Hardscrabble Road (27 page)

“Voting is an important obligation of citizenship,” Tibor said gravely.

“Paying taxes is a more important obligation of citizenship, and I do that,” Gregor said. “But I don’t like this stuff. I
don’t like all the yelling. I don’t like the business of making the other guy look like a cross between Lucifer and Hitler.
And I especially don’t like being told by the mayor of the city of Philadelphia that I’m a stealth contributor to John Jackman’s
primary campaign. I don’t give money to candidates. I’m not that stupid.”

Tibor shrugged. “It will get worked out, Krekor. The mayor can’t be seen to be obstructing a police investigation into the
murder of a famous man. It is murder, isn’t it? They know that for sure?”

“Yes,” Gregor said. “It definitely is murder. Poison was what the pathologist decided last night, and not very sophisticated
poison. Straight arsenic, and lots of it. They found the bag with his personal things in it. There was a big bag of pills.
They’re analyzing those, now. I seem to be running into a lot of arsenic-laced pills lately. That’s odd for a coincidence.”

“It seems to me like a fairly sensible way to commit a murder,” Tibor said. “Not that murder is ever sensible, you understand,
but that lacing somebody’s medication with arsenic is a sensible way to go about it if you can be sure that nobody else will
take the pills. That was the case here?”

“Absolutely. Harrigan was a pill addict. Nobody else was going to get near his pills. The thing is, we almost didn’t find
him. He’d been in the morgue for two weeks without anybody knowing it was him, and the doctor who did the autopsy pulled the
corpse out to work on thinking it was a homeless man who’d died at Our Lady of Mount Carmel out on Hardscrabble Road. If it
wasn’t for the situs inversus, it would have been weeks before we found the body, if ever. It would at least have been until
he was supposed to reappear from rehab, which wouldn’t be for another twenty something days.”

“Situs inversus,” Tibor said. “The site is inverted?”

“It’s a medical condition,” Gregor said. “All your organs are on the
wrong side and your intestines curve in the wrong direction. Your heart is on your right instead of your left, for instance.
That’s what the book title means. He made a big deal about it. His heart was on the right side, literally. On the right side
of his chest. And that’s how the pathologist figured it out, or rather suspected it. He opened up the body and the heart was
on the right side, and he remembered the ads for Harrigan’s program, which always mentioned the fact, and there we were. He
called the police, told them what he had and what he suspected, and they ran a fingerprint check. Which was funny, really,
because they’d run at least three other fingerprint checks on
that body in as many days, and come up blank. Of course, it wasn’t Drew Harrigan’s fingerprints they were looking for. It
was Sherman Markey’s.”

“And this is a case the mayor does not want you involved in?” Tibor said. “It sounds like just your kind of thing. It is complicated.
It is absurd. It is making a lot of noise. It was on every news station last night, Krekor, and I did listen, but I must have
missed the part about the situs inversus.”

“Or maybe they never mentioned it. I don’t know what the reporters know about how the body was found. The problem is, here
is the body, and we don’t begin to have any idea how it ended up where it ended up, and dead at the same time. The one thing
that we went over and over and over yesterday was where it was found, and were they sure this was the particular body that
had been found. And the answer is, yes, there’s no question whatsoever. He died in the barn at Our Lady of Mount Carmel on
the night of January twenty-seventh or the early morning of January twenty-eight. And the ambulance came out and got the body.
It was tagged and filed in a morgue drawer. It’s been there ever since. Which leaves us with a number of very interesting
questions, starting with why a man like Drew Harrigan would pretend to be homeless and go sleep for the night in a barn full
of homeless people. I mean, this isn’t just some rich guy. This is a man who gave every indication of absolutely loathing
homeless people. He called them crazy. He called them lazy bums. He said at one point that the police should round them all
up, put them on a boat, and dump them on one of those islands they use for landfills.”

“Oh, tcha,” Tibor said. “There is no point in reading this man’s book.”

“No, do it, please. For me. Because I can’t read it. And you’ve got to understand he was speaking on his radio program, and
that program has an audience with a distinct ideological skew.”

“Dumping the homeless in a landfill is not an ideological skew,” Tibor said. “It’s a sin. It is the essence of an anti-Christian
perspective.”

“Interestingly enough,” Gregor said, “I don’t think Harrigan had much to say about religion. Anyway. We have to figure out
what he was doing in that barn, wearing Sherman Markey’s hat or one exactly like it—”

“—He had the hat of the man you were looking for?” “Well,” Gregor said, “don’t get too worked up yet. It was a red wool watch
cap. There are thousands of them for sale in the city. They cost maybe thirty dollars. It could just be a coincidence. But,
for now, yes, he was wearing a hat identical to the one Sherman Markey was wearing the last time anybody remembers seeing
him. And Sherman Markey is still missing. And Harrigan was supposed to be in rehab, but if he’s been dead for two weeks, why
hasn’t the rehab place gotten in touch with the judge to report Harrigan AWOL? The more you try to think it through, the worse
it gets, and the
worse it gets, the more keeps landing on you. We all sat around last night in John’s office—me, John, Rob Benedetti who’s
the district attorney, the two cops who had the original Harrigan drug bust—we all sat around talking about it, and the more
we talked the more it sounded like an Agatha Christie novel. We were making timetables. It was insane.”

“Timetables of what?”

“Of who had seen who where. The last time anybody had seen Drew Harrigan. The last time anybody had seen Sherman Markey. Hats.
You name it. By the time we all got through at the morgue it was the middle of the night and nobody wanted to talk to us,
including Neil Savage, Harrigan’s attorney. And Judge Williamson isn’t talking to anybody.”

“There’s a judge who is a suspect?”

“There’s a judge who signed off on Harrigan’s rehab, and what all of us want to know is what kind of paper he got to ensure
that Harrigan was actually going into rehab and staying there. We all want to know a lot of things, but like I said, it was
late, and we couldn’t get anybody to talk to us, or they couldn’t get anybody to talk to them, and then the mayor called and
had a fit about me. This was at, oh, I don’t know. Midnight. I hung around a little while longer and then came home. And I’m
very tired, and very fed up, and I know I’m going to have to go out there today and listen to John and the mayor both blithering
about the primary and the general election and the world going to hell in a handbasket, and all I want to do is take a couple
of weeks in Bermuda. It’s warm this time of year in Bermuda, isn’t it?”

“Warmer than here,” Tibor said.

Godiva nuzzled deeper into Tibor’s lap, and Tibor petted her absently. Gregor thought that if Grace was away for long, she’d
come back to find that dog so devoted to Tibor that she wouldn’t want to come back home.

Gregor finished his coffee and checked his watch. If he had to get up in the middle of the night to work on something he wasn’t
even sure he was being hired to work on, everybody else should get up in the middle of the night to keep him company.

He wasn’t sure that was the best policy for a politician to follow, but he felt himself justified in being smug that he was
not now, and would not ever be, a politician.

A
t seven o’clock, Gregor
was out on Cavanaugh Street, waiting for the cab he’d very carefully called for from Tibor’s apartment. It shouldn’t be difficult
to get a cab at this hour of the morning, but nothing ever worked the way it was supposed to, and he was taking no chances.
Tibor
came out to the street to wait beside him, since he had to go that way to get to the Ararat for breakfast anyway, and when
the cab pulled up, they were discussing Bennis’s book tour. Or not discussing it, as the case might be. Gregor found it difficult
to understand why so many people had so much trouble talking about Bennis as if she were an ordinary human being, instead
of this fantasy that had dropped out of heaven onto their heads and might go back there at any moment, for any reason.

“I think it is a matter of professional obligation,” Tibor was saying as the cab was stopped at the light only two intersections
away. “I think you are wrong to believe that it has anything to do with you. I think that if Bennis were angry with you, she
would tell you. Bennis is like that.”

Gregor was about to say that he had no idea what Bennis was like, but the cab was suddenly there, pulling in so close to the
cars parked at the curb that it threatened to scrape the paint from a green Volvo and a yellow Ford Escape. Gregor gave one
small thought to who on Cavanaugh Street wanted to pay for the gas on an SUV when he was living in a city where the hills
were few and the snow removal was good, and then got into the cab’s backseat.

“Never in her life has Bennis ever made any sense to me,” he told Tibor, through the still-open door, “and she doesn’t make
much sense to me now. All I know is, she’s upset about something, she’s been upset for months, she won’t tell me what’s going
on, and now she’s disappeared. And I don’t care if you call it a book tour or a professional obligation, it’s still a vanishing
act. I’m too old for this, Tibor.”

“You’re never too old for love,” Tibor said.

The problem was, this situation had nothing to do with love, and Gregor knew Tibor knew it. He slammed the door shut and told
the driver to go down to John Jackman’s office. Here was one early morning John wouldn’t be spending at his campaign headquarters.
The cab pulled out and down Cavanaugh Street far more quickly than it had advanced from the stoplight to pick Gregor up, and
they were suddenly in a built-up section of the city, full of office buildings and hole-in-the-wall restaurants with plate
glass windows. The sky was already light, with that sharp edge to it that meant the air was extremely cold.

The first thing Gregor caught sight of that his mind fixed on was a dispenser full of copies of the Philadelphia Inquirer,
its headline glued to the Drew Harrigan story but properly vague, as it would have to be given the time limitations of going
to press while the investigation was still stumbling around in confusion. The next thing he saw was a homeless woman wearing
a thick bulky coat, stockings that fell down her legs, and bedroom slippers. It was the image of a moment, connected to nothing,
indicative of nothing, and before he had really absorbed it the light changed and the cab shot off
and away, onto other streets. Gregor found himself thinking of something the nun had said last night, while they had both
been sitting in the police precinct’s waiting room for the second time.

“The trick about the homeless problem,” she said, “is getting anybody to realize there’s a homeless problem at all. We notice
homeless people when they scare us. When they don’t scare us, it’s as if they’re ghosts. We look right through them. We don’t
see them at all.”

The homeless person Gregor Demarkian was not seeing at the moment was Sherman Markey, and it made him very, very worried.

F
or Ellen Harrigan, the
worst thing the night before had not been being taken to the morgue to look at the dead body. The worst part of yesterday
had been coming back to the apartment and realizing she had no idea of what she was supposed to do. She tried to remember
how her mother had been when her father died, but that didn’t work. When Ellen’s father had died, Ellen’s mother had been
immediately surrounded by Ellen’s aunts on both sides of the family. Nearly a dozen women had crowded into their house and
brought casseroles, cleaning buckets, Mass cards, and gossip. They had arranged for the funeral, catered the wake, and called
Father Henfrey about having a novena said for the repose of Ellen’s father’s soul. Ellen had no idea who was going to do all
that now. There would have to be a funeral, but Ellen didn’t know how to arrange one, and didn’t want to know. She didn’t
know if Drew should be buried from the Catholic Church or not. He never went to church unless he was out on the road touring,
and then he went because his fans went, or lots of them did. It had been forever since Ellen went to church, too. You got
away from things like that when you no longer lived where you were supposed to. She did still believe in God, because it was
stupid not to, and the only people who didn’t were liberals and secular humanists, who were even worse than liberals. Still,
she couldn’t just sit in the apartment day after day now that Drew was gone. She was going to have to do something.

She didn’t know when she had decided that she ought to go into Drew’s office, but as soon as she arrived at the office doors,
she knew it had been the right thing to do. Drew’s offices were on the fifteenth floor of a tall building in the center of
the city, a self-contained suite with big double glass doors with the words
DREW HARRIGAN
:
HEART ON THE RIGHT SIDE
stenciled onto them. Ellen shuddered at the sight of them. She’d always hated that thing about Drew’s organs being all on
the wrong side of his body, and she still resented the fact that there was a right side for them to be on.

She pushed through the double doors and walked into the lobby. Nobody was at the receptionist’s desk, but that made sense.
It was far too early.

Her head hurt, just a little. Somebody had given her a sedative last night, but it hadn’t put her to sleep. It hadn’t done
anything for her that she could tell. She was cold in this office, in a way she hadn’t been outside, although it was freezing
outside. She looked at the walls. They were covered with big, outsized pictures of Drew. They were posters for books and the
radio show and the television show, which hadn’t gone over too well.