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Conspiracy Theory(115)



Gregor let himself in to his apartment. Bennis wasn’t home, which was just as well, since he didn’t want to talk to anybody but the people he needed to call. Upstairs, Grace Feinman was pounding away on one of her harpsichords. Gregor thought he remembered someone saying that she now had three up there, plus the virginals. He put his coat on the hook of the coat stand and went into the living room to sit down on the couch. He pulled the phone to him and started dialing.

Later on, when he was finished with these, he would have to find a way to talk to Kathi Mittendorf again.





3


It wasn’t until it was over that Gregor Demarkian admitted to himself that it was a relief to talk on a regular, rather than a cell, phone. Not only couldn’t you be intercepted out of thin air—he had visions of vans roving throughout the city, randomly snatching messages in mid-flight in the hopes of being the person who picked up the next phone call from Monica Lewinsky—but you didn’t have to worry about the sound quality fading out on you or disappearing altogether. Gregor did not remember either of those things ever happening to him. Bennis was too much of a stickler for getting exactly what she wanted and too willing to pay lots of money to get it to be saddled with inefficient cell phone service. Still, that sort of thing was always happening to Howard Kashinian, and Gregor was sure that if something could happen to Howard, it could happen to him.

He looked down at the notebook he’d been jotting things down in for the past hour of phone calls and hoped he’d be able to decipher it when the time came. He had very neat handwriting, but he’d not only written lists and words but drawn arrows and made symbols, all in an attempt to straighten out the complexities of just who could or could not have fired a rifle at Tony Ross on the night of the party. The short explanation was that anybody who had already been on the grounds at the time and who had already had access to a gun there could have committed the murder. That was less helpful than it seemed, because although the secret service had screened the area early on the day, they hadn’t been able to keep it absolutely secure because of the right-of-way granted to the riding club. Besides, the secret service simply didn’t apply the same level of scrutiny to the arrangements for the first lady as they did for the president himself, unless there was some indication that the first lady was in direct and immediate danger. They had provided near-paranoid security for Hillary Clinton, because the media had been full of furious denunciations of her almost from the day her husband began running for office. This first lady was far less controversial. She was also far less interesting, but Gregor had to admit that interesting people were more likely to be vilified than uninteresting ones. The simple fact was that the secret service had not been all that concerned about a party given by Charlotte Deacon Ross. It was unlikely to be dangerous. The first lady didn’t have legions of enemies hoping to get rid of her at the first opportunity. Charity balls were a regular feature of a first lady’s life, and if they had to do a full security sweep on every one of them, they’d have to double their numbers and never do anything else.

The problem, Gregor decided, was not how the murderer got on to the estate. He—or she, he amended, for the sake of the voice of John Jackman in his head—could have managed that any of a number of ways, including simply walking in through the front gate. The problem was how the murderer got out again after the murder, which was by no means an easy thing. The first lady had not arrived and never did arrive. The secret service had turned the car around and taken her right back to Washington. The security already in place on the estate had locked into place only seconds after the shots were fired. It wasn’t as good, or as tight, as the secret service would have been, but it would have made just strolling out the front gate a near impossibility. It would have meant strolling out the bridal path a near impossibility too, because there had been a man stationed at that entrance. That left only a very few options for escape, and he understood why Michael Harridan hadn’t liked any of them.

He folded the notebook up and put it back in his pocket. It was after six. He wondered where Bennis was. He grabbed his coat from the coatrack in the hall and headed out down the stairs. He could still hear laughter coming up from old George Tekemanian’s apartment, but Grace was no longer playing her harpsichord. Maybe she’d gone to rehearsal, or to play a concert. He went down one flight and knocked on Bennis’s door. He would always think of that apartment as Bennis’s apartment, even though she never went there anymore except to work. They really ought to knock the two apartments together and make a duplex, even if it did mean confirming in public what everybody on Cavanaugh Street already knew.