by Jane Haddam
The bottom line was this: Kathi no longer felt safe going anywhere, even to the bathroom, when she wasn’t armed. She had therefore armed herself, out of the huge cache in the basement, as soon as Susan had left for the evening and she was alone with the nightly news. By then, of course, there were news bulletins flashing by every few minutes. CNN and CNBC were reporting the story as if it were a political assassination, which it might well be. Kathi knew nothing about pistols. She couldn’t have recited the name of any to save her life. She’d simply picked out the biggest, blackest one in the pile, passing by the smaller “ladies’ guns” that might have fit more easily into her everyday purse. She was sure bigger guns would pack more of a wallop than smaller guns. Bazookas and howitzers were huge, and they packed more of a wallop than rifles. It took her nearly an hour to get the gun loaded. She didn’t know what any of the terminology was supposed to mean. She didn’t know how to match the gun with the bullets that belonged to it. Some bullets didn’t fit into the chambers, so she discarded them. Some bullets fit but were wrong for reasons she could not divine. Every time she found what she thought was the right ammunition, she took the gun up to her bedroom and fired into a big stack of pillows she used to prop her head up when she did Penny Press Fun and Easy Puzzles before dropping off to sleep. The gun kicked back against her hand painfully. She’d had no idea that firing a gun could set your bones on fire. Some of the bullets didn’t fire at all, though, and there was no pain then. Some of the bullets seemed to half explode inside the chamber. Eventually, she discarded any bullet that did not fit exactly. Too loose a fit, she decided, was just as bad as too big to fit at all. It was only when it was all over, and she had the bullets she needed, that she wondered if she could have done herself some real damage by experimenting the way she had. Maybe one of the bullets that rattled around too much could have made the gun blow up in her hand. She had no idea. She only knew it hadn’t happened.
It wasn’t until much later that it occurred to her that she might have been heard by somebody in the neighborhood. All the houses here were very close together. When neighbors heard gunshots, they didn’t come over to check, but they did sometimes call the police. She sat down on her couch and waited for three hours to see if somebody would come to the door, but nobody did. Maybe none of her neighbors was home. Maybe none of them was paying attention. Kathi had a vision of them all sitting in their living rooms, glued to their TV sets, listening to the first reports of the shooting. By then, CNN had camera crews on the spot. Kathi could see the tall wrought-iron gates that closed off the house. CNN must have had a helicopter too, because there were aerial shots of the house itself with dozens of police cars parked in front of it. People came and went on the ground: women in evening gowns; policemen in uniform; men who might have been guests or detectives or FBI agents.
“All men wear uniforms,” Michael always said. “That suit and tie that men wear to work is a uniform. So’s the T-shirt and jeans they wear on the weekends. The trick is to narrow choices without letting you realize they’ve done it. They don’t like individuality, those people. Individuality is dangerous to them.”
Kathi should have been at Price Heaven right this minute. Ten to six was her usual shift—but only four days a week, because Price Heaven didn’t hire anybody full-time if it could help it. She had called in sick today, in spite of the fact that, being part-time, she would not get paid for being out. She had put the gun, fully loaded, into the big canvas tote bag she’d taken to carrying instead of her purse. There were laws against carrying a concealed weapon on the streets of Philadelphia, but they were the Illuminati’s laws. One of the first things the Illuminati tried to do was to disarm the population. A disarmed population was unable to fight back.
The bus was bumping along on streets she didn’t know. Like most people, she rarely left her own neighborhood except to go to work, and then she had a fixed routine for travel. She kept the tote bag on her lap with her hands wound through the handle. She had to physically prevent herself from reaching in to touch the gun. It gave her that much reassurance. The houses were nicer here than they were in her part of town. Most of them were brick. The people seemed to be better-dressed too. Either they had good dark coats that went all the way down past their knees, or those quilted-looking parkas people bought from L.L. Bean. Katy Davenport had had one of those parkas when they were together in school.
The bus pulled up to a stop. Kathi consulted her three-by-five card—she always wrote notes to herself on three-by-five cards; they were harder to lose than Post-it notes—and realized she was at her stop. She got up and waited for the bus’s back door to open. She had the impression that people who got out the back door were less conspicuous than people who got out the front. On the street, she looked around, checking the street signs. In the rich towns out on the Main Line, there were sometimes no street signs at all. If you didn’t know where you were, you didn’t belong there.
“There are people who think they’re well-off,” Michael said, “but they only think that because they don’t know how really rich people live. Really rich people live as far out of sight as they can. They don’t want people to know how much they really have.”
Kathi consulted her three-by-five card again. She had no idea what she was going to do now that she was here. Maybe there would be a diner where she could get a cup of coffee and some toast. It was just about all she could afford if she expected to have enough money to take the bus home. She folded the three-by-five card in half and put it in the pocket of her jacket, which was nothing at all like an L.L. Bean parka. Cavanaugh Street, she repeated to herself, in her head. Then she turned in the direction of the yellow police barriers that had been set up along the sidewalk two blocks down.
3
Ryall Wyndham had been waiting most of his life to be famous, and now that it had happened, he didn’t know what to do with it. It wasn’t that he minded the attention. There were people who got rabbit-caught-in-the-headlights syndrome, but he wasn’t one of them. It hadn’t occurred to him, at first, the kind of capital he would be able to make of this. He’d only wondered if he was going to be in for endless hassles of a legal nature, because there he was, just a few hundred feet away, and there was that prick Tony Ross exploding into pieces right in front of his face. The problems of a legal nature that he had envisaged were strictly of a procedural kind. It hadn’t hit him until much later that he might be considered a suspect, not only because he’d been on the spot but because he’d been so public about the fact that he’d loathed Tony and all of his works. Of course, a lot of people loathed Tony Ross. Anybody in a position like that made enemies, without even trying, and on top of that Tony had the whole class thing: good-looking in an emaciated, English sort of way; tall and lean; good at sports; good with women; intellectually accomplished. Intellectually snobbish, that was what Ryall thought, but there was no way to fight that manner when you were confronted with it, unless you had it yourself. Ryall was one person who never misquoted that line from Hamlet that most people mistakenly thought said “to the manor born.” It wasn’t “to the manor.” It was “to the manner,” and that alone made Ryall convinced that Shakespeare was a genius. There was something there he could write a book about some day. If you told a woman like Charlotte Deacon Ross that you thought Shakespeare was a genius, she’d think you were a middlebrow hick, and that would be the end of your invitations to her “intimate evenings.” The only way you could redeem yourself would be to give a lot of money to one of her projects. Ryall did not have that kind of money. Charlotte herself gave 150,000 dollars a year to the opera alone. Women who wanted invitations were known to give a fifth of that, first time out. For Ryall, there was no substitute for staying an insider. He might consider Shakespeare a genius, but he’d never say so where anybody could hear him, and he would always know the name of the literary genius of the moment. The literary genius of this particular moment was Cynthia Ozick, who wrote excruciatingly thin little novels about alienation and spirit
ual dislocation, laced through with Yiddish folklore. Charlotte liked Cynthia Ozick because Cynthia Ozick had once been quoted, in Esquire, saying, “I am not entertained by entertainment.” It was the kind of thing the queen of England would say. Charlotte liked that, in spite of the fact that she thought of the queen of England as hopelessly bourgeois.
I am now making no sense whatsoever, Ryall thought, staring into the small screen of his television set. The very chicest thing was to have no television at all, and Ryall hadn’t had one until three days ago, when he realized he wanted, passionately, to see himself on all these television programs he was doing. He wanted to see himself when the show aired, and he wanted to see himself on the videotape they gave him a day or two later, like a souvenir. He’d had to buy not only the television set, but a VCR as well, and that had left him not only dangerously out of pocket but upset as well. Apparently, nobody was buying videotapes anymore. They were buying DVDs. The clerk in the Radio Shack Ryall had gone to had been as disdainful as Charlotte Ross when confronted with a tourist from Topeka who “really loved art.” Ryall didn’t care. He only wished he’d bought a bigger set, so that he didn’t have to scrunch up his eyes to see himself on the screen. In a couple of days, he was supposed to be on Larry King Live. Practically everybody watched Larry King Live except those women who were too chic to own a television set, and their children watched it. He had no trouble imagining himself at the next big fund-raiser—when one of those women had the guts to give one—with all those college kids hanging off his elbows while he talked about what it was like to schmooze over coffee with Jesse Jackson and Barbara Ehrenreich.
The tape had come to its natural end. All he could see on the screen was fuzz. The cell phone he had plastered to his ear was humming. Nick Braden-ton was lecturing him, again. He stepped forward and hit rewind. He wanted to watch the tape again. He wished he had bought a bigger set. He wished even more than he hadn’t lost the remote for this one. The tape finished rewinding and he hit the play button again.
“Are you listening to me?” Nick said. “I talk and I talk, but I don’t think you ever listen to me.”
“I’m listening to you.”
“I’m your editor,” Nick said. “I’m responsible for you. And you’re behaving like an ass.”
“I seem to be doing all right,” Ryall said. On the screen, there was a sudden sharp picture of himself, only a few seconds long, being introduced to the viewers. He did look like Porky Pig. He half-expected the camera to pan around to his behind and catch a view of a curly little tail poking out from the seat of his trousers. God, it was embarrassing.
“You’re making yourself suspect number one in the biggest shooting of the year,” Nick said. “Or maybe of the decade. You’re plastered all over everything from the National Enquirer to Crossfire, and the only thing that ever comes out of your mouth is just how close you were when the bullets hit.”
“I was close when the bullets hit,” Ryall said. “I saw his face explode in front of my eyes.”
“Save it for cable. You know and I know that if you really had been that close, you wouldn’t have stood there watching Tony Ross’s face explode. You’d have dived under the nearest table and done your best to be invisible.”
Ryall sniffed. “Maybe you underestimate me, Nick. Maybe I’m not just some poof society gossip columnist.”
“Have I ever called you a poof?”
Ryall didn’t answer.
“Shit,” Nick said.
If Ryall had had the remote, he would have been able to freeze frames to study what he was doing wrong. He was too jumpy. He talked too fast. His face was too animated. You wanted to be larger than life when you went on television, but not too larger than life, because then you looked—cartoonish.
“Try to pay attention,” Nick said. “I don’t give a flying fuck about your sex life, your social life, or your sexual orientation. I do care about having my office invaded by a bunch of FBI agents who need a quick fix and think they’ve got one in my least retiring regular columnist. This is not a game, Ryall. Got that? Tony Ross wasn’t just Charlotte Ross’s husband. He was the head of one of the world’s most influential investment banks. He’s had dinner at the White House as a matter of course for the last four administrations. The first lady was on her way to his front door when he got offed, and the offing looks a lot like a professional hit. This might, just might, have some connection to international terrorism, if only because of Ross’s exposure on the globalization issue. So when you go around telling everybody and his cat that you looked right into Tony Ross’s eyes at the moment he was hit—”
“I did look into his eyes.”
“—a few people, like those FBI agents, and the Bryn Mawr cops, get to thinking that the reason you knew enough to be staring at Tony in the first place was because you were either in the process of shooting him or because you had prior knowledge that he was going to be shot. And when you put that together with the fact that this mess has been the biggest boost to your career since the day you first learned how to use a computer, some people—”
“That’s ridiculous,” Ryall said. “Nobody would shoot anybody just in the hopes that it would give his career a boost. Nobody would even think of it.”
“People think of everything.”
“Besides,” Ryall said, “you already said it. It looks like a professional hit. I couldn’t carry out a professional hit if I wanted to. I can’t even hit skeet.”
“Somehow, I don’t think that’s going to be the kind of argument that impresses anybody. Look, Ryall, for God’s sake. I’m just trying to save your ass. You’ve already got them so focused on you they can’t think about anybody else. Tone it down a little.”
“I don’t have any reason to tone it down a little,” Ryall said. He sounded constipated, even to himself. “I’m only telling the truth.”
“You’re only saying what you have to say to keep getting asked back to those programs,” Nick said. “This isn’t going to work, Ryall. You’re not going to be the next Greta Van Susteren.”
“I’m only telling the truth,” Ryall said again. Then he pulled the cell phone away from his ear and switched it off. He could hear Nick’s voice coming out of it right to the very end. He didn’t care. He could always say they’d been cut off. Nick wouldn’t believe it, but he wouldn’t press the issue. It happened with cell phones all the time.
On the little screen, a tiny, overanimated version of himself was jumping and squirming on the padded seat of a guest chair. He hadn’t understood how the camera would catch and magnify his every mood. He didn’t just look like Porky Pig. He looked like Porky Pig on amphetamines, sixty seconds before a serious psychotic break. Nick was wrong. He would be the next Greta Van Susteren. He had been plucked out of relative obscurity by the crush of great events and a major news story. By the time it was over, he would be familiar to everyone in America. It astonished him to realize just how much he wanted this. It went deeper than any other emotion he’d ever known. It brought him bolt upright in the middle of the night and made it impossible for him to sleep for more than four hours at a time. It was the miracle he’d been waiting for, and he hadn’t even known he’d been waiting.
God, he thought. What I wouldn’t do to be rid of every last one of them. It was too bad that this wasn’t a case of serial murder, so that he could watch them dying in agony one by one. He would reserve a very special death for Charlotte Deacon Ross, who looked down on the English royal family and thought that Ryall Wyndham existed only to provide an uncontroversial escort for women temporarily unaccompanied by their husbands—that, and just the right amount of just the right kind of publicity, when she decided she wanted publicity.
The tape had run its course again. It had only been a half-hour talking heads show. Ryall pushed rewind and waited for the tape to scroll back to its beginning. He pushed play again and pulled up one of the chairs as close to the screen as he could manage. It was a question of studying and working and thinking and p
lanning. If he did everything right, he would be released.
THREE
1
These days, the trip out to Bryn Mawr was like taking no trip at all. If you went by car—and Gregor was going by car, because Bennis was driving him— it hardly looked as if you’d left the city. The nicer parts of Brooklyn, that’s what it reminded him of. The buildings were lower and set further back on the road than they were in Philadelphia proper. There was grass along the edges of the sidewalks. There were more gas stations and sit-down fast-food restaurants in small ponds of parking lots. It was not the Bryn Mawr he remembered from his childhood, when he used to come out here with friends just to drive through the winding streets and look at the big houses behind their gates. The big houses were still here. He had first met Bennis in the one that had belonged to her father, which also happened to be one of the oldest and biggest in the township and a landmark of railroad robber-baron excess. Tony Ross and his wife had their house here too. From what Gregor had seen on the night of Tony Ross’s murder, that one was big enough to be a boarding school. Still, there was something about Bryn Mawr experienced the way he was experiencing it now. It was as if it had somehow, inexplicably, shrunk.
Bennis was bouncing along a widish, two-lane main road with too many cars parked at the curb on both sides. Every once in a while, she swore. Every once in a while, she slowed to a crawl so that she could read the signs on the cross streets. They were no longer in Bryn Mawr, which was fine, because Bryn Mawr didn’t actually have a police station. Lower Merion did, in Ard-more, which covered Tony Ross’s house. Both Bennis and the Lower Merion detective who had approached him at the Ross house after the murder had explained all this in detail, but it made his head hurt.
