Hardscrabble Road

by Jane Haddam

  There was going to be no way to avoid having this woman up to the apartment. It drove Ellen crazy.

  “Why don’t you come up to the apartment?” Ellen asked Danielle. Then she headed for the elevators, biting the insides of her cheeks so that she wouldn’t scream. Her jaw hurt. She’d just had a root canal. She wanted to take painkillers and go to bed and watch Titanic on DVD.

  The apartment took up half the top floor of this building. It could only be reached if you had a special key to put into the board next to the floor buttons. Ellen keyed them in and waited for the elevator doors to open up on the penthouse lobby.

  She went across the lobby and opened the apartment with another key. Drew was always talking about getting full-time staff, including a maid to open up for them when they came home, but Ellen thought it would make things seem too cramped even in a large apartment. They could wait for the full-time staff for when they bought a place out on the Main Line.

  Danielle walked through the foyer and threw her coat on the back of the couch. Ellen followed her, trying to look helpful and upbeat.

  “Can I get you anything? Coffee? I can’t offer you a drink, because we threw all that out just before Drew went into rehab. Not that Drew’s an alcoholic, you understand, but it’s supposed to be bad for somebody who’s getting over a problem with pills. I don’t understand why it’s legal to sell pills like that if they’re addictive. I mean, isn’t that why drugs are illegal? Because they’re addictive?”

  “I don’t know,” Danielle said. “I’ve never thought about it. I don’t need coffee, Ellen, thank you. I just wanted to tell you what the lawyers said.”

  “It’s not going to do any good telling me what the lawyers said. I’m not going to understand it, because I don’t know the background. Drew can take care of it when he gets home.”

  “Right,” Danielle said. “Look, Ellen, you’ve got to try to understand that Drew may not be able to handle things when he gets home. Even assuming the course of treatment in rehab is one hundred percent successful—”

  “—Why shouldn’t it be one hundred percent successful? Drew doesn’t want to be addicted to anything. It’s just a matter of strength of character. Drew has a lot of strength of character. The problem with most people who take drugs is that they don’t care. They don’t want to get up out of their little cocoons and get some work done.”

  “Right,” Danielle said again. “The thing is, even assuming success, Drew’s going to have a lot of legal problems to deal with. You’ve got to get used to the fact that he might have to spend some time in jail.”

  Ellen blinked. “Nonsense,” she said. “Why should he spend any time in jail? He hasn’t done anything wrong.”

  “He was caught in possession of dozens of pills that he had no right to have.”

  “But they were legal pills,” Ellen said. “They were pills doctors gave him.”

  “The doctors only gave him the pills because he lied to them and said no other doctors were giving him the same pills. Which is against the law. And then there are the pills the doctors didn’t give him, that he got on the black market—”

  “From that man Sherman Markey. I know. I saw him on the news the other night. I don’t understand why he isn’t in jail.”

  “He’s out on bail.”

  “He shouldn’t be out on bail, though, should he? He should be in jail.”

  “Ellen, at the moment, Drew is out on bail.”

  “They’ve got those people being Sherman Markey’s lawyers. The Justice Project. They’re Communists, did you know that? Drew told me. During the Cold War, they actively worked for the destruction of the United States and the victory of her enemies. That’s just how Drew put it. Aren’t people given the death penalty for treason?”

  Danielle ran her tongue slowly over her upper lip, and all of a sudden Ellen didn’t want to be in the same room with her anymore. For all she knew, Danielle could be a lesbian. So many people were, these days.

  “I’m going to make coffee,” she said. “And I’m going to take some Advil. I just had a root canal.”

  “I’m sorry, Ellen. I didn’t mean to barge in on you at a bad moment.”

  “Advil is all right, isn’t it? It’s not illegal? I won’t go to jail for having a whole bottle of Advil in the medicine cabinet, a big one, with two hundred fifty pills?”

  “No, of course you won’t. Ellen, listen, it’s about the property on Hardscrabble Road that Drew deeded to the Our Lady of Mount Carmel Monastery. The nuns want to sell it.”

  “Well, it’s their property now, isn’t it? That’s what Drew said. They can sell it if they want to.”

  “Ordinarily yes, of course, they could. But now, you see, there’s a problem, because the lawyers at the Justice Project have gone to court and gotten an injunction to stop the sale until Mr. Markey’s suit against Drew can be settled—”

  “I can’t believe that man is suing Drew. I can’t believe it. It’s the money, you know. He thinks Drew is rich. He ought to be in jail.”

  “Yes, well, the thing is, the reason why the judge agreed to stop the sale— hold it up, temporarily, really—anyway, the reason is that the judge thinks there’s a chance that the entire transaction, giving the property to the convent, the sale, that the entire thing is a setup. That Drew has somebody pretending to be a buyer who isn’t a real buyer. And that the sale will look all right on paper, but no money will actually change hands, so Drew will end up owning the property but at the same time the paperwork will look like he doesn’t and therefore it won’t be taken away from him if he’s ordered to pay Sherman Markey any money.”

  “You’re being ridiculous. You sound like a mystery story.”

  “It’s not at all ridiculous, Ellen. People do it all the time. They shield money from taxes, from lawsuits, from spouses they’re divorcing.”

  “Drew isn’t divorcing me.”

  “No, of course he’s not. I just mean that people do that kind of maneuver very often if they’re afraid a court is going to attach their assets. And this is just the kind of case where a court could attach Drew’s assets. Sherman Markey may win his lawsuit. There’s no telling. And Drew could have—”

  “—He’s in rehab,” Ellen said triumphantly. “He couldn’t have. He isn’t allowed to talk to anybody. He isn’t even allowed to talk to me.”

  “I know. I don’t think anybody thinks he’s trying to run this from rehab. Drew isn’t that stupid. It’s possible he set it up before he went in, with somebody he could trust.”

  “Who?”

  Danielle coughed. “Well, not to put too fine a point on it, you.”

  “Me?”

  “You’re his wife, Ellen. You can’t even be required to testify against him in court.”

  “And I’m supposed to be doing what, trying to buy this property Drew just gave away? Except I wouldn’t be really buying it, because I wouldn’t be using money?”

  “Ellen, please. The Abbess of Our Lady of Mount Carmel is Drew’s sister. She—”

  “She could be in on it, too? A nun?”

  “You’ve got to understand that the Catholic Church doesn’t have a great reputation for honesty in this country at the moment.”

  “I’m getting my Advil,” Ellen said. “This is ridiculous. You’re making it all up. Drew gave some property to a convent. He was giving to charity, for God’s sake.”

  “He didn’t give to charity until after Sherman Markey filed his suit.”

  “And it’s no use thinking he and that awful woman have some kind of scheme going together. They can barely stand to be in the same room with each other. She’s a liberal, you know, politically. She hates everything Drew stands for. She hates me.”

  “I didn’t know nuns had politics,” Danielle said. “Never mind, Ellen, I’m sorry I bothered you. I know it’s ridiculous, under the circumstances, knowing the people involved. But I did think you needed to know what people are thinking, and what they’re going to go on thinking. This isn’t going t
o go away, not even when Drew gets out of rehab. You’re both going to have to deal with it.”

  “I don’t have to deal with anything. Drew deals with it.” “Yes,” Danielle said. “Right. Okay, Ellen, I’m going to go and let you take your Advil and get some rest. I’m sorry I bothered you. It’s just that we thought, and the lawyers thought, we thought it was important you understood what’s going on.”

  “I understand what’s going on,” Ellen said. “It’s that Sherman Markey. He got caught and now he’s trying to put it all off on Drew. He should learn to take responsibility for himself and live like a decent person.”

  “Yes,” Danielle said. “Well.”

  She was all packed up and ready to go. Ellen didn’t move to follow her into the foyer and out the door. She didn’t care how gracious and polite she was supposed to be. Her jaw hurt, and she wanted nothing more than to claw the skin off Danielle Underwood’s face—or Sherman Markey’s, if she could find him anywhere close.

  There was something she hadn’t gotten again, something she was being stupid about. She could see it in the way Danielle was looking at her, but she’d be damned if she’d come out and ask about what it was.

  That was the kind of mistake she used to make in high school, and she was never going to make it again.

  6

  Marla Hildebrande cared nothing about politics. She cared nothing about religion, either, beyond the sort of vague fuzzy-happy feeling that there probably had to be a God out there somewhere, watching out for her. It only made sense. If people asked her whether she prayed, she said yes, because she sent up heartfelt wishes for deliverance several times a day. It was the kind of thing anybody would do if they had to work with the kind of people she had to work with. If people asked her what she thought of the president of the United States or gun control or gay marriage or tax cuts, she tended to mumble a lot and look bright but mentally disabled. She only rarely knew what they were talking about anyway, and President George W. Bush had been in office for two years before she realized he was in office at all. When people said “President Bush” to her, she thought they were talking about the first one, whom she rather liked, because he reminded her of a boy she had dated her freshman year in college. She was shocked to find out that gay people were demanding the right to marry. Why would they want to, when marriage was mostly a hellhole for the heterosexual people who already had the right to do it? The one issue that sounded vaguely interesting to her was tax cuts, because cuts seemed to imply that she would pay fewer taxes and take home more money, although she wasn’t sure of that. Political people got her confused, and they were angry all the time. Religious people weren’t angry all the time, but they were angry a lot, and too many of them seemed to go to jail for tax fraud. She couldn’t understand why any of it mattered anyway. It was only people talking, and the more they talked, the less sense they made. She was not registered to vote, which probably didn’t matter either. She would never remember to go to the polling place and do it.

  She would remember what night the election was on, because so many of the people she managed cared so much about elections, and so many of the programs she handled wound themselves around election results when the time came. She looked on them the way she looked on Oscar nights and the nights Miss America was crowned. It was the contest that mattered. Contests created conflict and conflict created narrative drive and narrative drive created radio programs people wanted to listen to, and if people wanted to listen to your programs, advertisers wanted to advertise on them. It didn’t even matter if the conflict was controversial, or what kind of controversial it was. Rush Limbaugh and Howard Stern both made a lot of money.

  Now she looked at the pile of papers on her desk and bit her lip. It was cold. There was a draft from the window at her back. Every time the pane rattled in the wind she could feel needles of ice running up and down her spine. Her story was simple, uncomplicated, and mostly (she thought) uninteresting. She had grown up in a suburb of Lehigh in a family that had been well-off enough that she’d never really thought about money, but not as well-off as the families of the two doctors and three lawyers in town, whose daughters sent away to New York for handbags and panty hose from Lord & Taylor. She had worked hard at school and gotten good grades, because that’s what you did. It was your job, and it was important to be conscientious at your job. She had joined the school newspaper and later the school yearbook staff. It was a matter of getting up every morning and doing what you were supposed to do. She knew that she was neither a genius nor an idiot, in the same way she knew that she was neither a beauty nor a beast. She had friends without being popular, a place on the honor roll without being valedictorian, was good for a game of basketball in gym class without being athletic in a way likely to get her noticed by a scout from one of the bigger universities. When the time came, she had gone off to Gettysburg College, one of those good enough schools that were not quite up to being first tier, never mind Ivy League. On the day she graduated, she was like a thousand other girls at good-but-not-great colleges from one end of the country to the other. The only thing she had going for her was that steady conscientiousness that was the closest she had come to finding a moral center to her life. Other people debated the existence and definition of good and evil. Marla did not debate. She only insisted—for herself as well as everybody else—that work get done when it was supposed to and as it was supposed to, that records be kept with thoroughness and care, that letters and phone calls be answered within the day if at all possible, and that no problem be left unattended until there was time to attend to it. Marla Hildebrand hated procrastination.

  At the moment, she also hated Drew Harrigan, and this Markey person, and every single lawyer in the city of Philadelphia. If she had been susceptible to migraines, she would have gotten one. As it was, her teeth hurt. Conscientiousness buys you things. She didn’t know when she’d first understood that, but it had been a long time before she’d landed at LibertyHeart Communications, and what it had bought her at the moment was the fact that she was the youngest network programming executive in American radio. She was so young that there had even been speculation in the trades that she’d only gotten this last promotion because she was sleeping with Frank Sheehy, the president and CEO and chairman of the board and founder—which was a good damned trick, since Frank was as gay as she was straight and made no secret of it. When she surfaced long enough to consider conditions in the real world around her, Marla sometimes wondered how Frank got away with it. You would have thought Drew Harrigan’s devoted fans would have had a hissy fit long ago about his show being carried on a network that belonged to a “pervert,” but they never did. It made Marla think that she must have it a lot more right than the talking heads she saw on CNN on the odd night she decided to tune it in. Nobody really cared about any of the stuff they said they cared about. They only said they cared about it to give themselves something to do, and keep from being bored.

  Personally, Marla preferred to stave off boredom with steak, wine, chocolate, and a good mystery novel, but it was probably a good thing other people didn’t agree with her, because if they did there would be no Liberty-Heart Communications for her to run the programming for.

  Of course, if this kept up, there might not be any LibertyHeart Communications to run the programming for anyway. That was why Frank was sitting on her couch—all right, lying half off it and half on it—and she was pawing through reports at six o’clock in the evening. She had been in the office since before six in the morning, and it was time to go home.

  “I just can’t believe that so much of our income depends on one man,” Frank said. “I mean, he’s only one man. Granted, he’s the size of a house, and he probably takes up two seats on any airplane he flies on that he doesn’t actually own, the principle remains the same. Was that smart of us, relying so much on one man?”

  “We didn’t do it on purpose, Frank. We were putting together a lineup, we were putting together a network, we were putting together a
syndicate, and along came Drew.”

  “Do you ever wonder about that? I mean, he’s got nothing to speak of. No credentials. The level of his commentary barely rises to the standard of a high school debating team—no, he’d get kicked off a high school debating team. He spends too much time shouting. Whatever made Drew Harrigan the biggest thing on radio since rock ’n’ roll?”

  “The same thing that made Father Coughlin the biggest thing on radio since radio, back in the day when Father Coughlin was a force to be reckoned with.”

  “Meaning racism and xenophobia?”

  “Meaning that radio reaches a downscale audience,” Marla said, blocking out the thought that she’d already had to explain this at least a dozen times over the years. “The kind of people you never met at Princeton. Or, what was it?, Andover—”

  “—Exeter.”

  “Same difference.”

  “We don’t think so.”

  “Everybody else does. Trust me, Frank. Anyway, it’s a downscale audience. Mostly white men in blue-collar jobs or, worse, who’ve lost them. Guys who are worried about making the next car payment and worried about making the rent and worried about the state of their credit card bills. Guys who wake up in the morning and look in the mirror and find themselves staring straight into the face of a loser.”

  “And Drew is what? One of their own?”

  “Sort of.”

  “You’d think they’d all be socialists.”

  “They aren’t ‘ists.’ They don’t go that far. They just know that they’ve got to put up with being embarrassed every single day, and it’s always by the local doctor or lawyer or professor at the community college, the guys who went and got the education they didn’t get and probably couldn’t have gotten because they didn’t have the academic talent, those guys. And they hate them. They truly hate them.”

  “So the whole phenomenon runs on hate.”

  “The whole phenomenon runs on resentment. Drew makes them feel real. He says what they think and says it’s okay and makes millions of dollars doing it. They feel like they’re getting their own back. I think of Drew as an addiction. When they can’t have him, they get depressed. They go into withdrawal.”