by Jane Haddam
He turned the pen over in his hands and then wrote: Why is there so much overlap between Ellen Harrigan’s list and Ray Dean Ballard’s list?
Some of the overlap made sense. Some of the people involved in the case were the kind of people who might reasonably be expected to have accounts at Markwell Ballard. Some of the overlap was just eerie. What was Ray Dean Ballard doing on Ellen Harrigan’s list at all? Yes, Drew Harrigan had attacked Philadelphia Sleeps, and called it practically a Communist organization, but that wasn’t personal, and it wasn’t likely to get Ray Dean fired or even inconvenienced in any other way. There was another question, too: Who had drawn that list up for Ellen Harrigan in the first place?
If there was one thing Gregor was sure of, it was that Ellen Harrigan hadn’t written it herself. She wasn’t that well wrapped. He doubted if she’d heard of all the people on it. He doubted even more that she had any idea why any of those people would “hate” her husband enough to want to kill him. Ellen Harrigan was a woman who ran on a very narrow array of emotions, and the most important of the ones she had was fear.
He dropped down what would have been another line if the paper had been lined and wrote: Where was he getting the prescription medication?
Gregor didn’t mean Drew Harrigan. He knew where Harrigan was getting the prescription medication. He meant Drew Harrigan’s source. It all came down to this: it made no sense to kill Harrigan if you couldn’t be sure that nobody would discover that you were the one feeding him the pills in the first place. That meant that you had to be getting those pills in a way that you believed could not be discovered in almost any circumstance.
They were at Rob Benedetti’s door. Gregor put the little bound book into the inside pocket of his coat and waited until Marbury came around to let him out. This was a car for transporting criminals. The back doors didn’t open from the inside.
Getting out, Gregor looked around, carefully checking for homeless people, but found none. The last few days had made him hypersensitive to an issue he’d never thought about much before, and that made him more than a little uncomfortable to think about now. They went through into the lobby and waited for the elevator. They walked into the elevator and pushed the button for Rob Benedetti’s floor. The building felt deserted, although Gregor knew it couldn’t be. It had to be the time of day.
“Places always spook me when they get like this,” Giametti said.
“Everything spooks you,” Marbury said. “You thought aliens were going to land when the planets aligned.”
The elevator stopped on Rob Benedetti’s floor and they all got out. They walked down to the woman who served as Benedetti’s gatekeeper. She didn’t need to be told who they were. Gregor thought he himself would probably stick in her memory forever, because he was the one she’d had to find after being told there was a body in the back in a shopping cart.
She got Benedetti himself on the intercom, told him they were there, and then turned back to Gregor. “It’s the nuns,” she said. “I can handle anything but nuns. And nuns in habits like that.” She waved her hands in the air. “I thought they stopped wearing habits like that. They’re not anywhere near as scary in ordinary street clothes.”
Benedetti came out and began waving them all into his office. He looked harried and triumphant at once. Gregor did not think this was a good sign. Investigations were not usually aided by investigators who imagined themselves marching through the last act in a Verdi opera.
“Wait until you hear this,” he said, in what was supposed to be a muted tone under his breath, but wasn’t. “Just wait until you hear this.”
The two nuns Gregor remembered from the police station were sitting in Benedetti’s office, their feet flat on the floor, their hands folded in their laps and out of sight under their voluminous sleeves. At least, Gregor thought it was the same two. He was sure about the young one, who was unusual in both her looks and her manner. He admitted to himself that he hadn’t paid attention to the other nun yesterday, and wasn’t paying much attention to this other nun now.
Benedetti waved them all to chairs and sat down on the edge of his desk. “This is Sister Maria Beata and Sister Mary Immaculata. I think we’ve all met.”
“Yes, of course, Mr. Benedetti,” Immaculata said. She looked disapproving, but she probably always did.
“Tell Mr. Demarkian what you told me,” Benedetti said to Sister Beata. Then he turned to Gregor. “They came marching in here about forty-five minutes ago and told me the most amazing thing.”
“We didn’t know where else to go,” Beata said. “Our first thought after talking to Reverend Mother was to go to the precinct at Hardscrabble Road, of course, but that didn’t seem to make sense, since it didn’t seem as if anybody there knew anything about this. Then we tried to call you, Mr. Demarkian, but we got your answering machine. We know you have a cell phone number, but we didn’t know what it was.”
“We weren’t sure if there was directory assistance for cell phone numbers,” Immaculata said.
Beata brushed this off. “The thing is, I never would have remembered. I mean, I did remember, in a way, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. Even at the time, you see, the man in the red hat looked familiar, but I just thought that was because he came to the barn often. And the odd thing is, he did come to the barn often. Or rather, often enough. At least a couple of times a month this winter.”
“People come in and out,” Immaculata said. “You can never tell with the barn, who will show up and who will not. We have regulars, but there are other people who come and go.”
“And later,” Beata said, “when it was Drew Harrigan in the red hat, I thought that was it. I must have recognized him as Harrigan and not realized it. But I knew that couldn’t be true. Mr. Harrigan was Reverend Mother’s brother. I hadn’t seen him often, but I’d seen him often enough to know when somebody wasn’t him, and the man in the red hat that night couldn’t have been him. He was too thin, for one thing.”
“Listen to this.” Benedetti was practically dancing.
Beata ignored him. “Then this morning,” she said, “we were in town, and Immaculata wanted a throat lozenge, because she was coughing. So we stopped at a drugstore to buy her some Halls mentholyptus, and he was there, standing by the magazine rack. And then I knew, you know, because he was wearing a hat. Just not a red one.”
“Jig Tyler,” Rob Benedetti said, nearly crowing. “It was Jig Tyler who showed up at the barn that night, dressed up like a homeless person.”
“Are you sure?” Gregor asked Beata.
Beata nodded her head. “Absolutely sure. It’s like when you’re trying to remember the name of an actor you’re watching in a movie, or where you’ve seen him before, and then the next day or so it comes to you, and you can’t imagine you ever didn’t know. I’m sure. I looked straight into his face as we were getting out of the car.”
“Did you look straight into the face of Drew Harrigan when he was found dead?” Gregor asked.
Beata shook her head. “I really couldn’t have told very much from the body, Mr. Demarkian. It was slumped, and fouled with vomit. I’m not a doctor and I’m not a pathologist. It was…unnerving…to be with a dead body at all, never mind one who’d been sick. I took a pulse. I checked for breathing. I wasn’t looking into his face. I’m sorry.”
“No, that’s quite all right. I don’t blame you. You say that Dr. Tyler had been to the barn before on more than one occasion?”
“Oh, yes,” Beata said. “He’d been coming all winter. I don’t know why I never realized who he was, because that wasn’t the first time I’d thought I recognized him. But you see, we don’t really spend that much time in the barn. We hire a man for security, and then we leave the place open. It’s not really a shelter. Any other winter, the city would have shut us down if we tried to do this the way we’re doing it. Now, of course, with the temperatures so awful, they look the other way. But it’s not as if we’re out there managing things all the time.”
“Did you ever see anybody else you thought you recognized?” Gregor asked.
“No, Mr. Demarkian. I’m sorry. You’re wondering if I might have seen Mr. Harrigan. I’m almost certain I didn’t. But that doesn’t mean he wasn’t there. You might ask one of the other extern sisters, Immaculata here or Marie Bernadette.”
“I didn’t recognize this one,” Immaculata said. “I still can’t believe you did.”
“You wouldn’t happen to know the specific dates on which you saw Dr. Tyler?” Gregor said.
Beata shook her head. “I really don’t. It wasn’t that big an issue for me, you see. It wasn’t that I thought anything was wrong or going on. I suppose I should have.”
“I don’t see why,” Gregor said. “I don’t see why anybody would think that perfectly ordinary people with decent homes to go to would be lined up to get a spot in a homeless shelter so far out on the city limits it’s almost in the next township. Although I suppose that was the point. The remoteness, I mean.”
“This is the point,” Benedetti said. “Jig Tyler poisoned Drew Harrigan. He was supplying Harrigan with pills, and Harrigan was out of control, and he was afraid Harrigan was going to implode and take him down, too, so he filled a bunch of pills with poison and killed him.”
“And he killed Frank Sheehy, why?” Gregor said.
“We’ll find out,” Benedetti said.
Gregor sighed. “Never mind. You’ve actually almost got it right. Almost, not quite. You know what part you got wrong?”
“What?” Benedetti said.
“The part where Jig Tyler kills Drew Harrigan. Jig Tyler didn’t kill anybody, and certainly not Harrigan. Although I suppose we’re going to have to shut down his antics anyway.”
SIX
1
Ellen Harrigan truly hated Neil Savage’s offices, and Neil Savage, and Neil Savage’s law firm, and everything about Neil Savage and all his works. She hated him, and them, more than she hated the women who had worked for Drew, who seemed to her to exist for no other reason but to make the point that women who hadn’t attended the Ivy League or the Seven Sisters weren’t fit to live. She hated him more than she hated liberals, and with more concentration, because she knew who and what he was. She had come to the realization, over the last few days, that she didn’t actually know what a “liberal” was, except for somebody who voted for the Democratic Party, which didn’t make sense. Her father voted for the Democratic Party. All the men she had known growing up did, the ones who worked the line at the factories that ringed the small city near their town, the ones who worked as garage mechanics, even the ones who managed the local IGA and wore a short-sleeved white collar shirt and thin stringy tie to do it in. She was beginning to think that she had understood even less than she had thought she had. Being married to Drew, it had been much too easy to let him take care of everything, including the thinking, and the fact was that she didn’t care that much about politics anyway. Liberal, conservative, Republican, Democrat, it was all pretty much the same to her, except that she was sure that whoever Drew had liked was a Good Person, and whoever he didn’t was not. That was fine when he was alive, but he wasn’t alive anymore. He was lying in a morgue somewhere. People suspected her of killing him. She thought that people suspected her now more than they had when she’d first gone to Gregor Demarkian with that list. She thought they hated her now that she had done that press conference. It hadn’t been a good idea. She had let herself be panicked, and she knew what she was like when she was panicked.
Standing in the front waiting room with its pictures of overdressed old farts on the walls and leather furniture that looked like nobody was allowed to sit on it, Ellen checked herself for signs that she was losing her resolve, but there were none. She used to be intimidated when she came into this room. She wasn’t anymore. She still thought the overdressed old farts would have looked down their noses at her, but she didn’t care. She still thought the furniture cost more, altogether, than what she’d paid for her first car, but she didn’t care about that, either. She had been panicked because she had been thinking the way they wanted her to think, and in the …She groped for the word. There was a word. She’d heard it at a dinner in Washington once when she had been seated at the same table as Michael Novak and his wife. Michael Novak was an intellectual. He intimidated her, although right now she wasn’t sure he’d meant to. Still, she’d listened to him, and she’d come up with a word.
“Categories.” That was the word. She thought in the categories they wanted her to think in, and because she did that, she believed the things they wanted her to believe. And the issue wasn’t liberal or conservative, Republican or Democratic, left or right, or any of the other things that they said were so damned important to them. The issue was smart and stupid, and when it came right down to the wire, that was all they cared a flying damn about one way or the other.
The door that led to the offices at the back opened, and Neil himself poked his head out. Ellen was surprised, but only a little. Neil Savage would have sent out a secretary to greet his own mother, but he probably thought she was out of control, and dangerous. That was one of the things Michael Novak had been saying about “categories” at that dinner. When people started thinking in categories and forgot they were doing it, they ended up buying into the very myths and stereotypes they’d invented themselves. It had been some conversation about religious people and politics. She didn’t remember what it was about. She only remembered that she’d thought at the time that it made sense he was an intellectual.
Neil decided she wasn’t about to scream and cause a scene. He came out and held out his hand. “Mrs. Harrigan,” he said. “Ellen. Come on back and let me know what I can do for you.”
Ellen looked around again at all the overdressed old farts on the walls— she’d almost thought of them as “overstuffed,” which made her smile—and then walked past Neil through the door and into the long corridor beyond. There were more old farts here, and more expensive carpets, and that muted amber lighting very expensive hotels used to give the impression of intimidating elegance. In the end, though, it was just a law firm. It was no different from the offices her father went to on the clotted Main Street of their town when he wanted to buy a house or make his will. It was all an illusion, everything these people had. They used it to make you afraid of them.
She walked right by the doors to the conference room and into Neil’s office, because she knew he would try his best to get her to sit at that big table while they talked. That was more of trying to make her afraid, and she wasn’t having any. She sat down in the big visitor’s chair, feeling the softness of the leather under the palms of her hands. What wasn’t illusion was money. She wondered why it was people were always so intimidated by money.
Neil came in and went around to the other side of his desk. Ellen had noticed that he liked looking “official.” He would have made a good judge. He was tall and intimidating. His face looked like it was hewn out of stone. He walked as if he were already wearing robes.
“Well,” he said, sitting down.
“Do you know who you look like?” she asked him. “You look like what’s his name, the senator. You look like John Kerry.”
Neil Savage blinked. “Yes. Well. As a matter of fact, I think we have a common ancestor in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. My mother would have known.”
Ellen looked around at the walls. There were no old farts here, only hunting prints and dark paneling. Everything in this building was dark paneling.
“I want to do something about the will,” she said.
Neil Savage blinked again. “Yes,” he said. “Well. We will have a reading, of course, as soon as possible, but it’s only been—”
“—We can have it the day after tomorrow,” Ellen said. “That should be enough time for you to get the word out to the other people who will need to be here. You can send messengers if you have to.”
“Well, yes, but that will depend on who is named in the will, won’t i
t? We may have to bring somebody down from New York, or up from Washington.”
“You won’t. I know what’s in the will, Neil. I have a copy of it.”
“Do you?”
“I’ve got copies of everything. The will. The deeds. Everything he owned, and everything we owned together, and everything I owned by myself. Not that I would have known what to do with the money if I’d been left to myself, but Drew bought stock for me, and real estate. I know you have all the originals, but I have copies. Drew said it was safer.”
“It is. It’s a lot safer.”
“I want to do whatever we have to do about the will. I control a lot of things now. The franchise, isn’t that what it’s called? The merchandising. I don’t suppose that will last all that long now that he’s dead, but it’s got to be taken care of.”
“I can take care of those things for you,” Neil said. “And Drew had a business manager. She can—”
“—Yes, I know Drew’s business manager.”
Neil hesitated. “If it’s, well, if it’s a personal thing, I can assure you that nothing Drew ever did gave me the least impression that—”
Ellen was genuinely startled. “Do you honestly think I’d suspect Drew of having an affair with that woman? Or with any of the women in his office? Drew was a lot of things, but one of them was not the kind of man who gets attracted to that kind of woman. Do you know what he used to say about Danielle? That she probably took her briefcase to bed with her. And he didn’t mean when she was sleeping alone.”
“Ah,” Neil said, “yes.”
“It bothered you when he talked like that, didn’t it? It bothered all of you. The women in the office, too. I mean, after all, what was he? Some small town hick with a tenth-rate education. That’s not mine, by the way, I heard a woman at a party say it once, when she thought she was alone with a friend in the ladies’ room. But you think that about all of them. Rush Limbaugh. Alan Keyes. Oliver North. They’re your version of slumming.”
