Hardscrabble Road (52 page)

“Good old Ray Dean Ballard is likely to have a date with a lethal injection,” Gregor said. “Except I think they’ll probably
call him Aldous on the execution order.”

T
hey were on their
way to Rob Benedetti’s office with Jig Tyler in the car—and pleased beyond belief to be riding in the back of a patrol car—
when Gregor’s always sketchy sense of direction kicked in and he realized they were only a few blocks from the offices of
the Justice Project. He told Marbury and Giametti that he wanted to stop, and they turned in and out of a few narrow streets
until they got to a place where they could double-park right in front of the Justice Project’s doors. They did not have any
intention of parking for real and getting out. It wasn’t the kind of neighborhood where you would feel safe parking a police
car.

Gregor waited until they let him out and then went up to the front door and rang. The building was old beyond telling, and
badly kept up. There was garbage on the sidewalk, untouched and unnoticed by the people who passed. A good number of the people
who passed were homeless men and women. They were moving with purpose. Gregor didn’t know if they had somewhere to go, or
had become good at this particular illusion.

A young woman let Gregor in, took his name, and called back for Kate Daniel. Gregor found himself wondering when they’d gotten
to the point where buildings with institutions and businesses in them felt the need to keep their front doors locked and on
a buzzer as a protection from… what? The pictures on the walls here were nowhere near as well-done or as oppressively expensive
as the ones in the lobby at Neil Savage’s offices, but they were equally didactic. Everybody wanted to teach everybody else
something.

The woman who had let him in put down the phone and said, “Ms. Daniel isn’t available at the moment. Would you like to make
an appointment?”

“No.” Gregor sighed. He could always bring in Marbury and Giametti and have them arrest her, but it would be showing off.
“Tell her for me,” he said, “that if she doesn’t produce Sherman Markey from wherever she’s got him stashed in the next three
hours, I’m going to send those two police officers in the car out there to arrest her for obstruction of justice. Oh, and
tell her I said I like her work.”

EPILOGUE

Mon, February 16

High 21F, Low 7F

The God that holds you over the pit of Hell, much as one holds a spider over the flame, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked.

—J
ONATHAN
E
DWARDS

Gravity is a habit that is hard to shake off.

—T
ERRY
P
RATCHETT

O
n the morning that
the office of the Philadelphia District Attorney announced the arrest of Aldous Raymond Ballard for the murders of Andrew
Mark Harrigan and Francis Xavier Sheehy, the Justice Project threw a press conference for Sherman Markey. Gregor Demarkian
wouldn’t have been invited to the press conference under the best of circumstances, and these weren’t the best of circumstances.
For one thing, the mayor was refusing to admit that Gregor Demarkian had been a part of the case at all. There were no contracts,
no notes, no official references of any kind. If the press insisted on putting Gregor at this interview with that suspect
or in that back alley where a body was discovered, that was the press’s problem, not the mayor’s, and as far as the mayor
was concerned, it was all hype and dazzle. It was the Philadelphia Police who had solved the mystery of the murder of Drew
Harrigan, under the able direction of Commissioner of Police John Jackman—and, in the process, arrested the son of one of
the most influential men on the planet, and one of the largest contributors to Philadelphia political parties. The mayor of
Philadelphia might be, as John Jackman suggested, an incompetent idiot at being mayor, but he was not an incompetent idiot
at being a politician.

For another thing, even Gregor wasn’t sure what he could claim to have done in this case. It wasn’t that he didn’t know what
it was he had done. It was that he usually had an agreement with the police department who hired him as a consultant. That
way everybody knew up front who was going to get credit for what, and Gregor didn’t mind letting the police have it all. Police
detectives were like any other professionals. They talked among themselves, and word got around. Gregor always had more requests
for his time than he had time to give.

For a third thing, he wasn’t a reporter, didn’t want to be a reporter, and couldn’t understand how anybody ever managed to
stay in journalism more
than a week without getting either bored to tears or thoroughly disgusted with himself. He had no idea what it was the reporters
thought they were going to get out of Sherman Markey, but he wished them well. He just hoped Rob Benedetti wasn’t planning
on calling Markey in as a witness. Gregor still hadn’t met the man, but he thought that Markey was likely to be as good a
witness as he was a plaintiff in a lawsuit. Benedetti would get better testimony out of a hamster.

The cab pulled up to the front of Our Lady of Mount Carmel Monastery, and Gregor reached into his pocket for his wallet. When
he’d come out here in police cars, he hadn’t really paid attention to the neighborhood. Now that he did, he saw that it was
run-down and shabby, but not as remote as he had assumed at first, merely because it was all the way out at the edge of the
city. He got out and paid the cabdriver. He looked up and down the street and saw small grocery stores, small shoe stores,
small “dollar stores” that promised that everything inside cost ninety-nine cents. There was also a McDonald’s, two blocks
down, lit up and crowded. Gregor did not see any homeless people. He took the time to look, hard, to make sure he wasn’t missing
them. Hardscrabble Road was clear.

He went up to the monastery’s front door, rang the bell, and waited. The door opened in less than a second, and Sister Beata
let him in.

“I’ve got the television out here,” she said as she closed up behind him. “It’s the only television in the place, and we never
see it except when something awful happens, but I’ve got it today. I convinced Reverend Mother that somebody from the house
had to hear Sherman Markey’s press conference, and she gave right in. I was a little surprised, really. Maybe she just wants
to know what he’s going to say.”

“Has he said anything?” Gregor asked.

“Not really. He’s such a confused old man. I keep asking myself if I’d have recognized him if he’d ever come to this house
and I’d seen him, but I don’t really know. I keep trying to console myself by saying that I recognized Jig Tyler, but that
isn’t the same thing, is it? Jig Tyler is the sort of person you notice. He radiates—something.”

“Well,” Gregor said, “an IQ over two hundred, a driving ambition to beat Napoleon’s, and a Messianic complex that should only
be brought out of the closet at Easter would tend to make a man radiate—something.”

Beata smiled. The little receiving room had a couch in it for visitors. She waved Demarkian to it and turned the television
set so that he could see. “He’s a very nice man, Dr. Tyler,” she said. “He’s come out to see me a couple of times since all
this happened. He brought us a cake. I told him I never understood why people always seemed to be trying to make nuns fat.
The next time he came, he brought us a vegetable tart. It was very good. He
sits in here some nights and we talk about political economy and Carmelite spirituality.”

“I’m warning you, Sister. It’s very hard to get a man to believe in God when he already thinks he is God.”

“I don’t think Dr. Tyler thinks he’s God,” Sister Beata said. “I think he thinks he sees more clearly than the rest of us.
I’ve been trying to convince him he’s wrong.”

There was a sudden loud sound on the television, and they both turned to look at it. There was nothing to see. A grizzled,
confused-looking old man was standing at the podium next to Kate Daniel, who had a hand on his shoulder. Chickie George was
standing in the background, looking grim. A reporter asked a question, and Sherman Markey mumbled through an answer that had
nothing to do with what he’d been asked.

“Why are they putting him through this?” Beata asked. “It’s so obvious he’s in no shape at all to answer questions. I wonder
if he even knows where he is. He looks like he’s in pain.”

“He’s in need of a drink,” Gregor said. “And they’re doing it to protect him, in case the police decide to name him as an
accomplice. It’s going to be pretty hard to do that and have it go over with the public after this performance.”

“But that would have been true all along, wouldn’t it?” Beata asked. “Why didn’t the Justice Project produce him weeks ago?
Anybody who looked at him had to see he wasn’t capable of doing what he’d been accused of doing. Even with clean clothes and
a bath and a haircut and shave and everything else they gave him so that he could appear up there, he doesn’t look capable
of getting prescription drugs for anybody, never mind himself. I mean, if I were a doctor, and he showed up at my door asking
for OxyContin, I’d think he was an addict and boot him out into the street.”

“I agree,” Gregor said. “But they did suspect him. Police investigations are strange that way. And my guess is that the Justice
Project didn’t produce him because Kate Daniel didn’t want it to. Like I said, she was protecting him. When the time came
for the suit to go forward in court, or if the case had gone forward and he was needed in criminal court, she would have produced
him. She just wanted him out of the limelight and away from anywhere he could be asked questions, because she could never
be sure what he was going to say. Look at him. Get him addled enough and he might confess to the murder of Jimmy Hoffa.”

“It made him look guilty of murder, though,” Beata said. “I’m not sure that was much better.”

“If he’d ever been thought guilty of murder by the police, he was dropped from the suspect list after I saw Ray Dean Ballard
pushing Frank
Sheehy’s body into that alley. And yes, I know I didn’t know it was Ballard and I didn’t know it was a body at the time. But
I did know that that man was tall and thin, and Sherman Markey is neither.”

“If you’d really paid attention to him, would you have known it was Ray Dean Ballard?”

“No,” Gregor said. “I was hypersensitive to looking at the time, but he was too far away from me. The fact that I got the
height and weight ratio even within the ballpark was a miracle of concentration as it was, and I was only concentrating because
you and other people had pointed out to me how seldom we actually look at the homeless.”

“And you were feeling guilty?”

“Yes,” Gregor said. “You’d made me feel guilty, Sister, you and, oddly enough, Ray Dean Ballard had.”

“He must care about the homeless,” Beata said. “He worked at Philadelphia Sleeps. He didn’t have to. He could have done anything.”

“I know,” Gregor said. “I suppose he must have cared about the homeless. I don’t know how to determine something like that.
I do know that he truly, truly hated Drew Harrigan and all the Drew Harrigans in the world, what he thought of as the Clone
Army. Rush Limbaugh. Ann Coulter. So, when he realized that Harrigan was addicted to prescription drugs—”

“—Yes, but how did he realize that?” Beata said. “How could he know that?”

“You forget that they’d met socially,” Gregor said. “At fund-raisers, as he put it to me, one of the times he talked to me.
There were charity events to raise money for Philadelphia Sleeps, and Drew was invited. But it was more than that. There were
charity events to raise money for all kinds of things, soup kitchens, children’s nutrition, and Ray Dean Ballard was invited
because he ran Philadelphia Sleeps and Drew Harrigan was invited because he was a prominent Philadelphian with a lot of money.”

“Somehow, I can’t see Drew Harrigan giving a lot of money to the homeless.”

“I don’t know that he did,” Gregor said, “but he was like a lot of men in his position, up from the bottom or near bottom.
Whether he liked giving money to the homeless or not, he liked meeting important people. And with some kinds of important
people, the only way a man like Drew Harrigan would get a chance to meet them would be at a charity event. Most of old-line
Philadelphia, even most of old-line Republican Philadelphia, thought he was a buffoon.”

“He was, wasn’t he? Just a little. I read his book. So did Reverend Mother. She said it wasn’t the sort of thing you wanted
to read aloud in the refectory.”

“I think it’s a little lightweight for Our Lady of Mount Carmel,” Gregor said. “Anyway, they met at charity functions, and
Ray Dean figured out that Drew Harrigan was hooked pretty easily. It wasn’t exactly a secret in the first place. My guess
is that Sheehy may have been getting Harrigan the pills at least on and off for a while before Ray Dean stepped in. I say
I guess because Ray Dean’s got better lawyers than the Vatican, and I’m not expecting him to be admitting to anything anytime
soon. But anyway, Ray Dean took over the task of getting Drew his pills.”

“But why? Why would he want to?”

“Power,” Gregor said. “Ray Dean may like working in the nonprofit sector, he may like helping people, but he also likes power.
Most people do. Here was this man he despised, who spent more time than was necessary excoriating Philadelphia Sleeps as a
‘Communist’ organization or a ‘socialist’ organization or whatever it was that week, and it turns out that he’s got a deep
dark secret that you could hold over his head. I think Ray Dean thought he was going to be able to control the situation,
and control Drew Harrigan.”

“And he couldn’t.”

“Hell,” Gregor said, and then blushed, for the first time in twenty-five years. “I’m sorry, Sister.”

“It’s really all right, Mr. Demarkian. I heard worse in district court.”

“Yes. At any rate. Ray Dean couldn’t control Drew Harrigan because Drew Harrigan couldn’t control Drew Harrigan. You know,
a political writer named Al Franken wrote a book called Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot, and Limbaugh went out and lost weight.
Limbaugh was picked up for illegally buying prescription drugs, and he really went into rehab and got clean. But Drew Harrigan
was a mess. When people called him fat, he ate more. When he saw himself getting addicted to OxyContin, he took more. He was
out of control in his life. He was out of control on the air. He was out of control in every possible way, and one day the
wrong cops stopped him.”