Conspiracy Theory

by Jane Haddam

  She turned on her heel and walked off. Gregor watched her go. Frank Margiotti and Marty Tackner watched her go too.

  “She’s something else,” Marty said. “She’s like a locomotive. I think we’ve just talked to the first woman president of the United States. Maybe we talked to the first woman Pope.”

  “I don’t think the Pope can be a woman,” Frank said.

  “If she wants to be Pope, she’ll fix that,” Marty said. Then he turned to Gregor Demarkian. “Sorry, Mr. Demarkian. We’re still in crisis mode here. Did Frank tell you anything about what’s going on?”

  “Not really,” Gregor said.

  “That one,” Frank jerked his head to indicate the departed Marianne, “says she saw her mother go out onto the front walk a little after four.”

  “And was that usual?” Gregor asked.

  “No,” Marty said. “It wasn’t. She said she had no idea what her mother was doing, but she didn’t really think anything of it, because why would she? They were in their own house. Her mother could go out the front door and look around if she wanted to.”

  “I agree. Then what?” Gregor asked.

  “Then,” Frank said, “she—this is Marianne, now—she went down this hall to the den, which is about two doors closer to the center than this one. The rooms are pretty big. That’s a fair ways down. Marianne went into the den and she was there when she heard the shots.”

  “Why did she go into the den?” Gregor asked.

  “She didn’t say,” Marty said. “Look, we’re still in the middle of the crime scene. The body just left. I know it’s best to get as much information as you can as soon as you can, but I think that under the circumstances—”

  “No, no,” Gregor said. “It’s all right. I wasn’t criticizing you. I was just trying to work things out. Marianne went into the den. Somebody else was here too, though, what’s his name? Alden?”

  “David Alden,” Frank said.

  “Who is David Alden?”

  “He was Tony Ross’s right-hand man at the bank,” Frank said. “Not that he puts it like that, and not that anybody else does, either, but that’s what it comes down to, I think. The guy who could pull the strings when Tony Ross wasn’t there.”

  “The man who will take over now that Tony Ross is dead?” Gregor asked.

  “I don’t know,” Frank said.

  “So, okay. Let’s see where we are. There were, in the house, Charlotte Deacon Ross herself. There were her daughters, Marianne and more—how many more?”

  “Three,” Marty said. “They’re in the main living room, or whatever they call it.”

  “Fine. There was David Alden. Why?”

  “We don’t know yet,” Frank said.

  “All right,” Gregor said. “What else? Who else? Servants?”

  “About a dozen all told,” Frank said. “That’s the permanent, full-time staff. Most of them don’t work in the house, though. This place has about a hundred acres and it’s apparently mostly lawn. They keep it up.”

  “But they were in the house at the time Charlotte Deacon Ross died?”

  “In their rooms or in the common room in the back wing,” Frank said. “There’s a back wing. This place is insane.”

  “Was there anybody else in the house?” Gregor asked. “Anybody at all? Visitors? Anybody?”

  “No,” Frank said. “Not that we know about. And that’s it for the immediate family. Those are all Tony Ross’s children.”

  “I don’t think you have to worry about who was in the house,” Marty said. “I’ve talked to the M.E. He can’t be sure until all the tests are run, but it looks like this was another rifle hit, somebody off in the trees somewhere. We might be able to rule out anybody who was actually inside the house at the time Charlotte Deacon Ross died.”

  “Yes,” Gregor said. “We might be able to do that.” Then he went around the perimeter of the morning room. He looked out the big windows. They opened on the drive and the front walk too. He looked at the small framed flower prints that lined one wall. He looked at the big Chippendale secretary that somebody—Charlotte Deacon Ross, most likely—had used as a desk.

  He came to a stop in the middle of the room and looked at the carpet under his feet: not only Persian, but good Persian.

  “Do you think this David Alden would talk to me if I wanted him to?” he asked.

  2

  He found David Alden in what the butler—there was no other word for him, he was a butler; Gregor found himself feeling like a character in Remains of the Day—called the living room. Why it was a living room when the half-dozen other rooms they had passed on the way to it that seemed to contain the same sort of furniture were not, Gregor didn’t know, but this was the part about working with rich people that he had not been comfortable with even when he was with the FBI. That was one of the reasons why he had been so pleased to become an administrator. It was all well and good to write heroic-sounding novels about the integrity and farsightedness of the dedicated investigator in the face of the bureaucratic timidity of the timid administrator. In real life, the dedicated investigator spent his time uncomfortable in one way or another. Either he was hiding in bushes while the rain fell on his head, or he was sitting in “living rooms” with people who spoke a language less comprehensible than Martian. It was not the same with public officials. The White House did not make Gregor Demarkian nervous, and neither did the houses of senators if their names weren’t Kennedy. He would have had a hard time putting words to the distinction, but he knew what it was, and he wasn’t the only one. Every agent in the Bureau had hated having to work with “those people,” and that was in spite of the fact that “those people” often took care to be relentlessly “nice.”

  The “living room” was an immense space, fourteen feet high, with a fireplace along one wall big enough to cook a side of beef on a spit. The fireplace surround was marble, and well taken care of. The Caravaggio on the wall was a real Caravaggio. The man Gregor presumed was David Alden was standing at one of the windows that looked out on the front walk and the drive, holding a drink in the air in one hand as if he were James Bond. It was only the attitude that worked, though. He was the wrong physical type for a Bond, too broad in the shoulders, too tall in the wrong way. If David Alden had gone to public schools instead of private ones, the other boys would have called him “string bean.”

  The butler cleared his throat. David Alden turned around. “Oh, yes,” he said. “You must be Mr. Demarkian. Wardrop can bring you some coffee if you need it. Or tea. Or a drink.”

  “I don’t think so,” Gregor said. He made a mental note of it—David Alden felt enough at home here to tell the servants what to do. That could be true familiarity, or cheek. At the moment, he had no way of knowing.

  Wardrop inclined his head slightly and went out. David Alden watched him go as if it really mattered to him. Then he shook his head slightly and turned his attention back to Gregor.

  “Excuse me. My head is full of wool. We were in the same room for a while, you know, the night Tony was killed.”

  “I think I was in the room with half of social Philadelphia.”

  “Oh, no. It only felt like that. Most people weren’t even close to arriving. People are like that. They like to be late. I’ve never understood it. Tony didn’t either, but then, when the person waiting for you is the king of Saudi Arabia, being late is not an option, even if you’re Tony Ross. You keep company with one of the Hannaford girls, don’t you?”

  “Ah,” Gregor said, thinking that Bennis would climb the walls to hear herself described that way. Or maybe she wouldn’t. He had to wonder why Ben-nis herself didn’t make him nervous the way the people in this house did. “Yes,” he said finally.

  “Maybe I should say the last of the Hannaford girls. God, that was an awful thing. I’m sorry. I’m dancing around the subject. You came here to talk about Charlotte. Can you have a drink? Or is it true that policemen aren’t allowed to drink on duty?”

  “I’m not a
policeman,” Gregor said.

  “No, of course not. You’re a—consultant. I never know what that word means, even in business.”

  “In this case, it means you don’t have to talk to me if you don’t want to,” Gregor said. “Most of the consulting I do does not concern talking with witnesses, although I like to be able to do it when I’m able. Usually I stick to patterns of criminality and the structure of investigations. If you’d prefer not to, though, nobody can compel you.”

  “Hardly. I’d much rather talk to you than to them. Most of us would. You are keeping company with one of the Hannaford girls. We won’t seem like alien life-forms to you. With them it’s like talking to zookeepers, sometimes.”

  Gregor decided to say nothing at all about his recent reverie on the alien-ness of people like David Alden and houses like this one. “You’ll have to talk to them eventually. They’ve got things to do at the moment, but they will insist. And anything you say to me here, I will report.”

  “Yes, of course.” David waved it away. “I know that. I don’t object to talking, although my lawyer will probably have a fit when he hears I have. They don’t like you to talk to anybody, no matter how innocent a bystander you might be. The point is one of approach, and of understanding. It’s very easy to fall under suspicion for behaving in an unorthodox way when there’s nothing unorthodox in the way you’re behaving. It’s just a different set of customs, and expectations.”

  “Fair enough,” Gregor agreed. “I don’t really know that I understand the customs and expectations any better than you do, though. I came in because I’ve been thinking about a piece of information I received from someone a little while ago. She said that all of you, all the people connected to the ball last week, I suppose—I should have pinned it down, but at the time, it didn’t seem important—that all of you belong to some kind of shooting club—”

  “Oh, not all of us,” David Alden said quickly, “but quite a few, yes. Marksmanship practice. That kind of thing. A lot of us took it up as a sport when we were children.”

  “Children with rifles?”

  “Supervised, yes, of course, why not? It was offered as a team sport when I was in school, starting in about third form—fifth grade, I think. When we were ten years old.”

  “And you did this?” Gregor said. “You belonged to a marksmanship team when you were ten?”

  “Absolutely. It was that or baseball in the spring, and I’ve never been able to stand baseball.”

  “Did your family insist you play sports?”

  “My family?” David looked blank. “Oh, no, although it’s expected of everybody, even now, that you’ll participate in athletics in some way. Squash. Handball. It keeps you in shape. It was the school that insisted, though, of course. There were two hours at the end of every day and everybody had to take part in sports. I don’t suppose it was the most comfortable thing for people who weren’t good at it.”

  Gregor thought it sounded like hell on earth. “So you learned to shoot early. Did you learn to shoot well?”

  “Very well,” David said drily. “I was champion of my prep school and my college teams.”

  “Are you still that good? Have you kept up with it?”

  “Of course.” David smiled. “Don’t think I’m giving anything away. You can check with my club. They keep records. Ryall Wyndham and I were the two best shots in the place except for Charlotte herself, and nobody is ever going to be better than Charlotte. Than Charlotte was. It’s hard to wrap my mind about the fact that the reason we’re standing here is that she’s a bloody mess on the front walk and it isn’t just Tony who’s dead.”

  “Ryall Wyndham didn’t learn to shoot at private school, though, did he?” Gregor asked. “His background is ambiguous.”

  David shrugged. “There are always people like Ryall around. All this matters to them. They do what they have to do to be close to it. I don’t see that it matters. If you meet them in business, all you really care about is how good they are at what they do. If they’re very good, you adopt them. Ryall isn’t very good at business that I can tell. He writes a gossip column.”

  “About people who say they don’t want to be gossiped about.”

  “That’s all right, Mr. Demarkian. Ryall doesn’t print the kind of gossip people like Charlotte don’t want to see in the papers, and I’m not sure he could if he wanted to. It’s not the thirties anymore. People don’t care about debutantes and Society parties the way they used to. You couldn’t make The Philadelphia Story now.”

  “People care about the banks,” Gregor said. “They care about layoffs, and companies that pull up stakes and leave communities high and dry.”

  “True, but Ryall doesn’t know much about any of that. He does know who’s had to go off and have an abortion this month, and who got sent down from Foxcroft for sneaking a boy into her room at midnight, and who had to have a marriage annulled. It’s odd to think that sixty years ago, that would have been big news in the local papers. Now, you’d practically have to hump Britney Spears under the Liberty Bell to get the papers to take any notice.”

  “You could kill somebody,” Gregor said. “That gets the papers to take notice.”

  “True.” David put his drink glass down. It was empty, except for the remains of two ice cubes at the very bottom. All the liquid was clear. “Before this, I was sure we had a political sniper. One of the antiglobalization people. One of the conspiracy people. We do watch them, you know. We’re not idiots. Most of them are perfectly harmless, just a little cracked. Some of them are dangerous.”

  “And you think the murder of Charlotte Deacon Ross rules out any participation by conspiracy groups?”

  “Well, it would have to, wouldn’t it?” David said. “Why would a conspiracy group want to kill Charlotte? I wanted to kill Charlotte. Most of the people who knew her did. She was that kind of woman. I’m sometimes surprised at the fact that Marianne has managed to go this long without denouncing her mother in a tell-all book, but Marianne was Tony’s favorite. She wouldn’t have done anything to pain him. But a conspiracy group? The only thing Charlotte ever conspired at was fixing the invitation list for the Philadelphia Assemblies.”

  “It doesn’t bother you that you’ve just admitted to having wanted to kill a woman who’s just been murdered?”

  “It doesn’t bother me to admit to anything that’s a matter of public record,” David said, “and besides, you know as well as I do that I wasn’t admitting to wanting to actually kill her. Don’t be ingenuous.”

  “I’ll try not to be,” Gregor said. The lights coming through the front windows were changing. The strobe effect was getting fainter. Maybe one of the marked police cars was leaving. “Tell me,” he said. “What are you doing here? You worked with Mr. Ross at his bank, didn’t you?”

  “Yes. I was his confidential assistant, which is a nice way of saying his hitman and his spy. A man in Tony’s position has to have one.”

  “And the bank is where? The physical building, I mean. Where you work.”

  “It’s in New York.”

  “What?”

  “It’s in New York,” David said patiently. “It’s in the financial district. We’re only a few blocks from what used to be the World Trade Center. We were both at our desks when they evacuated the area on September eleventh. We had to close down for almost three days.”

  “Do you live in New York?” Gregor asked.

  “I live in Philadelphia,” David said. “I have a town house in Society Hill.”

  “And you commute from there to New York? Every day?”

  “On and off. Sometimes I stay in New York for days. Sometimes I go back and forth. It’s not all that odd,” David said. “Lots of people do it. Tony did it. You can get in by Amtrak express in no time at all. Or you can do what Tony did, and have a driver. The commute is no worse than to the outer suburbs in Connecticut. And I grew up here.”

  “Every day,” Gregor said again.

  “The bank keeps an apartment
in town. I stay over if I have to work late. My family is here. My friends are here. And New York can be a pressure cooker if you don’t have someplace to go to get away from the insanity. Like I said, lots of people do it. Go up and down the road here and talk to the people in these houses. See how many of them include men who commute to New York.”

  Gregor filed it away for future reference. “Did you come here today from New York?”

  “Yes,” David said. “I worked up until about three-thirty and then I packed up my things and came on out. I was intending to work at home this evening.”

  “Why did you come here?”

  “To see how Charlotte was getting on, and what the arrangements were about the funeral. The bank will bring people down on the day. We’ll hire buses. But even yesterday, we weren’t sure when the body would be released. There was no way to plan. I wanted to know.”

  “You could have called.”

  “I could have, yes, but I thought this would be more considerate. I’m sure Charlotte was sick of phone calls.”

  “Did you come down from New York on the night of the party?” Gregor asked.

  “I did,” David said, “and so did Tony and Charlotte.”

  “Wasn’t Charlotte supposed to be supervising?”

  “She was supervising. By cell phone. She had caterers in. They had something on for the night before that Charlotte couldn’t miss, and then Tony had business in the city. It’s this Price Heaven disaster. That was happening even then.”

  “Did they bring you down with them?” Gregor asked.

  David shook his head. “No, not at all. I worked a lot later than Tony did that day. I had to, and it was Tony’s obligation to be here for Charlotte, not mine. If I’d ended up missing the party or being an hour later, it wouldn’t have mattered. If Tony had done either of those things, he’d better have had a damned good excuse in Charlotte’s terms, and I’m not sure what that would have been. The end of the world and the Last Judgment might have qualified, but I wouldn’t place bets on it.”

  “So,” Gregor said. “You came down from New York on the night of the party, and you came down from New York today. And when you got here— what? There are gates, aren’t there? And there’s somebody guarding the gates?”