Hardscrabble Road(19)

“You apparently are winning.”

“Yeah, I am. But that’s because I’m not the only one who thinks he’s an ass-hole. The party thinks he’s an asshole. And that one’s between you and me.”

“The party is backing your primary challenge.”

“Exactly.”

“I was wondering about that,” Gregor said. What he’d really been wondering was why John would want to upset the party brass by challenging an incumbent. It made much more sense if no upset was going to be involved. “Thank you. It seemed like an odd bit of timing, your running right now.”

“It’s not. Look, he can’t get re-elected. You know that and I know that. He was a complete mess on the Catholic Church scandal thing. He’s in the Cardinal’s pocket, or at least looks like he is. It was either somebody chucking him off the ticket, or letting the opposition have the mayor’s office. And you know we never let the opposition have anything.”

“Too dangerous,” Gregor said.

“You don’t really give a damn, do you?” John said.

“I don’t really give a damn about politics,” Gregor said, “which is getting to be a liability, since it’s all anybody seems to be able to talk about anymore. I do give a damn about whether you get to be mayor. I’d like to see that.”

“Well, that’s good.”

“I fully intend to vote for you for senator, when you run for that.”

“That’s a bit down the line at the moment,” John said. “You want to see what Olivia dug up for you on your problem?”

“Sure.”

There was a stack of papers sitting squarely in the middle of John Jackman’s desk. He picked them up and handed them over. “I didn’t want to say it when you called me over at the campaign, because I wasn’t positive, but it turns out I was right. We already have run a fingerprint check for Sherman Markey. In fact, we’ve run two, and not just on the corpses in the morgue. We’ve run it through recent arrests, too.”

“And?”

“Not a thing. Nothing even close. Every once in a while you get some ambiguous stuff; we don’t even have that.”

“What about deaths?” Gregor asked. “Homeless people have died in the city these last two weeks, right?”

“Yes.” John sighed.

“And?”

“And, what can I tell you? It’s been a brutal winter. It’s supposed to get worse over the next week or so. It isn’t going to get better anytime soon. If I knew what to do about this stuff, Gregor, I’d do it. The legal people say we’re not allowed to arrest them unless they’ve actually committed a crime. We can’t arrest them for vagrancy anymore because vagrancy laws are unconstitutional. We can arrest them for public drunkenness if they get rowdy enough, but most of the ones we’re most worried about don’t get rowdy. We can’t commit them to a mental institution unless they’re a clear and present danger to themselves or others, which they aren’t, because falling asleep in subzero temperatures so that they accidentally freeze to death in the night isn’t considered being a danger to themselves. That’s meant to mean only active suicide. And a lot of them won’t go into what shelters are available, even for the night.

“I mean, seriously, Gregor, seriously. What other evidence do we need that somebody is mentally ill besides the fact that he absolutely refuses to accept a warm bed on a night with subzero temperatures and chooses— chooses, I’m not making this up—to sleep on a park bench instead? Ed Koch had the right idea. When the temperature goes below a certain level, you round them up involuntarily and you get them inside whether they want to go or not.”

“Koch got into a lot of trouble for that.”

“He was still right,” John said. “The law makes assumptions that aren’t valid. The law makes assumptions about the intentions of the people who want these guys to go into shelters that are not valid. The law makes assumptions about these people themselves that are not valid.”

“The law is responding to the fact that for decades, a husband who didn’t want his wife to divorce him or a city administration that didn’t like poor people could get them involuntarily committed on nothing much better than a say-so,” Gregor said. “And you know it. The law is what it is today because of how it was abused in the past.”

“And that still leaves us with a city full of homeless people, mostly alcoholic and drug-addicted old men, who aren’t in their right minds because their minds were eaten away by rotgut years ago, or were paranoid schizophrenic to begin with. I’m sorry, Gregor. I know the history. I really do. But I hate this time of winter.”