Living Witness (41 page)

“Annie-Vic Hadley wasn't a good ole boy, and she wasn't a hillbilly. Judy Cornish and Shelley Niederman weren't hillbillies, either. I've never seen a case that had less to do with hillbillies than this one.”

“Bullshit,” Dale Vardan said. “What's this whole thing about? Bible-thumping idiots, that's what, all worked up because somebody told them they were descended from monkeys. Well, look at them. They look like they were descended from monkeys. They look like they're
still
monkeys.”

“That's the thing,” Gregor said. “You see all these papers? I looked through them this morning, and then I had Miss Hadley's grandniece look through them again this afternoon, just in case I missed something. You know what's not here? There's not a single thing, not one, having anything to do with Creationism and evolution, or even with the lawsuit.”

“Well, Hell,” Dale Vardan said. “Our guy took 'em, that's why. There's something in those papers about him and he doesn't want us to see.”

“Took them when?”

“Took them yesterday,” Dale Vardan said. “When he murdered the other woman. He had plenty of time.”

“Then why did he murder Shelley Niederman?”

“Because he's not murdering them for the papers,” Dale Vardan said. “He's murdering them because they're Satan-worshiping secular humanists who want to bring that stuff about monkeys into the Snow Hill public schools. Hillbillies,
Mr
. Demarkian. I told you. They're walking advertisements for mercy killing, only it would be a mercy to the rest of us if they'd just all end up dead.”

 

It was nearly five o'clock by the time Gregor got back to town, and by then he knew he would be spending another night with Gary Albright.

“It's really not a problem,” Bennis told him when he called. “If anything, it's probably a good thing you're out of the way. You'd only get caught up in this fight about the church. Go solve a murder and come back when it's over.”

Gregor didn't even want to think about what it meant that that argument was still going on. “Did you talk to Sister Beata?” he asked. “Did you find out anything about Catholics and evolution?”

“Only that Catholics have no trouble accepting evolution, because they've never taken the Bible to be literally true,” Bennis said. “Apparently, that's a Protestant thing. She gave me some stuff to give you to read and I put it on your night table. Do you want me to send it to you?”

“No, not really, not now,” Gregor said. “I still wish I understood all this, but I've got two murders and an attempted murder on my hands at the moment, so I'll let it wait. I wish I understood people better than I do.”

“You understand people better than most people do,” Bennis said.

“Which doesn't bode well for the human race,” Gregor told her. “Never mind. I have an early dinner meeting, except it isn't going to be so early by the time I get there. And what's worse, there's only one place in town to eat, it's owned by a suspect, and she hates me. Of course, she seems to hate practically everybody, so it's probably nothing personal.”

“Maybe I ought to come out there and keep you company.”

“If you do, Donna and a bunch of Armenian-American women are going to come with you, and I think I'd go crazy. I'll talk to you later. I've got to go eat a greasy hamburger on a cardboard bun. Let me tell you, it's not true that these little diners are going out of business because McDonald's is underselling them. It's because their food tastes like this.”

He flipped the phone shut and put it in his pocket. He was actually standing just outside the Snow Hill Diner. On any other day, he would probably have gone inside to sit down before calling Bennis. On this day he was just tired, and tired of being out in the sticks. He was not a small-town person. He didn't find such towns friendly, and he didn't find them comforting. In his experience, the smaller the town, the more likely it was to be a hotbed of intrigue and resentment. And resentment was the word for what was going on at the Snow Hill Diner and in Alice McGuffie's head.

Gregor looked through the window, past the half curtains and the gold-stenciled lettering. Molly Trask and Evan Zwicker were already sitting in a booth at the back, waiting for him.

Gregor went inside. There was no hostess, as there was at the Ararat back home, and no procedure for seating except to let you seat yourself. There were plastic yellow ribbon magnets reading
SUPPORT OUR TROOPS
here and there, a few American flag posters, and a big poster of a gigantic bald eagle right over the counter. The bald eagle looked either constipated or angry. It was hard to tell which.

Gregor made his way to the back and sat down across from the two agents-in-place. They both looked thoroughly bored.

“Good evening, Mr. Demarkian,” Evan Zwicker said. “We were just talking about your latest murder.”

“We were talking about whether or not there really was some kind of domestic terrorism going on,” Molly said. “You know, when you brought that up when we first met you, I thought you were being silly.”

“I was guessing, that's all,” Gregor said, as a girl came over with an order pad. When he looked a second time, he realized she wasn't a girl. She was a middle-aged woman and she looked exhausted. “I'll have a cup of coffee to start, and then I'll look at the menu,” he said.

The woman went away without a word. Gregor wondered what she went back to when she left the diner for the night. Then he wondered which side of the evolution/Intelligent Design debate she was on, or if she even knew there was a debate.

“If it makes you feel any better,” he said. “I'm now close to certain that there's no domestic terrorism, or any kind of terrorism, happening here. I think what we have is a plain old-fashioned murder, for plain old-fashioned motives.”

“I don't know,” Evan said. “I was beginning to think things were looking up. At least domestic terrorism would give us something to do. I don't think we've ever been so bored.”

“Well,” Gregor said, “you could always tell Kevin O'Connor that I thought there was a good possibility of domestic terrorism. In fact, I'd appreciate it if you would say that, because I need you to do something for me. This place simply doesn't have the resources to do the kind of investigation I need. And I don't have them, either.”

“What do you need?” Molly asked.

Gregor reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and came out with a folded piece of paper. He had written it carefully when he was still in Annie-Vic's house. He had wanted to make sure to get all the spelling right. He pushed the paper across the table.

“I want you to find out as much as you can about those three things,” he said. “Specifically, I want to know everything I can about how those three things are connected to the Snow Hill Board of Education.”

Molly Trask opened the paper and looked at what was written there. “Well,” she said, “Dellbach Construction. I've seen that name somewhere.”

“They're doing the new school complex,” Evan told her. “They've got a big sign out there on the road. We pass it nearly every day.”

“Ah,” Molly said. “But this other thing—this other thing. Isn't this a teachers' union you're talking about?”

“The local branch of the American Federation of Teachers,” Gregor said. “Absolutely.”

Molly Trask pushed the paper away. “For God's sake,” she said. “We can't investigate a teachers' union. Not without authorization from somebody a lot higher up than you. I don't think even Kevin could okay it without getting permission from Washington practically.”

“Well, I'm not interested in the union, per se,” Gregor said. “I'm interested in whoever the local person is who's doing the negotiating on this latest teachers' contract.”

Evan Zwicker shook his head. “It doesn't work like that,” he said. “The national office will send somebody out to do the negotiating. That's part of the reason for joining a big outfit like the AFT. They've got lawyers. They've got ombudsmen. They've got professional negotiators. If you're saying you think there's something corrupt going on with those negotiations, we have a big deal here.”

“Because it wouldn't just be the one guy, if you see what I mean,” Molly said. “They've got checks and balances, these unions do. They have to. The Justice Department doesn't trust them as far as it can throw them, so they've all got procedures, ways of checking on their people, that kind of thing. Which means that if something is going on, it's almost certainly going on all the way to the top. They're either clean or they're shot through with corruption.”

“All right,” Gregor said, filing that one for later. He reached over to the piece of paper and tapped on the item at the bottom. “With that one—I'm not sure just how you should go about it. The school district keeps a textbook fund somewhere. I don't know where. There must be a bank account, bank records, that kind of thing. And the district gets operating money, too. I need the bank information.”

“Well, that'll be easy enough,” Evan said.

“We may need a warrant,” Molly said.

“We can get a warrant,” Evan said. “But we might not need one. A lot of districts these days operate with sunshine rules. They publish their stuff at least once every year or two. The first thing we ought to do is look through the local paper and the local records. Everything you want could be right out in public like that, or it could have been sent as a report to every household in the town. Then all you have to wonder about is whether the accountant is honest.”

“Can we check that out?” Gregor asked.

“Sure,” Molly said. “You know, I hate to say it, but this is the best I've felt since we got here. It really has been boring. I mean, in spite of
all the things people say, there just doesn't seem to be any real craziness going on here over that lawsuit. Unless, you know, that's what the murders are about, and there really is somebody willing to kill other people because they believe in evolution.”

The middle-aged waitress was back, with her order pad.

Gregor didn't bother to look at the menu, which he had already seen several times in the last two days. He just reminded himself not to order anything fried or with a sauce, and opted for a turkey sandwich on toast with the vain hope that it would not come covered with enough mayonnaise to float the
Queen Elizabeth II
.

 

 

By the time the police cars and the cable news vans got back to Main Street, Franklin Hale was scared to death—except that he never thought of himself as scared, so he decided he had to be angry instead. And he was angry, on some level, angry at the way his town was being torn apart by all this crap, and at the way nobody in those cable news vans really cared about anything or anybody that was actually here. That was what Franklin had figured out, long before all this started. The people who ran cable news companies, the people who went to Washington to be representatives and senators, the people who wrote books and articles for magazines—all those people lived in their own special world, where all the people they met and all the people they knew were just like themselves. The other people, the people who made up most of the country, the people left behind in small towns and small cities and second-tier suburbs,
Franklin's
people, well those people might as well not exist. They were only important once every few years, when it came time to vote. Even then, they were more like animals in a zoo than real people, which was why people like Chris Matthews and Anderson Cooper could spend Sunday mornings
nattering on about The Mind of the Swing Voter instead of talking about anything serious.

Franklin Hale hated Chris Matthews, and Anderson Cooper, and Bill and Hillary Clinton. He hated Barack Obama and John McCain. He hated Chelsea Clinton and Susan Sarandon and all three of the Dixie Chicks. He hated Barbara Walters and all the women on
The View
. He hated both his senators and his congressman, and most of all he hated every single faculty member of every single university in the Ivy League. But here was the thing—his hate was simply a mental tic he paid very little attention to, as long as all these people stuck to the bargain. That was what was really wrong with the country. It wasn't that hotshots at Harvard thought gay guys should marry each other or that snooty little Hollywood starlets looked down their noses at him because he believed in what God Himself had set down in the Bible, instead of all this Darwin evolution crap. No, that wasn't the problem. That kind of thing had always been true. He remembered it from all the way back in his childhood, the way people like Annie-Vic rolled their eyes at the stupidity of the local yokels, the way people like David Suskind pontificated about the mental weaknesses of the ordinary voter.

No, Franklin thought, that wasn't the problem, that was just life. But up to now, up to just the past twenty years or so, there had been a bargain. Those people lived in their world, and Franklin lived in his own, and neither world told the other world what to do. They had no right, those people, they had no right to come in here and tell him and all the good people of Snow Hill that they had to live the way Hollywood wanted them to live, that they had to think the way Harvard wanted them to think. They had no right to crowd into the nooks and crannies of American life and suck up all the air. That was what it felt like. They sucked up all the air, and more and more, Franklin Hale felt as if he couldn't breathe.

No wonder Marcey was a wreck. No wonder his own home life was an endless saga of pills and liquor and that Ferris wheel of Marcey's mood swings. They sucked up all the air, those people did. They
turned the entire world into their backyard, where all the standards were theirs, where all the judgments were theirs, where nothing counted as success unless they wanted it to. That was what was wrong, Franklin knew. If their kind of success was the only kind of success there was, then everybody else was a failure. Everybody.