Hardscrabble Road

by Jane Haddam

  Gregor Demarkian’s eyebrows rose. “Isn’t that kind of information supposed to be confidential?”

  “Absolutely,” Ray Dean said.

  Gregor Demarkian cocked his head. “You’re a very interesting man, Mr. Ballard. I assume you’ve got hold of the names on that list through connections.”

  “I’ve got something better than connections,” Ray Dean said. “I own a fifteen percent interest in the bank. In trust, mind you, and I can’t sell it, but there it is. It’s all right, you know. You could get this information with a court order. We don’t allow absolute bank secrecy in the United States, for which I am truly grateful. If it makes you feel any better, my father is probably grateful, too.”

  “Why did you want a list of people connected to the disappearance of Sherman Markey who had accounts with your father’s bank?”

  “Because the nuns got an offer for the property Drew Harrigan parked with them,” Ray Dean said, “and the offer came through the Markwell Ballard Bank. Which, by the way, is why you could get the information with a court order, and why I could get it. The person who gave it to me knew that my father was going to have one of his patented fits as soon as he found out about it. And trust me, my father’s patented fits are something to see.”

  “I’ve heard about them. He won’t have a patented fit about your obtaining the information and giving it to me?”

  “I was hoping you wouldn’t say anything about my giving it to you,” Ray Dean said, “and he won’t mind that I went and got it. He’ll probably think it means I’m finally taking an interest in the family business, which I’m not. It’s not that I look down on the family business, or anything like that. It’s just that I’m not cut out for it.”

  “Why would you look down on the world’s most important investment banking firm?”

  “You’d be amazed at how many of the people I went to prep school with would do just that. Take a look at that list, Mr. Demarkian. It’s interesting.”

  Gregor Demarkian picked up the list off the table and began to read it, and Ray Dean, finally relaxed, looked around the restaurant with more interest and concentration. At a table near the center of the room there were three extremely old women, all thin to the point of emaciation and all wearing black. Something at the back of Ray Dean’s head labeled them the three witches from Macbeth and started waiting for them to leap up and chant. He looked around some more and found mostly small groups of people having breakfast quietly, but somehow all together, as if they all knew each other.

  Gregor Demarkian had put the list back on the table. Fr. Tibor Kasparian was trying to read it without looking as if that was what he was doing. Ray Dean turned his attention back to them.

  “It’s a very interesting list, Mr. Ballard.”

  “Call me Ray Dean. Or call me Aldy. Most of my life, I’ve been known as Aldy. I know it’s an interesting list.”

  “Drew Harrigan isn’t on it,” Gregor Demarkian said. “Is that because he’s dead?”

  Ray Dean shook his head. “Drew Harrigan couldn’t get an account at Markwell Ballard if he offered to die for it. The bank has criteria for accepting accounts, and the criteria are so outrageous that nobody can meet them. I mean nobody. My father can’t meet them. Bill Gates can’t meet them. Somebody like Drew Harrigan couldn’t come close.”

  “But Mr. Harrigan is likely to have had a lot more money than, say, Dr. Richard Alden Tyler.”

  “Sure,” Ray Dean said. “But it’s not about money. In the world my father lives in, everybody has money. My father has, uh, principles, about who he will enable to get richer and who he won’t. He wouldn’t touch the Drew Harrigan/Rush Limbaugh/Ann Coulter axis with a ten-foot pole. Not that he’s much in favor of Democrats, either, you understand. Do you know why I starred Jig Tyler’s name?”

  “No,” Gregor Demarkian said.

  “Because I’m pretty sure he’s the one who made the offer on the land to Our Lady of Mount Carmel Monastery.”

  Now, Ray Dean saw, he had Gregor Demarkian interested. “That’s not legal, is it, to ask about a particular transaction like that? Or to tell me. You really do need a court order for that sort of thing.”

  “I didn’t ask for it directly,” Ray Dean said. “They wouldn’t have given it to me if I had. But I grew up around people who know how to ask the questions that will get them the answer without crossing the line, and I got this one. Look at that list. There’s Neil Savage.”

  “Yes, I noticed that,” Demarkian said.

  “Savage almost certainly didn’t make the offer,” Ray Dean said, “because he’s Harrigan’s attorney, and doing that under the circumstances would have been illegal and it would probably have gotten him disbarred.”

  “If it ever came out,” Demarkian said.

  “He couldn’t know it wouldn’t,” Ray Dean said, “and he wouldn’t take that kind of risk. Not for a low-rent putz like Drew Harrigan. I’ve known a million Neil Savages. Trust me. Then there’s me, of course, and that’s perfectly possible, but I promise you the right to look through all my records at the bank, no matter how confidential, so you can check.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “Then there’s Kate Daniel, but the times don’t work. She didn’t have anything to do with this case until well after the offer was made. Of course, she was married to Savage once—”

  “—Was she?”

  “Years ago, when they were both just out of law school. She had a feminist epiphany and ran away from home. Of course, they could still be close. I have no idea if they are or not, but I’ve met them both, and I’d doubt it. And it goes back to that risk thing. It’s too close a connection to trust that it wouldn’t get caught.”

  “How does a woman like Kate Daniel get enough money to open an account in an investment bank?”

  “She inherits it,” Ray Dean said. “Then we’ve got Frank Sheehy. That’s a real possibility. A lot of the success of his business depended on Drew Harrigan. He was losing money because of the rehab thing. It was worth his while to do anything he had to do to get Drew Harrigan straightened out and back on the air. I can’t really rule out Frank Sheehy. Even the murder fits, if you think about it. Whoever was getting Drew Harrigan the drugs killed Sheehy because Sheehy knew all about it, or maybe Sheehy was getting Harrigan the drugs. I’m not very good at this, am I? I’ve thought about writing a murder mystery, but I keep getting worried I’d end up at the end of the book babbling like this.”

  “I want to know why you think it was Dr. Tyler who tried to buy that piece of land.”

  “Because Jig Tyler was feeding material to Drew Harrigan,” Ray Dean said. “He’d been doing it for months, at least. He might have been doing it for longer.”

  “And you know that—”

  Ray Dean looked at the ceiling. “Because he fed something to Drew about me. Last November. Three days before Thanksgiving, we were at a party together. He contributes to causes. The causes have parties. He goes. I’ve always found that one of the oddest things about him. Anyway, I had just come from the office, where I’d realized that I was going to have to turn down a donation we’d gotten that very afternoon, a big donation, in six figures, because I’d finally figured out who the donor was.”

  “Who was it?”

  “Charles Scherver. He doesn’t call himself that anymore. He changed his name when he got out of prison, but it was Charles Scherver nonetheless, the most famous American traitor in the history of the Cold War. If we’d taken the donation, it would have come out. We’re required to make our list of donors public. Anyway, by the time I tracked it down it was late, and there was nobody in the office, and I went to this party. And I got to talking to Dr. Tyler, and then, just as we were waiting for our cars on our way out, I told him about it. We were talking about donations versus public financing of charitable works, and Tyler was doing one of his shticks about the evils of capitalism, and I let loose with all the checks and balances there are on donations, and I told him about it. And then his car p
icked him up, and he was gone. The next morning—the very next morning—eleven o’clock sharp, Drew Harrigan led with the story on his broadcast.”

  “Maybe somebody overheard you.”

  “There was nobody there to overhear.”

  “Maybe he told a friend, who told Harrigan.”

  “Maybe,” Ray Dean said, “but I don’t believe it, and neither do you. It was too fast. He must have gone home and gotten on the phone right away, if he didn’t use a cell in the car. It’s the kind of stupid little thing that causes us no end of trouble because it gets all the ‘patriot’ groups mad at us—note that I’ve got mental scare quotes around the word ‘patriot’—and they make a lot of noise, and they bring our donations down.”

  “Even if he did give that information to Drew Harrigan,” Gregor Demarkian said carefully, “that doesn’t mean he also tried to buy the property from the nuns, does it?”

  “No,” Ray Dean said. “But.” He shrugged. “It was the connection. That started me looking. That’s what made me ask questions. Jig Tyler is the person who tried to buy that land from the monastery, Mr. Demarkian. I know it for sure.”

  “How?”

  “Telling you that would be illegal,” Ray Dean said. “You’re going to have to get a warrant and ask those questions yourself. But it’s true. I don’t know what kind of a connection Jig Tyler had with Drew Harrigan. I’ve met Tyler on a number of occasions, and I can’t imagine it. Tyler hates idiots. Harrigan was practically the definition of one. But there you are. Get the warrant. Ask the questions. Find out where Sherman Markey is and bring him back to me.”

  “You think Jig Tyler has Sherman Markey, too?”

  “I don’t know,” Ray Dean said. “I just know that he’s out there somewhere, dead or alive. He’s being used by people who should know better than to…I don’t know than to what. It’s freezing out there. He’s been gone for weeks. I want him back. I want him now.”

  “I’ll do my best,” Gregor Demarkian said.

  Ray Dean felt suddenly awkward—more shades of St. Paul’s, more memories from the kind of childhood he would never have wished on himself. He stood up a little stiffly and said good-bye in that oddly formal way he couldn’t help. He hadn’t noticed it before, but Fr. Tibor Kasparian hadn’t said a word. Ray Dean said it was nice meeting him, anyway, and then he heard his mother in his head, telling him that manners had to be glued on tight, especially in the most awkward situations.

  A moment later, he was out on the street, looking up and down again. He would go to that Middle Eastern food store, he thought. He would buy loukoumia and halva. He wasn’t the kind of person who usually used sugar to make himself feel better, but he didn’t usually use liquor, either, and he didn’t usually use pills, and he thought that, the way things were going, he might as well try something.

  2

  It was one of those things, an accident at the end of a long string of accidents, an impossibility dressed up as a moment of revelation. Jig Tyler had been trained well enough to know that coincidences happen. He didn’t believe in the supernatural, or the paranormal, or fate. Still, he wasn’t usually out of bed and out in town this early in the morning. He liked to read late at night, because it was quiet, and nobody thought to call him. He’d been up until at least three, plowing his way through the latest piece of idiocy by Mona Charen. He didn’t know why he went on reading books like that. They were aimed at an audience with an IQ of under a hundred and average cultural literacy of even less than that, and it was just as bad in the books by the “liberals” on the playing field. He wished he could take all these people and sweep them off the board, the way angry women swept chess pieces off boards in melodramatic movies. He wished he had a melodramatic movie to go to. He wished he were still asleep, but the alarm clock had gone off for some reason probably having to do with the fact that it was very old and beginning to malfunction, and he hadn’t been able to get to sleep again once he’d finally managed to stop its buzzing.

  He had gone out because he’d started feeling claustrophobic staying in, and he had gone into the drugstore because it had been handy and open when the wind started. He never wandered around in drugstores. He always headed straight for whatever it was he was looking for. He didn’t know what to make of the plastic toys and decks of cards and boxes of candy that drugstores had everywhere. He couldn’t imagine anybody paying the extra freight to pick up a three-ring binder here to get out of walking the few blocks to a regular stationery store. The people in drugstores made him nervous, because they always seemed to be confused about what it was they were supposed to do next. Now that he was out and awake and cold he was also fuzzy, the way he got when his sleep had been interrupted at the very worst time.

  He went back to look at the magazines because they were there to look at, and because they at least constituted something to read, sort of. He looked over the covers of Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News & World Report. He marveled at the sheer number of cooking magazines, all with glossy four color photo spreads of things that probably tasted terrible once you had them in front of you, but that looked so perfect on the page you wanted to have every one of them now. He looked at the car and motorcycle magazines. He looked at the women’s magazines, which all seemed to assume that women were spending their time at home all day the way they had in 1950. He was about to go back out into the cold when he saw the nuns.

  Here was another accident—what were the odds that it would be the same nuns, all the way out here, miles from Hardscrabble Road and their convent? Monastery, Jig reminded himself, and then the younger of the two turned, looked around absently, saw him, and stopped. Jig was holding a copy of Women’s Wrestling Today, which he found to be one of the most remarkable examples of popular culture he’d ever encountered. The women must have been taking steroids. There was no possibility that they could have developed that kind of musculature without them. He put the magazine down very quickly. The women were all wearing very skimpy clothing, thongs and postage stamp bra tops, not the kind of thing that would suit a nun. The nun didn’t seem to notice. She was staring at his face. Then she tugged sharply at her companion’s sleeve and started to come over.

  This was not an accident, but a mistake. He should have turned away and left the store, immediately. He should not have stood still where he was, with his left hand resting on the big magazine rack, as if he was seriously considering finding something to buy.

  “Excuse me,” the nun said. “I’m sorry to bother you. It’s Dr. Richard Tyler, isn’t it?”

  “That’s right,” Jig said. Then he thought that that, too, was another mistake. He would never make a spy. People recognized him from television, or from magazines. He was used to admitting who he was.

  “I’m sorry,” the nun said again. “I really don’t mean to bother you. It’s just—I have such a strong feeling I’ve seen you somewhere before.”

  “You’ve seen me on television, probably,” Jig said. “I’m not really on all that often, but people remember.”

  “We don’t watch television,” the nun said. “And it’s not that, it’s that I could swear I’ve seen you somewhere in person, face-to-face. Very closely face-to-face. Do you come out to the monastery?”

  “The monastery?”

  “Our Lady of Mount Carmel on Hardscrabble Road.”

  “Is that in Philadelphia?”

  The nun bit her lip. She was, Jig thought, a remarkably beautiful young woman, more like an actress playing a nun than most of the nuns he’d met. She was also very intelligent. It showed in her face. For once, it did not make him very comfortable.

  “I’m sorry,” she said finally. “I’m being ridiculous, and I’m intruding. It’s just—never mind. I don’t know. I’m not making any sense. Please excuse me, Dr. Tyler. I shouldn’t have intruded on your privacy.”

  “Not at all,” Jig said.

  The nun gave him one last searching, worried look. Then she turned away and went back to the other nun, who had bought something she
was now carrying in a white plastic bag. Jig realized that he couldn’t remember nuns like this, with full habits to the floor, carrying anything in their hands. He couldn’t remember them wearing coats, either, and now he knew why. They had heavy wool capes to wear instead.

  The two nuns went out together, to the front of the store, to the street. Jig watched them go until he couldn’t see them any longer. His mouth was as dry as paper. He looked at the clock on the wall and saw that it was barely quarter past eight.

  There were things he was good at, and things he was not good at. When he was good at something, he was so good at it that he could not be compared to other people who did it. In mathematics, in physics, in research medicine, he was so far out ahead of the pack that he might as well have been in the field alone. When he was not good at something, he was incapacitated. There were not a lot of things he was not good at, but they were there, and one of them was lying to other people face-to-face.

  No, he thought, that wasn’t true. Sometimes he did that very well. It was more complicated than that. It was just that he had been so very bad at lying to that nun, just a moment ago, and it was one of the few times in his life when he had wanted his lies to be effective.

  3

  Beata was on the bus and reaching for her breviary before it struck her, and then she found herself torn by the sort of procedural guilt she had always thought was the least attractive thing about religious life. It was quarter after eight. They were absent from prayers because they had errands to do, and they were later than they should have been because Immaculata had had three coughing fits in half an hour and wanted to pick up lozenges so that she didn’t cough and hack her way home. They were supposed to take the first opportunity to “make up” prayers, and that first opportunity was now, a half hour ride on this bus with nothing to worry about in the way of missing their stop, since it was the last one before the bus turned around. The Office sat in her hand, thick and red. They had separate volumes now for Advent and Christmas, Lent and Easter, and Ordinary Time. In The Nun’s Story, Audrey Hepburn had carried a prayer book so small it almost fit into the palm of her hand, but that was the Little Office, and nobody said the Little Office anymore. Beata couldn’t even fault the rule, really. The idea was to have the whole Church praying the same words at the same times every day, to lift up praise and supplication in one voice, ad maiorem Dei gloriam.