Conspiracy Theory

by Jane Haddam

  “Is strength of character what it is?”

  “It must be,” Bennis said. “It’s not like she’s marrying ski instructors. She’s helping the sort of people most of her parents’ neighbors probably secretly wished could be wiped off the face of the earth.”

  “Tell me about David Alden,” Gregor said.

  Bennis bent down and got something out of one of the tote bags. “You’re not going to like it,” she said, coming up with a cookie tin and popping the top off it.

  “What aren’t I going to like?”

  “He’s disappeared,” Bennis said, holding out a cookie tin full of honey cakes.

  “Disappeared how?” Gregor asked.

  “Disappeared,” Bennis said. “While Kathi Mittendorf was shoving a grenade down her throat and blowing herself to pieces, he was getting on a plane to Switzerland. By the time the police started looking for him, he’d gotten to Switzerland and gotten out, nobody is quite sure where. He doesn’t seem to be there anymore.”

  “How can nobody be sure where?” Gregor asked. “There are controls, there are passports—”

  “There are cars, there are roads, there are fake identities,” Bennis said. “I don’t know. That man from Lower Merion, Frank Margiotti—”

  “Yes?”

  “He’s coming in to see you as soon as they tell him it’s safe. We’ve all been worried about you. But he can tell you more about this than I can. David seems to have done a lot of planning beforehand. And I mean a lot. The money was gone at least three days before, as far as anybody has been able to determine. It went to the Caymans, but that doesn’t mean it’s there now, and they’re not cooperating. Oh, Gregor, I don’t know. I should have saved you the papers. They were full of it. But that was nearly a week ago.”

  “I’ve been out of it for a week?”

  “Just about. Oh, you were never in danger. At least that’s what they said. But you were woozy and not well, and your shoulder is a mess. They’re going to have to do surgery on it. And I haven’t the faintest idea what’s going on. I mean, I still don’t understand this thing with America on Alert, except that David apparently started it, or something—”

  “As a smoke screen for the murder of Tony Ross,” Gregor said. “That took me a while to figure out. I thought that the murder was a last-minute thing. It seemed logical to me that an embezzler wouldn’t want to kill anybody, and wouldn’t get started embezzling if he thought he was going to get found out and have to kill anybody.”

  “But David knew he was going to have to kill Tony all along? That just seems so odd. Tony was like a father to him. They’d been close for years.”

  “I rather think David Alden is one of those people who are never really close to anybody.”

  “All right. But America on Alert?”

  “We should have seen it coming,” Gregor said. “Not the murder of Tony Ross in particular, but that people like David Alden would use the new hysteria about terrorism to try to cover perfectly ordinary crimes. And that’s what he tried to do. He set up a situation where it looked as if Tony Ross was being targeted by domestic terrorists. He put up a Web site, half-plagiarized a bunch of stuff from the conspiracist sites, and then set up some local meetings to see what would happen. And he sent that newsletter to the Ross house for months, so that the police would find them everywhere, so that America on Alert would look like the likely culprit. And we know what happened. Kathi Mittendorf happened. Do you think we could get the nurse or somebody to get me some coffee to go with all this food you keep unloading?”

  “No coffee, only tea,” Bennis said. “Ring the little bell thingee next to the bed. So Kathi Mittendorf came to one of the lectures.”

  Gregor tried the “little bell thingee” and hoped it worked. He had no idea how to tell. “We think that what he’d do was announce a lecture and then set it up so that his speech would be heard through a public address system. We think he told his listeners that he was being hunted by the agents of the One World Government and couldn’t afford to allow his face to be seen. In the meantime, he’d be sitting in the audience as a supposed listener, keeping track of what was going on. Kathi Mittendorf probably came to a few of these lectures. Eventually, he decided to trust her.”

  “To tell her who he was,” Bennis said. “I mean, not that he was David. That he was Michael.”

  “Yes?” the intercom squawked. “Can I do something for you?”

  Bennis went to the wall. “This is Gregor Demarkian’s room. Do you think he could have some tea? The doctor said yesterday—”

  “He should start taking sustenance as soon as possible. I know. We’ll be right down.”

  “There,” Bennis said.

  “She sounds like a Morlock,” Gregor said.

  “He decided to trust Kathi Mittendorf,” Bennis said. “Then what?”

  “Then,” Gregor said, “he started to build an organization. He started very slowly, and he built small. My guess is that, by the time he murdered Tony Ross, America on Alert had maybe half-a-dozen members, if that. That other woman at the house the day of the standoff was probably one of them—”

  “Susan Hester,” Bennis said. “She was. They searched her apartment after it was over and it was full of America on Alert stuff. Oh, and guns, and ammunition, and hand grenades, and I don’t know what else. She was armed to the teeth.”

  “So was Kathi Mittendorf.”

  “We noticed,” Bennis said.

  The door opened and a woman in a green dress with a white collar came in, pushing a trolley. On the trolley there was a small metal pot of steaming water, a tea bag, a spoon, a pile of sugar packets, and a cup and saucer. Maybe, Gregor thought, there was a way Bennis could sneak coffee into his hospital room as well as honey cakes.

  Bennis took the things off the trolley and thanked the woman. The woman went out, looking completely bored. Bennis put the tea bag in the cup and poured water over it. “I don’t understand why they can never make tea properly in this country. I mean, what does it take to remember to pour boiling water over the bag?”

  “What does it take to understand that I got my shoulder hurt, not my stomach, and there’s no reason for me not to have coffee?”

  “Back to America on Alert,” Bennis said.

  “Yes,” Gregor said. “Well. It was simple, really. He had this organization set up, and he was producing those newsletters, lots and lots of them, really harping on Tony Ross and the bank, so that when the time came the first place the police would look would be at America on Alert. And that would be okay, because nobody would really know him, nobody would be able to finger him. If he’d been reasonably careful about the computers, which I can’t imagine he wouldn’t be, nobody would be able to trace him, really. And he could leave copies for Charlotte at the Ross house without being suspected. The only bottom-line problem he had was that Kathi Mittendorf had actually seen him, and that was something he could worry about later, if he had to worry about it at all.”

  “Okay. So then, what? This Steve Bridge person—”

  “Yeah. Well, Kathi Mittendorf was amassing weapons, and she was an amateur. So, eventually, she came to the attention of the two most inept agents in the history of the Federal Bureau of Investigation—”

  “Oh, I think that’s harsh,” Bennis said.

  “Don’t get me started on the deficiencies of Walker Canfield. At any rate, Canfield and Bridge were sent in to check out America on Alert, and when Bridge started to get too close, David Alden killed him and dumped his body in that vacant lot. Which was all right too, if you want to know the truth, because neither Canfield nor Bridge had ever laid eyes on him, and the vacant lot was in one of the worst neighborhoods in the city, the kind of place where you wouldn’t be surprised to find the body of some white guy with all the money and jewelry stripped off it. It also, by the way, happens to be only six blocks from Adelphos House, which means that David Alden had a perfect excuse if anybody saw him in the vicinity, since he’s been doing work for Annie Ross
Wyler’s foundation and he did visit her at Adelphos House on and off.”

  “Tea’s ready,” Bennis said. She took the tea bag out and laid it in the saucer. “It all sounds so complicated,” she said.

  Gregor tried the tea. It was Lipton. He didn’t like tea. “It wasn’t really,” he said. “It was just a diversion. What got complicated was the endgame, when he finally hit the point where he knew he would have to kill Tony Ross. In the first place, he had to use a venue where he wouldn’t automatically be the prime suspect, which, as Ross’s second in command and general right-hand man, he was likely to be. In the second place, he had to create a diversion, specifically to get me out of the picture.”

  “You? Really? Are you flattered? It must be very gratifying to know that master criminal manqués now think you’re a formidable master detective yourself so they—”

  “Hardly,” Gregor said. He tried putting three packets of sugar into the tea. Now it tasted bad, but sweet. “It was more in the way of supplementary insurance. Since I tend to get called in on major cases, it would be better if I was out of the way. So, he did a very sensible thing, given what he was thinking. He came down to Cavanaugh Street before he came to the party and left a bomb on a timer in the vestibule at Holy Trinity Church. He thought that if I was investigating the bombing, I wouldn’t have time to investigate the death of Tony Ross.”

  “You’d think somebody would have seen him,” Bennis said. “The Very Old Ladies see me every time I so much as sneeze in front of Ohanian’s.”

  “They’re looking for you. Cavanaugh Street is still part of the city of Philadelphia. It’s a city street in the middle of a busy city. Strangers come walking through all the time. It wasn’t much of a risk, either. And if somebody did see him, what would it matter? What would they have seen? A tall young Caucasian man in a dark coat. All he had to do was pull up his collar and hunch into it for his face to be completely obscured, and it wouldn’t have looked suspicious, either. The wind had been awful all week. It was awful that night.”

  “Could you prove all this?” Bennis asked. “If they bring him back, would you have enough for the city to bring charges against him for the bombing.”

  “No,” Gregor admitted. “The only way I know is that there’s nearly an hour’s discrepancy in the times—when he says he was in New York, when he says he was in Philadelphia, when he got to the party. Agatha Christie notwithstanding, it’s a hotbed of reasonable doubt. And, besides, he covered his ass on this one too, by sending Kathi Mittendorf to Cavanaugh Street to give that gun to Krystof Andrechev.”

  “Which is odd in and of itself,” Bennis said. “Why Krystof Andrechev?”

  “No reason,” Gregor said. “Alden probably went into the shop, or looked in the window, and didn’t talk to him. The only important thing was to get Kathi Mittendorf onto the street and have witnesses be able to attest that she was armed. He had a lot of luck. If Krystof hadn’t been so embarrassed by his accent, if he’d actually said something to Kathi Mittendorf, everything might have been much different.”

  “You mean she wouldn’t have put a grenade down her throat and blown herself up?”

  “I wish you’d stop putting it that way.”

  “It’s the way the papers put it,” Bennis said. “There were pieces of her as far as five blocks away. They’d have gone even further except that there were buildings in the way, and—”

  “Bennis.”

  “What about Charlotte?”

  “Piece of cake,” Gregor said. “He was already in the house. All he had to do was go out a side door and come around by the bridal path. Blow her away. Go back the way he came, get in his car, come around to the front gate and go in as if he had no idea something had happened. He thought that by doing that, we’d all think the killings were about Tony and Charlotte. That they had to be America on Alert, which was railing against them both. That the murders couldn’t be about Price Heaven, because Charlotte didn’t have much to do with Price Heaven. He was wrong.”

  “Marvelous. Everybody on the Main Line is going to hire super security this week. We’ll have to go through barbed wire every time we’re invited to dinner.”

  “I doubt it. People don’t work that way. I feel sorry about Kathi Mittendorf, though. She wasn’t wrapped too tightly, I’ll admit, but she was essentially harmless, left to herself.”

  “Nobody with four thousand rounds of ammunition in her basement is essentially harmless,” Bennis said. “And don’t ask. That was in the paper too. Do you realize she set a bomb to go off to blow the house up once she was dead? Fortunately, she didn’t seem to know what she was doing and nothing exploded, but if it had, she would have taken most of that block with her, and who was on the block? Families. Children. Nobody who was any danger of being part of the One World Government.”

  “I know, I know. I feel sorry for her anyway, Bennis. For all the Kathi Mittendorfs, the people whose lives have not worked out, who feel neglected and passed by and unimportant and helpless. There are a lot of them. More than you know.”

  “Most of them aren’t attempting to blow up their neighborhoods.”

  “Did Lida and Hannah happen to send meatballs? Because I could really do with some meatballs just about now. And some coffee.”

  Bennis leaned over and pulled both tote bags off the floor and onto the bed. They weighed so much, they made the bed springs creak.

  2

  It was dark when Tibor arrived, and by then Gregor was feeling “better.” At least, the nurses called it “better.” Gregor called it “annoyed.” His shoulder still hurt. The only thing he could do to stop it from hurting was to take De-merol from a hypodermic, seventy-five milligrams shot straight into his veins, and when he did that, he was a zombie for at least an hour. He was tired of not being able to think, and he was even more tired of being in the hospital. When they came to give him another shot, he turned it down and asked for a couple of Tylenol. He calculated the amount of time it would take for them to decide he was no longer in danger of relapsing and send him home. He was convinced that hospitals did not send you home when you still thought you needed serious painkillers. He wondered if it mattered that he didn’t have an HMO. He wondered what he would have to do to get somebody to bring him a large porterhouse steak. He thought of calling everybody from John Jack-man to Frank Margiotti. In the end, everything was too much effort. He found himself lying back in bed and watching the television hanging from the ceiling. He watched The Jerry Springer Show and thought it made sense.

  By the time Tibor got there—after “dinner,” which Gregor didn’t eat; during the eight o’clock visitors’ hour—Gregor was in so much pain he found it impossible to sit up all the way in bed, but his head was clear, and he told himself that was all he wanted. He had eaten an entire cookie tin full of honey cakes and another entire cookie tin full of some kind of hard cookie he couldn’t remember ever having tried before. It was probably something very traditional all their mothers used to make when they were young. Lida would chop him up one side and down the other when she found out he didn’t remember it. He watched the news and saw that Anne Ross Wyler was the lead story, ahead of something the Bush government was doing, he couldn’t determine what. He tried not to doze off. Outside the big windows next to his bed, he could see the city lit up for night. Across the street, there was a cemetery. He tried not to find it symbolic.

  “Why are hospitals always built next to cemeteries?” he asked Tibor when Tibor came in carrying an overstuffed tote bag that looked like one of the ones that belonged to Bennis.

  Tibor put the tote bag on the floor and looked out the window. “Possibly because they have use of the cemeteries,” he said. Then he turned his back to the scene and sat down in the visitor’s chair. “So,” he said. “You are better now? Bennis tells us this afternoon you are no longer babbling.”

  “I think I just missed some medication,” Gregor said. “Maybe the nurses were busy. Anyway, I’ve started turning it down. It makes my head fuzz
y. I can’t think.”

  “This is a good idea, refusing to take your medication?”

  “It’s only the painkillers, Tibor. I’m not refusing to take antibiotics. I don’t suppose they sent you with a steak.”

  “Yaprak Sarma,” Tibor said. “The meatballs are in the tin. The broth is in the Tupperware, which I’m not sure what that is, but Lida showed it to me. You put them together in the bowl, but this way the crust on the meatballs does not get soggy.”

  “Very nice.” Gregor did manage to sit up. A pain like a stab went through his shoulder. He ignored it as much as he was able. “Let me have it. That’s the first sign of decent food I can remember for days.”

  “I don’t think you can remember much of anything for days, Krekor. You have not been so sensible.”

  Tibor put the tote bag up on the bed. Besides the tin and the Tupperware, there was also a good-sized bowl and a stainless-steel soup spoon. There was even a ladle. If the United States government was this well organized, it could afford to cut taxes by half. On everybody. Gregor managed to sit up without compromise. It hurt, but not as much as it had. He pulled the utility table across his lap and began setting up for dinner.

  “Now if I could just get myself some coffee,” he said.

  “Bennis said to tell you the doctors say no coffee now for some time. You should drink Perrier. She has included a bottle.”

  Gregor took out the bottle of Perrier and made a face at it. If he wanted water, he wanted it without bubbles. “So,” he said. “How are you? Bennis said you were better. And making plans for the new church.”

  “Yes, Krekor, I am making plans. We have designs and blueprints—not for this new church yet, that will take time, but blueprints from other churches that I can look at for comparison. We have an architect. Bennis hired him. We have to get permissions from the city, but according to Mr. Jackman, that should not be a problem.”

  “No, it shouldn’t be. No mayor wants to go into an election hearing about how he wouldn’t let some poor little parish priest rebuild his church.”