Conspiracy Theory

by Jane Haddam

  “So your man got here and found the body and called in for help. Then what?”

  “Then the usual,” the first plainclothesman said.

  “Think of it as escalation,” the second plainclothesman said. “First the uniforms got here, and the vehicles, and the ambulance, and then they called us in. One of the uniforms thought he recognized him. Although how anybody could do that is beyond me.” He looked down at the body and shuddered. “Jesus Christ, but you see bad things on this job.”

  “How about cause of death?” Gregor asked. “Or is it too early to tell? Have you checked the body at all?”

  “He’s got a bullet hole in the side of his head,” the second plainclothesman said. “If you went around to this side, you can see it. Small hole. We’re talking a rifle, I’d guess, maybe fired from some distance away. But you can see it. Come and look.”

  Gregor did come and look, very carefully, not getting off the plank. It was true. The bullet hole was clearly there, and it just as clearly could not have been anything else, but it was small. He looked up and around. There were buildings on every side, some of them close. The only really open space was the vacant lot itself, and the short stretch of sidewalk that separated it from the road.

  “You’re going to have to do a door-to-door around here,” he said. “Especially if forensics tells you what you’re expecting to hear, and the shot was fired at a distance. You’d think somebody would have heard something. Even if it took place at night.”

  “What makes you think it took place at night?” the second plainclothes-man said.

  “Day is too risky,” Gregor said, not wanting to point out that the other two murders he’d seen something of in the last week had both taken place at night, or at least at early evening. There was no reason for these men to assume that the three deaths were automatically connected. Gregor wasn’t even sure why he was so sure they were. “Thank you,” he told both the men, suddenly catching sight of the tiny fish pin tacked to the first plainclothesman’s suit lapel. The first plainclothesman was wearing a heavy coat, unbuttoned but still wrapped tightly against his chest. The lapel hadn’t been visible before.

  Gregor turned away and went back down the ramp to John Jackman, who was leaning against the side of his limousine and watching the action. Somebody had brought him a coffee. Gregor wished somebody would bring him a coffee too.

  “Well?” Jackman asked when Gregor got back to the car.

  “Bullet hole in the right side of the skull, small but obvious. The detectives are guessing a rifle. I would too. Still, you won’t know until you know. Definitely fired at a distance.”

  “That you know?”

  “If it hadn’t been, the entry wound would have been a lot larger,” Gregor said. “The bottom line, though, is that it’s the same M.O. Virtually identical. Of course, we have no way of knowing the time of day, but I’d be willing to bet we were talking about evening or night, probably evening. It’s dark enough.”

  “And that would be in keeping with an identical M.O.?”

  “Something like that. Listen, John, where are we, exactly? Near Adelphos House yes. It didn’t take us too long to get here. What about Kathi Mitten-dorf’s place?”

  “Nearly two miles in that direction,” John said, pointing at the horizon. “I don’t know, Gregor, what are we near? It’s an inner-city minority neighborhood, mostly Spanish now, working-class, not a war zone. The schools suck, but then all the schools in Philadelphia suck, except the private ones and a few of the charters. There are dozens of neighborhoods like this all over the city. They’re not really ‘near’ anything except maybe each other, and sometimes they’re not even near each other.”

  “Kathi Mittendorf lives in a neighborhood like this,” Gregor said. “The same general atmosphere. Frame houses, some of them three-deckers, all of them run-down. I doubt if it’s a minority neighborhood, though.”

  “Ethnic, then,” Jackman said confidently. “The kind of place that revolves around the local church. Catholic, Lutheran, different churches for different neighborhoods. It’s all going, Gregor. Even the poorer people are beginning to move on out to the Main Line. In a few more years, there’ll be nothing left but the very poor and the very rich. And not very many of the very rich. This isn’t New York. They move on out to the Main Line too.”

  “In New York, they move on out to Westchester and Connecticut.”

  “Yeah, well. They still have Fifth Avenue and Park Avenue and the Upper East Side. I’m sorry to be such a pessimist, but I don’t like what’s happening. I haven’t liked it for a long time. And you put this other stuff in it, this stuff like America on Alert and, yes, God help me, all the stupidity surrounding the Harry Potter books, you put that mental set into the mix and you’re going for real trouble. I keep waiting for something to happen. I’m not sure what.”

  “Riots?”

  “No,” Jackman said. “I’m embarrassed to say it, but when I saw the World Trade Center thing, I thought it was that. I thought it was one of our own, another Tim McVeigh, a whole rash of Tim McVeighs, and the whole thing was about to crash down on our heads. And then the anthrax thing did turn out to be a Tim McVeigh, didn’t it?”

  “I think it turned out to be a lone nut,” Gregor said. “Not Tim McVeigh so much as the Unabomber.”

  “Whatever. The landscape’s changed. Policing’s changed. Everything is caught up in this crap, and that includes a big chunk of the guys on the force, and I’ll be damned if I know what to do about it. Never mind me. You want to go home?”

  “Yes,” Gregor said. “I think I do.”

  2

  There was one advantage to being driven around in a limousine, in spite of the fact that it made Gregor a little uncomfortable, and especially uncomfortable when he was with John Jackman, who loved the experience out of all proportion to its significance. The advantage was that he had his hands free to write, and that he was far enough in the back of the vehicle not to need to mentally apply the brakes every time the driver did something that made him want to cringe. All drivers made Gregor Demarkian want to cringe more often than not. Bennis and Donna caused him to feel grateful for traffic lights.

  As soon as they had pulled away from the scene, Gregor pulled out his notebook and started jotting. John Jackman sat on the other side of the seat and watched him.

  “I could never figure out what you were writing down all the time,” John said. “You never seemed to read those notebooks. Why do you write in them?”

  “It helps me remember things.” Gregor finished the page and looked it over. It wasn’t true that he didn’t read what he’d written. “This is what I need somebody to do. First, that idea of yours about the picture of Kathi Mitten-dorf. Can we get one fast and get it out for Krystof Andrechev to see?”

  “Sure. Have it done in a couple of hours.”

  “It may be harder to get a picture than you think.”

  “No, it won’t. She was being watched by the FBI, remember? They’ve got surveillance pictures, and our department has copies.”

  “Fair enough,” Gregor said. “I just want to know, as soon as possible, if she was the one who brought the gun to Cavanaugh Street.”

  “Do you think she was?”

  “Yes. If she wasn’t, my whole theory goes to hell, so let’s hope I’m not wrong. I hate having to start again this late in the day. It wastes time.”

  “You think Kathi Mittendorf bombed Holy Trinity Church? Or you think she murdered Tony and Charlotte Ross? And Steve Bridge, if they’re all connected.”

  “They’re all connected,” Gregor said, “unless, as I mentioned, Krystof An-drechev doesn’t identify Kathi Mittendorf, at which point I don’t know what’s going on. As for the other things …” Gregor shrugged. “I don’t think she’s killed anybody, no. About Holy Trinity Church, it depends. My guess is not. I don’t think he would have entrusted her with anything that important. Not, as it turned out, that it made much difference.”

  “I love it when
you’re being inscrutable. It satisfies my need to explode ethnic stereotypes. Who’s ‘he’?”

  “Michael Harridan.”

  “You’ve found Michael Harridan? I thought you said Michael Harridan didn’t exist.”

  “No, I never said that. Obviously, Michael Harridan exists. He writes a newsletter. He writes a lot of editions of a newsletter. Here’s something I’d like to know, just for curiosity’s sake. How often does that newsletter come out? I’m willing to bet almost anything that it’s started coming out a lot more frequently in, say, the last six months.”

  “He’s been planning all this for the last six months?”

  “At least. Maybe longer.”

  “So where is he?” John Jackman said. “You can’t just say he exists and committed a bunch of murders and not tell us where he is. We want to talk to him. The Lower Merion police want to talk to him. After what we saw back there, the FBI is going to want to talk to him too, and big time.”

  “We have talked to him,” Gregor said. “Or at least I have. I have no idea what your people have been doing about him one way or the other. The problem is, proving he’s himself, so to speak. Or rather, proving he’s not himself, part of the time. Do you know off the top of your head when the bomb went off in Holy Trinity Church?”

  “I think it was just about eight-thirty,” John Jackman said, “or a little before. Why?”

  “I was thinking about the principle of calculated risk. He calculates a lot of risk, Mr. Harridan does. If he wanted to be as sure as he could be that he wasn’t going to kill somebody—and he could never have been one hundred percent sure—he’d have had that bomb go off at midnight, when there was a good chance nobody at all would be in the church and nobody at all would be on the street. That’s a very conservative neighborhood in some ways.”

  “I’ve noticed. Why did he want to make sure nobody would be killed? I thought that that’s what these guys did. They went out and murdered a bunch of people in the name of home, the flag, apple pie, and an interpretation of the United States Constitution so wrongheaded it could qualify for the founding document of a totalitarian space colony.”

  “Very nice. But he didn’t want to kill anybody that night. He just wanted to make a mess. A very big mess. And distract my attention.”

  “Distract your attention?”

  “That’s right. Do you know of any celebrity murder anywhere on the Main Line or in Philadelphia that I haven’t been involved in in the last ten years?”

  “I think you’ve got delusions of grandeur. No matter what the Philadelphia Inquirer may tell you, you’re not the Armenian-American Hercule Poirot. You’re not better than the police. And one of the things I always did like about you was that you never considered yourself better than the police.”

  “It’s not because he considers me better than the police,” Gregor said patiently. “It’s about perspective. And, of course, about setting the terms of the debate. That’s what Michael Harridan does, you know. He sets the terms of any debate he’s in, and the fact that nobody ever sees him only makes that outcome more certain. It’s amazing the way that works.”

  “I now have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “Maybe I don’t either,” Gregor said.

  They had pulled into Cavanaugh Street. It was very late in the afternoon, almost evening, and the storefronts had begun to light up in the gloom. Ohanian’s had a sandwich sign propped up on the sidewalk in front of its door, advertising stuffed grape leaves and something Gregor couldn’t make out. The Ararat was still in its daytime mode, with all its lights blazing. When the dinner hour officially arrived, Linda Melajian would dim all the lights and put candles out on the tables. It was, Gregor thought, a perfectly ordinary, unassuming neighborhood, six or seven blocks of town houses and small apartment buildings and stores, of no interest to anybody but the people who lived on it. The car moved forward, and it began to be impossible to ignore the gaping hole where Holy Trinity’s facade used to be.

  “You all right?” John Jackman asked.

  “I’m fine,” Gregor said. “Get that picture over to Andrechev’s place, as fast as you can, today if possible. All right?”

  “All right.”

  “Then get me what you can on the forensics for Steve Bridge, as soon as you can. I need to know what kind of gun it was. Because he can’t be carrying a rifle around with him.”

  “It’s almost certainly going to be a rifle,” John Jackman said.

  “Oh, yes, I know. I know the murders were all done with a rifle. I’m just convinced they couldn’t all have been done with the same rifle. And rifles are a problem. Because they’re not like handguns. You can buy a handgun on any street corner in America. Rifles are a little harder to get.”

  “Well, you know, Gregor, we’re not talking about an Uzi here. I don’t think we’re going to find that Steve Bridge was killed with a military assault weapon. I don’t know what they’ve got in Lower Merion, but I saw the wound here, close up, closer up than I ever want to see another one, and I’ve seen a lot of wounds in my life. And I don’t think—”

  “No,” Gregor said. “Neither do I. That isn’t what I meant.”

  “What did you mean?”

  “I meant that wherever it is he’s getting these guns, it can’t be the way people usually get guns they don’t want traced to themselves. It’s the guns, you know, that I can’t figure out. He must have used at least two different ones. The question is, where is he getting them?”

  “Maybe he has them,” John Jackman said. “We don’t register all weapons, after all. If he’s using small rifles, he may have had them for years, for deer hunting, whatever. There probably wouldn’t be any record of the sale, or of his possession of them. If he’s been keeping them under the bed for years, how would anybody know he had them?”

  “But he hasn’t been keeping them under the bed for years,” Gregor said. The limousine stopped short in the street, next to several parked cars. It would be wrong to say that Jackman’s driver double-parked, since he didn’t kill the engine, but the effect was the same. Gregor got his gloves out of his pockets. “Never mind me,” he said. “I’ll call you tomorrow. Just, get that picture to An-drechev and see if he can identify it. And get me the lab results on those bullet wounds. Do we know if there were any bullets found on or near the body?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Well, maybe we’ll have a little luck for once. They do have the bullets found at the scene at the Tony Ross murder. I don’t know about the murder of Charlotte Ross, but my guess is that they found those too. It will be interesting to see if they match.”

  “I thought you said they wouldn’t match,” John Jackman said.

  “I said that at least two of them wouldn’t match,” Gregor said. “It’s possible that the ones from Tony Ross’s murder would match the ones from Charlotte’s, or that the ones from Charlotte’s would match the ones from Steve Bridge’s. But unless Mr. Harridan can walk on water and raise the dead, he couldn’t have committed all three of those murders with the same weapon.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because on the night of the party, he couldn’t have gotten a rifle onto the Ross property to save his life, and he didn’t have the time or the opportunity to hide one there earlier and come back and get it when he wanted to use it. It would have been too risky, anyway. They were doing security sweeps right and left. There’s only one place he could have gotten the weapon to kill Tony Ross, and he had to get hold of it on the night of the murder.”

  “What’s the one place he could have got hold of a rifle on the night of the murder?” Jackman actually looked curious.

  “From Tony Ross,” Gregor told him. Then he popped the door—he refused to wait for the driver to open it for him—and climbed out onto the street. The two younger Ohanian girls had come out onto the sidewalk to watch the show. When they saw it was him, they giggled and went back inside. Nobody on Cavanaugh Street thought anything at all of anything he did
anymore. They had long ago decided he was crazy.

  Gregor stuck his head back into the car. “We should have thought about that at the time,” he said. “About the security at the party. I’m not saying that the security was as tight as the media have been making it out to be. It isn’t that tight for the president himself, and he wasn’t coming. Still, it was tight enough, and that left us with two choices. Either the murderer was a professional, or he was somebody considered practically part of the wallpaper. And I know he isn’t a professional.”

  “Try to remember,” Jackman said, “that I’m not concerned with the Tony Ross murder. Or the Charlotte Ross murder, either. That’s Lower Merion’s problem. I’m here to help you out with the bombing of Holy Trinity Church, and to look into the murder of Steve Bridge, except that I don’t look into murders anymore these days. I’m a desk jockey.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Gregor said. “It’s all the same thing. Did you ever read a murder mystery where the butler did it?”

  “No,” Jackman said.

  “Neither did I.” Gregor slammed the door of the limousine shut and went around the back of it to the sidewalk. He climbed the steps to the front door to the building that held his apartment and went inside. There was a light coming from under old George Tekemanian’s apartment door, and laughter coming into the hall from the other side of it, but Gregor didn’t turn in that direction. He checked his mail—three bills; a frantic letter about how President Bush was destroying the nation from some Democratic Party fund-raising committee; a frantic letter about how liberals were destroying the nation from some Republican Party fund-raising committee; a Levenger catalogue—and went upstairs. For just a little while, he didn’t want to talk to Bennis, or Tibor, or Donna, or anybody else on Cavanaugh Street. He wanted to make more notes for himself, and then he wanted to make some phone calls. He’d need to talk to the director again, because that was the fastest way to FBI information that he knew of. He’d need to talk to Margiotti and Tackner again too, because there were some details he needed to work out about what exactly had happened on the night Tony Ross had died. Most important, though, he needed to sit down with as many editions of The Harridan Report he could find, and read them.