Hardscrabble Road

by Jane Haddam

  She looked up and the two secretaries who had been working at their desks only a moment ago were standing beside her. She couldn’t remember either of their names, and that was ridiculous. She knew the names of everybody who worked in the office. Hell, she knew the names of everybody who worked for LibertyHeart Communications and had anything to do with scheduling, anywhere in the country. They weren’t that big a company yet that she could afford not to know people’s names.

  One of the secretaries was tall and young and African-American and looked as if she could have walked into any stray modeling agency on any stray day and picked up enough work so that she’d never have to use a word processor again. The other was a middle-aged white woman in a red dress that was much too young for her. What did it mean that clothes were much too young for somebody? Marla didn’t know.

  It was the African-American woman who spoke up. “Was that—I know this is ridiculous, but we thought that looked like, you know, like Mr. Sheehy.”

  “It did look like Mr. Sheehy,” the white woman said.

  “I thought it looked like Mr. Sheehy, too.” Marla rubbed her palms against the sides of her face. She could breathe now, and know she was breathing, but that didn’t seem to be much help.

  “Are they saying Mr. Sheehy is dead?” the African-American woman asked.

  She had to make a decision, Marla thought. That was what she was paid for, making decisions. What would it mean, if Frank was really dead? What would happen to LibertyHeart? Who would own it? Frank had a large and extended family, scattered everywhere. He was the only one of them who worked very hard or did much of anything, but they all had money. When she had first come to work for this company, she had been endlessly fascinated by the parade of Ivy League colleges that seemed to be somehow attached to people Frank was related to. Later, she learned to be more impressed with the private high schools. It was odd, what people cared about, and what you learned to care about along with them. She wasn’t afraid for her job. She was the best scheduler in the business. Other companies tried to head-hunt her three or four times a year. She was afraid for herself. If she had had a motive to kill Drew Harrigan—and she still didn’t think she’d really had one; she couldn’t imagine what it would be—she must have had an even better motive to kill Frank Sheehy. Didn’t the employees always want to kill the boss?

  “We have to call the police,” she said.

  The room around her was very quiet. The two other women were very still. The whole thing sounded absurd, sounding like an echo against the walls of this enormous room. You called the police if a disgruntled employee showed up with a shotgun. You called the police if you arrived in the morning and found that the place had been broken into. You called the police if the assistant with the abusive husband was getting beaten to a pulp on the front doorstep. You didn’t call the police to tell them you thought that the homeless man who had been found dead in a shopping cart behind the District Attorney’s Office was your boss and the owner of the company you worked for, and had at least ten million dollars in a trust fund that kept him happily on the mailing list of every good tailor in town.

  “I have to call the police,” Marla said again. That was when she realized that just being able to breathe, or just being able to move, didn’t necessarily mean you were going to get anything done.

  “You can use my phone,” the African-American woman said, tugging at Marla’s elbow. “Come on. I’d make the call myself, but under the circumstances—”

  “You knew him better,” the white woman said. There was an edge to her voice, as if she were just about to get hysterical. Marla remembered her now. Her name was Karin Kowalski. She did get hysterical sometimes, especially when the computers broke down.

  Marla followed the African-American woman to her desk and sat down in her chair. She hated those chairs. She hated the wheels. She hated the small seats and smaller seat backs. She hated OSHA for insisting they have them. She couldn’t remember the number she was supposed to call if she had any information about this man.

  “Did either of you see the number?” Marla said. “They flashed a number on the screen, didn’t they? Did either of you see it?”

  “You can call the local precinct,” the African-American woman said.

  “They’ll have the number. They may even be able to transfer you.”

  “Yes,” Marla said. She didn’t know the number of the precinct, either. She was sweating. She was still crying. Everything about her was wet.

  The African-American woman reached across Marla’s lap to the computer, tapped on the keys, and brought up a list. “Second from the top. That’s the precinct.”

  “Why second?” Marla asked. “Shouldn’t the police be first?”

  “The fire department is first. Do you want me to dial for you?”

  “No,” Marla said. “No, no. That’s all right.” She picked up the phone. The African-American woman’s name was Charisse Johnson. That was it. Somebody ought to promote her. What would happen to the secretaries if LibertyHeart shut down, or was sold to another company, a bigger company? She punched numbers into the phone pad and listened to the ring. It wasn’t true that if she didn’t make this call, none of this would be real.

  The phone was picked up by a woman with a voice like Arnold Schwarzenegger and a delivery like Speedy Gonzales. Marla didn’t catch her name, and she didn’t catch the number of the precinct, either.

  “Excuse me,” she said. “I know this isn’t the right number to be calling but—”

  “This number is for police business, ma’am. If you don’t have police business, you shouldn’t be tying up this line.”

  “But it is police business,” Marla said. “It’s just that I know this isn’t the right number, and I hope you have the right number—”

  “—This is not directory assistance, ma’am.”

  Marla would have been on the verge of tears if she hadn’t already been crying, and now she didn’t know what to do next. The policewoman on the phone sounded angry at her. She was scared to death of people being angry at her. Maybe that was just something she used to be. She was having trouble breathing again.

  “Ma’am?” the policewoman said.

  “Give me that,” Charisse Johnson said. She took the phone away from Marla, and Marla was glad to let it go. I’m reverting, Marla thought. I’m reverting to kindergarten or something. I’m not making any sense at all.

  “This is Charisse Johnson,” Charisse said into the phone. “I’m at Liberty-Heart Communications. We’re at—well, good, I’m glad you know where we are. That may save time. And there’s no need to snap. We do have police business. There was a story on the news about two seconds ago, saying the police are looking for anyone who can identify a man found in a shopping cart behind…yes, that one…yes, we do think we can identify him…yes… thank you…yes…if I could have that number …yes.”

  Charisse Johnson hung up. “Cow,” she said. “I hate women like that.”

  “She’s only doing her job,” Karin Kowalski said.

  “Her job is to deal with the public,” Charisse said, “and she’s doing it badly. Do you want me to make the call to the hot line, Ms. Hildebrande? You still look very upset.”

  “Why are you a secretary?” Marla said. “Why aren’t you a manager somewhere? What were we thinking when we hired you?”

  “You were thinking I didn’t have a college degree, which I never got because I had my daughter when I was sixteen. Don’t worry about it. Do you want me to call the hot line?”

  “Yes,” Marla said. She would worry about it, though. If she landed another job in Philadelphia, she would steal Charisse Johnson away from whoever bought LibertyHeart and give her the kind of job she deserved. There was something wrong with a system that wouldn’t let you hire a competent person who didn’t have a college degree but would let you hire an incompetent one who did. She wasn’t thinking straight again.

  Charisse had sat down on the edge of her desk and punched in the numbers
for the hot line. Marla closed her eyes and listened very carefully for the moment when she would say Frank’s name into the receiver, and it would all be as real as it would ever get.

  2

  Growing up, Kate Daniel had always wanted, anxiously, to be perfect— to be perfectly obedient, really, so that nobody would ever be angry with her, and she would never do anything wrong. She remembered that time of her life with a kind of wonder. She could still feel the grinding anxiety of it just under the surface of her skin, like a ghost that had lost the capacity to haunt her. Other girls violated dress codes or rolled their skirts up in the girls’ room after classes were over. Kate checked the dress code twice before she allowed herself to leave her room in the morning, and her skirts always fell precisely at the middle of her knees. Other girls smoked in the boiler room and told the housemother they needed to pick up feminine hygiene products at the drugstore so that they could meet boys in town. Kate never smoked anything, anywhere, and the only boys she knew were the ones who came to the subscription dances her parents brought her to over the long vacations. She could see some point in the way she had been when she’d still been a teenager and in boarding school, but the habit had followed her to college, and then into law school, and then into her marriage. Feminist magazines imagined the “pioneers,” the women who broke the sex barrier in the law schools and medical schools, as bold and angry. Kate had been timid and afraid, and most afraid of all that she would be discovered doing something wrong. Maybe it was just that she felt guilty all the time, although at this moment she could not think of what she would have thought she was guilty of. She did know that she had always felt as if she were about to be caught at something.

  Of course, it was possible that it was that very timidity, that long history of anxiety, that had made her what she was now. She had never smoked cigarettes in boarding school or college or law school, but she had smoked marijuana in that little one-room hole she had rented when she’d first left Neil and come to New York. She had never known any boys her parents would have disapproved of, but after she’d ended her marriage she’d lived three years with an activist lawyer from a working-class family who gave fiery speeches about how it was necessary to end private property and bring the rich to justice. If you start at one extreme, you go to the other. It bothered her that she was still going to extremes. Surely she should have grown out of all that by now. She ought to be more than ready to play by the rules. That was what the law was all about.

  Chickie George was standing at the door to her office, looking— unhappy. Actually, he looked furious. That was the word Kate had been trying so hard not to think. That seemed to be left over, too. She still didn’t want some people to be mad at her.

  She had a pile of papers on the desk. She moved them around. She had a pen in a penholder. She took it out, put it down on the green felt blotter, picked it up, and put it back again. She wondered why they still had blotters for desks. People didn’t use quill pens anymore. They didn’t even use fountain pens most of the time. They didn’t even use pens. Here was a way the computer had changed everything. The office wasn’t paperless, but every-body’s handwriting shat.

  “Do you mind if I come in for a moment?” Chickie George said.

  “I was just thinking about this man I lived with when I first came to New York,” Kate said. “He was, I don’t know, the kind of man women like me lived with in that time and place. His father worked in a factory. His mother was a school librarian. He’d gone to somewhere, the State University of New York at Buffalo, I think. He wanted the revolution to come tomorrow, with bells on.”

  Chickie came into the room and sat down in the guest’s chair without asking if he could. “We need to talk about something,” he said.

  “Are there people like that anymore?” Kate asked him. “People who want the revolution to come tomorrow? Does anybody take them seriously? It got to the point where I couldn’t stand to be around them. The revolution isn’t going to come tomorrow, and it shouldn’t. Socialism is dead, and if any of us had had any sense to begin with, we’d have known that before the Berlin Wall fell. Stalin and Pol Pot are the revolution personified. It was never going to be any better than that.”

  “We need to talk about something,” Chickie said again. “I don’t think the revolution comes into it, at the moment.”

  “Don’t you? I think the revolution comes into everything. People can’t imagine incremental change. They want perfection. I don’t want perfection anymore. I want a country where everybody who works for a living can live decently, eat decently, and send their kids to good schools right through their PhDs. And I want a country where the people who are really unable to take care of themselves are taken care of. And I want it now. But I don’t want a revolution anymore. I don’t expect the world to be perfect.”

  “Good,” Chickie said, “but right now I’ve got a problem that’s half personal and half-not. I offered to go to Gregor Demarkian for you. You sent me there, and you know that I had history with that man, even if it wasn’t much of one.”

  “It was hardly any at all,” Kate said. “You were one of the suspects in a case he consulted on. Did he even remember who you were?”

  “As a matter of fact, he did,” Chickie said, “and I wasn’t putting on the act I used to when he knew me last time. But that doesn’t matter. What does matter is that my relationship to him is important to me, slight as it is. And there’s more than that to be taken into consideration. I live and work here. I want to practice law in Philadelphia once I graduate and pass the bar. Gregor Demarkian is a very important person in this city, especially if you’re a lawyer. He’s tight with the commissioner of police and half the detectives and beat cops in the department. He can make or break a defense. I don’t want him angry with me, and I don’t want him deciding that I’m a dishonest jerk who’s willing to use our acquaintance to make him look like an idiot.”

  “You’re not making him look like an idiot.”

  “I know I’m not. I had no idea whatsoever what you’d done until about twenty minutes ago. But it’s going to look like I made him look like an idiot, and that’s all it’s going to take. If you don’t get on the phone to Gregor Demarkian and tell him what you’ve done, I’ll do it.”

  “And would you tell him what I’ve done, that it was me?”

  “Yes.”

  “You shouldn’t be so harsh about it,” Kate said. “I wasn’t, I’m not, being deliberately meretricious. I’m not lying for the sake of lying. You can’t defend these people without breaking some of the rules. The rules weren’t made for them. They were made for people like you and me.”

  “That sounds like the revolution you say you don’t want to have,” Chickie said.

  “No, it’s not,” Kate said. “It’s just realism, that’s all. This is a society—all societies are societies—where the rich count for more than the poor, the educated count for more than the uneducated, the able count for more than the disabled. I don’t expect to make that disappear anymore, but I do have to do whatever I can to level the playing field when I get into a fight. I can’t just go out there and behave as if my client were, well, you.”

  “Gregor Demarkian is a very decent human being,” Chickie said. “He’s not radical, and he’s not particularly ‘progressive,’ but he’s a decent human being and he’s a fair one. You’re making unwarranted assumptions about how he will behave—”

  “It’s not just him,” Kate pointed out. “It’s the police and the district attorney, too. They’re part of this. You act as if nothing and nobody existed but ourselves and Gregor Demarkian.”

  “Two people are dead, Kate. Including that poor idiot from Liberty-Heart Communications, who seemed to me like a pretty decent human being, too. This is not a game anymore. This is not a chance to stick it in the eye of Drew Harrigan.”

  “He was the first one who was dead,” Kate said.

  “Call Demarkian, and tell him what you did.”

  Kate swiveled the chai
r around so that her back was to Chickie and stared at the posters on the wall. They were somebody else’s posters, or else some secretary’s idea of what would be suitable for guest lawyers who wouldn’t be around very long. “It’s still about Drew Harrigan, you know,” she said. “It’s still about who he is, and what he can get away with, and what men like Sherman Markey can’t. It’s still not impossible that we’ll lose this fight and Markey will end up on the run or in jail.”

  “He’s already on the run.”

  “I know. I’m just saying that you have to be more careful than you’re being. You can’t just charge into the breach and blunder around and expect it all to work out like an episode of Law and Order.”

  “Call Demarkian or I will.”

  “All right,” Kate said, making up her mind. She swiveled the chair around again so that she was facing forward. She was struck, as she was sometimes, by just how young Chickie George really was. She wondered how much of his attitude had to do with the fact that he had a very good friend who was becoming a nun. She put her elbows down on the desk and her face in her hands. “All right,” she said again. “First thing in the morning, I’ll call him. You get me his number, and I’ll call him. But you have to understand. I don’t really think this is the right thing to do.”

  “Why not call him now?”

  “Because it’s late,” Kate said. “It’s very late. If he’s home, he’s going to want to rest, or he’s going to be already resting. If he’s not home, he’s not in a place where I can talk to him in peace. I’ll call him first thing in the morning. Get me the number. You were the one who said he wakes up early every day to have breakfast at some restaurant.”

  “At the Ararat on Cavanaugh Street at seven,” Chickie George said. He hesitated. “All right. I suppose. I’m not happy about the delay, but I suppose. But no later than that. If he still doesn’t know by tomorrow afternoon, I’m going to tell him.”