by Jane Haddam
The problem was, the folder wasn’t going to go away by itself, and she didn’t think the police were going to take more than a day or two to get around to searching the place.
2
There were times when Ray Dean Ballard needed to stop being Ray Dean Ballard and become Aldous Ballard again, himself. He used the Ray Dean the way an actor used a costume. It was necessary in his line of work, but he never mistook it for reality. That made his life difficult sometimes. It seemed to him that he shouldn’t have to worry about it so much, or for so long. He’d been working with homeless people now for over a decade. He’d been living on the salary they paid him, in the kind of apartment a salary like that could afford, in the clothes a salary like that could afford. He should have proved his sincerity by now. Sometimes he thought there was never any way to prove your sincerity in a situation like this. He was one of them until he became suspect, and he didn’t want to become suspect.
This morning, he also didn’t want to play Ray Dean Ballard. He didn’t think that had anything to do with Drew Harrigan’s death per se. After all, he barely knew the man, and what he knew he didn’t like. Still, the news was all over television and the radio. Morning Edition had it. The newspapers piled in stacks in front of newsstands had it. Everybody had it. If he’d owned a television, he could have done nothing for the next several hours but listen to reports about when Drew Harrigan died, how and where his body was found, who and what was going to be in trouble now. He didn’t have a television, and didn’t want one, and when he passed one in the window of an electronics store he paused only for a minute before moving on down the street. He did not look like the Ray Dean Ballard they were used to at the office, now. He was wearing a better coat, for one thing. The real difference was that his demeanor was almost completely changed. He was fed up, and restless, and he wanted to do something with the morning.
The first thing he did was to stop at a pay phone and tell them he wouldn’t be in until later. He’d left his cell phone at home, because he didn’t want to be interrupted, and he didn’t bother to tell them why he wouldn’t be in or where he’d be instead. That was one of the perks of being the boss. You didn’t owe anybody any explanations. The second thing he did was to stop at an ATM machine and get some money. Usually, he was careful not to carry too much around with him in cash. Nothing got people’s attention as much as a big wad of bills in a wallet. He checked the limits he was allowed and opted for five hundred dollars. It came out at him in tens and twenties, as if he had just committed a bank heist.
Out on the street again, he looked around at what was really a very prosperous neighborhood. The stores were good, selling things people needed at prices far above what people needed to pay. In another part of town, you could get a watch. In this part of town, you could get a Swiss Army watch, or a Rolex. He had never really understood Rolexes. If he wanted to spend $17,000 on something, he’d buy himself a car. Except that he didn’t understand cars, either.
He turned first left, then right, then left again, reaching each intersection at increasing speed, feeling more and more reluctant to slow down for pedestrians or traffic. Now that he’d decided to do this, he wanted to get it done. He saw only one homeless man on his way. The man was young and completely a mess. He was filthy. His trousers were literally in rags, in strips that hung down from his knees like abstract expressionist curtains. In spite of the wind and the cold and the time of day, he had his member out, waving in the wind. He was pissing on the tires of every car parked at the curb.
This is the truth, Ray Dean told himself. I am not able to solve the homeless problem. Nobody is able to solve the homeless problem. The homeless are not a problem. They are a fact of life.
He made one more turn, and then there it was, the one building in Philadelphia he was usually careful to avoid: the Markwell Ballard Bank. It was not the kind of bank people used to open checking accounts or savings accounts or nip into to get a little money. It had no tellers, no customer lines, no little bank of deposit slips next to the door. In fact, the door wasn’t a commercial door, open to the public. It was locked, and to get in you had to ring a bell and be admitted by a doorman.
Ray Dean rang the bell. The doorman peered out the plate glass of the window and then opened up.
“Mr. Aldy,” he said. “It’s been a long time. I hope you’re doing well.”
“I’m doing fine, Fitz. Is Cameron up there waiting for me?”
“Mr. Reed has been in his office for an hour,” Fitz said. “Everybody still hopes you’ll come into the business, you do know that, don’t you? We’re all waiting for you.”
“If you go on waiting, you’ll get like Rip Van Winkle,” Ray Dean said. “I’ll go on up. I hope you have an unexciting day.”
“Every day is unexciting except the ones where the president comes to visit or the protestors camp out on the street, but there isn’t going to be that kind of thing today. I bought myself pepper spray if the protestors come back.”
Ray Dean half ran to the stairs and started up, four flights, he didn’t care. He really was restless today. He made it up all three flights in record time, and without becoming breathless. All that running he did was obviously paying off. He went through the fire doors into the fourth-floor lobby and saw Cameron Reed pacing back and forth in front of the receptionist’s desk, as if he had nothing at all else to do. The receptionist didn’t look pleased.
“Aldy,” Cameron said. “I dropped everything. What’s the emergency?”
Ray Dean had half a mind to say “murder” right here where everybody could hear it, but he didn’t. He knew what Cameron was really worried about.
“It’s just something I need,” he said, edging Cameron toward his office door. “Let’s go into your office and be private. Really private. Turn off the intercom.”
“Margaret knows everything, Aldy, you know that. I don’t keep anything from Margaret.”
“Turn off the intercom,” Ray Dean said again. “I mean it, Cameron, this is private.”
Cameron looked anything but pleased, but Ray Dean hadn’t expected him to be pleased, so he didn’t worry about it. They went into the office and shut the door behind them. Cameron went over to the bank of buttons on his desk and flipped one up. He told Margaret that he was going to be “off-line” for a few minutes. Then he flipped the switch the other way again.
“The other one, too,” Ray Dean said.
“I don’t know—”
”—The other one too,” Ray Dean insisted. “Come on, Cam, don’t do this. I grew up in offices like this. Granted, not the Philadelphia ones, but they’re all alike. My father is a paranoid nutcase.”
“Your father is a great man.”
“The two things aren’t mutually exclusive. Flip off the other one.” Cameron looked away for a long moment, then pulled out a drawer and fiddled with another set of buttons.
“Of course,” Ray Dean said, “I don’t put it past the old lunatic to have had this whole place bugged like the Moscow embassy, but that will have to do in the way of precautions. Let me ease your mind and tell you that I still have no interest in coming into the family business. You’re welcome to be heir apparent to my father’s endless obsession with all things financial, except that I really appreciate it when you send me the dividend checks. Okay?”
Cameron visibly relaxed. “Okay,” he said.
“It should have occurred to you that if I’d changed my mind about that, I’d have talked to my father first. We do talk, you know. We talk a lot. If he gets bored, don’t be surprised if he decides to solve the homeless problem all by his own self. I want you to do something for me. I want you to run a financial check. Not the kind the credit card companies run before they give somebody a card; a real one. The kind you’d give to somebody the bank was thinking of loaning a couple of hundred million dollars.”
“We wouldn’t expose ourselves to that extent on a single loan.”
“You know what I mean.” “Yeah,” Cameron said.
“Yeah, I do. You got a reason for this? You’re not thinking of asking us to loan a pile of cash to a friend of yours or anything, are you? That doesn’t sound like you. Are we invading this person’s privacy for a reason?”
“I don’t know if you can invade the privacy of the dead,” Ray Dean said. “And the last thing I’d want is for the bank to loan this guy any money. Although, Lord, I’d give something to be a fly on the wall if my father and this man ever met. You know who Drew Harrigan is?”
“Of course I know who he is. He’s a buffoon.”
“He may be a buffoon, but he’s a very influential buffoon, and at the moment he’s dead. Murdered, according to the Philadelphia Police.”
“I did hear that he was dead. Are you saying you’re a suspect in his murder?”
“I suppose half of Philadelphia is a suspect in his murder,” Ray Dean said. “Maybe half the country. I think I can honestly say that Drew Harrigan gave five new people reasons to kill him every time he opened his mouth on the air, and he was on the air four hours a day six days a week for years. I want to know who was bankrolling him.”
“You just said he was on the air four hours a day six days a week. He was a popular radio host. Maybe he didn’t need anybody bankrolling him.”
“He might not need them now, but he would have in the beginning,” Ray Dean said. “I’ve been looking into it. His whole shtick depends on research, on knowing things that nobody else knows. And in order to do that, he’s got to develop sources, he’s got to have equipment, he’s got to have money, and he didn’t have it when he started. I want to know who’s bankrolling him. And don’t tell me maybe somebody started off doing it and isn’t now, because you know that’s not how those people work. Scaife. Olin. Whoever it was, they like to get control and keep it.”
“It wouldn’t be Olin,” Cameron said. “And I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t be Scaife, although he provides the money for a lot of this kind of thing. Why do you want to know who was bankrolling him? Do you think his backers killed him?”
“No. I think his drug supplier killed him, but there may be more of a connection there than you’d think. That’s not it, though. It’s just that it’s been bugging me. My guy is still missing. As far as I know, it’s still safest to assume he’s dead.”
“Your guy?”
“Sherman Markey. The homeless man Drew Harrigan—”
“Never mind,” Cameron said. “I remember. You think that if you find out who was bankrolling him, you’ll find your homeless guy?”
“No, I think I’ll find out what the point was,” Ray Dean said. “I made a list of Harrigan’s targets last night. A couple of professors at Penn, one of them being Jig Tyler.”
“The man is a Stalinist asshole,” Cameron said.
“I’m not disagreeing. But, look, there are those two. Jig Tyler for being a Stalinist asshole, as you put it. The other, a woman, for being a ‘lunatic feminist.’ Then there’s two Democratic congressmen, one from Massachusetts, one from Oregon. The one from Massachusetts is in favor of same-sex marriage. The one from Oregon is in favor of assisted suicide. Then there’s a Democratic senator from Illinois and the problem there seems to be that the guy is in favor of some provision in some trade act that is opposed to the spirit of NAFTA, or something. I couldn’t figure that one out, and I’ll bet most of his listeners couldn’t, either. It doesn’t make any sense. There’s nothing coherent about it. There’s no point.”
“What makes you think there’s going to be a point?”
“There always is a point,” Ray Dean said, “and you know it. I want to know what the point is. I want to know who was backing him. I want to follow the money. Could you do that for me?”
“Sure,” Cameron said. “It’ll take a couple of days, maybe. Or maybe not. It depends on how secretive they’re being, and how good they are at keeping secrets.”
“If it was us, would you tell me?”
“No.”
“Is it us?”
“Don’t be an ass,” Cameron said. “You know how your father feels about people like Drew Harrigan. Or Reagan Democrats in general. Or the guys in the pickup trucks with the Confederate flags, as Mr. Howard Dean put it.”
“My father never let his personal feelings get in the way of business. I don’t think he’s starting now.”
“He’s not,” Cameron said, “but he’s bankrolling the other side, so I think we can safely say that you can be more certain than you might have been otherwise that he’s not the force behind Drew Harrigan. Why don’t you just let the police do their job? They’ll look into the finances.”
“They won’t begin to know how to look into the finances,” Ray Dean said, “and you know it. Besides, I’m not necessarily interested in telling the police anything. I’m just interested in knowing. As soon as possible.”
“Your father will be pleased to know you’re taking an interest in the business.”
“My father is writing a book on the moral responsibilities of global capitalism. All he ever talks to me about is how he’s convinced I’m going to get killed, just like what’s his name, who was teaching in Harlem.”
“You can’t blame him. You work with some very crazy people. Violent people.”
“So does he,” Ray Dean said. “They just dress it up in fancier clothes. You’ve got my office number. Call me there. Ask for Ray Dean. Nobody knows who Aldy is.”
“Are you at least using Ballard?”
“Of course I’m using Ballard. Be good for me, Cam, okay? This is making me nuts. And I’ve got a feeling we’re going to hear nothing but bad news for the foreseeable future. I think my guy is going to show up dead, and I think the police are going to land on me with both feet. I was the one who sent vans out to search for a red watch cap on the night Drew Harrigan was murdered, wearing a red watch crap. Crap.”
FIVE
1
Gregor Demarkian didn’t know what he thought a Carmelite monastery was going to look like. Maybe he imagined a castlelike building with Gothic spires and a moat. Whatever it was, it wasn’t this blank front of a building that faced on the pavement like all the other buildings in the neighborhood, only the wooden door at the side indicating there was more to its property than to those of its neighbors. The wooden door shielded a driveway that led to the barn. Gregor could just see the other building at the back of the narrow space through which cars would have to drive if they wanted to park back there. He wondered if the monastery had cars, and if it did have them, what they were used for. The nuns were supposed to be cloistered. They wouldn’t be running around the city looking for the nearest McDonald’s drive-through.
They parked at the curb without difficulty. There weren’t a lot of cars here jockeying for spaces, which was odd. Even in the worst neighborhoods it was usually difficult to find a space. Marbury and Giametti put their police marker in the front window and got out. Gregor and Rob Benedetti got out, too. Gregor went up to the wooden door and rattled it.
“This would be how the homeless men got to the barn, wouldn’t it? Do they unlock it in the evenings?”
“I don’t know,” Benedetti said. “You can ask the nuns. Come inside.”
Gregor let himself be led around to the front door again. It was a very plain front door, distinguished only by the crucifix squarely in the middle of it, Christ in agony, dying on the Cross. Rob Benedetti rang the bell. They all stood on the doorstep, waiting in the cold. It was cold, too, as cold as it had been these past few weeks, and maybe worse. Gregor was beginning to think there was something wrong with him that he never remembered to bring a hat.
The door was opened by a nun Gregor didn’t know, in the same long, full habit Sister Beata had been wearing at the precinct station. She nodded to them without speaking and then gestured them inside. She didn’t ask to see anybody’s badge or identification, although Marbury had been getting his out of his coat pocket all the time. They trooped into the foyer and got their first surprise. The first way in wh
ich this monastery was different from the buildings around it would most certainly be the ceilings, which were more than high. Old buildings tended to have high ceilings, but Gregor didn’t think a neighborhood like this would have that kind of old building in it. He wondered what this building had been before the nuns took it over, and what renovations they had made before they turned it into a convent.
The nun led them through the small foyer into what seemed to be a waiting room, and Sister Beata rose from behind the desk there to greet them. Gregor was more than a little proud of himself for being able to recognize her. Nuns in full habit were like homeless people. You tended to look over them, rather than at them.
Sister Beata gestured to them to follow her, and they all trooped down a narrow hall to a pair of frosted-glass double doors. Beata opened them, gestured them all inside, and then came in herself, closing the doors behind her. Gregor looked around at what was obviously supposed to be a sitting room of some kind. The pictures on the wall were all determinedly religious, and not remarkable for anything but their indulgence in Catholic kitsch. There was Christ with the Sacred Heart coming out of his chest, a lick of flame at the top of it, as if it were a specialty candle. There was Christ surrounded by sheep and holding a lamb. There was the Virgin Mary holding out her arms, with light coming out of her fingertips. Beata caught him staring at the pictures and smiled.
“Yes, Mr. Demarkian. The art is awful. But it, like everything else in this room, including the paint job on the walls, was donated to us by the Sodality Friends of Carmel, and we appreciate their concern and support for our life lived within these walls. Would you all sit down please? We’ve got a few problems I need to discuss.”