Hardscrabble Road
Page 31
“Let’s get inside,” Rob Benedetti agreed.
He walked over to the teams surrounding the crime scene, and had a few words.
2
Gregor Demarkian liked crime scenes. He liked the concreteness of them, the mundane specificity of forensics before the analysis got underway and the medical examiner started to think of himself as a cross between Conan the Barbarian and Sherlock Holmes. He liked them a lot better than having to investigate in their absence, which happened sometimes, as it had with Drew Harrigan. The problem was that, in a way, it had happened now, too. Sherman Markey, assuming it was Sherman Markey, had not been killed in that back alley. There was too much of that going around in this case. None of the bodies was ever found where they died, and none of them was found where he’d been murdered. It made Gregor wonder how it had been done and why it had been done that way. To kill someone as Drew Harrigan had been killed, you either had to not care how long it took before the death occurred, or you had to be sure that the victim would ingest the poison close to immediately. If there was no urgency to the murder, why commit it? And was it ever possible to be absolutely sure that your victim would swallow a pill just when you wanted him to? Drew Harrigan could have taken those pills on the bus coming up to the monastery, or right away, as soon as he got them. He could have stepped out the murderer’s door and chugged them down dry and dropped dead half a block away.
Actually, there were a lot of questions to be asked about Drew Harrigan that nobody was asking yet, and others that were being asked, but without results. Back up in Rob Benedetti’s office, Gregor looked around again at the prints on the walls and the furniture, utilitarian and drab, so much like what anybody would expect the furniture to look like in a District Attorney’s Office that Gregor wondered if the person who had decorated it had taken her cues from old episodes of Perry Mason. He didn’t like the unusual in murder cases. He didn’t even believe the unusual in murder cases. When the unusual did exist, it was the sign of a serial killer, and that was not what was happening here.
Rob Benedetti was on the phone. He got off and came over to where Gregor was looking at a print of Connecticut’s Charter Oak. Gregor had no idea why the print was there.
“Marbury and Giametti will be up in a minute. I just talked to the ME. He’s standing by waiting for the body to be brought up to him. I want identification and confirmation of identification within the hour. This is making me crazy. I used to be a police officer, did you know that?”
“No,” Gregor said, “but I guessed.”
“Marbury and Giametti are good officers. It’s not that. It’s that the whole thing is taking too much time. I know. I shouldn’t lose my grip. But from the beginning, the whole thing—when I get my hands on Bruce Williamson, I’m going to kill him.”
“People threaten that all the time,” Gregor said.
“I know,” Rob Benedetti said, “but I mean it. I mean, you know, you absolutely know, that Drew Harrigan could never have been in rehab. If he had been and had gone missing, they would have notified the court. They would have had to. That’s a condition of these things. Always. Which means Bruce Williamson knew that wherever Drew Harrigan was going, it wasn’t rehab.”
“Not necessarily,” Gregor said. “He might just have agreed to rehab without the controls. He isn’t required by law to impose the controls. He’s the judge.”
“He’d have known something was wrong if they didn’t want the controls,” Benedetti said. “I hate these guys, did you know that? Guys like Bruce Williamson. And he isn’t the only one. Guys who are so damned impressed with money and fame that they think they’re doing the right thing running an entirely separate justice system for the big guys. Williamson is not known as an easy judge, did you know that? If you’re a black fifteen-year-old caught with a handful of coke in your pocket, you’re going to jail. If you’re a black sixteen-year-old, you’re going to an adult prison, and to hell with what we all know is going to happen to you there. But if you’re Drew Harrigan, or Alexandra Brand—”
“—Alexandra Brand lives in Philadelphia?”
“She was here filming a movie,” Benedetti said. “Got drunk as a skunk one night at some private club downtown, got in her car, ran a red light, hit a homeless woman pushing around one of those carts, and just up and left the scene.”
“Wait,” Gregor said. “I remember that. I do. It was in the papers non-stop for about three days and then it disappeared.”
“She pled and Williamson gave her probation. No community service, nothing. Just probation. And the old woman was dead. This is the problem, Mr. Demarkian. This is supposed to be a country of laws and not men, and we’re neck deep in a celebrity culture that makes the way the Brits treat royalty look egalitarian. It’s insane.”
“Why didn’t Drew Harrigan plead guilty and get probation?” Gregor asked. “If Williamson will sit still for a movie star who commits a hit-andrun homicide, why wouldn’t he sit still for Harrigan?”
“We weren’t buying,” Benedetti said. “We went in there—I went in there—and told them flat out that I wasn’t going to accept a plea bargain. I was going to insist on going to trial, and if Williamson and Harrigan’s people tried to get around me, I was going to go to the press. That put what’s his name, Savage, that put him up the wall, and there was a guy there from Harrigan’s sponsoring network, LibertyHeart, those people. That guy wasn’t happy, either. Maybe they were worried about the audience.”
“I take it you weren’t around when Alexandra Brand had her problems?”
“No,” Benedetti said, “and she’d have had more problems if I had been. But it’s not just judges like Williamson. It’s some of the cops, too. You know what all that means with Harrigan screaming and yelling. Somebody was paid off. Maybe more than one somebody. The guys don’t even see it as bribery. They’re starstruck. Everybody is. And I guess they don’t see the point in bothering people who matter with what they do to people who don’t, which is what they think of the people who live on the street. Does it bother you that we’ve all seen pictures of this guy Sherman Markey, and I’ve even seen him in person on at least two occasions, and none of us can recognize him when we see him?”
“I’ve never seen pictures of him,” Gregor said.
“Yeah, I know, but it’s like I said. I saw him in person. And if he passed me on the street today, I wouldn’t know who he was. I wouldn’t even begin to know. It’s things like that that get me nuts. This doesn’t even feel like a case, do you know what I mean? If it wasn’t for the Harrigan connection and we found this guy in the alley out back, the entire system would conspire in making us drop it. It isn’t important. These people die all the time. Move on to something that needs to get done.”
The door opened and Marbury and Giametti came in, looking more than a little exasperated.
“It’s not our precinct, and the only reason we’re here is to report back to where we belong,” Giametti was saying. “They’ve got detectives to handle cases like this, and we’ve got a job to do we aren’t doing.”
“I thought our job was to bring the bad guys in to justice,” Marbury said. “Whoever killed this guy is a bad guy, and he’s connected to our bad guy, he probably is our bad guy. You don’t have enough imagination. The city isn’t divided up into little grids that are completely sealed off from each other. Bad guys go from one precinct to the other all the time. If we get stuck in the bureaucratic maze, we won’t get anything done.”
Gregor gave a moment’s thought to the fact that the lines of jurisdiction were becoming hopelessly blurred. The one constant in this case, the one person who arguably had the right to be in it who was actually following it, was John Jackman, and he was keeping very carefully in the background. Gregor didn’t think that the precinct where Drew Harrigan had actually died had detectives on the job yet. He didn’t know if they knew they were supposed to.
Benedetti waved Marbury and Giametti into seats. “I’ve been complaining about celebrity justice,” he said.
“You don’t know that,” Giametti said. “You don’t know what this guy died of. You know what it’s like with these guys. They die all the time. We don’t know he was murdered.”
“If he wasn’t murdered, why push the cart into the alley and then call us up to find it?” Gregor said.
Giametti shrugged. “Maybe he died where somebody didn’t want him found, but that doesn’t mean he was murdered. He could have just been somewhere, with somebody, who’d rather we didn’t know…something.”
Gregor thought about it. “What about the phone call?” he said. “Who took the phone call?”
“Carol in the outer office did,” Benedetti said. “The phone rang, she picked it up, she did her usual thing with ‘District Attorney’s Office,’ or however she says it. Some guy said he had a message for ‘her boss,’ by which she presumed he meant me, and then he said that we ought to look out back because there was a dead body on our doorstep. She’s a bright woman. She asked him to hold. He didn’t buy it. He hung up.”
“Did she get the number?” Gregor asked.
“We always get the number,” Rob Benedetti said. “We’ve got the kind of caller ID system an ordinary citizen couldn’t buy if his life depended on it. We’ve got the number. It’s going to turn out to be a public pay phone, probably in the neighborhood. If I was this guy, I’d go use the one right down there on the street.”
“I wouldn’t,” Gregor said. “Remember, I saw him. He was dressed to look like a homeless man. Is that usual, homeless men using public pay phones?”
“The thing is,” Benedetti said, “he might not really have been dressed to look like anything. You see a guy with a cart—”
Gregor thought about it. “Okay, possible. I did pay more attention to the cart.”
“I’d really like to see a study done on what it is about people that makes us tag them as homeless on the street,” Rob Benedetti said. “I know they did a study where somebody went out to Grand Central in New York dressed really nicely and asked for money, and people gave it to him by the fistful, where they wouldn’t give it to the people who looked like they obviously needed it. I think the cart would have been enough.”
“Maybe,” Gregor said. “I’ll admit I can’t remember a thing about the man except that he was tall, and I don’t really know he was a man. It was just a general impression. I wish I knew where Drew Harrigan has been these last four weeks or whatever it was.”
“Me, too,” Benedetti said.
“I wish I knew more about Ellen Harrigan and her list,” Gregor said. “Did that strike you, that that wasn’t the kind of list you’d expect a woman like that to make up herself? Jig Tyler, okay, he’s a celebrity himself. He goes on television. But that other one, that Alison Standish. She might be important at the university, I don’t know. But she’s not—well, quite frankly, she’s not the kind of woman I’d have expected a woman like Ellen Harrigan ever to have heard of. And then there are some of the others. Ray Dean Ballard does what, runs an organization that works with the homeless? Would she have known who he was? Why?”
“Good question,” Benedetti said. “Ballard isn’t even one of the people Harrigan went after on his show. Most of the others are, except for Marla Hildebrande, who does the scheduling for LibertyHeart. What’ve we got?” He looked around the top of his desk and pulled a sheet of paper from the mess. “Jig Tyler. Alison Standish. Ray Dean Ballard. Marla Hildebrande. Kate Daniel. That’s Kate Daniel of the Justice Project, by the way. I assume Ellen Harrigan knew who she was, if only because she was the one spearheading the effort to sue Drew Harrigan on behalf of Sherman Markey. Sherman Markey isn’t on the list, though. That’s interesting. It seemed to me that Ellen Harrigan was blaming Sherman for everything.”
“It seemed like that to me, too,” Gregor said. “But mostly it seemed as if this wasn’t her idea. Would Neil Savage pull this kind of stunt?”
“You mean, ask her to come to us with a list? Maybe. I don’t know what lawyers would do. I never know what Savage is going to do.”
The phone on Benedetti’s desk rang, and he reached for it. Gregor went back to looking at prints on the walls. There were a couple of judges and lawyers, meant to look old. The judges were in wigs. There was one of Clarence Darrow from some newspaper’s editorial cartoon so ancient that the man was hooking his thumbs into his suspenders in front of the jury.
Rob Benedetti put down the phone and said, “Shit.”
“Excuse me?” Gregor said. Here was a difference between the Federal Bureau of Investigation under J. Edgar Hoover and the real world: in the Bureau in those days they had been trained not to swear with more diligence than they had been trained how to shoot, and if they were caught swearing in public they were suspended from duty for two weeks.
Rob Benedetti was staring at his phone and running his hands through his hair. “That was the ME’s office,” he said. “They got the body first thing. They’ve got it up on a slab. In the meantime, there’s something he thinks we need to know.”
“What’s that?” Gregor asked.
“They did a fingerprint check,” Benedetti said. “Whoever that is, it isn’t Sherman Markey.”
TWO
1
When Marla Hildebrande first saw the ID drawing up there on the television screen, her thought was: Oh, God, Frank has robbed a liquor store. Her next thought after that was, simply, that ID drawings were never any good. They never looked like the person the police were looking for. Then she began to feel uneasy. The sound was not on on the set. It never was, on the office set, unless somebody got interested in something and decided to turn it up. Marla was never entirely sure why Frank had the set in the office to begin with. He said he wanted to be ready if there was an assassination. Assassinations were one of those things he thought likely, on general principle. Marla had always secretly believed that he was interested in expanding the operation into cable. It was the kind of thing he would do, and he was young and ambitious, in spite of the lounge-around-the-office-couches-act he liked to put on for employees. That was Princeton. Never let them see you work.
She went across the field of desks to the little control panel for the screen and turned the sound up only slightly. It was past closing time and most of the women who worked in the bullpen were gone. It always bothered Frank that the secretaries and typists went home as soon as the closing bell rang, and Marla had never been able to explain to him about the differences between careers and jobs, or professions and simply earning a living. That was Princeton, too. Marla came from a long line of people who had had jobs and not careers and been more interested in earning a living than establishing a profession. You didn’t drive yourself into the ground physically and emotionally when you weren’t much interested in the job and really only wanted to make enough to pay for the house, and the vacation, and a night out every month at the nearest chain restaurant. Marla had to give Frank this: he never despised those things. They weren’t what he wanted for himself, but he didn’t look down on the people who did want them.
Frank couldn’t have held up a liquor store, she thought, and leaned in to hear what was going on. But the story had changed. The story on the screen now seemed to concern puppies.
Marla had a sudden urge to let it go, as if what she was about to do next was going to determine what that ID drawing meant. She knew you couldn’t change the past. She knew that. She just felt as if she could. She reached out for the controls and flipped to CBS, but the story there was about the presidential campaign, which hadn’t even started yet. She looked long and hard at the face of the Democratic candidate, who wasn’t the Democratic candidate yet, since the convention hadn’t happened, and then switched compulsively to NBC. It felt disloyal, somehow. Frank was devoted to ABC and Peter Jennings. He said he liked his Americans to be Canadi
ans.
NBC had the ID drawing up. Marla turned the sound high, much too high, and then turned it back down again. On the other side of the room, one of the two lone secretaries still at her desk made an annoyed noise and shuffled papers noisily.
“… police are asking the public’s help in identifying this man, found dead this afternoon in an alley near the office of the Philadelphia District Attorney. Originally believed to be a homeless…”
Marla didn’t hear the rest of it. She felt emptied of air. Once, when she was very small, she’d fallen from the top of a slide in Roger’s Park, right next to her house. It wasn’t a high slide, but it was wavy, so you bumped and sank as you went down, and she’d wanted very much to know what it felt like to go down. Then she’d gotten to the top of the ladder, and all of a sudden it had felt completely hypnotic. She was up here, the ground was down there, it was calling to her. The next thing she knew she was on the ground, and she couldn’t breathe. This was like that. She couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t think. She couldn’t move.
She had heard the news at noon. She had listened to it on one of their own radio stations. At noon they were saying that the body of Sherman Markey had been found in the alley, and she remembered thinking that was good. Now that they’d found Sherman Markey, it wouldn’t matter anymore about Ellen Harrigan’s suspect list.
“Listen,” she’d told Frank just yesterday. “You think it’s funny, but you’re not on it. I’m on it. Why that idiot woman thinks I’m more likely to kill Drew Harrigan than you, I don’t know.”
“Don’t worry,” Frank said. “It’s just a red herring. If you don’t want the police looking at you, you point them at somebody else.”
She really couldn’t breathe, but she had to be breathing. She really couldn’t move, but she had to be moving, because she was sitting down, backing into one of those horrible ergonomic chairs with the wheels that always threatened to shoot the thing out from under her. She was also crying. The tears were coming down her face in sheets. She hadn’t realized it until they dripped down onto her skirt and then through, making her thigh wet.