Hardscrabble Road

by Jane Haddam

  “How will you know if he knows?”

  “I’ll ask him.” Chickie leaned forward and took the notepad that sat beside the telephone—another guest-lawyer note, Kate thought, another message from the land of the secretaries. Chickie took the pen out of the inside said. pocket of his jacket and wrote the number on the pad. “There it is,” he said. “You don’t even need an area code.”

  Kate picked up the notepad and put it squarely in the middle of the felt blotter. “First thing tomorrow morning,” she said. “I get in here at seven anyway.”

  Chickie stood up. “It’s the one thing I don’t like about public interest law,” he said. “Too many of the people who do it seem to assume that the world is full of enemies, and offense is the only defense they can play.”

  “The world is full of enemies,” Kate said. “The fact that human nature won’t allow the revolution to succeed won’t change that.”

  “I’ve got to go downstairs and do some work on the single-room occupancy thing,” Chickie said. “The people who are on the other side of that aren’t enemies. They’re just trying to do what they’re trying to do.”

  “Trying to throw the poor into the street and let them starve?”

  “You don’t believe that any more than I do,” Chickie said. “Never mind. I’m going to go work. First thing tomorrow morning, or I do it myself.”

  Kate waited patiently as Chickie left the office and went down the hall.

  He was very young and very angry, and it wasn’t certain that he’d learn to understand all the things she had learned to understand in the long years since she’d left Philadelphia and stopped being a society wife.

  She waited until she was sure he must have gone down the stairs, that he couldn’t possibly be about to pop back in again to give her one more part of this lecture. Then she pulled the piece of paper with Gregor Demarkian’s phone number on it off the notepad and tore it into very tiny pieces.

  She didn’t know what she would say to Chickie tomorrow afternoon, but she would think of something. She had no intention of giving up what little advantage she had in this case just because Chickie George thought Gregor Demarkian was “a good guy.”

  THREE

  1

  It had been a long day, and not a good one, and Gregor Demarkian wanted to walk. It was what he usually did to clear his mind. He hated being in truly rural areas for very long, because there were no sidewalks, and walking any length in any direction was difficult. He hated bad weather, for that very reason, although he’d gone long distances in heavy rain and moderate snow. He left Rob Benedetti’s office after it was already dark and realized, in less than a block and a half, that this was never going to work. He didn’t mind wind, but he minded it when it pushed hard cold at him like needles. All his joints had begun to ache. His neck felt stiff enough to snap off his body like a plastic pearl on one of those little add-a-pearl necklaces the girls used to have when he was a child. He knew he was in trouble when he started thinking about himself when he was a child. Other people were sentimental about their childhoods. He was not. Growing up poor was either a lifelong ticket to neurosis or a prelude to something else, and he had the something else.

  He stepped into a tiny hole-in-the-wall magazine store just to get out of the cold and think. There was a television on the wall showing the news, and the story that was up was the one about Frank Sheehy. Gregor could still hear the noise in Rob Benedetti’s office when the confirmation had come through, but he didn’t want to think about that, either. There was something all wrong about this case. He just couldn’t put a finger on what it was. Everything was sideways. Nothing fit what it should. He wished he knew something more about Drew Harrigan, but when he asked people he got nothing more than clichés and nothing less than venom. To know him—or to know of him—was to hate him. That was clear. What wasn’t clear was the personality behind the bombast. It was as if the man had been invented, from scratch, out of old bits and pieces of political speeches.

  They were saying something on the news about Frank Sheehy and his life: his years at Princeton, his struggle to found LibertyHeart Communications. Gregor reached into the pocket of his coat and came up with a crumpled copy of Ellen Harrigan’s list. There was something else that bothered him, and that should have bothered Rob Benedetti and the police much more. They seemed to take it as a ruse on the part of Ellen Harrigan to draw suspicion away from herself, and Gregor thought that was certainly possible. He didn’t think it began to explain either why she’d made the list to begin with or why these particular people were on it.

  It was a silly idea, but it at least involved moving around, so he decided to go ahead with it. He went back out onto the street and looked up and down for the cab. Rush hour appeared to be over. He had no idea what time it was. At any rate, the traffic wasn’t back-to-back here. He saw a cab in the distance and raised his hand for it. It sped up until it got to him and then pulled over to the curb.

  It was one of those things. It was as if God were trying to tell him something. He got in and gave the driver the address he’d noted beside one of the names. Then he explained he was talking about one of the buildings at Penn. He’d been an undergraduate at Penn, years ago, but he’d never become really familiar with its campus, because he’d commuted from home instead of living in a dorm. It was a different time and a different place. The Ivy League was really Ivy. Poor boys on scholarships didn’t get around very much with the rich boys who ran everything from the Chess Club to the campus newspaper.

  They were closer than Gregor had realized. He probably could have walked—but then, you could walk almost anywhere in Philadelphia, if you were willing to take long enough to do it. He paid the driver and got out. The campus looked deserted, or close to it. The security lights were on everywhere. Did they lock the doors at night in these places? They would have if he’d been running things.

  The door to this one, the closest thing he could find to a “front” door, was not locked. He walked in and looked around. The address gave an office number on the second floor, and now that he thought of it, that was interesting. Why give Alison Standish’s office address instead of her home address? He got the list out again and looked down it to find Jig Tyler. It gave his office address, too. Either Ellen Harrigan hadn’t known the home addresses of the two professors at Penn, or she hadn’t wanted to look them up.

  He went up to the second floor, feeling more idiotic by the minute. The building was nearly empty. He did see one or two people at their desks, pecking away at computers, but it was obvious that most of the people who worked here had gone home long ago. He had no reason to think that Alison Standish hadn’t gone home, too. He would have, if he was her. He walked down past the offices. Most of their doors were closed. Some of those doors had posters hanging on them: the New York City Ballet; the imminent release of Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being; Che. He stopped for a moment in front of the Che. It astonished him that anybody still took Che seriously.

  Alison Standish’s office was far at the end of the hall, and he saw before he reached it that it was open. Light was flowing out of it into the dark corridor. He went up to the door and looked in. A blond woman in her forties was standing on a ladder with her back to him, trying to get a book off a high shelf.

  Gregor hesitated. He didn’t want to startle her, and he didn’t want her to fall. He cleared his throat and knocked lightly on the door. She turned around.

  “You’re very tall,” she said.

  “Ah,” Gregor said. “Yes. Yes, I am.”

  “Could you come up here and get this book for me? I should have known not to let them put books up on that shelf. I’m going to kill myself here.”

  She got down off the ladder. Gregor came into the office and got on. The top shelf was all the way up to the ceiling, and even for somebody as tall as he was, it wasn’t comfortable to try to get a book from it.

  “What you need is a taller ladder,” he said.

  “It’s t
he thick navy blue one right about where your head is. It’s called Ecclesiastica Romana.”

  Gregor got it. It weighed a ton. He came down the ladder and handed it over. “What is that, anyway?”

  “It’s a book on the evils of the Roman Church, written by a monk in twelfth-century Provence. I have to bless Latin, really, because if he’d written it in Provençal, I wouldn’t be able to understand a word. Not that we really understand the Latin, even ecclesiastical Latin, after all this time. The context is gone, and we can never get it back again. It makes you wonder what people are thinking when they say that they understand the Bible.”

  “My guess is that they’re thinking that the Bible, being divinely inspired, is also divinely delivered, so that God prevents us from making mistakes we would make with ordinary texts.”

  “You sound like you’re quoting somebody.”

  “I am,” Gregor said. “I’m quoting Father Tibor Kasparian, who is the pastor of Holy Trinity Armenian Christian Church and a good friend of mine.”

  “The Tibor Kasparian who wrote ‘The Aesthetic Roots of the Nestorian Controversy’?”

  “I don’t know. The Nestorian controversy sounds right. He talks about Nestorians quite a lot. I just don’t understand him. My name is Gregor Demarkian, by the way.”

  “I know,” Alison Standish said. “The Armenian-American Hercule Poirot. I recognized you from your photographs. And that would be the same Tibor Kasparian, by the way. I met him at a conference on The Problem of Art in a Time of Heresy. He’s an interesting man.”

  “Yes,” Gregor said. “He is.”

  “I take it you’ve come about that list, and about that man who died. I didn’t know him. I didn’t know Drew Harrigan, either. I’ve got no idea why all this is happening to me.”

  Gregor got down off the ladder and looked around. It was like being in Tibor’s apartment, in among the Serious Books. He saw English, French, German, Latin, Greek, and a few he didn’t recognize.

  “Rob Benedetti’s people looked it up,” he said. Then he paused. “Rob is the district attorney. After the list came out, they looked it up. They said that Drew Harrigan had talked about you ‘repeatedly’ on his show, and called for you to be investigated for bias, and that the university had responded by opening an investigation.”

  “I know.”

  “That’s a fair indication of why all this is happening to you.”

  “Except that Harrigan’s original accusation is part of what’s happening to me,” Alison said, “and I don’t understand why. I teach medieval literature and intellectual history. I’m not in the Women’s Studies program. The people in the Women’s Studies program don’t even like me. I’m too blindly wedded to the repressive hermeneutic of dominant heterosexism. Or something. I never get the jargon straight. My last book was about the influence of Scholastic theology on English common law.”

  “From what I understood, Harrigan claimed that he was in contact with a student of yours who claimed that you deliberately gave lower grades to students with conservative political convictions.”

  “I know. The problem is, I wouldn’t know which of my students had conservative political convictions to save my life. Modern politics doesn’t tend to come up in a course concentrating on marital imagery in medieval devotional poetry.”

  “What about the student in question. Do you remember him?”

  “I don’t even know if it was a him,” Alison said. “I’ve never had his name, and the university investigating committee wouldn’t give it to me short of a court order. Which, by the way, I was threatening to get. I’ve wracked my brains for weeks, but I can’t think of a single student in any class I’ve taught for the last five years who said anything at all about his politics one way or the other. I keep thinking that has to be wrong, somebody must have made an offhand comment during the last elections, and somebody probably did, but it didn’t stick with me. And if you’re about to ask me why somebody would go to all the trouble of contacting Drew Harrigan if that was the case, don’t bother. I don’t know.”

  “What did you mean, the university wouldn’t give you the name of the complaining student?” Gregor asked.

  “They wouldn’t,” Alison said. “That’s the way university inquiries are run. We’re better than the criminal justice system, you see. We’re really interested in getting to justice, and not just in a competition. It’s not an adversary system here.”

  “So you aren’t allowed to face your accusers?”

  “If they had to face me, they might be too intimidated to make the accusation.”

  “That’s the idea,” Gregor said. “It helps guard against false accusations.”

  “I know,” Alison said. “Which is why I was threatening a court order. They backed down after that, though. I knew they would. The public doesn’t understand the spirit of disinterested inquiry which is the function of the university, so they’re liable to get all worked up over what they mistakenly see as a university committee running roughshod over a professor’s due process rights.”

  “You sound very, very sarcastic.”

  “I am feeling very, very sarcastic,” Alison said. “But that’s all I can be. I really don’t know why this started, or why anybody would pick me to start it about. First I was all over the airways. There was even a piece up about me on Matt Drudge’s Web site. Then I was the object of the inquiry. Then the inquiry was called off but I was suddenly on Ellen Harrigan’s list. And, trust me, that one is all over campus by now. I’m going to have to change my name to Red Emma if this keeps up.”

  Gregor thought about it. “You never met Drew Harrigan, not even once?”

  “Not even once.”

  “What about Dr. Tyler, do you know? Had he met him?”

  “You’d have to ask him,” Alison said, “but I think he had. But that makes sense, doesn’t it? Dr. Tyler writes political books, lots of them, so far off the left end of the spectrum they’re practically on Mars. The evil corporations are brainwashing us all to believe we really want to eat hamburgers instead of raw vegetables and tofu on whole grain bread. The United States planned and carried out the 9/11 attacks itself, to give the government the excuse to restrict civil liberties. Drew Harrigan had something about Jig Tyler on nearly every broadcast. But I’ve just been sitting here, worried about Thomas Aquinas and the concept of property in twelfth-century Britain.”

  “Had you ever met Ellen Harrigan?”

  “No,” Alison said. “And from what I could see, I wouldn’t want to.”

  “Is she right? Did you have a motive for wanting her husband dead?”

  “Well, I was being investigated by the university, and that investigation did disappear as soon as Drew Harrigan’s body was found; but it would have disappeared anyway, because I had every intention of filing a suit, and the university wouldn’t risk that kind of publicity unless it had a lot stronger evidence against me than anything it could have had. I would think that, to kill somebody, you’d have to be desperate, and I wasn’t desperate.”

  “What about Dr. Tyler? Would he have had a reason to want Drew Harrigan dead?”

  “If you believe his books, he wants half the world dead. I don’t know, really. You’d have to ask him. I’ve met him exactly once, and that was yesterday, when the news came out that it was Drew Harrigan who’d died, and not that homeless man. He walked over here to tell me about it.”

  “Why?”

  “To offer commiseration from a fellow sufferer, I suppose,” Alison said. “Maybe he just wanted to see what I looked like after all the reports. Anyway, that’s the only time I ever set eyes on him in the flesh. I really couldn’t tell you much about him, not even what he was like. He seemed nice enough here yesterday. He seems anything but nice on television.”

  “One more thing,” Gregor said. “This accusation by a student, did it actually have to exist? Did there actually have to be a student making a complaint? If you weren’t allowed to question your accusers, what would stop the administrati
on from claiming that such a complaint had been made in order to, I don’t know, harass you, force you out of your job?”

  “The answer is nothing, I suppose, but why would they want to? I’m not a thorn in anybody’s side that I know of. I don’t have an endowed chair that somebody else might want. I don’t get involved in politics, campus or otherwise, or at least I didn’t before all this started. Why would anybody want to go to the trouble?”

  “I don’t know,” Gregor said.

  And it was true. He didn’t. He had no idea where this line of questioning was going. It was just that here was one more thing that had no reason to be here, one more complication for the sake of complication. He didn’t like it.

  What he did like was Alison Standish, and under other circumstances he would have offered to buy her dinner.

  2

  Most of Cavanaugh Street was dark by the time Gregor Demarkian got back, a three-block stretch of quiet in a city that had recently become so revitalized he sometimes thought it was threatening to turn into New York. There was light spilling out of the Ararat, but he never went there after eight in the evening anymore. There were too many tourists looking around for “exotic” food, and for him. That was what happened when your life became the subject of newspaper articles over and above the ones that reported the cases you were involved in or the testimony you gave at trials. Bennis would understand this. Bennis had spent a good deal of her life being an object of public curiosity. That was something you wanted to happen to you when you wrote books and wanted to sell as many of them as possible, which Bennis did. She took great pride in how many bestseller lists she’d been on and how long she’d been on them. But Bennis wasn’t home, and he was damned—he really was—if he was going to go rushing up to the apartment to see if she’d left a message on his answering machine. She hadn’t left a message on his answering machine now for over ten days, and he’d checked for one far too often.