Conspiracy Theory(41)

“Aren’t you going to park in the garage?” he said.

“I’ve got to go pick up Tibor at the hospital,” Bennis said.

“I thought you and Donna were going together and using her van.”

“We are, but I don’t have the time to put this in the garage now, so I thought I’d leave it here. Are you all right?”

Gregor reached in through his coat and jacket and came up with the folded wad of papers that were the copies he’d made of Canfield’s copies of The Harridan Report. He opened the wad and rifled through it. He found the one he wanted and handed it over.

“Halfway down the page,” he said. “Tell me what you think of that.”

Bennis checked the car clock out of the corner of her eye, but she took the papers and scanned them. “Oh,” she said. “Look at this. ‘Chairwoman of the event is Charlotte Deacon Ross, a Rockefeller on her mother’s side and married to a collateral member of the House of Morgan, who also happens to be Anthony van Wyck Ross, head of Lessard Cole, one of the world’s biggest and most important investment banks. Vice chairwoman is Bennis Hannaford, a member of the notorious Duke family.’ ”

“Is that accurate?” Gregor asked her.

“About what?” Bennis said. “Charlotte’s mother wasn’t a Rockefeller, she was only a second cousin or something. Not that you weren’t made to know that, Charlotte being Charlotte. Although she was good. You could never tell just how she got it across.”

“What about what it says about you?”

“It’s crap. Not only aren’t we members of the Duke family, my father wouldn’t talk to them at parties. The whole thing with Doris, you know—I mean, she was my father’s generation. One of the things about the old Main Line, and the people like them elsewhere, is that they have an incredible number of rules about how to bring up children, because you do have to worry about it. If you don’t give the child a decent foundation, he’s going to get hold of a forty-million-dollar trust fund when he’s eighteen or twenty-one or whatever and go completely nuts, which is what Doris did. My father thought that she’d been left to run wild as a child and not taught proper morals, which considering what he was like is something of a laugh. Of course, Doris wasn’t brought up in Philadelphia, but that wasn’t supposed to matter.”

“Was she really,” Gregor checked the newsletter again, “ ‘ritually murdered in 1993’? What does that mean, exactly, ‘ritually murdered’?”

“It means that Doris has been prime meat for tabloid journalism for most of a century. She did die in 1993. She was eighty, for God’s sake. And there was some suggestion of foul play, but mostly because Doris did the one thing every old money family has nightmares about, and that was leave a ton of money to her butler. I forget his name. People said he and a doctor had deliberately given Doris an overdose of morphine but, for goodness sake, how could anybody tell? She’d been drowning herself in alcohol and drugs since her teens, and in men too. Hot and cold running affairs all her life, and she was rich enough so that in the end she could buy what she couldn’t attract, and from all indications, she did just that. One of her cousins wrote the nastiest book about it about ten years ago.”

“So what is this about ‘ritually murdered’?”

Bennis sighed. “You ought to spend more time on the Internet,” she said. “These guys are all over the place. Your basic choice is between the religious ones and the secular ones, but even the secular ones go on about satanic ritual abuse, which is supposed to be going on everywhere, right under our noses, and the reason we never find any of the bodies of the tens of thousands of infants supposedly murdered in rituals every year is that the Illuminati eat them, or something.”

“What?”

Bennis pulled down the visor over the steering wheel and got one of the deposit receipts she kept there. She checked the date, then reached for the pen in the cup holder. Then she put the deposit slip on the steering wheel, wrote something on it, and passed the slip to Gregor.

“There,” she said. “While I’m out getting Tibor, get on-line and go to that. It’s an ad for tapes and things that they’re selling, but if you scroll down you’ll find complete descriptions of what’s on the tapes, and that should give you a pretty good idea of what is going on.”

Gregor looked at the slip of paper. Written on it was a single line in dark red ink: http://home.inreach.com/dov/cdlcons.htm.

“While you’re at it,” Bennis said, “you might do searches for David Icke and Cisco Wheeler. Icke is supposed to be an ‘investigator.’ They all give themselves these titles, you wouldn’t believe it. Anyway, he’s got nothing in the way of serious journalistic credentials, but he does run a Web site. Cisco Wheeler is even better.”