Hardscrabble Road (17 page)

Olivia Hall opened John’s door and shooed him in. “I’ll hold the calls for twenty minutes,” she said, without being asked.
“But you know that’s the best I can do, under the circumstances. It’s not my fault we’re under siege.”

“Why are you under siege?” Gregor asked, coming in and sitting down.

John sighed. “It’s the mayor’s office. They keep trying to get proof that I’m slacking off. They have somebody calling every
minute or two to ask trivial questions and give even more trivial orders that I’m not going to follow and don’t have to, but
the idea is to catch me not here, or something. They even phone me at lunch. It’s insane.”

“According to Mrs. Hall, we don’t talk about the campaign here.” “Right. Well, you know. The idea is to never mention it to
employees and staff, because that way the people over there can’t say I’m campaigning while at work, or forcing people to
support me, or something. He’s an ass-hole, you do know that, don’t you, Gregor? The mayor, I mean. He’s an asshole, and I
deserve to win.”

“You apparently are winning.”

“Yeah, I am. But that’s because I’m not the only one who thinks he’s an ass-hole. The party thinks he’s an asshole. And that
one’s between you and me.”

“The party is backing your primary challenge.”

“Exactly.”

“I was wondering about that,” Gregor said. What he’d really been wondering was why John would want to upset the party brass
by challenging an incumbent. It made much more sense if no upset was going to be involved. “Thank you. It seemed like an odd
bit of timing, your running right now.”

“It’s not. Look, he can’t get re-elected. You know that and I know that. He was a complete mess on the Catholic Church scandal
thing. He’s in the Cardinal’s pocket, or at least looks like he is. It was either somebody chucking him off the ticket, or
letting the opposition have the mayor’s office. And you know we never let the opposition have anything.”

“Too dangerous,” Gregor said.

“You don’t really give a damn, do you?” John said.

“I don’t really give a damn about politics,” Gregor said, “which is getting to be a liability, since it’s all anybody seems
to be able to talk about
anymore. I do give a damn about whether you get to be mayor. I’d like to see that.”

“Well, that’s good.”

“I fully intend to vote for you for senator, when you run for that.”

“That’s a bit down the line at the moment,” John said. “You want to see what Olivia dug up for you on your problem?”

“Sure.”

There was a stack of papers sitting squarely in the middle of John Jackman’s desk. He picked them up and handed them over.
“I didn’t want to say it when you called me over at the campaign, because I wasn’t positive, but it turns out I was right.
We already have run a fingerprint check for Sherman Markey. In fact, we’ve run two, and not just on the corpses in the morgue.
We’ve run it through recent arrests, too.”

“And?”

“Not a thing. Nothing even close. Every once in a while you get some ambiguous stuff; we don’t even have that.”

“What about deaths?” Gregor asked. “Homeless people have died in the city these last two weeks, right?”

“Yes.” John sighed.

“And?”

“And, what can I tell you? It’s been a brutal winter. It’s supposed to get worse over the next week or so. It isn’t going
to get better anytime soon. If I knew what to do about this stuff, Gregor, I’d do it. The legal people say we’re not allowed
to arrest them unless they’ve actually committed a crime. We can’t arrest them for vagrancy anymore because vagrancy laws
are unconstitutional. We can arrest them for public drunkenness if they get rowdy enough, but most of the ones we’re most
worried about don’t get rowdy. We can’t commit them to a mental institution unless they’re a clear and present danger to themselves
or others, which they aren’t, because falling asleep in subzero temperatures so that they accidentally freeze to death in
the night isn’t considered being a danger to themselves. That’s meant to mean only active suicide. And a lot of them won’t
go into what shelters are available, even for the night.

“I mean, seriously, Gregor, seriously. What other evidence do we need that somebody is mentally ill besides the fact that
he absolutely refuses to accept a warm bed on a night with subzero temperatures and chooses— chooses, I’m not making this
up—to sleep on a park bench instead? Ed Koch had the right idea. When the temperature goes below a certain level, you round
them up involuntarily and you get them inside whether they want to go or not.”

“Koch got into a lot of trouble for that.”

“He was still right,” John said. “The law makes assumptions that aren’t valid. The law makes assumptions about the intentions
of the people who want these guys to go into shelters that are not valid. The law makes assumptions about these people themselves
that are not valid.”

“The law is responding to the fact that for decades, a husband who didn’t want his wife to divorce him or a city administration
that didn’t like poor people could get them involuntarily committed on nothing much better than a say-so,” Gregor said. “And
you know it. The law is what it is today because of how it was abused in the past.”

“And that still leaves us with a city full of homeless people, mostly alcoholic and drug-addicted old men, who aren’t in their
right minds because their minds were eaten away by rotgut years ago, or were paranoid schizophrenic to begin with. I’m sorry,
Gregor. I know the history. I really do. But I hate this time of winter.”

“It’s an unusual winter,” Gregor said. “Coldest on record in, what, fifty years?”

“Something like that,” John said. “But we get at least a couple of days of extreme cold every year, and that means every year
we get a couple of nights of people freezing to death. The only compensation, and it isn’t much of a compensation, is that
most street crime goes way down. Your ordinary street criminal isn’t much interested in freezing his patootie off just to
get your wallet. Even convenience store and gas station holdups go down. Somehow it figures, you know? They’ve got no discipline,
these people, and no ambition. Shove a little hardship their way, and they just fold.”

“Right,” Gregor said. He looked around the office. It was spare, to the point of being denuded. Obviously, Olivia Hall didn’t
decorate, and John didn’t have a girlfriend at the moment. Gregor thought about asking John about the marriage thing—weren’t
successful politicians usually expected to have wives?—and decided against it.

“I think what Chickie was getting at,” he said, “was that it’s just possible something got missed. We’re dealing with a homeless
person here. People don’t always notice them in the way they notice other people.”

“We’re dealing with fingerprints here,” Jackman said.

“Even so.”

“Even so nothing,” Jackman said. “Look, I’m going to send you over to the district attorney, who’s the one you want to talk
to if you want to know everything there is to know about this; but the facts are simple. We did not one, but two searches,
and we got nothing. We checked out every corpse of every homeless person who came into the morgue from break of day on January
twenty-seventh until midnight February nine, and we didn’t get a thing. Which doesn’t mean he isn’t dead, mind you. People
die in abandoned
buildings and back alleys and we don’t find them for weeks or months. So anything could have happened. But if he came into
our system, we would have found him. Because we were careful. We were very, very careful.”

“Because the Justice Project asked about him?”

“Because this is Drew Harrigan and his people that we’re dealing with,” John said. “This is a guy who’s forced congressmen
out of office and gotten superintendents of large school districts fired. He’s coming out of rehab in a couple of weeks, and
when he does, he’s going to be loaded for bear, and the bear he’s going to be loaded for is us. We arrested him. We’re going
ahead with the prosecution. The DA isn’t backing down. The police aren’t backing down. And I’ve got a mayor who’s suddenly
making noises like he’s a Harrigan fan and who wants my ass more than he wants to win the lottery. What do you say?”

“I’d say you were probably very careful.”

“Right,” John said. “We were all very careful. But on the assumption that it never hurts to be more careful, and because it’s
you that’s asking, I’m going to call over and get them to run one more check. Who knows, maybe Markey showed up on a slab
in the last day or two and nobody caught it going in, although they’re supposed to check. But I want you to go down and talk
to the DA and let him outline exactly what’s going on here. Drew Harrigan didn’t get where he was without knowing how to win
a street fight better than most other people, and he isn’t going to go down without taking a hell of a lot of people with
him.”

“Is he going to go down?” Gregor asked.

Jackman nodded. “I think so. Harrigan’s people, hell, practically everybody, thinks we want to back away from a trial, but
we don’t. The DA is in a state of world-class piss-off. He’s being portrayed in the press as a corrupt little shit who just
wants to persecute a pathetic homeless man so he can let the rich guy off the hook, which is about as realistic as saying
that the NRA is really in favor of gun control. There have been rumors around town for weeks that we had Sherman Markey killed
because that way we could let Harrigan off with probation because people wouldn’t be upset about how we’re treating the homeless
guy—”

“Wait a minute,” Gregor said. “Doesn’t that contradict the other thing?”

“Of course it contradicts the other thing. Do you think anybody cares?” Jackman was out of his seat and pacing. “The whole
thing is getting to be more and more of a mess by the minute, and if there’s anything I want, truly and really, it’s to find
Sherman Markey under conditions that will not support the claim that we killed him. Which doesn’t mean that people won’t say
that anyway. I’ve made an appointment for you to see Rob in an hour. He’s clearing his desk so that he can talk to you. Be
on time.”

“I’m always on time,” Gregor said.

“Yeah, okay, you are, I’m sorry.” Jackman sat down again.

Gregor looked toward the office door. “This Mrs. Hall,” he said. “Is she efficient?”

“If Olivia Hall were running the Defense Department,” Jackman said, “its budget would be half what it is now, we’d have twice
as much in the way of hardware and three times as many soldiers, and the food would be good. I’m trying to get her to run
for City Council. Don’t tell me I’m not an honorable man. The day she wins a seat and leaves me, I’m going to cut my throat,
but I’m encouraging it anyway. Go see Rob. He’ll give you what you need to know.”

D
ownstairs on the street
again, with his coat collar pulled up and his hands in his pockets like everybody else, Gregor considered the fact that an
hour was a long time to have to go not very far to a place he could reach on foot. He looked around the neighborhood. He had
been in this part of town more often than he liked to remember, but he usually arrived in a cab and left in a cab. He didn’t
know much about what was here. It looked prosperous enough. Ordinary precinct houses often seemed to have been built on the
worst street in the vicinity, or to have become such as people moved out not to be threatened by the parade of felons that
went in and out the doors. Maybe not so many felons went in and out here. He walked up to the intersection—he ought to find
a place to get some coffee, and there was one; he’d remember it for later—and looked in both directions without finding what
he wanted. He went another block and looked down that intersection, and there it was: an outpost of Barnes & Noble. He gave
a mental nod to Bennis’s lecture about always using independent bookstores and went on down to it. If there was another bookstore
in this neighborhood, he didn’t know where it was, and he wasn’t going to take a cab back to Cavanaugh Street to find one
now.

He went into the Barnes & Noble and looked around. He didn’t do much shopping in bookstores. Either Bennis or Tibor tended
to pick up his books for him, or he bought them from Amazon because they were easy to find. He looked at the big central display
right inside the door and didn’t see what he was looking for, or anything like it. He moved a little farther into the store
and promptly got lost. There was a big section of something called “Bargain Books” that seemed to consist entirely of oversized
volumes on various artists and their works, and oversized cookbooks. He had a crazy urge to see if he could find something
called Picasso’s Guide to Spanish Cooking.

A young woman in good gray flannel slacks and a bright red sweater walked up to him. “Could I help you with something? You
look confused.”

“I’m looking for something I’m not sure exists.”

“If it’s a kind of book, it probably exists,” she said reassuringly. “And there’s a good chance we have it. We carry over
twenty thousand titles in this store.”

Twenty thousand titles sounded good. The store didn’t look big enough. “Do you know a talk radio host named Drew Harrigan?”

The woman looked wary. “Of course I know him. Well, know of him. We’ve never met. I mean, I don’t think he shops in this part
of Philadelphia.”

“Has he written a book?”

Now the woman looked more than wary. “Um, well, yes. Of course he’s written a book. He’s written three. The newest one is
a New York Times bestseller.” She looked at him more closely. “Do you really mean to say you didn’t know that?”

“I don’t listen to a lot of radio,” Gregor said. “Except, you know, All Things Considered and this oldies station where they
do a lot of Jan and Dean. And I don’t like politics.”

“You don’t like politics and you want a book by Drew Harrigan?”

“I want to know what all the fuss is about.”

“Are you, well, you know, conservative?”

“Conservative how?” Gregor asked.

“Conservative,” the young woman said. “You know, like, Republican.”