Hardscrabble Road

by Jane Haddam

  To be fair, nobody seemed to be interested in seeing her go back. Surely Alison hadn’t. Kate was a little sorry that she couldn’t help Alison herself, because the case sounded absolutely perfect, right down to the false accusations from a conservative source, but there it was. Alison wasn’t homeless. She had good degrees and a tenured faculty position. Sherman Markey was homeless, or dead, and he had nothing at all. It was, Kate thought, time for her to find somebody to sleep with. She wasn’t looking for a relationship with depth. She was looking for sex. Sex cleared her head.

  Lots of things cleared her head. Chickie George made it…well, there was that “bemused” again. Chickie was standing in the door to the office she had taken over, holding a file folder and looking dejected. The office was so clean it looked as if it were in pain.

  “He said he’d get them to check,” Chickie was saying, “and that’s the best I could hope for, really. I don’t know. Maybe we’re wrong. Maybe he isn’t dead.”

  “We can always hope,” Kate said, “but if he isn’t dead, where is he?”

  Chickie shrugged. “He’s an addled old man. Everybody keeps saying that. Maybe he got his hands on some serious booze and went on a bender.”

  “For two weeks? If he went on a bender for two weeks, he would be dead.”

  “People go on benders for longer than that,” Chickie said. “No, I know what you mean. Not people in Sherman’s kind of shape. I don’t know. Maybe he fuzzed out and can’t remember who he is or where he’s supposed to be. Maybe he’s just wandering around someplace.”

  “In the open? Then why hasn’t anybody seen him?”

  “I don’t know,” Chickie said. “Never mind. I know. He’s probably dead. And maybe they’ll do another check and find a corpse they overlooked. The whole thing is just getting so… odd. If you know what I mean.”

  “Sure,” Kate said. “There’s another possibility, you know. He could be dead, but not in a morgue. He could have died in some abandoned building somewhere and they just haven’t found the body yet. It’s cold. As long as it’s cold, there’s no smell. You’d be amazed at how many bodies they find in vacant lots once the spring thaws come.”

  “From the smell?”

  “Exactly.”

  “That’s pleasant to contemplate.”

  “Pleasant or not, that’s the way things work,” Kate said. “This time, though, we need them to look. I’m not sure we can go on with the case with Sherman missing, and I think we need to go on with the case. It’s important. Harrigan will be out in, what, twenty or so days? We don’t want him to walk. We do have to find Sherman.”

  “Can we go on with the case if we find him and he’s dead?”

  “I don’t know,” Kate said. “I’ll look into it. And don’t say we should never have reported him missing. We had to, under the circumstances. We probably had to under any circumstances. Have you talked to Harrigan’s lawyers yet?”

  “No, I thought you had.”

  “I have,” Kate said. Then she decided to let that one pass. “Never mind. It’s all under control. Go back to doing whatever you normally do and I’ll leave you alone until I get something definite going on.”

  “I’m supposed to be going to class,” Chickie said. “I haven’t been doing a lot of that lately. Are you sure you want me to go on? You always seem to have so much to do.”

  “Most of it has nothing to do with this,” Kate said. “You go.”

  Chickie hesitated in the doorway. Then he turned around and walked off, looking like something Central Casting had sent in to play a lawyer. Kate wondered what would happen to him once he passed the bar. A lot of kids said they wanted to go into public interest law, or work with the people who ordinarily wouldn’t have representation, but those big-firm salaries were waiting, and they were bigger and more outside the scale of ordinary experience every day. Penn was a good degree. It wasn’t as good as Yale or Harvard, but it was still a good degree. Somebody like Chickie would have offers.

  Kate knew herself well enough to understand that she couldn’t say, for sure, that she would be doing the kind of work she was doing if there had been anything like an alternative when she was first looking for a job. In the end, she was glad she’d chosen the work she had. She’d seen enough of the women who came in the law school classes after hers, who had had offers, not to envy them. If she put in a one-hundred-hour week, it was because she was working on something she believed in, something she honestly thought would make the world better. It wasn’t in order to save Exxon from being sued by the Alaskan fishermen whose livelihoods it had ruined by hiring a tanker captain who couldn’t hold his liquor, or to keep Enron executives out of jail and with their personal fortunes intact after they’d trashed the retirement savings of hundreds of their workers. Neil would probably say she was an idiot, or a Communist, but she was neither. She just didn’t see the point of spending her life, the only one she would ever have, making the rich richer and behaving as if the poor didn’t exist.

  Of course, there were dangers in the other direction. She had promised herself long ago that if she ever heard herself talking about “the transgressive hermeneutics of grammar” or describing her case as a “struggle against oppression,” she’d stop whatever she was doing, walk right out the door, and go to work for the Morgan Bank.

  Right now, she just thought she needed a vacation. She’d come straight out here after settling a case in New York for the Coalition for the Homeless, which had been very good work but a long haul, dealing with city lawyers whose only purpose in life was to get her to run out of money and out of steam, and she was exhausted. She could use an island with lots of sunshine, lots of sand, and lots of liquor.

  Here was something else she thought was important—she never, ever denied that she was who she was. Her idea of what to do about equality was to make the poor richer, not chuck herself into penury or play the martyr by buying her clothes at Kmart when she was able to shop at Saks. She was not a martyr, or a saint. She was just doing work she loved to do.

  The phone on her desk buzzed. She picked up and the receptionist said, “Ms. Daniel? It’s Mr. Ballard on line three.”

  Speaking of somebody who was trying to be a martyr or a saint, Kate thought. She picked up and said something noncommittal into the phone. Ray Dean Ballard always made her a little nuts. The fact that he insisted on calling himself Ray Dean made her nutser. If that was a word.

  “Don’t be pissy,” he said. “I’ve got some news.”

  “That’s good,” Kate said, “because we’re not much with news here this morning at all. What have you got?”

  “The body, maybe.”

  Kate sat up. “Are you serious? Where is it? How long has he been dead?”

  “Calm down,” Ray Dean said. “It’s not that far gone yet. I got a call from my guy in the District Attorney’s Office. Demarkian’s been in to see Benedetti.”

  “That’s not news. We knew he was going to do something like that. That’s why Chickie went to see him.”

  “True enough, but now the two of them have gone out to the Hardscrabble Road precinct house. They’re stopping somewhere on the way, to get the guys who arrested Harrigan. But the thing is—”

  “—What’s Hardscrabble Road?” “It’s about as close to the absolute edge of the city limits as you can get,” Ray Dean said. “You’d practically think it wasn’t part of the city at all. There’s a convent out there. Monastery. Carmelite nuns.”

  “Benedictines,” Kate said automatically. “Sherman Markey was supposed to be a regular at some homeless shelter run by Benedictines.”

  “Yes, I know that place, this isn’t that. This is way out. They don’t have a homeless shelter so much as they’ve got a barn they let people sleep in when the weather gets cold. The city would have a fit about the fact that there’s only one bathroom and no real beds, except everybody is scared to death we’re going to have a really big haul of people freezing to death this winter. Anyway, they found the hat. The red h
at Sherman was wearing the last night anybody saw him alive. It turns out that somebody died out there on the night of the twenty-seventh.”

  “And they didn’t tell anybody?”

  “Of course they told somebody,” Ray Dean said. “They called an ambulance, the whole magilla. But at the time the hat was missing, or something. Anyway, the hat was left behind. The body is at the morgue somewhere, they’re going to try to go find it. But this is going to be Sherman. It all fits.”

  “The place doesn’t fit,” Kate said slowly, “does it? You say it’s way out on the edge of the city? How would he have gotten there?”

  “How do they ever get anywhere?” Ray Dean said. “We can work that out later. You should be ready for news, though. It’s coming this afternoon. And it’s going to be more interesting than you think.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you know the monastery I’m talking about. Our Lady of Mount Carmel. It’s the one that owns the land you guys had the lien put on, the land Drew Harrigan gave to the nuns after you guys sued him on Sherman’s behalf. The one where Drew Harrigan’s sister is the Abbess.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Kate said.

  “Exactly. Hold on tight. This is going to be a wild ride. I’ll call you back later. I’ve got a bunch of stuff to do. I just wanted to make sure you were warned.”

  “Right,” Kate said. Then she put down the phone and stared at it.

  It wasn’t the clients who got to her. It wasn’t the plaintiffs. It wasn’t the defendants. It wasn’t even the other lawyers and judges. It was just this, the stuff that came out of the walls when you weren’t expecting it.

  3

  The order to run fingerprint checks on any and all corpses that had been delivered to the morgue since January 27 had come down more than two hours ago, and everybody in the facility had been ignoring it ever since. It wasn’t that they didn’t want to be helpful, Dr. Ramarcharadan thought. It was just that there was so much to do that nobody could handle their real workload, never mind all these calls for fingerprint checks. Dr. Ramarcharadan was from the Punjab. He’d been in America a total of fifty-two months. He was the most conscientious of men, but there was only so much he could do with a facility that was short-staffed in the best of times, and now—with this cold and the people dying from it—so outclassed that it might as well have been doing nothing at all.

  Except that that wasn’t true, and Dr. Ramarcharadan knew it. He was managing six autopsies a day these days. He was beginning to see corpses in his sleep. In India, he had not been a pathologist, and hadn’t expected to be. Here, he’d had no other choice. In a few years, he might be able to get all his certifications in order and be allowed to perform surgery again, which was what he was trained for.

  At the moment, he was all suited up and ready to go on one more corpse. His back hurt, his legs hurt, his feet hurt, and everything in his head was humming. He’d been at it since six o’clock this morning. He thought his wrists were about to fall off.

  The good thing about pathology was that you didn’t have to worry about finesse. Unless there was some overriding reason, and he couldn’t think of what one might be, you could just go ahead and do what you did without worrying about the patient’s feelings. This patient was on the chart as a homeless man picked up on one of those nights when just taking out the garbage could give a man frostbite. Dr. Ramarcharadan didn’t think there was much to be preferred in the Punjab over the United States, but the weather was definitely something. He tapped into the chest bone, made a long cut, and began to peel away the skin. They were getting to them far too late these days. They always left the homeless ones for last, because nobody was waiting to take possession of them. They should get at them right away. There was something wrong about leaving them here for so long, even frozen, even knowing they could not deteriorate.

  Dr. Ramarcharadan’s wife sometimes said she didn’t like him to touch her when he came home, because she knew he’d had his hands on dead bodies, and that was the work of untouchables—but he didn’t believe that. She was not a religious woman, any more than he was a religious man, and she didn’t approve of the caste system either. He thought it was an excuse, the way other women might get a headache. Ah, well. She’d borne him three sons in four years, all American citizens. Maybe she was just tired.

  If he hadn’t been thinking about the sons—good sons, too, strong and healthy, and intelligent—he would have noticed sooner. As it was, he was peeling back bone before it struck him, and for a long moment he didn’t understand what he was seeing. It was the intestines he noticed first. What were the chances of that? He should have seen the obvious, but he hadn’t.

  He took a deep breath and told himself to calm down. He thought about the newspaper headlines and the television news stories and the editorials in magazines over the last few weeks. He tried to remember what he did and didn’t know about how the law worked in the United States of America. The problem was, he mostly didn’t know. He wasn’t even sure that this would not, somehow, turn out to be his fault.

  He looked at the intestines again, just to make sure. They were still twisting in the wrong direction. Then he looked up the torso and checked that, too. It had not miraculously become something it was not.

  He stepped back away from the table and motioned to the nurse. When they were both outside the swinging doors in the waiting area he said, “We must call the police now, right away. We must not touch this body again until they come. Do you understand that?”

  She nodded frantically and then took off at a run.

  Dr. Ramarcharadan didn’t remind her that there was a phone on the wall not fifteen feet away.

  He didn’t blame her for her panic.

  EIGHT

  1

  For the Philadelphia Police Department, the real problem with the cold was that engines wouldn’t start. There had been some talk about constructing a heated garage for police and emergency vehicles, and the ambulances were parked in underground hospital garages that were never allowed to get cold enough to stall them, but in the end fiscal responsibility won out over common sense and shared history. Besides, it was an election year, and in an election year it never did anybody any good to suggest something that might require raising taxes. It did do whoever suggested it some good to propose new products and services, but this wasn’t 1957 anymore. If you suggested the service, your opponent would bring up the taxes.

  “I don’t think anybody knows what they’re talking about when they’re talking about taxes,” Rob Benedetti said, as he put Gregor into the car that would take him to Detectives Marbury and Giametti. “I mean, what do they think? They’re going to pay for the police department with air?”

  The only thing Gregor Demarkian knew about taxes was that he paid them, and he didn’t even know much about that, since Bennis’s accountant figured them for him and all he did was write checks. He got into the car, glad it was running and glad it had the heater on.

  “Let me tell you what people think about taxes,” Benedetti said. “They think that the government is spending a gazillion dollars on crap. Programs to bring Bolivian folk music to public schools. Programs to support the Daughters of the War of 1812 in their drive to mount an opera on the war to tour American high schools. Programs to establish an Institute of Broccoli Studies in northwest Tennessee.”

  Gregor couldn’t help himself. “Is Tennessee a big broccoli-growing state?”

  “How am I supposed to know?” Benedetti said. “That’s not the point. The point is that people think there are millions of these programs and they take up most of the budget, so all we have to do is get rid of the silly programs and we can have all the police and fire protection we want, and it isn’t true. There are programs, but they only take up a little money compared to the rest. When you cut taxes to the point where my own nieces and nephews could afford to pay them out of their allowances—and, believe me, my sister doesn’t hand out Rockefeller-sized allowances—anyway, you see what I mean. It’s completel
y insane. You should tell John Jackman it’s completely insane.”

  “I’ll try,” Gregor said.

  “We’ve got six vehicles that wouldn’t start this morning in this precinct alone,” Rob Benedetti said. “That’s six right here around my office. Plus I don’t remember how many state cars that won’t go. We need heated parking spaces. It’s winter, for God’s sake. It’s cold enough to turn rabbit turds into icicles. What do they want from us?”

  What Gregor wanted was to get the car moving and out of the way. He had no idea what had started Rob Benedetti on taxes, but just in case it was something he’d said, he wanted to be sure he wouldn’t be able to say it again. He made noncommittal noises—yes, of course it seemed sensible to pay enough in taxes to get the police protection you needed; no, of course it didn’t make sense to think that we could do away with taxes altogether and still have a city worth living in—and thought that politics in an election year was like Armenian Lent. Whether you wanted to take part in it or not, it chased you until it hunted you down.

  Which reminded him: Lent was coming up soon. Cavanaugh Street would be full of women cooking lentils in oil. The Ararat would serve him eggs with sausages for breakfast, but Linda Melajian would look disappointed in him when she put the plate on the table, and Tibor would sigh a lot. It wouldn’t do him any good to remind them all that Armenian Lent was one of the things he had wanted so desperately to escape when he left Philadelphia for graduate school.