Hardscrabble Road(109)
“Do you know where Sherman Markey is now?”
Neil Savage looked honestly surprised. “Of course I don’t. I wish I did. The disappearing act has caused no end of trouble. Not that I’m surprised, mind you. Taking off instead of taking responsibility is the kind of thing a man like that specializes in.”
“A man like what?”
“A homeless person,” Neil Savage said. “An alcoholic. A drug addict, presumably. You don’t end up on the streets like that unless you lack organization, determination, and pride. Don’t you think?”
2
The worst thing about not having a settled status—aside from the very good possibility that he was never going to get paid—was the fact that he had no settled place to work out of. The sensible thing would have been to use his own apartment on Cavanaugh Street. If he was going to behave like the Armenian-American Hercule Poirot, he might as well have the comforts of a Hercule Poirot, and at the moment luxury railway carriages were not available in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Unfortunately, Cavanaugh Street was convenient to nothing in this case, and there was no Hastings to sit beside him and fumble about badly among his ideas. He found himself sitting in the back of a police car again, wondering why it was strictly necessary for them to have this cagey-thing between the front and back seats, and making notes in a little bound book with stiff covers that Tommy Donahue had given him for Christmas. State police cars didn’t have it, or at least the one he’d last ridden in hadn’t. If it had, he’d have noticed. The little bound book looked precious, but it had the advantage of those stiff covers, half an inch thick, make of cardboard but very sturdy.
He had just started to make a list of questions when his cell phone went off, and the radio in the front seat went off as well.
“Mr. Demarkian?” a female voice said. “Mr. Benedetti needs to see you and Officers Marbury and Giametti as soon as possible. Do you think you could tell them so?”
Marbury turned around in the front seat and said, “That was for us. They want us to go to Benedetti’s office as soon as possible. You have any reason you can’t?”
Gregor thanked the woman on the phone and shut off. Then he went back to his list. It was a simple list, but he thought it pretty much covered everything he wanted to know to wrap this all up. What he wanted to know was a lot more than he, or Benedetti, needed to know. In real life police cases, a lot of questions went unanswered. There were always side issues and subplots it made no point to pursue. Fortunately, he was not a professional law enforcement person any longer. Right now, he didn’t even know if he was a professional consultant to law enforcement persons.
He shied away from examining his use of the word “persons” and wrote: Where is Sherman Markey?
He was fairly sure he knew who had gotten him out of the way. There was only one person, or group of people, who actually needed him out of the way. Gregor would bet on the single person and not the group, though. Groups leaked like sieves. He picked up his pen again and wrote: Why was Alison Standish falsely accused of political bias?
Gregor was not naive about the politics of Ivy League universities, and especially not of the Ivy League university he had himself graduated from. It was within the realm of possibility that there really was a disgruntled former student and that Dr. Standish had been politically biased when she dealt with him, but Gregor doubted it. It didn’t feel that way. She didn’t present herself as somebody who would discriminate against a student because of political views that arguably had nothing at all to do with the subject matter of the course at hand, or as somebody who cared much about politics in any sense.
He turned the pen over in his hands and then wrote: Why is there so much overlap between Ellen Harrigan’s list and Ray Dean Ballard’s list?
Some of the overlap made sense. Some of the people involved in the case were the kind of people who might reasonably be expected to have accounts at Markwell Ballard. Some of the overlap was just eerie. What was Ray Dean Ballard doing on Ellen Harrigan’s list at all? Yes, Drew Harrigan had attacked Philadelphia Sleeps, and called it practically a Communist organization, but that wasn’t personal, and it wasn’t likely to get Ray Dean fired or even inconvenienced in any other way. There was another question, too: Who had drawn that list up for Ellen Harrigan in the first place?
If there was one thing Gregor was sure of, it was that Ellen Harrigan hadn’t written it herself. She wasn’t that well wrapped. He doubted if she’d heard of all the people on it. He doubted even more that she had any idea why any of those people would “hate” her husband enough to want to kill him. Ellen Harrigan was a woman who ran on a very narrow array of emotions, and the most important of the ones she had was fear.