Hardscrabble Road (53 page)

“There were right cops?”

“Oh, yes,” Gregor said, “and if John Jackman gets elected mayor, we’re going to find out which ones. They’ve already started
looking into it. Harrigan was stopped dozens of times for ‘driving erratically,’ given a Breathalyzer test, and sent home.
Rob Benedetti’s office has demanded copies of the records, and he’ll get them. But it’s more than that. Marla Hildebrande
knew about it.”

“Marla Hildebrande is—?”

“Frank Sheehy’s program manager. Sheehy had made oblique references to the fact that they were having to keep the cops sweet,
given Harrigan’s behavior.”

“But that’s Frank Sheehy. That’s not Ray Dean Ballard.”

“No, but it doesn’t have to be,” Gregor said. “It only matters that the cops were in on the game, except these two cops, Marbury
and Giametti, were not. So, when they found Drew Harrigan in a car full of pills, they arrested him and impounded the pills.
And once that had happened, once it was out in the open, there was no way to just fix it and make it go away. Neil Savage
tried, and he’s very good. He’s probably one of the two or three best attorneys in Philadelphia. But if celebrity means you’re
not likely to get much of a sentence for what you do, it also means you’re not likely to get let go once you get caught. There’s
too much publicity. No police department, no district attorney, wants to get tagged with the charge that he let you off just
because you were famous.”

“So Drew Harrigan got arrested, and he got arraigned,” Beata said.

“And then that judge let him go into rehab instead of sending him to jail.”

“Bruce Williamson,” Gregor said. “Yes, well. Bruce is famous. Famous for loving famous people, I mean. Yes, he let Drew go
into rehab without the usual controls on that, and of course Drew had no intention of going into rehab. He had no intention
of doing anything about his drug habit instead of keeping it stoked. So he just kept out of sight. He had sixty days for his
lawyers to work something out so that he didn’t have to go to jail.”

“Where was he?”

Gregor shrugged. “Not in homeless shelters, I can assure you. Neil Savage has a vacation house up in the Catskills. He was
supposed to be there. Then he found out he couldn’t get the pills he wanted, and he called Ray Dean Ballard to come out to
see him. Which Ray Dean wasn’t about to do, and I don’t blame him. That’s when Harrigan started threatening him. Because the
power hold goes both ways. Ray Dean had power over Harrigan because Harrigan needed the drugs, but Harrigan had power over
Ray Dean because he could finger Ray Dean as his supplier. So, Harrigan made a few threats, and Ray Dean agreed to get him
the pills if he could get himself into the city.”

“And here,” Beata said.

“No,” Gregor said. “Not the first time. Remember, Harrigan had been out of the way for weeks by the time January twenty-seventh
rolled around, and a lot happened in that time. For one thing, Harrigan needed to protect his property. Drug cases are notorious
for costing people everything they own. So there was this monastery, with his own sister at the helm, but that wouldn’t work
by itself, because he didn’t really want to give up the property. So there was Ray Dean Ballard, with lots of money and lots
to lose, and a perfect intermediary in the shape of the Markwell Ballard Bank.”

“But that didn’t work,” Beata said, “because the Justice Project sued Harrigan for defamation on behalf of Sherman Markey.”

“Right,” Gregor said. “The judge they got for that one wasn’t Bruce Williamson, and he liened everything Harrigan owned. I
think that at that point, Harrigan probably went completely over the edge. He wasn’t a man who handled stress well. You can
see that in his book and if you listen to enough of his radio programs. So he wanted more pills to calm him down, and Ray
Dean decided to give them to him.”

“And that’s when he came here,” Beata said.

“Actually, he’d been coming here for weeks,” Gregor said. “From the start of the winter, long before he got arrested. Jig
Tyler was feeding him information about the University of Pennsylvania to use on the air, and Tyler didn’t want to get caught
talking to Harrigan. So Harrigan cooked up what he thought was the perfect cloak-and-dagger role-playing game. They’d been
coming here since the monastery opened the barn to the homeless at the beginning of the winter. They’d get dressed up in old
clothes, stand in line, go into the barn, talk for a while, and then both leave separately. Nobody was likely to notice them.
This isn’t a secure facility, the way some of the regular homeless shelters are downtown. This is an emergency accommodation
because the temperatures have been so low. There was no staff to speak of. The men weren’t checked in and out.”

“Reverend Mother has had a fit at the Cardinal, if you want to know,” Beata said. “It’s not that we mind opening the barn
to the homeless, but she always did think it was done in haste and without proper preparation.”

“If I were Reverend Mother, I’d insist on hiring at least one professional security guard,” Gregor said. “Anyway, Harrigan
wanted more pills, and Ray Dean didn’t want to risk another obvious run into the city with the chance that they’d be caught
together. So Harrigan suggested giving the pills to Jig Tyler and getting Jig Tyler out here for a meeting, and to Dr. Tyler
the whole thing sounded perfectly plausible. He didn’t know he was carrying pills full of arsenic. He didn’t know he was carrying
pills at all when Ray Dean Ballard gave them to him. If Harrigan hadn’t insisted on swallowing them the first chance he got,
Jig Tyler would never have known he was carrying pills at all.”

“So Dr. Tyler will be able to testify that he got the pills from Ray Dean Ballard,” Beata said. “That’s something.”

“That’s a lot. If I was Ballard, I’d have gone for Tyler before I’d gone for Sheehy, but I think Ballard thought that he was
safe from Tyler because Tyler didn’t want to risk what he has risked. Meaning that Ballard’s lawyers would try to make out
that Tyler physically gave Harrigan the poisoned pills, and that meant that Tyler was the one who wanted to and deliberately
did kill Harrigan. Sheehy probably looked like a much more pressing danger, since Sheehy knew about the pills and he knew
about the cops and he knew about the murder.”

“What did you say?”

“I said he knew about the murder,” Gregor said. “I’m not going to be able to prove that to anybody, but he knew about the
murder. On the night of January twenty-seventh, Frank Sheehy had a conversation with Marla Hildebrande about finding a talk
show to replace Drew Harrigan’s permanently. Marla Hildebrande thinks it was just a matter of being realistic about the prospects
for the show if Harrigan went to jail, which he very well could have. I think it was that Sheehy knew he was going to have
to replace the show because Harrigan wasn’t going to be alive to go on with it. And that, you know, is the best motive for
murder in the world.”

Beata looked at the television screen. The press conference had gone on far longer than Gregor would have suspected it could
have. Sherman Markey was slumped over the microphone in front of him, a vague-looking old man that normal people would pass
on the street without noticing, a man with too many bad habits, too much bad history, and no damned luck at all. Kate Daniel
looked brisk and confident. Chickie George looked as angry as he had sounded when he’d called Gregor in the middle of the
night to apologize for Kate Daniel’s behavior.

“I’d never have gotten you into this if I’d realized she knew where he was all along,” Chickie had said, and then he’d gone
on to rail endlessly about people who thought the end justified the means. “You’d think that’s the first thing they’d learn
the problems with in Philosophy 101, or wherever.”

Beata leaned forward and turned off the television. “I still wouldn’t recognize him if I saw him on the street,” she said.
“It’s a terrible thing, isn’t it? We don’t want to look, and they learn to be so self-effacing that nobody takes notice of
them. And they manage it. We’re supposed to be self-effacing, you know. The nuns at Carmel. We don’t ever quite seem to manage
it.”

“I think walking around in brown and black robes designed in the Middle Ages is likely to make you stick out on the bus, Sister.”

Beata laughed. “Most of us never do get on the bus. The nuns in enclosure stay in the house all the time. But when they do
go out, to vote, for instance, they wear exclaustration veils. Black net veils that cover their entire faces, more concealing
even than a burkha. That’s pretty self-effacing, too.”

Gregor got up. “With any luck, we’ll be able to find out where Ray Dean Ballard and Frank Sheehy met on the day Sheehy died.
I’ve got a terrible feeling it’s going to be in a public restaurant, like a diner, so that Ballard could slip him the arsenic
when he wasn’t looking and we’d never be able to find a trace on it; but there’s always the possibility that he was worried
about Sheehy collapsing in public and picked a more private place. We’ll see. One way or the other, there’s no way Ballard
stays out of prison. He may end up in the death chamber.”

“I don’t approve of the death chamber,” Beata said. “It always seems to me that there’s enough killing without having the
government create more.”

“I don’t approve of the death chamber either,” Gregor said, “but only because I’m far too aware of the fact that innocent
people end up there, and I don’t think we should go on with it as long as even one innocent person could even possibly be
unjustly executed. But morally—morally, I think that there’s not a single thing wrong with putting a man to death if he’s
committed deliberate and premeditated murder, and I won’t lose a millisecond’s sleep if Ray Dean Ballard dies.”

“Well, then,” Beata said. “I’d say I’ll pray for you, but I’m doing that already. I pray for Ray Dean Ballard and Frank Sheehy
and Drew Harrigan, too. That’s what we do in this place. We pray for the world.”

“If you try praying for them individually and by name, Sister, there won’t be enough time in the history of the universe.”

B
ack on Cavanaugh Street
, Fr. Tibor Kasparian was walking Grace Feinman’s dog. Or rather, he was trying to walk it. He had the dog on a leash, and
the dog was jumping around and getting tangled, terribly excited to be out in the world with people and hydrants and trees
to sniff. Gregor watched them both as he paid for yet another cab—he felt as if he’d spent the day paying for cabs—and then
crossed the street to where they were, halted temporarily as Godiva made a huge fuss over Lida Arkmanian.

“Tcha, Krekor,” Tibor said. “She’s a very friendly dog. I was taking her to your building to see if Grace is home yet. She
is due this afternoon sometime.”

“She is a very friendly dog,” Lida Arkmanian said, leaning down to rub her under her chin. Godiva sincerely loved this. She
showed it by leaping a foot in the air and barking in ecstasy. Lida stood up. “I don’t know how Grace thinks she’s going to
keep a dog like this in an apartment. They get big, Labradors do.”

“She will take the dog to a park and let it run around,” Father Tibor said. “She will take it to obedience school, too, I
hope. It is a wonderful dog, really, but it is very active.”

“Come on,” Gregor said. “I’ll let you into my place and you can stay there if Grace isn’t home yet.”

They went into the building and past old George Tekemanian’s door. Old George was out on the Main Line with his nephew for
the duration of the very bad cold, although why Martin and Angela thought the apartment on Cavanaugh Street wouldn’t be properly
heated was beyond Gregor’s
understanding. They went upstairs past Bennis’s apartment, where Tibor had stayed for the months the church and his own apartment
were being rebuilt after the bombing. They went up to Gregor’s floor and let themselves in. Tibor leaned his head back and
tried calling out “Grace” in his loudest voice, but his loudest voice wasn’t worth much. When the new church was built, they
had convinced him to get a microphone set up so that people could hear him when he sang the liturgy, and it had been a great
relief for everybody concerned.

“Don’t worry about it,” Gregor said. “She’s not home yet. There’s no music coming out of there at all. She can’t sleep without
music.”

“On the CD player,” Tibor said.

Tibor went down the short front foyer hall into the living room, and Gregor followed him. The apartment looked the way it
always looked, except that it had been empty the second before they’d walked in, and empty for hours before that. Really,
it felt as if it had been empty for months before that, although he knew it hadn’t been that long that Bennis had been on
her book tour. Emptiness was more than the absence of people. Or something like that. He shrugged off his coat and threw it
over the back of the couch. He wasn’t at his best when he was trying to be profound.

“I’m going to change,” he told Tibor. “Go into the kitchen and make yourself a cup of coffee. I bought those coffee bags Bennis
suggested a few months ago. They at least mean that we don’t have to drink what we percolate, and that’s something.”

“I’ll make for both of us, Krekor, no? And there’s food?”

“There’s a refrigerator full of food,” Gregor said. “Lida and Hannah and the rest of them think I’m starving to death now
that Bennis is away, which is funny as hell, if you think about it. You couldn’t get Bennis to cook if you threatened her
with death. Be right back.”

“Take your time, Krekor.”

Gregor went down the long hall to his bedroom, closed the door, and sat on his bed. He could see the answering machine from
where he was sitting, and there was no question at all that the green light on it was blinking. He took off his jacket and
tie and tossed them toward the chair. He missed. He got up, picked them up, and put them over the chair’s back. He sat down
again. His hands felt cold. His face felt cold. His brain felt frozen in place. He was not a man who found relationships with
women easy. He could not keep his distance or look at sex as a game for players who knew when to hit and run. He had been
in love exactly twice in his life, and in both those cases it seemed to him that the woman he loved had disappeared from existence
exactly when he needed and wanted her the most. But the green light on the answering machine was blinking, and that meant
somebody had left him a message.