Hardscrabble Road

by Jane Haddam

  SIX

  1

  The district attorney of the city of Philadelphia was a man named Robert Benedetti, and the only thing Gregor Demarkian knew about him for sure was that he hated to be called “Bob.” “It’s the alliteration,” John Jackman had said, six months ago, when they’d first discussed the man. “It’s the BB. He hates it.”

  Gregor couldn’t remember why it had come up. Benedetti was new in the job. His predecessor had dropped dead of a heart attack in the middle of a mob-based murder trial, and for about a week there had been speculation across the country that he’d really been the victim of a contract hit. The problem was, nobody knew of a contract killer who could make heart attacks happen so realistically that they looked like nothing else to four pathologists in a row. The man had been overweight, underexercised, and addicted to both cigarettes and coffee. He worked too hard and too long. His blood pressure would have looked better as one of those thermometer indicators that let the public know if the local fire department has raised enough money in donations to buy a new lounge set for the firehouse. Robert Benedetti had been appointed to fill out the rest of his term, and here he was, coming up on a general municipal election in November, and not a known quantity.

  Gregor gave his name to the receptionist and sat down in the waiting area. It was not an unfamiliar place. He’d been to see various district attorneys since he’d started consulting with police departments, and none of them ever seemed to do anything to change the waiting room’s ambience. The carpet was clean but a little worn, and determinedly bland. The pictures on the walls were of nothing that could offend anybody, ever, mostly because they were either of flowers or so abstract as to be indistinguishable from confusion. Gregor knew better than to do that thing about modern art that marked anyone who engaged in it as a provincial idiot—he wasn’t about to start talking about how all the paintings like that looked like something that could be done by a five-year-old child—but in the most private recesses of his brain, he still wondered why anybody bothered. And why, exactly, was good representational work no longer really “art”? He should have paid more attention to his Humanities courses when he was at Penn. He wasn’t sure he’d paid much attention to anything while he was at Penn, besides making damned sure that his grades were as close to perfect as he could get them, to make equally sure that an Ivy League school would take him for his graduate work. Gregor couldn’t even remember having had a strong ambition in any one direction. He hadn’t been considering the FBI while he was in college, traveling by public transportation every day from a Cavanaugh Street that was still poor tenements to the University of Pennsylvania of the late fifites, full of preppies and debutantes, and not all that dedicated to educating the kinds of people who needed scholarships to survive. Now he thought that his only ambition back then might have been to make it out. Making it out was different from making it. Making it meant having a lot of money and your picture in People magazine. Making it out meant just… never having to go back where you’d come from.

  And here he was, back where he’d come from. Did it matter that where he’d come from didn’t really exist now any more than the Gregor Demarkian of that period of time existed now? It mattered that Cavanaugh Street was town houses and expensive condominiums and not tenements and railroad flats.

  He was up on his feet and walking around the room, looking at the pictures on the walls the way he’d look at pictures in a museum, when somebody cleared his throat behind him. Gregor turned and found a short, wiry, intense young man in a gray suit that didn’t look like it fit him, because no suit anywhere would ever look like it fit him. His body was the wrong shape for suits. This is a man who ought to be a boxer, Gregor thought. But the man was holding out his hand, so Gregor held out his hand, too.

  “It’s Mr. Demarkian,” the man said. “I recognize you from your pictures. I’m Rob Benedetti.”

  “Ah,” Gregor said.

  “Ah?”

  “I was wondering what you used for a nickname,” Gregor said. “I’ve heard from several people that you don’t like to be called Bob.”

  “Right,” Benedetti said. He seemed to be at a loss for where to take the conversation next, for which Gregor didn’t blame him. He threw an odd look at the pictures on the wall and at Gregor standing to look at them and said, “Why don’t you come into the office and we can talk. John said you were going to help the Justice Project in the search for Sherman Markey.”

  Gregor followed Benedetti’s retreating back, wondering if he should bother to go into any long explanation of his present relationship to the case. It didn’t help that he didn’t know if he had any relationship to the case, or even if there was a case.

  He was explaining about the visit he’d had from Chickie George when he really noticed the room he’d been led into, and then he stopped. It was the most remarkable place he’d ever seen. If there was a paperless office in the United States, this wasn’t it. There were stacks of file folders full of paper everywhere: on the desk, on the floor, on the bookcases in piles obscuring the books, on the seat of the chair Gregor was supposed to sit in. It was like one of those paintings that got titled Schizophrenic’s Hallucination or Paranoid’s Dream. It was beyond a mess. It was a threatening mess.

  “Excuse me,” Rob Benedetti said. He reached over and took the files off the chair Gregor was supposed to sit in. Then he held them in his hands for a moment, wondering what he was supposed to do with them. Then he dumped them on the pile on his desk. Given how much was there, a few more probably wouldn’t make a difference.

  “Are you spring-cleaning or something?” Gregor asked.

  Rob Benedetti went around the desk and took a few file folders off the seat he was supposed to sit in himself. “I’ve been trying to get Carson’s stuff straightened out,” he said. “Carson was, I don’t know. Not exactly caught up. Not that I blame him, mind you. He must have been sick for months before he fell over. My wife is always trying to make me go to the doctor, and like that, because she says this is a job that kills people, but I think that’s going too far. Anyway, Carson must have been sick for a while, because here we are, and there’s a lot of back stuff that needs to be taken care of, and I’ve been going through it piece by piece so that I can figure out what’s going on.”

  “How’s it going?”

  “You can see how it’s going,” Rob Benedetti said. “Never mind. We’ll get to it or not. I’ll get elected in November or not. In the meantime, we’ve got a Drew Harrigan problem.”

  “I don’t,” Gregor said.

  “Yes, you do, whether you realize it or not,” Benedetti said. “How much do you know about Drew Harrigan?”

  Gregor had been carrying his coat over his arm when he came into the office and laid it down over the back of the chair when he’d sat down. Now he stood up, rummaged around in it, and pulled out the book he’d bought at Barnes & Noble.

  “I’ve got this,” he said. “I know he’s very successful. I’ve never heard him on the radio.”

  “Did you look at the book?”

  “A little.”

  “And?”

  Gregor hesitated. “It doesn’t seem fair to criticize when I’ve barely read anything but a line here or there, but the lines I’ve read have seemed a little ham-handed and simplistic. Simplistic to the point of being inaccurate sometimes.”

  “It’s okay. You can call him an idiot in this office if you want to.”

  “I don’t know that he is an idiot,” Gregor said. “I’ve got a tendency to feel that people who become great successes at legitimate endeavors, and even some of the ones who become great successes at illegitimate ones, are probably bright enough. Competition is tough. It’s not easy to make something of yourself, especially not a big something.”

  “Maybe,” Benedetti said. “Maybe the truth is that he got to be a big something by pandering to the idiots in his audience. He’s got a lot of idiots in his audience, and you’re hearing that from a man who’s probably closer to Harr
igan politically than he is to John Jackman. I’m nobody’s liberal. But.”

  “But?”

  “But if the man isn’t an idiot, he’s a liar,” Benedetti said. “He has to know that the stuff he says is wrong. He’s got a staff. They call here every once in a while to check things, and we try to be good about providing them with information. We try to be good about providing everybody with information. With Harrigan, it doesn’t make any difference. If it isn’t what he wants to hear, he doesn’t hear it. All I can say is thank God he’s going after the national audience and not just the one here, or we’d all be dead as door-nails from the misinformation.”

  “I still don’t see how that makes him my problem,” Gregor said.

  Benedetti sighed. “How much do you know about the case so far?” Gregor gave a rundown that included the traffic stop that had revealed a pile of illegal pills on the front passenger seat of Drew Harrigan’s car, the arrest, and Harrigan’s fingering of Sherman Markey.

  “Right,” Benedetti said. “Now, you got to understand something. The cops that pulled Harrigan over didn’t know it was Harrigan when they pulled him over. It was just some guy in an expensive car, driving like he’d had about twenty martinis. But within maybe a minute, they did know, because Harrigan wouldn’t shut up about it. I’m going to send you down to talk to them later, and they’ll tell you about it. The pills were there. They had to take the guy in. Harrigan acted like, because it was him, they could just let him ride.”

  “Is that possible?” Gregor asked. “Are there police in this city who would have let him ride?”

  “I don’t know,” Benedetti said. “There are police who are big fans. Harrigan is very pro-cop, at least superficially. He’s in favor of the death penalty. He’s in favor of stiffer sentences. He doesn’t like Miranda much—”

  “I thought the cops had gotten used to Miranda.”

  “They have,” Benedetti said. “What they don’t like is how easily a conviction can be overturned because of Miranda violations, or alleged Miranda violations. I don’t like that either. Anyway, Harrigan is good with that stuff, so there are fans on the force. I don’t know if any of them would have, or has, let him loose after finding him driving around in that state of mind with pills in the vehicle. But he went ballistic, and that gives me a feeling I don’t like.”

  “Meaning you think that a cop did let him off in similar circumstances at least one other time,” Gregor said.

  “Meaning I think it’s possible,” Benedetti said. “I don’t want to go labeling the beat officers before I know for sure. But if you talk to the two men who arrested him that night, Dane Marbury and Mike Giametti, they’ll tell you what they told me, and that’s that Harrigan went completely berserk when they insisted on arresting him. He got physically violent.”

  “He doesn’t look like somebody who could do much damage getting physically violent.”

  “Nah, he didn’t. He’s out of shape as hell. He’s practically as bad as Carson. Rush Limbaugh went on a diet. Drew Harrigan never bothered. But anybody can get physically violent. Harrigan pushed the officers, kicked them, bit one of them on the hand—”

  “—Bit him?”

  “He was flying,” Benedetti said. “God only knows what he had in him at the time, because once his lawyer got into it he wasn’t about to take a drug test, but the likelihood is OxyContin at least.”

  “OxyContin doesn’t make you violent, though, does it?” Gregor said. “It’s a tranquilizer, or something like that.”

  “It’s a pain reliever. It’s most similar in effect to narcotics.”

  “Just as I said, not the sort of thing to make you violent.”

  “No,” Benedetti said, “but you’ve got to remember a few things. First, it wasn’t the only thing he was taking. There were a lot of different pills on the seat, including three different kinds of prescription diet pills, which are amphetamines. Second, he didn’t get violent until Marbury and Giametti tried to arrest him. And third, people react differently to the same kinds of pills. That he was flying was a pretty good bet. You can see the police reports and the stuff from the station house, where he apparently behaved like a loon. Including singing.”

  “He was singing in the station house?”

  “He was singing ‘Do Wah Diddy Diddy,’ or whatever it’s called.”

  Gregor looked down at the picture on the back of Heart in the Right Place. “That must have been something to see. But you know, you still haven’t told me why I have a Drew Harrigan problem. I was brought into this to help find Sherman Markey. Granted, nobody would be looking for Markey if it weren’t for Harrigan, I still don’t see why I need to deal with Harrigan to find Markey. In fact, I’m not even sure I’m supposed to find Markey. All I was asked to do was to get you people to—”

  “—Do another morgue check, I know. It’s been done. John Jackman called it in an hour ago. But you’ve got to understand what the thing is with Drew Harrigan.”

  “What is it?”

  “Harrigan named Markey as his contact for the drugs,” Benedetti said, “something that everybody knew as soon as they saw him couldn’t be true. John said you hadn’t met Markey yet?”

  “That’s right.”

  “He’s an old alkie, a really old alkie. He’s been pickled for decades. Like a lot of these guys, he’s spaced. He’s almost like an Alzheimer’s patient, except that he can focus on one thing, and that’s getting another drink if there isn’t one sitting in front of him. Harrigan didn’t just say Markey got him the drugs, which I wouldn’t have believed anyway. Harrigan said he sent Markey to pharmacies, doctors’ offices—”

  “Jackman told me.”

  “Okay,” Benedetti said. “So Harrigan comes in, gets booked, calls his lawyer, and tells us all about Markey, right? We go get Markey, which isn’t hard, because he hangs out in only a couple of places and ends up at the same shelter when it gets too cold. We get Markey. We bring him in. It’s pretty obvious that whoever got Harrigan the drugs, Markey wasn’t it. So then I decided to do something, and I think it was probably a mistake.”

  “What did you decide to do?”

  “Charge Markey.”

  “Even though you knew he couldn’t be guilty.”

  “Yeah,” Benedetti said. “Look, Mr. Demarkian. This is the thing. Harrigan is behaving like a celebrity jerk. From off, his attitude has been that we can’t touch him and we won’t because he’s such an important person. He was that way to the officers in the car, he’s been that way to everybody he’s talked to since. He seems to think it’s automatic that because he’s a big celebrity we won’t bring any serious charges against him and we won’t insist on jail time. This is the guy who goes on the air four times a week and tells the world that the district attorneys of practically everywhere are complete wusses because they don’t send more white drug addicts to jail. That’s his solution to the difference in incarceration rates for drug crimes by race. Put more white drug addicts in jail, and if we don’t, we’re full of shit when we say we’re serious about the drug war. Sorry.”

  “That’s all right,” Gregor said.

  “Charging Markey got me two things,” Benedetti said. “The first thing it got me was an excuse not to drop charges or make a deal with Harrigan. I couldn’t do that and charge Markey at the same time because it would look like favoritism. It would look like I was going after a poor homeless man and letting the rich guy off the hook. Not that that isn’t done every day, because it is, but it gave me cover with Harrigan’s attorney. The second thing it got me was something of a lever to try to find out who was really getting Harrigan those drugs. Because you know and I know that somebody was, and that that somebody isn’t some pathetic old alkie living on the street. And I want him.”

  Gregor thought about it. “I can’t see that you did anything unethical. Your reasoning makes sense. Is Drew Harrigan going to get some kind of celebrity free ride?”

  “Probably.” Benedetti sighed. “In the long run. Oh, we’l
l put him away for a few months, but it’ll be a token thing. He’d be at too much risk in the general prison population, and there’s no real point in jailing him anyway. If you ask me, there’s no real point in jailing most of the people we jail. Violent offenders, yes. People who defraud over and over and over again. Okay. But why is it exactly that we put away some kid for smoking dope and keep him in jail for a year, or five? Why is that sensible? Or embezzlers, or people who kite checks? I can think of a million better ways to handle those things than jail.”

  “Are you going to say those things in the election?”

  “Not on your life.”

  “So you have your answer,” Gregor said. “You still haven’t told me, why do I have a Drew Harrigan problem?”

  Rob Benedetti stared at the ceiling, then at the floor, then out the small square window that seemed to have a view of nothing but blank gray walls. Then he turned back to Gregor. “The word’s been out on the street for the last three days,” he said, “that Sherman Markey is dead, and Drew Harrigan killed him.”

  “Drew Harrigan is in rehab.”

  “Drew Harrigan’s accomplice killed him, then,” Rob said. “Jackman said something about this,” Gregor said. “He said people were speculating. So what?”

  “It actually goes a little farther than that,” Benedetti said. “The night Sherman Markey disappeared, he was wearing a new set of clothes the people at the Justice Project bought him, including a bright red watch hat. On the morning of Tuesday, January twenty-eighth, a homeless man walked into the precinct station on Hardscrabble Road and tried to report a theft. He said a man he knew had died in a homeless shelter the night before, and some of the other men had stolen his hat. His bright red hat. He wanted to report the theft on behalf of the dead man.”

  “And the police let him file a report?”

  “No,” Benedetti said. “They sloughed him off, and that would have been that, because nobody would have remembered it. However, today, because you’ve been around asking questions and John Jackman is a friend of yours, we’ve had people double-checking things. And then we got lucky, and there was a coincidence.”