Hardscrabble Road (29 page)

“But we’re not talking about special treatment,” Reverend Mother said.

“Drew wasn’t killed in the monastery, he was killed in the barn. The barn is out there. There’s a big wall around the monastery
and the barn is on the other side of it.”

“So is the monastery’s front door,” Beata said. “You must realize that police procedure would demand they search the premises
here, all of them, if this wasn’t a monastery. There’d be no question, and no trouble getting a judge to sign the warrant.
And you have to understand that the Cardinal isn’t likely to be much help. He was brought in here to fix things after the
scandal. He’s not going to want to cause another scandal by insisting that the monastery enclosure not be violated.”

“But the police make exceptions for religion all the time,” Reverend Mother said. “I mean, well, think of it—”

“Here’s a reason to watch the news more often, Reverend Mother. The last district attorney wanted to end the practice of excusing
priests from testifying to what they’d heard in confession. It’s a new world out there. At the very least, they’re going to
have to insist on searching your office and your cell, because you will be a suspect. In the end, they’re going to have to
insist on searching everything. There’s no way around it. If you did kill your brother—”

“—Sister.”

“If you did, you could have hidden any number of things in this building, anywhere in it. You have free run of the place.
You’ve got more than that. You’ve got control of the place. You could have concealed pills, poison, anything, anywhere around
here.”

“Did they say where they thought I’d have gotten the poison in the first place?”

“They didn’t say anything about you and poison. I’m just telling you the way they’re going to think. And the poison they were
talking about yesterday was arsenic. It’s easy enough to get. It’s what’s in rat poison. I think we have dozens of boxes of
the stuff in the cellar.”

“I don’t think we have dozens of boxes of anything in the cellar,” Reverend Mother said, “but I take your point. You do realize
what this means, don’t you? They’ll break the enclosure. The monastery will have to be reconsecrated.”

“It can be done.”

“Oh, of course it can,” Reverend Mother said, “but it’s an enormous problem. And then, what about the nuns? We’ll have to
send them off someplace, or their own vows will—”

“No,” Beata said. “I don’t think so. It will look like—”

“You must be joking.” ”—I’m not,” Beata said. “It will look like you’re sending them away for a reason, because one of them
knows something, or because one of them is the murderer. I’m sorry, Reverend Mother, but we’re just going to have to put up
with it. It won’t be for long, and I doubt if anybody will be required to testify at the trial, if there is one, except me,
since I was the one who saw the body and called the ambulance. I know it’s a problem, and a pain in the neck. And we can certainly
talk to the Cardinal and see if he’s willing to mount a rearguard action. But in the long run, he’ll lose, and you’ll look
guilty. I think it’s better just to get it over with.”

Reverend Mother licked her lips. “You said there was an old district attorney. Does that mean there’s a new one now?”

“That’s right. The other one died suddenly, and this one was appointed.”

“Is this one… friendly to the Catholic Church?”

“I don’t know,” Beata said. “He isn’t somebody I knew when I was practicing law. He’s got an Italian name. He might have been
brought up Catholic.”

“Which could be good or bad,” Reverend Mother said. “I don’t know. I’d better call the Cardinal this morning, I suppose, and
talk it out with him. He’s going to do that thing where he doesn’t shout, but it’s worse.”

“I know,” Beata said.

What she didn’t say was that if the new district attorney was an anti-Catholic fanatic, the Reverend Mother could find herself
arrested, and it wouldn’t matter at all that there wasn’t going to be evidence enough to bring her to trial. It was the kind
of thing she should have been thinking yesterday, when she didn’t come forward with the information that the convent
was intimately connected to Drew Harrigan and all his works, and not just because he’d died in the barn.

It was the kind of thing she would have thought of automatically if she had still been practicing law, and it bothered her
that she hadn’t thought of it when it really mattered.

J
ohn Jackman’s office was
not really a neutral venue, although that was what he had declared it was when he decided, the night before, that they would
all meet there in the morning. Gregor didn’t really blame him. John was brilliant and young and African-American in a city
and state where being all three could propel him into the Governor’s Mansion, someday, and Gregor thought he wanted to get
there sooner rather than later. After that, he probably wanted to install himself in the White House, although Gregor tried
not to think about that. He could hate politics all he wanted, but he knew that if John ever ran for governor, or president,
he’d be doing some speeches in front of the kind of crowd that looked on A&E true crime specials the way other people looked
at the front page of the newspaper. At the moment, John wanted to install himself in the mayor’s office, and to do that he
had to be perceived as a man who could handle all the crime the city of Philadelphia threw up. He didn’t need a high-profile
celebrity murder case in the headlines every day for weeks, or even months. He didn’t need the perception that he was unable
to stand up to rich people when they got in trouble; but that perception was inevitable in cases like this one, because rich
people had good lawyers who knew the rules of the game. He especially didn’t need to give the present mayor an opportunity
to complain about him on the six o’clock news. He now had all these things, and with them the memory of the fact that he had
been a first-rate homicide detective. He was on a tear.

He could have used being married, though, Gregor thought, getting out of his cab in front of John’s building. Just up the
block, Rob Benedetti was getting out of another cab, looking very unhappy. Gregor decided that he wouldn’t say anything to
John about being married, because John would scream and yell, and because the worst of what could be done to him politically
probably wouldn’t be given his reputation. Gregor had a hard time
imagining anybody convincing the general public that John Henry Newman Jackman was gay. There was another thought that made
Gregor wish he never had to think about politics again. It was only in election years that he remembered that a good chunk
of his fellow citizens wouldn’t vote for someone who happened to be gay, and a bigger chunk wouldn’t vote for someone who
didn’t believe in God, and a yet bigger chunk than that wouldn’t vote for someone who used four-letter Anglo-Saxon words,
even on occasion. Of course, all politicians did that last thing, so it was just a question of never getting caught at it
in public, but still. Or maybe because. It didn’t matter. He didn’t think this was what the founders had envisaged when they
established a nation where citizens could vote.

“Mind their own business,” he said, out loud, into the cold air, and Rob Benedetti, coming up the block to join him, blinked.

“What was that?”

“Nothing,” Gregor said. “I was just thinking out loud. Do you like politics?”

“Like them? I don’t know. I suppose I do. I’m running for district attorney.”

“Wouldn’t you rather be appointed district attorney?”

“We don’t appoint district attorneys in Philadelphia,” Rob Benedetti said. “We elect them. Except in circumstances like mine,
you know, where a DA has to leave and there’s a few months before the next election. Are you all right?”

Gregor was fine. “I just wish it were next year instead of this one,” he said, “when nobody is running for anything.”

“Somebody is always running for something in Philadelphia,” Rob Benedetti said. “We have elections for something pretty much
every year.”

“Not elections I hear about,” Gregor said. “That would be enough.” There was a security guard waiting at the door of the building,
sitting on a folding chair and reading the sports pages. He dropped the paper as Gregor and Rob Benedetti came up, recognized
Rob immediately, and opened up.

“Sorry,” he said. “We’ve got a bomb threat. And there’s a huge fire down on Curzon Street.”

“You’ve got the building locked up because there’s a fire on Curzon Street?” Gregor asked. “That’s a mile away from here.”

“It’s making everybody jumpy,” the guard said. “It’s the homeless people, you know what I mean? Some of them started a fire
in a waste bin out behind an abandoned building and the building caught fire, and now half the block has gone up. I’m surprised
you didn’t hear the sirens, even if you weren’t exactly close. I heard the sirens when I was coming in this morning.”

“I heard sirens about an hour and a half ago,” Rob Benedetti said. “I didn’t think anything of it. There are always sirens
in town.”

“There’s another thing,” Gregor said, as they moved off toward the elevators. “Homeless people. There’s a problem, it’s a
real one. What to do about the homeless people. Some of them you can give homes to, but some of them you can’t. They won’t
go to homes. They’re mentally ill, or they’re addicted to drugs or alcohol, and they just won’t go. But they’re around. They
starve and they freeze to death. They get sick and spread their sicknesses. They upset pedestrians and tourists. You’d think
there would be something that could be done for them, for them, not to them, and I’ve never yet heard a politician in this
city even mention them. Not even once.”

“I have,” Rob Benedetti said. “Old Ellery Dreen used to go on about them all the time. Round ’em up and put ’em in workhouses
or send them to jail. Whatever.”

“Ellery Dreen wasn’t a serious politician,” Gregor said, “and I didn’t say do something to them, I said do something for them.
John isn’t talking about homeless people in his campaign. I know because I’ve read his stuff. The mayor isn’t talking about
them. But they’re out there, and we’ve got the worst cold we’ve seen in thirty years, and they’re freezing to death, or causing
fires, which could kill firefighters, and here we are. That’s what’s wrong with politics, you see. They yell at each other
about family values and gay rights and whether you approve of teaching evolution in the public schools, but nobody talks about
anything that’s actually happening that it would make sense for a government to do something about. And then everybody gets
angry, and calls each other the spawn of Satan, and the whole process becomes nothing but a way for people who were already
very angry to begin with to be angry in public.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever called anybody the spawn of Satan,” Rob Benedetti said, amused.

“Metaphorically,” Gregor said morosely. The elevator was here. The doors slid open. He and Rob Benedetti got on it and watched
the doors close in their faces. Gregor wondered why people did that, so automatically—got on the elevator, turned to face
the doors. He thought he was either going insane or in need of about forty continuous hours of sleep.

The elevator reached their floor, stopped with a bump, shuddered, and then sank a little. Gregor tried to put the image of
them plunging several stories to the basement right out of his head. The doors opened. He didn’t dash for the solidity of
the floor.

“You might consider,” Rob Benedetti said, “the possibility that they’re angry all the time. It isn’t just politics that makes
them angry. They’re just angry.”

“At what?”

“I don’t know,” Rob Benedetti said. “I haven’t got that far. But I’ve been thinking about it. I’ve thought about it a lot.
Because I think it’s true. Not everybody, you know, but a lot of people are just plain angry. All the time. I don’t think
they know what they’re angry about themselves. Sometimes I think they’re just disappointed about the way their lives turned
out, as if they were owed something better, but they don’t know what. I’m probably not making a lot of sense.”

“I’m going to kill that woman,” John Jackman said. “I’m going to kill both those women and then I’m going to shit on a shingle.”

The voice floated out over the heads, down the corridor, into the air. John was in his office. They couldn’t see him.

“When John swears,” Rob Benedetti said, “the world must be coming to an end. I guess we ought to go down and see what he’s
doing.”

W
hat John Jackman was
doing was pacing around his desk, around and around, as if he was circling it the way a bird of prey circled an object of
his desire. Olivia Hall was standing just inside the door, her arms folded across her chest, looking like she wasn’t having
any.

“If you’re going to cuss, I’m going to go sit at my desk,” she said. “If you’re going to blaspheme, I’m going to go home.”

“I apologized. Didn’t I? I apologized.”

“You apologized for swearing,” Olivia Hall said. “You didn’t apologize for threatening to kill a couple of nuns.”

“Oh for Christ’s sake.”

“Home,” Olivia said.

“I’m sorry,” John Jackman said. “And I didn’t mean I was going to actually kill the nuns. It was an expression. And I’ve got
reason to be upset, Olivia, I do. I’ve got reason.”

“I didn’t say you didn’t have reason,” she said.

“What’s going on?” Gregor said.

“I’ll let you and these two gentlemen talk,” Olivia said. “I’ll send the officers in as soon as they get here. You calm down,
John. Lose your temper, lose the argument.”

“This isn’t an argument. This is a murder investigation.”

“You’re not going to win any murder investigation swearing and taking the Lord’s name in vain,” Olivia said. “I’ll be right
outside, getting some real work done.”

She left the room and closed the door behind her. All three of the men stared at the closed door as if they expected it to
open again, revealing Olivia with wings. Then John Jackman coughed, and that broke the spell.