Conspiracy Theory

by Jane Haddam

  The phone rang. He straightened up a little and tried to breathe. He was sweating all over now. He could feel wet heavy sweat soaked into the back of his jacket. His hands were so slick, he had to wipe them against the knees of his pants in order to pick up the phone. He was going to have to change all his clothes before he went out. He was going to have to take a shower. What if she had been lying to him? What if she had gone to the papers already, or the police? What if everybody in town knew what he did in his car in the darkness of the early evenings before he had to go to another party or another opening or another wedding? They all did it too. He knew that. They all did it too, but they wouldn’t admit it.

  He took one more deep breath and picked up the phone. He was sure he was going to hear Matt Drudge at least, somebody who specialized in real gossip, somebody with the clout to get the news out on an international scale. They all said they didn’t read Matt Drudge, but they did. They read him first. Ryall wondered if he could be Matt Drudge himself. He knew he couldn’t. It was the Porky Pig thing, again. No matter what he did, he still looked like Porky Pig. Sometimes he expected Disney to sue him for copyright infringement.

  He picked up the phone. It wasn’t Matt Drudge. It wasn’t the police. It wasn’t even Annie Ross. It was only Nick Bradenton, sounding exasperated.

  “Ryall? Ryall, where are you? You owe me a column. It should have been here an hour ago. Are you paying any attention to what we pay you for anymore at all?”

  “I’ve been paying attention,” Ryall said defensively. His chest hurt. This was what was wrong with letting himself get spooked. He got breathless. His voice squeaked. “I’ve turned in the best columns of my career over the last couple of weeks. I’ve even provided you with real news. You can’t fault me for that.”

  “You’ve been late four out of the last six days,” Nick said. “I know you like going to New York. And I know you like going to Atlanta. And I know you like seeing your face on the television screen. But if you expect to have a job here when this is over, you’d better get your act together.”

  “Of course I expect to have a job here,” Ryall said. That was not strictly true. He expected to have the job, yes, but he did not expect to want it. He was sure it was only a matter of time before CNN would give him a spot in the same way they had once given Greta Van Susteren one. That was how these things happened. Just in case, though—in case something went wrong, in case the universe was as uneven and unfair as it had always been—it was best to play safe. “The column’s done,” he said. “I’ll e-mail it as soon as I get off the phone.”

  “Yeah, well. Do that. But there’s something else.”

  “What else?”

  “There’s some news. Not really news. It’s not for publication just yet, if you know what I mean. We’ve got a source. Can you get to Anne Ross Wyler?”

  “Anybody can get to Anne Ross Wyler,” Ryall said. “She lives in that godforsaken settlement house. She doesn’t even have servants.”

  “Well, neither do you, do you, Ryall? Our source says that she’s the prime suspect out there in Lower Merion. That she killed her brother and his wife. For money, I presume, although we don’t have any word on that. Maybe she’s another one of those crackpot debutante Marxists. I don’t know. We just want to know if you can go out there and talk to her. Get an interview about how she feels about her brother’s death and that kind of thing, but be cool about it. Don’t say anything that might tip her off.”

  “Hard news?” Ryall said, finding it difficult to breathe again. “I can’t believe it. You’re trusting me with hard news.”

  “Yeah,” Nick said. “I’m not a hundred percent happy about it, if you want to know the truth.”

  “Oh, thank you.”

  “Be serious, Ryall. This is not the kind of thing you usually do. But the rest of the guys thought you’d be the best one because you know the territory and you know the woman. She’s more likely to open up to you than she is to a stranger. Although, I don’t know. She’s always been so intensely loyal to Tony Ross. If that’s been an act all these years, she can’t be straight with anybody. Can you get over there right away?”

  “To Adelphos House? Of course I can. How do you know she’s there?” “I don’t, but that’s where she usually is, isn’t it? Maybe you ought to call first. There’s a certain amount of hurry. We hear she’s going to be picked up this evening. I have no idea why they’re waiting so long. But there it is. You have to get to her before that.”

  “I’ll get to her as soon as I get off the phone,” Ryall said, wondering how long it would take him to get the hint. Get off the phone. Get off the phone. Get off the phone.

  “You can get off the phone now,” Nick said. “And send that column, ASAP.” There was a click and then a dial tone. Ryall put the phone back in the hook and stared at it. He didn’t really have a column done. It was only half done. He could get it finished in, maybe, half an hour. He wondered if he would be able to concentrate on it. Maybe he should call Adelphos House first. Maybe he should stop off on the strip on his way to talk to Annie Ross. There were so many options, he didn’t know what to do.

  Then, abruptly, he sat down in the nearest chair and burst out laughing.

  2

  David Alden had always prided himself on being able to stay calm in a crisis. It was one of the things he was known for, even among the people who wanted to find some reason to get him out of the bank. And, truthfully, it wasn’t that he was uncalm, exactly. He wasn’t running around in a panic. He wasn’t having trouble trying to think. It was just that, since Charlotte had died, he’d been restless. It felt to him as if the things he was doing were ephemeral. There was this bank, this pre-war building with its high ceilings and marble floors and chandeliers that had to be cleaned six times a year by a company hired for just that purpose. There was Price Heaven, which was rapidly descending into the morass of an Enron scandal, with half the news stories devoted to the way in which Price Heaven’s middle managers would lose all the money they’d saved for retirement if the company collapsed and its stock became worthless. There was Michael Harridan and his Report, which had been cluttering up his briefcase ever since that last day at Tony’s house and that even now took up more of his time than it should. All he wanted was that people should start out making sense and go on making sense. He didn’t want them to wander off on tangents and confusions. Sometimes it seemed to him that people operated on an entirely symbolic level. The bank was not a temple and it did not house the body of a God, living or dead, no matter what its vice presidents thought. The middle managers at Price Heaven would not be in the midst of losing their savings if they’d taken the sensible advice most of them admitted to having been given and diversified their portfolios instead of keeping everything they had in one company’s paper. And as for Michael Harridan—

  There were five copies of The Harridan Report spread out across his desk, including a copy of the one Charlotte had shown him just before she died. David didn’t think he had ever known anybody, real or imaginary, as solemn and humorless as Michael Harridan. It was frightening to think of that man in the world. Maybe that was because that man wasn’t in the world. He was part of all of us. He was part of the people who ran the banks and the people who hated them. He was part of the pundits and part of the audience that checked their stocks online every day at lunch when they had a little free time at the office. He had gone out to the Trade Center with Adele and looked at the rubble there. Then he’d come back to the office and found a picture on the Internet of that church that had been bombed in Philadelphia. In the end, it came down to the same thing, it all came down to the same thing, too many people taking too many things seriously when they didn’t mean anything at all. Nothing meant anything at all. You worked and worked. You stayed up late and came in early and canceled dates and family dinners. You did all the things you were supposed to do and then it ended here, with you feeling like a piece of tired fruit suspended in Jell-O.

  That was it,
David thought. He wasn’t feeling panicked. He wasn’t losing his head in a crisis. He was simply passing into another phase, where nothing was urgent except the need to shut out all the noise that cluttered up his life.

  Next to the copies of The Harridan Report on his desk were the summary sheets of his report on Price Heaven. The type on their pages was smaller and less bold than that of Michael Harridan’s rag, and far more difficult to read. Here was the skinny on Price Heaven: It was an old and venerable company, probably too old and too venerable. Its image was antiquated. Its facilities were Stone-Aged. Two years ago, it had come to the bank with a cash shortfall and a need to modernize. Six months after that, it had begun to hemorrhage money. It was still hemorrhaging money, although not quite in the same way as it had been, since the bank had stopped all payments to creditors, even itself. Now it was only hemorrhaging money in its stock price. He could write the facts down in a hundred million different ways, but they would always come down to the same thing, and they would always result in the realization that there was nothing anybody could do now about Price Heaven. The board had a decent argument when they said he should have seen this coming when he first recommended the loan. There was nobody better suited to seeing it coming besides himself. He had a decent argument when he said that he had not been responsible for granting the loan, and that it wasn’t his recommendation, but Tony’s, that had swayed the board. It wasn’t an argument they wanted to listen to, because Tony was dead. He had this terrible, ugly urge to tell the truth, the kind of urge he knew he must never give in to, if he expected to have a life when the dust settled and Price Heaven had finally gone out of business.

  There was a knock on the door and Adele came in, bustling. “They’re almost ready downstairs,” she said. “Are you absolutely sure you want to hold this in the lobby? I know the conference room is too small, but that lobby looks so much like a stage set for a Depression movie about evil bankers. I wish you’d let me get somebody to take down the chandelier.”

  “It would be a waste of money to take down the chandelier,” David said. “And the lobby is the only place big enough. We won’t be completely screwing up anybody who wants to come in and out, will we?”

  “No, of course not. We’ve got one newsstand that’s going to be out of business for the duration. And there are a lot of people down there. That surprises me a little, do you know? I didn’t think the Price Heaven collapse was that big a story.”

  “Tony’s dead,” David said. “Charlotte’s dead. Maybe the press has finally made a few connections.”

  “Do you think they’re dead because of Price Heaven?” Adele asked. “That doesn’t seem right to me. I mean, what did Charlotte have to do with Price Heaven?”

  David gestured to the copies of The Harridan Report on his desk. “She didn’t have anything to do with it rationally. These people aren’t rational.”

  “Oh, that thing. I found some of those in the wastebasket a little while ago and read them. Complete lunacy. Is that what the police think, that Tony and Charlotte were murdered by somebody like that?”

  “I don’t know what the police think.”

  “No, of course you don’t. I don’t know why I should think you would. Maybe it’s just that I always think you know everything. Are you sure you’re all right? You’ve been behaving in the oddest way all day, as if you were sleepwalking. And with a press conference due to go off in less than fifteen minutes—”

  “I’ll be fine with the press conference,” David said.

  The phone rang. They both stared at it. David turned away and stared out the window. Adele’s voice was a low hum, sprightly and not particularly solemn. She was talking to somebody she knew and didn’t mind hearing from.

  He was thinking about the Trade Center again when she tapped him on the shoulder. He wondered how many people who worked in the financial district stopped in the middle of their day and thought about the Trade Center. He wished they would clear the rubble and put the things back up. No memorials. No compromises. Put them back up.

  “It’s Annie,” Adele said, holding the flat of her hand over the receiver. “I said I’d see if you’d talk to her. If it’s too much with the press conference so close—”

  “No, no,” David said. “I’ll talk to her.”

  “Good. Maybe she’ll cheer you up. I’m going to go make sure we’ve covered all the details.”

  “Thank you,” David said.

  Adele handed over the phone. She stood up and straightened her skirt and left the room. David stared at the phone for a second.

  “David?” Annie’s voice drifted out at him, sounding tinny.

  He put the receiver to his ear. “Hello, Annie. I’ve been thinking about you.”

  “I thought you might have been.”

  He didn’t know what to say to that. He really was like a fruit suspended in Jell-O. “Sorry. I seem to be having an out-of-it sort of day.”

  “That’s bad news. Tony used to say that people on his level could never afford to be out of it, even for an hour.”

  “I’m not on his level.”

  “You are for all practical purposes, aren’t you? The Price Heaven mess seems to have been dumped in your lap as if nobody else had ever had any responsibility. Not that you necessarily dislike that. I know you’ve always wanted responsibility.”

  “I’ve got to go give a press conference in a few minutes,” David said. “Exactly what it is they expect me to say is completely beyond me. There’s nothing to be said that hasn’t been said already. A million times. In a million other meltdowns. Do you remember the Kmart bankruptcy?”

  “Not really. It’s not the kind of thing I pay attention to, David.”

  “I know. Never mind. I feel the way you do when you wake up in the wrong part of your sleep cycle. Like I’m not quite connected. All I want to do is go home and go to bed for a week.”

  “Maybe you should.”

  “I can’t. You know why I can’t. We seem to be in nonstop crisis mode here today. We’ve been that way for a couple of weeks, now. Do you know what I was thinking about? I was thinking about what it was like in those five days after the attack on the Towers, when the Stock Exchange was closed. On one level, it was completely insane. We couldn’t get into the building. We still had deals and relationships that couldn’t be neglected. Some of our clients were willing to cut us a little slack, but a lot of them weren’t. But the thing is, even so, it was the calmest period I can remember in all my time at the bank. It was as if we’d all been stripped down to the skin, and nothing mattered except what really mattered. Do you understand that?”

  “I always told you it was a bad idea for you to stay in that job.”

  “I know.”

  “I always told you you’d end up regretting it. And you will, you know. If you don’t already.”

  “I don’t know if regret is the word I’d use.”

  “I’ll let you go to your press conference, then. I didn’t call for any reason. I just wanted to hear the sound of your voice. I was wondering how you were feeling.”

  “I’m feeling fine, I guess. There’s nothing in particular wrong. There’s nothing in particular right. You know how things are.”

  “Yes,” Annie said. “I know how things are. I’ll let you go now, David.”

  The phone buzzed. David pulled it away from his ear and stared at it. He thought that was the oddest conversation he had ever had. It might never have happened. It was like talking to a ghost.

  He took all the copies of The Harridan Report spread across his desk, wadded them up into a single ball, and threw them in the wastebasket.

  3

  Annie Ross Wyler hung up the phone and stood for a long moment in the shelter of the pay phone cubicle, doing nothing. For a moment, she wondered what had happened to phone booths. One of her strongest childhood memories was of being let loose in a Woolworth’s in central Philadelphia while her mother was otherwise engaged at the jeweler’s. Mademoiselle Chirac, who had been im
ported only a year before to teach French to both Annie and Tony, was supposed to give them a supervised afternoon in some park. Annie didn’t remember which one, or where it was. Mademoiselle Chirac hadn’t liked parks, any more than she’d liked American cheese, American television programs, or American wine. Her life was one long keening complaint, punctuated at unpredictable intervals by young men whom she seemed to think very little of but could not live without. Annie knew what was going on from the beginning: the clothes that were never put back quite the way they should have been; the lipstick smeared along the curve of the upper lip; the whispered calls in the middle of the night to plan trysts just out of sight of wherever the children would be. This afternoon, Mademoiselle Chirac was sitting at the fountain counter in the back while Annie and Tony ran wild—although, being Annie and Tony, their wildness probably looked like good manners to most of the nearby adults. Tony had found the telephone booths first, a whole line of them, all empty.

  I’m no longer making any sense at all, Annie thought. She stepped away from the non-booth whatever-it-was-called—they had to call these contraptions something. She ought to ask. She had AT&T stock. They would have to an-swer—and looked up and down the nearly empty street. It had to be close to noon. She could have checked her watch, but her head felt too heavy. Her eyelids felt like lead. She went back to the car she had parked on the curb and took a parking ticket off the windshield. That must have happened while her back was turned. She didn’t really care about the parking ticket. She’d always had more money than she knew what to do with. Now she not only had it, but couldn’t think of what she wanted it for. Her whole life felt upside down and sideways, all at once. Maybe she would give a lot of it to Patsy Lennon and the girls like her, the ones she knew personally, just to see what they would do with it. Maybe she would give it to the Freedom from Religion Foundation, since she knew exactly what they would do with it, and she was in something like a fighting mood. She wondered what it would be like to live like an ordinary person for real, instead of just playing pretend at it, what it would be like to have no money to spend rather than to refuse to spend it. That didn’t make much sense either, but it all went together on one level or another. It didn’t help that the money was in trusts, where she could not touch the principal.