Hardscrabble Road(28)

That “true” there. That was going to get him into trouble.

Shelley Balducci was standing in his office door, waiting. She’d been there for quite some time. Ray Dean didn’t think he’d have much trouble with her if she knew the whole truth about him, but you could never tell. The Shelley Balduccis of this world were a complete mystery to him.

“I don’t see what you can do,” she was saying. “Chickie went to see Gregor Demarkian. Mr. Demarkian will go to see whoever he knows on the police department. That should at least get people moving again.”

“Doesn’t it bother you that he could be dead out there, in a morgue someplace, maybe not even in a morgue? Would you like that to happen to you if you were dead?”

“But it wouldn’t happen to me,” Shelley said sensibly. “I’ve got a huge family. Somebody would be looking for me.”

“We’re looking for Sherman. It’s not doing a lot of good.”

“I know. But the morgue people, they look at Sherman and they can tell right off he’s a homeless person. Forget the clothes. It doesn’t matter how new the clothes are. Homeless people have new clothes sometimes. They get them from Goodwill.”

“There was the bath, too,” Ray Dean said. “They didn’t just get him new clothes. They got him cleaned up.”

“I know,” Shelley said, “but they couldn’t fix the rest of it. The state of his teeth. The shape his body was in. You could tell he was a homeless person just by looking at him.”

“And people would know you weren’t just by looking at you?”

“Of course. There’s a difference, don’t you see? I can’t believe you don’t think there’s a difference.”

“I didn’t say I didn’t think there was a difference. I said—” But there seemed no point in saying it again. What Shelley was saying was true. Sherman Markey did look like a homeless person, and in a way no clean change of clothes, or bath, or haircut could change. Something happened to people who lived out on the street that left an indelible mark. He wished he knew what it was.

“Besides,” Shelley was saying, “there’s nothing you can do about it, is there? It’s not your fault. We had people looking all over for him that night. We had vans out. If he was anywhere within our area, we would have found him.”

“If he was still alive.”

“Okay,” Shelley said. “If he was still alive. But you know, you can’t blame yourself for that. It’s not up to you. People are what they are. It doesn’t matter if Sherman was on the street because he had a disease or because he had no damned luck at all or because he behaved like an idiot and a jerk and brought it all down on his own head. He was a homeless person. They die a lot in the bad weather. Nobody noticed him because nobody notices homeless people. You have to go from there.”

“To where?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing,” Ray Dean said. “Nothing at all. Never mind. You’re right. I’m going to make a few phone calls and then I’ll okay the van schedules for tonight. Ask C. J. to come see me in about half an hour, will you? We’ve got a donor willing to supply the Station Street soup kitchen for seven straight days in return for a public announcement on my part. I’m happy to comply. Okay?”

“You don’t look good,” Shelley said.

“I’m fine,” Ray Dean said.

She hesitated some more, and then walked away, down the hall, out of sight. He watched her go. He wasn’t fine. He didn’t begin to be fine. It bothered him no end that people were willing to give to charity if they got a nice big announcement in the papers about it, or something else to make them feel important. He couldn’t count the number of dinners he had to have with big donors who demanded personal attention in exchange for the food they gave and the checks they wrote. He needed those people. He knew he needed them. He couldn’t supply the organization himself. He couldn’t begin to cover the needs of the people who lived “rough,” as their one Aussie put it. He just didn’t understand why every single person in the city of Philadelphia didn’t rise up and demand that something be done about these people who couldn’t feed or house themselves, who died in the cold, who died in spit and blood and vomit.

He wanted to believe that people would be different if they were brought up differently, that it was just a matter of training and education. He knew that wasn’t true. There was no solution for human nature, and no answer to the deepest of his questions about right and wrong. It was bad enough that some people were born rich and others were born poor. It was worse that some were born well and some were born mentally or physically ill. What did you do about a life that could never escape the confines of biochemistry?