Hardscrabble Road(20)
“It’s an unusual winter,” Gregor said. “Coldest on record in, what, fifty years?”
“Something like that,” John said. “But we get at least a couple of days of extreme cold every year, and that means every year we get a couple of nights of people freezing to death. The only compensation, and it isn’t much of a compensation, is that most street crime goes way down. Your ordinary street criminal isn’t much interested in freezing his patootie off just to get your wallet. Even convenience store and gas station holdups go down. Somehow it figures, you know? They’ve got no discipline, these people, and no ambition. Shove a little hardship their way, and they just fold.”
“Right,” Gregor said. He looked around the office. It was spare, to the point of being denuded. Obviously, Olivia Hall didn’t decorate, and John didn’t have a girlfriend at the moment. Gregor thought about asking John about the marriage thing—weren’t successful politicians usually expected to have wives?—and decided against it.
“I think what Chickie was getting at,” he said, “was that it’s just possible something got missed. We’re dealing with a homeless person here. People don’t always notice them in the way they notice other people.”
“We’re dealing with fingerprints here,” Jackman said.
“Even so.”
“Even so nothing,” Jackman said. “Look, I’m going to send you over to the district attorney, who’s the one you want to talk to if you want to know everything there is to know about this; but the facts are simple. We did not one, but two searches, and we got nothing. We checked out every corpse of every homeless person who came into the morgue from break of day on January twenty-seventh until midnight February nine, and we didn’t get a thing. Which doesn’t mean he isn’t dead, mind you. People die in abandoned buildings and back alleys and we don’t find them for weeks or months. So anything could have happened. But if he came into our system, we would have found him. Because we were careful. We were very, very careful.”
“Because the Justice Project asked about him?”
“Because this is Drew Harrigan and his people that we’re dealing with,” John said. “This is a guy who’s forced congressmen out of office and gotten superintendents of large school districts fired. He’s coming out of rehab in a couple of weeks, and when he does, he’s going to be loaded for bear, and the bear he’s going to be loaded for is us. We arrested him. We’re going ahead with the prosecution. The DA isn’t backing down. The police aren’t backing down. And I’ve got a mayor who’s suddenly making noises like he’s a Harrigan fan and who wants my ass more than he wants to win the lottery. What do you say?”
“I’d say you were probably very careful.”
“Right,” John said. “We were all very careful. But on the assumption that it never hurts to be more careful, and because it’s you that’s asking, I’m going to call over and get them to run one more check. Who knows, maybe Markey showed up on a slab in the last day or two and nobody caught it going in, although they’re supposed to check. But I want you to go down and talk to the DA and let him outline exactly what’s going on here. Drew Harrigan didn’t get where he was without knowing how to win a street fight better than most other people, and he isn’t going to go down without taking a hell of a lot of people with him.”
“Is he going to go down?” Gregor asked.
Jackman nodded. “I think so. Harrigan’s people, hell, practically everybody, thinks we want to back away from a trial, but we don’t. The DA is in a state of world-class piss-off. He’s being portrayed in the press as a corrupt little shit who just wants to persecute a pathetic homeless man so he can let the rich guy off the hook, which is about as realistic as saying that the NRA is really in favor of gun control. There have been rumors around town for weeks that we had Sherman Markey killed because that way we could let Harrigan off with probation because people wouldn’t be upset about how we’re treating the homeless guy—”
“Wait a minute,” Gregor said. “Doesn’t that contradict the other thing?”
“Of course it contradicts the other thing. Do you think anybody cares?” Jackman was out of his seat and pacing. “The whole thing is getting to be more and more of a mess by the minute, and if there’s anything I want, truly and really, it’s to find Sherman Markey under conditions that will not support the claim that we killed him. Which doesn’t mean that people won’t say that anyway. I’ve made an appointment for you to see Rob in an hour. He’s clearing his desk so that he can talk to you. Be on time.”