by Jane Haddam
He could have used being married, though, Gregor thought, getting out of his cab in front of John’s building. Just up the block, Rob Benedetti was getting out of another cab, looking very unhappy. Gregor decided that he wouldn’t say anything to John about being married, because John would scream and yell, and because the worst of what could be done to him politically probably wouldn’t be given his reputation. Gregor had a hard time imagining anybody convincing the general public that John Henry Newman Jackman was gay. There was another thought that made Gregor wish he never had to think about politics again. It was only in election years that he remembered that a good chunk of his fellow citizens wouldn’t vote for someone who happened to be gay, and a bigger chunk wouldn’t vote for someone who didn’t believe in God, and a yet bigger chunk than that wouldn’t vote for someone who used four-letter Anglo-Saxon words, even on occasion. Of course, all politicians did that last thing, so it was just a question of never getting caught at it in public, but still. Or maybe because. It didn’t matter. He didn’t think this was what the founders had envisaged when they established a nation where citizens could vote.
“Mind their own business,” he said, out loud, into the cold air, and Rob Benedetti, coming up the block to join him, blinked.
“What was that?”
“Nothing,” Gregor said. “I was just thinking out loud. Do you like politics?”
“Like them? I don’t know. I suppose I do. I’m running for district attorney.”
“Wouldn’t you rather be appointed district attorney?”
“We don’t appoint district attorneys in Philadelphia,” Rob Benedetti said. “We elect them. Except in circumstances like mine, you know, where a DA has to leave and there’s a few months before the next election. Are you all right?”
Gregor was fine. “I just wish it were next year instead of this one,” he said, “when nobody is running for anything.”
“Somebody is always running for something in Philadelphia,” Rob Benedetti said. “We have elections for something pretty much every year.”
“Not elections I hear about,” Gregor said. “That would be enough.” There was a security guard waiting at the door of the building, sitting on a folding chair and reading the sports pages. He dropped the paper as Gregor and Rob Benedetti came up, recognized Rob immediately, and opened up.
“Sorry,” he said. “We’ve got a bomb threat. And there’s a huge fire down on Curzon Street.”
“You’ve got the building locked up because there’s a fire on Curzon Street?” Gregor asked. “That’s a mile away from here.”
“It’s making everybody jumpy,” the guard said. “It’s the homeless people, you know what I mean? Some of them started a fire in a waste bin out behind an abandoned building and the building caught fire, and now half the block has gone up. I’m surprised you didn’t hear the sirens, even if you weren’t exactly close. I heard the sirens when I was coming in this morning.”
“I heard sirens about an hour and a half ago,” Rob Benedetti said. “I didn’t think anything of it. There are always sirens in town.”
“There’s another thing,” Gregor said, as they moved off toward the elevators. “Homeless people. There’s a problem, it’s a real one. What to do about the homeless people. Some of them you can give homes to, but some of them you can’t. They won’t go to homes. They’re mentally ill, or they’re addicted to drugs or alcohol, and they just won’t go. But they’re around. They starve and they freeze to death. They get sick and spread their sicknesses. They upset pedestrians and tourists. You’d think there would be something that could be done for them, for them, not to them, and I’ve never yet heard a politician in this city even mention them. Not even once.”
“I have,” Rob Benedetti said. “Old Ellery Dreen used to go on about them all the time. Round ’em up and put ’em in workhouses or send them to jail. Whatever.”
“Ellery Dreen wasn’t a serious politician,” Gregor said, “and I didn’t say do something to them, I said do something for them. John isn’t talking about homeless people in his campaign. I know because I’ve read his stuff. The mayor isn’t talking about them. But they’re out there, and we’ve got the worst cold we’ve seen in thirty years, and they’re freezing to death, or causing fires, which could kill firefighters, and here we are. That’s what’s wrong with politics, you see. They yell at each other about family values and gay rights and whether you approve of teaching evolution in the public schools, but nobody talks about anything that’s actually happening that it would make sense for a government to do something about. And then everybody gets angry, and calls each other the spawn of Satan, and the whole process becomes nothing but a way for people who were already very angry to begin with to be angry in public.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever called anybody the spawn of Satan,” Rob Benedetti said, amused.
“Metaphorically,” Gregor said morosely. The elevator was here. The doors slid open. He and Rob Benedetti got on it and watched the doors close in their faces. Gregor wondered why people did that, so automatically—got on the elevator, turned to face the doors. He thought he was either going insane or in need of about forty continuous hours of sleep.
The elevator reached their floor, stopped with a bump, shuddered, and then sank a little. Gregor tried to put the image of them plunging several stories to the basement right out of his head. The doors opened. He didn’t dash for the solidity of the floor.
“You might consider,” Rob Benedetti said, “the possibility that they’re angry all the time. It isn’t just politics that makes them angry. They’re just angry.”
“At what?”
“I don’t know,” Rob Benedetti said. “I haven’t got that far. But I’ve been thinking about it. I’ve thought about it a lot. Because I think it’s true. Not everybody, you know, but a lot of people are just plain angry. All the time. I don’t think they know what they’re angry about themselves. Sometimes I think they’re just disappointed about the way their lives turned out, as if they were owed something better, but they don’t know what. I’m probably not making a lot of sense.”
“I’m going to kill that woman,” John Jackman said. “I’m going to kill both those women and then I’m going to shit on a shingle.”
The voice floated out over the heads, down the corridor, into the air. John was in his office. They couldn’t see him.
“When John swears,” Rob Benedetti said, “the world must be coming to an end. I guess we ought to go down and see what he’s doing.”
2
What John Jackman was doing was pacing around his desk, around and around, as if he was circling it the way a bird of prey circled an object of his desire. Olivia Hall was standing just inside the door, her arms folded across her chest, looking like she wasn’t having any.
“If you’re going to cuss, I’m going to go sit at my desk,” she said. “If you’re going to blaspheme, I’m going to go home.”
“I apologized. Didn’t I? I apologized.”
“You apologized for swearing,” Olivia Hall said. “You didn’t apologize for threatening to kill a couple of nuns.”
“Oh for Christ’s sake.”
“Home,” Olivia said.
“I’m sorry,” John Jackman said. “And I didn’t mean I was going to actually kill the nuns. It was an expression. And I’ve got reason to be upset, Olivia, I do. I’ve got reason.”
“I didn’t say you didn’t have reason,” she said.
“What’s going on?” Gregor said.
“I’ll let you and these two gentlemen talk,” Olivia said. “I’ll send the officers in as soon as they get here. You calm down, John. Lose your temper, lose the argument.”
“This isn’t an argument. This is a murder investigation.”
“You’re not going to win any murder investigation swearing and taking the Lord’s name in vain,” Olivia said. “I’ll be right outside, getting some real work done.”
She left the room and closed the door behind her. A
ll three of the men stared at the closed door as if they expected it to open again, revealing Olivia with wings. Then John Jackman coughed, and that broke the spell.
“Remarkable woman,” he said, sitting down behind his desk. “I don’t even know if she’s going to vote for me in the primary, never mind in November. I don’t even know if she’s a member of a political party. But I’ll bet she votes.”
Gregor didn’t want to get back on the subject of voting, or politics. He paced around the room as if he had never been in it before. John didn’t go in for a lot of extraneous decoration. The walls had his degrees on them, and the awards he’d won, and a picture of him with President Bill Clinton, at the start of some federal anticrime initiative.
“So,” Gregor said. “What made you start making death threats against nuns?”
“We got a call this morning,” John said. “That nun from yesterday, what’s her name—”
“Sister Maria Beata,” Benedetti said.
“That sounds right,” John said. “Anyway, she walked back into the precinct house this morning and explained, calm as you please, that there was something she hadn’t mentioned yesterday, and that’s that the Mother Superior of this convent is—”
“Abbess of this monastery,” Gregor corrected.
John looked at the ceiling. “I don’t have time for this. I really don’t have time for this. The Abbess of this monastery happens to be Drew Harrigan’s sister.”
Rob Benedetti sat up a little straighter. “Really?”
John blew a raspberry. “Do you honestly think I’d be making this up? Things aren’t bad enough, I now have nuns for suspects. Half the Catholics in the city already hate us for the way we prosecuted the pedophilia cases— no, that’s not true. All the Catholics do. Half of them think we didn’t do enough and half of them think we did too much. And now I’ve got nuns, and you know as well as I do that by the end of business we’re going to have editorials and television pundits screaming that we let them get away because we’re too deferential to the Catholic Church, and the Catholic press is going to be screaming that we have no respect for freedom of religion, and the whole thing is going to end up as a Lifetime movie.”
“Calm down,” Gregor said. “It’s not enough that the Abbess is Harrigan’s sister. She’d have to have a motive for killing him. Did she have one?”
“I don’t know,” John said. “We’ve got an appointment to go out there this morning as soon as Marbury and Giametti show up, and you can ask her then. I won’t be able to go along, of course. It’s not my job. But the three of you can handle it and report back. And I have a terrible feeling that the answer is going to be yes.”
“Why?” Rob Benedetti asked.
“Because,” John Jackman said. “Because. And don’t tell me hunches are crap, because I don’t believe that. If it turns out a nun actually killed Drew Harrigan, this really is going to be a Lifetime movie.”
“If it turns out a nun really killed Drew Harrigan,” Gregor said, “this is going to be a major production with Julia Roberts in the starring role. Before you send me out to interrogate somebody, don’t you think we ought to clarify my position with the mayor’s office? He was threatening to arrest me last night.”
“He isn’t going to arrest you,” John said. “He was just saying that for the television cameras.”
“You’ll come say that to the judge if I end up in jail on obstruction charges,” Gregor said.
“Don’t worry about obstruction charges,” Rob Benedetti said. “I’m the one gets to decide whether anybody hits you with obstruction charges or not, and I’m not going to charge you.”
“You may not be here after November,” Gregor said.
There was a lot of noise from outside. The door swung open, and Olivia Hall walked in, looking both dignified and disapproving. “The detectives are here,” she said.
A moment later, Marbury and Giametti came in, holding their coats over their arms and looking as if they would do anything, anything at all, not to have this woman looking at them anymore. They waited, standing, while Olivia took another look around the room. They didn’t relax until she was gone and the door had been shut behind her.
“That was scary,” Dane Marbury said. “That’s always scary. I think that woman could control a prison without bothering to resort to weapons.”
“Never mind that,” John Jackman said. “Did you do what I asked you to do? Did you find anything.”
“Absolutely,” Giametti said. He reached into the pocket of his trousers and came up with a small, folded piece of paper: “334, 335, and 336 Albemarle Street. Those are lots, one of them vacant, the other two with abandoned buildings on them. They’re not in a great location, but they’re not in an absolutely impossible one, either. Drew Harrigan deeded them to Our Lady of Mount Carmel Monastery after Sherman Markey filed his lawsuit for defamation. After, the timing is important. On January twenty-fifth, two days before the last time anybody saw Harrigan alive, the Justice Project went into court on behalf of Markey and had the properties liened so that the monastery couldn’t sell them, which it thought it needed to do because the monastery looked like it was going to sell them, since it had found a buyer.”
“You got all these people out of bed?” John said. “I’m impressed.” “We didn’t need to get them out of bed,” Dane Marbury said. “We did a Google search and found some back stuff in the Inquirer. I don’t know how accurate it all is, but we can recheck when we question. The thing that got us, though, was the timing.”
“Right,” Giametti said. “Harrigan deeded the property after the Justice Project filed their defamation suit.”
“Which means he did it after he’d already gone into rehab,” Marbury said. “Where supposedly he couldn’t get in touch with anybody, because he was in a total immersion, absolute isolation program for sixty days.”
Jackman looked carefully from one to the other of them. “Was that even possible?”
Gregor stirred. “It depends,” he said. “The best guess is that Harrigan was never in rehab at all, but if that’s the case, there has to be some collusion on the part of the judge. That’s Williamson?”
“Yeah,” Marbury said.
“Okay,” Gregor said. “That’s not impossible. The other possibility is that Harrigan’s lawyer has power of attorney and did this under his own steam. But the attorney is Neil Savage, right? One of the more conservative attorneys in the city, conservative in the sense of not liking to go in for legal oddities. So I can’t see him deciding on his own to deed the property over to the nuns in order to shield it from the defamation suit, but I can’t see Harrigan having made provision for what to do in the case of a defamation suit, since they’re not automatic or even usual. Never mind the fact that Sherman Markey, being a homeless man without any assets, probably didn’t look like somebody who was going to end up with heavyweight legal representation.”
“Boy, they got that wrong,” Giametti said.
“Yes,” Gregor said. “Well, there’s also one more possibility, although it’s not the one you want to hear.”
“You don’t even have to mention it,” John said. “It could be a put-up job. The nuns could have colluded with Drew Harrigan to shield the property, the sale could be some kind of legal maneuver to return the property to Harrigan himself in a way that Markey couldn’t touch it, we could be looking at financial fraud charges as well as murder charges, and the entire Catholic population of Philadelphia could end up waiting in the street for me so they can beat me up. I don’t care what Olivia says. I really am going to kill those nuns.”
“I don’t think you have to go that far just yet,” Gregor said. “I’d guess the collusion scenario is unlikely. They could have a good explanation for all of this.”
“So go and ask them about it,” John said. “They’re the ones who had the body. Ask them about that, too.”
3
If it had been up to Gregor, they wouldn’t have all taken one car. He understood that Hardscr
abble Road was on the edge of the city, and that it might be difficult to find a cab that wanted to go there, but that inconvenience would be more than made up for by the fact that, with separate cars, any of them could leave at any time. He didn’t know why, but he had an urgent need to be able to walk out on this at will. The only consolation he had for the fact that that would not be possible was the further fact that he would not be required to sit in the backseat of a squad car again. Knowing that they would be shepherding both the district attorney and the Armenian-American Hercule Poirot, Marbury and Giametti had acquired an “unmarked,” meaning a car not painted to look like a police car, but otherwise so ridiculously stolid and neutral nobody but a cop would have been willing to drive it. This one was tan, with tan seats. It was some kind of sedan, and so boxy and slow-looking it could have used a pair of really big tail fins. Gregor thought he would always be disappointed that he had missed the fad for tail fins in cars. He would have bought a car like that, if one had been available to drive. He would have let Bennis drive it, since he almost never drove himself, and when he tried he tended to drive into things.
