Hardscrabble Road (46 page)

B
eata was on the
bus and reaching for her breviary before it struck her, and then she found herself torn by the sort of procedural guilt she
had always thought was the least attractive thing about religious life. It was quarter after eight. They were absent from
prayers because they had errands to do, and they were later than they should have been because Immaculata had had three coughing
fits in half an hour and wanted to pick up lozenges so that she didn’t cough and hack her way home. They were supposed to
take the first opportunity to “make up” prayers, and that first opportunity was now, a half hour ride on this bus with nothing
to worry about in the way of missing their stop, since it was the last one before the bus turned around. The Office sat in
her hand, thick and red. They had separate volumes now for Advent and Christmas, Lent and Easter, and Ordinary Time. In The
Nun’s Story, Audrey Hepburn had carried a prayer book so small it almost fit into the palm of her hand, but that was the Little
Office, and nobody said the Little Office anymore. Beata couldn’t even fault the rule, really. The idea was to have the whole
Church praying the same words at the same times every day, to lift up praise and supplication in one voice, ad maiorem Dei
gloriam.

Next to her on the seat, Immaculata was already hard at prayer, her finger moving carefully from line to line, her lips moving.
The Office was in Latin, and the rule had made much more sense when all the Offices were in Latin. These days, though, there
were religious orders and churches saying the Office in every possible vernacular. Somebody had told her once that the Office
had been translated into Klingon and posted on the Internet.

Beata opened the Office to the relevant day, to the beginning of Morning Prayer, and stopped. The words came. The visions
did, too. She had seen Dr. Richard Tyler before, she just hadn’t realized it was him. She’d not only seen him, she’d stared
straight at his face and exchanged at least half a dozen sentences with him. Even at the time, something about him had been
nagging at her, some feeling that he was somebody she knew or somebody she ought to recognize. But, of course, she’d pushed
all that away. She’d just
assumed that she’d seen him before at the barn. She saw so many of them, and so many of them came over and over and over again.

Out the windows of the bus the day was dark and cold and windy. The few sickly trees that lined the sidewalks were bent under
the force of winds that whipped back and forth with no indication of what they would do next. It wasn’t just that she knew
where she’d seen him, it was that she knew when she’d seen him, and that was, well, crazy. It got crazier the longer she thought
of it. She should pray her Office. She should offer this up. God was supposed to provide you with answers to dilemmas like
this.

At the moment, though, God was not providing, and Beata knew she was going to have to take it up with Reverend Mother.

I
t was Rob Benedetti’s
idea that they should all meet at Neil Savage’s office, and then his further idea that he himself shouldn’t be there, since
he wasn’t really investigating “the case.” Gregor Demarkian had come to the conclusion that nobody was investigating “the
case.” In several important respects, there was no “case” to investigate. There was only a series of not-quite-connected happenings,
a lot of conjecture, and a confusion of jurisdiction. Surely a homicide detective working out of the Hardscrabble Road precinct
should be investigating the death of Drew Harrigan, and a homicide detective out of whatever precinct it was where the DA’s
Office was should be investigating the death of Frank Sheehy. Even assuming cooperation between those two detectives—or, more
likely, detective teams—that would be confusion enough, without taking into consideration the fact that Frank Sheehy had almost
certainly not died in the place he was found, and the further fact that a man dressed as a homeless person pushing a shopping
cart could have walked for miles without being intercepted by anybody. Even the police gave the homeless people a wide berth.
It would be easy for all this confusion to sink whatever case there might be altogether, and Gregor thought John Jackman should
know that, but he didn’t want to tell him, yet. The lack of any clear jurisdiction was having the oddly salutary effect of
leaving him free to work out the problems presented on his own, which was something he’d almost never had the luxury of doing,
even at the FBI. There was always somebody around to second-guess you, or to insist that you do this first rather than that.
Right now, they were all doing whatever he told them to do, in whatever order he told them to do it. Nobody else was competing
for their time.

It was Marbury and Giametti who would be coming to Neil Savage’s office. Rob Benedetti had told him about it when he called
last night to run the details of the ME’s report.

“Arsenic, again,” he’d said. “I know we suspected it, but it’s kind of disappointing. If it’s another case of filling a bunch
of pill capsules with the stuff, it’s going to be impossible to trace to anybody in particular.”

“Did Frank Sheehy take pills?”

“I don’t know,” Rob said. “I had one of the uniforms up here go over and talk to that woman again, that Marla Hildebrande,
and she didn’t seem to think so, but she was an employee. She could have not known.”

“The impression I got was that she was very close to Sheehy,” Gregor said, “but that doesn’t matter, because it almost surely
won’t be another case of putting the arsenic in pill capsules. When you do that, you have to be prepared to wait. Unless you
doctor every single pill, you’ve got to assume it could be a week or more before your victim is actually dead, and I’m pretty
sure nobody could wait that long to get rid of Frank Sheehy.”

“So how would he deliver the arsenic?”

“In a cup of coffee,” Gregor said. “In a drink. Anything sweet would be all right. After that, all we need is somebody who
would not be seen as out of place handing Frank Sheehy a drink—no, beyond that. Somebody who wouldn’t seem out of place talking
to Frank Sheehy in the first place. Somebody Frank Sheehy talked to often enough so that nobody would take much notice of
the fact when he was around.”

“That sounds like it has to be Marla Hildebrande herself,” Rob Benedetti said.

Gregor got out of the cab in front of a magnificent town house with a double wide front facade and steps that curved out to
the left and right as if they belonged in a ballroom instead of on a city street. Gregor kept forgetting that in Philadelphia,
unlike Washington, Really Important Law Firms didn’t take up several floors of a high-rise building, the more modern the better.
He went up the steps and rang the front door bell. The front door was not open to the public. Nothing else took up space in
this building but the firm. A woman came to the door and let him in, and he found himself in the wide front lobby of what
could have been a private club. Marbury and Giametti were already there, in uniform, looking something worse than out of place.
The redheaded woman who had admitted Gregor was paying no attention to them. She did pay attention to Gregor Demarkian, but
just.

“Mr. Savage will be out in a moment,” she said. Then she nodded toward the little cluster of chairs and couches near the front
windows, where Marbury and Giametti already were.

“I keep expecting Katharine Hepburn to come down the stairs and talk about calla lilies,” Marbury said.

Gregor took in the rugs—Persian, and real—and the porcelain. The
paintings were all portraits of men who looked at once too prosperous and too smug to also look intelligent.

Another woman came out, this one small and neat and middle-aged. “Mr. Demarkian?” she said. “Come with me, please. Mr. Savage
can see you now.”

Marbury and Giametti rose when Gregor did, and followed the middle-aged woman when Gregor did, but neither the middle-aged
woman nor the redhead at the front desk paid any attention. Maybe, Gregor thought, this is how they meant it to be. They would
deal with the fact that the police were in the building by pretending that the police weren’t in the building, and the police
would help along the delusion by never talking directly to anybody in the firm. The hallway was a masterpiece of masculine
interior decorating. The paneling went halfway up the walls and was topped with a flat plaster wall papered in dark green.
The runner carpet was dark green, too, but narrow enough to show the hardwood underneath, the same hardwood that had been
used on the walls. There were more pictures, one after the other, in a long line. There had to be a hundred years of partners,
or more.

The small, middle-aged woman opened a door and waved Gregor inside. “He’ll be right in,” she said, and then disappeared.

Gregor, Marbury, and Giametti found themselves in a long conference room, with another Persian rug, another four half-walls
of paneling, and another cluster of partners’ portraits.

“I think everybody who ever worked for this firm had a burr up his ass,” Giametti said.

The door opened, and a man Gregor presumed to be Neil Elliot Savage came in. He was tall and thin and “patrician,” in the
way newspapers meant that word. In other words, he seemed arrogant. He had nothing with him, not so much as a folder. His
suit was expensive but not new.

“Mr. Demarkian,” he said, holding out his hand. Unlike the receptionist and the middle-aged woman, he didn’t behave as if
Marbury and Giametti didn’t exist, only as if they almost didn’t. “Gentlemen,” he said to them, turning his head to one side.
When Gregor sat down, Neil Savage sat down as well. He didn’t wait for the uniformed officers.

“Well,” he said, laying out his long fingers on the table in front of him, “I’m not really sure what information we can give
you. Even though Mr. Harrigan is dead, considerations of confidentiality restrict what I can tell you about his affairs, unless
I’m ordered to do so by a court, and the courts are restricted in what they can order me to do.”

“Did you know the man who just died, Frank Sheehy?” Gregor asked.

“Of course I did. Mr. Sheehy owned the company that syndicated Mr. Harrigan’s radio show. Of course, Mr. Harrigan had an agent
to negotiate contracts
and that kind of thing, but we in this office looked over everything Mr. Harrigan signed, one more time, so to speak, and
just in case. It’s a good policy.”

“I’m sure it is. Will there still be contracts to look over, now that Mr. Harrigan and Mr. Sheehy are both dead?”

“Of course there will be,” Neil Savage said. “There’s the matter of the corporation, for instance, which owns all of Mr. Harrigan’s
copyrights and which handles material under his name. He’s got a publisher for his books, but he was very popular on the lecture
circuit, and every lecture he gave was tape-recorded and reproduced for sale on his Web site. Those tapes will go on selling,
and so will the books. And the corporation itself will not necessarily disband. It will depend on how the fans respond to
the fact that he’s dead.”

“Do you think they’ll respond well?” Gregor asked.

Neil Savage gave an elaborate shrug. “I’ve got no idea what they’ll do. Mr. Harrigan was not a typical client for this firm.
Most of our clients are either individuals whose families have been with us for generations, or the businesses those families
engage in. Of course, there are some exceptions. No firm could survive in this day and age without making some concessions
to modernity, and we do. But Mr. Harrigan was our only media celebrity.”

“How did he happen to come to this firm for representation?”

“He was recommended by a longtime client.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Savage, but you must admit—I’ve seen something of what Drew Harrigan did, and what he was like. And I’ve talked
with his wife at length. Somehow, they don’t seem the sort of people to have friends of the kind that would be longtime clients
in this place.”

Neil Savage hesitated. “One of our longtime clients,” he said, “is the Philadelphia Republican Party. They’ve got a state
firm in Harrisburg, of course, but Philadelphia is a large political operation on its own, and it has legal issues of its
own.”

“Do you also handle the Democratic Party?”

“No.”

“As a matter of conviction?”

“As a matter of tradition,” Neil Savage said. “My grandfather was lieutenant governor here, a long time ago. My great-great-grandfather
was mayor of Philadelphia in the days when people like us could be elected mayor of Philadelphia.”

“Did you know that Drew Harrigan was addicted to prescription painkillers?”

“Everybody knew it,” Neil Savage said. “Not the fans, of course, but everybody who came in contact with him on a daily basis.
It was hard to miss. I think even Ellen knew, although she’s something of a…she looks on the bright side of things.”

“You believe Mr. Sheehy knew?”

“Of course. In fact, I know he did. We talked about it on several occasions. It was obvious a year ago that something was
going to happen eventually if we couldn’t get Mr. Harrigan to enter treatment voluntarily, and, of course, eventually something
did.”

“What about the names on Ellen Harrigan’s list of suspects? Did you know them?”

“I knew the names, yes. I didn’t necessarily know the people.”

“Why did you know the names?”

“Because,” Neil Savage said, “they were mostly the names of people we had reason to believe might file a lawsuit against Drew
Harrigan or The Drew Harrigan Show. Miss Hildebrande’s name seemed to have been thrown in to make the list longer, but the
rest were people Drew Harrigan had commented on on the air. He was not a temperate man.”

“No, he wasn’t,” Gregor agreed. “Did any of them in fact have a lawsuit pending?”

“No,” Neil Savage said. “But there have been lawsuits in the past. That’s chiefly the work we did for Mr. Harrigan, dealing
with the lawsuits. There were a lot of them.”

“Did that bother Mr. Sheehy? Did he get sued when Drew Harrigan did?”