Hardscrabble Road(11)

“And you think I have influence with the Philadelphia Police?”

“Don’t you?”

“At the moment,” Gregor said, “I don’t know.”





2


An hour later, Gregor Demarkian was lying on the couch in his own living room. His shoes were under the coffee table, where they tended to fall when he kicked them off without thinking. His cell phone was lying squarely in the middle of his chest, on top of the sweater, two presents from Bennis, melding. He had no idea why he was feeling so restless. Chickie George was a nice man. He had a simple problem, and the favor he’d asked for had been neither out of line nor incomprehensible. It was more sensible than not to do a morgue check under the circumstances. It was not so sensible that the police were being recalcitrant about doing one. He ran it around and around in his mind. Sherman Markey was a homeless alcoholic, and therefore low priority. Sherman Markey was a principal defendant in a high-profile celebrity drug case, and therefore high priority. The second should trump the first. Either somebody in the PD was being close to criminally stupid, or there was something else going on here. Gregor was willing to bet that there was something else going on here. The questions were, what and for whom? Either Chickie George was withholding information from him, or the police were withholding information from Chickie George. About one thing, though, he and Chickie were in complete accord. If Sherman Markey was dead, it wasn’t likely that Drew Harrigan had murdered him, in person or by proxy. If he had, there was something odder happening here than he dared to imagine.

The thing was, it wasn’t so simple these days, deciding if he had “influence” with the Philadelphia Police. A year ago, it would have been no problem. Now it was an election year, and as in all election years, people were watching their backs. He had always been apolitical. Even when politics had been what he thought of as “nice,” he had been apolitical. Now it just felt like something that existed to muck up his life.

Not more than a few months ago, he had promised himself to stay out of crime in the city of Philadelphia until at least the start of 2005. It didn’t mean much that Chickie George wasn’t actually asking him to investigate a crime, or even anything that was necessarily connected to a crime. He needed the Philadelphia Police, and he knew without asking that the Philadelphia Police were not going to be happy to hear from him, especially concerning a case that could have some serious media traction if it was played right. The mayor’s office wasn’t going to be happy to hear from him, either. And all that, in spite of the fact that he had always had extremely cordial relations with the government of the city of Philadelphia during all the years he had been living on Cavanaugh Street, right up until the minute before last.

He sat up and put the cell phone on the coffee table. He stared at it for a minute—he hadn’t wanted a cell phone; that had been Bennis’s idea, part of her campaign to bring him into the twenty-first century—and then picked it up and flipped it open. The buttons were so small, he always thought he should punch them with the tip of a chopstick, or maybe a toothpick. He punched them with his fingers, and waited while the phone ring. Then somebody at the other end picked up, and he heard the deep-throated, cheerful hum of Angela Wallaby’s gospel-choir-trained African-American South Philadelphia accent saying, “You’re reached the offices of John Henry Newman Jackman at the headquarters of Jackman for Mayor: a new vision and a new future for the city of Philadelphia. How can I help you?”

Well, Gregor thought, you could talk John out of challenging the sitting mayor of Philadelphia to a goddamned primary run.

Since Angela wasn’t likely to agree to anything like that, Gregor said, “Hey, Angela, it’s Gregor Demarkian. Tell the next mayor of the city of Philadelphia that I have something of a problem.”





THREE



1


Neil Elliot Savage did not get into the office before nine o’clock unless there was a reason for him to be there, and in his experience there almost never was. The mania for workaholism was, in his opinion, much like the mania for downscale Southern accents, country music, and stock car racing, a corruption of everything that was vital and important in culture, a surrender to the forces of populism and vulgarity. It was better to spend the morning at home, with Beethoven coming out of the Bose sound system he’d installed in the kitchen only two years ago Christmas and Henry James propped up on the little wooden reading stand he kept on the kitchen table next to the blond rush mat he used to mark his place. When he’d been married—and there was something he didn’t like to think about, even for a minute—it was Katherine who had set up the place mat every morning and laid out a linen napkin next to a setting from her everyday silver. It was Katherine who had poured his juice and made his coffee. It was Katherine who had put his toast out next to pots of creamed butter and ginger preserve. The whole scene had been like a fantasy from those very same Henry James novels, except that throughout the project Katherine had been livid and steaming. That was what Neil remembered most about Katherine—the anger that was both wide and deep, that covered everything.