Hardscrabble Road (34 page)

“Mr. Savage is Mr. Harrigan’s attorney?” Gregor said.

“That’s right.”

“Mr. Harrigan has an attorney who hates him?” Gregor said.

“Apparently.”

“This is getting odder all the time,” Gregor said. “So you went to see Mr. Savage, and you came back, and you saw Drew Harrigan,
where?”

“To be accurate, I saw a man in a red watch cap,” Beata said. “And it was just as I was getting out of the cab with Sister
Immaculata. The door was open, the one that leads to the barn, and the men were already lining up to get in to sleep. It was
dark, but it wasn’t time for us to open up yet. And I saw a man in the line with a bright red hat, and it was the hat I noticed.”

“Did he look well, or sick, or drugged?” Gregor asked.

“I didn’t get close enough to tell,” Beata said. “I was standing on the sidewalk. He was down near the barn door. It might
have been anybody at all in that watch hat. But I saw the watch hat.”

“Did you see him again?” Gregor asked.

“When he was dead,” Beata said. “One of the other men came to me in the night and said that the man in the red hat was dead,
and some of the other men were stealing his clothes. They’d already stolen the hat.”

“So when you went to see him the second time, he wasn’t wearing the hat?” Gregor asked.

“No,” Beata said. “And I know what you’re going to say. It could have been somebody else in the hat the first time. Yes, it
could have been. But the man who came to see me, he’s called Whizbang Joe—”

“—Is that supposed to mean something?” Gregor asked.

“Probably,” Beata said, “but I don’t really want to know what. Anyway, Joe came in to see me and he seemed to think it was
the same person who’d had the cap all along. I know homeless people aren’t the best witnesses, usually, and Joe is as addled
as the rest of them, but he was very certain, and
very upset because of the theft. So I tend to think he knew what he was talking about. Anyway, I went out with him and looked
at the body and made sure it was really dead and not just passed out or in a coma—”

“And you didn’t recognize him as Drew Harrigan then?” Benedetti asked.

“No,” Beata said. “But he really was a mess, a big one by then. He had vomit all over him. He was, I don’t know, the way they
get when they die like that. We’ve never done this with the barn before. It was the Cardinal’s idea this year. But we had
two deaths before this one anyway. They die—I don’t know how to explain it—they die bereft of humanity.”

“How did you decide he was dead?” Gregor asked.

“I put my head on his chest to hear if I could hear his heart beating, and then I tried to take a pulse. When those didn’t
work, I took the back of my crucifix and held it up to his nose. To see if his breath clouded it.”

“Then what did you do?” Gregor asked.

“I asked Joe to stay with the body. I came back into the monastery, told Reverend Mother what had happened, and we called
the ambulance. Then I went back to the barn to wait next to the body until the ambulance men came. They came pretty quickly,
actually. They don’t usually, for homeless cases. Not when the person is already dead.”

“And the ambulance men came and took the body away,” Gregor said.

“That’s right.”

“And then what?” Gregor asked.

“And then nothing,” Beata said. “It’s as I said, we’d had a couple of others. We send them to the morgue and we pray for them,
but after that, we don’t have anything else we can do for them.”

“But you must have heard the news reports, about the disappearance of Sherman Markey,” Gregor said.

“No,” Beata said.

Gregor raised his eyebrows. “It was all over the news, Sister. It was a major story for at least a couple of days.”

“Mr. Demarkian,” Beata said, “you don’t understand what an enclosure is. We don’t have a television here—oh, we have one.
It’s in a storeroom on the second floor and Reverend Mother would take it out if the president were assassinated or there
was a nuclear attack. It came out after 9/11 for a couple of days. But mostly it just stays in the storeroom. We don’t watch
it. We don’t get newspapers. We don’t get magazines. We are on the Internet.”

“Somehow, that figures,” Marbury said.

“But we’re not really on it, the way most people are. We have a Web portal and a Web site and we answer mail. Or, rather,
I do, because as an extern sister I have the right to be ‘outside.’ But for a piece of news to penetrate here, it’s got to
be a lot more important than the report of the disappearance of a
homeless man in Philadelphia. Even one connected to Drew Harrigan and his drug problems. I did notice that Ben had broken
up with J. Lo. Or vice versa.”

“I think she walked out on him,” Giametti said helpfully.

Gregor was about to ask if the monastery had had any contact with the physical body after the ambulance had taken it away,
if any of them had been asked to try to identify it, for instance, when the sister who had let them in came to the door and
tapped lightly.

“I’m sorry to interrupt,” she said, “but there’s a person here, a woman here, saying she’s come to find Mr. Demarkian. I—she’s
uh, a little upset, I suppose. She’s very insistent. And I did say you were all busy, but—”

“—You can’t just keep me standing here,” somebody said, and the voice was such a high, wailing shriek, Gregor winced. “Don’t
you know who I am? You can’t just keep me standing here like I’m not anybody and you can jerk me around.”

They all turned in the direction of the voice, because it was coming closer. Gregor could hear the sound of needle-sharp heels
clacking into the hardwood floor.

“You can’t just keep me standing here,” the voice said again, and then she was there, right in front of them, like a bad joke.

W
hoever she was, she
wasn’t very steady on those high heels. Gregor looked down and saw the ankle straps straining against ankles that weren’t
steady enough to wear them gracefully, and then those heels, at least three and a half inches high, and so thin they looked
like toothpicks. The rest of the woman seemed to be of a piece. Her hair was improbably blond and improbably enormous. It
was the kind of thing women went in for when they were competing to be Miss Mississippi. The earrings were real, though. There
was no substitute for emeralds that looked so perfectly like emeralds as those did, especially at that size. The dress and
the coat were just odd. They were both conspicuously expensive, but neither of them fit right. The coat was much too large,
its heavy, ostentatious fur slipping off her shoulders every time she moved. The dress was much too small, making her hips
look larger than they might have and forcing her breasts to strain against the fabric. She reminded Gregor of Marilyn Monroe,
except that Monroe was a woman who commanded attention because of her very presence, and this was a woman who commanded attention
because she was decked out so freakishly she made her audience uneasy about what she would do next.

Rob Benedetti was on his feet. They were all on their feet, even Sister
Beata. Sister Beata looked as if she were about to be asked to throw the woman out, or as if she wanted to.

Rob Benedetti said, “It’s Mrs. Harrigan, isn’t it? What are you doing here?”

“Looking for Mr. Demarkian,” Ellen Harrigan said. “Mr. Armenian-American Hercule Poirot. I called his place and there wasn’t
anybody there. So then I called Commissioner Jackman. You wouldn’t believe how much it took me to find out he was here. You
probably think I’m stupid. Everybody thinks I’m stupid. But I’m here.”

“Is there something in particular you want to see me about?” Gregor asked.

Ellen Harrigan turned to face him, looking him up and down. Gregor was interested to note that the looking over didn’t bother
him at all. This woman really had no force of personality at all. She was like a gigantic doll. Even her rampages made little
or no impression.

She dropped the coat off her shoulders, onto the floor. Gregor got the impression that she made a habit of dropping her clothes
on the floor, the sort of thing that Bennis, who had been born and raised rich as sin, would never do. This one not only dropped
her coat, she stepped on it. Shades of Barbra Streisand’s first television special.

“I’ve brought a list,” she said. “That bitch at the office said you think I’m a suspect, so I brought a list.”

“A list of what?” Gregor asked.

“A list of all the people who wanted Drew dead,” Ellen Harrigan said. “There are a lot of them. Liberals. Communists, some
of them. Traitors. You wouldn’t believe it. They all wanted him dead.”

“Your husband was a public man,” Gregor said carefully, “but at least the way this stands right now, there really isn’t the
likelihood that the perpetrator will turn out to be somebody who only knew your husband through his radio program. It’s more
likely, you see—”

“—I’m not talking about people who knew Drew only through his radio program,” Ellen Harrigan said. “I’m talking about people
who hated him. His syndicators, for one thing. And Jig fucking Tyler. The smartest man in the world. Smarter than all the
rest of us. And that woman who works with him who has a Communist cell and makes all her students join it. And that Southern
freak over at the homeless people. They all wanted him dead. All of them. You’re not going to make me a suspect just because
I’m not politically correct.”

Gregor Demarkian no longer had the faintest idea what this woman was talking about, but he did know one thing.

She was dead drunk.

A
lison Standish saw the
interoffice envelope on her desk and the man sitting in the chair near the bookcases at the same time, and for a moment she
thought the sight of the man was stranger than the sight of the envelope. She was in her coat and had a cup of coffee in her
hand. She’d picked it up at a place a few streets away that didn’t use branded cardboard cups to put their take-out coffee
in, because she’d learned long ago that she was useless at figuring out what was and was not an acceptable place to buy coffee.
Starbucks was out, because it was a large corporation, and it didn’t matter that it hadn’t been a large corporation twenty
years ago. Other places were out because they were just too downscale. It wasn’t all right to buy a cup of something nameless
from a local deli. Still other places were out because they served “Free Trade” rather than “Fair Trade” coffee, which mattered
to people, although Alison couldn’t straighten out why. Coffee tasted like coffee to her. She was sure there were special
kinds, with hidden subtleties of flavor, that she could have if she was willing to spend a lot more money than she wanted
to to get her caffeine fix in the morning. She was equally sure that the politics of coffee was intricate and nuanced, that
many coffee growers in South America treated their workers as no better than slaves, that coffee-growing co-operatives were
ready and able to sell her coffee if she was ready and able to pay the extra price it would cost to pay people decently. Hell,
she was even ready and able to pay the extra price it would cost to pay people decently. The problem was, she could never
keep the brand names straight. She ended up walking down the long halls to her office carrying something that blazed out her
lack of sensitivity, her lack of awareness, her lack of political commitment. At least that last part was true. The only thing
Alison Standish was politically committed to was Pope Leo IV, and he had died in 855
CE
.

The man was vaguely familiar, Alison wasn’t really sure why. She wasn’t paying much attention, because it had suddenly struck
her that the envelope was very odd indeed. Interoffice mail came to her mailbox, not her desk. And the last thing the departmental
secretaries had any interest in doing was delivering mail to the offices of individual professors.

She went to the desk and picked it up. It was from “the office of the chairman,” as if the chairman had an office. God, but
Roger could be so damned pretentious. It only got worse when he wrote his articles, which tended to be heavy on the “transformative
experience” of “trangressive texts.” The fad for postmodernism and deconstruction was waning, and Alison thought it couldn’t
come too soon. She’d spent enough of her life listening to literature professors spout gibberish.

She looked at the envelope and frowned. She wanted to open it, but the man was still sitting there in her visitor’s chair,
saying nothing, looking expectant. She put the envelope down again.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “You are—? Did we have an appointment?”

“Oh, no,” the man said. “I just—I looked you up on the system. These are your office hours. So I decided to come over. Under
the circumstances.”

“Are there circumstances?” Alison asked. There was the envelope, waiting for her. She couldn’t have been fired. Getting a
tenured professor fired was damned near impossible. Other things could have happened to her, though. She could have been censured,
or suspended. She could have been put on monitoring, which would mean that a representative of the university would sit in
on all her classes to make sure she didn’t say something she shouldn’t. She’d never heard of that happening at Penn, but it
had happened other places. On the other hand, it was usually the diversity coordinator or somebody like that who did the monitoring,
and those people were more concerned with professors who hated left-wing students than the ones who hated right-wing students.
Maybe the right-wing students had their own monitor who could be brought in if the occassion demanded it. Alison didn’t hate
left-wing students or right-wing students. Mostly, she didn’t even know which were which.

“You can open that if you want,” the man said. “I don’t mind.”

“No, no,” Alison said. “It’s all right. I’m sorry to be so rude. I’m afraid I don’t remember you.”

“We’ve never met. I’m Jig Tyler.”

“Oh,” Alison said, and thought: Good grief, the great man himself, two Nobel prizes, the Fields Medal, five bestselling books.
She put the envelope down again and held out her hand. “I’m sorry I didn’t recognize you. I mean, I did, a little; you looked
familiar but I couldn’t place you. I’m Alison Standish. I’m very happy to meet you.”