Hardscrabble Road

by Jane Haddam

  Tibor was listening now. “And this person is left to roam the streets?” He seemed stunned.

  Chickie George shrugged. “Involuntary commitment is a form of incarceration. You can’t just run around committing people for their own good. There are all kinds of issues involved there.”

  “Let’s not worry about false imprisonment at the moment,” Gregor said. “You say he’s missing. Since when?”

  “The morning of January twenty-eighth, at least. It might have been earlier, but we went looking for him on the morning of January twenty-eighth, and he was nowhere to be found.”

  “Where did you look?”

  “We checked his SRO. We should have found him a better place. He might have stayed. But we didn’t have the money, and he’d probably have ended up getting evicted anyway. He can get pretty damned odd on alcohol.”

  “Where else did you look?”

  “We checked the homeless shelters,” Chickie said. “Actually, those got checked twice. Ray Dean Ballard had his people looking out for Sherman the night before. That would have been the twenty-seventh. They weren’t making a systematic search, though. They were just keeping an eye out for him. We’d just bought him these new, clean clothes and gotten him spruced up a little because of the case. He had a bright red hat. We thought he’d be easy to spot.”

  “Who’s Ray Dean Ballard?”

  “He’s the guy who runs Philadelphia Sleeps. They’re a homeless service. They run a few shelters, but mostly they run vans to try to get people to go into shelters, especially in this weather. Same thing with soup kitchens, getting social services, getting legal help. They had vans out that night because it was lethally cold, and they had their people looking out for Sherman. And they didn’t find him.”

  “Did that bother you at the time, that they couldn’t find him?”

  “Not really, no,” Chickie said. “Sherman is Sherman. He really could just wander off and forget where he was, forget what he was doing, forget where he was supposed to be. For the first few days, I wasn’t worried at all. I just thought—well, you know. Sherman is Sherman. He probably got hold of a few big bottles of wine and he’s off drinking them. Either that, or he lost the hat, so nobody knows what they’re looking for anymore. There’s an odd thing with homeless people. Nobody remembers their faces. They remember the clothes, you know, and the shtick, if there is one, but they don’t remember the faces. Not even most of the people who work with the homeless full-time.”

  “Would you recognize Sherman Markey’s face?”

  “I think so,” Chickie said. “But I’m not claiming to be a saint. I really don’t know. He’d be wearing the clothes we gave him, though. I’d recognize those.”

  “You gave him only one set of clothes?”

  “No, but he left the others in the SRO. We bought him a big royal blue parka. We were trying to make him stand out as much as possible. Ray Dean had a fit about that, because he says that makes them targets, especially the winos, because they’re unconscious so much of the time. So it may be he’s out there and he’s lost the parka and the hat and he’s just wearing a khaki shirt and new blue jeans. Or maybe not.”

  “Exactly,” Gregor said. “I take it you’ve considered the possibility that he’s dead.”

  Chickie looked away, out the window, onto Cavanaugh Street. It was coming on to eight o’clock, and the solid gray of the sky seemed faintly backlit. It was officially morning. “I haven’t just considered it,” Chickie said, “I’m assuming it. He froze to death. Or he got rolled and murdered for whatever he had on him, which wouldn’t have been much. Or he just died. He wasn’t in the best of physical shape. If Drew Harrigan were out and about instead of telling his troubles to group therapy in rehab, I’d even have my suspicions that Harrigan murdered him.”

  “Why?”

  “Because Sherman was more useful to him dead than alive. Because with Sherman alive, it’s too easy to see the holes in Harrigan’s story, for one thing. And because with Sherman alive and in trouble with the law, it’s harder for Harrigan to get let out on probation instead of doing some prison time. If this was an Agatha Christie story, I could think of thirty people who might want Sherman dead.”

  “But you don’t think any of them killed him?”

  “No,” Chickie said. “You don’t go to the bother of murdering people like Sherman, not unless you’re a street mugger who can’t think past the next wallet. I think we can rule out one of those cases where you get to appear on the front page of the Inquirer as the Armenian-American Hercule Poirot. But I still need to find Sherman, and I was wondering if you’d be willing to help.”

  “I’m not exactly the world’s best bloodhound,” Gregor said. “Especially not these days.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t ask you to go physically track him down,” Chickie said. “We’ve already tried that, really, and we had a better shot at succeeding than a professional would have anyway, because we know how homeless people think and we know how Sherman thinks. It’s not that. It’s just that I’ve spent the last week trying to get the Philadelphia Police to take us seriously, and I haven’t gotten anywhere yet. I thought you might put in a good word for us, or a fire up their asses, or whatever you think might work.”

  “So that they’ll go out and search for Sherman Markey?”

  “No,” Chickie said, “so that they’ll do a morgue check for the finger-prints. Sherman was fingerprinted when he was arrested. They could use those and check them against the bodies that have come into the morgue in the last couple of weeks. According to the paper this morning, half a dozen homeless people have died in the last two weeks of exposure to the cold. I know that others have died for other reasons. All those people are sitting in the morgues, waiting for the coroner to have a stray minute to get around to doing their autopsies, and those have been fingerprinted, too. I think if we ran a morgue check, we might find Sherman.”

  “And if you do, then what?”

  “I don’t know,” Chickie said. “It will probably depend on how he died. But I’d like to know that he died, and not have to be sitting here wondering if he’s wandering around somewhere, getting frostbite because he can’t remember he’s got a perfectly good room in an SRO. Well, it wasn’t a perfectly good room. But you know what I mean. It was clean, and it had heat.”

  “And you think I have influence with the Philadelphia Police?”

  “Don’t you?”

  “At the moment,” Gregor said, “I don’t know.”

  2

  An hour later, Gregor Demarkian was lying on the couch in his own living room. His shoes were under the coffee table, where they tended to fall when he kicked them off without thinking. His cell phone was lying squarely in the middle of his chest, on top of the sweater, two presents from Bennis, melding. He had no idea why he was feeling so restless. Chickie George was a nice man. He had a simple problem, and the favor he’d asked for had been neither out of line nor incomprehensible. It was more sensible than not to do a morgue check under the circumstances. It was not so sensible that the police were being recalcitrant about doing one. He ran it around and around in his mind. Sherman Markey was a homeless alcoholic, and therefore low priority. Sherman Markey was a principal defendant in a high-profile celebrity drug case, and therefore high priority. The second should trump the first. Either somebody in the PD was being close to criminally stupid, or there was something else going on here. Gregor was willing to bet that there was something else going on here. The questions were, what and for whom? Either Chickie George was withholding information from him, or the police were withholding information from Chickie George. About one thing, though, he and Chickie were in complete accord. If Sherman Markey was dead, it wasn’t likely that Drew Harrigan had murdered him, in person or by proxy. If he had, there was something odder happening here than he dared to imagine.

  The thing was, it wasn’t so simple these days, deciding if he had “influence” with the Philadelphia Police. A year ago, it would have been no problem.
Now it was an election year, and as in all election years, people were watching their backs. He had always been apolitical. Even when politics had been what he thought of as “nice,” he had been apolitical. Now it just felt like something that existed to muck up his life.

  Not more than a few months ago, he had promised himself to stay out of crime in the city of Philadelphia until at least the start of 2005. It didn’t mean much that Chickie George wasn’t actually asking him to investigate a crime, or even anything that was necessarily connected to a crime. He needed the Philadelphia Police, and he knew without asking that the Philadelphia Police were not going to be happy to hear from him, especially concerning a case that could have some serious media traction if it was played right. The mayor’s office wasn’t going to be happy to hear from him, either. And all that, in spite of the fact that he had always had extremely cordial relations with the government of the city of Philadelphia during all the years he had been living on Cavanaugh Street, right up until the minute before last.

  He sat up and put the cell phone on the coffee table. He stared at it for a minute—he hadn’t wanted a cell phone; that had been Bennis’s idea, part of her campaign to bring him into the twenty-first century—and then picked it up and flipped it open. The buttons were so small, he always thought he should punch them with the tip of a chopstick, or maybe a toothpick. He punched them with his fingers, and waited while the phone ring. Then somebody at the other end picked up, and he heard the deep-throated, cheerful hum of Angela Wallaby’s gospel-choir-trained African-American South Philadelphia accent saying, “You’re reached the offices of John Henry Newman Jackman at the headquarters of Jackman for Mayor: a new vision and a new future for the city of Philadelphia. How can I help you?”

  Well, Gregor thought, you could talk John out of challenging the sitting mayor of Philadelphia to a goddamned primary run.

  Since Angela wasn’t likely to agree to anything like that, Gregor said, “Hey, Angela, it’s Gregor Demarkian. Tell the next mayor of the city of Philadelphia that I have something of a problem.”

  THREE

  1

  Neil Elliot Savage did not get into the office before nine o’clock unless there was a reason for him to be there, and in his experience there almost never was. The mania for workaholism was, in his opinion, much like the mania for downscale Southern accents, country music, and stock car racing, a corruption of everything that was vital and important in culture, a surrender to the forces of populism and vulgarity. It was better to spend the morning at home, with Beethoven coming out of the Bose sound system he’d installed in the kitchen only two years ago Christmas and Henry James propped up on the little wooden reading stand he kept on the kitchen table next to the blond rush mat he used to mark his place. When he’d been married—and there was something he didn’t like to think about, even for a minute—it was Katherine who had set up the place mat every morning and laid out a linen napkin next to a setting from her everyday silver. It was Katherine who had poured his juice and made his coffee. It was Katherine who had put his toast out next to pots of creamed butter and ginger preserve. The whole scene had been like a fantasy from those very same Henry James novels, except that throughout the project Katherine had been livid and steaming. That was what Neil remembered most about Katherine—the anger that was both wide and deep, that covered everything.

  “I didn’t spend three years at the Harvard Law School to pour orange juice for you in the morning,” she would say, when the anger went beyond the point where striking attitudes was enough for her. “And you didn’t get Parkinson’s disease at Phillips Exeter. You can pour your own damned coffee.”

  In the years since—and there were many years—Neil had wondered why she hadn’t walked out on him long before, but of course that was the times. You didn’t walk out on a perfectly good husband in 1963. You especially didn’t file for divorce because he wanted you to pour his orange juice in the morning, and you thought you were too busy and important to do it. Eventually, he’d gotten her a maid, and that was when the real trouble started. That was when he realized that she wasn’t really angry about the orange juice. She didn’t care about making beds. She didn’t care about making toast. What she cared about was the fact that she was one of only two women in her graduating class at Harvard Law, she’d had to be twice as intelligent and twice as determined as any of the men there to make it at all, and now she was married in Philadelphia and had nothing in particular to do.

  Well, Neil thought, she had something in particular to do now. He hadn’t mentioned it at the office when the subject had first come up, but he was going to have to, soon. The men in the firm who remembered his marriage were largely long gone. Partners did that. They got worn-out by age and time. The ones who did remember probably didn’t realize that this Kate was that Kate. She wasn’t using Savage as a last name, and she’d never used her maiden name when she’d come to firm parties or paid her respects to the managing partner’s wife at Christmas. She also wasn’t from Philadelphia, so not so many people knew her family as might have if the firm had been located in Boston or New York. She hadn’t even called herself Kate. When Neil thought of the two of them married, she was always Katherine to him, as she had been Katherine at Vassar when he’d first met her, and she’d first explained how and why she intended to go to law school, and what she intended to do with the degree once she got it.

  Of course, she wasn’t doing, now, what she had intended to do with the degree when she’d first started at Harvard, and he’d first decided to indulge her by not insisting that they get married right away, as soon as he graduated from law school himself. The truth of it was, he’d been afraid to press her. He’d been afraid she’d turn him down. He’d been able to sense the ferocity in her even then. Then, of course, the “women’s movement” had come along, and that had been the impetus she needed—no, Katherine never needed impetus. She had that all on her own. The “women’s movement” had been the narrative she needed, as they would have said when Neil was in college, and the narrative had taken her out of his life forever, and to New York. She would have gone anyway. It would only have taken her longer. She needed someplace to be that would let her be a lawyer, and Philadelphia at that time and in that era was not it.

  Of all the vulgarities in a vulgar age, Neil thought that the “women’s movement” was the very worst. It made ugly what had the right to be beautiful, and harsh what had the right to be gentle. It wasn’t that he begrudged women the right to be lawyers if they wanted to be. It was that he begrudged the loss of grace in the world that had come about when women began to shriek. Maybe he just begrudged the loss of Katherine, who had not only walked out on his life and let him arrange the divorce in any way he wanted to, without so much as a backward glance at the property settlements, but had never bothered to send him a Christmas card in all the years since. He sent Christmas cards to her, when he knew where she was, which was less often than he liked. He kept the photograph album of their wedding that she had left behind.

  Right now, he kept only the orange juice. The rest of the food—toast, coffee, ginger preserve, butter—he put away or threw away. None of it appealed to him. It was one thing to say he didn’t like to get into the office before nine. It was another thing to waltz into the office after nine. Even Grayson Barden didn’t do that. The fact was, he’d been sitting here at this table for an hour and a half, thinking not about work, not about getting ready to get going, not about Drew Harrigan and his problems, but about Kate, and the fact of Kate was making it impossible for him to move. He should have married again. He should have abandoned his principles and found some nice Philadelphia debutante who wanted nothing more than to spend her days arranging charity functions and playing tennis at a country club, and married her, and done what all partners do, put up with it. If it had felt too sordid, he wouldn’t have had to have a mistress on the side. He just couldn’t seem to make himself care, one way or the other, about the sort of woman who would be interested in marryin
g him. The divorcées and widows his own age were the least attractive of all. They were not only not-Kate, they had hardened in their tastes and attitudes. They already knew all they wanted to know.

  It was already eight forty-five, and if he hadn’t wanted to see Kate again he should have told someone at the firm what the situation was, and asked to be taken off Drew Harrigan’s account. He should have done that in any case, because he truly hated Drew Harrigan and everything he stood for, and the attitude was plain on his face every time the man’s name was mentioned. The problem was, the rest of the firm felt the same way. Even the secretaries were Old Philadelphia enough to consider Mr. Harrigan something of an embarrassment to the name of Barden, Savage & Deal.

  It was eight forty-five and he had to get out of the house. He had to get his car, or find a cab, and go into the office. He had to sit behind his desk and behave as if nothing important was happening, because nothing important was. Kate would not be embarrassed to see him, and he knew it. She would not be intimidated by the idea of negotiating with her ex-husband, and he knew that too. She would not be shy about letting everybody in the room know that they had a long shared past that she didn’t look back on with fondness. She would not let any of this get in the way of the work she was supposed to do, and that was the final straw. Neil would be sitting there barely able to get any work done at all, and Kate would be on the other side of the conference table—she had insisted on either a conference room or a meeting in her own office at the Justice Project, which nobody at the firm was going to agree to—as cool and focused as if she were in her own living room with nobody else in sight.