Hardscrabble Road(108)
“Do you think they’ll respond well?” Gregor asked.
Neil Savage gave an elaborate shrug. “I’ve got no idea what they’ll do. Mr. Harrigan was not a typical client for this firm. Most of our clients are either individuals whose families have been with us for generations, or the businesses those families engage in. Of course, there are some exceptions. No firm could survive in this day and age without making some concessions to modernity, and we do. But Mr. Harrigan was our only media celebrity.”
“How did he happen to come to this firm for representation?”
“He was recommended by a longtime client.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Savage, but you must admit—I’ve seen something of what Drew Harrigan did, and what he was like. And I’ve talked with his wife at length. Somehow, they don’t seem the sort of people to have friends of the kind that would be longtime clients in this place.”
Neil Savage hesitated. “One of our longtime clients,” he said, “is the Philadelphia Republican Party. They’ve got a state firm in Harrisburg, of course, but Philadelphia is a large political operation on its own, and it has legal issues of its own.”
“Do you also handle the Democratic Party?”
“No.”
“As a matter of conviction?”
“As a matter of tradition,” Neil Savage said. “My grandfather was lieutenant governor here, a long time ago. My great-great-grandfather was mayor of Philadelphia in the days when people like us could be elected mayor of Philadelphia.”
“Did you know that Drew Harrigan was addicted to prescription painkillers?”
“Everybody knew it,” Neil Savage said. “Not the fans, of course, but everybody who came in contact with him on a daily basis. It was hard to miss. I think even Ellen knew, although she’s something of a…she looks on the bright side of things.”
“You believe Mr. Sheehy knew?”
“Of course. In fact, I know he did. We talked about it on several occasions. It was obvious a year ago that something was going to happen eventually if we couldn’t get Mr. Harrigan to enter treatment voluntarily, and, of course, eventually something did.”
“What about the names on Ellen Harrigan’s list of suspects? Did you know them?”
“I knew the names, yes. I didn’t necessarily know the people.”
“Why did you know the names?”
“Because,” Neil Savage said, “they were mostly the names of people we had reason to believe might file a lawsuit against Drew Harrigan or The Drew Harrigan Show. Miss Hildebrande’s name seemed to have been thrown in to make the list longer, but the rest were people Drew Harrigan had commented on on the air. He was not a temperate man.”
“No, he wasn’t,” Gregor agreed. “Did any of them in fact have a lawsuit pending?”
“No,” Neil Savage said. “But there have been lawsuits in the past. That’s chiefly the work we did for Mr. Harrigan, dealing with the lawsuits. There were a lot of them.”
“Did that bother Mr. Sheehy? Did he get sued when Drew Harrigan did?”
“Most of the time, no,” Neil Savage said. “People who sue, well, they tend not to get very good representation. Of course, Mr. Harrigan made comments about public figures, and if they’d decided to sue they would have had very good representation indeed, but they wouldn’t. It’s nearly impossible for a public figure to sue a media company for libel or slander and win. The courts err far too much on the freedom of the press side of the issue. But other people, professors at the University of Pennsylvania, for instance, who were among Drew’s favorite targets, those people do sometimes decide to sue. And they can neither afford, nor do they know how to find, representation that would be of any use to them.”
“Do you know who was getting the extra prescription drugs for Drew Harrigan?”
“According to Mr. Harrigan, it was a homeless man who did occasional work for him, named Sherman Markey.”
“According to everybody I’ve talked to,” Gregor said, “it wouldn’t have been possible for Sherman Markey to have done any such thing. For one thing, he looked the part of a homeless person far too well for druggists to hand pills to him on a regular basis.”
Neil Savage shrugged. “According to Drew, that was who it was. I’ve got no reason to disbelieve him.”
“Have you met Sherman Markey?”
“I’ve seen him,” Neil Savage said. “He was in court on a couple of occasions because of the lawsuit he filed for defamation. That the Justice Project filed for him. He was in court.”