Hardscrabble Road (48 page)

“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.”

E
llen 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 it? 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.”

“I really don’t think I know what you mean,” Neil said.

He was stiff now. She could feel it. She got up and began to walk around the office, doing the unthinkable, the one thing
she had been told by everyone, even Drew, that she was never to do. She started picking up the brica-brac. It was ancient
and venerable bric-a-brac: a painted wooden duck decoy that had never been in the water; a picture of a woman in a shirtwaist
dress in a thick silver frame; a little canoe made out of birch bark and tailored into a perfect miniature. She could feel
him flinching every time she picked up something else. There were no Steuben glass crystal hand warmers here, and there never
would be.

“You know,” she said, “I know you think I’m stupid, and it’s probably true. I’m not very quick at a lot of things, and there’s
a lot I don’t understand. But I understand this. All those people you can’t stand have rights, too. They have the right to
be heard. They have the right to be taken seriously.”

“Nobody has the right to be taken seriously. You earn that by the content of your ideas.”

“That’s not what I meant, and you know it. But maybe you don’t, so I’ll let it pass. The thing is, I’ve thought it all out,
and I’ve decided that I’ll be a lot better without you than with you. And that goes for Drew’s staff. There have to be people
out there who can run an office without thinking their shit doesn’t stink because they got their degree from Mount Holyoke.
There have got to be people with skills that I can actually work with.”

“You’ve never had any problem working with me,” Neil said.

“That’s because I’ve never had to work with you. You could ignore me while Drew was alive. You can’t ignore me now. I don’t
want to spend my time meeting in offices surrounded by all your dead partners who probably
thought the Irish were the next worst thing after refrigerator mold, if they even knew what refrigerator mold was. I don’t
care if people hate me for being Catholic, but I care when they laugh at me for it.”

“I’ve never laughed at anybody for being Catholic.”

“Not in public, no. But you do. At least, you laugh at my kind of Catholic, at rosaries and scapulars and pictures of us making
First Holy Communion in a white dress and a veil like a make-believe bride. I didn’t make that one up, either. That was one
of the women at the office. I want the will read, and settled, and then you’re fired. You never wanted Drew’s business anyway.
Now you’re rid of it.”

“I think you’re making a mistake,” Neil said. “You think I’m too stupid to think for myself,” Ellen said, “and that could
be true. We’ll just have to see. As soon as we get the will read and it becomes official that I’m taking over the franchise,
I’m going to fire the office staff. All of them.”

“But they know where everything is. They know things you can’t possibly know, that even Drew couldn’t possibly know.”

“I’ve got a friend from home who’s been a secretary all her life. I’m going to bring her in to run things. I’ll bring her
in a couple of weeks early so they can show her what she needs to know. And no, Neil, I’m not so stupid that I don’t know
that they’ll probably sabotage her—or is it that I think they’ll probably sabotage her that’s the stupid part? That’s something
I heard once, too. That people like Drew think the things they think because they’re just stupid enough to know they don’t
get it, so they suspect everybody all the time of trying to pull one over on them. But Drew wasn’t stupid, you know. No matter
what you thought.”

“I didn’t think he was stupid.”

“Maybe not. Maybe you only thought he was vulgar. I don’t see where it matters. After I get Janice installed at the office,
I’m going to take off for two weeks and take my nieces to Disney World. No fancy restaurants where I don’t know how to pronounce
the food. No being stuck with mineral water and a salad because that’s what everybody else is eating and I’m afraid to look
like an idiot having a hamburger. I’m going to drink Coke, eat pizza and Tex Mex, and go on rides. And you’ll never hear from
me again.”

“I don’t think you can just take off for Florida like that,” Neil said. “You’re a suspect in a murder investigation. You may
have to get permission from the court.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Ellen said. “The only reason I’d need that is if I’d been arrested and I was out on bail, but I’m not
going to be arrested, and you know it. Nobody suspects me of killing Drew. Not even Gregor Demarkian suspects me of killing
Drew.”

“You can’t possibly know that.”

“But I do know it,” Ellen said. “And do you know how I know it? Because the person he suspects is you.”