Hardscrabble Road

by Jane Haddam

  Harvard probably wouldn’t have been much better, he thought, climbing out of the police car and going up the steps to the building he knew the Math Department was in. Still. He’d checked the map, and the Math Department was still in this building. He’d thought it was only the humanities that were stalled physically and institutionally. He wondered if Penn’s Math Department was a good one, or a filler to stuff the vacant spaces between Physics and Chemistry. There was Jig Tyler, but you could never tell.

  Marbury and Giametti didn’t want to come in. Penn, it seemed, was deliberately intimidating to local law enforcement.

  “It’s not that they don’t cooperate when they need to,” Marbury said. “If they did that, we could nail them. It’s that you don’t want to make a mistake with one of their people.”

  “You especially don’t want to make a mistake with one of their people like Jig Tyler,” Giametti said.

  Gregor could actually see the point. He left them his cell phone—Rob Benedetti had called him at least six times since he’d been to see Marla Hildebrande, and he hadn’t done anything but ride across town in a patrol car—and went in, through the front doors, and up the stairs. It was not like last night, with Alison Standish. The building was full of people. The students looked the way they had always looked, except that there were more “different” faces among them than there had been in his day. There were not, however, as many “different” faces as the brochures and Web site made it appear. These days, all recruiting materials from the Ivy League looked as if they were advertisements for the Model UN.

  He knew where Jig Tyler’s office was because he had looked it up on Penn’s Web site before coming in to see Rob Benedetti this morning. Tibor should get credit for another bit of work on the case, because without him Gregor couldn’t find anything on the Internet. Tibor had gotten him Jig Tyler’s teaching and office hour schedule, too. He just wished he’d been able to think of a way to get Dr. Tyler out of this building and down to a precinct station, where he wouldn’t feel as if he were about to be stopped and questioned at any moment. Gregor had spent his entire time at Penn waiting for somebody—a security guard, maybe—to tell him he didn’t belong there and had to go home.

  Jig Tyler was sitting behind his desk behind piles of books, reading down through a page of text with his finger following the lines. Gregor wondered if he always did that when he read, or if he was only doing it now because he knew Gregor was standing in the doorway. You had to wonder what that was like, to have that kind of mind, to be able to do the things Jig Tyler was able to do. Maybe it was like nothing. Maybe he experienced it as normal.

  Gregor cleared his throat. He felt silly doing it. They were not only playacting with each other, they were playacting badly. “You can put the book down,” he said. “You know I’m here. You had to know I was coming.”

  Jig sat back. He had the kind of tall ranginess basketball players had, but Gregor didn’t remember hearing that he’d ever played basketball. He took his wire-rim glasses off and put them down on the book. “I take it the nun called you,” he said.

  “She came to talk to us, yes,” Gregor said. “You had to know she was going to do that.”

  “Oh, yes. Do I get any points for not taking the day off and going to New York?”

  “Not really. You’re smart enough to know that wouldn’t work.”

  “You’d be astonished to know what kinds of stupidity smart people can get themselves into,” Jig said. “Or maybe you wouldn’t. You graduated from Penn. I looked you up.”

  “And?”

  “Very impressive. I’d say very impressive especially considering your background, but I know better than that, too. Those were the days before affirmative action and diversity goals, and you probably wouldn’t have qualified for either anyway. So, very impressive. I liked the dual major in history and philosophy. I liked the fact that you didn’t major in literature.”

  “You don’t like literature?”

  “I like it fine. I don’t like literature professors.”

  “You have to know by now that you delivered the poison to Drew Harrigan,” Gregor said.

  Jig rubbed the sides of his face with the palms of his hands and then picked up his glasses and put them on again. “Yes, of course I know. I knew as soon as they found the body. I suspected before that. I just wasn’t sure he was dead. Do you know that I didn’t deliver the poison intentionally?”

  “Do you mean that you didn’t think you were delivering poison?” Gregor said. “Oh, yes. You had absolutely no reason to kill Drew Harrigan. In fact, you had a few decent reasons to want him to stay alive. What was it you thought you were doing?”

  “Saving the left from itself,” Jig Tyler said. “The older I get, the more I think the distinctions are wrong. Left and right. Conservative and liberal. It’s not that. It’s libertarian and authoritarian. It’s people who want freedom and people who want control. Never mind. I’m not making any sense. It was his idea, by the way, all the cloak-and-dagger stuff. Pretending to be homeless men and meeting at that monastery. His sister is the Mother Superior.”

  “I know. Didn’t it occur to you to tell anybody about all of this? Come to me, if to nobody else, if you didn’t want any exposure?”

  “But there’s going to be exposure, isn’t there?” Jig said. “There’s going to be no way around it. I’m going to be the only person who is able to put our man in the right place and the right time.”

  “You could have gotten yourself killed,” Gregor said. “He’s killed two people alredy. If you’ve got a cold capsule anywhere in this office or at your house, anywhere he could get to it, I wouldn’t bet on your surviving a week.”

  “I’ve been very careful to take individually wrapped caplets. I hate that word. Caplets. Why is it that multinational corporations have to invent new words every time they produce a not all that new product?”

  “Are you the one who tried to buy that property?”

  “No,” Jig said. “He did. Drew blackmailed him into it, essentially. Drew pointed out, entirely legitimately, that he wouldn’t be the only one who went to jail on prescription drug charges, if Drew wanted to start talking. And Drew was getting, ah, a little nuts. By the time I saw him that last time, at the monastery, he was damn close to raving. He could have passed for one of the regular schizophrenics.”

  “What was he raving about?”

  “The usual paranoid bullshit,” Jig said. “He was being persecuted. It was all politics. The Clintons were out to get him—”

  “—The Clintons?”

  “Yes, well,” Jig said. “Drew was still very obsessed with the Clintons. They’re supposed to be leading a worldwide conspiracy of Communists and socialists to do, I don’t know what. He got lucky with the judge, or Neil Savage got smart. Bruce Williamson would set bail for a man who gunned down a hundred babies and old ladies in front of Independence Hall at high noon if the man was a celebrity. Still, he was out and he was in hiding. He couldn’t go any of his usual places. He was going to end up in court no matter what else happened, and that drove him nuts. And then there was Sherman Markey, a stooge, in Drew’s words, who only existed as a scheme to deprive him of his property. Deprive Drew of his property. If you see what I mean.”

  “So he blackmailed our friend into buying the property and holding it until his legal troubles were over and he could get it back,” Gregor said, “and he did it through Markwell Ballard because there was no way that Markwell Ballard would release any information about the deal to anybody, even the authorities. Not bad.”

  “Not bad that Markwell Ballard was available,” Jig said. “Not everybody can get an account there, and they don’t do retail checking. Drew couldn’t get an account there.”

  “Whose idea was it for you to bring the pills?”

  “Drew’s, I think,” Jig said. “I didn’t know that our friend was the one who was getting him the pills until I got a call asking me to take the little package with me when I went out to Hardscrabb
le Road. I don’t approve of prescriptions, did you know that? I think we should just leave everything out over the counter and let people go to hell in their own handbaskets. So I took the little envelope out there.”

  “Did you see him die?”

  “No. I didn’t even see him take the pills. I gave the package, we talked for a while—”

  “—About what?”

  “About Penn,” Jig said. “I think the meeting might have been a ruse to get me to deliver the drugs, but I couldn’t know that. I went because I always went when he asked me to. I thought he’d be back, back on the air, back at the same old stand. And I needed him.”

  “You gave him the hat you were wearing.”

  “Right. I’d got it from our friend, believe it or not. I take it he got it from Sherman Markey.”

  “I think so,” Gregor said.

  “If he knows where Sherman Markey is, Sherman Markey is dead,” Jig said.

  “He doesn’t know where Sherman Markey is,” Gregor said. “I know who does, but I’m not all that interested in screaming at somebody just yet. What about Frank Sheehy? He knew about the drugs?”

  “I don’t know. But I’ll tell you what he did know about. He knew about Ellen Harrigan’s suspects list.”

  “Did he?”

  “Yes,” Jig said. “I talked to him, to Sheehy, maybe ten hours before I saw his picture on the news. I ran into him downtown and started railing at him, because I thought he’d written it. I knew she hadn’t. It was the wrong list. She’d have thought of other names. And he stopped me in the middle of ranting and told me that it hadn’t been his idea, but it was a good one nevertheless, because it diverted suspicion from the people who were on it. Nobody took Ellen seriously. The cops wouldn’t take Ellen seriously, either.”

  “The idea was to divert suspicion to possible suspects whose names weren’t on the list?”

  “I think so.”

  “That almost worked,” Gregor said. “But only almost. He should never have given me the second list, the one with the names of the people who had accounts at Markwell Ballard. It drew attention to himself, and to the fact that he was the one person on Ellen Harrigan’s list nobody would have thought to put there. He wasn’t one of the people Drew Harrigan went after. Harrigan went after Philadelphia Sleeps, but not Ray Dean Ballard personally. Are we going to have to subpoena you or are you going to come down and make a statement voluntarily?”

  “Oh, I’ll make a statement voluntarily,” Jig said. “There’s no reason not to, is there? No matter what anybody thinks, I’m pretty safe here. I could get away with things nobody else on any other campus could. Two Nobels will do that for you.”

  “That isn’t a small thing, two Nobels.”

  “I didn’t say it was,” Jig Tyler said. “And I worked very hard to get them. Do you know what makes me the most angry about all of this? Good old Ray Dean Ballard never worked very hard at anything, except maybe pretending he wasn’t who he was.”

  “Good old Ray Dean Ballard is likely to have a date with a lethal injection,” Gregor said. “Except I think they’ll probably call him Aldous on the execution order.”

  3

  They were on their way to Rob Benedetti’s office with Jig Tyler in the car—and pleased beyond belief to be riding in the back of a patrol car— when Gregor’s always sketchy sense of direction kicked in and he realized they were only a few blocks from the offices of the Justice Project. He told Marbury and Giametti that he wanted to stop, and they turned in and out of a few narrow streets until they got to a place where they could double-park right in front of the Justice Project’s doors. They did not have any intention of parking for real and getting out. It wasn’t the kind of neighborhood where you would feel safe parking a police car.

  Gregor waited until they let him out and then went up to the front door and rang. The building was old beyond telling, and badly kept up. There was garbage on the sidewalk, untouched and unnoticed by the people who passed. A good number of the people who passed were homeless men and women. They were moving with purpose. Gregor didn’t know if they had somewhere to go, or had become good at this particular illusion.

  A young woman let Gregor in, took his name, and called back for Kate Daniel. Gregor found himself wondering when they’d gotten to the point where buildings with institutions and businesses in them felt the need to keep their front doors locked and on a buzzer as a protection from… what? The pictures on the walls here were nowhere near as well-done or as oppressively expensive as the ones in the lobby at Neil Savage’s offices, but they were equally didactic. Everybody wanted to teach everybody else something.

  The woman who had let him in put down the phone and said, “Ms. Daniel isn’t available at the moment. Would you like to make an appointment?”

  “No.” Gregor sighed. He could always bring in Marbury and Giametti and have them arrest her, but it would be showing off. “Tell her for me,” he said, “that if she doesn’t produce Sherman Markey from wherever she’s got him stashed in the next three hours, I’m going to send those two police officers in the car out there to arrest her for obstruction of justice. Oh, and tell her I said I like her work.”

  EPILOGUE

  Mon, February 16

  High 21F, Low 7F

  The God that holds you over the pit of Hell, much as one holds a spider over the flame, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked.

  —JONATHAN EDWARDS

  Gravity is a habit that is hard to shake off.

  —TERRY PRATCHETT

  1

  On the morning that the office of the Philadelphia District Attorney announced the arrest of Aldous Raymond Ballard for the murders of Andrew Mark Harrigan and Francis Xavier Sheehy, the Justice Project threw a press conference for Sherman Markey. Gregor Demarkian wouldn’t have been invited to the press conference under the best of circumstances, and these weren’t the best of circumstances. For one thing, the mayor was refusing to admit that Gregor Demarkian had been a part of the case at all. There were no contracts, no notes, no official references of any kind. If the press insisted on putting Gregor at this interview with that suspect or in that back alley where a body was discovered, that was the press’s problem, not the mayor’s, and as far as the mayor was concerned, it was all hype and dazzle. It was the Philadelphia Police who had solved the mystery of the murder of Drew Harrigan, under the able direction of Commissioner of Police John Jackman—and, in the process, arrested the son of one of the most influential men on the planet, and one of the largest contributors to Philadelphia political parties. The mayor of Philadelphia might be, as John Jackman suggested, an incompetent idiot at being mayor, but he was not an incompetent idiot at being a politician.

  For another thing, even Gregor wasn’t sure what he could claim to have done in this case. It wasn’t that he didn’t know what it was he had done. It was that he usually had an agreement with the police department who hired him as a consultant. That way everybody knew up front who was going to get credit for what, and Gregor didn’t mind letting the police have it all. Police detectives were like any other professionals. They talked among themselves, and word got around. Gregor always had more requests for his time than he had time to give.

  For a third thing, he wasn’t a reporter, didn’t want to be a reporter, and couldn’t understand how anybody ever managed to stay in journalism more than a week without getting either bored to tears or thoroughly disgusted with himself. He had no idea what it was the reporters thought they were going to get out of Sherman Markey, but he wished them well. He just hoped Rob Benedetti wasn’t planning on calling Markey in as a witness. Gregor still hadn’t met the man, but he thought that Markey was likely to be as good a witness as he was a plaintiff in a lawsuit. Benedetti would get better testimony out of a hamster.

  The cab pulled up to the front of Our Lady of Mount Carmel Monastery, and Gregor reached into his pocket for his wallet. When he’d come out here in police cars, he hadn’t really paid attention to the neighborhood. N
ow that he did, he saw that it was run-down and shabby, but not as remote as he had assumed at first, merely because it was all the way out at the edge of the city. He got out and paid the cabdriver. He looked up and down the street and saw small grocery stores, small shoe stores, small “dollar stores” that promised that everything inside cost ninety-nine cents. There was also a McDonald’s, two blocks down, lit up and crowded. Gregor did not see any homeless people. He took the time to look, hard, to make sure he wasn’t missing them. Hardscrabble Road was clear.

  He went up to the monastery’s front door, rang the bell, and waited. The door opened in less than a second, and Sister Beata let him in.

  “I’ve got the television out here,” she said as she closed up behind him. “It’s the only television in the place, and we never see it except when something awful happens, but I’ve got it today. I convinced Reverend Mother that somebody from the house had to hear Sherman Markey’s press conference, and she gave right in. I was a little surprised, really. Maybe she just wants to know what he’s going to say.”

  “Has he said anything?” Gregor asked.

  “Not really. He’s such a confused old man. I keep asking myself if I’d have recognized him if he’d ever come to this house and I’d seen him, but I don’t really know. I keep trying to console myself by saying that I recognized Jig Tyler, but that isn’t the same thing, is it? Jig Tyler is the sort of person you notice. He radiates—something.”

  “Well,” Gregor said, “an IQ over two hundred, a driving ambition to beat Napoleon’s, and a Messianic complex that should only be brought out of the closet at Easter would tend to make a man radiate—something.”

  Beata smiled. The little receiving room had a couch in it for visitors. She waved Demarkian to it and turned the television set so that he could see. “He’s a very nice man, Dr. Tyler,” she said. “He’s come out to see me a couple of times since all this happened. He brought us a cake. I told him I never understood why people always seemed to be trying to make nuns fat. The next time he came, he brought us a vegetable tart. It was very good. He sits in here some nights and we talk about political economy and Carmelite spirituality.”