Hardscrabble Road

by Jane Haddam

  “Right,” Shelley said. “That means he was ineffective, which is definitely what we’re looking for, isn’t it? Think of it. No more hour-long rants about how it’s all their own fault. They made their bed and they should have to lie in it. Decent citizens shouldn’t be taxed to pay for bums who have no respect for themselves. No more letter-writing campaigns to the mayor of Philadelphia demanding to get the homeless off the streets and put them in jail, for God’s sake. What do these people want, a return to the days when we arrested people for being poor?”

  “Did we ever have days when we arrested people for being poor?”

  “We had poorhouses,” Shelley said, “and we put people in jail for debt. Or at least they did in England. It was in that book you gave me.”

  “David Copperfield.”

  “That’s the one. They want to go back to that. I mean the Dickens thing. They want to punish poor people for being poor.”

  “Sherman Markey’s principal problem isn’t that he’s poor.”

  “I know that.”

  “Poor is easy to fix,” Ray Dean said. “There’s a problem you can solve by throwing money at it.”

  “We really don’t want Sherman Markey to disappear. Not now. We should have one of the vans go actively looking for him. Yes, even in this weather and even though we have a lot of people to bring in. It’s just a matter of letting one of the drivers know and giving him some idea of what to look for. He can pick up other people on the way.”

  Ray Dean rubbed the sides of his face with the palms of his hands and thought about it. It wasn’t just Sherman Markey they should be looking for. In fact, under most circumstances, Sherman Markey was well down on the list of people they should be worried about, because Sherman was an alcoholic, not a paranoid schizophrenic. Unless he was too drunk to see, he knew he could die of cold and he had nothing against spending the night in a shelter if he could find a bed. Nobody ever had to corner Sherman at the end of a dead-end street and hope to hell he didn’t have a knife under the folds of his too-big clothes and the will and the delusory vision to use it.

  “There’s another thing,” Shelley said.

  Ray Dean looked up.

  “There’s Drew Harrigan’s people,” Shelley said. “Don’t you know as well as I do that they want Sherman dead? It wouldn’t take much. They could hire some street kid for a couple of thousand dollars and that would be the last you’d see of Sherman Markey.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” Ray Dean said. It wasn’t just “shit” he couldn’t say. He couldn’t say “for Christ’s sake” either. You didn’t want to be caught doing that in an area of the country where a church could have ten thousand people show up for Wednesday evening prayer services.

  “I know you think I’m exaggerating—”

  ”—I think you’re behaving like a loon. What’s wrong with people? Do you honestly think that Drew Harrigan, who, no matter what else he is, is a major force in American media, who meets with congressmen and presidents, who does commercials for everything from shaving cream to fast food, do you honestly think a man in that position would go out and hire some coked-up street kid to stick it to a mess of a homeless man who’s going to lose his lawsuit anyway because he’s not going to be able to remember whatever it was he was supposed to testify to when he gets to the witness stand? Do you really believe that?”

  “To save himself a few years in a federal penitentiary? Yes. I believe that.”

  “Then I give up,” Ray Dean said. “I really do. There used to be a world where we all gave our fellow citizens the benefit of the doubt. We didn’t think they were out to get us. We didn’t think that perfectly sane people went out and committed murders, hired hit men, I don’t know what. We didn’t suspect they were doing God only knows what behind closed doors and always to—to—I don’t know—I don’t know what to think anymore.”

  “It wouldn’t be that much trouble to have the drivers actively looking for Sherman. It really wouldn’t. And he’d be easier to find than you think. He’s got a red hat.”

  “A red hat?”

  “Chickie told me. They bought him new clothes, and one of the things they bought him was a red hat. It was in the store where they took him shopping and he liked it, so they bought it for him. One of those watchman’s hats, you know, except instead of navy blue or black, it’s in bright red. You’d probably be able to see him across the street. He’d be no problem to pick out in a line of people waiting for dinner at a soup kitchen.”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay?”

  “Okay,” Ray Dean said. “Get the address of the SRO, find out whose route goes by there, have him reconfigure his night a little to check the area. Tell the rest of them to look for Sherman if they know him or the red hat if they don’t. We might as well keep an eye out.”

  “Excellent,” Shelley said. “I thought you were going to say no. I thought you were going to stand on principle. You spend a lot of time standing on principle. It drives me nuts.”

  “This climate drives me nuts,” Ray Dean said. “I mean, what’s wrong with people? When did we all start suspecting each other? When did we all start being afraid of each other?”

  “When Reagan was elected,” Shelley said promptly. “It’s the Republicans’ fault.”

  Ray Dean kept his mouth shut as she jumped off the desk and flounced out the door, the very picture of a University of Pennsylvania undergraduate with a Serious Interest in Social Justice.

  That was among a number of good damned reasons why Ray Dean had never told anybody here that he was a registered Republican.

  8

  This was the kind of weather that made Alison Standish think she really wanted to own a car more substantial than the Cooper Mini she’d picked up only a year and a half ago. She’d told her friends and colleagues that she’d bought it for the fuel efficiency. Cooper Minis were the hot car across the campus of the University of Pennsylvania this year. They really were fuel-efficient, and if you had to park on crowded city streets, or in university parking lots where half the students owned SUVs that didn’t quite fit within the lines of demarcated parking spaces, there was no better vehicle. The problem was, Alison already knew the Mini didn’t do all that well in heavy snow. There had been a fair amount of heavy snow last winter, right after she’d bought it, and she’d found it was far too easy to get stuck in the snow dunes the DOT piled up or to spin out on black ice when you weren’t paying attention. Of course, even SUVs spun out on black ice, and the real solution to the snow dune problem was a DOT that took its job seriously and cleared the streets instead of just pushing muck from one side of them to the other, but somehow none of that seemed to matter when she was stranded in the road and the people who rescued her were clucking their heads about her stupidity in buying such a small car for a city with such bad weather.

  The other problem was that she hadn’t bought the Cooper Mini for its fuel efficiency, or even for its ease of parking. She’d bought it because she’d seen it in The Italian Job. The people in the Women’s Studies Department could say anything they wanted about being oppressed by media images, but the fact was that Alison liked the idea of herself zipping around town like Charlize Theron—of even looking like Charlize Theron. Not that she was all that bad-looking, really. She was tall and thin, which helped. She had good bones in her face, and thick darkish-blond hair that didn’t look as if it were going to be in need of Rogaine anytime soon. It was just that, working at the university, there was a tendency to let yourself go, to skip the makeup, to pull your hair back in something sensible instead of having it cut and colored properly. At the moment, her dirty-blond hair was more than a little gray. She was fifty-two years old, and although she didn’t quite look it— thank God for whatever genetic blessing she’d gotten that had made her face so slow to wrinkle—she felt it more and more often these days. She wasn’t tired in the physical sense. She had always been very physically vigorous, and she was still. She was exhausted to the point of collapse in the psy
chological sense, and that was—that was—. She couldn’t think of what that was. She had noun disease. The names of things escaped her. She only wished that the names of people would escape her, but she had no such luck.

  On the car radio, turned up far too high for her to concentrate on the road, The Drew Harrigan Show was just going off the air. The host wasn’t Drew Harrigan this time, because he was blessedly in rehab. The replacement was a jokey-sounding Southerner who had nothing like Drew Harrigan’s sense of comic timing, or delivery. He also had nothing like Drew Harrigan’s scope of content in commentary, which was nothing if not a relief. Alison had listened to the whole last hour of the program, and there hadn’t been a word about her in it. There hadn’t been a word about her in the rest of the program, either, any of the three other hours of it, because if there had been, somebody would have shown up at her office door to tell her about it.

  She peered through the windshield at the road ahead of her, full of cars moving not very fast under streetlights that needed to be brighter. She did not look down at the piles of folders and papers next to her on the front passenger seat. Some of them were student papers, assignments to correct from the courses she taught in Intellectual History of the High Middle Ages and Christian Theology and Jewish Scholarship in the Period of the Crusades. Some of them were forms and proposals related to the attempt to establish Medieval Studies as an interdisciplinary minor. Some of them were just housekeeping: forms to sign for her advisees, forms to file about failures and excessive absences, forms to file for the faculty health plan and the faculty Senate Committee on the Curriculum and the university search committee for a new dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. The ones she didn’t want to look at were the ones related to her Drew Harrigan problem.

  Out on the street, traffic lights went from red to green without much happening. Policemen parked at the curb in squad cars that were like taxis with their off-duty lights on, not available for business. Homeless people walked carefully close to the walls of buildings, like nuns in medieval convents, taught that walking in the open was a sign of arrogance and pride. Alison wondered just how cold it was out there. Minus something, she was sure, because she’d been hearing about it all day. She wondered how many of the homeless people she saw would still be alive in the morning, and then she wondered at herself, and all the other drivers on this road, including the policemen in their parked car. They all knew what happened in weather like this. They all knew they were looking at people who were scheduled to die, just as surely as anybody had ever been scheduled to die in the death chamber. Alison was sure that a good number of these people would write letters of protest, or even show up and carry signs, if someone was about to be executed. Out here they did nothing except turn off whatever part of their brain actually saw these people they were looking at. They were the same way with the lines of people at the soup kitchen doors and out in front of the Goodwill before it opened. She was, too. It was all well and good to label people bleeding heart liberals, but she didn’t think anybody whose heart was bleeding could be so… oblivious to what was going on out here.

  There was a little break in the gridlock and she inched the car forward, through the intersection, before coming to a near stop again. Whoever had programmed the traffic lights in this part of town either hadn’t known what he was doing or had done it so long ago that the traffic patterns he had worked to control had no relations to the ones that existed now. She had only another two blocks to go before she got to her turn, and then another block and a half before she got to her building. It wasn’t as if she had to go far. It was just that, trapped in the car like this, she found it too hard not to think.

  She was, she thought, the last person at the university who should be having a Drew Harrigan problem. Jig Tyler, yes, of course—as far as she was concerned, Jig Tyler should be having a problem with all sane people, the ones who weren’t living in a fantasy of global revolution resulting in a golden age led by Plato’s philosopher-kings. She’d once spent five minutes contemplating what life would be like under the rule of Jig’s philosopher-kings, and the vision had been so acute she’d wanted to lie down on the couch and do nothing but watch Miss Marple movies for a month. Of course, there weren’t that many Miss Marple movies. She would have had to watch the same ones over and over again. There were only so many times she could stand to contemplate Margaret Rutherford’s marriage of convenience to Stringer Davis. For some reason she had never been able to understand, she was unable to see a large, fat woman with a small, thin man without imagining them naked and together, as if there was a glitch in her brain that needed to work out the logistics of something that was none of her business. Most of the time she found it impossible to imagine people together. When people had dragged her along to porn movies—or erotica, if they were the expensive kind—she’d just gone unfocused when those parts came on the screen, and ended up not remembering anything at all.

  I’m insane, she thought now. I’m truly and irrevocably insane. The light at the next intersection was suddenly green, and the traffic was suddenly sparse. She sailed through both—okay, with the second one bleeding through the yellow into the red a little, but she couldn’t help herself—and turned onto her street. On the side streets like this, there were not so many homeless people, or not so many lights illuminating them.

  There was a space at the curb, the perfect space for a Mini. There was an SUV in the space behind the open one and an SUV in the space in front, and both of them were over their limits. Alison pulled in between them and asked herself if she was absolutely sure that the automobile insurance she had would replace the car if one of the SUVs ran over it trying to get out in the morning. The reason she shouldn’t be having a Drew Harrigan problem was simple. She wasn’t in the Women’s Studies Department, which he hated. She didn’t even like the Women’s Studies Department, and the people who taught there didn’t like her. She wasn’t a socialist. She wasn’t a Communist. She wasn’t even a Democrat. She always registered Independent, which in her case meant she had no idea what side she was on, and didn’t want to think about it. She wasn’t any of the things Drew Harrigan hated except, maybe, a professor in a field he probably thought was “useless,” meaning medieval literature. It made no sense to her that she would have ended up in the mess she had ended up in, and all because of a vendetta that had no foundation in anything she could think of, ever.

  She looked at the pile of papers on the passenger seat and decided to skip them. She got her big shoulder bag from the floor and unwound herself from behind the wheel onto the street. It was ridiculously cold out there, and the wind was making it worse. She thought about the homeless people she had seen on the pavements as she’d driven home, and then she ran around the front of the car, across the sidewalk, and up the front steps to her building. It was a beautiful building, really. Once a long time ago it had been somebody’s very elegant town house. Now it was four very elegant apartments. She let herself into the vestibule with her key, found Carrie Youngman’s buzzer on the board, and leaned against it as if she were announcing a fire.

  “What the hell?” Carrie said through the intercom.

  “It’s me. I need Irish coffee.”

  “In or out?”

  “In. You don’t want to go out. You’ve got no idea what it’s like out there. Can I come on up?”

  “Sure.”

  Alison didn’t need Carrie to buzz her in. She used her key again and then went running up the long flights of stairs. There was an elevator here, in the back, useful for just two people, but she never used it. It saved a lot of trouble and hassle with dieting if she just ran up the stairs.

  Carrie was on the second floor, just below her own apartment, which she didn’t want to see at the moment. There would be messages on her answering machine and more calls coming through on the phone. That would happen because she’d just, accidentally sort of, left her cell phone in her desk at the university.

  Carrie had the door open by the time Alison g
ot to the top of the stairs. Carrie was wearing a long nightgown made of knitted cotton with an enormous T-shirt pulled over it. The T-shirt said: THIS IS WHAT A FEMINIST LOOKS LIKE.

  “Apparently,” Alison said, “a feminist looks like a slattern having a bad hair day. What did you do to your hair?”

  “It’s what I didn’t do to it. Brush it.”

  “Okay.”

  “Well, I only look this way around the house. I promise you if I wear it outside I’ll do it when I’m done up respectably. I had a deadline to meet.”

  “And that means you didn’t get dressed or brush your hair?”

  “No time.”

  “I had a friend in college who wanted to be a writer, and she made a point of always getting up and getting dressed just as if she were going into any other kind of office.”

  “Your friend was mentally ill. Or maybe it was just more of that crap with Wellesley. So what’s been so terrible about your day?”

  Alison moved into the apartment and sat down on the couch. It was a very nice couch, but the white of its upholstery was no longer really white, and it was covered with copies of The Weekly World News.

  “This what you were writing for today?”

  “I couldn’t if I wanted to. I don’t have the imagination. What’s been so terrible about your day?”

  “They scheduled the inquiry this morning.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Yes, Carrie, of course I’m serious. And don’t tell me you don’t believe it, because I can’t believe it, either.”

  “But I don’t get it,” Carrie said. “What are they going to inquire about? I mean, Drew Harrigan says this student came to him and complained that you gave worse grades to conservatives and Christians than you gave to liberals, okay, he said that—”

  “—About five hundred times over the course of three weeks.”

  “Yes, I know, but still. He never gave the name of the student. There may not even be any student. He could have made the whole thing up. How could anybody possibly know? What’s the university going to investigate?”