Hardscrabble Road (39 page)

“I’m not walking around in it, Krekor. I only came because I didn’t know where else to go. Do you know who this man is?”

“No, but I’ve got a guess.”

“Your guess is the Sherman Markey person that has been in the papers?”

“Exactly.”

“I came to say you shouldn’t feel guilty about not noticing,” Tibor said. “They look at you and you look away, it’s not because
you’re hard-hearted or don’t care what happens to other people. It’s because they can’t be trusted. So many of them are mentally
ill, or on drugs or alcohol, you don’t know what they’re going to do. You worry that they’ll get violent.”

“And that’s supposed to be better?”

“Tcha, Krekor. Life is what it is. People are what they are. We are called by God to be stewards of the earth and His people,
but that doesn’t make either the earth or His people suitable for a Disney movie. You’re afraid of what will happen if you
make eye contact with them. So am I. So are we all. Personal solutions will not work here.”

“You’d better go,” Gregor said. “That’s the ambulance people coming in.”

Tibor nodded slightly and walked away, down the alley, toward the street. Gregor knew what Tibor had been trying to tell him,
but it didn’t make him feel any better. There was something, planted deep inside him by a mother who never turned a tramp
away from the door, that said he should be better than that.

The ambulance men were not taking long to decide that the body was just that, a body, and not an emergency. They had pulled
back to let the forensics team move in. Gregor didn’t remember seeing that team arrive.

“My mother,” Gregor said to Benedetti, “used to feed homeless people. They’d come onto the street, back when the street was
less upscale than it is now. It was tenements, really. They’d come and she’d be sitting on the stoop with a big basket, she
and all the other women, working on things for dinner.
Peeling vegetables. Breaking up bread to use in these Armenian dishes, I don’t even know what to call them. The men would
come by and they would give them food. All the time. Except they didn’t call them the homeless, then. They called them tramps.”

Benedetti gave Gregor a very odd look. “There are still tramps. And people still feed them. But Mr. Demarkian, this is not
a tramp we’re dealing with here, and neither are the homeless people you see most of the time on the street. It’s not the
Great Depression anymore.”

“Give me a break,” Gregor said. “Do I look that old?”

“It’s not the 1950s, either,” Benedetti said. “Most of the people you see on the street these days, especially in a city like
Philadelphia, aren’t just down on their luck. A large proportion of them are mentally ill. You could get yourself killed making
contact with them if you don’t know how. Another large portion of them are addicted. The alkies won’t do you any harm, except
to piss on your shoes, but the drug addicts can and do get violent and some of them can and will kill people who look like
they have the price of a fix on them. You can’t go on some kind of personal crusade to fix things.”

“That’s what they say about giving them money,” Gregor said. “That you shouldn’t give them money, because they’ll only use
it for booze or drugs. That you only encourage them to bother other people.”

“I give money to beggars all the time. I don’t worry about what they buy with it. If booze and drugs are that important to
them, maybe they know something about themselves I don’t. And I don’t worry about them bothering other people. People could
use being bothered more than they are. Do you know what I do worry about? I worry about them following me home, and following
me day after day, until I have to have somebody arrest them, or they have a knife.”

“Do you really worry that all homeless people are violent?”

“No,” Benedetti said. “Almost none of them are. I worry I’m going to get the one in a hundred who is. Give it up, Mr. Demarkian.
The homeless problem wouldn’t disappear if you were more careful to look these people in the eyes and give them money.”

“They’ve bagged the body,” Gregor said.

He and Benedetti both turned to watch the body being lifted up by the edges of the black body bag and carried down the alley
to the ambulance waiting at the end. Gregor wondered why they always called an ambulance when they had a dead body, even when
they were absolutely positive that the body was dead. It was as if they couldn’t bear the idea of someone dying without medical
attention, although where any of these men and women would get medical attention, Gregor didn’t know. There was Medicaid,
but most of
these people were too confused to apply for it and too apt to have no address to use when applying. They were paranoid, too.
They were afraid of doctors. They were afraid of social workers. Maybe that was the common thread in all their lives. Maybe
they were all so afraid of people, and of living, that living like this was better than having to face the demand to communicate
on a daily basis.

I’m blithering, Gregor thought. I no longer know what I’m thinking. If Tibor could hear me, he’d lecture me for an hour.

“Listen,” he told Rob Benedetti. “It’s freezing out here. Do we all really have to stand out here in the cold until forensics
is through?”

“Nah. We can go back in. I was thinking that myself. Is this the man you saw pushing the cart before?”

“No. This one is short and chunky. Not fat but—”

“Yeah, I know. Some of them are fat, did you know that? It happens more with women than with men. How they get and stay fat,
I’ll never know.”

“Yes,” Gregor said, “well, the one I saw was tall and thin. Very thin. I’d say a man, except I don’t really know that.”

“Because you didn’t really look,” Rob Benedetti said. “Let’s not start that again.”

“I wasn’t going to. He was tall and thin and wearing dark clothes. That’s all I know. We might be able to piece together a
few things if we went back inside, though. I told your receptionist I was leaving and where I was going, for instance.”

“So?”

“So, she might remember the time,” Gregor said. “I told her I was leaving, I came downstairs, and right as I was walking out
the building, there this guy was. I saw him pushing the cart along the sidewalk, and then I saw him turn into that alley we
came down. The time would be a big help if, as I presume, we think that this is Sherman Markey and the person I saw pushing
the cart is the person who killed him.”

“And Drew Harrigan,” Rob Benedetti said. “We can only hope. Okay, that’s good. We’ll get the time. I’d be happier if we could
get the identification first. We’re all just assuming—”

“—The woman who came to get me said you had a phone call.”

“We did,” Rob Benedetti said. “That’s part of the reason why we’re assuming. Crap. This makes no sense. Assuming this was
the guy who killed them both, and this is Markey, dead from I don’t know what, why not just leave him wherever he fell? Why
bring him out here in the wretched cold and dump him behind the DA’s Office?”

“Lots of reasons,” Gregor said. “Markey may have died in a place that could incriminate the murderer, although I doubt it.
I can’t see any of the
people we’ve looked at in this case so far, not even any of the people on Ellen Harrigan’s list, inviting a man like Sherman
Markey onto their property for any reason. It would make more sense for them to pick a neutral place to meet. My guess is
that somebody needs us to know that Sherman Markey is dead.”

“Needs us to know that?” Rob Benedetti said. “Why?”

Gregor shrugged. “There’s something somebody gets if Sherman Markey is dead. Rather than just missing, I mean. I don’t suppose
it’s possible that Sherman Markey made a will.”

“I’ll ask the people over at the Justice Project about it,” Rob Benedetti said, “but somehow, I doubt it.”

“So do I. Is it possible Sherman Markey was left anything of value in Drew Harrigan’s will?”

“If he was, I’ll join the circus.”

“My feeling exactly,” Gregor said. “I don’t know. There has to be a reason to go through all this elaborate nonsense to make
sure we found the body, right away, and to make sure we got it identified right away. I don’t believe in detective story murderers
who go through a lot of elaborate rigmarole in order to commit the perfect crime. Murderers don’t do that kind of thing in
real life.”

“Charles Stuart,” Rob Benedetti said solemnly.

“Yes, well,” Gregor said. “Any man stupid enough to shoot himself in the stomach is a wild card nobody should make any predictions
about. Let’s get inside.”

“Let’s get inside,” Rob Benedetti agreed.

He walked over to the teams surrounding the crime scene, and had a few words.

G
regor Demarkian liked crime
scenes. He liked the concreteness of them, the mundane specificity of forensics before the analysis got underway and the
medical examiner started to think of himself as a cross between Conan the Barbarian and Sherlock Holmes. He liked them a lot
better than having to investigate in their absence, which happened sometimes, as it had with Drew Harrigan. The problem was
that, in a way, it had happened now, too. Sherman Markey, assuming it was Sherman Markey, had not been killed in that back
alley. There was too much of that going around in this case. None of the bodies was ever found where they died, and none of
them was found where he’d been murdered. It made Gregor wonder how it had been done and why it had been done that way. To
kill someone as
Drew Harrigan had been killed, you either had to not care how long it took before the death occurred, or you had to be sure
that the victim would ingest the poison close to immediately. If there was no urgency to the murder, why commit it? And was
it ever possible to be absolutely sure that your victim would swallow a pill just when you wanted him to? Drew Harrigan could
have taken those pills on the bus coming up to the monastery, or right away, as soon as he got them. He could have stepped
out the murderer’s door and chugged them down dry and dropped dead half a block away.

Actually, there were a lot of questions to be asked about Drew Harrigan that nobody was asking yet, and others that were being
asked, but without results. Back up in Rob Benedetti’s office, Gregor looked around again at the prints on the walls and the
furniture, utilitarian and drab, so much like what anybody would expect the furniture to look like in a District Attorney’s
Office that Gregor wondered if the person who had decorated it had taken her cues from old episodes of Perry Mason. He didn’t
like the unusual in murder cases. He didn’t even believe the unusual in murder cases. When the unusual did exist, it was the
sign of a serial killer, and that was not what was happening here.

Rob Benedetti was on the phone. He got off and came over to where Gregor was looking at a print of Connecticut’s Charter Oak.
Gregor had no idea why the print was there.

“Marbury and Giametti will be up in a minute. I just talked to the ME. He’s standing by waiting for the body to be brought
up to him. I want identification and confirmation of identification within the hour. This is making me crazy. I used to be
a police officer, did you know that?”

“No,” Gregor said, “but I guessed.”

“Marbury and Giametti are good officers. It’s not that. It’s that the whole thing is taking too much time. I know. I shouldn’t
lose my grip. But from the beginning, the whole thing—when I get my hands on Bruce Williamson, I’m going to kill him.”

“People threaten that all the time,” Gregor said.

“I know,” Rob Benedetti said, “but I mean it. I mean, you know, you absolutely know, that Drew Harrigan could never have been
in rehab. If he had been and had gone missing, they would have notified the court. They would have had to. That’s a condition
of these things. Always. Which means Bruce Williamson knew that wherever Drew Harrigan was going, it wasn’t rehab.”

“Not necessarily,” Gregor said. “He might just have agreed to rehab without the controls. He isn’t required by law to impose
the controls. He’s the judge.”

“He’d have known something was wrong if they didn’t want the controls,” Benedetti said. “I hate these guys, did you know that?
Guys like
Bruce Williamson. And he isn’t the only one. Guys who are so damned impressed with money and fame that they think they’re
doing the right thing running an entirely separate justice system for the big guys. Williamson is not known as an easy judge,
did you know that? If you’re a black fifteen-year-old caught with a handful of coke in your pocket, you’re going to jail.
If you’re a black sixteen-year-old, you’re going to an adult prison, and to hell with what we all know is going to happen
to you there. But if you’re Drew Harrigan, or Alexandra Brand—”

“—Alexandra Brand lives in Philadelphia?”

“She was here filming a movie,” Benedetti said. “Got drunk as a skunk one night at some private club downtown, got in her
car, ran a red light, hit a homeless woman pushing around one of those carts, and just up and left the scene.”

“Wait,” Gregor said. “I remember that. I do. It was in the papers non-stop for about three days and then it disappeared.”

“She pled and Williamson gave her probation. No community service, nothing. Just probation. And the old woman was dead. This
is the problem, Mr. Demarkian. This is supposed to be a country of laws and not men, and we’re neck deep in a celebrity culture
that makes the way the Brits treat royalty look egalitarian. It’s insane.”

“Why didn’t Drew Harrigan plead guilty and get probation?” Gregor asked. “If Williamson will sit still for a movie star who
commits a hit-andrun homicide, why wouldn’t he sit still for Harrigan?”

“We weren’t buying,” Benedetti said. “We went in there—I went in there—and told them flat out that I wasn’t going to accept
a plea bargain. I was going to insist on going to trial, and if Williamson and Harrigan’s people tried to get around me, I
was going to go to the press. That put what’s his name, Savage, that put him up the wall, and there was a guy there from Harrigan’s
sponsoring network, LibertyHeart, those people. That guy wasn’t happy, either. Maybe they were worried about the audience.”