28 Hearts of Sand (22 page)

Andy snapped the briefcase shut. He put it back down on the floor again, but near his own leg instead of Kyle’s. Kyle felt the other briefcase being slid toward him. Andy reached into the breast pocket of his suit jacket and took out a pad and pen.

“You’d think they’d have at least a modicum of common sense,” Andy said, “and they never do.”

“It’s the time and the place,” Kyle said. “It’s tax-free money. And the money is all that matters.”

“The money was always all that mattered,” Andy said.

“Maybe,” Kyle said.

“No maybe about it,” Andy said. “Can you imagine Steve Durham pulling a stunt like this for anything but money? Bringing some guy a hundred thousand dollars in cash, in the middle of the day, coming all the way up here from Washington, the whole bit—can you imagine him doing it for any other reason?”

“No,” Kyle said. “But it wasn’t Senator Durham I was thinking about.”

“Who were you thinking about? Mother Teresa? She did a lot for money, too, even if it wasn’t to buy herself Mercedes convertibles. The whole world runs on money.”

Andy wrote a long note on the top page of the pad, signed it at the bottom, and handed it across the table to Kyle. Kyle read it through very carefully and then folded it up and put it in his pocket.

“Have you ever heard of Dr. Jonas Salk?” he asked Andy.

Andy had ordered himself a cheesecake of his own. Now that business had been concluded, he was happily eating it.

“Not a clue,” he said.

“He was a guy back in the forties and fifties who discovered one of the first really effective vaccines for polio,” Kyle said. “There was another guy around the same time who discovered one, too, but the guy you hear about is always Salk. He was a doctor at a time when doctors didn’t get rich, and he discovered the vaccine in a back room. He wasn’t part of a big research staff. Anyway, he discovered this vaccine, and the offers came pouring in to have him lease the rights to it to drug companies. He could have gotten hugely rich. People were willing to pay anything to make sure their children didn’t get polio, and there were polio epidemics almost every summer.”

“So?” Andy asked. “Did he end his days living in the Caribbean with native girls?”

“There are no native girls in the Caribbean,” Kyle said. “And he ended his days in a modest two-story house where he’d lived for most of his adult life. He didn’t make a dime out of the polio vaccine. He gave the formula away for free on condition that the people who made the stuff also give it away or free. He thought making sure no child ever again got polio was more important than the money.”

Andy shook his head. “If you think I’m going to admire that, I don’t. It’s a stupid Hollywood gesture. You need money to survive in this world, and there’s no point in scraping by if you don’t have to. I don’t see you scraping by. You had a job with Legal Aid. You didn’t stay there.”

“No,” Kyle admitted. “I didn’t.”

“And that friend of yours out in Alwych,” Andy said. “Tim what’s his name, that runs the clinic.”

“Brand,” Kyle said.

“He may spend his time running a free clinic, but he’s got trust fund money out the wazoo. He isn’t putting himself in any danger of going broke.”

“No, he isn’t.”

“Life’s a bitch and then you die,” Andy said. “There isn’t anything that would make me sit still with scraping by if I didn’t have to. And the only reason why I don’t go for the kind of thing the senator did is that I know I wouldn’t get away with it.”

“I’ve got to go,” Kyle said. “I’m supposed to be doing something with fireworks for a party tonight. Tomorrow’s the Fourth of July.”

“Don’t I know it.”

“Do you think it was all about the money for them, too?” Kyle asked. “John Adams. George Washington. Thomas Jefferson.”

“Sure it was,” Andy said. “They were a bunch of rich guys who didn’t want to pay taxes to Great Britain. I can’t believe you’re having this fit. You never struck me as that kind of guy.”

“I never struck me as that kind of guy, either,” Kyle said.

He got out of the booth and reached under the table for the briefcase that was identical to the one he’d brought, but much lighter. Then he walked down the length of the deli and out into the bright hot air.

2

By eight o’clock, Tim Brand was willing to admit that there was not going to be much business at the clinic for the night. He went out the back door to sit on the low stone wall next to the stairs that led up to Main Street. It was usually quiet back there, except for the nurses taking cigarette breaks.

He took his cell phone out of his pocket and checked for messages, but there were none of any importance. He took out a package of Altoids peppermints and opened it. He stuck three of the things in his mouth and felt his tongue burn.

There was a noise at the top of the cement stairs and he looked up. A woman was coming down toward him, wearing a longish skirt and a T-shirt and espadrilles. He knew who she was immediately, but what his mind told him was:
She’s still eighteen.

The woman got to the bottom of the stairs, and the face became—well, not eighteen anymore.

We’re both forty-eight,
Tim thought.

Virginia came the rest of the way down the stairs and took a seat a little ways from him on the stone wall. Then she took a pack of cigarettes out of the pocket of her skirt and lit up.

“I can’t do this in public anymore,” she said. “Put a picture of this in the paper and I’m probably done. I love cigarettes, though. I think it’s one of the great injustices of the world that they aren’t good for you.”

“They are good for you in some ways,” Tim said. “It’s just that, in other ways, they kill you. I thought you’d quit.”

“I thought I’d quit, too. I smoke about five of the things a day now. It’s better than the old three packs.”

Tim watched as Virginia studied her cigarette. People rarely noticed it, but they looked remarkably alike. It wasn’t that common in fraternal twins.

“Is there a reason for the visit?” he asked. “It can’t be just because you’re in town. You’re in town a lot without coming to see me.”

“I could say I came because there are things I wanted to know, but you wouldn’t believe me.”

“What do you want to know?”

“Well,” Virginia said, “I’d like to know why it’s all right for you to do what you do and at the same time deny women common ordinary things men would expect to have without issue, but when I fight for women to have those things, I’m just advancing a selfish agenda. I’d like to know why denying and depriving and restricting women is an acceptable foible in someone doing Good Works, when it wouldn’t be an acceptable foible to treat anybody else that way. Why is it, Tim, that what women need is always a side issue?”

“I’m not depriving or denying anyone anything,” Tim said. “I am living according to the dictates of my conscience, just as you’re living according to the dictates of yours.”

“And the dictates of your conscience say what? That what women need, what they want, what they hope, what they dream—that all that doesn’t matter? That they’re nothing but broodmares for the social order? That nothing about them is really human except the content of their wombs?”

“We’re not going to get anywhere with this, Virginia. We’ve done it before.”

“I know,” Virginia said.

The cigarette had burned down to the stub. She threw it on the ground and stubbed it out. She was, Tim thought, a very beautiful woman.

“I thought we ought to talk about something else,” Virginia said, sounding more than a little abrupt. “That man is here. Gregor Demarkian.”

“I know,” Tim said.

“I’m not worried about him, exactly,” Virginia said. “I know I didn’t kill Chapin. I’m pretty sure you didn’t, either. And I don’t know who did. If you want to know the truth, it astonishes me that anybody would after all this time.”

“Evaline Veer?” Tim suggested. “That’s the best I’ve been able to come up with.”

“Hope called me,” Virginia said.

“She came here, too,” Tim said.

“She was out of her mind frantic,” Virginia said. “I mean completely out of her mind. She doesn’t—handle things well.”

“No,” Tim agreed.

“I kept thinking she was going to make people think she was guilty of something whether she was or not.”

“She did go and talk to that man,” Tim said. “You know, the one with the books. Knight Sion Publishing, or whatever that was.”

“I can’t see what she had to tell him that he didn’t already know,” Virginia said.

“He paid her a few hundred dollars,” Tim said. “She came and talked to me about it this morning. She said she was feeling guilty about betraying us, and I said I didn’t think it was much of a betrayal. You’re right. There isn’t much the man didn’t already know, and not much he hadn’t published, either. I was glad she had the money. There isn’t much teaching available in the summers. I don’t think she eats right.”

“There wasn’t any need for it to ruin any of us. It didn’t ruin you. Or me. Or Kyle.”

“It ruined Marty and Chapin.”

“Marty is dead,” Virginia said. Then she shivered. “Chapin is dead, too, but it doesn’t feel real to me. I think I’ve been assuming she’s been dead all these years. But Marty—well, I don’t think about the robberies much. I didn’t take part in them, and I didn’t suspect Chapin and Marty did until there was all that fuss on the news. But I do remember that damned accident.”

“I don’t think it would be possible to forget, either,” Tim said. “I remember the screeching noise and then being slammed into the back of the front seat and then being twisted around like a pretzel. I wasn’t wearing a seat belt.”

Virginia took out her cigarettes again, looked at them for a moment, and put them back into her pocket.

“I’d better go,” she said. “They’re probably looking for me.”

“You know I’m not praying that you win your election.”

“I do know,” Virginia said. “And I don’t pray, but I’m not hoping you get out from under the laws of the State of Connecticut. I’m not hoping that you have to close, mind you. I do hope you’re going to see the light.”

“I have seen the light,” Tim said, “and if the state prevails and demands that I hand out the morning-after pill, I will close. I will shut the place down cold and I’ll make it entirely clear why.”

“And everybody will call you a hero for doing it,” Virginia said. “I do have to go, Tim. I have to get back to the fight to make the world safe for selfish, shallow feminists.”

“Your words, not mine.”

“I don’t understand why it’s always all right to shortchange and restrict and disadvantage women,” Virginia said. “Except, on some level, mostly I do. I’ll see you later.”

“Probably sometime next year,” Tim said.

Virginia gave him a little smile and then ran up the concrete steps as quickly and as smoothly as if she really had been still eighteen. Tim watched her go with a feeling that was a lot like pain.

SEVEN

1

Gregor Demarkian’s instructions to the Alwych Police Department did just what he’d expected them to do. They’d made the entire population of the APD headquarters start running around in circles. By the time he arrived back in Alwych, officers and technicians had been dispatched to the Waring house to “fingerprint everything in sight,” as Jason Battlesea put it, and a couple of people had been called in from the state police to help. Gregor had an almost irresistible urge to ask if the state police forensics people had lost their accreditation along with their lab, but he managed to choke it back and then to go over, once more, what he needed them all to do. He had no idea if he would actually be able to get Ray Guy Pearce arrested for something, but he did know he was going to try.

“We got the FBI on the phone,” Jason Battlesea said, “and some guy named Fitzgerald said to tell you that this man you’re interested in has never been fingerprinted. So if you’re going to check for his fingerprints, you’re going to have to have some reason to bring him in. He’s some kind of lawyer.”

Gregor considered this. Ray Guy Pearce a lawyer? There was nothing impossible about it, and given the man’s mental state on every level, it had probably been a smart move. Lawyer or not, though, there were ways to get a man fingerprinted.

“I’m surprised somebody hasn’t insisted over the years,” Gregor said, “but it doesn’t matter. We’ll get him fingerprinted. And then I’m going to break his head.”

“But I don’t understand,” Jason Battlesea said. “Is this the person who killed Chapin Waring? He came in from outside and killed her? But why would he do that? If he knew her in Queens, why didn’t he kill her in Queens?”

“He didn’t know her like that,” Gregor said. “He thought he was shielding her from the agents of the worldwide reptilian conspiracy.”

“What?”

Gregor shook his head. “Mr. Pearce believes,” he said, “that the entire world is run by thirteen families, the richest thirteen families on the planet. The members of these families are not human. They are the descendants of the union of human women with Satan’s demons. And these thirteen families have been the same families since the beginning of time. They just pretend to be other people in order to fool the public about the true nature of the world. So, you see, they’ll create the illusion that someone like Bill Clinton was born and grew up in poverty, when in reality he was the son of one of these families, and being groomed to take power.”

Jason Battlesea looked bewildered. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but that sounds like gibberish. Are you trying to tell me that this Pearce guy is crazy?”

“Not in the way you mean, no,” Gregor said. “There are a lot of people in the world—in the world, mind you, not just in the United States—who believe versions of that story. And there are a lot of versions. There are Catholic and Protestant versions, atheist versions, Muslim versions. A little twist here and there, and the story works for anybody. Ray Guy Pearce thought Chapin Waring was a member of one of those thirteen families, and that she had escaped from that family and now wanted to tell the truth to the world. But she couldn’t poke her head above the radar, or they would find her, capture her, and destroy her.”