“Go to CNN,” Jig Tyler said. “That ought to work.”
Alison hesitated, and then went. The window came up with a picture of Drew Harrigan in the middle of it, and for just one moment Alison thought it was nothing but another story about the murder. Then she saw the inset picture of a vapid-looking blonde holding up what seemed to be a piece of legal-sized typing paper, and the words: HARRIGAN WIDOW NAMES NAMES.
“What’s this?” Alison said.
“That’s Mrs. Drew Harrigan, the fair Ellen,” Jig Tyler said. “Have you met her?”
“I’ve never even seen a picture of her before. Who’s she naming the names of?”
“Well, there’s you, for one. And me.”
Alison looked up. “Me? Why? I don’t even know her.”
“I do, although only in passing. Believe it or not, the Harrigans and I get invited to some of the same fund-raisers. You’d be amazed at the people I’m willing to put up with for charity. The names she’s naming are the list of people she believes had motive, opportunity, and blind unreasoning hatred to kill her husband.”
Alison blinked. “But that makes no sense,” she said. “Why would I want to kill her husband?”
Jig Tyler pointed to the envelope on the desk. “That. Drew Harrigan is dead and the inquiry is over.”
“But it doesn’t have anything to do with that,” Alison said. “It can’t have. I threatened to sue the department back to the Stone Age. That’s what happened.”
“That’s not what it’s going to look like.”
“But this is ridiculous,” Alison said. “The police can’t be taking this seriously.”
“Well,” Jig Tyler said, “if my sources are to be believed, and they usually are, she took it to the police first. Actually to Gregor Demarkian. Tracked him down at that convent where the body was found this morning and gave the list to him. Then she seems not to have believed that he was taking it seriously, so she came back here and called a press conference. That was at about ten thirty. It’s now just about noon, and that story is on every wire service on the planet. The police are going to have to take it seriously.”
“Good God,” Alison said.
“Assuming God exists, I doubt if he’s good. But mostly I assume he doesn’t exist. Do you believe in God?”
“No, not really, I suppose. I don’t think about it much.”
“For what it’s worth, I don’t think Drew Harrigan believed in God much, either. He just found God a convenient co-pilot for the show. Have you listened to the show?”
“I tried once. I couldn’t get through it.”
“It’s frightening how many stupid people there are in the world,” Jig said. “And the most frightening thing of all is that they know they’re stupid. They feel it. That’s why they get so hysterical about ‘pointy-headed intellectuals’ who ‘look down on them.’ It’s projection. They look down on them selves. And it’s not just the ones who vote Republican. If you ask me, the Democrats are worse. The liberals are the worst of all. It’s a shill. They make people believe things can get better if they just fool around with the system a little, instead of getting rid of the whole thing at once.”
“You think that’s wrong? That things can never get better by fooling around with the system a little?”
“They can get superficially better,” Jig Tyler said. “You can buy people off with a house and a car and enough money for a vacation every summer. They don’t notice that the house is a crackerbox in a soulless housing development where all the neighbors’ houses are the same, or the car breaks down in five years, or the summer vacation means trekking out to a godforsaken little patch of sand with five thousand other people crowded onto it and staying in the kind of motel that advertises rooms for twenty dollars a night, no cable. They don’t notice that the people who are robbing them blind have their own islands in the Caribbean and their own planes with full bedroom and bath facilities and never get crowded anywhere.”
“I read one of your books once,” Alison said. “The One Party System, that one.”
“So I’m repeating myself,” Jig Tyler said. “I’m sorry. I just get so carried away. It seems so obvious to me. There are many more of us than there are of them. They can’t continue to rule unless we allow them to continue to rule. For decades, every time another election came around, I’d expect to see an insurgency. I almost thought I had one in the sixties. The sixties were a sham, and since then we’ve had nothing but corporate party politics. It’s like toothpaste that comes in three different colors. They’re all the same. The differences between them are superficial.”