Hardscrabble Road

by Jane Haddam

  Why had Drew Harrigan been in a barn full of homeless men at a cloistered monastery at the edge of the city? Even assuming he needed to get around without being recognized, the barn seemed like an extraneous detail—an exaggerated gesture that didn’t look as if it was necessary for anything. Gregor Demarkian did not believe in murderers who did elaborate things for the sake of doing elaborate things, or of being clever. Murderers were not clever. Most of them were barely even conscious. They got liquored up and started a fight in a bar. They got high on speed or cocaine and started imagining that the neighbor was sending his cat over to poison their supply of beer. They got fired or blew a tire or lost some money on the races and then just lost it themselves. The ones who tried to be clever were the least clever of all. They always forgot things. Most of all, they forgot that the detective story cliché that said all cops were stupid was just that, a cliché, and not reality.

  “Are you okay?” Rob Benedetti asked him, as they began to move into an area of small, triple-decker houses.

  “I was thinking about Charles Stuart.”

  “Who’s Charles Stuart?”

  “It was a murder case in Boston a few years ago,” Gregor said. “This guy was driving through a poor neighborhood with his wife when he stopped at a stoplight or something. I don’t remember why they stopped. But then, according to him, they were attacked by a large black guy, armed. Then they were kidnapped and driven to Mission Hill by force. The guy killed the wife and shot Stuart himself in the stomach.”

  “Ack,” Marbury said. “I remember that one. It wasn’t a black guy, right? It was—”

  “—Stuart himself,” Gregor said. “Yes, exactly. Stuart killed his wife and shot himself in the stomach so that he could claim they were attacked. Which was pretty interesting, since most murderers wouldn’t take a chance like that. He could have killed himself.”

  “Maybe he just didn’t realize how dangerous it was to do what he was doing to himself,” Rob Benedetti said. “I mean, most of these guys aren’t rocket scientists.”

  “No, they’re not,” Gregor said, “and he probably wasn’t either, although he was a successful man. He wasn’t entirely stupid. But the reason that I was thinking about it was that the answer was the simplest one. Wife is dead, husband killed her. That’s the way it works ninety-nine percent of the time. The simplest explanation is usually the right one.”

  “Occam’s razor,” Giametti said solemnly.

  “Try applying Occam’s razor in this case,” Gregor said. “What was Drew Harrigan doing in a barn full of homeless men on the edge of the city—I mean, look at this route; it’s not like we’re right next door to the Liberty Bell—what was he doing there? Do you know what the simplest explanation is?”

  “That he went there to visit his sister for some reason,” Rob Benedetti said.

  “Exactly,” Gregor said. “And that he was dressed as a homeless person and pretending to be one so that he didn’t get spotted, because, let’s face it, he’s an unusual-looking person. Was. Big and fat and florid. Got his picture on a million things, including a book that’s in the stores now. That’s the simplest explanation here, except for one thing.”

  “What’s that?” Marbury asked.

  “Why bother with the barn,” Gregor said. “If he wanted to see his sister, why didn’t he just go right up to the monastery and ask to see her? Under most circumstances, the simplest explanation would be that he didn’t want anyone to know he was seeing her, but that doesn’t make sense, either. He’s dressed as a homeless person. Nobody is going to know it’s him to begin with. He doesn’t gain anything by sleeping in the barn, assuming that’s what he was doing. Turn it around. Maybe it was the Reverend Mother who insisted on the barn. Maybe she’s the one who didn’t want to be seen talking to her brother, or even to a homeless man. But there’s no reason for that, either. She’s his sister. Why shouldn’t she talk to him? Especially since he’s in trouble and she’s a nun.”

  “Do you really think it’s going to turn out to be something like this, something this simple?” Rob Benedetti asked. “Do you really think we’re going to end up arresting a nun?”

  “I don’t know,” Gregor said.

  “We’d like to avoid it,” Rob Benedetti said. “Not because we’re soft on the Catholic Church, but because it’s always bad news when we arrest a little old lady. A little old lady in a habit is going to be worse.”

  “And they’re going to be really impressive habits,” Giametti said. “I didn’t think nuns wore habits like that anymore, all the way down to the floor.”

  “The nuns on EWTN do,” Marbury said.

  They were getting farther and farther out now, into the areas Gregor had already decided weren’t really in the state of Pennsylvania at all. They could have been anywhere, the remnants of an industrial city that had long since lost both its industry and its claim to civilization.

  “Every once in a while,” he said, “you do get cases where the simplest explanation isn’t the right one, but when you do, it’s almost always because there’s a perpetrator in the picture who feels the need to star in his own movie. Somebody who has to devise patterns, make plots, see the world as a functioning whole without a single element out of place. And that’s worrisome.”

  “Because they tend to get away with it?” Rob Benedetti said.

  “Oh, no,” Gregor said. “They’re the last kind of murderer to get away with it. The ones who get away with it are the ones who act on impulse and just disappear. That was the whole point of Murder Incorporated. It’s hard to catch a murderer who just walks up, gets it over with, and has no other connection to the victim. No, what’s worrisome about the murderer who does the not-simplest thing is that he, or she, is almost always a fanatic.”

  FOUR

  1

  Where were you on the night of January 27? That was the basis of a play Marla Hildebrande had read when she was in high school, and now it struck her as odd, that she was sitting here in her office trying her best to answer it. The play was by Ayn Rand, she was sure. She’d read it during her only period of “political engagement,” except that nobody is ever really politically engaged with Ayn Rand, except maybe Alan Greenspan. If politics was something like Ayn Rand envisaged it, Marla could get herself interested in it. It wasn’t the particulars of Randian politics that had intrigued her, though, it was the tone. High moral drama, intensely personal statements of commitment and conviction, conspicuous heroism conspicuously observed—it would be like being in the kind of movie whose television ads involved a lot of trumpets. When she wasn’t happy being what she was, Marla could see herself starring in one of those, something with Russell Crowe in it, and boats, something with an execution scene at the end, so that she could brave death and give a speech in the most affecting possible circumstances. Anne Boleyn. Sir Thomas More. Mary, Queen of Scots. Marla could see herself playing all of them on the scaffold, as long as she didn’t have to be on a scaffold herself.

  She was going insane. That was the problem. She had been sitting in the office since seven, and not one single practical thing was done. The network wasn’t going to run itself. The contracts weren’t going to get signed. The talk show hosts and disc jockeys weren’t going to get monitored—and you had to monitor them. The network ran mostly conservatives, so there wasn’t usually a problem with the FCC on obscenity, but there was always the danger that one of these guys would commit slander on the air or challenge a sitting United States general to a duel at high noon. That would be funny, except that a guy named Charlie Little had done it once, and the general in question had shown up at the studio loaded for bear. Frank was probably right. The general probably wouldn’t have done anything. It would have ruined his career. Still.

  In the end, Marla always did come back to liking herself as she was. There was a lot of satisfaction in it. She wasn’t a Genius, so she didn’t have to prove her depth and originality at every moment. She wasn’t a Creative, so she didn’t have to show her disdain f
or society by wearing silly clothes and swearing a lot. She wasn’t a Titan of the Industry, so she didn’t have to win every battle she fought and only be seen in cars that cost more than most people made in the course of two years. She wasn’t beautiful, so she didn’t have to rush around to plastic surgeons to stem the tide of time with Botox and lifts. She had nothing to prove, and that made it far easier to do her work, do it well, and stay employed.

  Even in high school, when everybody had been working so hard to be cool and popular, she had known better than to try to be either. If you just went your way, if you just did what you were supposed to do when you were supposed to do it—well, then, everything would be all right. You would get where you were going. You would have what you wanted. You would be who you wanted to be in the end.

  The problem was, she didn’t remember what she had been doing on the night of January 27. The chances were good that she had been here, talking to Frank about something, but she didn’t actually know if she had, or what they’d been talking about. And the police would ask. She knew they would. They would look into her life, too, and although they would find nothing there, nothing she had to be ashamed of, nothing that could be construed as damaging—well, they might not find anything like that, but they were bound to search the building. They were bound to check into the fires she had put out over the years. They were bound to do a lot of things. It wasn’t as easy as it seemed it ought to be to display your innocence in a murder investigation.

  She got up, went over to her filing cabinet, and then remembered she needed her key. The computer was supposed to usher in the new paperless office and make furniture like the filing cabinet completely obsolete, but Marla didn’t know any large office anywhere without a few of these cabinets. She wondered what other people kept in them. She kept files, but then the cabinets had been built to hold files.

  She got the key out of her purse and the top drawer of the cabinet opened up. She took out the entire stack of folders inside. They were ordinary manila folders, legal sized, color-coded with stick-on tabs. One of them held the documentation in a hit-and-run case in Palm Harbor, Florida. Fortunately, the kid who’d been hit hadn’t died, and hadn’t been permanently injured. He’d just been thrown from his bike and stuck in the hospital for six weeks in traction, because he broke both his legs and his collarbone in the fall. One of them held the documentation in a shoplifting case in Fort Wayne, Indiana. That one had been a little stickier. There were photographs of three gold cigarette lighters, two Rolex diamond watches, and a woman’s turquoise and onyx necklace making their way into pockets and out the door. Marla couldn’t remember how many times she had told her people only to shop in the very best stores. If they were overtaken by a fit of kleptomania in a place like that, well, the store would be used to it, and used to covering it up. One of them held the documentation in a stalking case in Enid, Oklahoma. That had been the easiest of them all, because it had just been a question of transferring the idiot out of Oklahoma to somewhere he wouldn’t have access to the girl, which meant Portland, Maine. There hadn’t been another girl, for which Marla was grateful. She was less grateful that the girl in Enid, Oklahoma, had been fifteen years old, and that the disc jockey in question had been arrested for the third and definitive time when he’d gotten himself completely tanked on Stolichnaya, stripped to the skin, and stationed himself in her backyard beneath her bedroom window. When the police picked him up, he’d been baying at the moon, or something.

  There were always things like this. They happened. Radio was an odd medium. It was full of people who had little or no self-control. She was expected to deal with the emergencies and put out the fires. She did it.

  The folder that really worried her was the one with the red label on it, red for deal with this now, this is an emergency. She pulled it closer to her and opened it. Yes, all right, there were the drug incidents, dozens of drug incidents. Ever since Drew was arrested, the papers had been full of shocked editorials and even more shocked quotes from friends. Nobody had suspected. He’d managed to get away with it for so long. All that was bullshit, and Marla didn’t mind using the word that fit. Anybody who didn’t know Drew Harrigan had a drug problem didn’t know Drew Harrigan. Anybody who thought that Drew Harrigan was successfully hiding the drug problem he had wasn’t on the inside of Drew Harrigan’s operation, or on any of the police forces in the Philadelphia ADI. Drew not only got out of control, he traveled. He drove everywhere. Marla had begun to truly hate that damned Mercedes car, because before Drew had it he had been more than satisfied with being driven around.

  By the end, it was only Ellen who was being driven around. Drew was out on the road and out on his own. He liked to stop into places and see if people recognized him, too, and being who he was, being Drew and not NPR, that meant going into the kind of bars with neon signs in their windows advertising Miller beer. If there was one thing Marla had told her people more often than she’d told them only to shoplift in the very best stores, it was to stay out of places where men got drunk on the cheap. There was always some guy who’d decide he hated you just for the sake of giving himself an excuse to beat you up. There was always a bartender with a hot line straight to the local police station. There was always a guy hiding out in a booth in the back who wanted nothing more than to get the National Enquirer a tip they would use on their front page. These were not the incidents Marla was most proud of, because these were not the incidents she had been able to cover up completely. Drew had landed on the cover of the Enquirer on and off. He told people, on the radio and off, that it was a form of persecution. He was just an innocent bystander, dropping into a place for a beer, and this is what the liberals did to him.

  Marla always thought that if liberals ever attacked Drew Harrigan, he wouldn’t know what to do about it. They’d beat on him with copies of the collected works of John Dewey, and he’d be reduced to calling in the cops the way he’d once been reduced to calling in the teachers when the bigger kids at school took his lunch money and locked him into his locker.

  Marla wondered how much of Drew Harrigan could be explained by the fact that he’d spent grade school as a fat, soft, cringing victim of a little kid, and that by the time he got to be six feet four and four hundred pounds, it was too late to do in the kids he still hated for making his life miserable.

  The interesting pieces of paper in this folder did not have to do with Drew’s transgressions per se. Transgressions were part of the game. The interesting pieces of paper in this folder had to do with bribes. That wasn’t what they called them. Neither Drew nor Frank would have said they were bribing half the police departments in Pennsylvania to keep Drew out of trouble. Still, bribes were what they were, and Marla had known, from the first time they paid one, that she had to have a record of what they had given to whom and when. Yes, it was illegal activity and yes, they shouldn’t have done it, but they had done it, and not to keep a record of it was to let the police departments in question completely off the hook. Marla had bank receipts, Internet wire transfers, receipts for SUVs donated to one police department and computers donated to another. She had withdrawals clearly marked “for the Upper Merion PD” and “for Lehigh PD re disorderly stop.” The notes were clear enough so that they could be read by a judge or a district attorney or a jury without having to be translated by her. There was a paper trail a million miles long, which she had planted carefully and deliberately, and with Frank’s full knowledge, as the only way they had to cover their asses in the event of the kind of meltdown they had been subjected to when Drew got arrested for drugs… but the problem was no longer that Drew was arrested for drugs. It was that Drew was dead, almost certainly murdered, and the big question was going to be who had murdered him and why. This file was almost certainly evidence of a motive. Hell, she could go to jail for nothing but what she admitted to in it. Frank could go to jail, too. And to keep themselves out of jail they might have done whatever it was the murderer had done to get Drew out of the way.

&nbs
p; Filled his pills full of arsenic, Marla thought. She’d heard that this morning on the radio as she was coming in to work. She’d heard it on NPR, as a matter of fact. She did listen to their own stations most of the time, but in the car she wanted news, and for that she wanted NPR. The one thing they did badly on this network was news.

  The problem was, she could go to jail for getting rid of this folder, too. There were laws against destroying evidence. She could always tuck it into her tote bag and bring it home, but then she’d have to find a way to get rid of it there, and she didn’t keep a shredder in her spare bedroom. Besides, shredders weren’t foolproof. She’d seen movies where the police reconstructed shredded documents. Getting rid of a big, fat file folder full of documents was as hard as getting rid of a body, and she didn’t have the first idea of how to get rid of a body. She’d always counted on the fact that the police would be no more interested in bringing this evidence forward than she would be herself, but that was because she hadn’t expected Drew to be arrested by two cops who weren’t in on the deal and weren’t interested in being in on it, or prosecuted by a new district attorney who knew nothing about the kind of arrangements that had been put in place by the old one. If she shredded the folder here, somebody would see her shredding it. Even if she waited until after hours, there was always the chance that somebody would be around late, or that a cleaning woman would see. Besides, this was radio, people were around late all the time. If she didn’t shred it and just took it out and threw it somewhere, in a garbage can, in the water, somebody would find it and fish it out and sell it to the highest bidder. Marla Hildebrande had watched enough true crime to know that murderers were fools to think they could hide what they didn’t want anybody to see.