Hardscrabble Road (45 page)

“But Mr. Harrigan is likely to have had a lot more money than, say, Dr. Richard Alden Tyler.”

“Sure,” Ray Dean said. “But it’s not about money. In the world my father lives in, everybody has money. My father has, uh,
principles, about who he will enable to get richer and who he won’t. He wouldn’t touch the Drew Harrigan/Rush Limbaugh/Ann
Coulter axis with a ten-foot pole. Not that he’s much in favor of Democrats, either, you understand. Do you know why I starred
Jig Tyler’s name?”

“No,” Gregor Demarkian said.

“Because I’m pretty sure he’s the one who made the offer on the land to Our Lady of Mount Carmel Monastery.”

Now, Ray Dean saw, he had Gregor Demarkian interested. “That’s not legal, is it, to ask about a particular transaction like
that? Or to tell me. You really do need a court order for that sort of thing.”

“I didn’t ask for it directly,” Ray Dean said. “They wouldn’t have given it to me if I had. But I grew up around people who
know how to ask the questions that will get them the answer without crossing the line, and I got this one. Look at that list.
There’s Neil Savage.”

“Yes, I noticed that,” Demarkian said.

“Savage almost certainly didn’t make the offer,” Ray Dean said, “because he’s Harrigan’s attorney, and doing that under the
circumstances would have been illegal and it would probably have gotten him disbarred.”

“If it ever came out,” Demarkian said.

“He couldn’t know it wouldn’t,” Ray Dean said, “and he wouldn’t take that kind of risk. Not for a low-rent putz like Drew
Harrigan. I’ve known a million Neil Savages. Trust me. Then there’s me, of course, and that’s perfectly possible, but I promise
you the right to look through all my records at the bank, no matter how confidential, so you can check.”

“Fair enough.”

“Then there’s Kate Daniel, but the times don’t work. She didn’t have anything to do with this case until well after the offer
was made. Of course, she was married to Savage once—”

“—Was she?”

“Years ago, when they were both just out of law school. She had a feminist epiphany and ran away from home. Of course, they
could still be close. I have no idea if they are or not, but I’ve met them both, and I’d doubt it. And it goes back to that
risk thing. It’s too close a connection to trust that it wouldn’t get caught.”

“How does a woman like Kate Daniel get enough money to open an account in an investment bank?”

“She inherits it,” Ray Dean said. “Then we’ve got Frank Sheehy. That’s a real possibility. A lot of the success of his business
depended on Drew Harrigan. He was losing money because of the rehab thing. It was worth his while to do anything he had to
do to get Drew Harrigan straightened out and back on the air. I can’t really rule out Frank Sheehy. Even the murder fits,
if you think about it. Whoever was getting Drew Harrigan the drugs killed Sheehy because Sheehy knew all about it, or maybe
Sheehy was getting Harrigan the drugs. I’m not very good at this, am I? I’ve thought about writing a murder mystery, but I
keep getting worried I’d end up at the end of the book babbling like this.”

“I want to know why you think it was Dr. Tyler who tried to buy that piece of land.”

“Because Jig Tyler was feeding material to Drew Harrigan,” Ray Dean said. “He’d been doing it for months, at least. He might
have been doing it for longer.”

“And you know that—”

Ray Dean looked at the ceiling. “Because he fed something to Drew about me. Last November. Three days before Thanksgiving,
we were at a party together. He contributes to causes. The causes have parties. He goes. I’ve always found that one of the
oddest things about him. Anyway, I had just come from the office, where I’d realized that I was going to have to turn down
a donation we’d gotten that very afternoon, a big donation, in six figures, because I’d finally figured out who the donor
was.”

“Who was it?”

“Charles Scherver. He doesn’t call himself that anymore. He changed his name when he got out of prison, but it was Charles
Scherver nonetheless, the most famous American traitor in the history of the Cold War. If we’d taken the donation, it would
have come out. We’re required to make our list of donors public. Anyway, by the time I tracked it down it was late, and there
was nobody in the office, and I went to this party. And I got to talking to Dr. Tyler, and then, just as we were waiting for
our cars on our way out, I told him about it. We were talking about donations versus public financing of charitable works,
and Tyler was doing one of his shticks about the evils of capitalism, and I let loose with all the checks and balances there
are on donations, and I told him about it. And then his car picked him up, and he was gone. The next morning—the very next
morning—eleven o’clock sharp, Drew Harrigan led with the story on his broadcast.”

“Maybe somebody overheard you.”

“There was nobody there to overhear.”

“Maybe he told a friend, who told Harrigan.”

“Maybe,” Ray Dean said, “but I don’t believe it, and neither do you. It was too fast. He must have gone home and gotten on
the phone right away, if he didn’t use a cell in the car. It’s the kind of stupid little thing that causes us no end of trouble
because it gets all the ‘patriot’ groups mad at us—note that I’ve got mental scare quotes around the word ‘patriot’—and they
make a lot of noise, and they bring our donations down.”

“Even if he did give that information to Drew Harrigan,” Gregor Demarkian said carefully, “that doesn’t mean he also tried
to buy the property from the nuns, does it?”

“No,” Ray Dean said. “But.” He shrugged. “It was the connection. That started me looking. That’s what made me ask questions.
Jig Tyler is the person who tried to buy that land from the monastery, Mr. Demarkian. I know it for sure.”

“How?”

“Telling you that would be illegal,” Ray Dean said. “You’re going to have to get a warrant and ask those questions yourself.
But it’s true. I don’t know what kind of a connection Jig Tyler had with Drew Harrigan. I’ve met Tyler on a number of occasions,
and I can’t imagine it. Tyler hates idiots. Harrigan was practically the definition of one. But there you are. Get the warrant.
Ask the questions. Find out where Sherman Markey is and bring him back to me.”

“You think Jig Tyler has Sherman Markey, too?”

“I don’t know,” Ray Dean said. “I just know that he’s out there somewhere, dead or alive. He’s being used by people who should
know better than to…I don’t know than to what. It’s freezing out there. He’s been gone for weeks. I want him back. I want
him now.”

“I’ll do my best,” Gregor Demarkian said.

Ray Dean felt suddenly awkward—more shades of St. Paul’s, more memories from the kind of childhood he would never have wished
on himself. He stood up a little stiffly and said good-bye in that oddly formal way he couldn’t help. He hadn’t noticed it
before, but Fr. Tibor Kasparian hadn’t said a word. Ray Dean said it was nice meeting him, anyway, and then he heard his mother
in his head, telling him that manners had to be glued on tight, especially in the most awkward situations.

A moment later, he was out on the street, looking up and down again. He would go to that Middle Eastern food store, he thought.
He would buy loukoumia and halva. He wasn’t the kind of person who usually used sugar to make himself feel better, but he
didn’t usually use liquor, either, and he didn’t usually use pills, and he thought that, the way things were going, he might
as well try something.

I
t was one of
those things, an accident at the end of a long string of accidents, an impossibility dressed up as a moment of revelation.
Jig Tyler had been trained well enough to know that coincidences happen. He didn’t believe in the supernatural, or the paranormal,
or fate. Still, he wasn’t usually out of bed and out in town this early in the morning. He liked to read late at night, because
it was quiet, and nobody thought to call him. He’d been up until at least three, plowing his way through the latest piece
of idiocy by Mona Charen. He didn’t know why he went on reading books like that. They were aimed at an audience with an IQ
of under a hundred and average cultural literacy of even less than that, and it was just as bad in the books by the “liberals”
on the playing field. He wished he could take all
these people and sweep them off the board, the way angry women swept chess pieces off boards in melodramatic movies. He wished
he had a melodramatic movie to go to. He wished he were still asleep, but the alarm clock had gone off for some reason probably
having to do with the fact that it was very old and beginning to malfunction, and he hadn’t been able to get to sleep again
once he’d finally managed to stop its buzzing.

He had gone out because he’d started feeling claustrophobic staying in, and he had gone into the drugstore because it had
been handy and open when the wind started. He never wandered around in drugstores. He always headed straight for whatever
it was he was looking for. He didn’t know what to make of the plastic toys and decks of cards and boxes of candy that drugstores
had everywhere. He couldn’t imagine anybody paying the extra freight to pick up a three-ring binder here to get out of walking
the few blocks to a regular stationery store. The people in drugstores made him nervous, because they always seemed to be
confused about what it was they were supposed to do next. Now that he was out and awake and cold he was also fuzzy, the way
he got when his sleep had been interrupted at the very worst time.

He went back to look at the magazines because they were there to look at, and because they at least constituted something
to read, sort of. He looked over the covers of Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News & World Report. He marveled at the sheer number
of cooking magazines, all with glossy four color photo spreads of things that probably tasted terrible once you had them in
front of you, but that looked so perfect on the page you wanted to have every one of them now. He looked at the car and motorcycle
magazines. He looked at the women’s magazines, which all seemed to assume that women were spending their time at home all
day the way they had in 1950. He was about to go back out into the cold when he saw the nuns.

Here was another accident—what were the odds that it would be the same nuns, all the way out here, miles from Hardscrabble
Road and their convent? Monastery, Jig reminded himself, and then the younger of the two turned, looked around absently, saw
him, and stopped. Jig was holding a copy of Women’s Wrestling Today, which he found to be one of the most remarkable examples
of popular culture he’d ever encountered. The women must have been taking steroids. There was no possibility that they could
have developed that kind of musculature without them. He put the magazine down very quickly. The women were all wearing very
skimpy clothing, thongs and postage stamp bra tops, not the kind of thing that would suit a nun. The nun didn’t seem to notice.
She was staring at his face. Then she tugged sharply at her companion’s sleeve and started to come over.

This was not an accident, but a mistake. He should have turned away and left the store, immediately. He should not have stood
still where he was,
with his left hand resting on the big magazine rack, as if he was seriously considering finding something to buy.

“Excuse me,” the nun said. “I’m sorry to bother you. It’s Dr. Richard Tyler, isn’t it?”

“That’s right,” Jig said. Then he thought that that, too, was another mistake. He would never make a spy. People recognized
him from television, or from magazines. He was used to admitting who he was.

“I’m sorry,” the nun said again. “I really don’t mean to bother you. It’s just—I have such a strong feeling I’ve seen you
somewhere before.”

“You’ve seen me on television, probably,” Jig said. “I’m not really on all that often, but people remember.”

“We don’t watch television,” the nun said. “And it’s not that, it’s that I could swear I’ve seen you somewhere in person,
face-to-face. Very closely face-to-face. Do you come out to the monastery?”

“The monastery?”

“Our Lady of Mount Carmel on Hardscrabble Road.”

“Is that in Philadelphia?”

The nun bit her lip. She was, Jig thought, a remarkably beautiful young woman, more like an actress playing a nun than most
of the nuns he’d met. She was also very intelligent. It showed in her face. For once, it did not make him very comfortable.

“I’m sorry,” she said finally. “I’m being ridiculous, and I’m intruding. It’s just—never mind. I don’t know. I’m not making
any sense. Please excuse me, Dr. Tyler. I shouldn’t have intruded on your privacy.”

“Not at all,” Jig said.

The nun gave him one last searching, worried look. Then she turned away and went back to the other nun, who had bought something
she was now carrying in a white plastic bag. Jig realized that he couldn’t remember nuns like this, with full habits to the
floor, carrying anything in their hands. He couldn’t remember them wearing coats, either, and now he knew why. They had heavy
wool capes to wear instead.

The two nuns went out together, to the front of the store, to the street. Jig watched them go until he couldn’t see them any
longer. His mouth was as dry as paper. He looked at the clock on the wall and saw that it was barely quarter past eight.

There were things he was good at, and things he was not good at. When he was good at something, he was so good at it that
he could not be compared to other people who did it. In mathematics, in physics, in research medicine, he was so far out ahead
of the pack that he might as well have been in the field alone. When he was not good at something, he was incapacitated.
There were not a lot of things he was not good at, but they were there, and one of them was lying to other people face-to-face.

No, he thought, that wasn’t true. Sometimes he did that very well. It was more complicated than that. It was just that he
had been so very bad at lying to that nun, just a moment ago, and it was one of the few times in his life when he had wanted
his lies to be effective.