by Jane Haddam
He was sweating, and the meeting wasn’t until noon. He had the whole morning to get through without throwing up or doubling over in pain from the cramps that kept spasming through him like labor pains. He had no idea why it was this bad, or why Beethoven did nothing to cure it, as Beethoven always had in the past. He just wished it was all over with, and he could go back to worrying about Drew Harrigan’s escrow arrangements, which mattered far more than Sherman Markey at this point, and would matter far more in the future. It would be different if there was any possibility that Drew Harrigan had killed him, but there was no evidence that the homeless old man was dead, and Drew was more securely locked up than he would have been in jail.
Not for the first time, Neil Elliot Savage thought that he might really like to see Drew Harrigan in jail.
2
The nine o’clock show was just about to go on, and not for the first time, Marla Hildebrande felt guilty. She felt especially guilty because it was clear that Frank Sheehy didn’t feel guilty at all.
“It isn’t like we murdered the man,” Frank said, stretched out on the couch in her office again like he was beached there. “We don’t even know he’s dead. He’s just disappeared.”
“For two weeks in weather like this,” Marla said. “You know as well as I do he must have frozen to death somewhere. And we were wishing for it.”
“We weren’t wishing for it. We were just hoping for something to come up that would make it politically feasible for the DA to go for a pretrial diversion program or probation or whatever the hell would get Drew back in front of a mike as soon as possible. And here we are.”
“Assuming he isn’t found. And I’m hoping he’ll be found.”
“So am I, because it doesn’t matter if he’s found,” Frank said. “The disappearing act is going to make him look bad, which will make Drew look better. Really. That’s all we need. We don’t need anybody dead. We don’t need apocalypse and destruction. We just need Drew.”
Marla sighed. She switched on the speaker next to her on the desk. They were keeping Drew’s big opening. It was still The Drew Harrigan Show, after all. The hokey announcer’s voice came on, riding a crest of horn music. “It’s Drew Harrigan, the man with his heart in the right place, coming to you from Philadelphia.” She shut the speaker off.
“After this, you don’t want to know.”
“That bad?”
“I told you. None of them are bad. They’re just bland. And they lack fire. Have you given any thought whatsoever to what I said to you about finding other talent? Even if Drew comes back from rehab and we don’t have to worry about another hiatus, we still need a more diversified list. We can’t go on like this letting one person hold us hostage.”
“So, go looking. Didn’t I tell you you could go looking?”
“Yes,” Marla said. She hesitated a little and opened the long center drawer of her desk. “I have gone looking. Or listening, as the case may be. I’ve been listening to satellite pickup of little stations all over the West.”
“Why the West?”
“Because you need the accent,” Marla said. “God forbid anybody should sound like they came from New York or New England. It’s guaranteed to brand them as an intellectual snob. But I don’t like the Southern ones. It’s overkill.”
“And under brains,” Frank said. “Why is it that a Southern accent always makes people sound twenty IQ points stupider than anybody else?”
“You don’t think Ray Dean Ballard sounds twenty IQ points stupider than anybody else.”
“It’s not the same kind of Southern accent. Did you know his name isn’t really Ray Dean?”
“What did he change it from, Joe Bob?”
“Aldous.”
“Like Huxley.”
“It’s his mother’s maiden name.” “Whatever,” Marla said. She was fiddling with the tape. It was a very good tape, even though she’d made it off the satellite hookup, which made everything sound like a cat pissing. She got it into the tape machine and hit the rewind button, because she’d listened to it last night, and it was obvious from the way the thing looked that she’d forgotten to rewind it. She always forgot to rewind things. She wondered why that was.
“I like this one,” she said, “not only because I like the guy, but because I like the content. I know politics sells, but I think we’re coming to the end of that on a lot of levels. There’s too much rancor, too much anger.”
“I thought you said that was the point. That our listeners are angry.”
“They are. But they’re angry about a lot of things, not just ‘liberals.’ And they’ve got a couple of dozen angry white guy talk radio hosts to listen to.”
“So, this is what, a shock jock?”
“No. We’ve got FCC problems,” Marla said. “The FCC is suddenly forcing all the ‘obscenity’ off the air. It’s enough to make you crazy. Also, I don’t really get the shock jock thing. I don’t have an ear for it. No, this is something else. His name is Mike Barbarossa, and he’s from Seattle.”
“Uh-oh,” Frank said. “Seattle, the home of Starbucks, computer programmers, and the lowest citizen church attendance of any part of the country.”
“Wanna move?”
“Let me hear the tape,” Frank said.
Marla heard the hard chunk that meant the tape had stopped rewinding and pushed the play button. At first there was nothing but fuzz. Marla thought she needed to learn how to burn a CD off the satellite feed. It might be clearer. Then there was some tinny music that sounded as if it were being run through yet another not very good tape machine.
“Ignore the technical level,” Marla said. “This is a small station, they probably don’t have the money or expertise. We could fix that.”
The tinny music stopped and a mildly twangy voice said, “It’s five o’clock in the city of Seattle and this is Mike Barbarossa coming to you with sanity, common sense, and an uncorrupted crap detector. We ought to apply the crap detector to the commercials, but we never do. Give a listen to this message from our sponsors and I’ll be right back, with the day’s first winner in the Just How Stupid Can You Get contest.”
Frank Sheehy frowned. “We couldn’t let him do that to the commercials, could we?”
“Sure we could. People know the commercials are propaganda. They know they’re crap. And the sponsors don’t give a damn as long as they have the captive audience, which they will have, in the car with nowhere to hide. Seriously. Listen to this.”
“Okay,” Mike Barbarossa said. “We’re back from that fantasy land where a new car can get you a love life and a new cake recipe can bring you closer to God. It’s time for Mike’s How Stupid Can You Get roundup, the way we start the day with news that makes you think the human race should have been extinct long ago. Let’s start with Mr. Tim Mayfield of Marden, Oklahoma, who cut off his own penis in order to blame the ‘crime’ on a woman who came home with him from a bar and then refused to sleep with him. After he’d cut his penis off and thrown it across the parking lot of the trailer park where he lived, he called the police and blamed the whole thing on Shirley, resulting in a manhunt lasting three days—maybe I should say womanhunt for our feminist listeners—that left police more and more suspicious that something was wrong with Mr. Mayfield’s story. Mayfield finally confessed, and he’s being charged with making a false crime report. It turns out that it’s not illegal to cut off your own penis in Oklahoma.”
“What the hell?” Frank said.
Marla was ecstatic. “Don’t you love it? It’s like the Darwin Awards for radio. Sometimes he does stuff from the Darwin Awards, and then he gives them credit. Oh, and plugs their books and their Web site—www.darwinawards.com.”
“The whole show is this?”
“No.” Marla turned the tape off for a moment. “This is the opening bit, where he collects stories of people being stupid from all over the country and then reads them. There’s a section later in the show where he takes phone calls, but that’s not the best part.
At the end of the show, every once in a while, probably when he has material, he does stories on local charlatans. Psychics. Alternative medicine scams. Faith healers.”
“He goes after religion?”
“Calm down.” Marla said. “It’s not as bad as you think. He doesn’t go after regular religion, churches, things like that. He goes after these guys who get people to come and pay them money so they can pray over them and declare them well, except the people never are well. You know what I mean.”
“I know that shows like that get absolutely no money and have absolutely no audience,” Frank said. “For Christ’s sake, Marla, what are you thinking? That group up in New York, what’s their names, CSICOP, those people, they’ve been trying to get into radio or television for years, and it’s always bombed flat. People like their illusions. They don’t want to hear that their favorite psychic is an alcoholic fraud who’s using their money to take vacations in Barbados.”
“Listen,” Marla said. “The problem with CSICOP’s stuff is that it’s always too serious. I like CSICOP a lot, I really do, but they’re always dead serious and full of references to I don’t know what, scientific protocols and things. Most people get bored with that stuff and won’t follow it, and a lot of people can’t follow it. But that isn’t what Mike Barbarossa does. What he really is is debunking for the same audience that listens to Drew Harrigan, well, some of them, plus a lot of guys in the same situation who can’t stand Harrigan. The guys we’ve never been able to reach before. What Mike Barbarossa does is to make those guys feel smarter than the idiots around them and smarter than the kind of PhD that falls for this sort of nonsense. It’s perfect. And Mike Barbarossa is perfect. Listen to that voice.”
Marla pushed the play button again.
Mike Barbarossa said, “Now we come to the case of Mr. James Burns, of Alamo, Michigan, where they have one of those little liberal arts colleges you can never figure out why anybody goes to them. Mr. Burns was trying to fix his truck one night. He’d been hearing a niggling little noise, and he couldn’t figure out what it was. So what Mr. Burns did was to get a friend of his to drive the truck out to the Interstate while he hung on underneath it and listened. They found his body wrapped around the drive shaft.”
“Oof,” Frank said.
Marla turned the tape off again. “It’s good stuff, Frank, and it will work. At least let me call this guy and ask him if he’ll send me an audition tape. It won’t cost us anything, it won’t cost him any more than a FedEx package, we’ll have better quality sound. We can have him on the network in a month and on the syndication list in three. It won’t matter if Drew Harrigan has to go to jail for life. We’ll have a backup. And a good one. Listen to me, Frank. I think this is the coming thing.”
Frank actually did appear to be listening. Marla had to give him that. Just to make the case stronger, she turned on the speaker and let the voice of Drew Harrigan’s stand-in host flow through the room. Except that the voice didn’t actually flow. It sort of dripped. It sounded like the man had sucked on a helium balloon.
“Turn it off,” Frank said. “You’ve made your point.”
“I can call him?”
“Go right ahead.”
“I can tell him we’re looking for a headliner?”
“Isn’t that pushing it?”
“Maybe, but I’m going to tell him. Trust me, Frank, this will work. And we’ll all feel better about it. You don’t like Drew Harrigan anyway. He’s a pompous windbag and a pain in the ass to work with. I don’t like Drew Harrigan. He’s a walking threat of a sexual harassment suit, if nothing else. And the techies don’t like Drew Harrigan. You’d think these people would realize that you just shouldn’t piss off the staff, but they never do. I’m going to go make a phone call to Seattle.”
“I’m going to go have some more coffee,” Frank said. “Do you remember when you hired Drew Harrigan? I told you at the time that we’d come to regret it.”
Actually, what Frank had told her at the time was that he wanted to be protected from ever having to be in the same room with Drew unless there was somebody else present; but it didn’t matter. Frank walked out the door, and Marla went flipping through her Rolodex to find the card she’d written Mike Barbarossa’s contact information on. She gave a passing thought to Sherman Markey, and then she just let it go. She couldn’t go on feeling guilty forever, and it wasn’t like she’d killed the man, or forced him to sleep in the streets on a night when it was cold enough to freeze a man’s balls into ice cubes.
She had a schedule to fill, and now that she had a chance in hell of filling it, without Mr. Drew Harrigan, she was feeling better than she had in months.
3
At the Monastery of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, Sister Maria Beata of the Incarnation was just finishing up her duty in the kitchen and getting ready to go out to man the front desk. The reading in refectory had been even more of St. John of the Cross, and the reading in schola this afternoon would be the same: the monastery was going through a positive orgy of the works of St. John. Beata thought she could stand it if only somebody besides herself would say the obvious: that the man was a sexual hysteric; that his ecstatic visions were sexual to the point of being embarrassing; that the fact that St. John had been named a doctor of the Church centuries before St. Teresa had been allowed to carry the title was embarrassing for its bad taste as well as its sexism. Nobody else would say the obvious, though, so she would have to. And then she would be in trouble again.
She put the last dish away in the cupboard, wiped her hands on her wide white apron, then untied the apron behind her neck and waist and took it off. She hung it on one of the hooks that had been hammered into the kitchen wall just for aprons—they shared aprons; whoever needed one took whichever one was available; they didn’t have aprons of their own—and went out of the kitchen, across the refectory, and into the hall. The Angelus bell started ringing just as she reached the grille, and she fell into the prayer without thinking much about it.
“Angelus Domini nuntiavit Mariae,” a voice came from above her head.
“Et concepit de Spiritu Sancto,” she answered, and then she was at the grille and the door with its careful locks, leading to the vestibule.
She let herself out of the cloister and nodded to Sister Immaculata at the desk. The rule was that the front desk had to be manned at all times by an extern sister, in case anyone came to the monastery in need of prayer or assistance. In Beata’s experience, not much of anybody did.
“Good morning, Sister. Did we have any visitors while we were listening to Annunciata drone endlessly on about the Bridegroom at breakfast?”
Immaculata frowned, to let Beata know that she did not approve of this kind of conversation, which criticized the good faith efforts of other sisters, and solemnly vowed sisters at that. Beata ignored her.
Immaculata leaned over and rummaged through the drawer in the desk. “As a matter of fact, we did. An old man, one of the men from the barn, came in to give you this.”
“This” was a bright red watch cap. Beata blinked.
“He said to tell the ‘other nun,’ which I presume is you, that he was wrong about the hat. They must not have stolen the hat after all, because he found it last night under one of the beds in the back of the barn. Do you understand any of that?”
“Of course. It was that man who died here, a couple of weeks ago. Don’t you remember?”
“I remember that a man died.”
“Yes,” Beata said, “well. He had on a hat, a brand-new watch hat, this one. I remember seeing him wearing it, standing in line waiting to get into the barn when I came back from the lawyers’ that day. When he died, this other man came to the door to tell me that he was dead and that some other men had stolen the hat. Except either they didn’t, or they stole it and then lost it, because here it is.”
“I’m not comfortable with this idea of giving over the barn to homeless people,” Immaculata said. “It’s not—they’re not just homeless, t
hese men. They’re troubled. Some of them are mentally ill. Some of them are violent. We don’t have anybody here who knows how to treat them professionally. And that wasn’t the first one who died.”
“Yes, well, Sister, homeless people will die in weather like this. We might as well do what we can to alleviate the situation. I wonder what I ought to do with the hat.”
“Give it to the coroner, I suppose,” Immaculata said. “Or to the police generally. Isn’t that what’s supposed to happen when somebody dies a pauper and his body is taken off wherever they take things like that, by the authorities?”
There were times when Beata wondered if Immaculata lived in a time warp, so that the world she saw looked a lot more like the one Dickens had seen than the one Beata did, but in this case, she supposed the woman was right.
Who else would they give the hat to, if not the police?
FOUR
1
There were people who had told John Henry Newman Jackman that he ought to quit his job as commissioner of police of the city of Philadelphia while he tried to unseat the present mayor in a primary challenge for the Democratic nomination, but none of those people were his friends, and none of them were his fellow police officers, and besides, he wouldn’t have listened to that kind of advice in any case. In Gregor Demarkian’s experience, Mr. Jackman rarely listened to advice of any kind, from anyone, on any matter. They’d first met when Gregor had come to Philadelphia as the FBI officer on a kidnapping case. If there was one thing Gregor was happy never to have to do again, it was to work kidnapping detail as a special agent of the FBI, complete with unmarked brown sedans parked on the side streets of nearly abandoned city districts, cold coffee in Styrofoam cups, and a partner who couldn’t stop whining about the way his wife treated his dog. There was a memory from the past, coming out of nowhere. Gregor didn’t think he’d thought of Steve Lillianfield in twenty years. And good riddance.
John Jackman, on the other hand, he’d thought of. Almost from the moment Gregor had resettled himself on Cavanaugh Street after the death of his wife and his retirement from the Bureau, he’d been watching John Jackman’s slow but steady rise up through a spider’s web of increasingly more important jobs to the place where he was now. Gregor couldn’t say it had never occurred to him that John might want to run for elective office. It had, but the office in question was, perhaps, president of the United States. That would suit him. The idea of John Jackman as mayor of Philadelphia was nearly…something.
