Hardscrabble Road

by Jane Haddam

  “I’m warning you, Sister. It’s very hard to get a man to believe in God when he already thinks he is God.”

  “I don’t think Dr. Tyler thinks he’s God,” Sister Beata said. “I think he thinks he sees more clearly than the rest of us. I’ve been trying to convince him he’s wrong.”

  There was a sudden loud sound on the television, and they both turned to look at it. There was nothing to see. A grizzled, confused-looking old man was standing at the podium next to Kate Daniel, who had a hand on his shoulder. Chickie George was standing in the background, looking grim. A reporter asked a question, and Sherman Markey mumbled through an answer that had nothing to do with what he’d been asked.

  “Why are they putting him through this?” Beata asked. “It’s so obvious he’s in no shape at all to answer questions. I wonder if he even knows where he is. He looks like he’s in pain.”

  “He’s in need of a drink,” Gregor said. “And they’re doing it to protect him, in case the police decide to name him as an accomplice. It’s going to be pretty hard to do that and have it go over with the public after this performance.”

  “But that would have been true all along, wouldn’t it?” Beata asked. “Why didn’t the Justice Project produce him weeks ago? Anybody who looked at him had to see he wasn’t capable of doing what he’d been accused of doing. Even with clean clothes and a bath and a haircut and shave and everything else they gave him so that he could appear up there, he doesn’t look capable of getting prescription drugs for anybody, never mind himself. I mean, if I were a doctor, and he showed up at my door asking for OxyContin, I’d think he was an addict and boot him out into the street.”

  “I agree,” Gregor said. “But they did suspect him. Police investigations are strange that way. And my guess is that the Justice Project didn’t produce him because Kate Daniel didn’t want it to. Like I said, she was protecting him. When the time came for the suit to go forward in court, or if the case had gone forward and he was needed in criminal court, she would have produced him. She just wanted him out of the limelight and away from anywhere he could be asked questions, because she could never be sure what he was going to say. Look at him. Get him addled enough and he might confess to the murder of Jimmy Hoffa.”

  “It made him look guilty of murder, though,” Beata said. “I’m not sure that was much better.”

  “If he’d ever been thought guilty of murder by the police, he was dropped from the suspect list after I saw Ray Dean Ballard pushing Frank Sheehy’s body into that alley. And yes, I know I didn’t know it was Ballard and I didn’t know it was a body at the time. But I did know that that man was tall and thin, and Sherman Markey is neither.”

  “If you’d really paid attention to him, would you have known it was Ray Dean Ballard?”

  “No,” Gregor said. “I was hypersensitive to looking at the time, but he was too far away from me. The fact that I got the height and weight ratio even within the ballpark was a miracle of concentration as it was, and I was only concentrating because you and other people had pointed out to me how seldom we actually look at the homeless.”

  “And you were feeling guilty?”

  “Yes,” Gregor said. “You’d made me feel guilty, Sister, you and, oddly enough, Ray Dean Ballard had.”

  “He must care about the homeless,” Beata said. “He worked at Philadelphia Sleeps. He didn’t have to. He could have done anything.”

  “I know,” Gregor said. “I suppose he must have cared about the homeless. I don’t know how to determine something like that. I do know that he truly, truly hated Drew Harrigan and all the Drew Harrigans in the world, what he thought of as the Clone Army. Rush Limbaugh. Ann Coulter. So, when he realized that Harrigan was addicted to prescription drugs—”

  “—Yes, but how did he realize that?” Beata said. “How could he know that?”

  “You forget that they’d met socially,” Gregor said. “At fund-raisers, as he put it to me, one of the times he talked to me. There were charity events to raise money for Philadelphia Sleeps, and Drew was invited. But it was more than that. There were charity events to raise money for all kinds of things, soup kitchens, children’s nutrition, and Ray Dean Ballard was invited because he ran Philadelphia Sleeps and Drew Harrigan was invited because he was a prominent Philadelphian with a lot of money.”

  “Somehow, I can’t see Drew Harrigan giving a lot of money to the homeless.”

  “I don’t know that he did,” Gregor said, “but he was like a lot of men in his position, up from the bottom or near bottom. Whether he liked giving money to the homeless or not, he liked meeting important people. And with some kinds of important people, the only way a man like Drew Harrigan would get a chance to meet them would be at a charity event. Most of old-line Philadelphia, even most of old-line Republican Philadelphia, thought he was a buffoon.”

  “He was, wasn’t he? Just a little. I read his book. So did Reverend Mother. She said it wasn’t the sort of thing you wanted to read aloud in the refectory.”

  “I think it’s a little lightweight for Our Lady of Mount Carmel,” Gregor said. “Anyway, they met at charity functions, and Ray Dean figured out that Drew Harrigan was hooked pretty easily. It wasn’t exactly a secret in the first place. My guess is that Sheehy may have been getting Harrigan the pills at least on and off for a while before Ray Dean stepped in. I say I guess because Ray Dean’s got better lawyers than the Vatican, and I’m not expecting him to be admitting to anything anytime soon. But anyway, Ray Dean took over the task of getting Drew his pills.”

  “But why? Why would he want to?”

  “Power,” Gregor said. “Ray Dean may like working in the nonprofit sector, he may like helping people, but he also likes power. Most people do. Here was this man he despised, who spent more time than was necessary excoriating Philadelphia Sleeps as a ‘Communist’ organization or a ‘socialist’ organization or whatever it was that week, and it turns out that he’s got a deep dark secret that you could hold over his head. I think Ray Dean thought he was going to be able to control the situation, and control Drew Harrigan.”

  “And he couldn’t.”

  “Hell,” Gregor said, and then blushed, for the first time in twenty-five years. “I’m sorry, Sister.”

  “It’s really all right, Mr. Demarkian. I heard worse in district court.”

  “Yes. At any rate. Ray Dean couldn’t control Drew Harrigan because Drew Harrigan couldn’t control Drew Harrigan. You know, a political writer named Al Franken wrote a book called Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot, and Limbaugh went out and lost weight. Limbaugh was picked up for illegally buying prescription drugs, and he really went into rehab and got clean. But Drew Harrigan was a mess. When people called him fat, he ate more. When he saw himself getting addicted to OxyContin, he took more. He was out of control in his life. He was out of control on the air. He was out of control in every possible way, and one day the wrong cops stopped him.”

  “There were right cops?”

  “Oh, yes,” Gregor said, “and if John Jackman gets elected mayor, we’re going to find out which ones. They’ve already started looking into it. Harrigan was stopped dozens of times for ‘driving erratically,’ given a Breathalyzer test, and sent home. Rob Benedetti’s office has demanded copies of the records, and he’ll get them. But it’s more than that. Marla Hildebrande knew about it.”

  “Marla Hildebrande is—?”

  “Frank Sheehy’s program manager. Sheehy had made oblique references to the fact that they were having to keep the cops sweet, given Harrigan’s behavior.”

  “But that’s Frank Sheehy. That’s not Ray Dean Ballard.”

  “No, but it doesn’t have to be,” Gregor said. “It only matters that the cops were in on the game, except these two cops, Marbury and Giametti, were not. So, when they found Drew Harrigan in a car full of pills, they arrested him and impounded the pills. And once that had happened, once it was out in the open, there was no way to just fix it and make it go away. Neil Savage tr
ied, and he’s very good. He’s probably one of the two or three best attorneys in Philadelphia. But if celebrity means you’re not likely to get much of a sentence for what you do, it also means you’re not likely to get let go once you get caught. There’s too much publicity. No police department, no district attorney, wants to get tagged with the charge that he let you off just because you were famous.”

  “So Drew Harrigan got arrested, and he got arraigned,” Beata said.

  “And then that judge let him go into rehab instead of sending him to jail.”

  “Bruce Williamson,” Gregor said. “Yes, well. Bruce is famous. Famous for loving famous people, I mean. Yes, he let Drew go into rehab without the usual controls on that, and of course Drew had no intention of going into rehab. He had no intention of doing anything about his drug habit instead of keeping it stoked. So he just kept out of sight. He had sixty days for his lawyers to work something out so that he didn’t have to go to jail.”

  “Where was he?”

  Gregor shrugged. “Not in homeless shelters, I can assure you. Neil Savage has a vacation house up in the Catskills. He was supposed to be there. Then he found out he couldn’t get the pills he wanted, and he called Ray Dean Ballard to come out to see him. Which Ray Dean wasn’t about to do, and I don’t blame him. That’s when Harrigan started threatening him. Because the power hold goes both ways. Ray Dean had power over Harrigan because Harrigan needed the drugs, but Harrigan had power over Ray Dean because he could finger Ray Dean as his supplier. So, Harrigan made a few threats, and Ray Dean agreed to get him the pills if he could get himself into the city.”

  “And here,” Beata said.

  “No,” Gregor said. “Not the first time. Remember, Harrigan had been out of the way for weeks by the time January twenty-seventh rolled around, and a lot happened in that time. For one thing, Harrigan needed to protect his property. Drug cases are notorious for costing people everything they own. So there was this monastery, with his own sister at the helm, but that wouldn’t work by itself, because he didn’t really want to give up the property. So there was Ray Dean Ballard, with lots of money and lots to lose, and a perfect intermediary in the shape of the Markwell Ballard Bank.”

  “But that didn’t work,” Beata said, “because the Justice Project sued Harrigan for defamation on behalf of Sherman Markey.”

  “Right,” Gregor said. “The judge they got for that one wasn’t Bruce Williamson, and he liened everything Harrigan owned. I think that at that point, Harrigan probably went completely over the edge. He wasn’t a man who handled stress well. You can see that in his book and if you listen to enough of his radio programs. So he wanted more pills to calm him down, and Ray Dean decided to give them to him.”

  “And that’s when he came here,” Beata said.

  “Actually, he’d been coming here for weeks,” Gregor said. “From the start of the winter, long before he got arrested. Jig Tyler was feeding him information about the University of Pennsylvania to use on the air, and Tyler didn’t want to get caught talking to Harrigan. So Harrigan cooked up what he thought was the perfect cloak-and-dagger role-playing game. They’d been coming here since the monastery opened the barn to the homeless at the beginning of the winter. They’d get dressed up in old clothes, stand in line, go into the barn, talk for a while, and then both leave separately. Nobody was likely to notice them. This isn’t a secure facility, the way some of the regular homeless shelters are downtown. This is an emergency accommodation because the temperatures have been so low. There was no staff to speak of. The men weren’t checked in and out.”

  “Reverend Mother has had a fit at the Cardinal, if you want to know,” Beata said. “It’s not that we mind opening the barn to the homeless, but she always did think it was done in haste and without proper preparation.”

  “If I were Reverend Mother, I’d insist on hiring at least one professional security guard,” Gregor said. “Anyway, Harrigan wanted more pills, and Ray Dean didn’t want to risk another obvious run into the city with the chance that they’d be caught together. So Harrigan suggested giving the pills to Jig Tyler and getting Jig Tyler out here for a meeting, and to Dr. Tyler the whole thing sounded perfectly plausible. He didn’t know he was carrying pills full of arsenic. He didn’t know he was carrying pills at all when Ray Dean Ballard gave them to him. If Harrigan hadn’t insisted on swallowing them the first chance he got, Jig Tyler would never have known he was carrying pills at all.”

  “So Dr. Tyler will be able to testify that he got the pills from Ray Dean Ballard,” Beata said. “That’s something.”

  “That’s a lot. If I was Ballard, I’d have gone for Tyler before I’d gone for Sheehy, but I think Ballard thought that he was safe from Tyler because Tyler didn’t want to risk what he has risked. Meaning that Ballard’s lawyers would try to make out that Tyler physically gave Harrigan the poisoned pills, and that meant that Tyler was the one who wanted to and deliberately did kill Harrigan. Sheehy probably looked like a much more pressing danger, since Sheehy knew about the pills and he knew about the cops and he knew about the murder.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I said he knew about the murder,” Gregor said. “I’m not going to be able to prove that to anybody, but he knew about the murder. On the night of January twenty-seventh, Frank Sheehy had a conversation with Marla Hildebrande about finding a talk show to replace Drew Harrigan’s permanently. Marla Hildebrande thinks it was just a matter of being realistic about the prospects for the show if Harrigan went to jail, which he very well could have. I think it was that Sheehy knew he was going to have to replace the show because Harrigan wasn’t going to be alive to go on with it. And that, you know, is the best motive for murder in the world.”

  Beata looked at the television screen. The press conference had gone on far longer than Gregor would have suspected it could have. Sherman Markey was slumped over the microphone in front of him, a vague-looking old man that normal people would pass on the street without noticing, a man with too many bad habits, too much bad history, and no damned luck at all. Kate Daniel looked brisk and confident. Chickie George looked as angry as he had sounded when he’d called Gregor in the middle of the night to apologize for Kate Daniel’s behavior.

  “I’d never have gotten you into this if I’d realized she knew where he was all along,” Chickie had said, and then he’d gone on to rail endlessly about people who thought the end justified the means. “You’d think that’s the first thing they’d learn the problems with in Philosophy 101, or wherever.”

  Beata leaned forward and turned off the television. “I still wouldn’t recognize him if I saw him on the street,” she said. “It’s a terrible thing, isn’t it? We don’t want to look, and they learn to be so self-effacing that nobody takes notice of them. And they manage it. We’re supposed to be self-effacing, you know. The nuns at Carmel. We don’t ever quite seem to manage it.”

  “I think walking around in brown and black robes designed in the Middle Ages is likely to make you stick out on the bus, Sister.”

  Beata laughed. “Most of us never do get on the bus. The nuns in enclosure stay in the house all the time. But when they do go out, to vote, for instance, they wear exclaustration veils. Black net veils that cover their entire faces, more concealing even than a burkha. That’s pretty self-effacing, too.”

  Gregor got up. “With any luck, we’ll be able to find out where Ray Dean Ballard and Frank Sheehy met on the day Sheehy died. I’ve got a terrible feeling it’s going to be in a public restaurant, like a diner, so that Ballard could slip him the arsenic when he wasn’t looking and we’d never be able to find a trace on it; but there’s always the possibility that he was worried about Sheehy collapsing in public and picked a more private place. We’ll see. One way or the other, there’s no way Ballard stays out of prison. He may end up in the death chamber.”

  “I don’t approve of the death chamber,” Beata said. “It always seems to me that there’s enough killing without having the go
vernment create more.”

  “I don’t approve of the death chamber either,” Gregor said, “but only because I’m far too aware of the fact that innocent people end up there, and I don’t think we should go on with it as long as even one innocent person could even possibly be unjustly executed. But morally—morally, I think that there’s not a single thing wrong with putting a man to death if he’s committed deliberate and premeditated murder, and I won’t lose a millisecond’s sleep if Ray Dean Ballard dies.”

  “Well, then,” Beata said. “I’d say I’ll pray for you, but I’m doing that already. I pray for Ray Dean Ballard and Frank Sheehy and Drew Harrigan, too. That’s what we do in this place. We pray for the world.”

  “If you try praying for them individually and by name, Sister, there won’t be enough time in the history of the universe.”

  2

  Back on Cavanaugh Street, Fr. Tibor Kasparian was walking Grace Feinman’s dog. Or rather, he was trying to walk it. He had the dog on a leash, and the dog was jumping around and getting tangled, terribly excited to be out in the world with people and hydrants and trees to sniff. Gregor watched them both as he paid for yet another cab—he felt as if he’d spent the day paying for cabs—and then crossed the street to where they were, halted temporarily as Godiva made a huge fuss over Lida Arkmanian.

  “Tcha, Krekor,” Tibor said. “She’s a very friendly dog. I was taking her to your building to see if Grace is home yet. She is due this afternoon sometime.”

  “She is a very friendly dog,” Lida Arkmanian said, leaning down to rub her under her chin. Godiva sincerely loved this. She showed it by leaping a foot in the air and barking in ecstasy. Lida stood up. “I don’t know how Grace thinks she’s going to keep a dog like this in an apartment. They get big, Labradors do.”