Hardscrabble Road (20 page)

That “true” there. That was going to get him into trouble.

Shelley Balducci was standing in his office door, waiting. She’d been there for quite some time. Ray Dean didn’t think he’d
have much trouble with her if she knew the whole truth about him, but you could never tell. The Shelley Balduccis of this
world were a complete mystery to him.

“I don’t see what you can do,” she was saying. “Chickie went to see Gregor Demarkian. Mr. Demarkian will go to see whoever
he knows on the police department. That should at least get people moving again.”

“Doesn’t it bother you that he could be dead out there, in a morgue someplace, maybe not even in a morgue? Would you like
that to happen to you if you were dead?”

“But it wouldn’t happen to me,” Shelley said sensibly. “I’ve got a huge family. Somebody would be looking for me.”

“We’re looking for Sherman. It’s not doing a lot of good.”

“I know. But the morgue people, they look at Sherman and they can tell right off he’s a homeless person. Forget the clothes.
It doesn’t matter how new the clothes are. Homeless people have new clothes sometimes. They get them from Goodwill.”

“There was the bath, too,” Ray Dean said. “They didn’t just get him new clothes. They got him cleaned up.”

“I know,” Shelley said, “but they couldn’t fix the rest of it. The state of his teeth. The shape his body was in. You could
tell he was a homeless person just by looking at him.”

“And people would know you weren’t just by looking at you?”

“Of course. There’s a difference, don’t you see? I can’t believe you don’t think there’s a difference.”

“I didn’t say I didn’t think there was a difference. I said—” But there seemed no point in saying it again. What Shelley was
saying was true. Sherman Markey did look like a homeless person, and in a way no clean change of clothes, or bath, or haircut
could change. Something happened to people who lived out on the street that left an indelible mark. He wished he knew what
it was.

“Besides,” Shelley was saying, “there’s nothing you can do about it, is there? It’s not your fault. We had people looking
all over for him that night. We had vans out. If he was anywhere within our area, we would have found him.”

“If he was still alive.”

“Okay,” Shelley said. “If he was still alive. But you know, you can’t blame yourself for that. It’s not up to you. People
are what they are. It doesn’t matter if Sherman was on the street because he had a disease or because he had no damned luck
at all or because he behaved like an idiot and a jerk and brought it all down on his own head. He was a homeless person. They
die a lot in the bad weather. Nobody noticed him because nobody notices homeless people. You have to go from there.”

“To where?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing,” Ray Dean said. “Nothing at all. Never mind. You’re right. I’m going to make a few phone calls and then I’ll okay
the van schedules for tonight. Ask C. J. to come see me in about half an hour, will you? We’ve got a donor willing to supply
the Station Street soup kitchen for seven straight days in return for a public announcement on my part. I’m happy to comply.
Okay?”

“You don’t look good,” Shelley said.

“I’m fine,” Ray Dean said.

She hesitated some more, and then walked away, down the hall, out of sight. He watched her go. He wasn’t fine. He didn’t begin
to be fine. It bothered him no end that people were willing to give to charity if they got a nice big announcement in the
papers about it, or something else to make them feel important. He couldn’t count the number of dinners he had to have
with big donors who demanded personal attention in exchange for the food they gave and the checks they wrote. He needed those
people. He knew he needed them. He couldn’t supply the organization himself. He couldn’t begin to cover the needs of the people
who lived “rough,” as their one Aussie put it. He just didn’t understand why every single person in the city of Philadelphia
didn’t rise up and demand that something be done about these people who couldn’t feed or house themselves, who died in the
cold, who died in spit and blood and vomit.

He wanted to believe that people would be different if they were brought up differently, that it was just a matter of training
and education. He knew that wasn’t true. There was no solution for human nature, and no answer to the deepest of his questions
about right and wrong. It was bad enough that some people were born rich and others were born poor. It was worse that some
were born well and some were born mentally or physically ill. What did you do about a life that could never escape the confines
of biochemistry?

You did something better than this, Ray Dean told himself. But this was all he knew how to do, so he was going to go on doing
it.

He picked up the phone and punched in the number Kate Daniel had given him the last time he talked to her. Maybe he could
ask her why he was depressed the way he was.

T
he district attorney of
the city of Philadelphia was a man named Robert Benedetti, and the only thing Gregor Demarkian knew about him for sure was
that he hated to be called “Bob.” “It’s the alliteration,” John Jackman had said, six months ago, when they’d first discussed
the man. “It’s the BB. He hates it.”

Gregor couldn’t remember why it had come up. Benedetti was new in the job. His predecessor had dropped dead of a heart attack
in the middle of a mob-based murder trial, and for about a week there had been speculation across the country that he’d really
been the victim of a contract hit. The problem was, nobody knew of a contract killer who could make heart attacks happen so
realistically that they looked like nothing else to four pathologists in a row. The man had been overweight, underexercised,
and addicted to both cigarettes and coffee. He worked too hard and too long. His blood pressure would have looked better as
one of those thermometer indicators that let the public know if the local fire department has raised enough money in donations
to buy a new lounge set for the firehouse. Robert Benedetti had been appointed to fill out the rest of his term, and here
he was, coming up on a general municipal election in November, and not a known quantity.

Gregor gave his name to the receptionist and sat down in the waiting area. It was not an unfamiliar place. He’d been to see
various district attorneys since he’d started consulting with police departments, and none of them ever seemed to do anything
to change the waiting room’s ambience. The carpet was clean but a little worn, and determinedly bland. The pictures on the
walls were of nothing that could offend anybody, ever, mostly because they were either of flowers or so abstract as to be
indistinguishable from confusion. Gregor knew better than to do that thing about modern art that marked anyone who engaged
in it as a provincial idiot—he wasn’t about to
start talking about how all the paintings like that looked like something that could be done by a five-year-old child—but
in the most private recesses of his brain, he still wondered why anybody bothered. And why, exactly, was good representational
work no longer really “art”? He should have paid more attention to his Humanities courses when he was at Penn. He wasn’t sure
he’d paid much attention to anything while he was at Penn, besides making damned sure that his grades were as close to perfect
as he could get them, to make equally sure that an Ivy League school would take him for his graduate work. Gregor couldn’t
even remember having had a strong ambition in any one direction. He hadn’t been considering the FBI while he was in college,
traveling by public transportation every day from a Cavanaugh Street that was still poor tenements to the University of Pennsylvania
of the late fifites, full of preppies and debutantes, and not all that dedicated to educating the kinds of people who needed
scholarships to survive. Now he thought that his only ambition back then might have been to make it out. Making it out was
different from making it. Making it meant having a lot of money and your picture in People magazine. Making it out meant just…
never having to go back where you’d come from.

And here he was, back where he’d come from. Did it matter that where he’d come from didn’t really exist now any more than
the Gregor Demarkian of that period of time existed now? It mattered that Cavanaugh Street was town houses and expensive condominiums
and not tenements and railroad flats.

He was up on his feet and walking around the room, looking at the pictures on the walls the way he’d look at pictures in a
museum, when somebody cleared his throat behind him. Gregor turned and found a short, wiry, intense young man in a gray suit
that didn’t look like it fit him, because no suit anywhere would ever look like it fit him. His body was the wrong shape for
suits. This is a man who ought to be a boxer, Gregor thought. But the man was holding out his hand, so Gregor held out his
hand, too.

“It’s Mr. Demarkian,” the man said. “I recognize you from your pictures. I’m Rob Benedetti.”

“Ah,” Gregor said.

“Ah?”

“I was wondering what you used for a nickname,” Gregor said. “I’ve heard from several people that you don’t like to be called
Bob.”

“Right,” Benedetti said. He seemed to be at a loss for where to take the conversation next, for which Gregor didn’t blame
him. He threw an odd look at the pictures on the wall and at Gregor standing to look at them and said, “Why don’t you come
into the office and we can talk. John said you were going to help the Justice Project in the search for Sherman Markey.”

Gregor followed Benedetti’s retreating back, wondering if he should bother to go into any long explanation of his present
relationship to the case. It didn’t help that he didn’t know if he had any relationship to the case, or even if there was
a case.

He was explaining about the visit he’d had from Chickie George when he really noticed the room he’d been led into, and then
he stopped. It was the most remarkable place he’d ever seen. If there was a paperless office in the United States, this wasn’t
it. There were stacks of file folders full of paper everywhere: on the desk, on the floor, on the bookcases in piles obscuring
the books, on the seat of the chair Gregor was supposed to sit in. It was like one of those paintings that got titled Schizophrenic’s
Hallucination or Paranoid’s Dream. It was beyond a mess. It was a threatening mess.

“Excuse me,” Rob Benedetti said. He reached over and took the files off the chair Gregor was supposed to sit in. Then he held
them in his hands for a moment, wondering what he was supposed to do with them. Then he dumped them on the pile on his desk.
Given how much was there, a few more probably wouldn’t make a difference.

“Are you spring-cleaning or something?” Gregor asked.

Rob Benedetti went around the desk and took a few file folders off the seat he was supposed to sit in himself. “I’ve been
trying to get Carson’s stuff straightened out,” he said. “Carson was, I don’t know. Not exactly caught up. Not that I blame
him, mind you. He must have been sick for months before he fell over. My wife is always trying to make me go to the doctor,
and like that, because she says this is a job that kills people, but I think that’s going too far. Anyway, Carson must have
been sick for a while, because here we are, and there’s a lot of back stuff that needs to be taken care of, and I’ve been
going through it piece by piece so that I can figure out what’s going on.”

“How’s it going?”

“You can see how it’s going,” Rob Benedetti said. “Never mind. We’ll get to it or not. I’ll get elected in November or not.
In the meantime, we’ve got a Drew Harrigan problem.”

“I don’t,” Gregor said.

“Yes, you do, whether you realize it or not,” Benedetti said. “How much do you know about Drew Harrigan?”

Gregor had been carrying his coat over his arm when he came into the office and laid it down over the back of the chair when
he’d sat down. Now he stood up, rummaged around in it, and pulled out the book he’d bought at Barnes & Noble.

“I’ve got this,” he said. “I know he’s very successful. I’ve never heard him on the radio.”

“Did you look at the book?”

“A little.”

“And?”

Gregor hesitated. “It doesn’t seem fair to criticize when I’ve barely read anything but a line here or there, but the lines
I’ve read have seemed a little ham-handed and simplistic. Simplistic to the point of being inaccurate sometimes.”

“It’s okay. You can call him an idiot in this office if you want to.”

“I don’t know that he is an idiot,” Gregor said. “I’ve got a tendency to feel that people who become great successes at legitimate
endeavors, and even some of the ones who become great successes at illegitimate ones, are probably bright enough. Competition
is tough. It’s not easy to make something of yourself, especially not a big something.”

“Maybe,” Benedetti said. “Maybe the truth is that he got to be a big something by pandering to the idiots in his audience.
He’s got a lot of idiots in his audience, and you’re hearing that from a man who’s probably closer to Harrigan politically
than he is to John Jackman. I’m nobody’s liberal. But.”

“But?”

“But if the man isn’t an idiot, he’s a liar,” Benedetti said. “He has to know that the stuff he says is wrong. He’s got a
staff. They call here every once in a while to check things, and we try to be good about providing them with information.
We try to be good about providing everybody with information. With Harrigan, it doesn’t make any difference. If it isn’t what
he wants to hear, he doesn’t hear it. All I can say is thank God he’s going after the national audience and not just the one
here, or we’d all be dead as door-nails from the misinformation.”

“I still don’t see how that makes him my problem,” Gregor said.

Benedetti sighed. “How much do you know about the case so far?” Gregor gave a rundown that included the traffic stop that
had revealed a pile of illegal pills on the front passenger seat of Drew Harrigan’s car, the arrest, and Harrigan’s fingering
of Sherman Markey.