Conspiracy Theory

by Jane Haddam

  Gregor felt the taxi pull up to the curb and looked out to see that he was right in front of Le Demiurge, where he was supposed to meet John Jackman for lunch. His watch said that it was barely noon, and Jackman, being Jack-man, was always at least a little late. That had been true even when he hadn’t had the excuse of being commissioner of police to explain the habit away. Gregor got out a small clutch of bills and handed them to the driver. He got out of the cab and looked around at a pleasant but mostly unassuming neighborhood. He had no idea where John found these places. Even Bennis, who looked on eating out as a sacrament, hadn’t heard of most of them. This one had one of those arched canvas awnings stretched out across the sidewalk. Gregor had always wondered what the procedure was for getting the city to allow you to put one of those up. It was the kind of thing he thought about when he wasn’t able to get to sleep at night and he didn’t want to wake Bennis by getting out of bed and starting up the computer. Of course, she never worried about that sort of thing when it came to him, but she never woke him up, either.

  The problem with Quantico’s dictum on murderers was that it was only about 90 percent right. Even those murderers who seemed to have nothing in common did have something in common, if nothing else the fact that they’d killed someone. It went deeper than that. Gregor thought he could say with certainty that virtually all murderers actually killed the person they had intended to kill. Those plots that showed up in crime fiction sometimes, where bodies were strewn across the landscape by mistake until the perpetrator finally got it right, were implausible. The key was to pay attention to who had actually died. In this case, that meant paying attention to Charlotte Deacon Ross, and not just to Tony Ross alone. The danger was in the possibility that they would find an explanation they liked so much for that first murder that they would do whatever they had to do to shoehorn the second one into it. It didn’t do to assume that all murders after the first, if there were more than one, occurred because somebody or the other “knew too much.” It happened. Gregor had seen it happen. Most of the time, it didn’t happen. If Charlotte Deacon Ross and Tony Ross were dead, it was because somebody had a reason to want Charlotte Deacon Ross and Tony Ross dead. That seemed to leave out America on Alert. Gregor was sure that Kathi Mittendorf considered Charlotte Deacon Ross to be a mind-controlled sex slave of the Illuminati, but he’d have been very surprised to find out that she thought Mrs. Ross was one of the people who ran the world. It also seemed to rule out a whole host of motives, like sex and jealousy. The kind of lover who might want one of them dead would be unlikely to want them both dead. The most obvious avenue of investigation would be the daughters. Gregor was sure they must stand to inherit something, and possibly a great deal. The problem was that Gregor couldn’t remember a case of murder for inheritance on the Main Line—ex-cept for one, and that had been an extremely odd and bizarre situation brought on by a paterfamilias who had a mind as warped and paranoid as Howard Hughes’s had been at the end. No, now that he thought about it, it was really remarkable. With all that money floating around, there should have been a fair amount of violence at the edges of that group of people, but as far as he knew, there had not been.

  The other way in which all murderers were alike, every single one of them, was in that odd tunnel vision that allowed them to see only themselves as human. Me me me, Gregor thought. Then he looked around at where he was. He hated people who stood on sidewalks talking on cell phones, but he wasn’t really happy with the ones who sat at restaurant tables talking on cell phones, either. Bennis said that in London, bums on the street sat in doorways and talked on cell phones. Gergor went into Le Demiurge and gave his name to the hostess at the desk. She checked him off a list and began to show him to a table. John was not, of course, there. John would not be there for at least another fifteen minutes. A waiter came by to ask him if he wanted something to drink. Gregor ordered a Perrier and lime and asked where the pay phones were.

  “I could bring a phone to the table,” the waiter offered helpfully. “Most of our patrons these days prefer their own cell phones, of course, but—”

  “No, no,” Gregor said. “I don’t want to have this particular conversation in the middle of a restaurant. Are there pay phones?”

  There were pay phones, in the narrow back hall near the men’s and ladies’ rooms. Gregor hoped to find the kind with a booth that could be closed, but had no luck. This restaurant was too new. It had only those weird wall cubicles that were supposed to surround the speaker’s ears, but were always too low on the wall to manage it. Gregor went into the men’s room and looked around. Nobody was there. He got out his phone and dialed Bennis’s number.

  “Live goat escort service,” Bennis said, picking up. “We supply the billy to suit your lifestyle.”

  “Jesus,” Gregor said. “What do you think you’re doing when you pull something like that?”

  “Scaring off telemarketers,” Bennis said. “The national ones don’t faze no matter what you do, but the locals just freak. We’ve had three calls from some company trying to sell us vinyl windows. Where are you calling from?”

  “It’s called Le Demiurge. It’s one of John Jackman’s restaurants.”

  “That ought to be good. If you like it, we’ll go. Tibor’s out with the architect Russ Donahue hired, walking over the rubble and outlining the requirements for floor plans. Russ thought it would cheer him up, to be doing something about all this instead of just brooding.”

  “Is it working?”

  “Hard to tell,” Bennis said. “He looks solemn enough, but he walked out of here telling the architect that he’d have to lend him a copy of The History of the Theology of the Church in Armenia. I’ve seen it. It weighs about forty pounds.”

  “It is working,” Gregor said. “I want to ask you something. Why aren’t there more murders on the Main Line?”

  “What? There are murders on the Main Line. You said so yourself. You said—”

  “No, no. I don’t mean those kinds of murders. I mean murders among people like your family. All those rich families out in Bryn Mawr and Sewickly and Radnor. Millions of dollars at stake. Sometimes hundreds of millions of dollars. The sheer law of averages says there should be a certain number of murders for the inheritance money, and I don’t believe that Main Line debutantes are any less rapacious than anybody else—”

  “They’re probably more,” Bennis said. “But they wouldn’t kill for the inheritance money. I mean, what would be the point? Most of them wouldn’t inherit anything.”

  “Are you trying to tell me these people don’t pass their money down to their children? Or are you just saying that your father was typical, and they don’t give their daughters anything?”

  “My father was never typical, on any point. No, I mean that if you’ve got serious money, you don’t leave it around in bank accounts or whatever to be handed over to your children when you’re dead. One of these days, George W. Bush or somebody will manage to get the estate tax repealed, but in the meantime, dying with a lot of money in the bank just means your heirs are going to hand a whole lot of it over to the government. So you don’t do that. You take care of that before you die.”

  “You give your money to your children before you die? What do you live on yourself?”

  “You give your money to your grandchildren before you die,” Bennis explained patiently. “You live on the income until you die. It’s called a living trust. I think. Ask somebody who knows about this stuff. But anyway, that’s what you do, and then you put other money in regular trusts so that your children have something to live on themselves. But most of these people die with very small estates, relative to what they were actually worth, or in control of. And the children and the grandchildren have their money affairs set up so that they don’t usually see any significant change just because somebody died. If you see what I mean.”

  “Vaguely,” Gregor said. “Is that what the Rosses did? They’ve got four daughters.”

  “Are you thinking that one
of the Ross girls killed her parents? Well, I suppose the oldest one could do it, but the other three have IQs like miracle golf scores. I couldn’t see them doing the planning.”

  “But they can all shoot, can’t they?” Gregor said. “You told me that—or somebody did. They weren’t talking about the girls, but what I remember was that all these people belong to some gun club—”

  “I’m sure they all shoot,” Bennis said patiently. “I’m sure they’re all good at it too. They’d make a point of it. They probably all ride, as well, and they’re probably good at that too. Have you ever paid attention to who competes in the equestrian events at the Olympics? But that still doesn’t mean that they’re capable of planning a rifle murder in the middle of a charity ball. I should think that took an enormous amount of planning and forethought.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Only maybe?”

  “I think we’ve been putting too much stress on the planning and forethought. There are other explanations. It might have been a matter of opportunity. Somebody happened to be there and saw his chance—”

  “And where did he get the gun?” Bennis sounded impatient. “That place was crawling with security that night, and not just the firm Charlotte hired. And it’s a good firm. It had to be, given Tony’s position. But the secret service was there, for God’s sake.”

  “I know. But something tells me there had to be a way. There were guns in the house, weren’t there?”

  “I’m sure there were, but I’m also willing to bet almost anything that they were locked away in gun cabinets. They were at Engine House when I was growing up, and even after we all grew up. It’s just common sense.”

  “Still,” Gregor said. “It keeps bothering me. That there’s something obvious, or close to obvious, and I’m just not getting it. What about the sister? Would she be likely to inherit money when her brother died?”

  “Her brother, yes, but not Charlotte,” Bennis said. “Not unless something very dramatic has taken place in that family without anybody telling me about it. Charlotte and Annie hated each other practically as a matter of principle. Charlotte thought Annie was ostentatious. Annie thought Charlotte was a twit.”

  “I’ve met Mrs. Wyler. She didn’t look ostentatious to me.”

  “When you buy your clothes at Price Heaven and wear them to places where everybody else has Chanel, you might be accused of being ostentatious. I don’t see why you’re so off the original theory. I thought it made a lot of sense that they’d been killed by some conspiracy group who thought Tony was bringing on a one-world satanic government, or whatever it is this week.”

  “And killed Mrs. Ross—why?”

  “I don’t know,” Bennis said.

  “I don’t know either,” Gregor said. “And that’s my problem. Never mind. I’d better go find out if John has arrived, or if I’m going to be left drinking Per-rier at the table until almost dinnertime. There is something about all this, though. Some organizing idea. I must be asking the wrong questions. I wish I knew what the right ones were.”

  “Just don’t order everything with cream sauce,” Bennis said. “Are you all right? You sound depressed.”

  “I’m not depressed, I’m annoyed. I’ll talk to you later. If you think of anything, write it down. Maybe this place serves that crème brûlée stuff you got for me a few weeks ago.”

  “I’m never in my life going to feed you anything again but steamed vegetables,” Bennis said.

  Gregor switched the phone off. The men’s room was still empty. No one had come in in all the time he’d been talking to Bennis. He put the phone away in his pocket and then—for no reason he could have put in his words—washed his hands. Remember who actually died, he thought, and then, me me me.

  There was something there, right at the edge of his mind, and he couldn’t get hold of it.

  2

  Always, in the detective novels Father Tibor Kasparian insisted on pressing on him when he had a cold, the detective—usually a professional private investigator, but sometimes a little old lady living on her own in a village or a haute cuisine caterer active in the gay rights movement or a cat—would sit down halfway through the book, outline the details of the case, and know, immediately, not only who had done it and why, but how to catch the murderer in the way most likely to result in either an arrest or a suicide. Gregor did not remember a book in which the detective had arrived at the halfway point without actually knowing what the crime was. He had no idea if he was now at what would be the halfway point if this were a book, but he did know that the only thing he was sure of was that he wasn’t sure. Tony Ross was dead. Charlotte Ross was dead. Holy Trinity Armenian Christian Church had been half destroyed and rendered completely unusable. All those things might go together or not, might say something about each other or not, might help find a solution or not—but he had no way of knowing, because he had no way of organizing all the elements into a coherent whole. It would have been much easier if he could have assigned the Ross murders to a straightforward money motive. The daughters wanted the money. The sister wanted the money. Then he could have put the bombing of Holy Trinity definitively aside, separate and not in need of being included in anybody else’s mosaic. As it was, he was going around in circles. If he’d been asked to explain the case to someone coming into it new, he would have had to say: Which of several possible cases are you referring to?

  John was not, of course, at the table when Gregor got back to it, so he drank Perrier poured over lime and looked around for something to scribble on. He couldn’t scribble on the napkins here. They were cloth, and elegantly monogrammed. It was no wonder that great books were always conceived in bars and cheap diners. They had paper napkins their patrons could write on. Gregor went through his pockets and came up with another issue of The Harridan Report. He seemed to have dozens of them, stashed all over himself and the apartment back on Cavanaugh Street. He got out his pen and started to write names and draw lines and arrows. He filled up one sheet of paper and went on to another. He was on the third by the time Jackman did show up, and he was no better organized. On the third sheet of paper he had a list, although not a definitive list. His head hurt.

  John sat down and asked the waiter for a Perrier of his own. Gregor thought idly that if they were in Italy, John could have had a glass of wine at lunch with nobody thinking anything of it. John looked at the paper upside down.

  “What is that?” he said.

  Gregor shrugged. “It’s a list.”

  “A list of what?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “That won’t do, Gregor. It can’t be a list of you don’t know. You’re not allowed not to know anything.”

  Gregor pushed it across to him and shrugged. John Jackman picked it up.

  “Tony Ross,” he said. “Charlotte Deacon Ross. Father Tibor Kasparian. Ryall Wyndham. David Alden. Anne Ross Wyler. Michael Harridan and people connected to Michael Harridan. Krystof Andrechev. All right. Everybody who has anything to do with either of the cases you’re looking into at the moment. That’s what you were making a list of.”

  “In a way,” Gregor said.

  The waiter was back. John already knew what he wanted, which made sense, since John did not suggest restaurants for working lunches unless he was already comfortable with them. Gregor ordered something that sounded as if it might have beef in it.

  “Why do you always go to these places where you can’t identify the food?” Gregor asked. “What’s the mania for cooking things in pastry crusts?”

  “You’ll love it. Don’t worry about it. What else can this be if it isn’t a list of everybody connected to the two cases you’re looking into.”

  “Well,” Gregor said, “for one thing, I doubt if it’s everybody. It’s just the people who have surfaced in connection to the two. There may be dozens of others.”

  “Right,” John said, “that’s true enough. So?”

  “So, then there’s the question of Michael Harridan. Who he is. If he is—
no, no, don’t say it. I know there must be at least somebody who is playacting at being Michael Harridan, but it would be nice to know if there’s somebody who’s Michael Harridan full-time, or somebody who is someone else on this same list who is Michael Harridan only for publication. I talked to that woman today. Kathi Mittendorf.”

  “And?” John looked interested.

  “And it was like talking to a schizophrenic, although she obviously isn’t one,” Gregor said. “Everything was the script. But I’d bet my life that she was hiding something in that house.”

  “Like what?”

  “Guns, explosives, something like that,” Gregor said. “I could just smell it. And yes, I know you can’t get a search warrant on the basis of just smelling it. But she exhibited all the signs. If I had to guess, I’d say they were stashed in the basement somewhere. That’s what she couldn’t stop looking at. Not at the basement, you know, but at the floor.”

  “You know, Gregor, it’s a whole different ball game if we can prove they’re armed. It’s one thing to be a kook living off conspiracy theories, but the feds do not take kindly to large caches of weapons and explosives. Almost nobody collects that stuff without intending to use it.”