Hardscrabble Road

by Jane Haddam

  He passed his own apartment and looked up at the windows at Lida Arkmanian’s on the other side of the street. The big bank of glass on the second floor was dark. If Lida was home, she wasn’t in her living room. He crossed the street so as not to be directly in the line of fire when he passed the Ararat. He had to pass the church first, and that was all right. The spookiness he’d gotten from it before it had been rebuilt was gone now that its entire facade was lit up all night long, framing the tall new stained glass windows and the broad stone steps as if they were works of art. If he went up the steps and tried the door, it would be open. Tibor insisted on it. There was always the possibility that somebody, passing, might need to pray. They took care of the security problems by having a tandem team of parishioners sit vigil all night. You could come in to pray, but if you tried to leave a package under the pew, it would be discovered before it could blow the church to pieces again. He had sat vigil a few times himself, to fill a gap in the schedule, or because he knew he wasn’t going to be able to sleep anyway. Most of the time it was the Very Old Women who stayed up all night, and who didn’t mind spending the time in a church.

  The Ararat was packed. He was glad for the Melajians at the same time he was sad for the days when he could always stop in and eat, because there was always a place at the tables and never much of anybody around he didn’t know. He passed Ohanian’s and considered stopping in to buy loukoumia, or something else he could shove down his throat without thinking about it. He was starving. He should have eaten hours ago. He went another half block, crossed another street, and went another half block again. By now, the street was very, very quiet. It was all residential here. Most of the buildings were private houses that didn’t rent their ground floors out to businesses. He went up the steps of the one that was wrapped up to look like a box of chocolate candy—Donna must be getting ready for Valentine’s Day early—and rang the buzzer.

  It was Tommy who came to the door, a book in one hand and a pair of glasses in the other. The glasses were new this year, and he had been very careful to get wire rims, like the kind Harrison Ford wore when he was teaching college classes in the Indiana Jones movies.

  “Hi, Mr. Demarkian. Have you talked sense into Grace yet?”

  “Grace is in New York playing the harpsichord,” Gregor said. “What does she need to have sense talked into her about?”

  “About the name of that dog,” Tommy said. “I mean, it’s undignified. It’s undignified for the dog.”

  Down at the end of the long hall that ran past the stair, a door opened. Donna Moradanyan Donahue stuck her head out and said, “Oh, Gregor. Hello. We weren’t expecting you. Aren’t you on a case?”

  “Relax,” Gregor said. “I haven’t come to pump you about Bennis.”

  Donna relaxed so visibly it was practically the punch line to a comedy routine. Gregor ignored it, and kept coming down the hall toward the kitchen. “I’m looking for Russ, to tell you the truth. I’ve got a few things I want to ask him.”

  “Is it private?” Donna asked. “If it’s private, you can go into the study.”

  “It’s not particularly private. I don’t care where we are. Would it be wrong of me to ask if you had a ham sandwich somewhere around? It’s been a long day and I forgot to eat dinner.”

  “Did you remember to eat lunch?”

  “Lunch, yes,” Gregor said. “For that, I had Tibor come to keep me company.”

  “I’ve got a lot of dinner left over. I’ll throw some into the microwave. Russ is watching something or the other on cable.”

  Gregor turned to his left and went into the door that led to the “study,” which the Donahues sometimes called the “television room.” Whatever it was, it was the place where the television was left to rest, because Donna had strong views on having a television in a place where people were supposed to socialize. Gregor always thought it was one of those things she must have picked up at college before she dropped out.

  In the study, Russ was camped out in an enormous overstuffed chair, watching Forensic Files. Gregor had seen some of those programs on Court TV, and although they’d seemed accurate enough, he couldn’t understand why anybody watched them. It seemed to him there was far too much information out there about crime and forensics as it was.

  Russ looked up and said, “Hey, Gregor. What’s up?”

  “I’m looking for a lawyer,” Gregor said.

  “Has John managed to get you arrested? I saw you on television, by the way. Jackman’s out of his mind. He’s going to cause a nuclear explosion by the time he’s finished with this.”

  “It’s Rob Benedetti running the show, as far as I can tell.”

  “It ought to be a homicide detective running the show,” Russ said, “and Rob Benedetti is going to do what John Jackman wants him to do, because he thinks John Jackman is going to be the next mayor of Philadelphia.”

  “Is he?”

  “In a walk.”

  “I don’t understand why you’d want to watch something like this,” Gregor said. “Don’t you get enough of this at work all day?”

  “I don’t get any of this at work all day,” Russ said. “I don’t practice criminal law. I probably should. What do you need a lawyer for that you’d come over here in the night?”

  The door to the room swung open a little farther than it was, and Donna came in carrying a long tray with enough food on it to keep Gregor for three days, plus a tall glass of mineral water, a linen napkin, a full set of silverware, and a little white ceramic cup full of whipped butter. There was a TV table open and discarded against the wall near the bookcase. She put the tray down on that and straightened up.

  “There,” she said. “That should keep you. I’ll leave you two alone to talk.”

  “You don’t need to leave us alone to talk,” Gregor said. “It’s nothing confidential.”

  Donna was out the door and gone.

  “It’s because of Bennis,” Russ said. “She doesn’t want you—”

  ”—Oh, I know,” Gregor said, moving the TV table, tray and all, in front of the other overstuffed armchair. “She should know better, though. I haven’t pumped her about Bennis yet. Do you know what’s going on with Bennis?”

  “No,” Russ said. “It’s like the seal of the confessional or something. I’ll admit to its being incredibly annoying.”

  Gregor sat down in front of the food and thought that no matter what else was going on, Donna was a true Armenian woman. If somebody said they were hungry, she assumed they had been starving in the desert for forty days and fed them accordingly.

  “So, what is it?” Russ said. “You need help solving a case, for once? What will the papers think if they find out the Armenian-American Hercule Poirot comes to a lowly local lawyer when he’s stumped by a fiendish archvillain?”

  “You watch too much television,” Gregor said. “And I’m not stumped, if by stumped you mean not able to figure out who committed the crime. I know who committed the crime. I knew it halfway through the morning of the second day. There were really only two or three possibilities. One of them is now dead, and another one isn’t capable.”

  “I’d be careful about that if I were you,” Russ said. “I think it was even you who told me that everybody is capable, and it’s bad policy to rule out a suspect because you think he has too fine a soul to commit a murder.”

  “I’m not talking about fineness of soul,” Gregor said, “I’m talking about capacity. You can’t murder somebody with a knife unless you can raise a knife and bring it down. That kind of thing.”

  “There is somebody in this case of yours who isn’t physically capable of, what, putting arsenic into prescription painkiller capsules?”

  “No. Well, not exactly.”

  “How did the other one die, this, what’s his name, Sheehy?”

  “Frank Sheehy. We don’t know yet, but we’re going to assume poison. They almost always go on the way they’ve started. It’s easier. The ME’s report will be in tomorrow. The thing
is, I know who, and I know why, in general at least, two people are dead. But there are other things going on here that I don’t understand, and it bothers me.”

  “Are you sure they’re connected with the killings, assuming that should be a plural?”

  “No,” Gregor said. “I’m not sure. And that’s part of the problem. Let me ask you something, even if you don’t practice criminal law.”

  “Shoot.”

  “Does it come under attorney-client privilege if an attorney knows that his client is in the process of committing a crime, and does nothing to stop it?”

  “Gregor, attorneys know their clients are guilty of crimes all the time.”

  “No, I didn’t say guilty, past tense. I said in the process of. Committing a crime now. Right this second. Is the attorney still protected by attorney-client privilege?”

  “I don’t know,” Russ said. “It’s not that easy. Attorneys are friends of the court. That means they have a responsibility to see that trials and court proceedings are carried out ethically. And to an extent I think it would depend on what kind of a crime it was. An attorney can certainly be an accessory, before, during, and after the fact. Some things, though, would be nearly impossible to prove, so impossible that nobody would ever bother, and the attorney involved could certainly stonewall a long time on the principle of privilege.”

  “What about if the person was committing a crime with the full knowledge of the judge whose order he was violating?”

  “Wait now. Are you talking about a crime, or a court order?”

  “Both.”

  “They’re different things,” Russ said. “The court order brings in that friend-of-the-court thing. And the judge couldn’t be in on it.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because if he was, there would be no violation. Judges have broad discretion in their own courtrooms. Absent something like a mandatory minimums law, they can pretty much do what they want. I’ve seen murderers walk away with nothing but probation in my time, which is how we got mandatory minimums to begin with.”

  “What if the judge said one thing in the courtroom on record and something else in chambers in private?”

  “Doesn’t matter much, as long as you can prove what was said in chambers. Like I said, he’s got broad discretion to do what he wants. He’s supposed to. You write laws for the general rule, but you try particular cases, and they’ve all got quirks. I don’t like mandatory minimums, myself. They’re—”

  “—Do you like Bruce Williamson?”

  “Oh God,” Russ said.

  “Oh God?”

  “Some of us would like to see Judge Williamson go to Hollywood, get an agent, and enter the acting profession legitimately. The man is a disaster, Gregor. He’s never met a celebrity he doesn’t have an excuse for, and he doesn’t care what it is the excuse is needed to cover. Every defense lawyer with a prominent client in the city of Philadelphia does cartwheels trying to get Bruce Williamson on the case, and the worst of it is that when the person involved isn’t a celebrity, Williamson is the next best thing to a hanging judge. Is all this about Bruce Williamson? Because if it is, good luck.”

  “No,” Gregor said, “it isn’t really about Bruce Williamson. It just starts there. Well, no, it starts with Drew Harrigan’s drug problem, I’d guess. Williamson isn’t the only one who has a celebrity fixation, is he?”

  “You mean some of the uniformed police officers do? Yeah, they do. But that’s minor, compared to the havoc a judge can wreak.”

  “It starts with Drew Harrigan’s drug problem,” Gregor said, “but I think it only gets to the point where a murder is imminent once Harrigan was arrested and brought in front of Williamson. And even then it would have been all right if Williamson had been another kind of judge.”

  “You do realize you’re making no sense,” Russ said. “I’m making sense to myself,” Gregor said. “The problem with situations like this is that they look like puzzles, and they really aren’t. Not in the sense we usually use the term.”

  “A mystery wrapped in an enigma,” Russ intoned.

  Gregor picked up his fork and started in on dinner. “I met a very interesting person today,” he said. “Her name is Dr. Alison Standish, and she knows Tibor.”

  FOUR

  1

  Ray Dean Ballard had heard the rumor in dozens of places over the years, and read it in the Philadelphia Inquirer, so when he started out that morning he had the feeling of doing something so rational, and so sure of success, it gave him no more worry than brushing his teeth. He didn’t bother to buy a map and work out the bus routes. He would have, ordinarily, but over the past week or so the whole charade he had been putting on for work had seemed more shallow and less necessary than ever. It shouldn’t be a requirement for employment, anywhere, or friendship, ever, to pretend to be something you are not. Exactly how he would go about being what he was, or even how he’d know that if he saw it, he wasn’t sure. It had been years since he had thought all this through. Even then, working it out on page after page of a narrow-ruled legal pad on the desk in his dorm room at Vanderbilt, he hadn’t come to any hard-and-fast conclusions. He was not the kind of person who found solace in revolutionary posturing. He wasn’t about to turn vocal Communist wannabe just because his father was the icon of global capitalism. He didn’t want to show up on the evening news with a Kalashnikov and a beret and declare the overthrow of oppression to be right around the corner. God only knew he didn’t want to plunge himself into that half-world of unhappy resentments populated by rich-girl socialist independent filmmakers and rich-boy volunteers for the Cuban Harvest. Hadn’t there been a time, somewhere back there, when it was possible to want to do good in the world just because you were unhappy that so many of your fellow citizens were doing badly? Hadn’t there been a time when everything, even the food you ate, wasn’t politics?

  He got a cab outside his apartment, and thought that it was time to change that. He wasn’t going to buy a town house in Rittenhouse Square, but he could do better than this, and there was really no reason to go on putting up with bad plumbing when he didn’t have to. On the other hand, he didn’t want to turn out like Tony Benn, living like the lord he’d been born to be and spouting off about the miserable conditions suffered by the world’s downtrodden poor. He didn’t know what he wanted to be. It seemed impossible, considering how much thought he’d given to it back in Tennessee, but he didn’t actually seem to have figured out his life yet.

  The cab deposited him outside the big plate glass windows of a small restaurant, and as soon as he got out onto the sidewalk he could see that it wasn’t much more than one of those hole-in-the-wall diners that dotted the city from one end to the other. Etched gold lettering across the top of the largest window said: ARARAT. Ray Dean looked up and down the street. It was a nice street. The houses were expensive as city houses went, but not as expensive as the kind of thing his father would have bought. Of course, very few people could afford the kind of thing his father would have bought, but it was amazing how many people tried. He saw a small grocery up the street a little. It was a “Middle Eastern” grocery, and he wondered if that meant they would have loukoumia and halva. He could buy packages of both and bring them home when it was time for him to leave. He looked through the big plate glass window at the people at the tables and then realized that the man he was looking for was right there, sitting in the window booth, facing off against a plate of eggs, sausages, and hash browns that would have given a cholesterol-induced heart attack to a fifteen-year-old Olympic athlete.

  Ray Dean went into the restaurant and looked around again. There didn’t seem to be a hostess waiting to seat him. He went over to the window booth and looked down at the man he knew to be Gregor Demarkian and the other man with him, a little man, very thin and gnarled, who was making do with buttered toast. For the first time, Ray Dean began to think he should have called in advance. He hadn’t because… because he’d thought of this as going into the police station to
make a report. It was ridiculous, but there it was.

  The two men were looking up at him now, the smaller one with a look of calm inquiry, Gregor Demarkian with a look that was not so calm. Ray Dean cleared his throat.

  “Excuse me,” he said. “Mr. Gregor Demarkian? I’m sorry to bother you, but I thought—I’m sorry. My name is Aldous Ballard, and I run an organization called Philadelphia Sleeps.”

  Gregor Demarkian was staring at him. Ray Dean didn’t think he was blinking. Finally, Gregor Demarkian coughed a little and said, “Aldous Ballard. Well, you’re too young to be the original, so that would make you … what? The grandson?”

  “The son. But my father doesn’t use Aldous. He uses William.”

  “In the papers, he’s always William Aldous Ballard.”

  “True enough,” Ray Dean said. “At the coalition, they call me Ray Dean.”

  “Why?”

  Ray Dean sighed. “Because when I went to work there, it seemed the better part of valor. Can I sit down? I have this thing.” He stuck his hands in the pockets of his coat and came up with a typewritten list. “I have something I thought you ought to see. I didn’t do it to bring it in here. I don’t know why I did it. Because I was pissed off at being jerked around, I think.”

  “Sit,” Gregor Demarkian said. “This is Father Tibor Kasparian.”

  “How do you do, Father?” Ray Dean sat.

  A young woman was at the side of the table instantly, with a cup and a saucer and the coffeepot. Ray Dean allowed her to pour for him, and thanked her, and told her that he didn’t need any breakfast just yet, but it was good of her to ask. He sounded to himself like a decade before, at Parents’ Day at St. Paul’s. That was a blast from the past.

  He put the typewritten paper on the table before him and said, “I went to the bank. My father’s bank. The branch of it here, you know. And I got this.”

  “What’s this?”

  “A list of the people connected to the disappearance of Sherman Markey who have accounts with the Markwell Ballard Bank.”