Hardscrabble Road

by Jane Haddam

  The problem was, Drew probably wouldn’t have minded it. Neil let himself into the conference room. Marian Fuller was sitting in one of the chairs along the side of the table, tapping on a laptop.

  “Come in and sit down,” she said. “I’m not being serious. I’m on the Internet.”

  “I didn’t know you could get on the Internet in the conference room.”

  “You can get on the Internet anywhere in these offices. Even the bathrooms. Don’t ask me. It was Grayson Barden’s idea. Bringing the firm into the twenty-first century.”

  “The twenty-first century seems to be starting with an ice age. I think it’s below zero out there.”

  “It’s minus eleven,” Marian said. “So, what did you think? How was Sister Maria Beata of the Incarnation?”

  Neil dropped his briefcase on the table and dropped into a chair. “She reminded me of somebody, I’m not sure who. She was bright as hell.”

  “She didn’t remind you of someone, Neil, you know her. At least in passing. Her name used to be Susan Titus Alderman. She was within a week of a partnership at Coatley, Amis when she decided to enter the convent.”

  “Are you serious? A Catholic at Coatley?”

  “She wasn’t a Catholic when they hired her. She’s Evan Alderman’s daughter.”

  Neil sat up a little straighter. “That’s who she reminded me of, Evan. And not just in the way she looks. She has that same style of argumentation. She’s very good.”

  “She’s supposed to be. I meant to tell you about it before you left this morning, but I was late getting in and you went out early. It didn’t matter much, though, did it? It wasn’t an adversarial situation. You’re both on the same side.”

  “We both want the monastery to be able to sell the property, if that’s what you mean.”

  “That’s what I meant, yes,” Marian said. “Although you know, I’m getting a little nervous about the buyer. You don’t suppose that Drew could be so stupid as to try to be buying the property himself? Behind our backs, I mean.”

  “Drew is stupid enough for anything and you know it.”

  “We’re using the word differently,” Marian said patiently. “He’s stupid, yes, in that academic sense that matters so much to people like us, but he’s shrewd, too. He’s got a good eye for what’s best for him. What worries me is that he’s greedy, too, and greed gets in the way of judgment far too often. If it didn’t, we wouldn’t have jobs.”

  “Well,” Neil said, “that’s true enough. But the isolation in rehab is real. He has to stay incommunicado for sixty days. He’s got forty more of them left. He can’t be communicating with lawyers trying to buy the property we’re trying to sell for him any more than he can be communicating with us. If he got caught at it, they’d kick him out the door. And then the legal problems would land on his head.”

  “They’re going to land anyway.”

  “I know. He knows. But time matters.”

  “True,” Marian said. “Of course, in a way, that almost makes it worse. It’s not that hot a property. Who would want to buy it?”

  “Maybe somebody who wants to help out the nuns without letting it go public that he’s contributing to the Archdiocese,” Neil said. “The scandals have made a lot of people unhappy to have a public connection.”

  “This is one and a half million dollars we’re talking about. People don’t lay out one and a half million dollars anonymously. And there’s only so anonymous it can be. Whoever it is is going to have to file tax forms, I don’t know what else. Why the anonymity?”

  “Presumably because there’s something about the sale we might not like.”

  “Exactly.”

  Neil looked away. He liked Philadelphia in the winter. He liked the bleakness of it, the darkly clouded skies, the cold. He thought there was something stronger and finer about people who could live through that without having to run off to someplace southern and sunny, a happyface place without mind and without soul. Mostly without mind, he thought. That was why he hated Drew Harrigan. Drew Harrigan stood for all the crap he had to put up with these days, the alliances he had to make to be allowed to exist in his own country at all.

  “Neil?” Marian said.

  “Nothing,” Neil said. “I was thinking about the Republican Party.”

  “Why?”

  “Drew Harrigan,” Neil said. “The new face of the Republican Party. Pork rinds and stock car races. Don’t you just get sick of all those people sometimes, the local yokel, we’re all small-town folks people? The religious people.”

  “I don’t think Drew Harrigan is religious.”

  “I don’t either. But he’s part of it. Part of this whole movement to see intelligence and erudition and cultivation as—I don’t know what.”

  “The hallmark of the liberal Democrat?”

  “FDR has a lot to answer for,” Neil said. Then he shook his head hard, as if to clear it. “I’m sorry. I’m behaving like an idiot. It’s been a long day.”

  “Because of the nun?”

  “The nun was all right. She really is very bright. It was a nice change from Drew.”

  “Drew’s in rehab. You’ve got a respite. But I think we should take this seriously, Neil. I don’t like the fact that the buyer is anonymous, and so anonymous that we can’t even trace the lines of influence. I don’t like it that he’s got a law firm from Wilmington, and one we don’t do business with.”

  “It could be a her,” Neil said. “Maybe it’s a woman. Maybe Drew put Ellen up to it.”

  “If he did, he’s a dead man,” Marian said, “which he may be no matter what, but that would tear it. Have you talked to Ellen?”

  “A couple of times.”

  “And?”

  “She didn’t say anything in particular. The last time she really thought anything through was when she decided to go out for cheerleader instead of drum majorette in high school. She cries a lot. She’s convinced there’s a conspiracy to bring Drew down—”

  “Drew’s convinced of that,” Marian said quickly. “And I don’t think it’s completely out of the question. You’ve got to wonder why there’s this level of fuss—”

  “No, you don’t,” Neil said. “The man was caught with a Tupperware container full of illegally acquired prescription drugs on the seat beside him in the car, while he was driving erratically—assuming we’d like a polite word for it—and then he damn near threatened to blow the cop’s head off when he was asked to get out of the car. There’s a point at which even the most accommodating district attorney has his hands tied. Or forced, as the case may be. We ought to be grateful that Drew didn’t actually have the gun to carry out the threat, or we might be going to a funeral right now.”

  “There were no guns,” Marian said.

  Neil sighed. “I don’t understand how these people live like that,” he said. “The … confusion of it, I suppose. The constant upheavals. Drunk and stoned and fighting and I don’t know what. He’s no different than any of the rest of them.”

  “We need to do something about the buyer,” Marian said. “We need to find out who that is. We need to cover our asses, not to put too fine a point on it.”

  “I know.”

  “And?”

  “And I don’t know,” Neil said. “I’ll go back to work on it in the morning. We’ve tried all the usual things. I’ll see if there’s something we haven’t thought of before. Not that it really matters at the moment anyway, since the Justice Project has the injunction and the monastery can’t sell the property anyway. Has it ever occurred to you that our lives would be a lot easier if Sherman Markey was just dead?”

  “Going to get a gun and start trolling all the SROs and homeless shelters in Philadelphia?”

  “No. But it’s true. Without Markey making a fuss, nobody would care about the property. Nobody would care about the buyer. This whole thing would disappear in a few weeks. The DA doesn’t want to prosecute Drew. It’s going to be a pain and a half. He’d be more than happy to agree to
a plea bargain on pretty good terms, if nobody was watching. Markey’s making everybody watch.”

  “It was Drew’s idea to stick Markey with the procurement charge.”

  “I know.”

  “And Markey wasn’t procuring anything for anybody.”

  “I know that, too. So does the DA. Drew’s an idiot and an ass. But we knew that already.”

  Marian turned off her computer and folded it up. “Maybe you ought to go home and get some rest. Go out and have a drink first, if you need to. Get some Johnny Walker Blue.”

  “If I start drinking Johnny Walker Blue, you’re going to have to start paying my mortgage. Do you wonder who it is that Drew’s shielding? Who got him the drugs?”

  “No,” Marian said. “It’s not my business to wonder. It’s not yours, either.”

  “No, it isn’t. And I suppose it could be Ellen. Of course, she’s got the same problem as Sherman Markey. She’s a brain-dead ditz. And she’s not exactly retiring. She’d walk into a drugstore wearing four-inch heels and thirty thousand dollars’ worth of chinchilla and they’d be talking about it for months afterwards.”

  “Go home,” Marian said. “It doesn’t matter who got him the drugs. It doesn’t matter that he’s an idiot. He’s sitting in rehab and he can stay there for the moment.”

  “He’d better stay there.”

  “Exactly. Go home.”

  “If you were going to murder Sherman Markey, the thing to do would be to poison his booze. It wouldn’t even be hard. You’d just doctor a bottle and hand it to him, and he’d take it and drink it. Nobody can think his way out of a paper bag these days. It’s incredible.”

  “I’m going to go home,” Marian said. “Imagine me sitting in front of my fireplace with the cat on my lap, reading P. D. James. Imagine yourself doing the same.”

  “Emerson,” Neil said. “That’s what I’m reading. Ralph Waldo Emerson. He couldn’t think his way out of a paper bag, either.”

  Marian tucked the laptop under her arm and left. Neil looked back up out the window. It was not, he thought, about money. Drew was richer than he was by several magnitudes, and he doubted that Drew’s family had had any less than his own when they were both growing up. It was not about money but about commitment, and most important, about commitment to those things that made civilization—what? That made civilization civilization. That made civilization possible. There was no civilization at all in a world full of people who were proud of their ignorance, who wore their willful stupidity as a mark of honor, who used the words “educated” and “intellectual” as epithets more worthy of scorn than pederasty or treason. It was not about money. It was not even about “Americanism.” It was about the life of the mind.

  He got up and looked around. The conference room was the same as he remembered it from his father’s time. There was good mahogany paneling on the walls. There was good oak flooring underfoot. The Persian carpets had been cleaned a month or so ago, but they hadn’t been replaced in fifty years.

  Maybe he was wrong to think of the difference in the terms he did. Maybe he was so quick to recoil at the excesses of Drew Harrigan and his followers that he missed the good in them. Maybe the world had not been better and finer and more honorable when he was a boy—but it had been more uncompromisingly respectful of intelligence and achievement, and it had not been so enamored of the populist skew. He was sick of the jokes of people who could only laugh at what they did because they didn’t understand it. He was sick of the kind of religion that pressed relentlessly to compress all life into the intellectual provincialism of the sort of small towns that had once made Sinclair Lewis despair. His America was not the America of creationism and WWJD bracelets any more than it was the America of bodegas and barrios. There were days when he wanted to torch the entire city of Philadelphia just to see what would rise from the ashes.

  He wouldn’t do it, because he was scared to death, deep down, that what would rise would be a rap band and a Bible-believing Christian.

  He had to go home. Marian was right. It had been a long day, a long week, a long month, a long year, and he had gotten to that point in the day when killing somebody felt like a rational response to the conditions he was forced to live under.

  It wouldn’t do him any good to murder Sherman Markey—but he was right about the fact that everybody he knew would be better off if Sherman Markey showed up dead.

  5

  To Ellen O’Bannion Harrigan, life often seemed like a jigsaw puzzle with a couple of pieces missing—or like the English classes she had been required to take in high school, where the teacher and all the other students had been part of a joke she had not been let into, and kept claiming to see Meaning and Symbolism and Complexity in poems Ellen knew made no sense. There was a lot of that second thing going around in the world at large, as far as Ellen could see. Even the people who worked in Drew’s office liked to talk about Iconography and Semiotics and the Politics of Meaning, which Ellen had finally figured out was the idea that people voted in order to make sure their lives Meant Something in the long run. She had no idea what it was people were supposed to want their lives to Mean.

  Right now, what Ellen knew was that she wanted the city of Philadelphia to do something about the homeless people. This was the fourth little knot of them she had seen in the ride back from the dentist’s office, huddled together over the steam grates that were set into the sidewalk every block in the middle of the city. There were two women and two men. They were all impossibly dirty.

  The city of Philadelphia should move them, Ellen thought, sitting back. The city should send them to shelters, or arrest them for vagrancy. She didn’t trust people who chose to live like that. Sherman Markey was a homeless person, after all, and he was responsible for Drew taking drugs and being in all the trouble he was in. Drew would never have taken drugs if he’d been left to himself. He wasn’t a drug kind of person. It was the homeless people who took drugs.

  The apartment was just up ahead, not a block and a half away. There were no homeless people here. The doormen chased them away. They sometimes got into trouble for doing it—apparently, you weren’t supposed to be able to make citizens get off the public sidewalks, even if they were dirty and smelled and might be dangerous to the people who lived in the neighborhood—but they did it anyway, and most of the time nobody complained. She just wanted to get home and take a couple of Advil to keep her jaw from aching. This was the fourth root canal she’d had in as many weeks.

  The driver pulled up to the curb and Ellen waited patiently for him to come around and open her door. This was important. Drew had drilled it into her over and over again. This wasn’t a cab. This was his personal car and his personal driver. That made it her personal car and her personal driver. It wasn’t her job to behave as if the driver were doing her any favors. She was also supposed to remember not to call him a “chauffeur.”

  The driver came and opened the door. She got out into the wind and flinched. It was really very, very cold. You would think that a night like this would make those people living on the street realize they had to change their lives and learn to be better. People called her stupid, but even she wasn’t so stupid that she couldn’t have picked up on a point like that one.

  She said good evening to the doorman and went in through the big glass doors into the lobby, and then she stopped. There was a woman in the lobby, sitting in one of the big leather armchairs with her coat thrown off to the back of her, reading something Ellen thought at first might be a monthly magazine called First Things—and if that had been the case, the woman would have been Martha Iles, Drew’s chief assistant. Ellen truly hated Martha Iles, in spite of the fact that she knew Drew would never be attracted to her, never in a million years. Actually, no man anywhere would ever be attracted to Martha. She was a frump, a pudgy little woman who wore skirts just long enough to make her legs look thicker. She was also a right royal bitch—which was a word, like “chauffeur,” that Ellen was supposed to remember never to say.<
br />
  The woman in the chair wasn’t reading First Things, but Vanity Fair, which was kept on the coffee table in the lobby to give visitors something to do while the people they were waiting for were taking too long to come down and get them. She was too tall and too thin to be Martha, too, and her hair had been colored recently, where Martha’s had never been colored at all. Ellen relaxed a little. It was Danielle Underwood, Drew’s media assistant, the one he had hired to prove that he wasn’t some kind of anti-woman sexist Neanderthal.

  Of course, as far as Ellen was concerned, women really should spend their time in kitchens, but that was just her opinion. It was just because she thought children were more important than money, even if she couldn’t have any right now, because it would make things too complicated.

  Danielle had seen her come in and put the magazine back on the coffee table. She stood up and got her coat by its collar.

  “Ellen,” she said. “It’s good to see you.”

  Ellen did not think it was all that good to see Danielle, but she couldn’t say that kind of thing. The ideal was to be always gracious and polite and absolutely vacuous, so that nobody could tell what you were thinking.

  “Danielle,” she said. “Has something happened? Isn’t it late for you to be out?”

  “I’ve been talking to the lawyers. To Neil Savage. I thought I’d come over and tell you what was going on.”

  “I don’t really understand what’s going on,” Ellen said. “There’s no use explaining it to me. Drew will be back in about a month. You should tell it all to him, then. He handles that kind of thing.”

  “Yes,” Danielle said. “Well.” She looked at the doorman.