Hardscrabble Road (30 page)

“Remarkable woman,” he said, sitting down behind his desk. “I don’t even know if she’s going to vote for me in the primary,
never mind in November. I don’t even know if she’s a member of a political party. But I’ll bet she votes.”

Gregor didn’t want to get back on the subject of voting, or politics. He paced around the room as if he had never been in
it before. John didn’t go in for a lot of extraneous decoration. The walls had his degrees on them, and the awards he’d won,
and a picture of him with President Bill Clinton, at the start of some federal anticrime initiative.

“So,” Gregor said. “What made you start making death threats against nuns?”

“We got a call this morning,” John said. “That nun from yesterday, what’s her name—”

“Sister Maria Beata,” Benedetti said.

“That sounds right,” John said. “Anyway, she walked back into the precinct house this morning and explained, calm as you please,
that there was something she hadn’t mentioned yesterday, and that’s that the Mother Superior of this convent is—”

“Abbess of this monastery,” Gregor corrected.

John looked at the ceiling. “I don’t have time for this. I really don’t have time for this. The Abbess of this monastery happens
to be Drew Harrigan’s sister.”

Rob Benedetti sat up a little straighter. “Really?”

John blew a raspberry. “Do you honestly think I’d be making this up? Things aren’t bad enough, I now have nuns for suspects.
Half the Catholics in the city already hate us for the way we prosecuted the pedophilia cases— no, that’s not true. All the
Catholics do. Half of them think we didn’t do enough and half of them think we did too much. And now I’ve got nuns, and you
know as well as I do that by the end of business we’re going to have editorials and television pundits screaming that we let
them get away because we’re too deferential to the Catholic Church, and the Catholic press is going to be screaming that we
have no respect for freedom of religion, and the whole thing is going to end up as a Lifetime movie.”

“Calm down,” Gregor said. “It’s not enough that the Abbess is Harrigan’s sister. She’d have to have a motive for killing him.
Did she have one?”

“I don’t know,” John said. “We’ve got an appointment to go out there this morning as soon as Marbury and Giametti show up,
and you can ask
her then. I won’t be able to go along, of course. It’s not my job. But the three of you can handle it and report back. And
I have a terrible feeling that the answer is going to be yes.”

“Why?” Rob Benedetti asked.

“Because,” John Jackman said. “Because. And don’t tell me hunches are crap, because I don’t believe that. If it turns out
a nun actually killed Drew Harrigan, this really is going to be a Lifetime movie.”

“If it turns out a nun really killed Drew Harrigan,” Gregor said, “this is going to be a major production with Julia Roberts
in the starring role. Before you send me out to interrogate somebody, don’t you think we ought to clarify my position with
the mayor’s office? He was threatening to arrest me last night.”

“He isn’t going to arrest you,” John said. “He was just saying that for the television cameras.”

“You’ll come say that to the judge if I end up in jail on obstruction charges,” Gregor said.

“Don’t worry about obstruction charges,” Rob Benedetti said. “I’m the one gets to decide whether anybody hits you with obstruction
charges or not, and I’m not going to charge you.”

“You may not be here after November,” Gregor said.

There was a lot of noise from outside. The door swung open, and Olivia Hall walked in, looking both dignified and disapproving.
“The detectives are here,” she said.

A moment later, Marbury and Giametti came in, holding their coats over their arms and looking as if they would do anything,
anything at all, not to have this woman looking at them anymore. They waited, standing, while Olivia took another look around
the room. They didn’t relax until she was gone and the door had been shut behind her.

“That was scary,” Dane Marbury said. “That’s always scary. I think that woman could control a prison without bothering to
resort to weapons.”

“Never mind that,” John Jackman said. “Did you do what I asked you to do? Did you find anything.”

“Absolutely,” Giametti said. He reached into the pocket of his trousers and came up with a small, folded piece of paper: “334,
335, and 336 Albemarle Street. Those are lots, one of them vacant, the other two with abandoned buildings on them. They’re
not in a great location, but they’re not in an absolutely impossible one, either. Drew Harrigan deeded them to Our Lady of
Mount Carmel Monastery after Sherman Markey filed his lawsuit for defamation. After, the timing is important. On January twenty-fifth,
two days before the last time anybody saw Harrigan alive, the Justice Project went into
court on behalf of Markey and had the properties liened so that the monastery couldn’t sell them, which it thought it needed
to do because the monastery looked like it was going to sell them, since it had found a buyer.”

“You got all these people out of bed?” John said. “I’m impressed.” “We didn’t need to get them out of bed,” Dane Marbury said.
“We did a Google search and found some back stuff in the Inquirer. I don’t know how accurate it all is, but we can recheck
when we question. The thing that got us, though, was the timing.”

“Right,” Giametti said. “Harrigan deeded the property after the Justice Project filed their defamation suit.”

“Which means he did it after he’d already gone into rehab,” Marbury said. “Where supposedly he couldn’t get in touch with
anybody, because he was in a total immersion, absolute isolation program for sixty days.”

Jackman looked carefully from one to the other of them. “Was that even possible?”

Gregor stirred. “It depends,” he said. “The best guess is that Harrigan was never in rehab at all, but if that’s the case,
there has to be some collusion on the part of the judge. That’s Williamson?”

“Yeah,” Marbury said.

“Okay,” Gregor said. “That’s not impossible. The other possibility is that Harrigan’s lawyer has power of attorney and did
this under his own steam. But the attorney is Neil Savage, right? One of the more conservative attorneys in the city, conservative
in the sense of not liking to go in for legal oddities. So I can’t see him deciding on his own to deed the property over to
the nuns in order to shield it from the defamation suit, but I can’t see Harrigan having made provision for what to do in
the case of a defamation suit, since they’re not automatic or even usual. Never mind the fact that Sherman Markey, being a
homeless man without any assets, probably didn’t look like somebody who was going to end up with heavyweight legal representation.”

“Boy, they got that wrong,” Giametti said.

“Yes,” Gregor said. “Well, there’s also one more possibility, although it’s not the one you want to hear.”

“You don’t even have to mention it,” John said. “It could be a put-up job. The nuns could have colluded with Drew Harrigan
to shield the property, the sale could be some kind of legal maneuver to return the property to Harrigan himself in a way
that Markey couldn’t touch it, we could be looking at financial fraud charges as well as murder charges, and the entire Catholic
population of Philadelphia could end up waiting in the street for me so they can beat me up. I don’t care what Olivia says.
I really am going to kill those nuns.”

“I don’t think you have to go that far just yet,” Gregor said. “I’d guess
the collusion scenario is unlikely. They could have a good explanation for all of this.”

“So go and ask them about it,” John said. “They’re the ones who had the body. Ask them about that, too.”

I
f it had been
up to Gregor, they wouldn’t have all taken one car. He understood that Hardscrabble Road was on the edge of the city, and
that it might be difficult to find a cab that wanted to go there, but that inconvenience would be more than made up for by
the fact that, with separate cars, any of them could leave at any time. He didn’t know why, but he had an urgent need to be
able to walk out on this at will. The only consolation he had for the fact that that would not be possible was the further
fact that he would not be required to sit in the backseat of a squad car again. Knowing that they would be shepherding both
the district attorney and the Armenian-American Hercule Poirot, Marbury and Giametti had acquired an “unmarked,” meaning a
car not painted to look like a police car, but otherwise so ridiculously stolid and neutral nobody but a cop would have been
willing to drive it. This one was tan, with tan seats. It was some kind of sedan, and so boxy and slow-looking it could have
used a pair of really big tail fins. Gregor thought he would always be disappointed that he had missed the fad for tail fins
in cars. He would have bought a car like that, if one had been available to drive. He would have let Bennis drive it, since
he almost never drove himself, and when he tried he tended to drive into things.

Why had Drew Harrigan been in a barn full of homeless men at a cloistered monastery at the edge of the city? Even assuming
he needed to get around without being recognized, the barn seemed like an extraneous detail—an exaggerated gesture that didn’t
look as if it was necessary for anything. Gregor Demarkian did not believe in murderers who did elaborate things for the sake
of doing elaborate things, or of being clever. Murderers were not clever. Most of them were barely even conscious. They got
liquored up and started a fight in a bar. They got high on speed or cocaine and started imagining that the neighbor was sending
his cat over to poison their supply of beer. They got fired or blew a tire or lost some money on the races and then just lost
it themselves. The ones who tried to be clever were the least clever of all. They always forgot things. Most of all, they
forgot that the detective story cliché that said all cops were stupid was just that, a cliché, and not reality.

“Are you okay?” Rob Benedetti asked him, as they began to move into an area of small, triple-decker houses.

“I was thinking about Charles Stuart.”

“Who’s Charles Stuart?”

“It was a murder case in Boston a few years ago,” Gregor said. “This guy was driving through a poor neighborhood with his
wife when he stopped at a stoplight or something. I don’t remember why they stopped. But then, according to him, they were
attacked by a large black guy, armed. Then they were kidnapped and driven to Mission Hill by force. The guy killed the wife
and shot Stuart himself in the stomach.”

“Ack,” Marbury said. “I remember that one. It wasn’t a black guy, right? It was—”

“—Stuart himself,” Gregor said. “Yes, exactly. Stuart killed his wife and shot himself in the stomach so that he could claim
they were attacked. Which was pretty interesting, since most murderers wouldn’t take a chance like that. He could have killed
himself.”

“Maybe he just didn’t realize how dangerous it was to do what he was doing to himself,” Rob Benedetti said. “I mean, most
of these guys aren’t rocket scientists.”

“No, they’re not,” Gregor said, “and he probably wasn’t either, although he was a successful man. He wasn’t entirely stupid.
But the reason that I was thinking about it was that the answer was the simplest one. Wife is dead, husband killed her. That’s
the way it works ninety-nine percent of the time. The simplest explanation is usually the right one.”

“Occam’s razor,” Giametti said solemnly.

“Try applying Occam’s razor in this case,” Gregor said. “What was Drew Harrigan doing in a barn full of homeless men on the
edge of the city—I mean, look at this route; it’s not like we’re right next door to the Liberty Bell—what was he doing there?
Do you know what the simplest explanation is?”

“That he went there to visit his sister for some reason,” Rob Benedetti said.

“Exactly,” Gregor said. “And that he was dressed as a homeless person and pretending to be one so that he didn’t get spotted,
because, let’s face it, he’s an unusual-looking person. Was. Big and fat and florid. Got his picture on a million things,
including a book that’s in the stores now. That’s the simplest explanation here, except for one thing.”

“What’s that?” Marbury asked.

“Why bother with the barn,” Gregor said. “If he wanted to see his sister, why didn’t he just go right up to the monastery
and ask to see her? Under most circumstances, the simplest explanation would be that he didn’t want anyone to know he was
seeing her, but that doesn’t make sense, either. He’s dressed as a homeless person. Nobody is going to know it’s him to begin
with. He doesn’t gain anything by sleeping in the barn, assuming that’s
what he was doing. Turn it around. Maybe it was the Reverend Mother who insisted on the barn. Maybe she’s the one who didn’t
want to be seen talking to her brother, or even to a homeless man. But there’s no reason for that, either. She’s his sister.
Why shouldn’t she talk to him? Especially since he’s in trouble and she’s a nun.”

“Do you really think it’s going to turn out to be something like this, something this simple?” Rob Benedetti asked. “Do you
really think we’re going to end up arresting a nun?”

“I don’t know,” Gregor said.

“We’d like to avoid it,” Rob Benedetti said. “Not because we’re soft on the Catholic Church, but because it’s always bad news
when we arrest a little old lady. A little old lady in a habit is going to be worse.”

“And they’re going to be really impressive habits,” Giametti said. “I didn’t think nuns wore habits like that anymore, all
the way down to the floor.”

“The nuns on EWTN do,” Marbury said.

They were getting farther and farther out now, into the areas Gregor had already decided weren’t really in the state of Pennsylvania
at all. They could have been anywhere, the remnants of an industrial city that had long since lost both its industry and its
claim to civilization.

“Every once in a while,” he said, “you do get cases where the simplest explanation isn’t the right one, but when you do, it’s
almost always because there’s a perpetrator in the picture who feels the need to star in his own movie. Somebody who has to
devise patterns, make plots, see the world as a functioning whole without a single element out of place. And that’s worrisome.”