“Of course.” David smiled. “Don’t think I’m giving anything away. You can check with my club. They keep records. Ryall Wyndham and I were the two best shots in the place except for Charlotte herself, and nobody is ever going to be better than Charlotte. Than Charlotte was. It’s hard to wrap my mind about the fact that the reason we’re standing here is that she’s a bloody mess on the front walk and it isn’t just Tony who’s dead.”
“Ryall Wyndham didn’t learn to shoot at private school, though, did he?” Gregor asked. “His background is ambiguous.”
David shrugged. “There are always people like Ryall around. All this matters to them. They do what they have to do to be close to it. I don’t see that it matters. If you meet them in business, all you really care about is how good they are at what they do. If they’re very good, you adopt them. Ryall isn’t very good at business that I can tell. He writes a gossip column.”
“About people who say they don’t want to be gossiped about.”
“That’s all right, Mr. Demarkian. Ryall doesn’t print the kind of gossip people like Charlotte don’t want to see in the papers, and I’m not sure he could if he wanted to. It’s not the thirties anymore. People don’t care about debutantes and Society parties the way they used to. You couldn’t make The Philadelphia Story now.”
“People care about the banks,” Gregor said. “They care about layoffs, and companies that pull up stakes and leave communities high and dry.”
“True, but Ryall doesn’t know much about any of that. He does know who’s had to go off and have an abortion this month, and who got sent down from Foxcroft for sneaking a boy into her room at midnight, and who had to have a marriage annulled. It’s odd to think that sixty years ago, that would have been big news in the local papers. Now, you’d practically have to hump Britney Spears under the Liberty Bell to get the papers to take any notice.”
“You could kill somebody,” Gregor said. “That gets the papers to take notice.”
“True.” David put his drink glass down. It was empty, except for the remains of two ice cubes at the very bottom. All the liquid was clear. “Before this, I was sure we had a political sniper. One of the antiglobalization people. One of the conspiracy people. We do watch them, you know. We’re not idiots. Most of them are perfectly harmless, just a little cracked. Some of them are dangerous.”
“And you think the murder of Charlotte Deacon Ross rules out any participation by conspiracy groups?”
“Well, it would have to, wouldn’t it?” David said. “Why would a conspiracy group want to kill Charlotte? I wanted to kill Charlotte. Most of the people who knew her did. She was that kind of woman. I’m sometimes surprised at the fact that Marianne has managed to go this long without denouncing her mother in a tell-all book, but Marianne was Tony’s favorite. She wouldn’t have done anything to pain him. But a conspiracy group? The only thing Charlotte ever conspired at was fixing the invitation list for the Philadelphia Assemblies.”
“It doesn’t bother you that you’ve just admitted to having wanted to kill a woman who’s just been murdered?”
“It doesn’t bother me to admit to anything that’s a matter of public record,” David said, “and besides, you know as well as I do that I wasn’t admitting to wanting to actually kill her. Don’t be ingenuous.”
“I’ll try not to be,” Gregor said. The lights coming through the front windows were changing. The strobe effect was getting fainter. Maybe one of the marked police cars was leaving. “Tell me,” he said. “What are you doing here? You worked with Mr. Ross at his bank, didn’t you?”
“Yes. I was his confidential assistant, which is a nice way of saying his hitman and his spy. A man in Tony’s position has to have one.”
“And the bank is where? The physical building, I mean. Where you work.”
“It’s in New York.”
“What?”
“It’s in New York,” David said patiently. “It’s in the financial district. We’re only a few blocks from what used to be the World Trade Center. We were both at our desks when they evacuated the area on September eleventh. We had to close down for almost three days.”
“Do you live in New York?” Gregor asked.
“I live in Philadelphia,” David said. “I have a town house in Society Hill.”
“And you commute from there to New York? Every day?”
“On and off. Sometimes I stay in New York for days. Sometimes I go back and forth. It’s not all that odd,” David said. “Lots of people do it. Tony did it. You can get in by Amtrak express in no time at all. Or you can do what Tony did, and have a driver. The commute is no worse than to the outer suburbs in Connecticut. And I grew up here.”