Hardscrabble Road (50 page)

“Nobody is listening to this,” Alison said.

“You would have sued,” Jig said. “They would have listened to that. Just watch them change if not changing means they lose
money.”

“They’re not going to change,” Alison said. “They’re just going to retire.

I’ve got to get back to my office. I have to teach in a little while. I never have supported the speech codes, you know. Why
pick me?”

Jig shrugged. “It was a paper you wrote. I forgot what it was called, now. About women and heresy.”

“ ‘Women and Theology in the Albigensian Crusade.’ ”

“That’s the one.”

“I really do have to go now,” Alison said.

She watched him sitting there behind his desk, perfectly at ease with himself and the world, perfectly at ease with his conscience.
There were people who said that the great danger of a scientific education was that it lacked insight into the human condition.
For that, you had to study the humanities. Here he was, though, with his Heidegger and his Jane Austen, and he was just as
arrogant and brutal as any witch-hunting thug.

F
or a few moments,
Gregor Demarkian thought he was going to have to stage an escape from Marbury and Giametti’s car. It was suddenly obvious
why there was no settled chain of command in this case. Without one, Rob Benedetti could play crusading district attorney,
like a character in a John Grisham novel, and run the whole show himself. He didn’t even have to leave the office to do it,
since Gregor had the cell phone, and Benedetti had no compunctions about dialing its number. It had gone beyond the point
where Gregor was worried about whether or not he was ever going to be named a formal consultant on this case, or whether or
not he was going to get paid. He’d gone without getting paid before. All he wanted was to be able to do two things in a row
without having to check in and explain himself. He especially wanted not to have to listen to Benedetti’s ideas on how a criminal
should be hunted down and cornered. It was a shame young men were no longer required to spend a couple of years in the army.
The army would have taught Rob Benedetti that the last thing you wanted to do with something panicked and dangerous was corner
it.

“I know who the killer is,” Benedetti insisted, his voice coming over the air like a squawk.

“No, you don’t,” Gregor told him. Then he shut the phone all the way off and stuck it in his pocket. Benedetti could still
get to him on Marbury and Giametti’s radio, but he’d have to work at that, and that would take time. “I want to go over to
LibertyHeart Communications,” Gregor said. “I want to talk to Marla Hildebrande for a while.”

“Do you think she’ll be there?” Marbury asked. “The day after her boss was killed?”

“I’d think she’d have to be. There’s the network to run. There’s the direct stations. Somebody has to be doing all that.”

Neither Marbury nor Giametti could think of a good objection to that— Gregor himself could think of two—and neither of them
seemed very interested in waiting around to be told what to do by headquarters, so they all piled into the patrol car again
and started back out into city traffic. By now the day had started for serious, and there were a lot of cars on the road.
Gregor wondered whether that hadn’t been part of the reason to choose Hardscrabble Road as the place to meet. It had to be
an advantage not to have to dodge gridlock and backups when time was going to be important to you.

But no, that didn’t matter. He was making things unnecessarily complicated. They were pulling up alongside a line of parked
cars somewhere in the very center of downtown. There wasn’t anywhere to park.

“We can double-park because it’s us,” Marbury said, “but the department doesn’t like it. You want to go in on your own and
let us get this straightened out?”

Since Gregor didn’t need them at all, except as a substitute for real credentials—don’t ask what I’m doing here, I’ve got
these nifty uniformed policemen coming with me—he climbed out of the car and went to the pavement. LibertyHeart was not CBS
or ABC or Fox. It didn’t have an entire building with an enormous logo sign out front. In fact, it didn’t have a sign out
front at all. Gregor finally found it by going into the lobby of the nearest high-rise building and checking the information
board. He was spending far too much time these days checking information boards.

LibertyHeart was on the ground floor. He tried to figure out whether that made sense or not, and then decided it did. If they
were broadcasting from here at all, all it would take would be some equipment on the roof, and it was a very high roof. He
went down the hall until he found a door that finally had a logo on it—the Statue of Liberty inside a heart; this did not
bode well for the general level of originality in this organization—and went in. The receptionist at the front desk was distinctly
Not Ready for Prime Time. Her hair was pulled back in an elastic band. Her skirt was made of denim.

“Yes?” she said.

“I’d like to see Marla Hildebrande,” Gregor said. “Could you tell her that Gregor Demarkian is out here waiting.”

The receptionist was chewing gum. Gregor half expected her to make some crack about the Armenian-American Hercule Poirot.
She just got on the phone and called for Marla Hildebrande instead.

It took no time at all for Marla to come to the reception area and collect him. The receptionist might not be ready for prime
time, but Marla definitely was. In spite of the fact that she had obviously been crying, and that she hadn’t had much sleep,
she was turned out like an ad for Brooks Brothers women’s suits and made up with the skill of a professional. She could
have walked into an interview with Bill Gates or the president of the United States and looked entirely at home.

She held out her hand to him. “Oh, Mr. Demarkian. It’s good to see you again. I’m sorry about last night. I know I wasn’t
being coherent—”

“You were fine,” Gregor said. “You were distraught.”

“Oh, dear. I can’t think of that word anymore without remembering the Harry Potter movie. You know, Moaning Myrtle.”

“Mm,” Gregor said. He did not know.

“I didn’t know what else to do but what I did, you see,” Marla said. “I mean, we saw the picture on the screen. And you know
how it is with those pictures, you see the pictures when they’re looking for somebody, and then you see the somebody when
they pick him up, and the person they pick up never looks anything like the pictures. But the picture looked just like Frank.
It was uncanny.”

“It wouldn’t have happened the way it did last night under normal circumstances,” Gregor said. “If you ever make another identification,
they’ll just take your information and your contact numbers and that will be it. The district attorney felt, because the case
has been so—”

“—Overpublicized?” Marla Hildebrande smiled slightly. “Yes, I know. We used to say around here that everything Drew Harrigan
did was overpublicized.”

“Could we go someplace and talk? I’ve got two officers with me, Marbury and Giametti, and they ought to be in soon, but I’d
still like someplace we could close the door.”

“Come back to my office. Ginny, please. When the officers get here, send them back.”

“ ’s’okay,” the receptionist said.

Marla Hildebrande rolled her eyes and waved Gregor through the door to the offices proper. They consisted of an enormous bullpen
full of secretaries’ cubicles, all of them separated by glass, and a few offices at the back. One of those offices also had
a glass wall that left it open to the bullpen. That was the one Marla Hildebrande took him into.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “Frank had the only office you could really close off. I really need to be able to see what’s going
on. It’s usually bad news. Will it matter, that they can see us?”

“No. It probably wouldn’t matter if they could hear us, although that makes me a little nervous.”

“I’ll close the door. They won’t be able to hear anything. We’re operating on a full schedule today. We have to be. But it
isn’t like we’re a huge corporation. Yet. Frank would always say yet. He wanted to be a huge corporation. But we’re not, not
yet, and so everybody has to work.”

She closed the door and waved him onto the couch, which was worn but looked comfortable. He sat down. Marla Hildebrande sat
on the edge of the desk.

“So,” she said. “I’m sort of surprised to see you here. Surprised and pleased. I know this is being taken as part of the Drew
Harrigan case. I know that. And I know what happens when that happens, when you’re the secondary victim in a celebrity case.
Goodness only knows, we report on enough of them. Celebrity cases, I mean. Although it’s usually the celebrity who’s the perpetrator.
Listen to me. I’m not making any sense at all, am I?”

“You’re doing fine,” Gregor said. “I just want to ask you a few questions. They’re really the questions I should have asked
Frank Sheehy when he was alive.”

“All right.”

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

“Oh, of course we did,” Marla said. “It was an open secret throughout the industry. These things usually are. And of course
we had to cover for it, at least potentially. Although I’ll admit, even when he came stoned to work, Drew really could work.”

“Did you know where he was getting his information?”

“Drew, you mean? Well, he wasn’t an investigative reporter, if that’s what you’re thinking. He wasn’t anything like one. The
impression I always got was that he got his stuff from informants. It’s a snowball kind of thing. In the beginning it’s hard,
but after a while people come to you. People who want to feel important. People with grudges. You have to be careful, of course,
because people with grudges can feed you false information and get you sued, but it isn’t the end of the world to get sued
in a business like Drew’s.”

“Did you like Drew Harrigan?”

“God, no.”

“Did Frank Sheehy like Drew Harrigan?”

“Frank liked the money Drew made for everybody, and beyond that I don’t think he cared much one way or the other. He was a
very practical man when it came to business. We had Drew, but we also have three shock jocks. They’re popular, too. We’re
an equal opportunity offender.”

Gregor let that one go, and put it up to the fact that she was…distraught. “Try this,” he said. “Did you know that Frank Sheehy
had an account with Markwell Ballard?”

“The investment bank? Really? I’m impressed.”

“But not surprised.”

“No,” Marla said. “Not really. Frank came from a wealthy family, a really large wealthy family, with everybody at prep school
and Princeton and that
kind of thing. And the business has been successful. I could see him with an account at Markwell Ballard.”

“Did he try to buy the property Drew Harrigan gave to the nuns at Our Lady of Mount Carmel?”

“No, that I know he didn’t do,” Marla said, “because he was pissed about it. He said Drew was going to end up shanghaiing
himself into jail by pulling this kind of thing.”

“He thought the sale of the property was something Drew was pulling?”

“That it was a setup, yes, to bulletproof himself from a court judgment in case Sherman Markey won in court. I thought that,
too. Didn’t you?”

“I think everybody did. Was Frank Sheehy getting the prescription drugs for Drew Harrigan? Did he know who was?”

For the first time, Marla hesitated. She seemed to be making up her mind about something. “Well,” she said finally. “He’s
dead, isn’t he? No, he wasn’t the person getting the drugs for Drew, but he knew who was. He told me once that drug addictions
were miraculous things, because they could make two people who were otherwise complete enemies into allies. I think on one
level he thought it was funny. Oh, he didn’t think the drug addiction itself was funny. That was making him crazy, because
with a guy like Drew, with a show riding on him, people’s jobs riding on him, dysfunction is never funny.”

“Do you know who Frank Sheehy thought was buying the drugs for Drew Harrigan?”

“Not really,” Marla said. “I mean, I’ve got a suspicion, but it really doesn’t attach itself to anything. I mean, it’s not
based on evidence, or anything solid—”

“A suspicion about whom?”

Marla flushed. “You’re going to think I’m nuts. A suspicion about Jig Tyler. You know, the genius, the guy with—”

“—I know who Dr. Tyler is, yes. Why do you think it was Jig Tyler?”

Marla threw up her hands. “It was just something he said once, about how it was amazing how the oddest people would bend over
backwards to accommodate Drew. But he said that about a lot of people. About Neil Savage, for instance. And Ray Dean Ballard.
And even the people at the Justice Project. And everybody did bend over backwards for Drew. Half of them because of the celebrity
thing, and half of them because they were afraid of him.”

“So why do you think Mr. Sheehy was referring to the drugs when he said what he said about Dr. Tyler?”

“Because of when it was,” Marla said. “It was the day they found out that the body at Hardscrabble Road belonged to Drew.”

“Did Frank Sheehy know that Drew Harrigan had never gone into rehab?”

“Yes,” Marla said. “To tell the truth, so did I. The judge—”

“Yes, we all know about the judge. What about the night Drew Harrigan would have died. That would have been the twenty-seventh
of January. Was Mr. Sheehy in the office that night?”

“All night,” Marla said. “And so was I. In fact, he was in this office most of the time. We were discussing what we were going
to do if Drew had to go to jail. Or worse. What we were going to do if we had to replace Drew permanently.”

“Did you reach a solution?”

“Absolutely. Frank authorized me to audition a prospect and get the ball rolling, and we made an offer to a new guy this week.”

“What about the last few days, since the body was discovered,” Gregor said. “Did Mr. Sheehy do anything out of the ordinary?
Did he seem nervous?”

Marla shook her head. “It’s really been business as usual. And, like I said, we’d already made the arrangements for the new
guy. We were already looking ahead. You have to, in a business like this. The one kind of dead you don’t want around here
is dead air.”