Hardscrabble Road

by Jane Haddam

  The men all remained standing. Beata looked even more amused, then made an elaborate show of sitting down herself. The men all sat.

  “I thought that sort of thing went out with my mother’s generation,” she said.

  “It’s,” Giametti said. “Ah. It’s—”

  “It’s the habit, Officer Giametti, I know,” Beata said. “It’s ironic, really, because this habit marks me as an extern sister, and as an extern sister I’m the lowliest creature in a cloistered community. I am, however, able to be here with you. Nuns who have taken solemn vows are not able to be here with you. They live in strict enclosure. They never leave the confines of the consecrated area of the monastery. They don’t see people face-to-face. If you want to visit with them, you must talk to them in the conversation room while they remain behind the grille. Reverend Mother Constanzia is in fact a cloistered nun.”

  Rob Benedetti stirred in his seat. “You know, that’s not going to work,” he said. “We’re going to have to talk to the Reverend Mother, if she’s the one who is Drew Harrigan’s sister—”

  “—She’s the one,” Beata said.

  Rob Benedetti plowed determinedly on. “And we’re going to have to do it face-to-face, not behind a grille. We do try to make accommodations for religious convictions, but—”

  “It’s quite all right, Mr. Benedetti. The Reverend Mother and I discussed that this morning. It’s a little more complicated than you realize, but we’ve asked permission from the Cardinal for Reverend Mother to break enclosure in this matter and for the community to abandon enclosure so that the police may search where they like.”

  “The barn,” Marbury said quickly.

  “The barn is not within the enclosure,” Beata said. “You’ll see when you get back there. There’s a wall separating it from the enclosure. We used to use it for a garage before we gave up the cars, and we needed a place mechanics could get to when they broke down. They were a nuisance, really, and you don’t need cars in the city, and we don’t go anywhere anyway. But here’s the thing. We are arranging it, but it hasn’t been arranged yet. Before you can see Reverend Mother anywhere but through the grille, before you can search the monastery proper, we’ve got to have permission from the Cardinal. I’m sure he’ll give it. The problem is, he hasn’t given it yet. He’s in Rome.”

  “And you want us to wait until he gets back from Rome?” Marbury said.

  “Hardly,” Beata said. “We’ve got a call in. The thing is, we don’t have permission now, and we may not get it while you’re here this time, and that may mean—”

  “—That we’ll have to come back,” Rob Benedetti said.

  “I know it’s a long way,” Beata said, “and I do apologize, but we didn’t think. We should have, of course. I remembered it almost as soon as I tried to get to sleep. Things were confused.”

  “I’m sure they were,” Gregor said. “But we can talk to you now, can’t we, Sister?”

  “Of course,” Sister Beata said.

  “You said before that you didn’t go anywhere anyway, but that isn’t strictly true, is it?” Gregor asked. “You yourself do go places, and I’d expect you’re not the only one. That’s why you’re an extern sister.”

  “True,” Beata said. “There’s me, Sister Immaculata, and Sister Marie Bernadette. We are all allowed to go out into the world and do what the community needs us to do. The shopping, for instance.”

  “Do you go out often?” Gregor asked. “Almost every day.” “What about the post office?” Gregor asked. “Do you go to the post office?”

  “Once a week, on Friday,” Beata said. “There’s almost always something. We need stamps. Or we need to send packages. That used to be easier. They used to pick those up at the door. Now with all the Homeland Security initiatives, they want us to bring the packages in personally. So I do.”

  “What kind of packages do you send?” Rob Benedetti asked.

  “We send copies of the works of St. Teresa of Avila, our foundress, to people interested in Carmelite spirituality,” Beata said. “Also the works of St. John of the Cross, St. Thérèse of Lisieux, and St. Edith Stein, all Carmelites, all writers. We send holy cards, especially the one with the Blessed Virgin giving the scapular to St. Simon Stock—”

  “—What?” Marbury said. “St. Simon Stock was the original founder of the Carmelite Order,” Beata said. “St. Teresa of Avila only reformed the order and established this branch of it. Legend says that the Virgin appeared to St. Simon Stock and gave him the brown scapular we all wear, and told him that anyone wearing this scapular at the moment of death will not fail to make a good one.”

  “A good death?” Marbury said.

  “That’s right,” Beata said. “There’s a concern, isn’t there, with a good death? With a death that leaves us reconciled to God.”

  “What’s a scapular?” Gregor asked.

  Beata picked up the long piece of material hanging down in front of her dress. “This is. It goes all the way down behind, too. Lay people wear a symbolic representation of it, two square pieces of wool cloth on a pair of strings that hang front and back across your shoulders under your clothes. We have a lot of those, too, and we send them out. It’s not so much what we send, you know, as that people need to feel that we’re listening. That somebody is listening. It always surprises me how many people there are who are lonely and isolated in this world.”

  “Why surprise?” Gregor asked.

  “I suppose because it seems nonsensical,” Beata said. “If there are so many lonely people out there, why can’t they get together with each other? I’m a very practical person, really, the last sort of person you’d think would be attracted to Carmel in some ways. And it makes me impatient. Fortunately, I’m not asked to deal with souls in trouble. The only responsibility I have for the mail is delivering it to the post office when there’s too much of it to be mailed directly from here. And buying stamps.”

  “Tell me about the night Drew Harrigan died,” Gregor said. “For the [moment, I’m going to assume it was Drew Harrigan here that night and that he died here that night. Forensics could change that. When did you first notice him?”

  “Do you mean, when did I first notice the man in the red hat?” Beata said. “Because that’s all I noticed. Just a man, generic, in a red hat. I didn’t recognize Drew Harrigan.”

  “Would you have?” Gregor asked.

  “Under the circumstances?” Beata said. “Probably not. He was in clean enough clothes, and the hat was clean, but one of the first things I noticed about him was that he was unkempt and his face was dirty. And besides, I’d never seen Drew Harrigan in person, and I hadn’t seen him very often even in the media. He was on the air before I came to Carmel, but he was nowhere near as big as he is now, and I doubt if I’d seen half a dozen pictures of him in my life. So no, it isn’t odd that I didn’t recognize him any of the times I saw him that night.”

  “Any of the times?” Gregor said.

  “How many times were there?” “Well, there was the first one,” Beata said. “That was when we came home, Immaculata and I, from meeting with the lawyers.”

  “Which lawyers?” Benedetti said.

  “Drew Harrigan’s lawyers,” Beata said.

  Every one of them sat up a little straighter in their chairs.

  “Why ever would you be meeting with Drew Harrigan’s lawyers?” Gregor asked.

  “Well,” Beata said, “let’s start with this. I am a lawyer, so Reverend Mother thought it would be better to send me than to rely entirely on the lawyers from the Archdiocese.”

  “You’re a lawyer,” Rob Benedetti said. “Have you ever practiced in Philadelphia?”

  “Of course.”

  “Where?” Benedetti said.

  “At the firm of Coatley, Amis,” Sister Beata said. “I was a week away from taking up a partnership when I decided to come to Carmel. They were not pleased with me.”

  “The only person who ever left Coatley in the lurch on a partnership was th
is woman, this Alderman woman, who did the Racicot-Barrelson case—”

  “That’s right,” Beata said.

  “You’re Alderman?” Benedetti said.

  “Susan Titus Alderman. I was. Needless to say, my family isn’t really in love with the idea of Carmel, either. Especially since it meant I had to have converted to Catholicism to come. We still think Catholicism is a little tacky in my part of Pennsylvania.”

  “The Racicot-Barrelson thing was brilliant,” Benedetti said.

  “Thank you.”

  “Could we get back to why it was you were meeting with Drew Harrigan’s lawyer?” Gregor said.

  Beata nodded. “Mr. Harrigan had deeded a few parcels of property to us a couple of weeks before. And don’t ask. Yes, it was definitely after Sherman Markey decided to sue him for defamation, although if he was trying to shield property, he should have done it a good time before. I’d worry more about the civil forfeiture laws than I would about a homeless man with help from the Justice Project.”

  “And you were meeting with Drew Harrigan’s lawyers in regard to this deed?” Gregor asked.

  “No,” Beata said. “The deed was finalized. The problem was that we wanted to sell the properties, because we had a bank loan—still have it, actually—a very substantial one, that we’d taken on as a balloon payment, and the payment was coming due. And, of course, since this is Carmel, we didn’t have the money. So we wanted to sell the properties. But Sherman Markey’s lawyers had gone into court and had liens placed on them, saying that Mr. Harrigan had only deeded them to us in order to shield them from any judgment that might arise from Mr. Markey’s defamation suit. So I was meeting with Mr. Harrigan’s lawyers to find out what the situation was exactly. I’m a little out of the loop here, if you can believe it.”

  “When is the balloon payment due?” Gregor asked.

  “It was due and passed,” Beata said. “The bank agreed to roll it over into a conventional second mortgage. We told the Cardinal about it and he had one of his patented ice-cold glaring hissy fits.”

  “This was two weeks ago?” Gregor said. “Did you really expect to have the properties sold in two weeks?”

  “We had a buyer,” Beata said.

  “Who?” Rob Benedetti asked.

  “We don’t know,” Beata said.

  “How can you not know?” Benedetti asked.

  “The offer was made anonymously, about four days after Drew Harrigan deeded the property to us,” Beata said. “We took it seriously, because it was made through the Markwell Ballard Bank.”

  “That’s interesting,” Gregor said.

  “I thought so, too,” Beata said. “You really do have to take it seriously. There had to be a buyer out there who was both willing and able to buy the property, or Markwell Ballard wouldn’t have handled the negotiations. They don’t need anybody’s business. They’ve thrown clients out for far less than making bogus buy offers. The thing is, they also don’t take in any guy off the street with twenty dollars in his pocket. When I was still in the world—that’s what we call not being in the convent, being in the world—the minimum you needed to open an account at Markwell Ballard was two million dollars. And that just got you an appointment. If they didn’t like your face, that was all there was to it. Drew Harrigan didn’t have an account at Markwell Ballard.”

  “You know that for sure?” Gregor asked.

  “Yes,” Beata said. “Neil Savage mentioned it. It was so odd of him to have said it that I would have thought he was deliberately throwing me misinformation except for the fact that he was so incredibly, triumphantly satisfied about it.”

  “Mr. Savage is Mr. Harrigan’s attorney?” Gregor said.

  “That’s right.”

  “Mr. Harrigan has an attorney who hates him?” Gregor said.

  “Apparently.”

  “This is getting odder all the time,” Gregor said. “So you went to see Mr. Savage, and you came back, and you saw Drew Harrigan, where?”

  “To be accurate, I saw a man in a red watch cap,” Beata said. “And it was just as I was getting out of the cab with Sister Immaculata. The door was open, the one that leads to the barn, and the men were already lining up to get in to sleep. It was dark, but it wasn’t time for us to open up yet. And I saw a man in the line with a bright red hat, and it was the hat I noticed.”

  “Did he look well, or sick, or drugged?” Gregor asked.

  “I didn’t get close enough to tell,” Beata said. “I was standing on the sidewalk. He was down near the barn door. It might have been anybody at all in that watch hat. But I saw the watch hat.”

  “Did you see him again?” Gregor asked.

  “When he was dead,” Beata said. “One of the other men came to me in the night and said that the man in the red hat was dead, and some of the other men were stealing his clothes. They’d already stolen the hat.”

  “So when you went to see him the second time, he wasn’t wearing the hat?” Gregor asked.

  “No,” Beata said. “And I know what you’re going to say. It could have been somebody else in the hat the first time. Yes, it could have been. But the man who came to see me, he’s called Whizbang Joe—”

  “—Is that supposed to mean something?” Gregor asked.

  “Probably,” Beata said, “but I don’t really want to know what. Anyway, Joe came in to see me and he seemed to think it was the same person who’d had the cap all along. I know homeless people aren’t the best witnesses, usually, and Joe is as addled as the rest of them, but he was very certain, and very upset because of the theft. So I tend to think he knew what he was talking about. Anyway, I went out with him and looked at the body and made sure it was really dead and not just passed out or in a coma—”

  “And you didn’t recognize him as Drew Harrigan then?” Benedetti asked.

  “No,” Beata said. “But he really was a mess, a big one by then. He had vomit all over him. He was, I don’t know, the way they get when they die like that. We’ve never done this with the barn before. It was the Cardinal’s idea this year. But we had two deaths before this one anyway. They die—I don’t know how to explain it—they die bereft of humanity.”

  “How did you decide he was dead?” Gregor asked.

  “I put my head on his chest to hear if I could hear his heart beating, and then I tried to take a pulse. When those didn’t work, I took the back of my crucifix and held it up to his nose. To see if his breath clouded it.”

  “Then what did you do?” Gregor asked.

  “I asked Joe to stay with the body. I came back into the monastery, told Reverend Mother what had happened, and we called the ambulance. Then I went back to the barn to wait next to the body until the ambulance men came. They came pretty quickly, actually. They don’t usually, for homeless cases. Not when the person is already dead.”

  “And the ambulance men came and took the body away,” Gregor said.

  “That’s right.”

  “And then what?” Gregor asked.

  “And then nothing,” Beata said. “It’s as I said, we’d had a couple of others. We send them to the morgue and we pray for them, but after that, we don’t have anything else we can do for them.”

  “But you must have heard the news reports, about the disappearance of Sherman Markey,” Gregor said.

  “No,” Beata said.

  Gregor raised his eyebrows. “It was all over the news, Sister. It was a major story for at least a couple of days.”

  “Mr. Demarkian,” Beata said, “you don’t understand what an enclosure is. We don’t have a television here—oh, we have one. It’s in a storeroom on the second floor and Reverend Mother would take it out if the president were assassinated or there was a nuclear attack. It came out after 9/11 for a couple of days. But mostly it just stays in the storeroom. We don’t watch it. We don’t get newspapers. We don’t get magazines. We are on the Internet.”

  “Somehow, that figures,” Marbury said.

  “But we’re not really on it, the way m
ost people are. We have a Web portal and a Web site and we answer mail. Or, rather, I do, because as an extern sister I have the right to be ‘outside.’ But for a piece of news to penetrate here, it’s got to be a lot more important than the report of the disappearance of a homeless man in Philadelphia. Even one connected to Drew Harrigan and his drug problems. I did notice that Ben had broken up with J. Lo. Or vice versa.”

  “I think she walked out on him,” Giametti said helpfully.

  Gregor was about to ask if the monastery had had any contact with the physical body after the ambulance had taken it away, if any of them had been asked to try to identify it, for instance, when the sister who had let them in came to the door and tapped lightly.

  “I’m sorry to interrupt,” she said, “but there’s a person here, a woman here, saying she’s come to find Mr. Demarkian. I—she’s uh, a little upset, I suppose. She’s very insistent. And I did say you were all busy, but—”

  “—You can’t just keep me standing here,” somebody said, and the voice was such a high, wailing shriek, Gregor winced. “Don’t you know who I am? You can’t just keep me standing here like I’m not anybody and you can jerk me around.”

  They all turned in the direction of the voice, because it was coming closer. Gregor could hear the sound of needle-sharp heels clacking into the hardwood floor.

  “You can’t just keep me standing here,” the voice said again, and then she was there, right in front of them, like a bad joke.

  2

  Whoever she was, she wasn’t very steady on those high heels. Gregor looked down and saw the ankle straps straining against ankles that weren’t steady enough to wear them gracefully, and then those heels, at least three and a half inches high, and so thin they looked like toothpicks. The rest of the woman seemed to be of a piece. Her hair was improbably blond and improbably enormous. It was the kind of thing women went in for when they were competing to be Miss Mississippi. The earrings were real, though. There was no substitute for emeralds that looked so perfectly like emeralds as those did, especially at that size. The dress and the coat were just odd. They were both conspicuously expensive, but neither of them fit right. The coat was much too large, its heavy, ostentatious fur slipping off her shoulders every time she moved. The dress was much too small, making her hips look larger than they might have and forcing her breasts to strain against the fabric. She reminded Gregor of Marilyn Monroe, except that Monroe was a woman who commanded attention because of her very presence, and this was a woman who commanded attention because she was decked out so freakishly she made her audience uneasy about what she would do next.