Hardscrabble Road (47 page)

“Most of the time, no,” Neil Savage said. “People who sue, well, they tend not to get very good representation. Of course,
Mr. Harrigan made comments about public figures, and if they’d decided to sue they would have had very good representation
indeed, but they wouldn’t. It’s nearly impossible for a public figure to sue a media company for libel or slander and win.
The courts err far too much on the freedom of the press side of the issue. But other people, professors at the University
of Pennsylvania, for instance, who were among Drew’s favorite targets, those people do sometimes decide to sue. And they can
neither afford, nor do they know how to find, representation that would be of any use to them.”

“Do you know who was getting the extra prescription drugs for Drew Harrigan?”

“According to Mr. Harrigan, it was a homeless man who did occasional work for him, named Sherman Markey.”

“According to everybody I’ve talked to,” Gregor said, “it wouldn’t have been possible for Sherman Markey to have done any
such thing. For one thing, he looked the part of a homeless person far too well for druggists to hand pills to him on a regular
basis.”

Neil Savage shrugged. “According to Drew, that was who it was. I’ve got no reason to disbelieve him.”

“Have you met Sherman Markey?”

“I’ve seen him,” Neil Savage said. “He was in court on a couple of occasions because of the lawsuit he filed for defamation.
That the Justice Project filed for him. He was in court.”

“Do you know where Sherman Markey is now?”

Neil Savage looked honestly surprised. “Of course I don’t. I wish I did. The disappearing act has caused no end of trouble.
Not that I’m surprised, mind you. Taking off instead of taking responsibility is the kind of thing a man like that specializes
in.”

“A man like what?”

“A homeless person,” Neil Savage said. “An alcoholic. A drug addict, presumably. You don’t end up on the streets like that
unless you lack organization, determination, and pride. Don’t you think?”

T
he worst thing about
not having a settled status—aside from the very good possibility that he was never going to get paid—was the fact that he
had no settled place to work out of. The sensible thing would have been to use his own apartment on Cavanaugh Street. If he
was going to behave like the Armenian-American Hercule Poirot, he might as well have the comforts of a Hercule Poirot, and
at the moment luxury railway carriages were not available in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Unfortunately, Cavanaugh Street
was convenient to nothing in this case, and there was no Hastings to sit beside him and fumble about badly among his ideas.
He found himself sitting in the back of a police car again, wondering why it was strictly necessary for them to have this
cagey-thing between the front and back seats, and making notes in a little bound book with stiff covers that Tommy Donahue
had given him for Christmas. State police cars didn’t have it, or at least the one he’d last ridden in hadn’t. If it had,
he’d have noticed. The little bound book looked precious, but it had the advantage of those stiff covers, half an inch thick,
make of cardboard but very sturdy.

He had just started to make a list of questions when his cell phone went off, and the radio in the front seat went off as
well.

“Mr. Demarkian?” a female voice said. “Mr. Benedetti needs to see you and Officers Marbury and Giametti as soon as possible.
Do you think you could tell them so?”

Marbury turned around in the front seat and said, “That was for us. They want us to go to Benedetti’s office as soon as possible.
You have any reason you can’t?”

Gregor thanked the woman on the phone and shut off. Then he went back to his list. It was a simple list, but he thought it
pretty much covered
everything he wanted to know to wrap this all up. What he wanted to know was a lot more than he, or Benedetti, needed to know.
In real life police cases, a lot of questions went unanswered. There were always side issues and subplots it made no point
to pursue. Fortunately, he was not a professional law enforcement person any longer. Right now, he didn’t even know if he
was a professional consultant to law enforcement persons.

He shied away from examining his use of the word “persons” and wrote: Where is Sherman Markey?

He was fairly sure he knew who had gotten him out of the way. There was only one person, or group of people, who actually
needed him out of the way. Gregor would bet on the single person and not the group, though. Groups leaked like sieves. He
picked up his pen again and wrote: Why was Alison Standish falsely accused of political bias?

Gregor was not naive about the politics of Ivy League universities, and especially not of the Ivy League university he had
himself graduated from. It was within the realm of possibility that there really was a disgruntled former student and that
Dr. Standish had been politically biased when she dealt with him, but Gregor doubted it. It didn’t feel that way. She didn’t
present herself as somebody who would discriminate against a student because of political views that arguably had nothing
at all to do with the subject matter of the course at hand, or as somebody who cared much about politics in any sense.

He turned the pen over in his hands and then wrote: Why is there so much overlap between Ellen Harrigan’s list and Ray Dean
Ballard’s list?

Some of the overlap made sense. Some of the people involved in the case were the kind of people who might reasonably be expected
to have accounts at Markwell Ballard. Some of the overlap was just eerie. What was Ray Dean Ballard doing on Ellen Harrigan’s
list at all? Yes, Drew Harrigan had attacked Philadelphia Sleeps, and called it practically a Communist organization, but
that wasn’t personal, and it wasn’t likely to get Ray Dean fired or even inconvenienced in any other way. There was another
question, too: Who had drawn that list up for Ellen Harrigan in the first place?

If there was one thing Gregor was sure of, it was that Ellen Harrigan hadn’t written it herself. She wasn’t that well wrapped.
He doubted if she’d heard of all the people on it. He doubted even more that she had any idea why any of those people would
“hate” her husband enough to want to kill him. Ellen Harrigan was a woman who ran on a very narrow array of emotions, and
the most important of the ones she had was fear.

He dropped down what would have been another line if the paper had been lined and wrote: Where was he getting the prescription
medication?

Gregor didn’t mean Drew Harrigan. He knew where Harrigan was getting the prescription medication. He meant Drew Harrigan’s
source. It all
came down to this: it made no sense to kill Harrigan if you couldn’t be sure that nobody would discover that you were the
one feeding him the pills in the first place. That meant that you had to be getting those pills in a way that you believed
could not be discovered in almost any circumstance.

They were at Rob Benedetti’s door. Gregor put the little bound book into the inside pocket of his coat and waited until Marbury
came around to let him out. This was a car for transporting criminals. The back doors didn’t open from the inside.

Getting out, Gregor looked around, carefully checking for homeless people, but found none. The last few days had made him
hypersensitive to an issue he’d never thought about much before, and that made him more than a little uncomfortable to think
about now. They went through into the lobby and waited for the elevator. They walked into the elevator and pushed the button
for Rob Benedetti’s floor. The building felt deserted, although Gregor knew it couldn’t be. It had to be the time of day.

“Places always spook me when they get like this,” Giametti said.

“Everything spooks you,” Marbury said. “You thought aliens were going to land when the planets aligned.”

The elevator stopped on Rob Benedetti’s floor and they all got out. They walked down to the woman who served as Benedetti’s
gatekeeper. She didn’t need to be told who they were. Gregor thought he himself would probably stick in her memory forever,
because he was the one she’d had to find after being told there was a body in the back in a shopping cart.

She got Benedetti himself on the intercom, told him they were there, and then turned back to Gregor. “It’s the nuns,” she
said. “I can handle anything but nuns. And nuns in habits like that.” She waved her hands in the air. “I thought they stopped
wearing habits like that. They’re not anywhere near as scary in ordinary street clothes.”

Benedetti came out and began waving them all into his office. He looked harried and triumphant at once. Gregor did not think
this was a good sign. Investigations were not usually aided by investigators who imagined themselves marching through the
last act in a Verdi opera.

“Wait until you hear this,” he said, in what was supposed to be a muted tone under his breath, but wasn’t. “Just wait until
you hear this.”

The two nuns Gregor remembered from the police station were sitting in Benedetti’s office, their feet flat on the floor, their
hands folded in their laps and out of sight under their voluminous sleeves. At least, Gregor thought it was the same two.
He was sure about the young one, who was unusual in both her looks and her manner. He admitted to himself that he hadn’t paid
attention to the other nun yesterday, and wasn’t paying much attention to this other nun now.

Benedetti waved them all to chairs and sat down on the edge of his desk. “This is Sister Maria Beata and Sister Mary Immaculata.
I think we’ve all met.”

“Yes, of course, Mr. Benedetti,” Immaculata said. She looked disapproving, but she probably always did.

“Tell Mr. Demarkian what you told me,” Benedetti said to Sister Beata. Then he turned to Gregor. “They came marching in here
about forty-five minutes ago and told me the most amazing thing.”

“We didn’t know where else to go,” Beata said. “Our first thought after talking to Reverend Mother was to go to the precinct
at Hardscrabble Road, of course, but that didn’t seem to make sense, since it didn’t seem as if anybody there knew anything
about this. Then we tried to call you, Mr. Demarkian, but we got your answering machine. We know you have a cell phone number,
but we didn’t know what it was.”

“We weren’t sure if there was directory assistance for cell phone numbers,” Immaculata said.

Beata brushed this off. “The thing is, I never would have remembered. I mean, I did remember, in a way, but I couldn’t put
my finger on it. Even at the time, you see, the man in the red hat looked familiar, but I just thought that was because he
came to the barn often. And the odd thing is, he did come to the barn often. Or rather, often enough. At least a couple of
times a month this winter.”

“People come in and out,” Immaculata said. “You can never tell with the barn, who will show up and who will not. We have regulars,
but there are other people who come and go.”

“And later,” Beata said, “when it was Drew Harrigan in the red hat, I thought that was it. I must have recognized him as Harrigan
and not realized it. But I knew that couldn’t be true. Mr. Harrigan was Reverend Mother’s brother. I hadn’t seen him often,
but I’d seen him often enough to know when somebody wasn’t him, and the man in the red hat that night couldn’t have been him.
He was too thin, for one thing.”

“Listen to this.” Benedetti was practically dancing.

Beata ignored him. “Then this morning,” she said, “we were in town, and Immaculata wanted a throat lozenge, because she was
coughing. So we stopped at a drugstore to buy her some Halls mentholyptus, and he was there, standing by the magazine rack.
And then I knew, you know, because he was wearing a hat. Just not a red one.”

“Jig Tyler,” Rob Benedetti said, nearly crowing. “It was Jig Tyler who showed up at the barn that night, dressed up like a
homeless person.”

“Are you sure?” Gregor asked Beata.

Beata nodded her head. “Absolutely sure. It’s like when you’re trying to remember the name of an actor you’re watching in
a movie, or where you’ve
seen him before, and then the next day or so it comes to you, and you can’t imagine you ever didn’t know. I’m sure. I looked
straight into his face as we were getting out of the car.”

“Did you look straight into the face of Drew Harrigan when he was found dead?” Gregor asked.

Beata shook her head. “I really couldn’t have told very much from the body, Mr. Demarkian. It was slumped, and fouled with
vomit. I’m not a doctor and I’m not a pathologist. It was…unnerving…to be with a dead body at all, never mind one who’d been
sick. I took a pulse. I checked for breathing. I wasn’t looking into his face. I’m sorry.”

“No, that’s quite all right. I don’t blame you. You say that Dr. Tyler had been to the barn before on more than one occasion?”

“Oh, yes,” Beata said. “He’d been coming all winter. I don’t know why I never realized who he was, because that wasn’t the
first time I’d thought I recognized him. But you see, we don’t really spend that much time in the barn. We hire a man for
security, and then we leave the place open. It’s not really a shelter. Any other winter, the city would have shut us down
if we tried to do this the way we’re doing it. Now, of course, with the temperatures so awful, they look the other way. But
it’s not as if we’re out there managing things all the time.”

“Did you ever see anybody else you thought you recognized?” Gregor asked.

“No, Mr. Demarkian. I’m sorry. You’re wondering if I might have seen Mr. Harrigan. I’m almost certain I didn’t. But that doesn’t
mean he wasn’t there. You might ask one of the other extern sisters, Immaculata here or Marie Bernadette.”

“I didn’t recognize this one,” Immaculata said. “I still can’t believe you did.”

“You wouldn’t happen to know the specific dates on which you saw Dr. Tyler?” Gregor said.

Beata shook her head. “I really don’t. It wasn’t that big an issue for me, you see. It wasn’t that I thought anything was
wrong or going on. I suppose I should have.”