Hardscrabble Road

by Jane Haddam

  Next to her on the seat, Immaculata was already hard at prayer, her finger moving carefully from line to line, her lips moving. The Office was in Latin, and the rule had made much more sense when all the Offices were in Latin. These days, though, there were religious orders and churches saying the Office in every possible vernacular. Somebody had told her once that the Office had been translated into Klingon and posted on the Internet.

  Beata opened the Office to the relevant day, to the beginning of Morning Prayer, and stopped. The words came. The visions did, too. She had seen Dr. Richard Tyler before, she just hadn’t realized it was him. She’d not only seen him, she’d stared straight at his face and exchanged at least half a dozen sentences with him. Even at the time, something about him had been nagging at her, some feeling that he was somebody she knew or somebody she ought to recognize. But, of course, she’d pushed all that away. She’d just assumed that she’d seen him before at the barn. She saw so many of them, and so many of them came over and over and over again.

  Out the windows of the bus the day was dark and cold and windy. The few sickly trees that lined the sidewalks were bent under the force of winds that whipped back and forth with no indication of what they would do next. It wasn’t just that she knew where she’d seen him, it was that she knew when she’d seen him, and that was, well, crazy. It got crazier the longer she thought of it. She should pray her Office. She should offer this up. God was supposed to provide you with answers to dilemmas like this.

  At the moment, though, God was not providing, and Beata knew she was going to have to take it up with Reverend Mother.

  FIVE

  1

  It was Rob Benedetti’s idea that they should all meet at Neil Savage’s office, and then his further idea that he himself shouldn’t be there, since he wasn’t really investigating “the case.” Gregor Demarkian had come to the conclusion that nobody was investigating “the case.” In several important respects, there was no “case” to investigate. There was only a series of not-quite-connected happenings, a lot of conjecture, and a confusion of jurisdiction. Surely a homicide detective working out of the Hardscrabble Road precinct should be investigating the death of Drew Harrigan, and a homicide detective out of whatever precinct it was where the DA’s Office was should be investigating the death of Frank Sheehy. Even assuming cooperation between those two detectives—or, more likely, detective teams—that would be confusion enough, without taking into consideration the fact that Frank Sheehy had almost certainly not died in the place he was found, and the further fact that a man dressed as a homeless person pushing a shopping cart could have walked for miles without being intercepted by anybody. Even the police gave the homeless people a wide berth. It would be easy for all this confusion to sink whatever case there might be altogether, and Gregor thought John Jackman should know that, but he didn’t want to tell him, yet. The lack of any clear jurisdiction was having the oddly salutary effect of leaving him free to work out the problems presented on his own, which was something he’d almost never had the luxury of doing, even at the FBI. There was always somebody around to second-guess you, or to insist that you do this first rather than that. Right now, they were all doing whatever he told them to do, in whatever order he told them to do it. Nobody else was competing for their time.

  It was Marbury and Giametti who would be coming to Neil Savage’s office. Rob Benedetti had told him about it when he called last night to run the details of the ME’s report.

  “Arsenic, again,” he’d said. “I know we suspected it, but it’s kind of disappointing. If it’s another case of filling a bunch of pill capsules with the stuff, it’s going to be impossible to trace to anybody in particular.”

  “Did Frank Sheehy take pills?”

  “I don’t know,” Rob said. “I had one of the uniforms up here go over and talk to that woman again, that Marla Hildebrande, and she didn’t seem to think so, but she was an employee. She could have not known.”

  “The impression I got was that she was very close to Sheehy,” Gregor said, “but that doesn’t matter, because it almost surely won’t be another case of putting the arsenic in pill capsules. When you do that, you have to be prepared to wait. Unless you doctor every single pill, you’ve got to assume it could be a week or more before your victim is actually dead, and I’m pretty sure nobody could wait that long to get rid of Frank Sheehy.”

  “So how would he deliver the arsenic?”

  “In a cup of coffee,” Gregor said. “In a drink. Anything sweet would be all right. After that, all we need is somebody who would not be seen as out of place handing Frank Sheehy a drink—no, beyond that. Somebody who wouldn’t seem out of place talking to Frank Sheehy in the first place. Somebody Frank Sheehy talked to often enough so that nobody would take much notice of the fact when he was around.”

  “That sounds like it has to be Marla Hildebrande herself,” Rob Benedetti said.

  Gregor got out of the cab in front of a magnificent town house with a double wide front facade and steps that curved out to the left and right as if they belonged in a ballroom instead of on a city street. Gregor kept forgetting that in Philadelphia, unlike Washington, Really Important Law Firms didn’t take up several floors of a high-rise building, the more modern the better. He went up the steps and rang the front door bell. The front door was not open to the public. Nothing else took up space in this building but the firm. A woman came to the door and let him in, and he found himself in the wide front lobby of what could have been a private club. Marbury and Giametti were already there, in uniform, looking something worse than out of place. The redheaded woman who had admitted Gregor was paying no attention to them. She did pay attention to Gregor Demarkian, but just.

  “Mr. Savage will be out in a moment,” she said. Then she nodded toward the little cluster of chairs and couches near the front windows, where Marbury and Giametti already were.

  “I keep expecting Katharine Hepburn to come down the stairs and talk about calla lilies,” Marbury said.

  Gregor took in the rugs—Persian, and real—and the porcelain. The paintings were all portraits of men who looked at once too prosperous and too smug to also look intelligent.

  Another woman came out, this one small and neat and middle-aged. “Mr. Demarkian?” she said. “Come with me, please. Mr. Savage can see you now.”

  Marbury and Giametti rose when Gregor did, and followed the middle-aged woman when Gregor did, but neither the middle-aged woman nor the redhead at the front desk paid any attention. Maybe, Gregor thought, this is how they meant it to be. They would deal with the fact that the police were in the building by pretending that the police weren’t in the building, and the police would help along the delusion by never talking directly to anybody in the firm. The hallway was a masterpiece of masculine interior decorating. The paneling went halfway up the walls and was topped with a flat plaster wall papered in dark green. The runner carpet was dark green, too, but narrow enough to show the hardwood underneath, the same hardwood that had been used on the walls. There were more pictures, one after the other, in a long line. There had to be a hundred years of partners, or more.

  The small, middle-aged woman opened a door and waved Gregor inside. “He’ll be right in,” she said, and then disappeared.

  Gregor, Marbury, and Giametti found themselves in a long conference room, with another Persian rug, another four half-walls of paneling, and another cluster of partners’ portraits.

  “I think everybody who ever worked for this firm had a burr up his ass,” Giametti said.

  The door opened, and a man Gregor presumed to be Neil Elliot Savage came in. He was tall and thin and “patrician,” in the way newspapers meant that word. In other words, he seemed arrogant. He had nothing with him, not so much as a folder. His suit was expensive but not new.

  “Mr. Demarkian,” he said, holding out his hand. Unlike the receptionist and the middle-aged woman, he didn’t behave as if Marbury and Giametti didn’t exist, only as if they almost didn�
��t. “Gentlemen,” he said to them, turning his head to one side. When Gregor sat down, Neil Savage sat down as well. He didn’t wait for the uniformed officers.

  “Well,” he said, laying out his long fingers on the table in front of him, “I’m not really sure what information we can give you. Even though Mr. Harrigan is dead, considerations of confidentiality restrict what I can tell you about his affairs, unless I’m ordered to do so by a court, and the courts are restricted in what they can order me to do.”

  “Did you know the man who just died, Frank Sheehy?” Gregor asked.

  “Of course I did. Mr. Sheehy owned the company that syndicated Mr. Harrigan’s radio show. Of course, Mr. Harrigan had an agent to negotiate contracts and that kind of thing, but we in this office looked over everything Mr. Harrigan signed, one more time, so to speak, and just in case. It’s a good policy.”

  “I’m sure it is. Will there still be contracts to look over, now that Mr. Harrigan and Mr. Sheehy are both dead?”

  “Of course there will be,” Neil Savage said. “There’s the matter of the corporation, for instance, which owns all of Mr. Harrigan’s copyrights and which handles material under his name. He’s got a publisher for his books, but he was very popular on the lecture circuit, and every lecture he gave was tape-recorded and reproduced for sale on his Web site. Those tapes will go on selling, and so will the books. And the corporation itself will not necessarily disband. It will depend on how the fans respond to the fact that he’s dead.”

  “Do you think they’ll respond well?” Gregor asked.

  Neil Savage gave an elaborate shrug. “I’ve got no idea what they’ll do. Mr. Harrigan was not a typical client for this firm. Most of our clients are either individuals whose families have been with us for generations, or the businesses those families engage in. Of course, there are some exceptions. No firm could survive in this day and age without making some concessions to modernity, and we do. But Mr. Harrigan was our only media celebrity.”

  “How did he happen to come to this firm for representation?”

  “He was recommended by a longtime client.”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Savage, but you must admit—I’ve seen something of what Drew Harrigan did, and what he was like. And I’ve talked with his wife at length. Somehow, they don’t seem the sort of people to have friends of the kind that would be longtime clients in this place.”

  Neil Savage hesitated. “One of our longtime clients,” he said, “is the Philadelphia Republican Party. They’ve got a state firm in Harrisburg, of course, but Philadelphia is a large political operation on its own, and it has legal issues of its own.”

  “Do you also handle the Democratic Party?”

  “No.”

  “As a matter of conviction?”

  “As a matter of tradition,” Neil Savage said. “My grandfather was lieutenant governor here, a long time ago. My great-great-grandfather was mayor of Philadelphia in the days when people like us could be elected mayor of Philadelphia.”

  “Did you know that Drew Harrigan was addicted to prescription painkillers?”

  “Everybody knew it,” Neil Savage said. “Not the fans, of course, but everybody who came in contact with him on a daily basis. It was hard to miss. I think even Ellen knew, although she’s something of a…she looks on the bright side of things.”

  “You believe Mr. Sheehy knew?”

  “Of course. In fact, I know he did. We talked about it on several occasions. It was obvious a year ago that something was going to happen eventually if we couldn’t get Mr. Harrigan to enter treatment voluntarily, and, of course, eventually something did.”

  “What about the names on Ellen Harrigan’s list of suspects? Did you know them?”

  “I knew the names, yes. I didn’t necessarily know the people.”

  “Why did you know the names?”

  “Because,” Neil Savage said, “they were mostly the names of people we had reason to believe might file a lawsuit against Drew Harrigan or The Drew Harrigan Show. Miss Hildebrande’s name seemed to have been thrown in to make the list longer, but the rest were people Drew Harrigan had commented on on the air. He was not a temperate man.”

  “No, he wasn’t,” Gregor agreed. “Did any of them in fact have a lawsuit pending?”

  “No,” Neil Savage said. “But there have been lawsuits in the past. That’s chiefly the work we did for Mr. Harrigan, dealing with the lawsuits. There were a lot of them.”

  “Did that bother Mr. Sheehy? Did he get sued when Drew Harrigan did?”

  “Most of the time, no,” Neil Savage said. “People who sue, well, they tend not to get very good representation. Of course, Mr. Harrigan made comments about public figures, and if they’d decided to sue they would have had very good representation indeed, but they wouldn’t. It’s nearly impossible for a public figure to sue a media company for libel or slander and win. The courts err far too much on the freedom of the press side of the issue. But other people, professors at the University of Pennsylvania, for instance, who were among Drew’s favorite targets, those people do sometimes decide to sue. And they can neither afford, nor do they know how to find, representation that would be of any use to them.”

  “Do you know who was getting the extra prescription drugs for Drew Harrigan?”

  “According to Mr. Harrigan, it was a homeless man who did occasional work for him, named Sherman Markey.”

  “According to everybody I’ve talked to,” Gregor said, “it wouldn’t have been possible for Sherman Markey to have done any such thing. For one thing, he looked the part of a homeless person far too well for druggists to hand pills to him on a regular basis.”

  Neil Savage shrugged. “According to Drew, that was who it was. I’ve got no reason to disbelieve him.”

  “Have you met Sherman Markey?”

  “I’ve seen him,” Neil Savage said. “He was in court on a couple of occasions because of the lawsuit he filed for defamation. That the Justice Project filed for him. He was in court.”

  “Do you know where Sherman Markey is now?”

  Neil Savage looked honestly surprised. “Of course I don’t. I wish I did. The disappearing act has caused no end of trouble. Not that I’m surprised, mind you. Taking off instead of taking responsibility is the kind of thing a man like that specializes in.”

  “A man like what?”

  “A homeless person,” Neil Savage said. “An alcoholic. A drug addict, presumably. You don’t end up on the streets like that unless you lack organization, determination, and pride. Don’t you think?”

  2

  The worst thing about not having a settled status—aside from the very good possibility that he was never going to get paid—was the fact that he had no settled place to work out of. The sensible thing would have been to use his own apartment on Cavanaugh Street. If he was going to behave like the Armenian-American Hercule Poirot, he might as well have the comforts of a Hercule Poirot, and at the moment luxury railway carriages were not available in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Unfortunately, Cavanaugh Street was convenient to nothing in this case, and there was no Hastings to sit beside him and fumble about badly among his ideas. He found himself sitting in the back of a police car again, wondering why it was strictly necessary for them to have this cagey-thing between the front and back seats, and making notes in a little bound book with stiff covers that Tommy Donahue had given him for Christmas. State police cars didn’t have it, or at least the one he’d last ridden in hadn’t. If it had, he’d have noticed. The little bound book looked precious, but it had the advantage of those stiff covers, half an inch thick, make of cardboard but very sturdy.

  He had just started to make a list of questions when his cell phone went off, and the radio in the front seat went off as well.

  “Mr. Demarkian?” a female voice said. “Mr. Benedetti needs to see you and Officers Marbury and Giametti as soon as possible. Do you think you could tell them so?”

  Marbury turned around in the front seat and said
, “That was for us. They want us to go to Benedetti’s office as soon as possible. You have any reason you can’t?”

  Gregor thanked the woman on the phone and shut off. Then he went back to his list. It was a simple list, but he thought it pretty much covered everything he wanted to know to wrap this all up. What he wanted to know was a lot more than he, or Benedetti, needed to know. In real life police cases, a lot of questions went unanswered. There were always side issues and subplots it made no point to pursue. Fortunately, he was not a professional law enforcement person any longer. Right now, he didn’t even know if he was a professional consultant to law enforcement persons.

  He shied away from examining his use of the word “persons” and wrote: Where is Sherman Markey?

  He was fairly sure he knew who had gotten him out of the way. There was only one person, or group of people, who actually needed him out of the way. Gregor would bet on the single person and not the group, though. Groups leaked like sieves. He picked up his pen again and wrote: Why was Alison Standish falsely accused of political bias?

  Gregor was not naive about the politics of Ivy League universities, and especially not of the Ivy League university he had himself graduated from. It was within the realm of possibility that there really was a disgruntled former student and that Dr. Standish had been politically biased when she dealt with him, but Gregor doubted it. It didn’t feel that way. She didn’t present herself as somebody who would discriminate against a student because of political views that arguably had nothing at all to do with the subject matter of the course at hand, or as somebody who cared much about politics in any sense.