Hardscrabble Road

by Jane Haddam

  Finally, the car was on the road and moving, and Gregor went back to feeling as if he were in a road trip movie. He thought he’d done more traveling in cars today than he ordinarily did in any given week, and all to get from one place to the other in a mostly confined area. The activity felt pointless. He wasn’t really all that emotionally involved in finding Sherman Markey, or in anything Drew Harrigan might think he wanted to do. On the other hand, the activity had done what he’d started out hoping it would do. He’d spent most of the day not thinking of Bennis Hannaford at all.

  I’m too old, he thought, to have the kind of relationship with a woman that requires me to work hard at not thinking about her.

  Marbury and Giametti worked out of a precinct not very far from the District Attorney’s Office. It was their car that wouldn’t start, which was why Gregor was going to them. It was afternoon now, and there were more people on the street, many of them aimless. In spite of the cold, though, Gregor thought it was better in February than in December, because in December it got dark in the middle of the afternoon.

  One of the men was waiting at the curb when the car drove up. He was tall and thin and shaggy in a way policemen usually aren’t. In Gregor’s experience, men who joined the police force liked to think of themselves as being in the military. They went in for buzz cuts and too many hours spent working out with weights.

  The car drew to a stop and the tall man opened the door at Gregor’s side. He really did not look military at all. His hair came down over the back of his collar. His fingers were so long, they could have been caricatures out of a cartoon about a skeleton. The effect was thrown off by the short police jacket, standard uniform issue. It had been made for a compact, bulky man who loved his G.I. Joe dolls. The skeleton put a hand out to help him from the car.

  “Mr. Demarkian?” he said. “I’m Dane Marbury. We’ve given up on the car. Mike’s gone to get us a new one. And we’d both like to thank you very much.”

  “For what?” Gregor was out and closing the car door behind him. The cold was still wicked. The wind was still stiff.

  “For giving us something to do on a long, boring day,” Marbury said. “Don’t mind us. This is the least exciting precinct in the city. We’ve got rich guys. We’ve got hookers. Don’t let anybody ever tell you that rich guys only like high-priced call girls. You wouldn’t believe how many of them like to pick up hookers off the street, skanky hookers, too—”

  “Dane, for Christ’s sake. He used to be with the FBI.”

  The person who said this was the bulky, compact man Gregor had been imagining in a police uniform jacket, and he came equipped even with the buzz cut. Dane Marbury turned around and shrugged.

  “So he was with the FBI,” he said. “What does the FBI know? They’re clueless on the street and you know it.”

  “The FBI knows from rich guys being blackmailed by cheap hookers. How do you do, Mr. Demarkian. I’m Mike Giametti.”

  “How do you do,” Gregor said.

  It really was cold out here. Neither of the young men seemed to notice it.

  “I still say we ought to thank him,” Dane Marbury said. “He’s got us out of here for the afternoon, and I’m more than happy to go. I’m not all that interested in rich guys and I’m not all that interested in hookers.”

  “No, I’m glad to get out of here, too,” Giametti said. I’ve got us a ride. The nuns are going to be waiting.”

  “And it’s cold,” Gregor said.

  The two younger men looked at him, seemed confused, and blinked.

  2

  The precinct that included the Monastery of Our Lady of Mount Carmel was supposed to be “not central,” or “out of the way,” but Gregor had never imagined it might actually be out in the country. He kept trying to get his bearings and couldn’t. They were in the city, then the city petered out, then there were miles of strip malls and fast-food restaurants, then there was grass, or as much of it as you could see under the heavy coating of snow that had not disappeared this far out into the country. Except that they couldn’t be in the country, Gregor thought, because they were still within the city limits. If they hadn’t been, then the police who covered Hardscrabble Road would belong to a township, and not Philadelphia.

  Mike Giametti looked just as confused as Gregor was. “If the map didn’t fit, I’d think we were lost. You sure this is where we’re supposed to go?”

  Dane Marbury nodded. “I checked the maps back at the precinct. This is where we’re supposed to go. You wouldn’t think it was part of the city, would you?”

  “I don’t think it’s part of the city,” Giametti said. “I think we’re lost.”

  “Next intersection should be Colcannon Street,” Marbury said.

  All three of them held their breath as the next intersection came up, but it was Colcannon Street. The problem was that there didn’t seem to be much of anything on Colcannon Street. There were a few low buildings: a hardware store, a pharmacy, a pawnshop, a Laundromat. There were a few vacant lots. The area didn’t look depressed as much as it looked never developed, and Gregor didn’t think there was anywhere in the city of Philadelphia, or even in the greater Metro area, that hadn’t been developed.

  “Next intersection is Gwane Street,” Marbury said.

  The next intersection was Gwane Street. There was nobody walking around on the pavements at all. The whole thing could have been a stage set for a Twilight Zone episode. Still, Gregor thought, there was that pawnshop. Pawnshops meant poor people, or at least people living close enough to the edge that they needed extra money fast and had no choice but to part with the things they loved to get it. It wasn’t impossible that an area with a pawnshop would also be an area with homeless people.

  “I know why it looks so wrong,” Gregor said suddenly. “There aren’t any adult bookstores.”

  “There aren’t any adult bookstores in most of the neighborhoods of Philadelphia,” Dane Marbury said. “What do you take us for?”

  “In neighborhoods with pawnshops, there are adult bookstores,” Gregor said. “Except here, there aren’t.”

  “Maybe they’re afraid of the nuns,” Mike Giametti said.

  Gregor shifted uncomfortably in the backseat. This was a squad car, so he was in the compartment usually reserved for people who had been arrested for something or the other. “Tell me about Drew Harrigan,” he said. “Rob Benedetti said—”

  “Yeah,” Marbury said. “It’s our big claim to fame. If we’d realized who it was—no, that’s not true. He was behaving like a jerk. In a car. Just what you need on a city street, with cars and pedestrians everywhere.”

  “The car was weaving?”

  “The car was doing weird things with speeding up and slowing down,” Giametti said. “It would, like, rev up and go for a few feet and then he’d hit the brake and when he started up again, he’d inch forward. The street wasn’t packed but there were other cars, and they were getting pretty upset. You couldn’t tell what he was going to do next.”

  “Yeah, and then he hit the gas pedal for serious,” Marbury said, “and just sort of shot off, right through a red light, and we decided we’d had enough. So we stopped him.”

  “And then it started getting weird,” Giametti said.

  “I didn’t know who he was,” Marbury said. “I mean, I know he’s famous, he does commercials, but what can I say? I’d never seen him. And I don’t listen to his radio show.”

  “He expected us to recognize him, though,” Giametti said. “And he did look sort of familiar to me right from the beginning, but he was flying. I mean, he was absolutely off the wall. He was singing.”

  “Benedetti said he was singing when you got him back to the precinct station,” Gregor said.

  “Oh, he was singing there, too,” Marbury said. “But he was singing right off in the car, between bouts of calling us stuff I’m not supposed to say in uniform except on a witness stand. He kept saying, ‘You know how important I am? You know how important I am? John Cleese is
going to play me in the movie.’ ”

  “Not John Cleese,” Giametti said. “John Goodman. You know, the guy who played Roseanne’s husband on TV.”

  “Whatever,” Marbury said. “We hauled him out of the car, and that was when he really started screaming at us. He kept saying, ‘You can’t arrest me. You can’t arrest me. I’ve got a deal with the city. I’ve got a deal.’ ”

  “He said that?” Gregor said. “That he had a deal?”

  “Yeah,” Giametti said. “Over and over again. Thing is, I think we’d have heard about it. I mean, our precinct is in this guy’s own neighborhood. If he’d cut some kind of deal with some of the beat cops, we’d have heard about it.”

  “Somebody would at least have tried to warn us off him,” Marbury said.

  “So what we thought was, maybe there’s some guys who just let him go when they find him because they feel sorry for him, or because they’re fans. There are a lot of conservatives on the police force. We figured he’d been stopped for behaving like an idiot a couple of times and the cop who stopped him gave him a break and let it pass. It happens, even for people who aren’t celebrities.”

  “But anyway,” Marbury said, “we figured we weren’t obliged to do the same, and we didn’t want to see him on the road for another goddamned minute, so we took him out of the car, and that’s when we saw the Tupper-ware thing on the front passenger seat. It was weird because I recognized the thing. The container. My wife’s sister sells Tupperware. We have a container just like it at home. And it was full of pills.”

  “The whole front of the car was full of pills,” Giametti said. “He’d been speeding up and hitting the brakes, and some of the pills had gotten loose and spilled on the floor and the seat and everywhere. Everything you could think of. OxyContin. Percoset. Darvocet. Percodan. Benzphetamine. Phentermine. Uppers, downers, you name it. All prescription.”

  “There’s this thing they do on the street,” Marbury said, “called a rainbow cocktail. You take a whole bunch of pills and you pick ’em by the color, and then you down the whole thing with Scotch. That’s what we thought he’d been doing. We asked him to take a Breathalyzer test and he refused. So we handcuffed him and put him in the squad car.”

  “We got the handcuffs on before he knew what we were doing,” Giametti said. “Getting him into the car wasn’t so easy. He went berserk. He kicked. He bit. He body-blocked. You wouldn’t think it to look at him, but he can manage one hell of a body block. He’s a big guy. He should have played football. I thought we were going to have to call for backup, but we got him in the car, and then we got back to the station as fast as we could.”

  “We were hoping the drive would calm him down,” Marbury said, “and it did some. I mean, he just sat back there singing and calling us motherwhatevers every few seconds, and he wasn’t jumping around. So we got him back to the station, we start to take him out of the car, and wham, there he goes again. He slammed into me from the side with his hip hooked out and I fell on my ass, and then he started to run, and Mike had to go after him, and by that time I was calling for backup, so about thirty guys showed up just as Mike grabbed him.”

  “And we’ve got all these guys surrounding him, guns drawn, and what does he do?” Giametti said. “First he starts screaming that they can’t shoot him, because don’t they know who he is?”

  “By then we all did,” Marbury said. “A couple of the guys with the guns even said so out loud: ‘Oh, my God. We’ve arrested Drew Harrigan.’ ”

  “But just when I thought we were going to have to put him in a strait jacket,” Giametti said, “he started singing again. And that was it. That was all he did for the rest of the night. Sing. He sang every oldies song I’ve ever heard of and a few I haven’t. ‘Do Wah Diddy Diddy.’ ‘Peggy Sue.’ ‘Great Balls of Fire.’ ”

  “And we get him in the station,” Marbury said, “and we book him, and we fingerprint him, and we photograph him, and he’s still singing. He won’t shut up. He won’t answer questions. Forget it. He’s still singing. So we slam him in a room and tell him he either starts behaving himself or we’ll lock him up for the night, and he demands to see his lawyer. And that was that.”

  “That was that?” Gregor asked. “You just let him go?”

  Giametti laughed. “He got Neil Savage down here. You know Neil Savage? From Barden, Savage & Deal?”

  “I know Barden, Savage & Deal,” Gregor said. “But they’re not a criminal firm, are they? They don’t handle this kind of thing.”

  “They handle whatever their clients want them to handle,” Giametti said, “and they’ve got the advantage of being the firm that represents the Republican Party in Pennsylvania. Plus, of course, a whole truckload of Republican bigwigs and semi-Republican bigwigs.”

  “What do you mean semi?”

  “Well,” Marbury said, “you can’t really blame Drew Harrigan on the entire Republican Party, can you? I mean, they didn’t hire him. They don’t pay him. He’s on his own.”

  “He’s just on his own and he only likes Republican politicians,” Giametti said, “but, yeah, Dane has a point. It’s just that Barden, Savage & Deal represent a lot of the big noises in conservative politics in this state. All the pro-life groups, for one thing.”

  “I’m pro-life,” Marbury said.

  “That has nothing to do with anything,” Giametti said. “Anyway, Neil Savage himself came down to the precinct station, told Harrigan to shut up—which he didn’t really do, since he went on singing—got on the phone, and within half an hour we had a hearing before a judge and the judge had set bail. Fastest thing I’ve ever seen in my life. You wouldn’t have believed it. Then Savage got Harrigan out the door, and that was the last we saw of him. The next morning, we got word that Harrigan had entered a total immersion rehab program and would be incommunicado for the next sixty days, the whole thing had already been cleared with the judge. And then there was a statement, which Savage read at a press conference. It was the statement that accused Sherman Markey of being the go-between for all the drugs.”

  “This was Bruce Williamson who was the judge?”

  “That’s the one.” Marbury sniggered.

  “Marvelous,” Gregor said.

  “This is going to be it,” Marbury said, leaning closer to the windshield to get a better look at the small sign by the side of the road. “God, it’s deserted around here. You’ve got to wonder how they stand it. Sherman Markey didn’t get him the drugs. Did we tell you that?”

  “Everybody keeps telling me that,” Gregor said.

  “It’s the truth,” Marbury said. “You should have seen Sherman when he was alive. He couldn’t think straight enough to remember he was on his way to the men’s room when he needed to take a piss. And neither one of us believes that crap about Sherman doing work around Drew Harrigan’s apartment for spare change. Sherman couldn’t do any work beyond whatever it took to get the cork out of the wine bottle, and he saved himself the trouble of that most of the time by buying the kind of wine that has a screw top. Assuming he bought any at all and didn’t just finish open bottles people left on the street.”

  “That’s a driveway,” Giametti said. “Look at it.”

  “That’s not a driveway, that’s an alley,” Marbury said.

  He pulled the squad car up to the curb. There were almost no cars parked anywhere on this street. There were still no people. Gregor started buttoning his coat again, in anticipation of the wind. It was only anticipation, because he couldn’t let himself out. There was no way to open the doors back here from the inside.

  “I’m glad Rob isn’t interested in letting him off,” Giametti said. “I’m sick of these guys who piss and moan about everybody else, who want the police to act like the Spanish Inquisition, then they get into some trouble and they expect to walk right out of it. We ought to stick more of these guys in jail sometime. That would do more than anything else I can think of to improve the level of public discourse.”

  “Mike reads heavy mag
azines,” Marbury said solemnly.

  Then they both got out onto the street and opened up for Gregor at once. The two open doors created a wind tunnel that sent cold air slamming against Gregor’s face as if he’d just stepped up to a working fan.

  “Damn,” he said, and got out himself.

  3

  Gregor Demarkian saw the nun as soon as he walked through the precinct house door, because she was a vision from another time and another place: a nun in a habit, a real habit, that went all the way down to the floor, that completely covered her head. The only difference in the picture he was imagining was on the forehead. She had no white band of cloth on the forehead. Instead, her black veil was draped over a white headdress that ended at her hairline. Black veil, white wimple, brown habit. Gregor wasn’t sure he’d ever met a Carmelite before. Then he looked down at her feet and realized she was wearing only socks and sandals, not real shoes.

  She was up near the counter, pacing up and down in front of the sergeant on duty as if nothing on the planet could convince her to stay still. She was very young, and very pretty, tall and slender and erect. Except for Audrey Hepburn, she was the only person Gregor had ever seen who looked too thin in a traditional nun’s habit. He wondered what it was about the shoes.

  “You just can’t keep questioning him over and over again,” she was saying. “He’s not well. He doesn’t have any answers. What do you think you’re doing?”

  “If he wants a lawyer, he can ask for one.”

  “I am a lawyer,” the nun said. “If you want my credentials, I’ll call the monastery and have Sister Immaculata bring them in for me. He’s a tired, sick old man and his only crime was to find that hat and bring it to my attention. I should never have told you who he was. This is completely ridiculous.”

  Gregor, Giametti, and Marbury had reached the counter, and the young nun turned to look at the three of them. She seemed surprised to see them there—which said something, Gregor thought, about the level of traffic this precinct had had here so far today.