Conspiracy Theory(64)

They pulled up in front of the house itself, a long Gothic pile stretched out a good two hundred feet along the drive, 50,000 square feet, 100 family rooms. A uniformed police officer came toward them, waving. At the last moment, he saw Gregor sitting in the backseat and waved the cab on. The cab pulled as far forward as it could, which wasn’t much. There seemed to be dozens of vehicles parked near the front door: police cars, a forensics van, an ambulance, unmarkeds. It looked as if everybody in this corner of the Main Line had decided to come down here and get in on the action.

The cab pulled to a halt. Gregor glanced at the meter, took his wallet out of his pocket, and threw enough money into the front seat to be sure that the driver would get not only his fare but a tip. He got out into the cold dark air and looked around. Frank Margiotti was standing in the arched front doorway, talking to someone Gregor did not recognize. A moment later, the unrecognized someone took off for the interior of the house, and Frank looked up and saw Gregor.

“Thank God,” he said, running down the front steps to where Gregor was still stymied by the maze of equipment laid out along the walk. “Sorry to pull you away from whatever it was you were doing, but we need some help here. And we didn’t want to ask the FBI.”

“Not that particular agent of the FBI, no,” Gregor said. “Is he still here?”

“We don’t know,” Frank said. “We didn’t call him. We’ve got—ah. This is a mess. They just got the body back. Tony Ross’s body. They were in there getting ready for the wake.”

“And Mrs. Ross was where when she died?”

Frank Margiotti waved his hands down the drive. “Out there. It was nearly exact, really. She must have been doing what Tony Ross was doing on the night he was killed, going down the walk for some reason—”

“Tony Ross was greeting somebody,” Gregor pointed out. “There were people arriving that night, a lot of them. Were there people coming here tonight?”

“No. Not until tomorrow. Tomorrow is the wake.” Frank Margiotti looked around. “I’ve been on the Main Line most of my life. I’ve lived with these people. I still can never get over them. Who would want to have a wake in their own house?”

“It’s a big house,” Gregor said.

“Yeah, yeah. It’s a dead body. A very dead body. I wouldn’t want a dead body anywhere near where I sleep. They’re all in there in the something or the other. Morning room.”

“Who?”

“The daughters. Four of them. And this guy named David Alden. Like Miles Standish and John Alden, except I didn’t say that, because I’m not crazy. Come on in. Marty is expecting you. And we’re all completely strung out.”

Gregor looked back over his shoulder to the walk on the other side of the door and saw that the chalk marks of the body were indeed down, and saw a barrier to make sure that nobody stepped on them or entered the immediate scene while forsenics was working. Then he followed Frank into the entrance hall. It was an entrance hall on a grand scale, built by a Robber Baron to accommodate delusions of grandeur that might have been less delusionary than many people supposed. It must have been remarkable to be newly rich in an age like that, when so many other people were becoming newly rich along with you, and nobody laughed when you brought back entire walls of English castles to install in the Pennsylvania suburbs.

The entrance hall led to another wide hall that Gregor remembered was called the gallery. There were paintings on the walls, but not important ones. The Rosses had a serious art collection somewhere. Gregor wasn’t sure if it was on the grounds or outside them. Maybe they had endowed a museum. Toward the end of the gallery on the right side, doors were open and people were wandering in and out of them, but not many people, and not very often. Gregor noticed an enormous portrait of a portly man in formal evening dress with a monocle in his left eye. He looked less imposing than uncomfortable.

Frank went all the way to the end, to a swinging door that had been propped shut with a wastebasket. He turned right into the nearest room and said, “Here he is, Marty. Got here as soon as the cab could get him here.”

Marty Tackner stopped talking to a tall young woman without makeup and came over. “Mr. Demarkian. We’re glad to see you. Nobody has the faintest idea what happened—”

“I do,” the young woman without makeup said. She strode over to them, looking angry. What she really looked like was Tony Ross, right down to the thick eyebrows that arched almost to a point at the center. “Somebody killed my mother, that’s what happened.”