Hardscrabble Road

by Jane Haddam

  Gregor knew, without having been told, that if he was going to talk to John after nine, he’d have to talk to him down at police headquarters. John was on a crusade to prove that he could run for everything—possibly even for the presidency, although he hadn’t mentioned it—while still being completely focused on his regular duties and completely effective as a commissioner of police. Gregor had no idea when he was going to campaign, or had been campaigning. John was nearly lunatic on the subject of making “personal” calls from his office. The history of police commissioners in Philadelphia wasn’t a pretty one. There had been a lot of corruption over the years. John had swept into that job promising to change all that, and he’d been behaving like a cross between Joan of Arc and Savonarola ever since. Still, he must have been campaigning sometimes, but that was political news Gregor did keep up with. The primary challenge was going very well. It was going so very well, the present mayor was not expected to survive it.

  The cab pulled up in front of the tall, blank building that now served as police headquarters, and Gregor got out his wallet to pay the man. The cab hadn’t quite made it to the curb, which was solidly packed with parked cars. That meant that all the cars behind them were blocked from going forward until Gregor got his act together and his business done.

  Gregor hurried. It was still cold, but not quite as cold as it had been this morning. He should have worn a hat anyway. He just wasn’t used to wearing one. He threw the cabdriver a small wad of bills that included a more generous tip than he might have given if he’d had time to think about it, and made the door in a run. The homeless people that he knew would be here later in the day were not here yet. He wondered where they had gone. The people walking up and down the sidewalks all had their coat collars turned up and their hands in their pockets. A sign on a store across the street said both 9:27 a.m. and 2 degrees F.

  In the building, he stopped at the security desk and gave his name and destination. The guard looked through the notes on his clipboard and said, “Oh, yes, Mr. Demarkian. You’re going to Mr. Jackman’s office. Take the elevator.”

  Gregor had no idea how else he could get to John’s office. He supposed there were stairs, but he’d never actually seen any. He got onto the elevator with two women, both African-American and both dressed in serious business suits. It was generally agreed that John had brought needed formality into the building and an end to what had become ritual complaints about the lack of African Americans on the police force and its support staff. The women were pretty, but not as pretty as John’s receptionist, who looked like she ought to take over for Naomi Campbell if Campbell ever decided to retire.

  Gregor got out of the elevator on John’s floor and presented himself to the Ms. Campbell in training, whose name was actually Shoshona Washington. She looked at him as if she’d never seen him before—which she had, so many times that he could have been a member of her family—and then checked her book for his name. Only then did she deign to call in to John’s office and announce that he was there.

  It wasn’t John, but John’s assistant Olivia who came out to get him. Olivia was the latest embodiment of John’s theory of hiring assistants, as opposed to hiring receptionists.

  “With receptionists, you hire pretty,” John had told him, when he’d first staffed this office. “With receptionists, you’re looking to hit people in the eye, and besides, they don’t do much anyway. But with assistants, you need brains, you need common sense, and you need organization. With assistants, you need church women.”

  “Doesn’t this violate the separation of church and state somehow?” Gregor had asked him, imagining for a moment an entire Gospel choir taking up the space just outside John’s office door.

  John looked disgusted. “It’s not about their religion. I don’t care if they strangle chickens and worship the devil. It’s about their entire mind-set. I mean, look at these women. They keep their churches running. They do the books. They schedule the pastor’s time. They clean the places out. They issues the press releases when they have to be issued. They run the Sunday School and the choir and all the projects. You get a bunch of them together on the bus, they can make a kid with a boom box turn the sound off by just staring at him. Church women.”

  Olivia was a tall, heavy, dignified woman in her fifties. Gregor had always thought she could get a kid with a boom box to turn the sound off by staring at him all on her own. She held out her hand to him, and he took it.

  “Good morning, Mr. Demarkian. It’s good to see you.”

  “It’s good to see you, too, Mrs. Hall.” It had taken him a moment to remember her last name, because John always called her Olivia. But it also hadn’t seemed right for him to call her Olivia himself.

  She was leading the way back to John’s office. “He’s very excited to see you. I don’t know what it is you have for him, but it must be more interesting than what we’ve got around here at the moment. Isn’t it a terrible thing, what happens in the winter? I’ve got no use for people who drug and drink and waste the only life the Lord is going to give them, but I don’t see leaving them to freeze to death in the street, either.”

  “Maybe the campaign is getting him down.”

  Olivia Hall turned to give him a long, cool stare. “We don’t talk about the campaign on police premises,” she said. “We don’t mix the campaign with the work here.”

  “Of course not.”

  She turned away again, and knocked on John’s door. “It’s the homeless people who are getting him down, and all this cold. Every precinct in the city has had at least one homeless death so far this season, and it’s going to get worse before it gets better. It depressed him. He’s the kind that wants to make everything right, and this is something nobody is going to make right anytime soon.”

  “Of course,” Gregor said. He still felt like a third grader who had been scolded by the teacher in front of the entire class, in spite of the fact that there was nobody around who could have heard Olivia’s rebuke to him. Mrs. Hall, he reminded himself.

  Olivia Hall opened John’s door and shooed him in. “I’ll hold the calls for twenty minutes,” she said, without being asked. “But you know that’s the best I can do, under the circumstances. It’s not my fault we’re under siege.”

  “Why are you under siege?” Gregor asked, coming in and sitting down.

  John sighed. “It’s the mayor’s office. They keep trying to get proof that I’m slacking off. They have somebody calling every minute or two to ask trivial questions and give even more trivial orders that I’m not going to follow and don’t have to, but the idea is to catch me not here, or something. They even phone me at lunch. It’s insane.”

  “According to Mrs. Hall, we don’t talk about the campaign here.” “Right. Well, you know. The idea is to never mention it to employees and staff, because that way the people over there can’t say I’m campaigning while at work, or forcing people to support me, or something. He’s an ass-hole, you do know that, don’t you, Gregor? The mayor, I mean. He’s an asshole, and I deserve to win.”

  “You apparently are winning.”

  “Yeah, I am. But that’s because I’m not the only one who thinks he’s an ass-hole. The party thinks he’s an asshole. And that one’s between you and me.”

  “The party is backing your primary challenge.”

  “Exactly.”

  “I was wondering about that,” Gregor said. What he’d really been wondering was why John would want to upset the party brass by challenging an incumbent. It made much more sense if no upset was going to be involved. “Thank you. It seemed like an odd bit of timing, your running right now.”

  “It’s not. Look, he can’t get re-elected. You know that and I know that. He was a complete mess on the Catholic Church scandal thing. He’s in the Cardinal’s pocket, or at least looks like he is. It was either somebody chucking him off the ticket, or letting the opposition have the mayor’s office. And you know we never let the opposition have anything.”

  �
�Too dangerous,” Gregor said.

  “You don’t really give a damn, do you?” John said.

  “I don’t really give a damn about politics,” Gregor said, “which is getting to be a liability, since it’s all anybody seems to be able to talk about anymore. I do give a damn about whether you get to be mayor. I’d like to see that.”

  “Well, that’s good.”

  “I fully intend to vote for you for senator, when you run for that.”

  “That’s a bit down the line at the moment,” John said. “You want to see what Olivia dug up for you on your problem?”

  “Sure.”

  There was a stack of papers sitting squarely in the middle of John Jackman’s desk. He picked them up and handed them over. “I didn’t want to say it when you called me over at the campaign, because I wasn’t positive, but it turns out I was right. We already have run a fingerprint check for Sherman Markey. In fact, we’ve run two, and not just on the corpses in the morgue. We’ve run it through recent arrests, too.”

  “And?”

  “Not a thing. Nothing even close. Every once in a while you get some ambiguous stuff; we don’t even have that.”

  “What about deaths?” Gregor asked. “Homeless people have died in the city these last two weeks, right?”

  “Yes.” John sighed.

  “And?”

  “And, what can I tell you? It’s been a brutal winter. It’s supposed to get worse over the next week or so. It isn’t going to get better anytime soon. If I knew what to do about this stuff, Gregor, I’d do it. The legal people say we’re not allowed to arrest them unless they’ve actually committed a crime. We can’t arrest them for vagrancy anymore because vagrancy laws are unconstitutional. We can arrest them for public drunkenness if they get rowdy enough, but most of the ones we’re most worried about don’t get rowdy. We can’t commit them to a mental institution unless they’re a clear and present danger to themselves or others, which they aren’t, because falling asleep in subzero temperatures so that they accidentally freeze to death in the night isn’t considered being a danger to themselves. That’s meant to mean only active suicide. And a lot of them won’t go into what shelters are available, even for the night.

  “I mean, seriously, Gregor, seriously. What other evidence do we need that somebody is mentally ill besides the fact that he absolutely refuses to accept a warm bed on a night with subzero temperatures and chooses— chooses, I’m not making this up—to sleep on a park bench instead? Ed Koch had the right idea. When the temperature goes below a certain level, you round them up involuntarily and you get them inside whether they want to go or not.”

  “Koch got into a lot of trouble for that.”

  “He was still right,” John said. “The law makes assumptions that aren’t valid. The law makes assumptions about the intentions of the people who want these guys to go into shelters that are not valid. The law makes assumptions about these people themselves that are not valid.”

  “The law is responding to the fact that for decades, a husband who didn’t want his wife to divorce him or a city administration that didn’t like poor people could get them involuntarily committed on nothing much better than a say-so,” Gregor said. “And you know it. The law is what it is today because of how it was abused in the past.”

  “And that still leaves us with a city full of homeless people, mostly alcoholic and drug-addicted old men, who aren’t in their right minds because their minds were eaten away by rotgut years ago, or were paranoid schizophrenic to begin with. I’m sorry, Gregor. I know the history. I really do. But I hate this time of winter.”

  “It’s an unusual winter,” Gregor said. “Coldest on record in, what, fifty years?”

  “Something like that,” John said. “But we get at least a couple of days of extreme cold every year, and that means every year we get a couple of nights of people freezing to death. The only compensation, and it isn’t much of a compensation, is that most street crime goes way down. Your ordinary street criminal isn’t much interested in freezing his patootie off just to get your wallet. Even convenience store and gas station holdups go down. Somehow it figures, you know? They’ve got no discipline, these people, and no ambition. Shove a little hardship their way, and they just fold.”

  “Right,” Gregor said. He looked around the office. It was spare, to the point of being denuded. Obviously, Olivia Hall didn’t decorate, and John didn’t have a girlfriend at the moment. Gregor thought about asking John about the marriage thing—weren’t successful politicians usually expected to have wives?—and decided against it.

  “I think what Chickie was getting at,” he said, “was that it’s just possible something got missed. We’re dealing with a homeless person here. People don’t always notice them in the way they notice other people.”

  “We’re dealing with fingerprints here,” Jackman said.

  “Even so.”

  “Even so nothing,” Jackman said. “Look, I’m going to send you over to the district attorney, who’s the one you want to talk to if you want to know everything there is to know about this; but the facts are simple. We did not one, but two searches, and we got nothing. We checked out every corpse of every homeless person who came into the morgue from break of day on January twenty-seventh until midnight February nine, and we didn’t get a thing. Which doesn’t mean he isn’t dead, mind you. People die in abandoned buildings and back alleys and we don’t find them for weeks or months. So anything could have happened. But if he came into our system, we would have found him. Because we were careful. We were very, very careful.”

  “Because the Justice Project asked about him?”

  “Because this is Drew Harrigan and his people that we’re dealing with,” John said. “This is a guy who’s forced congressmen out of office and gotten superintendents of large school districts fired. He’s coming out of rehab in a couple of weeks, and when he does, he’s going to be loaded for bear, and the bear he’s going to be loaded for is us. We arrested him. We’re going ahead with the prosecution. The DA isn’t backing down. The police aren’t backing down. And I’ve got a mayor who’s suddenly making noises like he’s a Harrigan fan and who wants my ass more than he wants to win the lottery. What do you say?”

  “I’d say you were probably very careful.”

  “Right,” John said. “We were all very careful. But on the assumption that it never hurts to be more careful, and because it’s you that’s asking, I’m going to call over and get them to run one more check. Who knows, maybe Markey showed up on a slab in the last day or two and nobody caught it going in, although they’re supposed to check. But I want you to go down and talk to the DA and let him outline exactly what’s going on here. Drew Harrigan didn’t get where he was without knowing how to win a street fight better than most other people, and he isn’t going to go down without taking a hell of a lot of people with him.”

  “Is he going to go down?” Gregor asked.

  Jackman nodded. “I think so. Harrigan’s people, hell, practically everybody, thinks we want to back away from a trial, but we don’t. The DA is in a state of world-class piss-off. He’s being portrayed in the press as a corrupt little shit who just wants to persecute a pathetic homeless man so he can let the rich guy off the hook, which is about as realistic as saying that the NRA is really in favor of gun control. There have been rumors around town for weeks that we had Sherman Markey killed because that way we could let Harrigan off with probation because people wouldn’t be upset about how we’re treating the homeless guy—”

  “Wait a minute,” Gregor said. “Doesn’t that contradict the other thing?”

  “Of course it contradicts the other thing. Do you think anybody cares?” Jackman was out of his seat and pacing. “The whole thing is getting to be more and more of a mess by the minute, and if there’s anything I want, truly and really, it’s to find Sherman Markey under conditions that will not support the claim that we killed him. Which doesn’t mean that people won’t say that anyway. I’ve ma
de an appointment for you to see Rob in an hour. He’s clearing his desk so that he can talk to you. Be on time.”

  “I’m always on time,” Gregor said.

  “Yeah, okay, you are, I’m sorry.” Jackman sat down again.

  Gregor looked toward the office door. “This Mrs. Hall,” he said. “Is she efficient?”

  “If Olivia Hall were running the Defense Department,” Jackman said, “its budget would be half what it is now, we’d have twice as much in the way of hardware and three times as many soldiers, and the food would be good. I’m trying to get her to run for City Council. Don’t tell me I’m not an honorable man. The day she wins a seat and leaves me, I’m going to cut my throat, but I’m encouraging it anyway. Go see Rob. He’ll give you what you need to know.”

  2

  Downstairs on the street again, with his coat collar pulled up and his hands in his pockets like everybody else, Gregor considered the fact that an hour was a long time to have to go not very far to a place he could reach on foot. He looked around the neighborhood. He had been in this part of town more often than he liked to remember, but he usually arrived in a cab and left in a cab. He didn’t know much about what was here. It looked prosperous enough. Ordinary precinct houses often seemed to have been built on the worst street in the vicinity, or to have become such as people moved out not to be threatened by the parade of felons that went in and out the doors. Maybe not so many felons went in and out here. He walked up to the intersection—he ought to find a place to get some coffee, and there was one; he’d remember it for later—and looked in both directions without finding what he wanted. He went another block and looked down that intersection, and there it was: an outpost of Barnes & Noble. He gave a mental nod to Bennis’s lecture about always using independent bookstores and went on down to it. If there was another bookstore in this neighborhood, he didn’t know where it was, and he wasn’t going to take a cab back to Cavanaugh Street to find one now.