Hardscrabble Road(122)

“Saving the left from itself,” Jig Tyler said. “The older I get, the more I think the distinctions are wrong. Left and right. Conservative and liberal. It’s not that. It’s libertarian and authoritarian. It’s people who want freedom and people who want control. Never mind. I’m not making any sense. It was his idea, by the way, all the cloak-and-dagger stuff. Pretending to be homeless men and meeting at that monastery. His sister is the Mother Superior.”

“I know. Didn’t it occur to you to tell anybody about all of this? Come to me, if to nobody else, if you didn’t want any exposure?”

“But there’s going to be exposure, isn’t there?” Jig said. “There’s going to be no way around it. I’m going to be the only person who is able to put our man in the right place and the right time.”

“You could have gotten yourself killed,” Gregor said. “He’s killed two people alredy. If you’ve got a cold capsule anywhere in this office or at your house, anywhere he could get to it, I wouldn’t bet on your surviving a week.”

“I’ve been very careful to take individually wrapped caplets. I hate that word. Caplets. Why is it that multinational corporations have to invent new words every time they produce a not all that new product?”

“Are you the one who tried to buy that property?”

“No,” Jig said. “He did. Drew blackmailed him into it, essentially. Drew pointed out, entirely legitimately, that he wouldn’t be the only one who went to jail on prescription drug charges, if Drew wanted to start talking. And Drew was getting, ah, a little nuts. By the time I saw him that last time, at the monastery, he was damn close to raving. He could have passed for one of the regular schizophrenics.”

“What was he raving about?”

“The usual paranoid bullshit,” Jig said. “He was being persecuted. It was all politics. The Clintons were out to get him—”

“—The Clintons?”

“Yes, well,” Jig said. “Drew was still very obsessed with the Clintons. They’re supposed to be leading a worldwide conspiracy of Communists and socialists to do, I don’t know what. He got lucky with the judge, or Neil Savage got smart. Bruce Williamson would set bail for a man who gunned down a hundred babies and old ladies in front of Independence Hall at high noon if the man was a celebrity. Still, he was out and he was in hiding. He couldn’t go any of his usual places. He was going to end up in court no matter what else happened, and that drove him nuts. And then there was Sherman Markey, a stooge, in Drew’s words, who only existed as a scheme to deprive him of his property. Deprive Drew of his property. If you see what I mean.”

“So he blackmailed our friend into buying the property and holding it until his legal troubles were over and he could get it back,” Gregor said, “and he did it through Markwell Ballard because there was no way that Markwell Ballard would release any information about the deal to anybody, even the authorities. Not bad.”

“Not bad that Markwell Ballard was available,” Jig said. “Not everybody can get an account there, and they don’t do retail checking. Drew couldn’t get an account there.”

“Whose idea was it for you to bring the pills?”

“Drew’s, I think,” Jig said. “I didn’t know that our friend was the one who was getting him the pills until I got a call asking me to take the little package with me when I went out to Hardscrabble Road. I don’t approve of prescriptions, did you know that? I think we should just leave everything out over the counter and let people go to hell in their own handbaskets. So I took the little envelope out there.”

“Did you see him die?”

“No. I didn’t even see him take the pills. I gave the package, we talked for a while—”

“—About what?”

“About Penn,” Jig said. “I think the meeting might have been a ruse to get me to deliver the drugs, but I couldn’t know that. I went because I always went when he asked me to. I thought he’d be back, back on the air, back at the same old stand. And I needed him.”

“You gave him the hat you were wearing.”

“Right. I’d got it from our friend, believe it or not. I take it he got it from Sherman Markey.”

“I think so,” Gregor said.

“If he knows where Sherman Markey is, Sherman Markey is dead,” Jig said.

“He doesn’t know where Sherman Markey is,” Gregor said. “I know who does, but I’m not all that interested in screaming at somebody just yet. What about Frank Sheehy? He knew about the drugs?”