“I don’t know. But I’ll tell you what he did know about. He knew about Ellen Harrigan’s suspects list.”
“Did he?”
“Yes,” Jig said. “I talked to him, to Sheehy, maybe ten hours before I saw his picture on the news. I ran into him downtown and started railing at him, because I thought he’d written it. I knew she hadn’t. It was the wrong list. She’d have thought of other names. And he stopped me in the middle of ranting and told me that it hadn’t been his idea, but it was a good one nevertheless, because it diverted suspicion from the people who were on it. Nobody took Ellen seriously. The cops wouldn’t take Ellen seriously, either.”
“The idea was to divert suspicion to possible suspects whose names weren’t on the list?”
“I think so.”
“That almost worked,” Gregor said. “But only almost. He should never have given me the second list, the one with the names of the people who had accounts at Markwell Ballard. It drew attention to himself, and to the fact that he was the one person on Ellen Harrigan’s list nobody would have thought to put there. He wasn’t one of the people Drew Harrigan went after. Harrigan went after Philadelphia Sleeps, but not Ray Dean Ballard personally. Are we going to have to subpoena you or are you going to come down and make a statement voluntarily?”
“Oh, I’ll make a statement voluntarily,” Jig said. “There’s no reason not to, is there? No matter what anybody thinks, I’m pretty safe here. I could get away with things nobody else on any other campus could. Two Nobels will do that for you.”
“That isn’t a small thing, two Nobels.”
“I didn’t say it was,” Jig Tyler said. “And I worked very hard to get them. Do you know what makes me the most angry about all of this? Good old Ray Dean Ballard never worked very hard at anything, except maybe pretending he wasn’t who he was.”
“Good old Ray Dean Ballard is likely to have a date with a lethal injection,” Gregor said. “Except I think they’ll probably call him Aldous on the execution order.”
3
They were on their way to Rob Benedetti’s office with Jig Tyler in the car—and pleased beyond belief to be riding in the back of a patrol car— when Gregor’s always sketchy sense of direction kicked in and he realized they were only a few blocks from the offices of the Justice Project. He told Marbury and Giametti that he wanted to stop, and they turned in and out of a few narrow streets until they got to a place where they could double-park right in front of the Justice Project’s doors. They did not have any intention of parking for real and getting out. It wasn’t the kind of neighborhood where you would feel safe parking a police car.
Gregor waited until they let him out and then went up to the front door and rang. The building was old beyond telling, and badly kept up. There was garbage on the sidewalk, untouched and unnoticed by the people who passed. A good number of the people who passed were homeless men and women. They were moving with purpose. Gregor didn’t know if they had somewhere to go, or had become good at this particular illusion.
A young woman let Gregor in, took his name, and called back for Kate Daniel. Gregor found himself wondering when they’d gotten to the point where buildings with institutions and businesses in them felt the need to keep their front doors locked and on a buzzer as a protection from… what? The pictures on the walls here were nowhere near as well-done or as oppressively expensive as the ones in the lobby at Neil Savage’s offices, but they were equally didactic. Everybody wanted to teach everybody else something.
The woman who had let him in put down the phone and said, “Ms. Daniel isn’t available at the moment. Would you like to make an appointment?”
“No.” Gregor sighed. He could always bring in Marbury and Giametti and have them arrest her, but it would be showing off. “Tell her for me,” he said, “that if she doesn’t produce Sherman Markey from wherever she’s got him stashed in the next three hours, I’m going to send those two police officers in the car out there to arrest her for obstruction of justice. Oh, and tell her I said I like her work.”