Hardscrabble Road

by Jane Haddam

  “And they haven’t abandoned him because of the, ah, legal trouble?”

  “You mean, because it turns out he’s been broadcasting high for the last three years? No, of course not. Half of them think he’s the victim of some left-wing plot. All of them have or have had alcohol and drug problems of their own. They sympathize.”

  “Then I don’t understand. Why are we having a problem with the numbers?”

  “Well,” Marla said, “think of it this way. Their addiction is to Drew, not to right-wing politics. Oh, some of them have an addiction to right-wing politics, and those people will go on listening no matter who’s putting out the message. But most of these guys want Drew, personally. And Drew isn’t here. Drew is in rehab.”

  “And they don’t like his replacement?”

  “We’ve had three replacements in three weeks. None of them has gone over, and I don’t think any of the others we’re going to try will. Drew is a true phenomenon. He’s practically sui generis. Even Limbaugh doesn’t generate the kind of blind loyalty he does. Our numbers are off by fifty percent since the day Drew announced the drug thing, and that isn’t the worst news. The worst news is that they’re still falling, and they’re falling fast.”

  Frank thought about it. “But it’s temporary, isn’t it? Drew will be out of rehab, in, what, forty days?”

  “Forty-two. I’ve got the replacements doing a countdown. But Frank, you’ve got to face some facts. One is that even though Drew may get out of rehab, he may not be available to work right away. Or if he is, maybe not for long.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning that the DA isn’t going to let this go. He can’t let this go. People would scream bloody murder. He’s going to have to prosecute.”

  “But there won’t be a trial,” Frank said. “There never is in cases like this. There’ll be a plea bargain. I know Drew is stupid, but he’s not stupid enough to go to trial and risk getting sent to a penitentiary.”

  “No, he’s not. But the DA still has that problem, and my guess is that he’s going to insist on Drew doing at least some jail time. The Feds won’t. No matter which side is in power when the time comes to do something about Drew’s case, they’ll back away. The Republicans will do it because they don’t want to slam one of their own. The Democrats will do it because they don’t want to be accused of playing politics. But the DA, Frank, the DA is stuck between a rock and a hard place. He’s going to have to insist on something serious. Especially if he’s going after Sherman Markey. I mean, how would it look—you stick the addled old homeless guy in jail for delivering the drugs but you let the rich celebrity go free because you think he’s a victim?”

  “Crap,” Frank said.

  “I’ve talked to the legal department. They say we should get ready for at least ten months’ incarceration when this all shakes out.”

  “Worse crap.”

  “I know. You’re right, by the way. We shouldn’t be relying so much on just one man, and the fact that we do goes a long way to explaining the fact that we aren’t bigger than we are, when we should be. And I think that it would definitely be a good idea if we started looked around to expand our roster, maybe even expand our scope.”

  “You mean actually hire liberals for once? Can’t be done. Most of them can read.”

  “I meant looking into shock jocks. But in the meantime, we’ve got a big problem, and we need to think of something we can do about it.”

  “Have you thought of something?” Frank looked curious.

  Marla sighed. “No. Aside from murdering Sherman Markey, I can’t think of anything to do at the moment. We’ve got the replacements doing the countdown and pleading for the fans to support Drew, which they do; they just don’t want to listen to somebody else. We’d be better off if Drew could make the pleas for support himself from rehab, but of course if he did that the DA would land on him and we’d be in the same mess, except there’d be pictures of Drew with a number plate under his chin running in all the daily papers. But we do need to think of something, Frank, and we need to think of it fast.”

  “Are we losing money?”

  “Now? No. Most of our advertisers are on long-term contracts. But long-term contracts run out, and they’re not happy. If Drew does have to go to jail for ten months, we’ll be eviscerated. I mean it. They won’t stand for it.”

  “The contracts are all coming due?”

  “The contracts all have escape clauses in them. The advertisers aren’t using them now because this is supposed to be a short-term thing and they don’t want the fans to get mad at them, but they won’t put up with ten months. They really won’t.”

  “How would killing Sherman Markey help?”

  “What? Oh. It’s what I said. It’s the contrast. The DA can’t be seen to be hounding this poor old man into prison and letting the celebrity go free. If there was no poor old man to hound, it would be easier to let Drew off, run the process out for a year or two, and then quietly, when nobody was looking, give him probation. Do you see what I mean?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “Of course, we could have something really interesting happen and find out who was really getting Drew the drugs, but I’m not expecting that anytime soon. Doesn’t it bother you any? Who do you think was really procuring for him?”

  “Ellen, probably.”

  “Ellen can barely procure coffee at Starbucks. Oh, never mind. I’m just fussing now. It will all work itself out in the wash. But we’ve got the next forty-two days, plus probably another six to eight months after that, to save our asses from this thing, and we’d better do it. We’re not going to survive as a network or a syndicate with only one property.”

  “I know,” Frank said. He stood up. “Do you know what I wanted to do when I started this network? I wanted to do rock ’n’ roll. I wanted to be the place that wouldn’t fire Alan Freed. I don’t know if there’s a disc jockey anywhere these days who’s like Alan Freed.”

  “Rock ’n’ roll is a wholly owned subsidiary of global capitalism. Or so says Jig Tyler. There’s somebody you could put on the air. We’d probably get firebombed by the local militia.”

  “I’m going to go find someplace where there isn’t a draft. It’s freezing in here. You should get that window fixed.”

  “It’s not broken.”

  “It’s letting in cold air.”

  Actually, there was a thin film of ice along the bottom of it, right where the pane connected to the frame. Marla started pulling the papers on her desk into stacks.

  “Lucy can do this tomorrow,” she said. “But I don’t want you to go to bed tonight without thinking about this. Thinking about what you want to do. Come in in the morning and be ready to give me my marching orders on our next step. If you don’t, we’re all going to be out of work in eighteen months.”

  “And killing what’s his name isn’t really an option, I take it?”

  Marla would have said no, but it seemed superfluous, so she just went on stacking papers. She wished there was something she could do to change the world so that Frank could have the rock ’n’ roll radio network he’d always wanted, and she could run it.

  Instead, she was going to have to go home with the car radio tuned in to this station, and listen to one more good old boy with a down-home accent ranting about liberal elitists, pinko abortionists, and the homosexual agenda.

  7

  Ray Dean Ballard had spent most of the evening looking out his window and wishing for snow, but the best the weather had been able to do was a few ice crystals around five o’clock. Most of the time, Ray Dean hated snow. Snow meant the benches in the parks would be wet as soon as anybody lay down on them. Snow meant too much traffic in the streets and too many car accidents. Snow meant yet another story in the Philadelphia Inquirer about some homeless person somewhere pissing on the tires of a Volvo some doctor had parked at the curb while he ran into the store for the paper and hot coffee. From a public relations standpoint, extreme cold was much better than
snow. In extreme cold, the story in the Philadelphia Inquirer was always about some homeless person who had frozen to death under a bridge because there wasn’t enough room for him in the shelters.

  There really wasn’t enough room in the shelters for nights like this, but Ray Dean knew that the homeless person who died under the bridge tonight would not be there because he had been refused a bed. Ray Dean was twenty-six years old. He had been out of Vanderbilt for less than half a decade, and at work in this organization for even less time than that, and he already knew more than he wanted to about the homeless problem in America’s cities. At least, he assumed it was the same homeless problem in all of America’s cities. Part of the problem with being young and on your first job was that you lacked the breadth of experience you needed to judge whether your situation was atypical or not. He didn’t think Philadelphia was atypical, but he knew he was. He couldn’t imagine a bigger difference between this place and the place he grew up. He didn’t know what it said about him that he was fourteen years old before he rode in a car without a uniformed driver.

  Why exactly he’d majored in English literature, he didn’t know. Maybe it was because he got more of an insight into the things he was dealing with by reading Dickens than by going to lectures in sociology and social work, which always seemed to assume that the homeless were not only a problem but a “problem,” and something to be solved.

  He looked up at the chart on his wall and the arrows he’d been drawing on it all day, from the parks to the shelters, from the soup kitchens to the shelters, from the alleys to the … where? The fact was, if they hid out in the alleys, they didn’t want to go into the shelters. They weren’t even happy going into the soup kitchens, for fear someone would force them into the shelters. There was, out there in America, a wave of paranoia the like of which he had never suspected—even though he’d been sitting in Nashville, the very heart of it. It wasn’t just the homeless people who were defensive and afraid. It was everybody. If one half of Congress proposed the institution of a universal health care system, the other half was sure the first half were only doing it so that they could spy on the private lives of ordinary people and force them to eat wine and Brie instead of cheeseburgers and Cokes. If the part of Congress that was afraid of the universal health care system wanted to set up a universal database to track serial killers who went from state to state seeking victims, the part of Congress that had wanted the universal health care system would be convinced that the tracking project was a way to worm Big Brother into the lives of ordinary citizens and track their every move so that they could be picked up as soon as they showed any sign of opposing government initiatives. People owned guns not to protect themselves from crime in bad neighborhoods but in case the government came to the door wanting to lock them up for being Christians or socialists. At least the socialists had history on their side, if only vaguely. McCarthy had really existed. So had the Red Scares.

  Even so, it was as if the entire world had gone completely insane. It was impossible to get anything done. It was impossible to talk calmly and sensibly about solving a problem or even alleviating it. The Republicans thought the Democrats wanted to make it a law, on penalty of imprisonment, that everybody had to exercise and eat like vegans. The Democrats thought the Republicans were going to tamper with the new digital voting machines so that votes for Democrats would be counted as votes for Republicans and nobody would be able to check. It had gone beyond craziness and into some Twilight Zone of schizophrenic delusion where there were enemies around every corner, secret agendas behind every closet door, and evil lurking in the hearts of anybody who didn’t drive the kind of car you drove, listen to the kind of music you listened to, and eat the kind of food you ate.

  In the meantime, Ray Dean was sitting here worrying about 318 people who were living on the streets in this city, a good 50 of whom would refuse to come in out of the cold even when cold meant minus eleven degrees, or worse. He had exactly four vans, each of which could carry seven people besides the driver. One of those vans was in the shop with brake problems, and one of the others was holding two large garbage bags of clothes it had to deliver to one of the shelters, reducing its passenger capacity to six. They were going to be out there all night, first collecting the easy ones at the soup kitchens, then going through the parks, then looking through the alleys and under the bridges and in the abandoned buildings where the drug addicts shot up to be out of sight of the police until they could get high enough not to care if they got arrested. They would look and look, but they would miss some nonetheless, and tomorrow the Inquirer would run its story about the people who had frozen to death and how the people trying to help them were understaffed and underfunded. It was true, Ray Dean thought, they were understaffed and underfunded. The newspaper people meant well.

  There was a knock at the door and he called out to whoever it was to come in. His attention had suddenly been caught by the books on the floorto-ceiling built-in shelves that made up one of his walls: Henry James. George Steiner. W. B. Yeats. Lionel Trilling. John Donne. His parents had expected him to give it all up and get a business degree as soon as he graduated and come to his senses. He thought he might do that, one of these days, out of exhaustion or desperation. At the moment, he only wondered how the two things could exist in the world at the same time: those old men dying of cold under the bridges; John Donne telling us all that no man is an island, entire of itself.

  There seemed to be many men who wanted to be islands. Women, too.

  The door popped open and Shelley Balducci stuck her head in, looking frazzled. “I’ve just been on the phone to Chickie George. He says they’ve lost Sherman.”

  “Lost him? How do you lose Sherman?”

  “Well, he’s wandered off, you know what he means. And the thing is, Chickie’s afraid he might be hard to spot. They got him cleaned up. He’s had a shower, and a shave, and a haircut—does Sherman need haircuts? Isn’t he practically bald? Anyway, he’s had all that and he’s got entirely new clothes on. So he doesn’t smell, and he might not necessarily look like a homeless person. And they don’t know where he is.”

  “Did they go down to that place, the Benedictine place?”

  “Yes, they did, and there was no sign of him. The nuns haven’t seen him. And you know Sherman. He’s a creature of habit. So they’re worried. He looks prosperous from the perspective of other homeless people and drug addicts. They’re afraid he might have been rolled.”

  Ray Dean considered this. One of the things he hadn’t expected when he first came to work here—it hadn’t been true in the place he’d volunteered in Nashville in college—was that he would develop relationships with some of the people who needed his services. They weren’t the kind of relationships he had with his parents, or his friends, or even Shelley, but they were relationships nonetheless, with histories, and futures, and private understandings. He could honestly say that Sherman was one of the people he had developed a relationship with. Sherman was not as addled as he liked to look. He could keep the contents of a conversation in his head, if he hadn’t had too much to drink too recently, and he remembered things over time in a way that the mentally ill homeless never could. There weren’t many clients who made Ray Dean wonder how they had ever ended up the way they had ended up, but Sherman was one of them.

  “Sherman’s pretty good about neighborhoods,” he said now. “It wouldn’t be like him to get rolled.”

  “He’s pretty good about neighborhoods when he’s on his own, yes, but the Justice Project people put him up in an SRO. Not that I said anything about that to Chickie, of course. I mean, they meant well. I just wish all the people who meant well would think before they ran around doing things to ‘solve’ the problems of the homeless. What I’m thinking is that he’d have had to have left the SRO room and made his way through some fairly nasty territory to get back to where he was used to, and along the way anything could have happened.”

  “Crap,” Ray Dean said. Somebody else would h
ave said, “Shit.” He just couldn’t. There was a difference that being from his kind of people made in the way you behaved that nobody up here had managed to call him on yet.

  Shelley came all the way into the room and closed the door behind her. “The thing is,” she said, sitting down on the edge of Ray Dean’s desk, “we don’t want anything to happen to him.”

  “Of course we don’t.”

  “I mean, for more than the usual reasons. You know and I know that if Sherman isn’t around to carry on with that lawsuit, Drew Harrigan’s people are going to paste that whole sorry drug mess on him and Drew Harrigan is going to end up walking off scot-free.”

  “They’re going to try to do that even if he is around to carry on with the lawsuit.”

  “I know that. But it won’t be the same, will it? Sherman might win the lawsuit and that would leave Drew Harrigan in a lot more trouble than he would be otherwise, or Sherman might lose it and then they’d want to put him in jail and you know as well as I do that they couldn’t put Sherman in jail without putting Drew Harrigan in too, at least for a while. Think how it would look otherwise. Think of the political fallout.”

  “So?”

  “So there’s good reason for us to take a little extra time tonight and try to find him and bring him to safety. If he doesn’t want to live at the SRO—and I don’t blame him, those places are hellholes—maybe we could bring him back here and let him sleep in the storeroom. He wouldn’t be any trouble to anybody and he’d be warm.”

  “He’d end up pissing on the printer paper.”

  “No, he wouldn’t. Or maybe he would. We can always buy printer paper. What’s it worth to you to get Drew Harrigan off the air?”

  Ray Dean looked at his radio, propped up on a shelf in front of the collected works of Ernest Hemingway. “I listened to the replacement guy tonight. He was hopeless.”