Hardscrabble Road(107)

“That sounds like it has to be Marla Hildebrande herself,” Rob Benedetti said.

Gregor got out of the cab in front of a magnificent town house with a double wide front facade and steps that curved out to the left and right as if they belonged in a ballroom instead of on a city street. Gregor kept forgetting that in Philadelphia, unlike Washington, Really Important Law Firms didn’t take up several floors of a high-rise building, the more modern the better. He went up the steps and rang the front door bell. The front door was not open to the public. Nothing else took up space in this building but the firm. A woman came to the door and let him in, and he found himself in the wide front lobby of what could have been a private club. Marbury and Giametti were already there, in uniform, looking something worse than out of place. The redheaded woman who had admitted Gregor was paying no attention to them. She did pay attention to Gregor Demarkian, but just.

“Mr. Savage will be out in a moment,” she said. Then she nodded toward the little cluster of chairs and couches near the front windows, where Marbury and Giametti already were.

“I keep expecting Katharine Hepburn to come down the stairs and talk about calla lilies,” Marbury said.

Gregor took in the rugs—Persian, and real—and the porcelain. The paintings were all portraits of men who looked at once too prosperous and too smug to also look intelligent.

Another woman came out, this one small and neat and middle-aged. “Mr. Demarkian?” she said. “Come with me, please. Mr. Savage can see you now.”

Marbury and Giametti rose when Gregor did, and followed the middle-aged woman when Gregor did, but neither the middle-aged woman nor the redhead at the front desk paid any attention. Maybe, Gregor thought, this is how they meant it to be. They would deal with the fact that the police were in the building by pretending that the police weren’t in the building, and the police would help along the delusion by never talking directly to anybody in the firm. The hallway was a masterpiece of masculine interior decorating. The paneling went halfway up the walls and was topped with a flat plaster wall papered in dark green. The runner carpet was dark green, too, but narrow enough to show the hardwood underneath, the same hardwood that had been used on the walls. There were more pictures, one after the other, in a long line. There had to be a hundred years of partners, or more.

The small, middle-aged woman opened a door and waved Gregor inside. “He’ll be right in,” she said, and then disappeared.

Gregor, Marbury, and Giametti found themselves in a long conference room, with another Persian rug, another four half-walls of paneling, and another cluster of partners’ portraits.

“I think everybody who ever worked for this firm had a burr up his ass,” Giametti said.

The door opened, and a man Gregor presumed to be Neil Elliot Savage came in. He was tall and thin and “patrician,” in the way newspapers meant that word. In other words, he seemed arrogant. He had nothing with him, not so much as a folder. His suit was expensive but not new.

“Mr. Demarkian,” he said, holding out his hand. Unlike the receptionist and the middle-aged woman, he didn’t behave as if Marbury and Giametti didn’t exist, only as if they almost didn’t. “Gentlemen,” he said to them, turning his head to one side. When Gregor sat down, Neil Savage sat down as well. He didn’t wait for the uniformed officers.

“Well,” he said, laying out his long fingers on the table in front of him, “I’m not really sure what information we can give you. Even though Mr. Harrigan is dead, considerations of confidentiality restrict what I can tell you about his affairs, unless I’m ordered to do so by a court, and the courts are restricted in what they can order me to do.”

“Did you know the man who just died, Frank Sheehy?” Gregor asked.

“Of course I did. Mr. Sheehy owned the company that syndicated Mr. Harrigan’s radio show. Of course, Mr. Harrigan had an agent to negotiate contracts and that kind of thing, but we in this office looked over everything Mr. Harrigan signed, one more time, so to speak, and just in case. It’s a good policy.”

“I’m sure it is. Will there still be contracts to look over, now that Mr. Harrigan and Mr. Sheehy are both dead?”

“Of course there will be,” Neil Savage said. “There’s the matter of the corporation, for instance, which owns all of Mr. Harrigan’s copyrights and which handles material under his name. He’s got a publisher for his books, but he was very popular on the lecture circuit, and every lecture he gave was tape-recorded and reproduced for sale on his Web site. Those tapes will go on selling, and so will the books. And the corporation itself will not necessarily disband. It will depend on how the fans respond to the fact that he’s dead.”