Hardscrabble Road (21 page)

“Right,” Benedetti said. “Now, you got to understand something. The cops that pulled Harrigan over didn’t know it was Harrigan
when they pulled him over. It was just some guy in an expensive car, driving like he’d had about twenty martinis. But within
maybe a minute, they did know, because Harrigan wouldn’t shut up about it. I’m going to send you down to talk to them later,
and they’ll tell you about it. The pills were there. They had to take the guy in. Harrigan acted like, because it was him,
they could just let him ride.”

“Is that possible?” Gregor asked. “Are there police in this city who would have let him ride?”

“I don’t know,” Benedetti said. “There are police who are big fans. Harrigan is very pro-cop, at least superficially. He’s
in favor of the death penalty. He’s in favor of stiffer sentences. He doesn’t like Miranda much—”

“I thought the cops had gotten used to Miranda.”

“They have,” Benedetti said. “What they don’t like is how easily a conviction can be overturned because of Miranda violations,
or alleged Miranda violations. I don’t like that either. Anyway, Harrigan is good with that stuff, so there are fans on the
force. I don’t know if any of them would have, or has, let him loose after finding him driving around in that state of mind
with pills in the vehicle. But he went ballistic, and that gives me a feeling I don’t like.”

“Meaning you think that a cop did let him off in similar circumstances at least one other time,” Gregor said.

“Meaning I think it’s possible,” Benedetti said. “I don’t want to go labeling the beat officers before I know for sure. But
if you talk to the two men who arrested him that night, Dane Marbury and Mike Giametti, they’ll tell you what they told me,
and that’s that Harrigan went completely berserk when they insisted on arresting him. He got physically violent.”

“He doesn’t look like somebody who could do much damage getting physically violent.”

“Nah, he didn’t. He’s out of shape as hell. He’s practically as bad as Carson. Rush Limbaugh went on a diet. Drew Harrigan
never bothered. But anybody can get physically violent. Harrigan pushed the officers, kicked them, bit one of them on the
hand—”

“—Bit him?”

“He was flying,” Benedetti said. “God only knows what he had in him at the time, because once his lawyer got into it he wasn’t
about to take a drug test, but the likelihood is OxyContin at least.”

“OxyContin doesn’t make you violent, though, does it?” Gregor said. “It’s a tranquilizer, or something like that.”

“It’s a pain reliever. It’s most similar in effect to narcotics.”

“Just as I said, not the sort of thing to make you violent.”

“No,” Benedetti said, “but you’ve got to remember a few things. First, it wasn’t the only thing he was taking. There were
a lot of different pills on the seat, including three different kinds of prescription diet pills, which are amphetamines.
Second, he didn’t get violent until Marbury and Giametti tried to arrest him. And third, people react differently to the same
kinds of pills. That he was flying was a pretty good bet. You can see the police reports and the stuff from the station house,
where he apparently behaved like a loon. Including singing.”

“He was singing in the station house?”

“He was singing ‘Do Wah Diddy Diddy,’ or whatever it’s called.”

Gregor looked down at the picture on the back of Heart in the Right Place. “That must have been something to see. But you
know, you still haven’t told me why I have a Drew Harrigan problem. I was brought into this to help find Sherman Markey. Granted,
nobody would be looking for Markey if it weren’t for Harrigan, I still don’t see why I need to deal with Harrigan to find
Markey. In fact, I’m not even sure I’m supposed to find Markey. All I was asked to do was to get you people to—”

“—Do another morgue check, I know. It’s been done. John Jackman called it in an hour ago. But you’ve got to understand what
the thing is with Drew Harrigan.”

“What is it?”

“Harrigan named Markey as his contact for the drugs,” Benedetti said, “something that everybody knew as soon as they saw him
couldn’t be true. John said you hadn’t met Markey yet?”

“That’s right.”

“He’s an old alkie, a really old alkie. He’s been pickled for decades. Like a lot of these guys, he’s spaced. He’s almost
like an Alzheimer’s patient, except that he can focus on one thing, and that’s getting another drink if there isn’t one sitting
in front of him. Harrigan didn’t just say Markey got him the drugs, which I wouldn’t have believed anyway. Harrigan said he
sent Markey to pharmacies, doctors’ offices—”

“Jackman told me.”

“Okay,” Benedetti said. “So Harrigan comes in, gets booked, calls his lawyer, and tells us all about Markey, right? We go
get Markey, which isn’t hard, because he hangs out in only a couple of places and ends up at the same shelter when it gets
too cold. We get Markey. We bring him in. It’s pretty obvious that whoever got Harrigan the drugs, Markey wasn’t it. So then
I decided to do something, and I think it was probably a mistake.”

“What did you decide to do?”

“Charge Markey.”

“Even though you knew he couldn’t be guilty.”

“Yeah,” Benedetti said. “Look, Mr. Demarkian. This is the thing. Harrigan is behaving like a celebrity jerk. From off, his
attitude has been that we can’t touch him and we won’t because he’s such an important person. He was that way to the officers
in the car, he’s been that way to everybody he’s talked to since. He seems to think it’s
automatic
that because he’s a big
celebrity we won’t bring any serious charges against him and we won’t insist on jail time. This is the guy who goes on the
air four times a week and tells the world that the district attorneys of practically everywhere are complete wusses because
they don’t send more white drug addicts to jail. That’s his
solution to the difference in incarceration rates for drug crimes by race. Put more white drug addicts in jail, and if we
don’t, we’re full of shit when we say we’re serious about the drug war. Sorry.”

“That’s all right,” Gregor said.

“Charging Markey got me two things,” Benedetti said. “The first thing it got me was an excuse not to drop charges or make
a deal with Harrigan. I couldn’t do that and charge Markey at the same time because it would look like favoritism. It would
look like I was going after a poor homeless man and letting the rich guy off the hook. Not that that isn’t done every day,
because it is, but it gave me cover with Harrigan’s attorney. The second thing it got me was something of a lever to try to
find out who was really getting Harrigan those drugs. Because you know and I know that somebody was, and that that somebody
isn’t some pathetic old alkie living on the street. And I want him.”

Gregor thought about it. “I can’t see that you did anything unethical. Your reasoning makes sense. Is Drew Harrigan going
to get some kind of celebrity free ride?”

“Probably.” Benedetti sighed. “In the long run. Oh, we’ll put him away for a few months, but it’ll be a token thing. He’d
be at too much risk in the general prison population, and there’s no real point in jailing him anyway. If you ask me, there’s
no real point in jailing most of the people we jail. Violent offenders, yes. People who defraud over and over and over again.
Okay. But why is it exactly that we put away some kid for smoking dope and keep him in jail for a year, or five? Why is that
sensible? Or embezzlers, or people who kite checks? I can think of a million better ways to handle those things than jail.”

“Are you going to say those things in the election?”

“Not on your life.”

“So you have your answer,” Gregor said. “You still haven’t told me, why do I have a Drew Harrigan problem?”

Rob Benedetti stared at the ceiling, then at the floor, then out the small square window that seemed to have a view of nothing
but blank gray walls. Then he turned back to Gregor. “The word’s been out on the street for the last three days,” he said,
“that Sherman Markey is dead, and Drew Harrigan killed him.”

“Drew Harrigan is in rehab.”

“Drew Harrigan’s accomplice killed him, then,” Rob said. “Jackman said something about this,” Gregor said. “He said people
were speculating. So what?”

“It actually goes a little farther than that,” Benedetti said. “The night Sherman Markey disappeared, he was wearing a new
set of clothes the people at
the Justice Project bought him, including a bright red watch hat. On the morning of Tuesday, January twenty-eighth, a homeless
man walked into the precinct station on Hardscrabble Road and tried to report a theft. He said a man he knew had died in a
homeless shelter the night before, and some of the other men had stolen his hat. His bright red hat. He wanted to report the
theft on behalf of the dead man.”

“And the police let him file a report?”

“No,” Benedetti said. “They sloughed him off, and that would have been that, because nobody would have remembered it. However,
today, because you’ve been around asking questions and John Jackman is a friend of yours, we’ve had people double-checking
things. And then we got lucky, and there was a coincidence.”

“What coincidence was that?”

“One of the extern sisters at Our Lady of Mount Carmel walked into the Hardscrabble Road precinct station with the hat and
the old guy who’d tried to file the report the first time,” Benedetti said. “Just before you walked into this office, I got
on the phone to everybody in creation and started the wheels rolling. There was a death at Our Lady of Mount Carmel that night;
we’re trying to find out what happened to the body. I want to send Marbury and Giametti out to the monastery—do you know about
that, it’s nuns, but it’s still called a monastery?”

“You can get that from EWTN and Mother Angelica.”

“Right. Okay. Anyway, here we are. We have the hat, and granted there are a lot of watch hats and a lot of them are red, the
coincidences are piling up beyond what seems sensible. What scares me, what I really can’t get out of my brain, is that this
might be my fault. I thought I was being clever. I got Sherman Markey killed.”

“Do you really think that’s likely?” Gregor asked.

“I don’t know,” Benedetti said. “It’s that kind of thing. I don’t know Drew Harrigan well enough to know what he’d go for,
and I don’t know who his accomplice is at all. I haven’t got a clue as to what’s likely in this case. I just know I’ve got
a hat, and no Markey, and that when Harrigan walks out of rehab, I want to be standing there personally with the handcuffs.
There’s celebrity free ride for you. I got an experiment for you to do sometime. Go find some black kid off the street, up
for possession for the first time. Offer to pay his way to some fancy total immersion rehab place. See if you get anywhere
with the judge.”

“Who was the judge?”

“Bruce Williamson.” “Oh, God.” “Exactly. I’m going to get you a car, take you over to see the guys, okay?
It’s better that than have you wasting time looking for taxis when it’s nearly lunch hour. They said you didn’t drive.”

Gregor didn’t drive, but it wasn’t the kind of thing he wanted to go into at length, so he just stood up, got his coat, and
got moving.

A
few moments later
, sitting in the back of a plain black unmarked sedan—where did they find the cars they bought for police departments and city
governments?—Gregor Demarkian found himself turning Drew Harrigan’s book over and over in his hands. He didn’t like the man’s
face. It was too round, too smooth, too well taken care of, too smug, although he didn’t like to make judgments like that
about photographs. You couldn’t tell if somebody was smug or not from a photograph, just as you couldn’t really tell if a
defendant was remorseful by the fact that he didn’t show any emotion while he was in the courtroom. Gregor hated people who
came up with entire screenplays’ worth of motivation and character development from a few quick glimpses of a person under
extreme emotional distress. Not everybody cries when told that the person they love most is dead. Some people can’t break
down in public, and wait to do it until they’re alone. Not everybody looks guilty and haunted when he feels guilty and haunted.
Some people go numb with guilt and look like they’re made of stone. This was why Gregor had never really been happy with the
idea of trial by jury. It was made worse by the fact that attorneys deliberately attempted to seat the least educated and
least literate jurors they could find, on the assumption that the stupid are more easily influenced than the bright, and not
by facts and evidence.

Gregor opened the book at random. The paragraphs were short. There was a lot of white space at the top and the bottom and
the margins. Obviously, Drew Harrigan didn’t expect his average reader to have a doctorate in literature from Yale.

You know what really gets me about liberals? Liberals never met a criminal they didn’t like. Doesn’t matter what he’s done.
Doesn’t matter that he’s just slaughtered thirty people in a bank he’s been robbing. Doesn’t matter he’s spent his entire
life ripping people off and beating people up and being good for nothing, you arrest him and some liberal will come running
to say it’s all society’s fault. You know whose fault that is? Yours. It’s your fault if this piece of scum kills thirty people
in a bank. You get up every morning. You go to work. You put in your time. You pay your bills. You stay out of trouble. And
it’s your fault,
this guy tried to rob a bank, and instead of putting him in jail we should give him an income twice as much as what you’ve
got and send him to therapy to talk about his childhood.

Gregor sucked in air. That was—what? Trite. The sort of thing that had been around for twenty years or more. He wondered if
Drew Harrigan’s audience was young enough not to realize that Harrigan was just repeating things that had been said a hundred
times before by a hundred other people. It was disturbing to think they might be older, and looking to hear the same things
they’d been hearing for as long as they could remember. Gregor flipped through a few more pages.