Conspiracy Theory

by Jane Haddam

  “I know. What can I say? Get some decent intelligence in there and check it out. Except that decent intelligence has been nearly nonexistent in this case almost from the beginning. I talked to Walker Canfield too.”

  “Who’s Walker Canfield?”

  “One half of the team the Bureau sent out to infiltrate America on Alert,” Gregor said. “I told you about him. And his partner, who has now been missing for almost two weeks. It was almost like talking to Kathi Mittendorf. Is it just me, or have people become less and less rational in the last ten years? Or maybe I mean in the last ten days.”

  “Well, your Mr. Canfield is not my problem. He’s Lower Merion’s problem, and from what I’ve heard, they’re welcome to him.”

  “Except that, just like us, he’s concerned with America on Alert. Everybody is concerned with America on Alert. Have you noticed that? And that idiotic newsletter is everywhere.”

  “That idiotic newsletter has been everywhere for months,” John said. “You haven’t noticed it because it’s not the kind of thing you notice, but those things have been floating around forever. And there’s a Web site too, that’s been up for a while. And some of the guys who say the same things have been at it for years. David Icke. A-albionics. In spite of all the hysteria these groups put out about storm troopers and black helicopters, we don’t usually pay much attention to them unless they shoot somebody, and most of them don’t.”

  “I’d have noticed if somebody stuck one of those things in my mailbox,” Gregor said, “or if Tibor had them piled up in his apartment. I do pay some attention to my environment. My point isn’t that The Harridan Report hasn’t been around for a while, only that it’s suddenly become far more intrusive into the lives of people who aren’t exactly its target audience. Charlotte Ross had an issue of it in the room she was sitting in right before she went out on the walk and died—and then there’s that. Why did she go out on the walk?”

  “I don’t know,” John said. “It’s not my case, remember?”

  The food was arriving. The waiter put a large plate of something that looked like fish buried under grapes in front of John Jackman. Gregor seemed to be staring at a gigantic beef rose on a celery stalk. The waiter murmured anxious wishes for their satisfaction, half in French, and then disappeared.

  “You’re a sensible man,” Gregor said. “I really don’t understand your attraction for this sort of thing.”

  “Maybe it’s scar tissue from a legacy of discrimination and oppression. Maybe, deep down, I need to go to all those places that wouldn’t have served a black man at lunch even if he had a million dollars. Maybe—”

  “Can it,” Gregor said.

  “The fact remains,” John said, “that it really isn’t my case. There’s nothing I can do about the death of Charlotte Ross. There’s nothing I can do about the death of Tony Ross, either. I can probably get you information, if you think the Lower Merion police are holding out on you, but that’s about as good as it’s going to get.”

  “Could you do something else? Could you follow through on that idea of yours and get one of your people to get a good picture of Kathi Mittendorf that we could show to Krystof Andrechev?”

  John looked surprised. “Sure. Do you think that’s the explanation for that? I’ve got to tell you that our people are inclined to believe that there was no mysterious woman with a gun, that Andrechev—”

  “Is somehow involved with the bombing of the church,” Gregor said. “Yes, I know. And it’s a sensible first impression. But there was no need for Andrechev to come to me with that story. There was no need for him to do anything but sit tight and keep his mouth shut. We might never have noticed him.”

  “We would have noticed him eventually,” John said. “The investigators on that case have interviewed most of that neighborhood already. They’ll get to everybody before they’re done.”

  “Did they check out the gun?”

  “They’re working on it.”

  “My guess is that they won’t find anything on it. It’ll be completely clean. New. Never used for anything. Which brings us to the question of why Kathi Mittendorf went all the hell way across town—way, way across—to deliver it to Krystof Andrechev.”

  “You’re that sure it was Mittendorf?”

  “Yes,” Gregor said. “The description fits. And, I don’t know how to put it, it sort of fits the kind of thing I’d expect her to do, under the right circumstances.”

  “What are the right circumstances?”

  “Michael Harridan telling her to,” Gregor said.

  “Why would he tell her to?”

  “I don’t know,” Gregor said.

  “Look,” John said. “This scenario has the same problems as the one where she just shows up and gives him the gun. There’s no reason why. Especially if the gun is clean. If the gun had been used in a crime, we could say she was trying to ditch a piece of material evidence. But as it is, there’s no reason at all—”

  “Don’t you wonder what would have happened if Krystof Andrechev had actually said something?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well,” Gregor said, “they’re all hyperpatriots, aren’t they? America on Alert and all its members. And Andrechev is a Russian. He’s ashamed of his English, so he doesn’t talk much, and he was listening to this woman give him a lecture on how evil foreigners were, so he didn’t talk at all while she was in his store, but—and it’s not a small thing—if he had said something, she would have known immediately that he was an immigrant, and given his accent, she’d have had a fair chance of knowing he was Russian. Maybe she would have taken the gun away without giving it to him.”

  “And?”

  “I don’t know,” Gregor said.

  John threw his fork into his plate. “You’re impossible this afternoon, do you know that? Look, you’ve got a problem on the home front. Somebody blew up your church. We’re going at it in the way most likely to find the perpetrators, and the chances are that the bombing has nothing at all to do with what was going on out in Bryn Mawr. Is going on, I should say, since people seem to still be falling like flies. But it just doesn’t make sense to put them together the way you’re doing. What happened out in Bryn Mawr has all the characteristics of a professional job, and you know it. Professional-grade marksmanship, for one thing. Carried out under conditions of tight security—”

  Gregor straightened up a little. “Maybe not,” he said.

  “What? You told me yourself—”

  “Yes, I know, but—” Gregor said. “Sometimes I think we’ve all read too many Tom Clancy novels.”

  “I’ve never read a Tom Clancy novel in my life.”

  “Seen too many Harrison Ford movies, then,” Gregor said. “Never mind. Did you clear your afternoon the way I asked you to? I want to get out of here.”

  “Technically,” John said, “I shouldn’t be going anywhere. I live behind a desk now, and a big desk. So—”

  “Did you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Fine,” Gregor said. “The best instructor I ever had at Quantico used to tell us, nonstop, that the worst enemy we had was the things we thought we knew. And it’s true. Let’s go.”

  “I haven’t finished my lunch.”

  “That isn’t lunch,” Gregor said. “That’s performance art.”

  “Well, it’s performance art made with Dover sole, and I’m fond of it.”

  3

  By now, Gregor Demarkian had heard so much about Adelphos House—from Father Tibor, from John Jackman, from the newspaper articles Bennis and Donna had taken to leaving for him after the church decided to provide volunteers for Anne Ross Wyler’s project—that he thought of himself as having already been there. As soon as they turned onto the six-block stretch of street that Adelphos House called home, he knew it wasn’t true. There was nothing unusual in the fact of neighborhoods changing quickly in Philadelphia. Turn a corner, and you might go from ethnic Italian to upscale shopping to African-American to something ver
y much like a strip mall. What surprised him was the utter and unrelieved devastation of this place. This was not a rundown street in a city with too many of them. This was not the kind of area urban renewal claimed. This was a burned-out hulk. Better than two-thirds of the buildings he saw were abandoned. Windows were gaping holes without glass. What glass there was was on the streets. The buildings that were inhabited had boards put up over theirs, almost as if they feared that disappearing win-dowpanes were a communicable disease. Bricks were everywhere, along the sidewalks, even in the street. It was a good thing they had John Jackman’s driver to take them where they wanted to go. Gregor didn’t think there was a cab driver in Philadelphia who would be willing to come here, even in broad daylight. He couldn’t imagine what it would be like after dark. The vision he got was from one of those old Twilight Zone episodes that were supposed to take place after a nuclear holocaust. Whatever would hunt you here might not be human. Gregor could see no signs of humans. The abandoned buildings gave every indication of being empty. There were no homeless people pushing carts of clothes and debris along the blocks. There were no empty soda cans or bottles in the gutters. There were no bus shelters. There were no stores. There weren’t even any television antennae. Gregor supposed that these days everybody who had television had cable, but lots of buildings in other parts of the city had antennae on their roofs left over from the days when cable hadn’t yet been heard of, and he didn’t think it was likely that the cable people would be willing to come out here to hook somebody up, even if their agreement with the city said they had to.

  “Tell me Adelphos House isn’t really on this street,” Gregor said. “Tell me we’re just driving through on our way to someplace more sane.”

  “Nobody drives through this neighborhood,” John Jackman said. “Except the cops. And they’re armed. I wouldn’t come out here myself at night without backup.”

  “Well, now I understand something Annie Wyler told me. She said they had two cars at Adelphos House because they had to have cars. I remember thinking at the time that it was a typical rich-girl attitude. Nobody in Philadelphia has to have a car. There’s always public transportation.”

  “Not out here, there isn’t.”

  “Yes, I see that. Why is Adelphos House here? Surely there had to be other neighborhoods, closer to what Adelphos House does. They couldn’t all have been too expensive. Do hookers work this street? Who do they sell to?”

  “Hookers do not work this street,” John Jackman said as the car began to slow up. “From what I remember—I was working out on the Main Line at the time—she tried to buy something closer to the strip where the girls work, but she ran into all kinds of trouble. Zoning problems. Permit problems. Building code problems—”

  “This sounds like a setup.”

  “It probably was. I don’t have to tell you that there have indeed been some members of our esteemed city government who have been known to patronize underage prostitutes. Not that they admit to knowing the prostitutes are underage, you understand. But that hardly matters. And Anne Ross Wyler was a pain in the butt to those people before she ever opened Adelphos House.”

  “Was she taking pictures back then too?”

  “Uh, yeah,” John Jackman said. “She even landed in the hospital for it once. I don’t know how many cameras she’s lost over the years. This is it. Notice the windows—no boards. We’ve tried to tell her that junkies have no consciences because they aren’t really conscious, but she won’t listen. We haven’t told her that the people she annoys aren’t above and beyond taking potshots at her at home, but she probably already knows it. She won’t listen to that, either.”

  “Has anything ever happened at Adelphos House?”

  “From the outside, no. There have been a couple of incidents of the girls losing it. She lets girls stay if they want. She puts them back in touch with their families if they want. That isn’t always possible. Sometimes, the families sold the girls into prostitution to begin with. Don’t you just love junkie culture?”

  “I think it’s wonderful,” Gregor said.

  “That’s why I think we should end the drug war,” Jackman said. “Make it all legal. Let them kill themselves with it. I don’t give a damn. But free up police resources to go after things like child prostitution. We spend millions of dollars every year in this city chasing potheads, and there isn’t enough left over in the budget to even try to put an end to the people who put eleven-year-olds out to peddle their asses on the street.”

  The car had pulled to a stop at the curb. “I never thought of junkies having a culture,” Gregor said. John Jackman climbed out onto the sidewalk. Gregor climbed out too.

  “Everything has a culture these days,” Jackman said. “Mollusks have a culture. They probably also have an indigenous language they’re trying to protect from the cultural imperialism of the squid.”

  Adelphos House was in one of those brick buildings—like the one Gregor lived in on Cavanaugh Street—that was built right up next to the sidewalk, so that all it took to get from the street to the front door was to go up a few small steps. Gregor went around the car to join John Jackman on the sidewalk. As he did, Aldelphos House’s front door opened and a gigantic woman stepped out, her hair pulled back in a bun, her flowered dress floating in the stiff cold wind. For a split second, Gregor was confused. His first impression was that he was looking at Kathi Mittendorf again, but that passed, and then he didn’t know why he’d thought it. Kathi Mittendorf was lumpy, but this woman was obese. Gregor wondered how she managed to get up and down even this small set of steps every day. Kathi Mittendorf had hair dyed so falsely blond it hurt to look at it. This woman seemed to be content with her salt-and-pepper natural, pulled back against her skull and pinned untidily at the back of her head. Besides, Gregor thought, Kathi Mittendorf would never have been caught dead in a neighborhood like this one. It would have been far too threatening, far too close to being the thing she was most afraid of happening to her life.

  “Lucy,” John Jackman said, holding out his hand. “Go back in the house. It’s got to be nine degrees out here. You’re going to freeze.”

  “I’ve been freezing for an hour,” the woman said. “The heat’s out. We’ve got the oil company wheezing and whining and trying to get out of coming out here, even though they know they have to come out in an emergency, and this is surely an emergency. Is this Mr. Demarkian? Annie told me all about you.”

  “I’m Gregor Demarkian, yes,” Gregor said.

  “Lucinda Watkins,” the woman said.

  “Let me get to a phone,” John Jackman said, “and make a few calls. Maybe we can straighten out your heat problem for you while we’re here.”

  “That’s why it’s good to know an honest policeman,” Lucinda said. “Too bad they’re not all like you.”

  Gregor cocked an eyebrow. Jackman shrugged. “Some of the men on the force have been known to, ah—”

  “You know you’ve got men on your force who are visiting child prostitutes?” Gregor said.

  “No,” John Jackman said sourly. “Once I know who they are, I find a way to get rid of them. But I know there are always some. Christ, Gregor. How do you think that strip keeps operating?”

  Lucinda Watkins had retreated into Adelphos House’s front hallway and left the door open. John Jackman followed her and Gregor followed John Jackman. Inside, the ceilings were high, but the house itself was not impressive, and never had been. This had not started out as a fashionable neighborhood, the way so many poor neighborhoods did. The people who had lived here had not always been poor, but they had never been the kind of people to go regularly to the opera or the art museums. If Gregor had had to peg it, he’d have said turn-of-the-century and mostly in the possession of Catholic immigrants, Italians and Poles. There was a discolored place on the wall of the front hallway in the shape of a cross. Gregor had no problem imagining a crucifix hanging there, with a shallow cup of holy water underneath it.

  Lucinda scuttled behind h
im and shut the door. “I’ll go get Annie. She’s having a nap. She’s up all night with that stuff, and then she’s up early in the morning. It’s insane. She runs herself down. She gets a dozen colds every winter. And she won’t let anybody help.”

  “I thought you were getting some volunteers,” John Jackman said.

  “Oh, she’ll let people help with that sort of thing,” Lucinda said. “It’s the trawling the strip I’m talking about. She’s out there every night, rain or shine, it doesn’t matter what the weather is. She won’t let me go because she says I’ll be too conspicuous. I am very conspicuous, I know that. I know what I look like when I look in the mirror. Last time I had a physical, I weighed three hundred pounds. But still. I’m fast. You’ve got to admit I’m fast. And nobody would pay any attention to me out there. Nobody ever pays attention to middle-aged fat women. They pay attention to her.”

  A door along the hallway popped open, and a young woman dressed in jeans and a heavy cotton sweater came out. Lucinda looked up and smiled.

  “Melissa,” she said. She turned to Gregor and John Jackman. “This is Melissa Polk, one of our volunteers from Bryn Mawr College. Bryn Mawr provides us with a lot of valuable help during the school year. Melissa, listen, this is Mr. Jackman and Mr. Demarkian. Mr. Jackman is the commissioner of police. Mr. Demarkian—”

  “Is the Armenian-American Hercule Poirot,” Melissa said politely.

  Gregor winced. Lucinda ignored it. “Would you mind running up and telling Annie they’re here?” she said. “She’s lying down for a while. I’ll take them in to the living room.”

  “No problem,” Melissa said.

  Lucinda began shooing them toward a door. Gregor had forgotten how houses used to have all their rooms walled off from all the others, with doors that shut. He allowed himself to be pushed through this door into the smallish living room. He walked over to the bay window and looked out on the abandoned street.