she had had the responsibility of taking care of; panic because such an accident almost always meant an expenditure that would be difficult to make and injurious to the family budget. She could still remember her grandmother sitting down at the kitchen table working out the figures with pen and paper. So much out of the grocery money; so much out of the bus money; so much out of the money put aside each week to buy the papers: all this, just to get enough together to replace a toaster or a dress that was supposed to last the whole school year but that Lucinda had ripped on the playground the very first day. Life was counting, addition and subtraction, rigidity. A broken milk pitcher was a week with two days of greens, no meat. A ruined pair of shoes was a month without snack money for school and the two meatless days a week on top of it. The only money that never got cut was the money for books. Grandma Watkins insisted on buying them all a book a month, a real one, not from the racks at the drugstore but from the one bookstore in Jacksonville that the owner wouldn’t look down on her in. That had been a ritual as solemn and unbending as the rituals of the Catholic Church, which they did not belong to because the Catholics did not praise the Lord with enough joy, and because it was bad enough being poor in Mississippi without being Catholic on top of it. Lucinda had never, in all her life, ruined a book, and she couldn’t imagine herself doing it. Even the ruin of really bad books made her ill. She had tried and failed to join the Progressive Conference of Philadelphia, because at her first meeting a man had stood up and ripped apart a copy of The Bell Curve. Once, finding a copy of A Wake Up Call for the White Race getting rained on on the ground just next to a bus shelter, she had picked it up and wiped it off and put it in a dry, although suitably out of the way, place. It was not that she did not understand the power of hate, but that she felt the power of books more strongly, and the power of the need to preserve all things and waste nothing, against the day when you had nothing at all.

  Annie’s basic attitude to things was not to notice they were there. If they broke, and she had to notice them, she got annoyed at them and threw them away. Then she went out and bought another of whatever it was. Lucinda had known, from the beginning, that Annie was rich, but this approach to possessions had startled her from the beginning, and still did. It was bad enough when Annie swept away a load of broken crockery that had been smashed on the dining room floor—the girls, when they came to stay, were often angry; they screamed; they ranted; they broke things—and drove down to Price Heaven to buy three or four more sets of dinner plates or coffee mugs. At times like those, Lucinda could tell herself that she was being neurotic. A rich woman like Annie didn’t have to worry about the price of a few cheap plates. When it came to the cameras, Lucinda could not convince herself so easily that she was the one who was crazy. Cameras cost money. The cameras Annie bought cost hundreds of dollars, in one case over a thousand, because they were equipped to take night shots without an ordinary flash, to take shots at odd angles, to do all kinds of things that an ordinary off-the-shelf camera couldn’t do. Annie was no more careful about the cameras, or worried about their breaking, than she was about the plates. At least twice a month, she came back with one of the cameras smashed. The johns hated being photographed. If they thought they could get away with it, they leaped out of their cars and chased her. Sometimes it was the cops who took the cameras and ruined them. “Never underestimate the power of a cop on the take,” Annie always said, and Lucinda had come to understand that this was true. Lord only knew, Annie was right to say that the wholesale prostitution of twelve-and fourteen-year-olds would not continue to thrive if somebody wasn’t looking the other way.

  Standing at the door to the darkroom, Lucinda hesitated. The red light wasn’t on, which should mean it was okay to go in, but Lucinda had the feeling that Annie wasn’t always careful about the lights. Finally, she knocked. There was the sound of metal things being moved around—what went on in a darkroom Lucinda didn’t know—and Annie said, “Come in.”

  Lucinda went in. Annie was sitting on a swivel stool. Print after photographic print was spread out on the long, wide worktable in front of her. She had her retractable art light trained right over the ones in the middle. Lu-cinda closed the door behind her. In spite of the art light, the room was dark.

  “Well?” she said.

  Annie shook her head. “Ambiguous. Far too ambiguous, unfortunately. And yet I know it was him. I recognized him as soon as I saw him.”

  “I still don’t understand why that isn’t enough.”

  “It isn’t enough because he’s got friends in high places and they’re not about to let him go down in a way that will make him look bad. Even if he really isn’t one of our own.”

  “This is the Main Line stuff you’re always talking about? One of our own?”

  “Something like that.”

  “I’m beginning to wish you hadn’t taken the car that night. If you hadn’t taken the car, you wouldn’t have been able to follow him.”

  “It was too cold a night not to take the car,” Annie said. Then she pushed her stool back until she could reach the switch on the back wall and turned on the overhead lights. In the now bright light, Lucinda could see that Annie was wearing that Freedom FROM Religion button she’d taken to putting on since the national prayer service after September 11. “Crap,” Annie said. “I don’t know what to do about this at all.”

  “I don’t suppose you could let it drop.”

  “No,” Annie said. “I saw the man pick up a thirteen-year-old girl and pay her twenty dollars to blow him. You know who it was? It was Patsy Lennon.”

  “Good Lord,” Lucinda said.

  “Yeah, I know. That kid has more issues than National Geographic. She’s a complete mess and an addict besides. But there he was, and there she was, and all I got a picture of was Patsy’s head and his hand on top of it. Maybe I’ll go looking for a telephoto lens. Maybe if they think I’m not there and can’t see them, they’ll go back to being out front about what they do.”

  “It’s too bad you didn’t take pictures later, when you got to that party. It seems like everybody in the world is looking for whoever it is who shot your brother.”

  Annie sighed. “I was invited to that party, did you know that? Oh, Charlotte’s never been able to stand me, I’m everything she hates about everything, but Tony always insisted. I’ve got the invitation upstairs. I should have gone. I could have stood around at the buffet table buttonholing political hotshots and financial wizards and reciting chapter and verse about their forays onto the Strip. Except that I wouldn’t have gotten anybody but the second-raters. Did you know that? The people who really run things, the people like Tony, know better than to even try something like this.”

  “He’s not one of the people who run things?”

  “No,” Annie said. “He’s—” She let her hands flutter in the air. She looked, Lucinda thought, incredibly tired. “I’ve often wondered if some of them don’t indulge, anyway. I know the attraction exists. Maybe what people like that do—” She pointed at the photograph in front of her. Lucinda couldn’t see anything in it but blur. “Maybe what they do is find suitable companions for the people who can’t find them for themselves. Can’t because they don’t dare. Can’t you see the headlines? Presidential Friend Linked to Child Prostitution. Head of International Bank Arrested for Soliciting Sex with Minor. The major papers wouldn’t run them, but the rags would. Thank God for the National Enquirer.”

  “So?” Lucinda said. “Does it go on?”

  “I don’t know. On one level, it seems to me inevitable that it would. On another, it seems to me just as inevitable that it wouldn’t.”

  “And I tho
ught you’d know, growing up with those people,” Lucinda said.

  Annie laughed. “In my day, there were some things they didn’t tell daughters. There probably still are. I just wish I knew what all that was about. There’s only one reason to rush off for a quickie blow job from Patsy Lennon on the way to the biggest charity ball of the season, and that’s because he’s got the bug and he’s got it bad. He has to be completely out of control. Which poses a lot of interesting questions.”

  “Maybe your brother knew about it,” Lucinda said. “Maybe your brother was going to make a public stink about it. So this guy—”

  “Shot him? Over that? I doubt it.”

  “Somebody shot him,” Lucinda pointed out. “And you were there. I mean, Annie, think of the timing. You were right there. You must have seen whoever it was go right through the gates in front of your nose.”

  “I know.”

  “And he went through the gates, before your brother was shot. Didn’t he?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, then,” Lucinda said, but she didn’t know what she meant by it. Well, then, you should go to the police and say something about it. Well, then, you should start tracking this guy and see what else you can find. Well, then, you should take care of yourself and butt out. Annie was staring down at the best of the prints, the one with Patsy’s head with the hand on top of it.

  “Well, then,” Lucinda said again. “You might just consider covering your ass. Go to the police and get this over with. Because if you don’t, and somebody noticed you there, you’re going to get yourself in a huge amount of trouble.”

  Annie sat up a little straighter in her chair. “I’ve got a better idea, better than going to the police. I should have thought of it before. Do you have a volunteer that can cover for you this morning?”

  “No,” Lucinda said. “Not until this afternoon. Why?”

  “I want you to go with me. We’ll go this afternoon. I should have thought of this before.”

  “Thought of what?” Lucinda said, but it was no use. Annie was packing up her prints, bustling around, cleaning up, as if nothing more unusual had happened in the last several days than that one of the johns had actually been arrested. It was impossible to talk to Annie when she was like this. At least, this time, whatever she had on her mind was unlikely to cost a great deal of money.

  Annie put the prints in a big manila envelope and the envelope in the locked top drawer of her filing cabinet. Lucinda went out into the hall and thought about calling child protective services to let them know what Patsy Lennon was up to, again. There were some people who never seemed to be doing anything but learning to be dead.

  2

  Kathi Mittendorf had been holding her breath ever since the night Anthony van Wyck Ross was murdered, and since she’d known about that murder long before most other people in the city, she was beginning to feel light-headed.

  “You know what they’re like,” Michael had said when he’d called, his voice sounding muffled as always and surrounded, this time, by wind. “They’re going to look for the first likely candidate to pin it on, and we may be that candidate. We’ve got a lot of literature out there. We’ve been making a lot of noise.”

  More to the point, Kathi thought, there was the problem of all the explosives, and of the guns and ammunition in the basement. She had no idea what kind of a gun Anthony van Wyck Ross had been murdered with, but she had some of nearly everything on the premises, each piece bought separately and by seemingly unconnected people over a period of nearly three years. Even with warning, she knew she wasn’t going to be able to get rid of it all on short notice. There was the problem with the licenses too. Everything she had was li-censed—except, of course, for the explosives, which were straightforwardly ille-gal—but none of it was licensed to her, and no two pieces of it were licensed to the same person. It was easy as cake getting around the licensing laws if you knew what you were doing, which Michael did, but it was not so easy explaining where you’d gotten everything if you got caught. There was also the problem that one stockpile led to another. They tried very hard to construct the kind of organization the Illuminati themselves had pioneered, with small cells isolated from other small cells, nobody knowing more than three or four of the others, most hermetically sealed off from the rest, but it hadn’t worked out. They needed each other too much. It was hard being among the very few who knew what was really going on in the world. It was too easy to panic when you realized what you were up against: the assembled forces of the great in the world, the banks, the foundations, the armies. Even now, after all this time, Kathi found herself waking up in the night in a cold sweat, sure as hell that every noise she heard was one of them tapping his way into her house, bugging her phones, filling the air of her living room full of hypnotic gas. The one thing Kathi feared more than any other was that she’d become like those people who drifted into the movement and then drifted out again. Either they saw the truth and didn’t want to believe it, or they were gotten to, nobody knew how or why. Kathi thought it was a little careless of them to hold their meetings in public and to advertise them, even if only in the little local weekly papers. They were everywhere, and They did not take chances. America on Alert was so open, it almost had to be infiltrated. Someone in the membership had to be working for Them.

  “Timothy McVeigh was set up,” Michael Harridan had told her, the first time she spoke to him. “Never forget that. It’s the best protection you have against being set up yourself. They want the American people to believe that we’re the ones who are dangerous, that we’re a bunch of kooks who’ll blow a bunch of babies to hell just because of our paranoia. That’s their word for us. Paranoid. That’s what they said about Randy Weaver and David Koresh. But they weren’t paranoid. They were right.”

  Kathi had wanted to put up a little shrine to all of them, a long line of framed pictures, on the wall of her bedroom, but eventually she had decided against it. If she got arrested, or blown away by the enemy, they could use those pictures to “prove” that she was insane and dangerous. If you were insane, they could do anything they wanted to you. You didn’t have any rights, the way you did if they arrested you in the ordinary way. Michael said there were hundreds of people, maybe thousands, locked away in mental institutions whose only real crime had been to understand what the Illuminati were doing and tell other people about it.

  “Paranoid is a wonderful word,” Michael said. “They call it a disease. The symptoms are anything they want them to be. One minute you’re on the street, getting people to really look at what has happened to America. The next minute, you’re in the loony bin, and the only way they’ll let you out is if you agree to stop talking about what you know.”

  The problem was to strike a balance between being clean and being careful. Kathi couldn’t help herself. Her nerves were shot. She wasn’t Michael Harridan. She wasn’t a professional on a mission. She was an ordinary forty-five-year-old woman, a little dumpy now at the beginning of middle age, easily tired at the end of a long day. She was only important because she knew what she knew, and because Michael trusted her. When the call came, she got Susan and went to work hiding the things they had to hide. They put the explosives in big black trash barrels in her basement and covered them with clothes that were so badly mildewed it was hard to be in the same room with their stench. They put the rifles in odd places that only women would think of: in the old washing machine that hadn’t worked in all the time Kathi had rented this house; at the back of the cedar closet behind a cracked panel that opened into the hollow wall. All the walls in this house were hollow. It was a house that would be considered very shabbily made even today. It had probably been considered a gimcrack mess in 1894, when it was built. The Illumi-nati were operating here in those days too—in fact, George Washington himself was a tool of the Illuminati, a thirty-third-degree Mason who was head of his local lodge—but it took a long time for a population to be habituated to the internal rot the Illuminati had decreed for all human
lives.

  “They think in centuries,” Michael always said. “Most people think in days, or maybe weeks. They take their time. If they didn’t, people would catch on, people would get frightened. Instead, it all looks normal. We make fun of the kind of people who talk about how things aren’t as good as they used to be. We treat them like cranks.”

  Kathi had not been able to give up all the guns. She could probably have hidden everything she had and hidden it well, but if she had, it would not have been available to her if something drastic happened. She hadn’t been able to shake the feeling that something drastic was going to happen any moment now. There was a homeless man who rummaged through the garbage cans on her street every morning. He looked a lot more alert than he ought to, and lately he’d been staying closer than ever to her door. There were all the security cameras at work. Price Heaven photographed everything, even the ladies’ changing rooms. There wasn’t a moment when management couldn’t zero in on anybody anywhere in the store. There were the transcripts she had made of the recordings from the party where Anthony van Wyck Ross had been killed. She still had them, the original and five copies, in the bottom drawer of the desk she kept in a corner of the dining room so that she could do her bills every month. She was sure they had been disturbed more than once while she was away from home, and that the desk had been moved too. It made her feel sick to her stomach to think of somebody coming into her house while she was away and going through her things. She’d rather have SWAT teams storm her front door.