“Do you know who Frank Sheehy thought was buying the drugs for Drew Harrigan?”
“Not really,” Marla said. “I mean, I’ve got a suspicion, but it really doesn’t attach itself to anything. I mean, it’s not based on evidence, or anything solid—”
“A suspicion about whom?”
Marla flushed. “You’re going to think I’m nuts. A suspicion about Jig Tyler. You know, the genius, the guy with—”
“—I know who Dr. Tyler is, yes. Why do you think it was Jig Tyler?”
Marla threw up her hands. “It was just something he said once, about how it was amazing how the oddest people would bend over backwards to accommodate Drew. But he said that about a lot of people. About Neil Savage, for instance. And Ray Dean Ballard. And even the people at the Justice Project. And everybody did bend over backwards for Drew. Half of them because of the celebrity thing, and half of them because they were afraid of him.”
“So why do you think Mr. Sheehy was referring to the drugs when he said what he said about Dr. Tyler?”
“Because of when it was,” Marla said. “It was the day they found out that the body at Hardscrabble Road belonged to Drew.”
“Did Frank Sheehy know that Drew Harrigan had never gone into rehab?”
“Yes,” Marla said. “To tell the truth, so did I. The judge—”
“Yes, we all know about the judge. What about the night Drew Harrigan would have died. That would have been the twenty-seventh of January. Was Mr. Sheehy in the office that night?”
“All night,” Marla said. “And so was I. In fact, he was in this office most of the time. We were discussing what we were going to do if Drew had to go to jail. Or worse. What we were going to do if we had to replace Drew permanently.”
“Did you reach a solution?”
“Absolutely. Frank authorized me to audition a prospect and get the ball rolling, and we made an offer to a new guy this week.”
“What about the last few days, since the body was discovered,” Gregor said. “Did Mr. Sheehy do anything out of the ordinary? Did he seem nervous?”
Marla shook her head. “It’s really been business as usual. And, like I said, we’d already made the arrangements for the new guy. We were already looking ahead. You have to, in a business like this. The one kind of dead you don’t want around here is dead air.”
Gregor looked out into the bullpen. The secretaries were all at work doing something at computers. He’d never understood what happened in offices to require so much typing, not even what happened in offices where he himself worked. He wondered where Marbury and Giametti were. Maybe they’d taken their squad car and disappeared.
“Thank you,” he said to Marla Hildebrande. “Just tell me one more thing. Whose idea was it to go looking for a replacement for Drew Harrigan? Yours or Mr. Sheehy’s?”
“I brought it up, but he had to authorize it. I can’t authorize it on my own.”
“But you brought it up, on the twenty-seventh?”
“Absolutely.”
“Did Mr. Sheehy resist the idea?”
“No, not at all,” Marla said. “If you want to know the truth, he seemed to be relieved. We both knew we were going to have to do something about Drew someday.”
2
Gregor Demarkian had graduated from the University of Pennsylvania so long ago, he could remember when it was a matter of campuswide discussion that the number of African Americans admitted to undergraduate study had reached a total of five. Of course, there was no discussion at all of what happened to students like him, bright, hardworking, local, and “foreign” in spite of the fact that they’d been born and raised in Philadelphia. The feeling at the time had been that the Gregor Demarkians of the world weren’t “really” American, although they weren’t really “international,” either. There was respect for international students, because they almost always came from wealthy or influential families in their home countries, and shared that vision of the world Penn tried so hard to instill in its graduates in those days. People like Gregor Demarkian were almost always poor and almost always “striving.” They not only worked hard, they looked like they worked hard, and that was the big no-no. Never let them see you sweat. But it went beyond that. Never let them see you care. Never let them see you want to better yourself. If you have to better yourself, there’s something wrong with you already.
The truth was, Gregor Demarkian got neurotic whenever he had to set foot in that part of the city that housed the University of Pennsylvania, and there was nothing he had been able to do in all these years to change that. He distinctly remembered a July during his third year in the Bureau when he’d done everything but shot himself in the foot not to be assigned to a kidnapping case that had involved a business professor at the Wharton School of Finance. He didn’t follow Penn football, or any other sport, and the only reason he contributed to the alumni fund was because he felt he had an obligation. Whatever else Penn had given him, it had given him a first-rate education. He had gone on to the Harvard Business School as ready to compete as any third-generation inheritor of a major merchant bank. He just couldn’t help hating the sight of the place. He always ended up thinking of the endless bus rides he’d had to take, from school to Cavanaugh Street and back again. He wondered if it would have been different if Cavanaugh Street had been then what it was now. He considered the possibility that if Cavanaugh Street had been then as it was now, his parents would have had enough money to let him live away in a dormitory, and he wouldn’t have gone to Penn at all.