Hardscrabble Road (43 page)

“What about the student in question. Do you remember him?”

“I don’t even know if it was a him,” Alison said. “I’ve never had his name, and the university investigating committee wouldn’t
give it to me short of a court order. Which, by the way, I was threatening to get. I’ve wracked my brains for weeks, but I
can’t think of a single student in any
class I’ve taught for the last five years who said anything at all about his politics one way or the other. I keep thinking
that has to be wrong, somebody must have made an offhand comment during the last elections, and somebody probably did, but
it didn’t stick with me. And if you’re about to ask me why somebody would go to all the trouble of contacting Drew Harrigan
if that was the case, don’t bother. I don’t know.”

“What did you mean, the university wouldn’t give you the name of the complaining student?” Gregor asked.

“They wouldn’t,” Alison said. “That’s the way university inquiries are run. We’re better than the criminal justice system,
you see. We’re really interested in getting to justice, and not just in a competition. It’s not an adversary system here.”

“So you aren’t allowed to face your accusers?”

“If they had to face me, they might be too intimidated to make the accusation.”

“That’s the idea,” Gregor said. “It helps guard against false accusations.”

“I know,” Alison said. “Which is why I was threatening a court order. They backed down after that, though. I knew they would.
The public doesn’t understand the spirit of disinterested inquiry which is the function of the university, so they’re liable
to get all worked up over what they mistakenly see as a university committee running roughshod over a professor’s due process
rights.”

“You sound very, very sarcastic.”

“I am feeling very, very sarcastic,” Alison said. “But that’s all I can be. I really don’t know why this started, or why anybody
would pick me to start it about. First I was all over the airways. There was even a piece up about me on Matt Drudge’s Web
site. Then I was the object of the inquiry. Then the inquiry was called off but I was suddenly on Ellen Harrigan’s list. And,
trust me, that one is all over campus by now. I’m going to have to change my name to Red Emma if this keeps up.”

Gregor thought about it. “You never met Drew Harrigan, not even once?”

“Not even once.”

“What about Dr. Tyler, do you know? Had he met him?”

“You’d have to ask him,” Alison said, “but I think he had. But that makes sense, doesn’t it? Dr. Tyler writes political books,
lots of them, so far off the left end of the spectrum they’re practically on Mars. The evil corporations are brainwashing
us all to believe we really want to eat hamburgers instead of raw vegetables and tofu on whole grain bread. The United States
planned and carried out the 9/11 attacks itself, to give the government the excuse to
restrict civil liberties. Drew Harrigan had something about Jig Tyler on nearly every broadcast. But I’ve just been sitting
here, worried about Thomas Aquinas and the concept of property in twelfth-century Britain.”

“Had you ever met Ellen Harrigan?”

“No,” Alison said. “And from what I could see, I wouldn’t want to.”

“Is she right? Did you have a motive for wanting her husband dead?”

“Well, I was being investigated by the university, and that investigation did disappear as soon as Drew Harrigan’s body was
found; but it would have disappeared anyway, because I had every intention of filing a suit, and the university wouldn’t risk
that kind of publicity unless it had a lot stronger evidence against me than anything it could have had. I would think that,
to kill somebody, you’d have to be desperate, and I wasn’t desperate.”

“What about Dr. Tyler? Would he have had a reason to want Drew Harrigan dead?”

“If you believe his books, he wants half the world dead. I don’t know, really. You’d have to ask him. I’ve met him exactly
once, and that was yesterday, when the news came out that it was Drew Harrigan who’d died, and not that homeless man. He walked
over here to tell me about it.”

“Why?”

“To offer commiseration from a fellow sufferer, I suppose,” Alison said. “Maybe he just wanted to see what I looked like after
all the reports. Anyway, that’s the only time I ever set eyes on him in the flesh. I really couldn’t tell you much about him,
not even what he was like. He seemed nice enough here yesterday. He seems anything but nice on television.”

“One more thing,” Gregor said. “This accusation by a student, did it actually have to exist? Did there actually have to be
a student making a complaint? If you weren’t allowed to question your accusers, what would stop the administration from claiming
that such a complaint had been made in order to, I don’t know, harass you, force you out of your job?”

“The answer is nothing, I suppose, but why would they want to? I’m not a thorn in anybody’s side that I know of. I don’t have
an endowed chair that somebody else might want. I don’t get involved in politics, campus or otherwise, or at least I didn’t
before all this started. Why would anybody want to go to the trouble?”

“I don’t know,” Gregor said.

And it was true. He didn’t. He had no idea where this line of questioning was going. It was just that here was one more thing
that had no reason to be here, one more complication for the sake of complication. He didn’t like it.

What he did like was Alison Standish, and under other circumstances he would have offered to buy her dinner.

M
ost of Cavanaugh Street
was dark by the time Gregor Demarkian got back, a three-block stretch of quiet in a city that had recently become so revitalized
he sometimes thought it was threatening to turn into New York. There was light spilling out of the Ararat, but he never went
there after eight in the evening anymore. There were too many tourists looking around for “exotic” food, and for him. That
was what happened when your life became the subject of newspaper articles over and above the ones that reported the cases
you were involved in or the testimony you gave at trials. Bennis would understand this. Bennis had spent a good deal of her
life being an object of public curiosity. That was something you wanted to happen to you when you wrote books and wanted to
sell as many of them as possible, which Bennis did. She took great pride in how many bestseller lists she’d been on and how
long she’d been on them. But Bennis wasn’t home, and he was damned—he really was—if he was going to go rushing up to the apartment
to see if she’d left a message on his answering machine. She hadn’t left a message on his answering machine now for over ten
days, and he’d checked for one far too often.

He passed his own apartment and looked up at the windows at Lida Arkmanian’s on the other side of the street. The big bank
of glass on the second floor was dark. If Lida was home, she wasn’t in her living room. He crossed the street so as not to
be directly in the line of fire when he passed the Ararat. He had to pass the church first, and that was all right. The spookiness
he’d gotten from it before it had been rebuilt was gone now that its entire facade was lit up all night long, framing the
tall new stained glass windows and the broad stone steps as if they were works of art. If he went up the steps and tried the
door, it would be open. Tibor insisted on it. There was always the possibility that somebody, passing, might need to pray.
They took care of the security problems by having a tandem team of parishioners sit vigil all night. You could come in to
pray, but if you tried to leave a package under the pew, it would be discovered before it could blow the church to pieces
again. He had sat vigil a few times himself, to fill a gap in the schedule, or because he knew he wasn’t going to be able
to sleep anyway. Most of the time it was the Very Old Women who stayed up all night, and who didn’t mind spending the time
in a church.

The Ararat was packed. He was glad for the Melajians at the same time he was sad for the days when he could always stop in
and eat, because there was always a place at the tables and never much of anybody around he didn’t know. He passed Ohanian’s
and considered stopping in to buy loukoumia, or something else he could shove down his throat without
thinking about it. He was starving. He should have eaten hours ago. He went another half block, crossed another street, and
went another half block again. By now, the street was very, very quiet. It was all residential here. Most of the buildings
were private houses that didn’t rent their ground floors out to businesses. He went up the steps of the one that was wrapped
up to look like a box of chocolate candy—Donna must be getting ready for Valentine’s Day early—and rang the buzzer.

It was Tommy who came to the door, a book in one hand and a pair of glasses in the other. The glasses were new this year,
and he had been very careful to get wire rims, like the kind Harrison Ford wore when he was teaching college classes in the
Indiana Jones movies.

“Hi, Mr. Demarkian. Have you talked sense into Grace yet?”

“Grace is in New York playing the harpsichord,” Gregor said. “What does she need to have sense talked into her about?”

“About the name of that dog,” Tommy said. “I mean, it’s undignified. It’s undignified for the dog.”

Down at the end of the long hall that ran past the stair, a door opened. Donna Moradanyan Donahue stuck her head out and said,
“Oh, Gregor. Hello. We weren’t expecting you. Aren’t you on a case?”

“Relax,” Gregor said. “I haven’t come to pump you about Bennis.”

Donna relaxed so visibly it was practically the punch line to a comedy routine. Gregor ignored it, and kept coming down the
hall toward the kitchen. “I’m looking for Russ, to tell you the truth. I’ve got a few things I want to ask him.”

“Is it private?” Donna asked. “If it’s private, you can go into the study.”

“It’s not particularly private. I don’t care where we are. Would it be wrong of me to ask if you had a ham sandwich somewhere
around? It’s been a long day and I forgot to eat dinner.”

“Did you remember to eat lunch?”

“Lunch, yes,” Gregor said. “For that, I had Tibor come to keep me company.”

“I’ve got a lot of dinner left over. I’ll throw some into the microwave. Russ is watching something or the other on cable.”

Gregor turned to his left and went into the door that led to the “study,” which the Donahues sometimes called the “television
room.” Whatever it was, it was the place where the television was left to rest, because Donna had strong views on having a
television in a place where people were supposed to socialize. Gregor always thought it was one of those things she must have
picked up at college before she dropped out.

In the study, Russ was camped out in an enormous overstuffed chair, watching Forensic Files. Gregor had seen some of those
programs on Court
TV, and although they’d seemed accurate enough, he couldn’t understand why anybody watched them. It seemed to him there was
far too much information out there about crime and forensics as it was.

Russ looked up and said, “Hey, Gregor. What’s up?”

“I’m looking for a lawyer,” Gregor said.

“Has John managed to get you arrested? I saw you on television, by the way. Jackman’s out of his mind. He’s going to cause
a nuclear explosion by the time he’s finished with this.”

“It’s Rob Benedetti running the show, as far as I can tell.”

“It ought to be a homicide detective running the show,” Russ said, “and Rob Benedetti is going to do what John Jackman wants
him to do, because he thinks John Jackman is going to be the next mayor of Philadelphia.”

“Is he?”

“In a walk.”

“I don’t understand why you’d want to watch something like this,” Gregor said. “Don’t you get enough of this at work all day?”

“I don’t get any of this at work all day,” Russ said. “I don’t practice criminal law. I probably should. What do you need
a lawyer for that you’d come over here in the night?”

The door to the room swung open a little farther than it was, and Donna came in carrying a long tray with enough food on it
to keep Gregor for three days, plus a tall glass of mineral water, a linen napkin, a full set of silverware, and a little
white ceramic cup full of whipped butter. There was a TV table open and discarded against the wall near the bookcase. She
put the tray down on that and straightened up.

“There,” she said. “That should keep you. I’ll leave you two alone to talk.”

“You don’t need to leave us alone to talk,” Gregor said. “It’s nothing confidential.”

Donna was out the door and gone.

“It’s because of Bennis,” Russ said. “She doesn’t want you—”

”—Oh, I know,” Gregor said, moving the TV table, tray and all, in front of the other overstuffed armchair. “She should know
better, though. I haven’t pumped her about Bennis yet. Do you know what’s going on with Bennis?”

“No,” Russ said. “It’s like the seal of the confessional or something. I’ll admit to its being incredibly annoying.”

Gregor sat down in front of the food and thought that no matter what else was going on, Donna was a true Armenian woman. If
somebody said they were hungry, she assumed they had been starving in the desert for forty days and fed them accordingly.

“So, what is it?” Russ said. “You need help solving a case, for once? What will the papers think if they find out the Armenian-American
Hercule Poirot comes to a lowly local lawyer when he’s stumped by a fiendish archvillain?”

“You watch too much television,” Gregor said. “And I’m not stumped, if by stumped you mean not able to figure out who committed
the crime. I know who committed the crime. I knew it halfway through the morning of the second day. There were really only
two or three possibilities. One of them is now dead, and another one isn’t capable.”

“I’d be careful about that if I were you,” Russ said. “I think it was even you who told me that everybody is capable, and
it’s bad policy to rule out a suspect because you think he has too fine a soul to commit a murder.”