Hardscrabble Road

by Jane Haddam

  Rob Benedetti was on his feet. They were all on their feet, even Sister Beata. Sister Beata looked as if she were about to be asked to throw the woman out, or as if she wanted to.

  Rob Benedetti said, “It’s Mrs. Harrigan, isn’t it? What are you doing here?”

  “Looking for Mr. Demarkian,” Ellen Harrigan said. “Mr. Armenian-American Hercule Poirot. I called his place and there wasn’t anybody there. So then I called Commissioner Jackman. You wouldn’t believe how much it took me to find out he was here. You probably think I’m stupid. Everybody thinks I’m stupid. But I’m here.”

  “Is there something in particular you want to see me about?” Gregor asked.

  Ellen Harrigan turned to face him, looking him up and down. Gregor was interested to note that the looking over didn’t bother him at all. This woman really had no force of personality at all. She was like a gigantic doll. Even her rampages made little or no impression.

  She dropped the coat off her shoulders, onto the floor. Gregor got the impression that she made a habit of dropping her clothes on the floor, the sort of thing that Bennis, who had been born and raised rich as sin, would never do. This one not only dropped her coat, she stepped on it. Shades of Barbra Streisand’s first television special.

  “I’ve brought a list,” she said. “That bitch at the office said you think I’m a suspect, so I brought a list.”

  “A list of what?” Gregor asked.

  “A list of all the people who wanted Drew dead,” Ellen Harrigan said. “There are a lot of them. Liberals. Communists, some of them. Traitors. You wouldn’t believe it. They all wanted him dead.”

  “Your husband was a public man,” Gregor said carefully, “but at least the way this stands right now, there really isn’t the likelihood that the perpetrator will turn out to be somebody who only knew your husband through his radio program. It’s more likely, you see—”

  “—I’m not talking about people who knew Drew only through his radio program,” Ellen Harrigan said. “I’m talking about people who hated him. His syndicators, for one thing. And Jig fucking Tyler. The smartest man in the world. Smarter than all the rest of us. And that woman who works with him who has a Communist cell and makes all her students join it. And that Southern freak over at the homeless people. They all wanted him dead. All of them. You’re not going to make me a suspect just because I’m not politically correct.”

  Gregor Demarkian no longer had the faintest idea what this woman was talking about, but he did know one thing.

  She was dead drunk.

  SIX

  1

  Alison Standish saw the interoffice envelope on her desk and the man sitting in the chair near the bookcases at the same time, and for a moment she thought the sight of the man was stranger than the sight of the envelope. She was in her coat and had a cup of coffee in her hand. She’d picked it up at a place a few streets away that didn’t use branded cardboard cups to put their take-out coffee in, because she’d learned long ago that she was useless at figuring out what was and was not an acceptable place to buy coffee. Starbucks was out, because it was a large corporation, and it didn’t matter that it hadn’t been a large corporation twenty years ago. Other places were out because they were just too downscale. It wasn’t all right to buy a cup of something nameless from a local deli. Still other places were out because they served “Free Trade” rather than “Fair Trade” coffee, which mattered to people, although Alison couldn’t straighten out why. Coffee tasted like coffee to her. She was sure there were special kinds, with hidden subtleties of flavor, that she could have if she was willing to spend a lot more money than she wanted to to get her caffeine fix in the morning. She was equally sure that the politics of coffee was intricate and nuanced, that many coffee growers in South America treated their workers as no better than slaves, that coffee-growing co-operatives were ready and able to sell her coffee if she was ready and able to pay the extra price it would cost to pay people decently. Hell, she was even ready and able to pay the extra price it would cost to pay people decently. The problem was, she could never keep the brand names straight. She ended up walking down the long halls to her office carrying something that blazed out her lack of sensitivity, her lack of awareness, her lack of political commitment. At least that last part was true. The only thing Alison Standish was politically committed to was Pope Leo IV, and he had died in 855 CE.

  The man was vaguely familiar, Alison wasn’t really sure why. She wasn’t paying much attention, because it had suddenly struck her that the envelope was very odd indeed. Interoffice mail came to her mailbox, not her desk. And the last thing the departmental secretaries had any interest in doing was delivering mail to the offices of individual professors.

  She went to the desk and picked it up. It was from “the office of the chairman,” as if the chairman had an office. God, but Roger could be so damned pretentious. It only got worse when he wrote his articles, which tended to be heavy on the “transformative experience” of “trangressive texts.” The fad for postmodernism and deconstruction was waning, and Alison thought it couldn’t come too soon. She’d spent enough of her life listening to literature professors spout gibberish.

  She looked at the envelope and frowned. She wanted to open it, but the man was still sitting there in her visitor’s chair, saying nothing, looking expectant. She put the envelope down again.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “You are—? Did we have an appointment?”

  “Oh, no,” the man said. “I just—I looked you up on the system. These are your office hours. So I decided to come over. Under the circumstances.”

  “Are there circumstances?” Alison asked. There was the envelope, waiting for her. She couldn’t have been fired. Getting a tenured professor fired was damned near impossible. Other things could have happened to her, though. She could have been censured, or suspended. She could have been put on monitoring, which would mean that a representative of the university would sit in on all her classes to make sure she didn’t say something she shouldn’t. She’d never heard of that happening at Penn, but it had happened other places. On the other hand, it was usually the diversity coordinator or somebody like that who did the monitoring, and those people were more concerned with professors who hated left-wing students than the ones who hated right-wing students. Maybe the right-wing students had their own monitor who could be brought in if the occassion demanded it. Alison didn’t hate left-wing students or right-wing students. Mostly, she didn’t even know which were which.

  “You can open that if you want,” the man said. “I don’t mind.”

  “No, no,” Alison said. “It’s all right. I’m sorry to be so rude. I’m afraid I don’t remember you.”

  “We’ve never met. I’m Jig Tyler.”

  “Oh,” Alison said, and thought: Good grief, the great man himself, two Nobel prizes, the Fields Medal, five bestselling books. She put the envelope down again and held out her hand. “I’m sorry I didn’t recognize you. I mean, I did, a little; you looked familiar but I couldn’t place you. I’m Alison Standish. I’m very happy to meet you.”

  Jig Tyler had stood up and taken her hand. He gave it a good quick shake and let go. “You’d better sit down and read that letter. You’ll feel better or worse depending on whether you’ve heard the news.”

  Alison picked the letter back up again and opened it. No matter how thrilled she was to meet Dr. Tyler, she really wanted to know what was in this letter, and she wanted to know it now, not later. She sat down behind her desk and ripped it open. Roger was pretentious, but not ridiculous. The letter started Alison, and she immediately relaxed.

  I’m glad to be able to tell you that the committee has looked into the allegations of the student in question and found them without foundation.

  Alison wanted to fix the syntax—you didn’t use “found” and “foundation” in a single sentence with only two words separating them—but instead she chucked the letter onto her desk and looked up at Dr. Tyler in his chair.
/>   “Relieved?” Jig Tyler said.

  “Very,” Alison said. “Did you know what it was about?”

  “About an allegation that you systematically discriminate against students with conservative views, brought out by a few broadcasts by Drew Harrigan. It’s all over campus that the department launched an inquiry and it’s been all over campus since this morning that they were going to abandon it. I take it you’re relieved.”

  “Very. I know you’ve been in trouble like that a dozen times, but I don’t have two Nobels to fall back on.”

  “I take it you haven’t heard the news,” Jig Tyler said.

  “If you mean the news that Harrigan is dead, yes, I’ve heard it,” Alison said. “It’s a terrible thing.”

  “Boot up your computer and get online. You need to see something.”

  Alison swiveled her chair to the side and tapped at the keyboard, sending the screen saver, a picture of the cathedral at Rheims, shuddering. The desktop appeared and she clicked on the Internet connection, which came up immediately, since the university was on a cable system and not on dial up anymore. She rather missed the sound of dial up, the way she rather missed the sound printers used to make before they got the silent ones.

  “Go to CNN,” Jig Tyler said. “That ought to work.”

  Alison hesitated, and then went. The window came up with a picture of Drew Harrigan in the middle of it, and for just one moment Alison thought it was nothing but another story about the murder. Then she saw the inset picture of a vapid-looking blonde holding up what seemed to be a piece of legal-sized typing paper, and the words: HARRIGAN WIDOW NAMES NAMES.

  “What’s this?” Alison said.

  “That’s Mrs. Drew Harrigan, the fair Ellen,” Jig Tyler said. “Have you met her?”

  “I’ve never even seen a picture of her before. Who’s she naming the names of?”

  “Well, there’s you, for one. And me.”

  Alison looked up. “Me? Why? I don’t even know her.”

  “I do, although only in passing. Believe it or not, the Harrigans and I get invited to some of the same fund-raisers. You’d be amazed at the people I’m willing to put up with for charity. The names she’s naming are the list of people she believes had motive, opportunity, and blind unreasoning hatred to kill her husband.”

  Alison blinked. “But that makes no sense,” she said. “Why would I want to kill her husband?”

  Jig Tyler pointed to the envelope on the desk. “That. Drew Harrigan is dead and the inquiry is over.”

  “But it doesn’t have anything to do with that,” Alison said. “It can’t have. I threatened to sue the department back to the Stone Age. That’s what happened.”

  “That’s not what it’s going to look like.”

  “But this is ridiculous,” Alison said. “The police can’t be taking this seriously.”

  “Well,” Jig Tyler said, “if my sources are to be believed, and they usually are, she took it to the police first. Actually to Gregor Demarkian. Tracked him down at that convent where the body was found this morning and gave the list to him. Then she seems not to have believed that he was taking it seriously, so she came back here and called a press conference. That was at about ten thirty. It’s now just about noon, and that story is on every wire service on the planet. The police are going to have to take it seriously.”

  “Good God,” Alison said.

  “Assuming God exists, I doubt if he’s good. But mostly I assume he doesn’t exist. Do you believe in God?”

  “No, not really, I suppose. I don’t think about it much.”

  “For what it’s worth, I don’t think Drew Harrigan believed in God much, either. He just found God a convenient co-pilot for the show. Have you listened to the show?”

  “I tried once. I couldn’t get through it.”

  “It’s frightening how many stupid people there are in the world,” Jig said. “And the most frightening thing of all is that they know they’re stupid. They feel it. That’s why they get so hysterical about ‘pointy-headed intellectuals’ who ‘look down on them.’ It’s projection. They look down on them selves. And it’s not just the ones who vote Republican. If you ask me, the Democrats are worse. The liberals are the worst of all. It’s a shill. They make people believe things can get better if they just fool around with the system a little, instead of getting rid of the whole thing at once.”

  “You think that’s wrong? That things can never get better by fooling around with the system a little?”

  “They can get superficially better,” Jig Tyler said. “You can buy people off with a house and a car and enough money for a vacation every summer. They don’t notice that the house is a crackerbox in a soulless housing development where all the neighbors’ houses are the same, or the car breaks down in five years, or the summer vacation means trekking out to a godforsaken little patch of sand with five thousand other people crowded onto it and staying in the kind of motel that advertises rooms for twenty dollars a night, no cable. They don’t notice that the people who are robbing them blind have their own islands in the Caribbean and their own planes with full bedroom and bath facilities and never get crowded anywhere.”

  “I read one of your books once,” Alison said. “The One Party System, that one.”

  “So I’m repeating myself,” Jig Tyler said. “I’m sorry. I just get so carried away. It seems so obvious to me. There are many more of us than there are of them. They can’t continue to rule unless we allow them to continue to rule. For decades, every time another election came around, I’d expect to see an insurgency. I almost thought I had one in the sixties. The sixties were a sham, and since then we’ve had nothing but corporate party politics. It’s like toothpaste that comes in three different colors. They’re all the same. The differences between them are superficial.”

  “I used to go on those sorts of vacations when I was little,” Alison said. “We had a trailer, though. We didn’t go to motels. We’d drive down to Cape Hatteras and hook up and spend the week there, and then we’d drive home. It really wasn’t awful, you know. I found it very enjoyable. I know my parents did, too.”

  “They wouldn’t have enjoyed it so much if they’d realized what they didn’t have. Do you know how I spent my vacations when I was little?”

  “No.”

  “At my father’s house in Rome. The first time I had dinner with the Pope, I was six years old.”

  “I don’t think I’d have much liked having dinner with the Pope when I was six,” Alison said, “and it has nothing to do with the fact that I wasn’t Catholic.”

  “We weren’t Catholic, either. My father was in the diplomatic corps. Which means I grew up around very rich people without being a very rich person myself. They are what they are, you know. They’re not stupid. They know they have to pay off at least a little if they want to stay in power, or in business. So they pay off, just a little. But never more than just a little. And they present the suckers with two options: a Democratic Party that’s working for them and pretending to be trying to take care of the people they hurt, and a Republican Party that’s working for them and pretending to care about people with ‘traditional values.’ They distract Democratic voters with puny-assed programs that won’t even begin to address the problems created by global capitalism, never mind the yawning chasm of inequality it creates. They distract the Republican voters with God, guns, and gays. They despise everybody who doesn’t have a bank account the size of Wisconsin and they always win. And the suckers get themselves all worked up about Roe v. Wade or immigration law, and never even see it happening.”

  “And you go on CNN and say all these things, do you?”

  “Yes, well,” Jig Tyler said. “It’s good for their image to present at least some opposing views. That way, they can’t be accused of censorship. And they always get somebody like me to present them. I’m the sort of person people who aren’t rich think of as rich. I’ve got a cushy job. I’m an Ivy League intellectual. I can be presented as compl
etely out of touch, and nobody they’d really want to listen to, so mostly they don’t listen.”

  “But you do the shows anyway.”

  “I do, yes,” Jig Tyler said. “There’s always the chance that there are one or two people ready to hear. They’d think you were rich, too. Do you know that?”

  “Yes,” Alison said, “I do. My family does, even now. They refer to my time in college as when I went off to that rich kids’ school.”

  Jig Tyler stood up. “I’m sorry to have barged in on you. I just thought you’d better be forewarned. It’s going to get fairly nuts before it quiets down. I thought you might not be used to that.”

  “I’m not.”

  “If I were you, I’d be careful not to make any statements to the press,” Jig said. “Oh, I’m going to, and probably most of the people on that list are going to, but you’ve never done it before. You’ve got no idea how to handle reporters’ questions. You don’t want to say anything that will land you in court on a murder charge when all you’ve done wrong is mistake the press for people who are willing to listen.”

  He stood up and looked around, at her bookshelves, at her filing cabinet, at the books stacked on the floor. Alison didn’t think she’d ever realized how truly tall and thin he was, cadaverous, like a skeleton in clothes.

  “You’ve got interesting books,” he said.

  Then he ambled out of the room, as inexplicably, Alison thought, as he’d wandered in. She watched him for as long as she could see him, then turned back to CNN and the story about Ellen Harrigan and her list. She had the kind of uneasy feeling she got when she ate too much dairy at dinner. She wasn’t allergic to dairy, exactly, but beyond a certain point it made her queasy and restless. She had the kind of thought she hadn’t had in many years, the kind that used to drive her crazy when her parents had it, the kind that had made her early life a long wasteland of waiting to get out of where she was and into a place where people understood books and ideas and everything that went with them.