by Jane Haddam
“Do you know Tony’s sister, Annie Ross?”
“Mrs. Wyler? I’ve met her a few times, why?”
“She thinks I’m turning on, tuning in, and about to drop out. She thinks I’m emotionally detached from banking.”
“Are you?”
“No. At least I don’t think so. At least, it’s not the banking. I know how this looks to people, you know. I hear all the jokes on Leno. Here we are, the heartless bank, making Price Heaven fire six thousand people right before Christmas. And I’ll admit, the timing is not stellar. If it were up to me, the physical year would end on August thirty-first and then these layoffs wouldn’t always coincide with the holidays, but Adele, the thing is, they’d still happen. They’d have to happen. And getting that damned fool CEO of theirs to take a cut in salary and bonuses wouldn’t keep a single extra person on the job.”
“I thought the idea was to get that damned fool CEO of theirs to resign.”
“It is. We’re going in on that today. But do you know what you get when you don’t have people like me, people like Tony, people like the bank—when you don’t have us coming in and forcing these things? Everything just jogs along getting worse until the business collapses completely. Or they get themselves a government bailout and then it jogs along even after it’s dead, and the money that could have been used to put life into a new and viable enterprise isn’t available, because we’re putting it into keeping a gigantic dinosaur alive and for what? For sentiment? It’s not even good sentiment. The collapse is going to come, no matter what. Staving it off just makes the mess bigger when it’s over.”
Adele cleared her throat. “David? You’re preaching to the choir here.”
“Yes,” David said, “I know. I know. Come take that walk with me. I want to move around a little before I start the day. And I want to see it. Just this once. Have you been?”
“We went—the whole bunch of us, all the exec assistants and most of the typists—we went the day after the observation platform was opened.”
“Why?”
“To see it,” Adele said.
“See?”
“Yes to see,” Adele said. “But we haven’t been back. None of us, that I know of. I think we wanted to see it because we’re all afraid of it. We’re still afraid of it.”
“You’re afraid the terrorists will come back?”
“No,” Adele said. “Not of that. I don’t know how to put it. The terrorists don’t bother me at all. They just seem like jerks.”
David turned his back to the window and sat on the sill. “You’re right. They seem like that to me too. Any loser can destroy things. They do it all the time. They get knives and guns and mug old ladies on Broadway. They set fire to buildings.”
“It’s—” Adele looked uneasy. “It’s just, you know, you hear all these things, about how we should appreciate other cultures for what they are, that every culture is great in its own way. And after that I couldn’t help feeling it wasn’t true. Their culture isn’t great. If it was, they wouldn’t have done that, and their people wouldn’t have cheered it. And I shouldn’t say that in the bank. We have a lot of clients from Islamic countries. Stewart Markham down in development will call me an imperialist.”
“At least,” David said wryly. “Annie wants to blame it on religion—all religion, everywhere, leads to violence. Christianity had its religious wars and it burned its heretics and hanged its witches. The Hindus kill the Muslims in India and Pakistan. The Muslims make war on the World Trade Center. We should go to work to abolish religion.”
“How can you abolish religion?”
“I think it’s all an excuse,” David said. “All of it. Religion. Politics. Love. Hate. Rage. It’s all an excuse for the fact that some people love blood. They love destruction. They hate everything about themselves so much. They hate what they are. They hate their humanness. And mostly they hate other people’s humanness. They hate the fact that other people are human just the way they are, but they do so much more, they accomplish so much more. That’s what they have to get rid of. The fact that there’s no difference between themselves and those people, the people who do things, who make things instead of tearing them down. I think every murder ever committed on the face of this planet has been committed out of guilt.”
“I’d like to say I know what you’re talking about, but I don’t,” Adele said. “Maybe you should take your coat off and sit down. I’ll bring you some coffee.”
“Maybe you should get your coat on and come with me. I’m going to go look at it. When we come back, we can take a break from Price Heaven and look over the setup for the foundation Annie wants to endow for Adelphos House. We can write up the specs and send it down to Carver to hammer out the details. I want to go, Adele. I’d like you to come with me.”
“All right,” Adele said. “My coat’s right out in the hall. Let me get it. Are you sure you shouldn’t be home in bed with a tranquilizer?”
“I’m sure.”
“You’re behaving the way some of us did right after it happened. Post-traumatic stress syndrome, they call it. Some of the younger men walked around for days looking like they’d just been shot, and not being able to remember where they put anything. Tranquilizers do help, you know. And nobody would think worse of you for taking a day off when two of your closest friends have been murdered within sight of you in less than a week.”
“I don’t need a day off. Get your coat. Let’s go.”
Adele hesitated. Then she shrugged slightly, turned on her heel, and went. She left the door open. David stared through it for a moment. The outer offices looked busy. They always were at this time of day. In an hour or two, the men on the Asia desk would pack up and go home. They worked reverse hours to be in touch with the Tokyo market. He didn’t think he had been exaggerating. He really didn’t. Every murder was committed out of guilt, the guilt of knowing that you were less than you ought to be. That was what had happened on September 11 and that was what had happened to Tony and Charlotte. It was counterproductive to attempt to make something huge and special and enormous out of a terrorist attack, as if to be a terrorist was to be something more than human, or less. To be a terrorist was to be exactly human. To be a murderer was to be exactly human. No matter what the excuses were, at the bottom, the motives were always the same.
Less than you ought to be, David thought, turning to look out the windows again, through the narrow streets around Wall, toward the towers that weren’t there anymore. He thought about Charlotte on the walk in front of the house, the back of her head gone, the grey-pink spatter of brains on the windows next to the front door. He thought about Tony with his face blown away. He should have known at the very beginning. All the signs were there. It simply hadn’t occurred to him.
Now that it had occurred to him, he had no idea what to do about it.
3
Lucinda Watkins finished doing the dishes at eleven. The house was still almost as quiet as it had been in the early morning, except for the thumps and giggles coming from the second-floor drawing room where there was an encounter therapy session in progress. The day outside was grey and getting greyer. The kitchen was cold. One of the things Lucinda wanted to do, as soon as they had the money to do it, was to completely overhaul the heating system. It didn’t make any sense to her to keep the house freezing cold when so many of the girls came here to get in out of the weather. If it was always warm and glowing and comfortable here, maybe more of them would come.
She went down the narrow hall to the front of the house where the living room was and looked out the front windows at the street. That was deserted. Even hookers didn’t walk here, no matter what the time of day or night. She wondered if it was ever possible to find a hooker in the morning, on a business basis. She’d never thought about it before. They were so concentrated on the night in this place. Annie went out at night. Those pictures she was always bringing back were always taken in the dark. The windows of the cars that cruised the strip were sometimes
tinted black too, although that was only for the men who could afford that sort of thing, or had the foresight to rent it. She wondered how many men rented cars to go trawling for tail. Then she winced at the phrase, even though she hadn’t spoken it out loud. It was Annie’s phrase. It sounded all right when Annie said it, just as it sounded all right when Annie said fuck or cunt as if she meant them. Annie could get away with anything. Lucinda didn’t think even Grandma Watkins would have disapproved.
She was restless, and agitated, and tired. She knew she had to go out, but she hesitated to do it. She didn’t want to leave and not get back by the time Annie did. She didn’t want to wait until Annie got home, either. She wondered how many people out there, how many ordinary, everyday people, really knew what people like Annie were like. Before she’d come to Adelphos House, Lucinda had been like everybody else. She’d only been able to guess, and her guesses had been made up of too many viewings of The Philadelphia Story and a few desultory forays into the fiction of Dominick Dunne. She’d been convinced that people like Annie—that people like Tony and Charlotte—were “all prim and proper,” as the saying went in her childhood, and that they only listened to classical music and went to Shakespeare plays. The truth was, she’d never heard anybody swear the way Annie did on a regular basis. Even the greaser boys of her adolescence, who’d made a fetish of their motorcycles and their violence, had had mouths less foul than Mrs. Wyler’s over breakfast and the morning paper. She thought of Charlotte, dead on the walk in front of her house, but it was hard to get a clear picture of the woman. Lucinda hadn’t known her very well. The few times they’d met, they’d said very little to each other, although it had been easy for Lucinda to see what Charlotte was thinking: trailer trash, cheap flash, vulgar. It was all well and good for Annie to fret over how paranoid and ridiculous The Harridan Report was, but it had a point, all the same. Those people really were different from you and me, if not different in the way the movies portrayed them as being. They didn’t watch television. They didn’t go to malls. They didn’t play the lottery. Of course, Lucinda didn’t do any of those things either, but that was different. She didn’t do them because she was here, working, and it was too expensive to keep more than two televisions on the premises, with cable, so there always seemed to be somebody using the one she wanted to use to watch Friends or listen to the news. And she didn’t play the lottery because she had sense. Every time she went home, or anywhere near it, she found her family and all their friends knee-deep in lottery tickets, hundreds of dollars of lottery tickets, and all of them losers. Learn to count, she wanted to scream at them— and then another happy-happy television commercial would come on for the Pennsylvania lottery, and it was like watching an ad for angel dust. The girls all played the lottery too, of course. They bought their tickets at the convenience stores they passed on their way downtown to work. They hid them where they hoped their pimps wouldn’t find them. Well, Lucinda knew, if one of them won, her pimp would find her soon enough. There was something The Harridan Report got exactly right. If the lottery wasn’t a plot of the rich to drain the blood of the poor, Lucinda didn’t know what it was.
She paced around the living room, aimless. She stopped at the window again and looked out again and saw nothing again. She thought about getting out the prospectus for the foundation Annie was setting up to fund Adelphos House. It was only a draft prospectus. The banks and the lawyers were still haggling over the details. Once the provisions were in place, Adelphos House would have a constant stream of income that would pay the bills and pay the taxes and pay the salaries of herself and two other full-time people, complete with benefits. Lucinda didn’t understand why it was taking so long to put it all together. Couldn’t you just take your money out of the bank and do what you wanted with it? There was something else The Harridan Report got exactly right. The money the rich had was different from the money ordinary people had, and not only because there was more of it. She wondered how banks stored their money. Were there vaults with gold under the rubble of the World Trade Center? Were there secret passages in Switzerland full of silver and precious stones? Surely, at some point, money would have to stop being paper for somebody. It couldn’t all just be a matter of blips on a ticker tape or pulses on a computer screen or those green oblong things everybody carried in their wallets and nobody thought about. Lucinda had seen French paper money once. It was odd how obvious it was that “money” was just paper when you looked at foreign currency, which you weren’t used to considering real.
Marvelous, she thought. I’m not only losing my mind, I’m working overtime at it. She didn’t want to look at the draft prospectus. She didn’t understand it, except for that bit about Adelphos House finally being set up to run independently of Annie’s writing checks. Of course, it would still be a matter of Annie’s having written a check, but a big one, so that they wouldn’t have to go back to her for more checks two and three times a week. She didn’t want to think about The Harridan Report, either. It gave her a headache, and then it made her feel a little resentful for being what it was. On one level, she couldn’t help thinking it was a work of genius. Only somebody truly plugged in to the way people think could have produced it, and that meant plugged in to the way they all think, the Annies as well as the regular people. She didn’t want to think about Adelphos House, either, which this morning felt like an oppressive weight. Sometimes it was like that. The whole history of human misery was wrapped up inside it and given a new name every hour: Patsy Lennon; Amy Margerbrad; Susie Kell.
She went back out into the hallway and back down to the other end of the house and got her coat out of the closet there. It was a big, heavy, thick wool thing that she’d bought at Price Heaven after a long summer of saving up. Annie would have given her the money to buy a better one. She’d have called it an “advance on salary” and then forgotten all about it. Lucinda had had no intention of asking. It was the kind of thing Annie did where she meant well, but it only made people angry.
Lucinda went back down to the front of the house. She could hear the encounter group rollicking away upstairs. Sometimes they screamed and cried for the whole two hours, but today they were laughing. She let herself out onto the street and looked around. Before she’d come to this place, she’d never believed that a city street could be utterly and irrevocably deserted, as if no human beings existed anywhere anymore, anywhere on the planet. She tried the door to make sure it locked. She turned left and began to move up the block as quickly as she could manage it with her weight. The wind was coming down between the abandoned buildings like swiftly flowing water through a shunt. It whistled and rattled and moaned. What glass was left in the windows around her shimmered in the very faint sunlight that emerged once in a while from the blanket of clouds. Annie said that she could feel the vampires who were buried here. Annie may have thought she was exaggerating for effect, but Lucinda knew she was exactly right. This neighborhood was full of vampires, and werewolves, and the shape-shifters that lived where no living thing could—and it had been a mistake for them to put Adelphos House here. They should have bought a building on a better street, closer to the action. They could have been right around the corner from the strip. Being where they were meant they were miles away from everything, even their own work—miles away emotionally, if not physically. Most of the time when they wanted to go anywhere, they had to use a car. That meant they had to keep two, just to make sure there was always one available at the house when Annie wanted to do her photographing. The wind sounded like children crying. The cold felt like glass. Lucinda knew there was no danger of it getting dark. It was still only late in the morning. She picked up speed anyway. The last thing she wanted to do was to be caught on this street on foot after nightfall, when the vampires came out to feed and the werewolves began to wait in the shelter of the empty buildings that were just one small step from being shape-shifters themselves.
She made a right, past two vacant lots and a big building that might once have been a facto
ry or a warehouse. She made another right, into the first faint stirrings of what could be called a neighborhood. She felt the muscles of her back ease a little, but only a little, because she knew she couldn’t stop here. She was too close to home.
In another three blocks, there was a street with some life on it. People sat on stoops. People went in and out of stores. People minded their own business. There was a big pharmacy there with pay phones in the back near the candy counter, old-fashioned ones with wooden booths. She would feel much better once she had made her call. History was an engine. It ground everything in its way to dust. If she wasn’t careful, they would all be dust too, and blood and skin and bone, lying out on the pavement, like those two people in Bryn Mawr.
FIVE
1
Murder, Gregor Demarkian had been told, when he was in training at Quan-tico, is the one crime without a reliable perpetrator profile. Every other crime—robbery, rape, assault, embezzlement—had its attractions for a certain segment of the population, a certain personality among all the possible personalties occurring among Americans in the twentieth century. Only murder was a wild card. Some murderers could be profiled. That was what the Behavioral Sciences Unit was all about. Serial killers were a definite personality type, more alike than different across the spectrum, and predictable, to a certain extent, because of it. The ordinary murderer was something else again. Go to any death row in any large state—go to Texas, Gregor thought sourly— and what you found was a hodgepodge of motives, social classes, educational backgrounds, religious convictions, car makes, tastes in books and coffee. The majority of the prisoners awaiting death would be what would be expected by anybody who spent significant time watching Bruce Willis movies. They would be poor, male, violent, senseless, addicted, the kind of people for whom nothing would ever be a deterrent if it required thinking. They would have killed their victims in robberies that hadn’t required anybody to die, or beaten their girlfriends or their girlfriends’ children into insensate pulps in an anger they were no longer able to explain. They were really rapists, or batterers, or thieves. The murders were side issues they never could quite figure out how to explain. Somewhere on that death row, or somewhere else in that prison, blessed with life instead of death because of their age or youth or status, there would be other murderers—the Diane Downses, the Charles Stewarts, the Jean Harrises, the middle class and the well-off, the envious, the resentful, the hateful, the cold. That was what they’d meant at Quantico when they told agents in training to be very careful about murder. It was far too easy to ignore the true perpetrator in a futile search for a mythical criminal type, hulking and monstrous, as if real human beings never hurt each other at all.
