Hardscrabble Road(111)

“And later,” Beata said, “when it was Drew Harrigan in the red hat, I thought that was it. I must have recognized him as Harrigan and not realized it. But I knew that couldn’t be true. Mr. Harrigan was Reverend Mother’s brother. I hadn’t seen him often, but I’d seen him often enough to know when somebody wasn’t him, and the man in the red hat that night couldn’t have been him. He was too thin, for one thing.”

“Listen to this.” Benedetti was practically dancing.

Beata ignored him. “Then this morning,” she said, “we were in town, and Immaculata wanted a throat lozenge, because she was coughing. So we stopped at a drugstore to buy her some Halls mentholyptus, and he was there, standing by the magazine rack. And then I knew, you know, because he was wearing a hat. Just not a red one.”

“Jig Tyler,” Rob Benedetti said, nearly crowing. “It was Jig Tyler who showed up at the barn that night, dressed up like a homeless person.”

“Are you sure?” Gregor asked Beata.

Beata nodded her head. “Absolutely sure. It’s like when you’re trying to remember the name of an actor you’re watching in a movie, or where you’ve seen him before, and then the next day or so it comes to you, and you can’t imagine you ever didn’t know. I’m sure. I looked straight into his face as we were getting out of the car.”

“Did you look straight into the face of Drew Harrigan when he was found dead?” Gregor asked.

Beata shook her head. “I really couldn’t have told very much from the body, Mr. Demarkian. It was slumped, and fouled with vomit. I’m not a doctor and I’m not a pathologist. It was…unnerving…to be with a dead body at all, never mind one who’d been sick. I took a pulse. I checked for breathing. I wasn’t looking into his face. I’m sorry.”

“No, that’s quite all right. I don’t blame you. You say that Dr. Tyler had been to the barn before on more than one occasion?”

“Oh, yes,” Beata said. “He’d been coming all winter. I don’t know why I never realized who he was, because that wasn’t the first time I’d thought I recognized him. But you see, we don’t really spend that much time in the barn. We hire a man for security, and then we leave the place open. It’s not really a shelter. Any other winter, the city would have shut us down if we tried to do this the way we’re doing it. Now, of course, with the temperatures so awful, they look the other way. But it’s not as if we’re out there managing things all the time.”

“Did you ever see anybody else you thought you recognized?” Gregor asked.

“No, Mr. Demarkian. I’m sorry. You’re wondering if I might have seen Mr. Harrigan. I’m almost certain I didn’t. But that doesn’t mean he wasn’t there. You might ask one of the other extern sisters, Immaculata here or Marie Bernadette.”

“I didn’t recognize this one,” Immaculata said. “I still can’t believe you did.”

“You wouldn’t happen to know the specific dates on which you saw Dr. Tyler?” Gregor said.

Beata shook her head. “I really don’t. It wasn’t that big an issue for me, you see. It wasn’t that I thought anything was wrong or going on. I suppose I should have.”

“I don’t see why,” Gregor said. “I don’t see why anybody would think that perfectly ordinary people with decent homes to go to would be lined up to get a spot in a homeless shelter so far out on the city limits it’s almost in the next township. Although I suppose that was the point. The remoteness, I mean.”

“This is the point,” Benedetti said. “Jig Tyler poisoned Drew Harrigan. He was supplying Harrigan with pills, and Harrigan was out of control, and he was afraid Harrigan was going to implode and take him down, too, so he filled a bunch of pills with poison and killed him.”

“And he killed Frank Sheehy, why?” Gregor said.

“We’ll find out,” Benedetti said.

Gregor sighed. “Never mind. You’ve actually almost got it right. Almost, not quite. You know what part you got wrong?”

“What?” Benedetti said.

“The part where Jig Tyler kills Drew Harrigan. Jig Tyler didn’t kill anybody, and certainly not Harrigan. Although I suppose we’re going to have to shut down his antics anyway.”





SIX



1


Ellen Harrigan truly hated Neil Savage’s offices, and Neil Savage, and Neil Savage’s law firm, and everything about Neil Savage and all his works. She hated him, and them, more than she hated the women who had worked for Drew, who seemed to her to exist for no other reason but to make the point that women who hadn’t attended the Ivy League or the Seven Sisters weren’t fit to live. She hated him more than she hated liberals, and with more concentration, because she knew who and what he was. She had come to the realization, over the last few days, that she didn’t actually know what a “liberal” was, except for somebody who voted for the Democratic Party, which didn’t make sense. Her father voted for the Democratic Party. All the men she had known growing up did, the ones who worked the line at the factories that ringed the small city near their town, the ones who worked as garage mechanics, even the ones who managed the local IGA and wore a short-sleeved white collar shirt and thin stringy tie to do it in. She was beginning to think that she had understood even less than she had thought she had. Being married to Drew, it had been much too easy to let him take care of everything, including the thinking, and the fact was that she didn’t care that much about politics anyway. Liberal, conservative, Republican, Democrat, it was all pretty much the same to her, except that she was sure that whoever Drew had liked was a Good Person, and whoever he didn’t was not. That was fine when he was alive, but he wasn’t alive anymore. He was lying in a morgue somewhere. People suspected her of killing him. She thought that people suspected her now more than they had when she’d first gone to Gregor Demarkian with that list. She thought they hated her now that she had done that press conference. It hadn’t been a good idea. She had let herself be panicked, and she knew what she was like when she was panicked.