Hardscrabble Road

by Jane Haddam

  The problem was, there was nobody from this life, either, to take up her time. The women she met, even the women on their own side, were all like Martha and Danielle. They had degrees from big-name colleges like Yale and Vassar. They talked about federalism in family policy and reconfiguring the tax code to favor traditional family forms and entrepreneurship. They were always writing books. In spite of the time they spent defending “stay at home moms” from the evils of elitist liberal feminism, Ellen didn’t think a single one of them would opt to be a stay at home mom herself, and none of them had any time during the day to do things like go to a movie or have lunch. They all had jobs, and the kinds of jobs that ate up ninety hours in the work week.

  The car was here, and Ellen got up to let the driver hold the front door for her and then hold the car door for her, because she was supposed to do that. When he got into the front seat, she tapped on the glass and leaned forward.

  “Not downtown right away,” she said. “I want to go to Christopher’s.”

  “You have an appointment at the hairdresser?”

  He sounded hesitant, because if she’d had an appointment at the hair-dresser he should have known about it. Her scheduler should have said something.

  “I don’t have an appointment, no,” she said. “I just want to stop there and check something.”

  It didn’t matter if she had an appointment or not. They’d take her. There was something good about being married to Drew.

  Christopher’s was not very far away. It was only a matter of a couple of intersections. On another day, she might have walked the distance, although she had to be careful with that. Most people didn’t know who she was, or who she was married to, and wouldn’t recognize her if their lives depended on it, but the true Drew-haters—and there were more of those than you’d think—were relentless. She’d been cornered on the street on several occasions, as if she could do anything about the way Drew talked about Social Security or Head Start on the air.

  It was after ten o’clock. When they pulled up to Christopher’s, the driver double-parked next to a Volvo and a Saab and started to get out to open her door for her.

  “You don’t have to do that,” she said quickly, popping the door herself.

  The door buzzed open, and Ellen pushed it in. The receptionist was on her feet with her hand out.

  “Mrs. Harrigan,” she said. “Am I supposed to have you down for an appointment? I don’t remember you in the book.”

  “No, no,” Ellen said. “I just, I was wondering, if Hermoine had a minute, do you know? It’s just. Things.”

  The receptionist made no gesture that indicated she had understood what Ellen was talking about, or cared. She went back behind her desk and picked up the phone. She must have talked to Hermoine. Ellen didn’t hear her. She was staring at the photographs on the walls as if she’d never seen them before.

  A moment later, Hermoine came in, a sensible-looking middle-aged woman in flat rubber-soled shoes and hair she had let go naturally gray. If Hermoine cared about looking as young as she felt, nobody knew.

  “Mrs. Harrigan?” she said.

  “Oh,” Ellen said. “Well.”

  “Come on back,” Hermoine said.

  There wasn’t much to the back. Christopher’s wasn’t a big place. They never scheduled more than ten or twelve hair appointments a day, and maybe as many manicures. They just charged enough for each so that they didn’t have to do more.

  Hermoine’s office was a little closetlike space near the door that led to the back alley where the garbage was taken out. Hermoine went in first, and sat behind her desk. She waved Ellen to a chair.

  “If you have an emergency, we can do something for you, of course,” she said. “But it really helps if you know beforehand. I know that’s not always possible—”

  Ellen hadn’t taken the chair. “It isn’t that kind of an emergency. It’s just. Things.”

  Hermoine licked her lips. If Ellen hadn’t known it was impossible, she’d have said the woman was annoyed. Hermoine was never annoyed. “What things?” Hermoine said.

  It was, Ellen thought, the sound of the human voice she needed. It didn’t matter if it was annoyed or not. “Things,” she said. “I was sitting in the apartment. I was showered and dressed and all done up and that was it. The whole place felt like it was pressing in on me. I don’t think I’ve been out much at all since Drew went into rehab, and it’s more than twenty days before he comes back, and I thought I was going crazy.”

  “Ah.”

  “And I felt—wrong. Do you know what I mean?”

  “No.”

  “I felt bad. Guilty, I guess. Because except for the loneliness, I hate to say this, but except for the loneliness it’s been better with him gone than with him here. It’s not him, you understand. I like having him around. It’s all the stuff that goes on. The people who shout at him. The people who call. You wouldn’t believe the people who call. I can’t answer my own phone. They call and swear at me.”

  “At you?”

  “About Drew,” Ellen said. “They don’t really care about me. It’s all about Drew. It really is. The ones who stop me on the street are the same way. And of course I don’t know what they’re talking about, and then they get mad at me and call me names, and half the names I don’t know either. It’s not Drew himself, you know. It’s the show.”

  “It must have calmed down some, then, since Mr. Harrigan has been … away.”

  “Not really,” Ellen said. There was the chair, empty. Hermoine expected her to sit in it. Ellen usually tried to do what was expected of her, because it was easier, and it meant that fewer people got mad at her. She sat. “They come up to me and talk to me about the rehab now. They call him a hypocrite. They call me a hypocrite, although I don’t get that. How do they know what I believe in to know that I’m a hypocrite? I never say anything about anything in public. I just wear a dress and smile. And then there are the people from his office. They’re always trying to tell me things. They’re trying to tell me Drew is going to go to jail, except now they say that he won’t.”

  “Now?” Hermoine sounded puzzled. Ellen was glad that she no longer sounded annoyed. “Why now?”

  “Because that man has disappeared,” Ellen said. “That awful homeless man. I never get his name straight. The one who got Drew the drugs. The one who was suing him. Can you imagine that? He got Drew the drugs and he was suing Drew for ruining his life or something, and the lawyers were all taking it seriously. It’s like Drew says. The courts are out of control. They’re run by a bunch of liberal idiots who want to destroy the country and turn it over to the UN to run.”

  “Ah,” Hermoine said.

  Ellen shifted in the chair. It was a terrible chair. She had never been in Hermoine’s office before. She thought it was not outfitted in the expectation that Hermoine would have visitors. Or, at least, not visitors from among her clients, who were used to comfortable chairs.

  “Anyway,” Ellen said, “he’s disappeared, or something. Do you want to know what woke me up this morning? My cell phone rang. The number is supposed to be a secret. It’s not under my name. The only people who know what it is are Drew and a few of his assistants at the office. But somebody got it. And it rang.”

  “And?”

  “And whoever it was accused me of having that terrible man killed,” Ellen said, and suddenly she was so near tears she couldn’t keep them back. It made no sense. She hadn’t felt like crying when the call had come this morning. She hadn’t felt like crying at any time since. At first, she’d merely been angry. Then she’d been afraid. Then she’d been—claustrophobic, that was the word. “They said Drew had had it done, had hired a hit man, from rehab. Can you imagine? He’s not even allowed to talk to me from rehab, and he’s supposed to be hiring hit men to chase homeless people around and have them killed. It was awful. You wouldn’t believe how awful it was. And I was afraid he’d call back. So I put the cell phone down the garbage disposal.”

 
; “What?” “I know, I know,” Ellen said. “It wasn’t the most sensible thing. I know it wasn’t. But I couldn’t help myself. Whoever it was had an awful voice, and he just went on and on. About how he knew we’d had that man killed, and how he was going to tell the police about it, and how Drew was going to die from lethal injection and that’s what ought to happen to somebody who’s such a big supporter of the death penalty. Except he didn’t say supporter. He said, I remember, cheerleader. Such a big cheerleader for the death penalty.”

  “And when all this happened you put the cell phone in the garbage disposal?”

  “That’s right,” Ellen said. “And then I called for the car, because I wanted to get out of the apartment. I thought he might have the number for the regular phone, too. I mean, those calls get screened, but things get through. You wouldn’t believe it. People leave messages on the answering machine. I didn’t want to be in the apartment anymore, just in case, and it was so quiet. I had to get out. I thought I’d go shopping.”

  “Instead you came here.”

  “Yes, well. I didn’t want to start talking about all this in a department store somewhere where everybody could hear me. You have to be careful with things like that. You say things and you don’t think there’s anybody around to listen, and then everything you’ve said shows up on the front page of the National Enquirer the very next Monday. Drew’s been on the front page of the Enquirer enough. And to think I used to actually like that newspaper.”

  Hermoine sighed. “It would have been easier if you’d called ahead,” she said, “but we’ll manage something. How about a manicure and some new color for your nails? That will give you time to rest and think about things. All I ask is that you consider calling the police when you leave us this morning.”

  “Calling the police? Why? The police are the ones who are persecuting Drew.”

  “Maybe. But that phone call sounds like a threat, or something close to it. You have no idea who made it. Somebody may be looking to do you harm.”

  “Just because I’m married to Drew?”

  “There are a lot of crazy people in the world.”

  “I know there are a lot of crazy people in the world,” Ellen said, “but they’re all liberals. Aren’t they? Wasn’t this man a liberal?”

  “I think it should be enough that he was threatening your husband with death, even if it was death by execution,” Hermoine said. “You shouldn’t take threats lightly. And you shouldn’t ignore them. And I think your husband would say the same if he were here.”

  “I wish he was here,” Ellen said. “I hate rehab. You have no idea how I hate rehab.”

  Hermoine didn’t say anything to that. She just stood up, and Ellen automatically stood with her. It was true, though. She really did hate rehab, and she hated even more all the things that were connected to rehab. She was sure, though, that Drew would never order anybody killed.

  “It just doesn’t make any sense,” she said, as Hermoine led her from the room in the direction of the manicurist. “Why would Drew want to murder some stupid old man who wasn’t worth anything to anybody? If he was going to murder somebody, he’d murder somebody who mattered.”

  3

  Ray Dean Ballard understood that the term “out” had come to cover a lot of other things besides being gay. There were people who said they were “out” as shopaholics, for instance, and people who said they were “out” as liberal Democrats, especially if they lived in the South. There was an entire movement to convince atheists to “come out,” and Ray Dean could never hear the term without thinking of young women in white dresses making deep curtseys in the middle of a ballroom floor. There was no movement anywhere to help people like Ray Dean Ballard to come out, and he didn’t expect there to be one soon. He kept wondering how long he was going to get away with it. For now, people wrote off what they thought of as his “eccentricities” by saying he came from the South, and you could never tell what people from the South would do. There was nobody in this office who had gone to Vanderbilt with him, or even to Emory or SMU, where they might have known someone in his family. There was nobody here who could expose him for who and what he was, except Kate, and he didn’t count her. She wouldn’t expose him for the same reason he wouldn’t expose her. He had no idea why he was thinking about this now, on this particular morning, when what he was supposed to be worrying about was what had happened to Sherman Markey. He wondered why it was that so many people who did the kind of work he did found it necessary to hate all things graceful, and elegant, and true.

  That “true” there. That was going to get him into trouble.

  Shelley Balducci was standing in his office door, waiting. She’d been there for quite some time. Ray Dean didn’t think he’d have much trouble with her if she knew the whole truth about him, but you could never tell. The Shelley Balduccis of this world were a complete mystery to him.

  “I don’t see what you can do,” she was saying. “Chickie went to see Gregor Demarkian. Mr. Demarkian will go to see whoever he knows on the police department. That should at least get people moving again.”

  “Doesn’t it bother you that he could be dead out there, in a morgue someplace, maybe not even in a morgue? Would you like that to happen to you if you were dead?”

  “But it wouldn’t happen to me,” Shelley said sensibly. “I’ve got a huge family. Somebody would be looking for me.”

  “We’re looking for Sherman. It’s not doing a lot of good.”

  “I know. But the morgue people, they look at Sherman and they can tell right off he’s a homeless person. Forget the clothes. It doesn’t matter how new the clothes are. Homeless people have new clothes sometimes. They get them from Goodwill.”

  “There was the bath, too,” Ray Dean said. “They didn’t just get him new clothes. They got him cleaned up.”

  “I know,” Shelley said, “but they couldn’t fix the rest of it. The state of his teeth. The shape his body was in. You could tell he was a homeless person just by looking at him.”

  “And people would know you weren’t just by looking at you?”

  “Of course. There’s a difference, don’t you see? I can’t believe you don’t think there’s a difference.”

  “I didn’t say I didn’t think there was a difference. I said—” But there seemed no point in saying it again. What Shelley was saying was true. Sherman Markey did look like a homeless person, and in a way no clean change of clothes, or bath, or haircut could change. Something happened to people who lived out on the street that left an indelible mark. He wished he knew what it was.

  “Besides,” Shelley was saying, “there’s nothing you can do about it, is there? It’s not your fault. We had people looking all over for him that night. We had vans out. If he was anywhere within our area, we would have found him.”

  “If he was still alive.”

  “Okay,” Shelley said. “If he was still alive. But you know, you can’t blame yourself for that. It’s not up to you. People are what they are. It doesn’t matter if Sherman was on the street because he had a disease or because he had no damned luck at all or because he behaved like an idiot and a jerk and brought it all down on his own head. He was a homeless person. They die a lot in the bad weather. Nobody noticed him because nobody notices homeless people. You have to go from there.”

  “To where?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Nothing,” Ray Dean said. “Nothing at all. Never mind. You’re right. I’m going to make a few phone calls and then I’ll okay the van schedules for tonight. Ask C. J. to come see me in about half an hour, will you? We’ve got a donor willing to supply the Station Street soup kitchen for seven straight days in return for a public announcement on my part. I’m happy to comply. Okay?”

  “You don’t look good,” Shelley said.

  “I’m fine,” Ray Dean said.

  She hesitated some more, and then walked away, down the hall, out of sight. He watched her go. He wasn’t fine. He didn’t be
gin to be fine. It bothered him no end that people were willing to give to charity if they got a nice big announcement in the papers about it, or something else to make them feel important. He couldn’t count the number of dinners he had to have with big donors who demanded personal attention in exchange for the food they gave and the checks they wrote. He needed those people. He knew he needed them. He couldn’t supply the organization himself. He couldn’t begin to cover the needs of the people who lived “rough,” as their one Aussie put it. He just didn’t understand why every single person in the city of Philadelphia didn’t rise up and demand that something be done about these people who couldn’t feed or house themselves, who died in the cold, who died in spit and blood and vomit.

  He wanted to believe that people would be different if they were brought up differently, that it was just a matter of training and education. He knew that wasn’t true. There was no solution for human nature, and no answer to the deepest of his questions about right and wrong. It was bad enough that some people were born rich and others were born poor. It was worse that some were born well and some were born mentally or physically ill. What did you do about a life that could never escape the confines of biochemistry?

  You did something better than this, Ray Dean told himself. But this was all he knew how to do, so he was going to go on doing it.

  He picked up the phone and punched in the number Kate Daniel had given him the last time he talked to her. Maybe he could ask her why he was depressed the way he was.