Conspiracy Theory(56)
“Obviously.”
“I’ve got to go,” she said. “Write down the names of those detectives and I’ll call them.”
2
Gregor Demarkian waited until he saw Anne Ross Wyler emerging from his own front door onto Cavanaugh Street before he admitted to himself that he was just too jumpy to sit still, and then he spent two straight minutes trying to talk himself out of doing what he had been thinking of doing for the past four days. Crime scenes had to be kept clean, he knew that. The question was whether or not Holy Trinity Church was a crime scene. The church board had been given permission to go in and look around. Plans were already underway for rebuilding, if you could call tearing the place down and putting up something entirely new on the same spot “rebuilding.” Whatever. At least it would be a church and not a new apartment building or a water-treatment plant or whatever it was they committed urban renewal in the name of nowadays. Ca-vanaugh Street didn’t need to be renewed. It didn’t even need to be cleaned. At least once a week, the older women and the women who had just come from Armenia went out and hosed down the sidewalks. It wasn’t the famous scrubbing the Swiss were supposed to do, but it did insure that debris didn’t collect in the gutters and that the sidewalks were clear of the sort of stains dogs left in spite of the pooper-scooper law. He was, he thought, avoiding the issue, as he almost always avoided the issue these days. He found it much easier to deal with the death of Tony Ross than he did the destruction of Holy Trinity Church. The death of Tony Ross was both sensible and explicable. At the end of the day, they would find one of the usual suspects: a disgruntled employee; a jilted lover; his wife. Maybe his wife had hired a hitman. From what Gregor had seen of Charlotte Deacon Ross, he wouldn’t put it past her.
He got his coat out of the foyer and went downstairs. Tibor still wasn’t back from the hospital, and nobody was in Bennis’s old apartment on the second floor. Grace was still playing upstairs. This time, it was music he couldn’t identify at all, although since she played with a chamber group that specialized in Baroque, he expected it was some of that. He got down to the first floor and saw that there was a note on old George Tekemanian’s door asking the old man to call Sheila Kashinian as soon as he got in. That was new since Bennis had dropped him off. Gregor wondered what Sheila Kashinian wanted, besides a new fur coat every fall and a vacation in the Bahamas every winter. It was remarkable how predictable people got as they got older. He wondered if it had happened to him as well.
Out on the street, he didn’t feel depressed, or pessimistic, or frightened. If you face your fears instead of run from them, they’ll be easier to bear, his mother used to say, when he was growing up on this very street, in the days when the buildings were all divided up into tiny apartments and most people’s parents spoke English badly and never at home. He turned up the street toward the church and the Ararat. He still went to the Ararat for breakfast every morning. That meant he’d been passing the church at least twice a day since the explosion happened. He’d been passing it on the other side of the street, deliberately, in a way he never would have only a month ago. It was too bad he hadn’t been on the bomb investigation squad at the Bureau. He’d had the standard training in explosives, but that had been in his training year, and after that he’d never had any cause to use the information. Use it or lose it. Bennis said that about something other than information.
He got to the church and crossed the street so that he could stand on the sidewalk directly in front of it. The yellow barrier tapes were still up, warning him of danger and the illegality of trespassing. He stepped over the one nearest to him and walked up the shallow steps to what used to be Holy Trinity’s front door. That was gone, and so was the wall that had divided the vestibule from the sacristy. He could look right down the center aisle to the altar. The pews were covered with junk. The roof was only half standing. Near the front to his right, it had caved in entirely. Toward the middle on the left side, there was a large hole like a ragged skylight. Rain had come through it and spread water stains across the pews.
He was thinking that it would not be ridiculously dangerous if he walked up to the altar and assessed the damage for himself, when he realized he was being watched. There was somebody behind him, staring at him. In the worst-case scenario, it would be a reporter—but there wasn’t really any danger of that. As long as the Tony Ross case was front-page news, very few reporters would bother with coming down here. In the best-case scenario, it was somebody from the street, maybe one of the Very Old Women, waiting to lecture him on taking foolish chances. He turned around to see who was stalking him and stopped, confused. The person standing on the sidewalk in the place he had just left was nobody he had expected at all.