Hardscrabble Road (33 page)

“This would be how the homeless men got to the barn, wouldn’t it? Do they unlock it in the evenings?”

“I don’t know,” Benedetti said. “You can ask the nuns. Come inside.”

Gregor let himself be led around to the front door again. It was a very plain front door, distinguished only by the crucifix
squarely in the middle of it, Christ in agony, dying on the Cross. Rob Benedetti rang the bell. They all stood on the doorstep,
waiting in the cold. It was cold, too, as cold as it had been these past few weeks, and maybe worse. Gregor was beginning
to think there was something wrong with him that he never remembered to bring a hat.

The door was opened by a nun Gregor didn’t know, in the same long, full habit Sister Beata had been wearing at the precinct
station. She nodded
to them without speaking and then gestured them inside. She didn’t ask to see anybody’s badge or identification, although
Marbury had been getting his out of his coat pocket all the time. They trooped into the foyer and got their first surprise.
The first way in which this monastery was different from the buildings around it would most certainly be the ceilings, which
were more than high. Old buildings tended to have high ceilings, but Gregor didn’t think a neighborhood like this would have
that kind of old building in it. He wondered what this building had been before the nuns took it over, and what renovations
they had made before they turned it into a convent.

The nun led them through the small foyer into what seemed to be a waiting room, and Sister Beata rose from behind the desk
there to greet them. Gregor was more than a little proud of himself for being able to recognize her. Nuns in full habit were
like homeless people. You tended to look over them, rather than at them.

Sister Beata gestured to them to follow her, and they all trooped down a narrow hall to a pair of frosted-glass double doors.
Beata opened them, gestured them all inside, and then came in herself, closing the doors behind her. Gregor looked around
at what was obviously supposed to be a sitting room of some kind. The pictures on the wall were all determinedly religious,
and not remarkable for anything but their indulgence in Catholic kitsch. There was Christ with the Sacred Heart coming out
of his chest, a lick of flame at the top of it, as if it were a specialty candle. There was Christ surrounded by sheep and
holding a lamb. There was the Virgin Mary holding out her arms, with light coming out of her fingertips. Beata caught him
staring at the pictures and smiled.

“Yes, Mr. Demarkian. The art is awful. But it, like everything else in this room, including the paint job on the walls, was
donated to us by the Sodality Friends of Carmel, and we appreciate their concern and support for our life lived within these
walls. Would you all sit down please? We’ve got a few problems I need to discuss.”

The men all remained standing. Beata looked even more amused, then made an elaborate show of sitting down herself. The men
all sat.

“I thought that sort of thing went out with my mother’s generation,” she said.

“It’s,” Giametti said. “Ah. It’s—”

“It’s the habit, Officer Giametti, I know,” Beata said. “It’s ironic, really, because this habit marks me as an extern sister,
and as an extern sister I’m the lowliest creature in a cloistered community. I am, however, able to be here with you. Nuns
who have taken solemn vows are not able to be here with you. They live in strict enclosure. They never leave the confines
of the consecrated area of the monastery. They don’t see people face-to-face. If you want to visit
with them, you must talk to them in the conversation room while they remain behind the grille. Reverend Mother Constanzia
is in fact a cloistered nun.”

Rob Benedetti stirred in his seat. “You know, that’s not going to work,” he said. “We’re going to have to talk to the Reverend
Mother, if she’s the one who is Drew Harrigan’s sister—”

“—She’s the one,” Beata said.

Rob Benedetti plowed determinedly on. “And we’re going to have to do it face-to-face, not behind a grille. We do try to make
accommodations for religious convictions, but—”

“It’s quite all right, Mr. Benedetti. The Reverend Mother and I discussed that this morning. It’s a little more complicated
than you realize, but we’ve asked permission from the Cardinal for Reverend Mother to break enclosure in this matter and for
the community to abandon enclosure so that the police may search where they like.”

“The barn,” Marbury said quickly.

“The barn is not within the enclosure,” Beata said. “You’ll see when you get back there. There’s a wall separating it from
the enclosure. We used to use it for a garage before we gave up the cars, and we needed a place mechanics could get to when
they broke down. They were a nuisance, really, and you don’t need cars in the city, and we don’t go anywhere anyway. But here’s
the thing. We are arranging it, but it hasn’t been arranged yet. Before you can see Reverend Mother anywhere but through the
grille, before you can search the monastery proper, we’ve got to have permission from the Cardinal. I’m sure he’ll give it.
The problem is, he hasn’t given it yet. He’s in Rome.”

“And you want us to wait until he gets back from Rome?” Marbury said.

“Hardly,” Beata said. “We’ve got a call in. The thing is, we don’t have permission now, and we may not get it while you’re
here this time, and that may mean—”

“—That we’ll have to come back,” Rob Benedetti said.

“I know it’s a long way,” Beata said, “and I do apologize, but we didn’t think. We should have, of course. I remembered it
almost as soon as I tried to get to sleep. Things were confused.”

“I’m sure they were,” Gregor said. “But we can talk to you now, can’t we, Sister?”

“Of course,” Sister Beata said.

“You said before that you didn’t go anywhere anyway, but that isn’t strictly true, is it?” Gregor asked. “You yourself do
go places, and I’d expect you’re not the only one. That’s why you’re an extern sister.”

“True,” Beata said. “There’s me, Sister Immaculata, and Sister Marie Bernadette. We are all allowed to go out into the world
and do what the community needs us to do. The shopping, for instance.”

“Do you go out often?” Gregor asked. “Almost every day.” “What about the post office?” Gregor asked. “Do you go to the post
office?”

“Once a week, on Friday,” Beata said. “There’s almost always something. We need stamps. Or we need to send packages. That
used to be easier. They used to pick those up at the door. Now with all the Homeland Security initiatives, they want us to
bring the packages in personally. So I do.”

“What kind of packages do you send?” Rob Benedetti asked.

“We send copies of the works of St. Teresa of Avila, our foundress, to people interested in Carmelite spirituality,” Beata
said. “Also the works of St. John of the Cross, St. Thérèse of Lisieux, and St. Edith Stein, all Carmelites, all writers.
We send holy cards, especially the one with the Blessed Virgin giving the scapular to St. Simon Stock—”

“—What?” Marbury said. “St. Simon Stock was the original founder of the Carmelite Order,” Beata said. “St. Teresa of Avila
only reformed the order and established this branch of it. Legend says that the Virgin appeared to St. Simon Stock and gave
him the brown scapular we all wear, and told him that anyone wearing this scapular at the moment of death will not fail to
make a good one.”

“A good death?” Marbury said.

“That’s right,” Beata said. “There’s a concern, isn’t there, with a good death? With a death that leaves us reconciled to
God.”

“What’s a scapular?” Gregor asked.

Beata picked up the long piece of material hanging down in front of her dress. “This is. It goes all the way down behind,
too. Lay people wear a symbolic representation of it, two square pieces of wool cloth on a pair of strings that hang front
and back across your shoulders under your clothes. We have a lot of those, too, and we send them out. It’s not so much what
we send, you know, as that people need to feel that we’re listening. That somebody is listening. It always surprises me how
many people there are who are lonely and isolated in this world.”

“Why surprise?” Gregor asked.

“I suppose because it seems nonsensical,” Beata said. “If there are so many lonely people out there, why can’t they get together
with each other? I’m a very practical person, really, the last sort of person you’d think would be attracted to Carmel in
some ways. And it makes me impatient. Fortunately, I’m not asked to deal with souls in trouble. The only responsibility I
have for the mail is delivering it to the post office when there’s too much of it to be mailed directly from here. And buying
stamps.”

“Tell me about the night Drew Harrigan died,” Gregor said. “For the
[moment, I’m going to assume it was Drew Harrigan here that night and that he died here that night. Forensics could change
that. When did you first notice him?”

“Do you mean, when did I first notice the man in the red hat?” Beata said. “Because that’s all I noticed. Just a man, generic,
in a red hat. I didn’t recognize Drew Harrigan.”

“Would you have?” Gregor asked.

“Under the circumstances?” Beata said. “Probably not. He was in clean enough clothes, and the hat was clean, but one of the
first things I noticed about him was that he was unkempt and his face was dirty. And besides, I’d never seen Drew Harrigan
in person, and I hadn’t seen him very often even in the media. He was on the air before I came to Carmel, but he was nowhere
near as big as he is now, and I doubt if I’d seen half a dozen pictures of him in my life. So no, it isn’t odd that I didn’t
recognize him any of the times I saw him that night.”

“Any of the times?” Gregor said.

“How many times were there?” “Well, there was the first one,” Beata said. “That was when we came home, Immaculata and I, from
meeting with the lawyers.”

“Which lawyers?” Benedetti said.

“Drew Harrigan’s lawyers,” Beata said.

Every one of them sat up a little straighter in their chairs.

“Why ever would you be meeting with Drew Harrigan’s lawyers?” Gregor asked.

“Well,” Beata said, “let’s start with this. I am a lawyer, so Reverend Mother thought it would be better to send me than to
rely entirely on the lawyers from the Archdiocese.”

“You’re a lawyer,” Rob Benedetti said. “Have you ever practiced in Philadelphia?”

“Of course.”

“Where?” Benedetti said.

“At the firm of Coatley, Amis,” Sister Beata said. “I was a week away from taking up a partnership when I decided to come
to Carmel. They were not pleased with me.”

“The only person who ever left Coatley in the lurch on a partnership was this woman, this Alderman woman, who did the Racicot-Barrelson
case—”

“That’s right,” Beata said.

“You’re Alderman?” Benedetti said.

“Susan Titus Alderman. I was. Needless to say, my family isn’t really in love with the idea of Carmel, either. Especially
since it meant I had to have converted to Catholicism to come. We still think Catholicism is a little tacky in my part of
Pennsylvania.”

“The Racicot-Barrelson thing was brilliant,” Benedetti said.

“Thank you.”

“Could we get back to why it was you were meeting with Drew Harrigan’s lawyer?” Gregor said.

Beata nodded. “Mr. Harrigan had deeded a few parcels of property to us a couple of weeks before. And don’t ask. Yes, it was
definitely after Sherman Markey decided to sue him for defamation, although if he was trying to shield property, he should
have done it a good time before. I’d worry more about the civil forfeiture laws than I would about a homeless man with help
from the Justice Project.”

“And you were meeting with Drew Harrigan’s lawyers in regard to this deed?” Gregor asked.

“No,” Beata said. “The deed was finalized. The problem was that we wanted to sell the properties, because we had a bank loan—still
have it, actually—a very substantial one, that we’d taken on as a balloon payment, and the payment was coming due. And, of
course, since this is Carmel, we didn’t have the money. So we wanted to sell the properties. But Sherman Markey’s lawyers
had gone into court and had liens placed on them, saying that Mr. Harrigan had only deeded them to us in order to shield them
from any judgment that might arise from Mr. Markey’s defamation suit. So I was meeting with Mr. Harrigan’s lawyers to find
out what the situation was exactly. I’m a little out of the loop here, if you can believe it.”

“When is the balloon payment due?” Gregor asked.

“It was due and passed,” Beata said. “The bank agreed to roll it over into a conventional second mortgage. We told the Cardinal
about it and he had one of his patented ice-cold glaring hissy fits.”

“This was two weeks ago?” Gregor said. “Did you really expect to have the properties sold in two weeks?”

“We had a buyer,” Beata said.

“Who?” Rob Benedetti asked.

“We don’t know,” Beata said.

“How can you not know?” Benedetti asked.

“The offer was made anonymously, about four days after Drew Harrigan deeded the property to us,” Beata said. “We took it seriously,
because it was made through the Markwell Ballard Bank.”

“That’s interesting,” Gregor said.

“I thought so, too,” Beata said. “You really do have to take it seriously. There had to be a buyer out there who was both
willing and able to buy the property, or Markwell Ballard wouldn’t have handled the negotiations. They don’t need anybody’s
business. They’ve thrown clients out for far less than
making bogus buy offers. The thing is, they also don’t take in any guy off the street with twenty dollars in his pocket. When
I was still in the world—that’s what we call not being in the convent, being in the world—the minimum you needed to open an
account at Markwell Ballard was two million dollars. And that just got you an appointment. If they didn’t like your face,
that was all there was to it. Drew Harrigan didn’t have an account at Markwell Ballard.”

“You know that for sure?” Gregor asked.

“Yes,” Beata said. “Neil Savage mentioned it. It was so odd of him to have said it that I would have thought he was deliberately
throwing me misinformation except for the fact that he was so incredibly, triumphantly satisfied about it.”