Hardscrabble Road (44 page)

“I’m not talking about fineness of soul,” Gregor said, “I’m talking about capacity. You can’t murder somebody with a knife
unless you can raise a knife and bring it down. That kind of thing.”

“There is somebody in this case of yours who isn’t physically capable of, what, putting arsenic into prescription painkiller
capsules?”

“No. Well, not exactly.”

“How did the other one die, this, what’s his name, Sheehy?”

“Frank Sheehy. We don’t know yet, but we’re going to assume poison. They almost always go on the way they’ve started. It’s
easier. The ME’s report will be in tomorrow. The thing is, I know who, and I know why, in general at least, two people are
dead. But there are other things going on here that I don’t understand, and it bothers me.”

“Are you sure they’re connected with the killings, assuming that should be a plural?”

“No,” Gregor said. “I’m not sure. And that’s part of the problem. Let me ask you something, even if you don’t practice criminal
law.”

“Shoot.”

“Does it come under attorney-client privilege if an attorney knows that his client is in the process of committing a crime,
and does nothing to stop it?”

“Gregor, attorneys know their clients are guilty of crimes all the time.”

“No, I didn’t say guilty, past tense. I said in the process of. Committing a crime now. Right this second. Is the attorney
still protected by attorney-client privilege?”

“I don’t know,” Russ said. “It’s not that easy. Attorneys are friends of the court. That means they have a responsibility
to see that trials and court proceedings are carried out ethically. And to an extent I think it would depend on what kind
of a crime it was. An attorney can certainly be an accessory, before, during, and after the fact. Some things, though, would
be nearly
impossible to prove, so impossible that nobody would ever bother, and the attorney involved could certainly stonewall a long
time on the principle of privilege.”

“What about if the person was committing a crime with the full knowledge of the judge whose order he was violating?”

“Wait now. Are you talking about a crime, or a court order?”

“Both.”

“They’re different things,” Russ said. “The court order brings in that friend-of-the-court thing. And the judge couldn’t be
in on it.”

“Why not?”

“Because if he was, there would be no violation. Judges have broad discretion in their own courtrooms. Absent something like
a mandatory minimums law, they can pretty much do what they want. I’ve seen murderers walk away with nothing but probation
in my time, which is how we got mandatory minimums to begin with.”

“What if the judge said one thing in the courtroom on record and something else in chambers in private?”

“Doesn’t matter much, as long as you can prove what was said in chambers. Like I said, he’s got broad discretion to do what
he wants. He’s supposed to. You write laws for the general rule, but you try particular cases, and they’ve all got quirks.
I don’t like mandatory minimums, myself. They’re—”

“—Do you like Bruce Williamson?”

“Oh God,” Russ said.

“Oh God?”

“Some of us would like to see Judge Williamson go to Hollywood, get an agent, and enter the acting profession legitimately.
The man is a disaster, Gregor. He’s never met a celebrity he doesn’t have an excuse for, and he doesn’t care what it is the
excuse is needed to cover. Every defense lawyer with a prominent client in the city of Philadelphia does cartwheels trying
to get Bruce Williamson on the case, and the worst of it is that when the person involved isn’t a celebrity, Williamson is
the next best thing to a hanging judge. Is all this about Bruce Williamson? Because if it is, good luck.”

“No,” Gregor said, “it isn’t really about Bruce Williamson. It just starts there. Well, no, it starts with Drew Harrigan’s
drug problem, I’d guess. Williamson isn’t the only one who has a celebrity fixation, is he?”

“You mean some of the uniformed police officers do? Yeah, they do. But that’s minor, compared to the havoc a judge can wreak.”

“It starts with Drew Harrigan’s drug problem,” Gregor said, “but I think it only gets to the point where a murder is imminent
once Harrigan was arrested and brought in front of Williamson. And even then it would
have been all right if Williamson had been another kind of judge.”

“You do realize you’re making no sense,” Russ said. “I’m making sense to myself,” Gregor said. “The problem with situations
like this is that they look like puzzles, and they really aren’t. Not in the sense we usually use the term.”

“A mystery wrapped in an enigma,” Russ intoned.

Gregor picked up his fork and started in on dinner. “I met a very interesting person today,” he said. “Her name is Dr. Alison
Standish, and she knows Tibor.”

R
ay Dean Ballard had
heard the rumor in dozens of places over the years, and read it in the Philadelphia Inquirer, so when he started out that
morning he had the feeling of doing something so rational, and so sure of success, it gave him no more worry than brushing
his teeth. He didn’t bother to buy a map and work out the bus routes. He would have, ordinarily, but over the past week or
so the whole charade he had been putting on for work had seemed more shallow and less necessary than ever. It shouldn’t be
a requirement for employment, anywhere, or friendship, ever, to pretend to be something you are not. Exactly how he would
go about being what he was, or even how he’d know that if he saw it, he wasn’t sure. It had been years since he had thought
all this through. Even then, working it out on page after page of a narrow-ruled legal pad on the desk in his dorm room at
Vanderbilt, he hadn’t come to any hard-and-fast conclusions. He was not the kind of person who found solace in revolutionary
posturing. He wasn’t about to turn vocal Communist wannabe just because his father was the icon of global capitalism. He didn’t
want to show up on the evening news with a Kalashnikov and a beret and declare the overthrow of oppression to be right around
the corner. God only knew he didn’t want to plunge himself into that half-world of unhappy resentments populated by rich-girl
socialist independent filmmakers and rich-boy volunteers for the Cuban Harvest. Hadn’t there been a time, somewhere back there,
when it was possible to want to do good in the world just because you were unhappy that so many of your fellow citizens were
doing badly? Hadn’t there been a time when everything, even the food you ate, wasn’t politics?

He got a cab outside his apartment, and thought that it was time to change that. He wasn’t going to buy a town house in Rittenhouse
Square, but he could do better than this, and there was really no reason to go on putting up with bad plumbing when he didn’t
have to. On the other hand,
he didn’t want to turn out like Tony Benn, living like the lord he’d been born to be and spouting off about the miserable
conditions suffered by the world’s downtrodden poor. He didn’t know what he wanted to be. It seemed impossible, considering
how much thought he’d given to it back in Tennessee, but he didn’t actually seem to have figured out his life yet.

The cab deposited him outside the big plate glass windows of a small restaurant, and as soon as he got out onto the sidewalk
he could see that it wasn’t much more than one of those hole-in-the-wall diners that dotted the city from one end to the other.
Etched gold lettering across the top of the largest window said:
ARARAT
. Ray Dean looked up and down the street. It was a nice street. The houses were expensive as city houses went, but not as
expensive as the kind of thing his father would have bought. Of course, very few people could afford the kind of thing his
father would have bought, but it was amazing how many people tried. He saw a small grocery up the street a little. It was
a “Middle Eastern” grocery, and he wondered if that meant they would have loukoumia and halva. He could buy packages of both
and bring them home when it was time for him to leave. He looked through the big plate glass window at the people at the tables
and then realized that the man he was looking for was right there, sitting in the window booth, facing off against a plate
of eggs, sausages, and hash browns that would have given a cholesterol-induced heart attack to a fifteen-year-old Olympic
athlete.

Ray Dean went into the restaurant and looked around again. There didn’t seem to be a hostess waiting to seat him. He went
over to the window booth and looked down at the man he knew to be Gregor Demarkian and the other man with him, a little man,
very thin and gnarled, who was making do with buttered toast. For the first time, Ray Dean began to think he should have called
in advance. He hadn’t because… because he’d thought of this as going into the police station to make a report. It was ridiculous,
but there it was.

The two men were looking up at him now, the smaller one with a look of calm inquiry, Gregor Demarkian with a look that was
not so calm. Ray Dean cleared his throat.

“Excuse me,” he said. “Mr. Gregor Demarkian? I’m sorry to bother you, but I thought—I’m sorry. My name is Aldous Ballard,
and I run an organization called Philadelphia Sleeps.”

Gregor Demarkian was staring at him. Ray Dean didn’t think he was blinking. Finally, Gregor Demarkian coughed a little and
said, “Aldous Ballard. Well, you’re too young to be the original, so that would make you … what? The grandson?”

“The son. But my father doesn’t use Aldous. He uses William.”

“In the papers, he’s always William Aldous Ballard.”

“True enough,” Ray Dean said. “At the coalition, they call me Ray Dean.”

“Why?”

Ray Dean sighed. “Because when I went to work there, it seemed the better part of valor. Can I sit down? I have this thing.”
He stuck his hands in the pockets of his coat and came up with a typewritten list. “I have something I thought you ought to
see. I didn’t do it to bring it in here. I don’t know why I did it. Because I was pissed off at being jerked around, I think.”

“Sit,” Gregor Demarkian said. “This is Father Tibor Kasparian.”

“How do you do, Father?” Ray Dean sat.

A young woman was at the side of the table instantly, with a cup and a saucer and the coffeepot. Ray Dean allowed her to pour
for him, and thanked her, and told her that he didn’t need any breakfast just yet, but it was good of her to ask. He sounded
to himself like a decade before, at Parents’ Day at St. Paul’s. That was a blast from the past.

He put the typewritten paper on the table before him and said, “I went to the bank. My father’s bank. The branch of it here,
you know. And I got this.”

“What’s this?”

“A list of the people connected to the disappearance of Sherman Markey who have accounts with the Markwell Ballard Bank.”

Gregor Demarkian’s eyebrows rose. “Isn’t that kind of information supposed to be confidential?”

“Absolutely,” Ray Dean said.

Gregor Demarkian cocked his head. “You’re a very interesting man, Mr. Ballard. I assume you’ve got hold of the names on that
list through connections.”

“I’ve got something better than connections,” Ray Dean said. “I own a fifteen percent interest in the bank. In trust, mind
you, and I can’t sell it, but there it is. It’s all right, you know. You could get this information with a court order. We
don’t allow absolute bank secrecy in the United States, for which I am truly grateful. If it makes you feel any better, my
father is probably grateful, too.”

“Why did you want a list of people connected to the disappearance of Sherman Markey who had accounts with your father’s bank?”

“Because the nuns got an offer for the property Drew Harrigan parked with them,” Ray Dean said, “and the offer came through
the Markwell Ballard Bank. Which, by the way, is why you could get the information with a court order, and why I could get
it. The person who gave it to me knew that my father was going to have one of his patented fits as soon as he found out about
it. And trust me, my father’s patented fits are something to see.”

“I’ve heard about them. He won’t have a patented fit about your obtaining the information and giving it to me?”

“I was hoping you wouldn’t say anything about my giving it to you,” Ray Dean said, “and he won’t mind that I went and got
it. He’ll probably think it means I’m finally taking an interest in the family business, which I’m not. It’s not that I look
down on the family business, or anything like that. It’s just that I’m not cut out for it.”

“Why would you look down on the world’s most important investment banking firm?”

“You’d be amazed at how many of the people I went to prep school with would do just that. Take a look at that list, Mr. Demarkian.
It’s interesting.”

Gregor Demarkian picked up the list off the table and began to read it, and Ray Dean, finally relaxed, looked around the restaurant
with more interest and concentration. At a table near the center of the room there were three extremely old women, all thin
to the point of emaciation and all wearing black. Something at the back of Ray Dean’s head labeled them the three witches
from Macbeth and started waiting for them to leap up and chant. He looked around some more and found mostly small groups of
people having breakfast quietly, but somehow all together, as if they all knew each other.

Gregor Demarkian had put the list back on the table. Fr. Tibor Kasparian was trying to read it without looking as if that
was what he was doing. Ray Dean turned his attention back to them.

“It’s a very interesting list, Mr. Ballard.”

“Call me Ray Dean. Or call me Aldy. Most of my life, I’ve been known as Aldy. I know it’s an interesting list.”

“Drew Harrigan isn’t on it,” Gregor Demarkian said. “Is that because he’s dead?”

Ray Dean shook his head. “Drew Harrigan couldn’t get an account at Markwell Ballard if he offered to die for it. The bank
has criteria for accepting accounts, and the criteria are so outrageous that nobody can meet them. I mean nobody. My father
can’t meet them. Bill Gates can’t meet them. Somebody like Drew Harrigan couldn’t come close.”