Hardscrabble Road (23 page)

Lots of things cleared her head. Chickie George made it…well, there was that “bemused” again. Chickie was standing in the
door to the office she had taken over, holding a file folder and looking dejected. The office was so clean it looked as if
it were in pain.

“He said he’d get them to check,” Chickie was saying, “and that’s the best I could hope for, really. I don’t know. Maybe we’re
wrong. Maybe he isn’t dead.”

“We can always hope,” Kate said, “but if he isn’t dead, where is he?”

Chickie shrugged. “He’s an addled old man. Everybody keeps saying that. Maybe he got his hands on some serious booze and went
on a bender.”

“For two weeks? If he went on a bender for two weeks, he would be dead.”

“People go on benders for longer than that,” Chickie said. “No, I know what you mean. Not people in Sherman’s kind of shape.
I don’t know. Maybe he fuzzed out and can’t remember who he is or where he’s supposed to be. Maybe he’s just wandering around
someplace.”

“In the open? Then why hasn’t anybody seen him?”

“I don’t know,” Chickie said. “Never mind. I know. He’s probably dead. And maybe they’ll do another check and find a corpse
they overlooked. The whole thing is just getting so… odd. If you know what I mean.”

“Sure,” Kate said. “There’s another possibility, you know. He could be dead, but not in a morgue. He could have died in some
abandoned building somewhere and they just haven’t found the body yet. It’s cold. As long as it’s
cold, there’s no smell. You’d be amazed at how many bodies they find in vacant lots once the spring thaws come.”

“From the smell?”

“Exactly.”

“That’s pleasant to contemplate.”

“Pleasant or not, that’s the way things work,” Kate said. “This time, though, we need them to look. I’m not sure we can go
on with the case with Sherman missing, and I think we need to go on with the case. It’s important. Harrigan will be out in,
what, twenty or so days? We don’t want him to walk. We do have to find Sherman.”

“Can we go on with the case if we find him and he’s dead?”

“I don’t know,” Kate said. “I’ll look into it. And don’t say we should never have reported him missing. We had to, under the
circumstances. We probably had to under any circumstances. Have you talked to Harrigan’s lawyers yet?”

“No, I thought you had.”

“I have,” Kate said. Then she decided to let that one pass. “Never mind. It’s all under control. Go back to doing whatever
you normally do and I’ll leave you alone until I get something definite going on.”

“I’m supposed to be going to class,” Chickie said. “I haven’t been doing a lot of that lately. Are you sure you want me to
go on? You always seem to have so much to do.”

“Most of it has nothing to do with this,” Kate said. “You go.”

Chickie hesitated in the doorway. Then he turned around and walked off, looking like something Central Casting had sent in
to play a lawyer. Kate wondered what would happen to him once he passed the bar. A lot of kids said they wanted to go into
public interest law, or work with the people who ordinarily wouldn’t have representation, but those big-firm salaries were
waiting, and they were bigger and more outside the scale of ordinary experience every day. Penn was a good degree. It wasn’t
as good as Yale or Harvard, but it was still a good degree. Somebody like Chickie would have offers.

Kate knew herself well enough to understand that she couldn’t say, for sure, that she would be doing the kind of work she
was doing if there had been anything like an alternative when she was first looking for a job. In the end, she was glad she’d
chosen the work she had. She’d seen enough of the women who came in the law school classes after hers, who had had offers,
not to envy them. If she put in a one-hundred-hour week, it was because she was working on something she believed in, something
she honestly thought would make the world better. It wasn’t in order to save Exxon from being sued by the Alaskan fishermen
whose livelihoods it had ruined by hiring a
tanker captain who couldn’t hold his liquor, or to keep Enron executives out of jail and with their personal fortunes intact
after they’d trashed the retirement savings of hundreds of their workers. Neil would probably say she was an idiot, or a Communist,
but she was neither. She just didn’t see the point of spending her life, the only one she would ever have, making the rich
richer and behaving as if the poor didn’t exist.

Of course, there were dangers in the other direction. She had promised herself long ago that if she ever heard herself talking
about “the transgressive hermeneutics of grammar” or describing her case as a “struggle against oppression,” she’d stop whatever
she was doing, walk right out the door, and go to work for the Morgan Bank.

Right now, she just thought she needed a vacation. She’d come straight out here after settling a case in New York for the
Coalition for the Homeless, which had been very good work but a long haul, dealing with city lawyers whose only purpose in
life was to get her to run out of money and out of steam, and she was exhausted. She could use an island with lots of sunshine,
lots of sand, and lots of liquor.

Here was something else she thought was important—she never, ever denied that she was who she was. Her idea of what to do
about equality was to make the poor richer, not chuck herself into penury or play the martyr by buying her clothes at Kmart
when she was able to shop at Saks. She was not a martyr, or a saint. She was just doing work she loved to do.

The phone on her desk buzzed. She picked up and the receptionist said, “Ms. Daniel? It’s Mr. Ballard on line three.”

Speaking of somebody who was trying to be a martyr or a saint, Kate thought. She picked up and said something noncommittal
into the phone. Ray Dean Ballard always made her a little nuts. The fact that he insisted on calling himself Ray Dean made
her nutser. If that was a word.

“Don’t be pissy,” he said. “I’ve got some news.”

“That’s good,” Kate said, “because we’re not much with news here this morning at all. What have you got?”

“The body, maybe.”

Kate sat up. “Are you serious? Where is it? How long has he been dead?”

“Calm down,” Ray Dean said. “It’s not that far gone yet. I got a call from my guy in the District Attorney’s Office. Demarkian’s
been in to see Benedetti.”

“That’s not news. We knew he was going to do something like that. That’s why Chickie went to see him.”

“True enough, but now the two of them have gone out to the Hardscrabble
Road precinct house. They’re stopping somewhere on the way, to get the guys who arrested Harrigan. But the thing is—”

“—What’s Hardscrabble Road?” “It’s about as close to the absolute edge of the city limits as you can get,” Ray Dean said.
“You’d practically think it wasn’t part of the city at all. There’s a convent out there. Monastery. Carmelite nuns.”

“Benedictines,” Kate said automatically. “Sherman Markey was supposed to be a regular at some homeless shelter run by Benedictines.”

“Yes, I know that place, this isn’t that. This is way out. They don’t have a homeless shelter so much as they’ve got a barn
they let people sleep in when the weather gets cold. The city would have a fit about the fact that there’s only one bathroom
and no real beds, except everybody is scared to death we’re going to have a really big haul of people freezing to death this
winter. Anyway, they found the hat. The red hat Sherman was wearing the last night anybody saw him alive. It turns out that
somebody died out there on the night of the twenty-seventh.”

“And they didn’t tell anybody?”

“Of course they told somebody,” Ray Dean said. “They called an ambulance, the whole magilla. But at the time the hat was missing,
or something. Anyway, the hat was left behind. The body is at the morgue somewhere, they’re going to try to go find it. But
this is going to be Sherman. It all fits.”

“The place doesn’t fit,” Kate said slowly, “does it? You say it’s way out on the edge of the city? How would he have gotten
there?”

“How do they ever get anywhere?” Ray Dean said. “We can work that out later. You should be ready for news, though. It’s coming
this afternoon. And it’s going to be more interesting than you think.”

“Why?”

“Because you know the monastery I’m talking about. Our Lady of Mount Carmel. It’s the one that owns the land you guys had
the lien put on, the land Drew Harrigan gave to the nuns after you guys sued him on Sherman’s behalf. The one where Drew Harrigan’s
sister is the Abbess.”

“Jesus Christ,” Kate said.

“Exactly. Hold on tight. This is going to be a wild ride. I’ll call you back later. I’ve got a bunch of stuff to do. I just
wanted to make sure you were warned.”

“Right,” Kate said. Then she put down the phone and stared at it.

It wasn’t the clients who got to her. It wasn’t the plaintiffs. It wasn’t the defendants. It wasn’t even the other lawyers
and judges. It was just this, the stuff that came out of the walls when you weren’t expecting it.

T
he order to run
fingerprint checks on any and all corpses that had been delivered to the morgue since January 27 had come down more than
two hours ago, and everybody in the facility had been ignoring it ever since. It wasn’t that they didn’t want to be helpful,
Dr. Ramarcharadan thought. It was just that there was so much to do that nobody could handle their real workload, never mind
all these calls for fingerprint checks. Dr. Ramarcharadan was from the Punjab. He’d been in America a total of fifty-two months.
He was the most conscientious of men, but there was only so much he could do with a facility that was short-staffed in the
best of times, and now—with this cold and the people dying from it—so outclassed that it might as well have been doing nothing
at all.

Except that that wasn’t true, and Dr. Ramarcharadan knew it. He was managing six autopsies a day these days. He was beginning
to see corpses in his sleep. In India, he had not been a pathologist, and hadn’t expected to be. Here, he’d had no other choice.
In a few years, he might be able to get all his certifications in order and be allowed to perform surgery again, which was
what he was trained for.

At the moment, he was all suited up and ready to go on one more corpse. His back hurt, his legs hurt, his feet hurt, and everything
in his head was humming. He’d been at it since six o’clock this morning. He thought his wrists were about to fall off.

The good thing about pathology was that you didn’t have to worry about finesse. Unless there was some overriding reason, and
he couldn’t think of what one might be, you could just go ahead and do what you did without worrying about the patient’s feelings.
This patient was on the chart as a homeless man picked up on one of those nights when just taking out the garbage could give
a man frostbite. Dr. Ramarcharadan didn’t think there was much to be preferred in the Punjab over the United States, but the
weather was definitely something. He tapped into the chest bone, made a long cut, and began to peel away the skin. They were
getting to them far too late these days. They always left the homeless ones for last, because nobody was waiting to take possession
of them. They should get at them right away. There was something wrong about leaving them here for so long, even frozen, even
knowing they could not deteriorate.

Dr. Ramarcharadan’s wife sometimes said she didn’t like him to touch her when he came home, because she knew he’d had his
hands on dead bodies, and that was the work of untouchables—but he didn’t believe that. She was not a religious woman, any
more than he was a religious man, and she didn’t approve of the caste system either. He thought it was an excuse, the way
other women might get a headache. Ah, well. She’d borne him three sons in four years, all American citizens. Maybe she was
just tired.

If he hadn’t been thinking about the sons—good sons, too, strong and healthy, and intelligent—he would have noticed sooner.
As it was, he was peeling back bone before it struck him, and for a long moment he didn’t understand what he was seeing. It
was the intestines he noticed first. What were the chances of that? He should have seen the obvious, but he hadn’t.

He took a deep breath and told himself to calm down. He thought about the newspaper headlines and the television news stories
and the editorials in magazines over the last few weeks. He tried to remember what he did and didn’t know about how the law
worked in the United States of America. The problem was, he mostly didn’t know. He wasn’t even sure that this would not, somehow,
turn out to be his fault.

He looked at the intestines again, just to make sure. They were still twisting in the wrong direction. Then he looked up the
torso and checked that, too. It had not miraculously become something it was not.

He stepped back away from the table and motioned to the nurse. When they were both outside the swinging doors in the waiting
area he said, “We must call the police now, right away. We must not touch this body again until they come. Do you understand
that?”

She nodded frantically and then took off at a run.

Dr. Ramarcharadan didn’t remind her that there was a phone on the wall not fifteen feet away.

He didn’t blame her for her panic.

F
or the Philadelphia Police
Department, the real problem with the cold was that engines wouldn’t start. There had been some talk about constructing a
heated garage for police and emergency vehicles, and the ambulances were parked in underground hospital garages that were
never allowed to get cold enough to stall them, but in the end fiscal responsibility won out over common sense and shared
history. Besides, it was an election year, and in an election year it never did anybody any good to suggest something that
might require raising taxes. It did do whoever suggested it some good to propose new products and services, but this wasn’t
1957 anymore. If you suggested the service, your opponent would bring up the taxes.