Hardscrabble Road

by Jane Haddam

  She pulled through the driveway, wedged narrowly between two buildings that both looked as if they should have been demolished in 1966. She found a neat little parking lot in back, complete with overhead security lights and parking spaces marked by clean white painted stripes. She pulled in next to the only other car and opened her driver’s side door. It really was minus eleven degrees out there. There was a wind, too, and it got up under her long wool skirt.

  “Ms. Daniel?” the man in the overcoat said.

  Kate’s own overcoat was on the backseat. She never wore a coat when she drove. It got in the way of…something. Now she reached back and pulled her coat up to her, a good camel’s hair one she’d splurged for at Brooks Brothers after the first time she’d seen herself on CNN, looking like she shopped at the Goodwill Dumpsters, never mind the Goodwill store. She got out onto the asphalt and pulled the coat around her shoulders. She leaned into the car and got her pocketbook and briefcase. She locked the car door and shut it.

  “Hi,” she said. “I’ve got a suitcase, in the trunk. Am I sleeping here?”

  The man in the overcoat sucked in air. “Ah,” he said. “Well. We’ve got you booked at the Hyatt. I mean, if it’s not your kind of thing, we could always—”

  “It’s exactly my kind of thing. I love room service. I won’t bother to get the suitcase out of the car until I get over there. There’s nothing I need in it now. Are you the one who’s going to be my aide?”

  “What? Oh, yes. I’m, uh, I’m Edmund George, yes.”

  “Do they call you Ed?”

  He looked uncomfortable. “Most people don’t call me anything,” he said. “My professors at Penn call me Mr. George.”

  “Do you want me to call you Mr. George?”

  “No.”

  This was interesting, Kate thought. She got her pocketbook strap over her shoulder. She shouldn’t call it a pocketbook. It was at least as big as her suitcase. She looked around the parking lot. It backed on a vacant lot. The buildings around them were squat and dirty and mostly dark.

  “Well,” she said, “maybe we should go inside and you can lay out the situation for me. I’m sorry I got here so late. I kept trying to leave New York and getting held up by odd things happening in traffic. I should have taken Amtrak.”

  If Mr. George was thinking that any sane person would have taken Amtrak, he didn’t say it. He just gestured in the direction of the back door to the building and started leading the way there. They’d gone to all this trouble about security lights and painted parking spaces, but what they should have done was hire a security guard. At least her car would be safe. It wasn’t the kind of thing your ordinary cocaine addict was interested in breaking into.

  Inside, the halls were clean but narrow, and the ceilings were blessedly high. The place seemed to be deserted. Mr. George led her down a small flight of stairs—they’d bought a new carpet fairly recently, Kate noticed; she wondered if that was because they’d had a sudden influx of money or because the old stuff had gotten so awful they’d had no choice—and then around a corner to a tiny office that looked as if it had been entirely papered in manila legal folders. There was a desk and a chair. There was a phone, a black one, in a “princess” style that was at least two decades out-of-date. There was a single poster on the wall, advertising Leontyne Price in Aida at the Metropolitan Opera in New York.

  “We’re not going to ask you to work in here,” Mr. George said. “This is my office, actually. I’ve got all the files you need. We’re cleaning out a space for you up at the front. We thought you could mess it up for yourself without any help from us.”

  “We didn’t go there, why?”

  “Because it isn’t open.” Mr. George flushed. “It was supposed to be, but Sheila must have forgotten and I don’t know where she keeps the spare set of keys. I’m sorry. I’m, you know, a law student. I work here part-time. It’s, I don’t know. I’m not really up on all the detail stuff with the building and that kind of thing.”

  “Okay,” Kate said. She didn’t need the office right away anyway. She needed the files and he said he had them. She took a stack of papers off the seat of the one chair in the center of the room and sat down, stretching her legs out in front of her in the long line that had once made Wolf Blitzer say to her, at a party, that if they ever made a movie about her life, they’d have to get Sigourney Weaver to play her. She was still wearing her coat. She hated wearing coats indoors. She stood up again and took it off.

  “Okay,” she said, sitting down for the second time. “So tell me. Is our client in jail?”

  “No,” Mr. George said. “We managed to get him out on bail. He isn’t really a flight risk, not in the normal sense of the term. The trouble with Sherman is that he wanders. He’s not very all there, if that makes sense.”

  “Drug addict?”

  “Alcoholic, mostly,” Mr. George said. “Although, if you ask me, it’s mostly a matter of opportunity. Sherman ingests whatever’s around to ingest. Drugs are more expensive than wine, so wine is what he usually has. One of the things we want to do is get him to a doctor and have him checked out, but he’s resisting. He says he doesn’t see any point in getting bad news he can’t do anything about.”

  “That’s sensible.”

  “It is, really. Sherman can be very sensible, sometimes. Most times, though, he’s not. He does seem to understand that he’s got court dates he has to make.”

  “Where does he live?”

  “We’ve got him put up at an SRO about five blocks from here, but he’s practically never there. He forgets, or maybe he just doesn’t want to. Usually, we find him at Holy Innocents over on Farraday Street.”

  “That’s a church?”

  “It’s a Benedictine convent. Sorry, monastery. They call them monasteries, even though it’s a place for nuns.”

  “Benedictine monasteries are usually enclosed,” Kate said. “This one isn’t.”

  “Do you mean cloistered?” Mr. George asked. “No, this one is cloistered. You can’t see most of the nuns to talk to, not even the Mother Superior, or whatever she is.”

  “Abbess.”

  “Yes, okay. Abbess. You can’t see her except behind bars, sort of. You go into this room and there’s a wall with bars, but not just up and down, also across, like an open waffle—”

  “—It’s called a grille.”

  “That’s it. Margaret Mary told me what the word was, but I forgot.”

  “Who’s Margaret Mary?”

  “A friend of mine. She’s a nun in training. A novice, I think.”

  “At Holy Innocents on Farraday Street?”

  “No,” Mr. George said. “At the Sisters of Divine Grace in upstate New York. It’s not a cloistered order. Anyway, that’s the only way you can talk to the nuns, except for two or three of them, who come out. Extern sisters, they’re called. That’s one I remember. They have a big barn on their property, heated, and they open it for homeless people when the weather gets cold. That’s the Cardinal Archbishop of Philadelphia. His idea, I mean. There used to be a church in the city that did that, and he got the idea that all Catholic facilities should do that, so they do. And Sherman likes it there. It’s on the edge of the city; it doesn’t hardly look part of the city, really. And they don’t get picky about the state he’s in, or search him for drugs or alcohol.”

  “The place must be a zoo.”

  “Apparently not. I’ve been out there a couple of times. It’s very calm. And clean, which I think may be part of the point. Anyway, Sherman likes it there better than he likes the SRO, so that’s where we look for him when we want to bring him in to court dates. I know it’s practically dogma around here never to become enmeshed in a belief in a client’s innocence, but I do think Sherman is innocent. I don’t think he got prescription drugs for Drew Harrigan or anybody else. I don’t think he could have kept himself together long enough to do it, and if he did, I think he’d forget about why and take the stuff himself.”

  Kate thought
about it for a minute. “He got stopped, didn’t he? Drew Harrigan. He was exceeding the posted speed limit in a residential zone and he got stopped by a cop. He had a couple of fistfuls of pills in a bowl of some sort sitting next to him on the front passenger seat.”

  “It was a Tupperware container, a small one. With the lid off.”

  “So the cop pulled him over and there were the pills. So then what? They took him down to the police station while they checked out the pills? What about Harrigan’s lawyer?”

  “Harrigan’s got lawyers,” Mr. George said. “A couple of dozen of them. But they did charge him that night, if that’s what you mean.”

  “That’s what I mean. And they arraigned him, when?”

  “About three days later.”

  “Is that when he started to accuse Sherman Markey of procuring the pills for him?”

  “Sort of,” Mr. George said. “It was odd, really. There was the arraignment. He entered a plea. He made the bail arrangements. He walked out of the courthouse door and held a press conference on the courthouse steps. I saw it on local TV. It looked like it had been planned.”

  “It should have been planned. If I was one of his lawyers, I’d have planned it to death. What did he do at the press conference?”

  “He did a twelve-step number,” Mr. George said. “He admitted to being addicted to prescription medication. And that’s where he did it. It was in the middle of this statement that he said something like, ‘For the last three years, I have used a man who works for me, Sherman Markey, to gain access to drugs I knew I would be unable …’ Yada, yada, yada. He didn’t actually accuse him. He just said—”

  “That Markey was getting him the stuff, yes. So the police arrested Sherman Markey.”

  “Not right away. That took a couple of days. First Drew Harrigan disappeared into rehab. And I do mean disappeared. We don’t even know the name of the facility, or its whereabouts, or anything.”

  “Does the court?”

  “It must, don’t you think?” Mr. George said. “I mean, they wouldn’t let him go off like that and not know where he was, would they?”

  “I don’t know,” Kate said. “He’s a celebrity client. It’s not as if he could disappear.”

  “He has disappeared.”

  “I meant in the long run. He’s a very recognizable man. He’s big. He’s tall. He’s loud. And even if they could manage to do something about all of that, he’s got that anomaly. ‘My heart’s in the right place, on the right side of my chest.’ ”

  “You can’t see that he was born with situs inversus.”

  “No, you can’t, but it’s a rare condition. He couldn’t go to a doctor without the doctor noticing it, or having to be told. It’s something everybody knows about. He can’t shut up about it. His heart is on the right side of his chest.”

  “So…”

  “So he couldn’t disappear for long,” Kate said again. “He’s the seven-hundred-pound elephant in the middle of the living room. How long is he supposed to be incommunicado in rehab?”

  “Sixty days. There are about forty, forty-two left.”

  “And in the meantime the legal case against him has stopped?”

  “I don’t think they’ve stopped investigating, but, yeah, they’re leaving him alone. Rehab is sacred. Instead, they’re going after Sherman as a dealer,” Mr. George said. “They’re going after him on federal as well as state charges. It’s insane. It’s as if he were a Colombian drug lord.”

  “Are they going to charge Harrigan with anything?”

  “They’ve charged him with possession of illegally obtained prescription medication. I don’t think he’s going to trial. I think they’re going to bargain it out to probation or even less. I don’t think he’s going to spend a day in jail.”

  “What does Markey say about it all?”

  “Not much. That he doesn’t know anything. That the only work he did for Harrigan was around the apartment, scut work, cleaning up. Harrigan claims he got Sherman off the street holding one of those ‘Will Work for Food’ signs.”

  “Is that possible?”

  “I don’t think Sherman would take the time to make a sign,” Mr. George said. “But Harrigan could have gotten him off the street. That’s where Sherman usually is.”

  “It’s odd, though, isn’t it? That he took this guy off the street, somebody like Harrigan, who’s always saying we should ship all the bums off to labor camps or let them die in their shoes. When was it? How long ago?”

  “He didn’t say. Harrigan didn’t. I don’t know if anybody asked Sherman. If they did, they probably didn’t get a straight answer. Sherman isn’t too good with time.”

  “Still,” Kate said, looking down at the palms of her hands as if they could tell her something, maybe about stock prices. “It doesn’t read right. Hiring him doesn’t read right. Keeping him around when he was as messed up as you say doesn’t read right. It’s as if he knew he was going to need a diversion.”

  “You mean he knew he was going to be arrested?”

  “Maybe. Or maybe he just knew he was going to be outed. If Markey wasn’t getting him the drugs, I wonder who was.”

  “You think Sherman’s innocent?”

  “I can’t tell yet,” Kate said. “We’ll straighten it out in the morning—can we find him in the morning?”

  “Sure. We can go out to Holy Innocents first thing, if you want. Meaning about six. Or we could catch him when he gets to the Liberty Bell. That’s where Sherman hangs out. At the Liberty Bell.”

  “That must be interesting for the tourists. Look, put the files I need together so I can look them over tonight, and let’s go someplace where I can get a Scotch the size of Detroit. Then you can tell me about your name.”

  “My name?”

  “Why you’re having so much trouble telling me what to call you.”

  Mr. George looked away. He had, Kate thought, a remarkably chiseled face, the kind of face that belonged to a male model more than to a law student. He looked back and blinked.

  “Chickie,” he said. “People call me Chickie. Or they used to.”

  “Used to?”

  “I’m gay. I used to, ah, before law school, I used to… camp it up. A lot. Not drag, you know, but swish, really. And then I gave that up. But I’m still gay. And I’m used to Chickie, so that’s what people call me who’ve known me for a while, but people are odd about it.”

  “You thought I’d mind that you were gay?”

  “I thought you might mind that I’m called Chickie. Except I’m trying not to be. The name is…I don’t know. Something.”

  “I’ll call you Ed, if you want. You ought to go for Edmund, though, to sound suitably Ivy League law school. But Ed?”

  “What?”

  “As long as you’re first-rate at legal research, I don’t give a flying damn if you fuck squid.”

  4

  Neil Elliot Savage disliked the Catholic Church in the same way he disliked Philly steaks, and Chinatown, and that god-awful street where the silly detective lived. It was not hate. He wasn’t about to put a sheet over his head and ride into the nearest Chinese movie theater screeching about the rights of white people and real Americans. He wasn’t even about to write the kind of letter to the editor that always got quoted in fund-raising mailings for organizations like the NAACP and the ACLU. If he could have, he would simply have retreated to a place where he wouldn’t be bothered by it all. But, of course, there was no such place anymore in America. The real Americans— and he did consider himself a real American, even if the words wouldn’t come into his mind fully formed—had so thoroughly lost this battle that they had become irrelevant. The culture was Hispanic, or Italian, or Jewish, or decadent, or dead, but it was not the culture of Emerson and Thoreau, of Jefferson and Adams, of New England brains and Virginia elegance. If the men who had signed the Declaration of Independence were to show up today on the steps of Independence Hall, they would be branded a bunch of liberal intellectual elitists and
rendered unelectable in any state but Massachusetts. If his own several times great-grandfather was to rematerialize in the middle of the small plot of land he had settled on when Philadelphia was still a colony, he would find himself in the middle of a restaurant catering to food from the Caucasus. It was all wrong, but there was nothing he could do about it. The best he could manage was to support people like Drew Harrigan, who at least stood against the tide of foreignness that had risen everywhere and would go on rising if something wasn’t done to make it stop. That was odd, because in a way Neil Elliot Savage disliked Drew Harrigan more than he disliked the foreignness. With Drew, he came perilously close to hate.

  The firm’s offices were in a set of interlocking brick houses near Ritten-house Square. They had been there for over a hundred years, and would be there for a hundred more, unless the neighborhood went to hell. The driver pulled up to the curb outside the main entrance. Neil got his briefcase and his coat and waited for the man to come around to open the door. He had spent all day arguing with a tall, thin, majestic young nun, and his head was throbbing because of it. Besides, she looked familiar. He was sure he’d seen her somewhere before, but he couldn’t place where. He didn’t know a lot of nuns. He didn’t meet them in the ordinary course of his business. His partners knew better than to throw him into contact with the Catholic Church, and especially with anything to do with the Cardinal Archbishop of Philadelphia.

  The driver opened the door. Neil got out, went across the sidewalk and up the steps, and rang the bell. Miss Hallworth opened up almost immediately, as if she’d been waiting at the window.

  “Good evening, Miss Hallworth,” he said, handing her the coat he hadn’t bothered to put on. Miss Hallworth was black, but he didn’t mind her. He really wasn’t a candidate for a white sheet. “Is Marian in the office?”

  “She’s waiting for you in the conference room.”

  Miss Hallworth was taking his coat to the walk-in cedar closet where all the partners’ coats were kept, and only the partners’ coats. The nun this afternoon had had a long wool cloak, like something out of a medieval drama. He couldn’t remember what she’d done with it when she’d sat down. He wondered what Drew Harrigan would have done about her if they’d had to meet face-to-face. It gave him a shameful feeling of triumphant glee just to imagine it. Drew Harrigan wasn’t the most secure person on the face of the earth. He was especially insecure about his intelligence, which was meager. That nun would have ripped him up one side and down the other.