Hardscrabble Road (24 page)

“I don’t think anybody knows what they’re talking about when they’re talking about taxes,” Rob Benedetti said, as he put Gregor
into the car that would take him to Detectives Marbury and Giametti. “I mean, what do they think? They’re going to pay for
the police department with air?”

The only thing Gregor Demarkian knew about taxes was that he paid them, and he didn’t even know much about that, since Bennis’s
accountant figured them for him and all he did was write checks. He got into the car, glad it was running and glad it had
the heater on.

“Let me tell you what people think about taxes,” Benedetti said. “They think that the government is spending a gazillion dollars
on crap. Programs to bring Bolivian folk music to public schools. Programs to support the Daughters of the War of 1812 in
their drive to mount an opera on the war to tour American high schools. Programs to establish an Institute of Broccoli Studies
in northwest Tennessee.”

Gregor couldn’t help himself. “Is Tennessee a big broccoli-growing state?”

“How am I supposed to know?” Benedetti said. “That’s not the point. The point is that people think there are millions of these
programs and they
take up most of the budget, so all we have to do is get rid of the silly programs and we can have all the police and fire
protection we want, and it isn’t true. There are programs, but they only take up a little money compared to the rest. When
you cut taxes to the point where my own nieces and nephews could afford to pay them out of their allowances—and, believe me,
my sister doesn’t hand out Rockefeller-sized allowances—anyway, you see what I mean. It’s completely insane. You should tell
John Jackman it’s completely insane.”

“I’ll try,” Gregor said.

“We’ve got six vehicles that wouldn’t start this morning in this precinct alone,” Rob Benedetti said. “That’s six right here
around my office. Plus I don’t remember how many state cars that won’t go. We need heated parking spaces. It’s winter, for
God’s sake. It’s cold enough to turn rabbit turds into icicles. What do they want from us?”

What Gregor wanted was to get the car moving and out of the way. He had no idea what had started Rob Benedetti on taxes, but
just in case it was something he’d said, he wanted to be sure he wouldn’t be able to say it again. He made noncommittal noises—yes,
of course it seemed sensible to pay enough in taxes to get the police protection you needed; no, of course it didn’t make
sense to think that we could do away with taxes altogether and still have a city worth living in—and thought that politics
in an election year was like Armenian Lent. Whether you wanted to take part in it or not, it chased you until it hunted you
down.

Which reminded him: Lent was coming up soon. Cavanaugh Street would be full of women cooking lentils in oil. The Ararat would
serve him eggs with sausages for breakfast, but Linda Melajian would look disappointed in him when she put the plate on the
table, and Tibor would sigh a lot. It wouldn’t do him any good to remind them all that Armenian Lent was one of the things
he had wanted so desperately to escape when he left Philadelphia for graduate school.

Finally, the car was on the road and moving, and Gregor went back to feeling as if he were in a road trip movie. He thought
he’d done more traveling in cars today than he ordinarily did in any given week, and all to get from one place to the other
in a mostly confined area. The activity felt pointless. He wasn’t really all that emotionally involved in finding Sherman
Markey, or in anything Drew Harrigan might think he wanted to do. On the other hand, the activity had done what he’d started
out hoping it would do. He’d spent most of the day not thinking of Bennis Hannaford at all.

I’m too old, he thought, to have the kind of relationship with a woman that requires me to work hard at not thinking about
her.

Marbury and Giametti worked out of a precinct not very far from the District Attorney’s Office. It was their car that wouldn’t
start, which was why Gregor was going to them. It was afternoon now, and there were more people on the street, many of them
aimless. In spite of the cold, though, Gregor thought it was better in February than in December, because in December it got
dark in the middle of the afternoon.

One of the men was waiting at the curb when the car drove up. He was tall and thin and shaggy in a way policemen usually aren’t.
In Gregor’s experience, men who joined the police force liked to think of themselves as being in the military. They went in
for buzz cuts and too many hours spent working out with weights.

The car drew to a stop and the tall man opened the door at Gregor’s side. He really did not look military at all. His hair
came down over the back of his collar. His fingers were so long, they could have been caricatures out of a cartoon about a
skeleton. The effect was thrown off by the short police jacket, standard uniform issue. It had been made for a compact, bulky
man who loved his G.I. Joe dolls. The skeleton put a hand out to help him from the car.

“Mr. Demarkian?” he said. “I’m Dane Marbury. We’ve given up on the car. Mike’s gone to get us a new one. And we’d both like
to thank you very much.”

“For what?” Gregor was out and closing the car door behind him. The cold was still wicked. The wind was still stiff.

“For giving us something to do on a long, boring day,” Marbury said. “Don’t mind us. This is the least exciting precinct in
the city. We’ve got rich guys. We’ve got hookers. Don’t let anybody ever tell you that rich guys only like high-priced call
girls. You wouldn’t believe how many of them like to pick up hookers off the street, skanky hookers, too—”

“Dane, for Christ’s sake. He used to be with the FBI.”

The person who said this was the bulky, compact man Gregor had been imagining in a police uniform jacket, and he came equipped
even with the buzz cut. Dane Marbury turned around and shrugged.

“So he was with the FBI,” he said. “What does the FBI know? They’re clueless on the street and you know it.”

“The FBI knows from rich guys being blackmailed by cheap hookers. How do you do, Mr. Demarkian. I’m Mike Giametti.”

“How do you do,” Gregor said.

It really was cold out here. Neither of the young men seemed to notice it.

“I still say we ought to thank him,” Dane Marbury said. “He’s got us out of here for the afternoon, and I’m more than happy
to go. I’m not all that interested in rich guys and I’m not all that interested in hookers.”

“No, I’m glad to get out of here, too,” Giametti said. I’ve got us a ride. The nuns are going to be waiting.”

“And it’s cold,” Gregor said.

The two younger men looked at him, seemed confused, and blinked.

T
he precinct that included
the Monastery of Our Lady of Mount Carmel was supposed to be “not central,” or “out of the way,” but Gregor had never imagined
it might actually be out in the country. He kept trying to get his bearings and couldn’t. They were in the city, then the
city petered out, then there were miles of strip malls and fast-food restaurants, then there was grass, or as much of it as
you could see under the heavy coating of snow that had not disappeared this far out into the country. Except that they couldn’t
be in the country, Gregor thought, because they were still within the city limits. If they hadn’t been, then the police who
covered Hardscrabble Road would belong to a township, and not Philadelphia.

Mike Giametti looked just as confused as Gregor was. “If the map didn’t fit, I’d think we were lost. You sure this is where
we’re supposed to go?”

Dane Marbury nodded. “I checked the maps back at the precinct. This is where we’re supposed to go. You wouldn’t think it was
part of the city, would you?”

“I don’t think it’s part of the city,” Giametti said. “I think we’re lost.”

“Next intersection should be Colcannon Street,” Marbury said.

All three of them held their breath as the next intersection came up, but it was Colcannon Street. The problem was that there
didn’t seem to be much of anything on Colcannon Street. There were a few low buildings: a hardware store, a pharmacy, a pawnshop,
a Laundromat. There were a few vacant lots. The area didn’t look depressed as much as it looked never developed, and Gregor
didn’t think there was anywhere in the city of Philadelphia, or even in the greater Metro area, that hadn’t been developed.

“Next intersection is Gwane Street,” Marbury said.

The next intersection was Gwane Street. There was nobody walking around on the pavements at all. The whole thing could have
been a stage set for a Twilight Zone episode. Still, Gregor thought, there was that pawnshop. Pawnshops meant poor people,
or at least people living close enough to the edge that they needed extra money fast and had no choice but to part with the
things they loved to get it. It wasn’t impossible that an area with a pawnshop would also be an area with homeless people.

“I know why it looks so wrong,” Gregor said suddenly. “There aren’t any adult bookstores.”

“There aren’t any adult bookstores in most of the neighborhoods of Philadelphia,” Dane Marbury said. “What do you take us
for?”

“In neighborhoods with pawnshops, there are adult bookstores,” Gregor said. “Except here, there aren’t.”

“Maybe they’re afraid of the nuns,” Mike Giametti said.

Gregor shifted uncomfortably in the backseat. This was a squad car, so he was in the compartment usually reserved for people
who had been arrested for something or the other. “Tell me about Drew Harrigan,” he said. “Rob Benedetti said—”

“Yeah,” Marbury said. “It’s our big claim to fame. If we’d realized who it was—no, that’s not true. He was behaving like a
jerk. In a car. Just what you need on a city street, with cars and pedestrians everywhere.”

“The car was weaving?”

“The car was doing weird things with speeding up and slowing down,” Giametti said. “It would, like, rev up and go for a few
feet and then he’d hit the brake and when he started up again, he’d inch forward. The street wasn’t packed but there were
other cars, and they were getting pretty upset. You couldn’t tell what he was going to do next.”

“Yeah, and then he hit the gas pedal for serious,” Marbury said, “and just sort of shot off, right through a red light, and
we decided we’d had enough. So we stopped him.”

“And then it started getting weird,” Giametti said.

“I didn’t know who he was,” Marbury said. “I mean, I know he’s famous, he does commercials, but what can I say? I’d never
seen him. And I don’t listen to his radio show.”

“He expected us to recognize him, though,” Giametti said. “And he did look sort of familiar to me right from the beginning,
but he was flying. I mean, he was absolutely off the wall. He was singing.”

“Benedetti said he was singing when you got him back to the precinct station,” Gregor said.

“Oh, he was singing there, too,” Marbury said. “But he was singing right off in the car, between bouts of calling us stuff
I’m not supposed to say in uniform except on a witness stand. He kept saying, ‘You know how important I am? You know how important
I am? John Cleese is going to play me in the movie.’ ”

“Not John Cleese,” Giametti said. “John Goodman. You know, the guy who played Roseanne’s husband on TV.”

“Whatever,” Marbury said. “We hauled him out of the car, and that was when he really started screaming at us. He kept saying,
‘You can’t arrest me. You can’t arrest me. I’ve got a deal with the city. I’ve got a deal.’ ”

“He said that?” Gregor said. “That he had a deal?”

“Yeah,” Giametti said. “Over and over again. Thing is, I think we’d have heard about it. I mean, our precinct is in this guy’s
own neighborhood. If he’d cut some kind of deal with some of the beat cops, we’d have heard about it.”

“Somebody would at least have tried to warn us off him,” Marbury said.

“So what we thought was, maybe there’s some guys who just let him go when they find him because they feel sorry for him, or
because they’re fans. There are a lot of conservatives on the police force. We figured he’d been stopped for behaving like
an idiot a couple of times and the cop who stopped him gave him a break and let it pass. It happens, even for people who aren’t
celebrities.”

“But anyway,” Marbury said, “we figured we weren’t obliged to do the same, and we didn’t want to see him on the road for another
goddamned minute, so we took him out of the car, and that’s when we saw the Tupper-ware thing on the front passenger seat.
It was weird because I recognized the thing. The container. My wife’s sister sells Tupperware. We have a container just like
it at home. And it was full of pills.”

“The whole front of the car was full of pills,” Giametti said. “He’d been speeding up and hitting the brakes, and some of
the pills had gotten loose and spilled on the floor and the seat and everywhere. Everything you could think of. OxyContin.
Percoset. Darvocet. Percodan. Benzphetamine. Phentermine. Uppers, downers, you name it. All prescription.”

“There’s this thing they do on the street,” Marbury said, “called a rainbow cocktail. You take a whole bunch of pills and
you pick ’em by the color, and then you down the whole thing with Scotch. That’s what we thought he’d been doing. We asked
him to take a Breathalyzer test and he refused. So we handcuffed him and put him in the squad car.”

“We got the handcuffs on before he knew what we were doing,” Giametti said. “Getting him into the car wasn’t so easy. He went
berserk. He kicked. He bit. He body-blocked. You wouldn’t think it to look at him, but he can manage one hell of a body block.
He’s a big guy. He should have played football. I thought we were going to have to call for backup, but we got him in the
car, and then we got back to the station as fast as we could.”

“We were hoping the drive would calm him down,” Marbury said, “and it did some. I mean, he just sat back there singing and
calling us motherwhatevers every few seconds, and he wasn’t jumping around. So we got him back to the station, we start to
take him out of the car, and wham, there he goes again. He slammed into me from the side with his hip hooked out and I fell
on my ass, and then he started to run, and Mike had to go after him, and by that time I was calling for backup, so about thirty
guys showed up just as Mike grabbed him.”