Hardscrabble Road

by Jane Haddam

  “No,” Tibor said. “I mean he has, what, gravitas is the word, and it isn’t English. I’m sorry. He is a great mind, probably the greatest I have ever met. This is not a trick, or a joke. He can do things with his mind I can’t even understand, never mind do myself. He is a committed person. Nobody wins two Nobels and a Fields Medal if he isn’t. His books are outlandish and overwrought, but they are meticulously researched and meticulously documented. I can only guess how quickly and efficiently his mind works, and on how many levels. When we first met, we talked about the formation of the New Testament, and he quoted St. Ignatius to me, in demotic Greek. I went back and looked up the passage when I got home, and he had it exactly. From memory. From a field he has no professional interest in. In the course of our time on the committee, he quoted from or alluded to everybody from Niels Bohr to Charles Schultz. He’s read Dante in the medieval Italian and understood it. He’s seen every movie Arnold Schwarzenegger ever made. He speaks six languages and reads ten. He can play both Beethoven and Jerry Lee Lewis on the piano. It’s an encyclopedic mind, a comprehensive mind, and the most remarkably detailed memory I’ve ever encountered in anyone, ever. It’s not a ‘photographic’ memory, it’s something better. It’s a regular memory, just at four hundred times the effectiveness that most of us can manage. If I’d met him under other circumstances, I might have felt privileged to have some time to talk to him. But.”

  “I knew there was a but coming,” Gregor said.

  “If there wasn’t a but, you’d have no need to talk to me. There is a but, Krekor, yes. And it is that I think that Dr. Tyler does not think he is human, or does not think the rest of us are.”

  “You mean, he thinks he’s God?”

  “No, no, Krekor. He is not trite. I mean that he thinks there is a difference between us and him, a difference so vast it is not a difference in degree but a difference in kind. He sees us the way we see very intelligent dogs. We can love our dogs, but we don’t treat them the way we treat our grandmothers. Dogs do not have rights, because we don’t think they would know what to do with them. We put them down, if we think we have to.”

  “That’s trite, though, isn’t it?” Gregor said. “The great genius who looks down on lesser mortals. I’d think that is as trite as it comes.”

  “It may be trite, Krekor, but it’s also human nature. If you ask me, the most pernicious idea this world ever came up with, next to the perfectibility of man, which has killed more people than smallpox, the next one is the idea of the genius. Leonardo da Vinci did not think of himself as a genius. He got a lot more work done than most of the people who have thought of themselves as geniuses, and he did it without writing himself out of the human race.”

  Up at the front of the café, the door opened and a woman came in, looking up one row of tables and down another, as if she was frantic to find somebody, but thought she wouldn’t. When she got to Gregor she stopped, nodded slightly, and came forward.

  “Mr. Demarkian?” she said.

  “That’s right,” Gregor said.

  “My name is Laurie Kohl. I’m an assistant DA in Rob Benedetti’s office. He says he wonders if you would mind coming across the street right away, right now, it’s urgent. There’s been a phone call.”

  “A phone call about what?”

  “I don’t know,” Laurie Kohl said, “but you’re not to go up to the office, you’re to wait for him in the lobby, he’s on his way down. And there are officers coming. I don’t know what’s going on. Could you come, please?”

  PART THREE

  Wed–Thurs, February 11–12

  High 11F, Low –2F

  Sentences of death, where they are freely chosen, do not need to be written.

  —GEORGE STEINER

  But consider, Sisters, that the Devil hasn’t forgotten us. He also invents his own honors in monasteries and invents his own laws.

  —ST. TERESA OF AVILA

  No matter how fast light travels it finds darkness has gotten there first, and is waiting for it.

  —TERRY PRATCHETT

  ONE

  1

  The first thing Gregor Demarkian thought of when he had time to think, nearly an hour later, was that no matter how much he had been complaining of the cold these last few days, he hadn’t spent much time outside in it. Now he had no choice.

  “Outside and in the back,” Rob Benedetti had said, when Gregor met him in the lobby little more than half an hour before.

  Tibor had been hanging back on the edges. Benedetti hadn’t noticed him. Then a whole line of patrol cars had pulled up, and suddenly everybody was running.

  Well, no, Gregor thought, not quite. He had felt as if everybody was running, but that had at least as much to do with his age as with the way other people were behaving. Marbury and Giametti had come, and they led the charge out the front door of the building, along the sidewalk, and through the narrow opening of an alley leading behind the buildings. Gregor’s stomach lurched as soon as he saw where they were going, and he remembered, as clearly as he remembered his conversation with Tibor, seeing the homeless man pushing a shopping cart through that space. He tried to remember what the homeless man had looked like, but couldn’t get anything except the impression of someone tall and thin. He tried to remember what was in the cart, but couldn’t get that, either, except that the thing was full. Everybody was right. You didn’t really look at homeless people. You didn’t notice them in detail, the way you might a “normal” person, although, in Gregor’s experience, you didn’t notice much about “normal” people either, unless they were somebody you knew or something had called your attention to them. Maybe that was the difference. Maybe you didn’t notice much about homeless people especially when something called your attention to them. You looked away, the way you would if a friend had just done something to embarrass himself in public.

  The backs of the buildings were a maze of fire escapes and garbage cans, stray garbage and discarded needles. Did addicts really huddle out in back of the District Attorney’s Office to shoot up? Apparently they did. Maybe they did that even behind police stations. If you were out of sight, you were invisible. The shopping cart was parked right at the end of a long line of metal garbage cans, the big ones the trucks came for three times a week. It might have been one more package destined for removal. Gregor wished he had brought a hat. He wished he had remembered to put on his gloves before his fingers felt so cold they could be broken off like icicles on the ends of his hands. He wished that when Marbury and Giametti got whatever it was out of the cart’s big well, it wouldn’t turn out to be a tall, thin homeless man in dark clothes.

  It wasn’t. Marbury reached in and disturbed the rags and papers to find the body. Then he checked for a pulse. When he didn’t get one, he got Giametti’s help and the two of them began to pry the body loose and into the air.

  “They have to do that,” Rob Benedetti said to Gregor, coming to stand very close to him as they both watched the extraction. Benedetti didn’t have a hat, either, and he’d forgotten the gloves entirely. “Even if they don’t get a pulse. Even if they know they’re dealing with a corpse. If there aren’t maggots coming out of the thing, they have to get it out and check it out again, just in case. The last thing we want is to end up killing somebody by accident, or not getting them help in time when we could have.”

  “Listen,” Gregor said. “I think I saw this cart come in here.”

  “What?”

  “I was crossing the street to get to the coffee shop, and this man, this tall, thin man—no, let me back up. This tall, thin person. I just assumed it was a man. Anyway, he pushed a shopping cart pretty much like this one into the alley that leads back here. There couldn’t be two of them, could there?”

  “I don’t know,” Benedetti said.

  They both looked at Marbury and Giametti, now working with two other officers. The body came up from the well like an unruly beach ball, and then suddenly it was stretched out between the men, one holding the arms, the
other holding the legs, a third officer propping up the torso at the middle of the back. They put the body down on the ground just as the ambulances came up out on the street, their sirens screaming into the cold like needles. They got down on their hands and knees and began to pump at the man, to check him out, to try the impossible. It was remarkable how automatic that was, trying the impossible. Even combatants in war, coming up on the enemy wounded, often tried to save them rather than kill them off.

  Gregor moved close to get a better look at the man. It was definitely not the one he had seen on the street. This man was short, and chunky, even though he was thin enough, probably from addictions and malnutrition. His clothes, though, were not as worn as you might expect them to be. They were dirty, but not torn, and not frayed. The man’s face was a mass of beard, and that made Gregor stop to think. He saw homeless men on the streets every day. Most of them had stubble, at most. Where did they shave? Or did alcohol make a beard stop growing? It hadn’t on this man. His beard was filthy and full of bits of food and dirt, but it was most definitely there. His hair was not. He was close to bald, and he didn’t have a hat.

  Tibor came up to Gregor’s side and pulled on his sleeve. Gregor had had no idea he was still there.

  “You should go home,” Gregor said. “This is a crime scene, at least presumptively. You can’t walk around in it without tainting the forensics.”

  “I’m not walking around in it, Krekor. I only came because I didn’t know where else to go. Do you know who this man is?”

  “No, but I’ve got a guess.”

  “Your guess is the Sherman Markey person that has been in the papers?”

  “Exactly.”

  “I came to say you shouldn’t feel guilty about not noticing,” Tibor said. “They look at you and you look away, it’s not because you’re hard-hearted or don’t care what happens to other people. It’s because they can’t be trusted. So many of them are mentally ill, or on drugs or alcohol, you don’t know what they’re going to do. You worry that they’ll get violent.”

  “And that’s supposed to be better?”

  “Tcha, Krekor. Life is what it is. People are what they are. We are called by God to be stewards of the earth and His people, but that doesn’t make either the earth or His people suitable for a Disney movie. You’re afraid of what will happen if you make eye contact with them. So am I. So are we all. Personal solutions will not work here.”

  “You’d better go,” Gregor said. “That’s the ambulance people coming in.”

  Tibor nodded slightly and walked away, down the alley, toward the street. Gregor knew what Tibor had been trying to tell him, but it didn’t make him feel any better. There was something, planted deep inside him by a mother who never turned a tramp away from the door, that said he should be better than that.

  The ambulance men were not taking long to decide that the body was just that, a body, and not an emergency. They had pulled back to let the forensics team move in. Gregor didn’t remember seeing that team arrive.

  “My mother,” Gregor said to Benedetti, “used to feed homeless people. They’d come onto the street, back when the street was less upscale than it is now. It was tenements, really. They’d come and she’d be sitting on the stoop with a big basket, she and all the other women, working on things for dinner. Peeling vegetables. Breaking up bread to use in these Armenian dishes, I don’t even know what to call them. The men would come by and they would give them food. All the time. Except they didn’t call them the homeless, then. They called them tramps.”

  Benedetti gave Gregor a very odd look. “There are still tramps. And people still feed them. But Mr. Demarkian, this is not a tramp we’re dealing with here, and neither are the homeless people you see most of the time on the street. It’s not the Great Depression anymore.”

  “Give me a break,” Gregor said. “Do I look that old?”

  “It’s not the 1950s, either,” Benedetti said. “Most of the people you see on the street these days, especially in a city like Philadelphia, aren’t just down on their luck. A large proportion of them are mentally ill. You could get yourself killed making contact with them if you don’t know how. Another large portion of them are addicted. The alkies won’t do you any harm, except to piss on your shoes, but the drug addicts can and do get violent and some of them can and will kill people who look like they have the price of a fix on them. You can’t go on some kind of personal crusade to fix things.”

  “That’s what they say about giving them money,” Gregor said. “That you shouldn’t give them money, because they’ll only use it for booze or drugs. That you only encourage them to bother other people.”

  “I give money to beggars all the time. I don’t worry about what they buy with it. If booze and drugs are that important to them, maybe they know something about themselves I don’t. And I don’t worry about them bothering other people. People could use being bothered more than they are. Do you know what I do worry about? I worry about them following me home, and following me day after day, until I have to have somebody arrest them, or they have a knife.”

  “Do you really worry that all homeless people are violent?”

  “No,” Benedetti said. “Almost none of them are. I worry I’m going to get the one in a hundred who is. Give it up, Mr. Demarkian. The homeless problem wouldn’t disappear if you were more careful to look these people in the eyes and give them money.”

  “They’ve bagged the body,” Gregor said.

  He and Benedetti both turned to watch the body being lifted up by the edges of the black body bag and carried down the alley to the ambulance waiting at the end. Gregor wondered why they always called an ambulance when they had a dead body, even when they were absolutely positive that the body was dead. It was as if they couldn’t bear the idea of someone dying without medical attention, although where any of these men and women would get medical attention, Gregor didn’t know. There was Medicaid, but most of these people were too confused to apply for it and too apt to have no address to use when applying. They were paranoid, too. They were afraid of doctors. They were afraid of social workers. Maybe that was the common thread in all their lives. Maybe they were all so afraid of people, and of living, that living like this was better than having to face the demand to communicate on a daily basis.

  I’m blithering, Gregor thought. I no longer know what I’m thinking. If Tibor could hear me, he’d lecture me for an hour.

  “Listen,” he told Rob Benedetti. “It’s freezing out here. Do we all really have to stand out here in the cold until forensics is through?”

  “Nah. We can go back in. I was thinking that myself. Is this the man you saw pushing the cart before?”

  “No. This one is short and chunky. Not fat but—”

  “Yeah, I know. Some of them are fat, did you know that? It happens more with women than with men. How they get and stay fat, I’ll never know.”

  “Yes,” Gregor said, “well, the one I saw was tall and thin. Very thin. I’d say a man, except I don’t really know that.”

  “Because you didn’t really look,” Rob Benedetti said. “Let’s not start that again.”

  “I wasn’t going to. He was tall and thin and wearing dark clothes. That’s all I know. We might be able to piece together a few things if we went back inside, though. I told your receptionist I was leaving and where I was going, for instance.”

  “So?”

  “So, she might remember the time,” Gregor said. “I told her I was leaving, I came downstairs, and right as I was walking out the building, there this guy was. I saw him pushing the cart along the sidewalk, and then I saw him turn into that alley we came down. The time would be a big help if, as I presume, we think that this is Sherman Markey and the person I saw pushing the cart is the person who killed him.”

  “And Drew Harrigan,” Rob Benedetti said. “We can only hope. Okay, that’s good. We’ll get the time. I’d be happier if we could get the identification first. We’re all just assuming—”

&
nbsp; “—The woman who came to get me said you had a phone call.”

  “We did,” Rob Benedetti said. “That’s part of the reason why we’re assuming. Crap. This makes no sense. Assuming this was the guy who killed them both, and this is Markey, dead from I don’t know what, why not just leave him wherever he fell? Why bring him out here in the wretched cold and dump him behind the DA’s Office?”

  “Lots of reasons,” Gregor said. “Markey may have died in a place that could incriminate the murderer, although I doubt it. I can’t see any of the people we’ve looked at in this case so far, not even any of the people on Ellen Harrigan’s list, inviting a man like Sherman Markey onto their property for any reason. It would make more sense for them to pick a neutral place to meet. My guess is that somebody needs us to know that Sherman Markey is dead.”

  “Needs us to know that?” Rob Benedetti said. “Why?”

  Gregor shrugged. “There’s something somebody gets if Sherman Markey is dead. Rather than just missing, I mean. I don’t suppose it’s possible that Sherman Markey made a will.”

  “I’ll ask the people over at the Justice Project about it,” Rob Benedetti said, “but somehow, I doubt it.”

  “So do I. Is it possible Sherman Markey was left anything of value in Drew Harrigan’s will?”

  “If he was, I’ll join the circus.”

  “My feeling exactly,” Gregor said. “I don’t know. There has to be a reason to go through all this elaborate nonsense to make sure we found the body, right away, and to make sure we got it identified right away. I don’t believe in detective story murderers who go through a lot of elaborate rigmarole in order to commit the perfect crime. Murderers don’t do that kind of thing in real life.”

  “Charles Stuart,” Rob Benedetti said solemnly.

  “Yes, well,” Gregor said. “Any man stupid enough to shoot himself in the stomach is a wild card nobody should make any predictions about. Let’s get inside.”