Hardscrabble Road(10)
“Did that bother you at the time, that they couldn’t find him?”
“Not really, no,” Chickie said. “Sherman is Sherman. He really could just wander off and forget where he was, forget what he was doing, forget where he was supposed to be. For the first few days, I wasn’t worried at all. I just thought—well, you know. Sherman is Sherman. He probably got hold of a few big bottles of wine and he’s off drinking them. Either that, or he lost the hat, so nobody knows what they’re looking for anymore. There’s an odd thing with homeless people. Nobody remembers their faces. They remember the clothes, you know, and the shtick, if there is one, but they don’t remember the faces. Not even most of the people who work with the homeless full-time.”
“Would you recognize Sherman Markey’s face?”
“I think so,” Chickie said. “But I’m not claiming to be a saint. I really don’t know. He’d be wearing the clothes we gave him, though. I’d recognize those.”
“You gave him only one set of clothes?”
“No, but he left the others in the SRO. We bought him a big royal blue parka. We were trying to make him stand out as much as possible. Ray Dean had a fit about that, because he says that makes them targets, especially the winos, because they’re unconscious so much of the time. So it may be he’s out there and he’s lost the parka and the hat and he’s just wearing a khaki shirt and new blue jeans. Or maybe not.”
“Exactly,” Gregor said. “I take it you’ve considered the possibility that he’s dead.”
Chickie looked away, out the window, onto Cavanaugh Street. It was coming on to eight o’clock, and the solid gray of the sky seemed faintly backlit. It was officially morning. “I haven’t just considered it,” Chickie said, “I’m assuming it. He froze to death. Or he got rolled and murdered for whatever he had on him, which wouldn’t have been much. Or he just died. He wasn’t in the best of physical shape. If Drew Harrigan were out and about instead of telling his troubles to group therapy in rehab, I’d even have my suspicions that Harrigan murdered him.”
“Why?”
“Because Sherman was more useful to him dead than alive. Because with Sherman alive, it’s too easy to see the holes in Harrigan’s story, for one thing. And because with Sherman alive and in trouble with the law, it’s harder for Harrigan to get let out on probation instead of doing some prison time. If this was an Agatha Christie story, I could think of thirty people who might want Sherman dead.”
“But you don’t think any of them killed him?”
“No,” Chickie said. “You don’t go to the bother of murdering people like Sherman, not unless you’re a street mugger who can’t think past the next wallet. I think we can rule out one of those cases where you get to appear on the front page of the Inquirer as the Armenian-American Hercule Poirot. But I still need to find Sherman, and I was wondering if you’d be willing to help.”
“I’m not exactly the world’s best bloodhound,” Gregor said. “Especially not these days.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t ask you to go physically track him down,” Chickie said. “We’ve already tried that, really, and we had a better shot at succeeding than a professional would have anyway, because we know how homeless people think and we know how Sherman thinks. It’s not that. It’s just that I’ve spent the last week trying to get the Philadelphia Police to take us seriously, and I haven’t gotten anywhere yet. I thought you might put in a good word for us, or a fire up their asses, or whatever you think might work.”
“So that they’ll go out and search for Sherman Markey?”
“No,” Chickie said, “so that they’ll do a morgue check for the finger-prints. Sherman was fingerprinted when he was arrested. They could use those and check them against the bodies that have come into the morgue in the last couple of weeks. According to the paper this morning, half a dozen homeless people have died in the last two weeks of exposure to the cold. I know that others have died for other reasons. All those people are sitting in the morgues, waiting for the coroner to have a stray minute to get around to doing their autopsies, and those have been fingerprinted, too. I think if we ran a morgue check, we might find Sherman.”
“And if you do, then what?”
“I don’t know,” Chickie said. “It will probably depend on how he died. But I’d like to know that he died, and not have to be sitting here wondering if he’s wandering around somewhere, getting frostbite because he can’t remember he’s got a perfectly good room in an SRO. Well, it wasn’t a perfectly good room. But you know what I mean. It was clean, and it had heat.”