Hardscrabble Road (16 page)

Frank actually did appear to be listening. Marla had to give him that. Just to make the case stronger, she turned on the speaker
and let the voice of Drew Harrigan’s stand-in host flow through the room. Except that the voice didn’t actually flow. It sort
of dripped. It sounded like the man had sucked on a helium balloon.

“Turn it off,” Frank said. “You’ve made your point.”

“I can call him?”

“Go right ahead.”

“I can tell him we’re looking for a headliner?”

“Isn’t that pushing it?”

“Maybe, but I’m going to tell him. Trust me, Frank, this will work. And we’ll all feel better about it. You don’t like Drew
Harrigan anyway. He’s a pompous windbag and a pain in the ass to work with. I don’t like Drew Harrigan. He’s a walking threat
of a sexual harassment suit, if nothing else. And the techies don’t like Drew Harrigan. You’d think these people would realize
that you just shouldn’t piss off the staff, but they never do. I’m going to go make a phone call to Seattle.”

“I’m going to go have some more coffee,” Frank said. “Do you remember when you hired Drew Harrigan? I told you at the time
that we’d come to regret it.”

Actually, what Frank had told her at the time was that he wanted to be protected from ever having to be in the same room with
Drew unless there was somebody else present; but it didn’t matter. Frank walked out the door, and Marla went flipping through
her Rolodex to find the card she’d written Mike Barbarossa’s contact information on. She gave a passing thought to Sherman
Markey, and then she just let it go. She couldn’t go on feeling guilty forever, and it wasn’t like she’d killed the man, or
forced him to sleep in the streets on a night when it was cold enough to freeze a man’s balls into ice cubes.

She had a schedule to fill, and now that she had a chance in hell of filling it, without Mr. Drew Harrigan, she was feeling
better than she had in months.

A
t the Monastery of
Our Lady of Mount Carmel, Sister Maria Beata of the Incarnation was just finishing up her duty in the kitchen and getting
ready to go out to man the front desk. The reading in refectory had been even more of St. John of the Cross, and the reading
in
schola
this afternoon would be the same: the monastery was going through a positive orgy of the works of St. John. Beata
thought she could stand it if only somebody besides herself would say the obvious: that the man was a sexual hysteric; that
his ecstatic visions were sexual to the point of being embarrassing; that the fact that St. John had been named a doctor of
the Church centuries before St. Teresa had been allowed to carry the title was embarrassing for its bad taste as well as its
sexism. Nobody else would say the obvious, though, so she would have to. And then she would be in trouble again.

She put the last dish away in the cupboard, wiped her hands on her wide white apron, then untied the apron behind her neck
and waist and took it off. She hung it on one of the hooks that had been hammered into the kitchen wall just for aprons—they
shared aprons; whoever needed one took whichever one was available; they didn’t have aprons of their own—and went out of the
kitchen, across the refectory, and into the hall. The Angelus bell started ringing just as she reached the grille, and she
fell into the prayer without thinking much about it.

“Angelus Domini nuntiavit Mariae,” a voice came from above her head.

“Et concepit de Spiritu Sancto,” she answered, and then she was at the grille and the door with its careful locks, leading
to the vestibule.

She let herself out of the cloister and nodded to Sister Immaculata at the desk. The rule was that the front desk had to be
manned at all times by an extern sister, in case anyone came to the monastery in need of prayer or assistance. In Beata’s
experience, not much of anybody did.

“Good morning, Sister. Did we have any visitors while we were listening to Annunciata drone endlessly on about the Bridegroom
at breakfast?”

Immaculata frowned, to let Beata know that she did not approve of this kind of conversation, which criticized the good faith
efforts of other sisters, and solemnly vowed sisters at that. Beata ignored her.

Immaculata leaned over and rummaged through the drawer in the desk. “As a matter of fact, we did. An old man, one of the men
from the barn, came in to give you this.”

“This” was a bright red watch cap. Beata blinked.

“He said to tell the ‘other nun,’ which I presume is you, that he was wrong about the hat. They must not have stolen the hat
after all, because he
found it last night under one of the beds in the back of the barn. Do you understand any of that?”

“Of course. It was that man who died here, a couple of weeks ago. Don’t you remember?”

“I remember that a man died.”

“Yes,” Beata said, “well. He had on a hat, a brand-new watch hat, this one. I remember seeing him wearing it, standing in
line waiting to get into the barn when I came back from the lawyers’ that day. When he died, this other man came to the door
to tell me that he was dead and that some other men had stolen the hat. Except either they didn’t, or they stole it and then
lost it, because here it is.”

“I’m not comfortable with this idea of giving over the barn to homeless people,” Immaculata said. “It’s not—they’re not just
homeless, these men. They’re troubled. Some of them are mentally ill. Some of them are violent. We don’t have anybody here
who knows how to treat them professionally. And that wasn’t the first one who died.”

“Yes, well, Sister, homeless people will die in weather like this. We might as well do what we can to alleviate the situation.
I wonder what I ought to do with the hat.”

“Give it to the coroner, I suppose,” Immaculata said. “Or to the police generally. Isn’t that what’s supposed to happen when
somebody dies a pauper and his body is taken off wherever they take things like that, by the authorities?”

There were times when Beata wondered if Immaculata lived in a time warp, so that the world she saw looked a lot more like
the one Dickens had seen than the one Beata did, but in this case, she supposed the woman was right.

Who else would they give the hat to, if not the police?

T
here were people who
had told John Henry Newman Jackman that he ought to quit his job as commissioner of police of the city of Philadelphia while
he tried to unseat the present mayor in a primary challenge for the Democratic nomination, but none of those people were his
friends, and none of them were his fellow police officers, and besides, he wouldn’t have listened to that kind of advice in
any case. In Gregor Demarkian’s experience, Mr. Jackman rarely listened to advice of any kind, from anyone, on any matter.
They’d first met when Gregor had come to Philadelphia as the FBI officer on a kidnapping case. If there was one thing Gregor
was happy never to have to do again, it was to work kidnapping detail as a special agent of the FBI, complete with unmarked
brown sedans parked on the side streets of nearly abandoned city districts, cold coffee in Styrofoam cups, and a partner who
couldn’t stop whining about the way his wife treated his dog. There was a memory from the past, coming out of nowhere. Gregor
didn’t think he’d thought of Steve Lillianfield in twenty years. And good riddance.

John Jackman, on the other hand, he’d thought of. Almost from the moment Gregor had resettled himself on Cavanaugh Street
after the death of his wife and his retirement from the Bureau, he’d been watching John Jackman’s slow but steady rise up
through a spider’s web of increasingly more important jobs to the place where he was now. Gregor couldn’t say it had never
occurred to him that John might want to run for elective office. It had, but the office in question was, perhaps, president
of the United States. That would suit him. The idea of John Jackman as mayor of Philadelphia was nearly…something.

Gregor knew, without having been told, that if he was going to talk to John after nine, he’d have to talk to him down at police
headquarters. John was on a crusade to prove that he could run for everything—possibly even for the presidency, although he
hadn’t mentioned it—while still being
completely focused on his regular duties and completely effective as a commissioner of police. Gregor had no idea when he
was going to campaign, or had been campaigning. John was nearly lunatic on the subject of making “personal” calls from his
office. The history of police commissioners in Philadelphia wasn’t a pretty one. There had been a lot of corruption over the
years. John had swept into that job promising to change all that, and he’d been behaving like a cross between Joan of Arc
and Savonarola ever since. Still, he must have been campaigning sometimes, but that was political news Gregor did keep up
with. The primary challenge was going very well. It was going so very well, the present mayor was not expected to survive
it.

The cab pulled up in front of the tall, blank building that now served as police headquarters, and Gregor got out his wallet
to pay the man. The cab hadn’t quite made it to the curb, which was solidly packed with parked cars. That meant that all the
cars behind them were blocked from going forward until Gregor got his act together and his business done.

Gregor hurried. It was still cold, but not quite as cold as it had been this morning. He should have worn a hat anyway. He
just wasn’t used to wearing one. He threw the cabdriver a small wad of bills that included a more generous tip than he might
have given if he’d had time to think about it, and made the door in a run. The homeless people that he knew would be here
later in the day were not here yet. He wondered where they had gone. The people walking up and down the sidewalks all had
their coat collars turned up and their hands in their pockets. A sign on a store across the street said both 9:27 a.m. and
2 degrees F.

In the building, he stopped at the security desk and gave his name and destination. The guard looked through the notes on
his clipboard and said, “Oh, yes, Mr. Demarkian. You’re going to Mr. Jackman’s office. Take the elevator.”

Gregor had no idea how else he could get to John’s office. He supposed there were stairs, but he’d never actually seen any.
He got onto the elevator with two women, both African-American and both dressed in serious business suits. It was generally
agreed that John had brought needed formality into the building and an end to what had become ritual complaints about the
lack of African Americans on the police force and its support staff. The women were pretty, but not as pretty as John’s receptionist,
who looked like she ought to take over for Naomi Campbell if Campbell ever decided to retire.

Gregor got out of the elevator on John’s floor and presented himself to the Ms. Campbell in training, whose name was actually
Shoshona Washington. She looked at him as if she’d never seen him before—which she had, so many times that he could have been
a member of her family—and then
checked her book for his name. Only then did she deign to call in to John’s office and announce that he was there.

It wasn’t John, but John’s assistant Olivia who came out to get him. Olivia was the latest embodiment of John’s theory of
hiring assistants, as opposed to hiring receptionists.

“With receptionists, you hire pretty,” John had told him, when he’d first staffed this office. “With receptionists, you’re
looking to hit people in the eye, and besides, they don’t do much anyway. But with assistants, you need brains, you need common
sense, and you need organization. With assistants, you need church women.”

“Doesn’t this violate the separation of church and state somehow?” Gregor had asked him, imagining for a moment an entire
Gospel choir taking up the space just outside John’s office door.

John looked disgusted. “It’s not about their religion. I don’t care if they strangle chickens and worship the devil. It’s
about their entire mind-set. I mean, look at these women. They keep their churches running. They do the books. They schedule
the pastor’s time. They clean the places out. They issues the press releases when they have to be issued. They run the Sunday
School and the choir and all the projects. You get a bunch of them together on the bus, they can make a kid with a boom box
turn the sound off by just staring at him. Church women.”

Olivia was a tall, heavy, dignified woman in her fifties. Gregor had always thought she could get a kid with a boom box to
turn the sound off by staring at him all on her own. She held out her hand to him, and he took it.

“Good morning, Mr. Demarkian. It’s good to see you.”

“It’s good to see you, too, Mrs. Hall.” It had taken him a moment to remember her last name, because John always called her
Olivia. But it also hadn’t seemed right for him to call her Olivia himself.

She was leading the way back to John’s office. “He’s very excited to see you. I don’t know what it is you have for him, but
it must be more interesting than what we’ve got around here at the moment. Isn’t it a terrible thing, what happens in the
winter? I’ve got no use for people who drug and drink and waste the only life the Lord is going to give them, but I don’t
see leaving them to freeze to death in the street, either.”

“Maybe the campaign is getting him down.”

Olivia Hall turned to give him a long, cool stare. “We don’t talk about the campaign on police premises,” she said. “We don’t
mix the campaign with the work here.”

“Of course not.”

She turned away again, and knocked on John’s door. “It’s the homeless people who are getting him down, and all this cold.
Every precinct in the
city has had at least one homeless death so far this season, and it’s going to get worse before it gets better. It depressed
him. He’s the kind that wants to make everything right, and this is something nobody is going to make right anytime soon.”

“Of course,” Gregor said. He still felt like a third grader who had been scolded by the teacher in front of the entire class,
in spite of the fact that there was nobody around who could have heard Olivia’s rebuke to him. Mrs. Hall, he reminded himself.