Hardscrabble Road(29)

You did something better than this, Ray Dean told himself. But this was all he knew how to do, so he was going to go on doing it.

He picked up the phone and punched in the number Kate Daniel had given him the last time he talked to her. Maybe he could ask her why he was depressed the way he was.





SIX



1


The district attorney of the city of Philadelphia was a man named Robert Benedetti, and the only thing Gregor Demarkian knew about him for sure was that he hated to be called “Bob.” “It’s the alliteration,” John Jackman had said, six months ago, when they’d first discussed the man. “It’s the BB. He hates it.”

Gregor couldn’t remember why it had come up. Benedetti was new in the job. His predecessor had dropped dead of a heart attack in the middle of a mob-based murder trial, and for about a week there had been speculation across the country that he’d really been the victim of a contract hit. The problem was, nobody knew of a contract killer who could make heart attacks happen so realistically that they looked like nothing else to four pathologists in a row. The man had been overweight, underexercised, and addicted to both cigarettes and coffee. He worked too hard and too long. His blood pressure would have looked better as one of those thermometer indicators that let the public know if the local fire department has raised enough money in donations to buy a new lounge set for the firehouse. Robert Benedetti had been appointed to fill out the rest of his term, and here he was, coming up on a general municipal election in November, and not a known quantity.

Gregor gave his name to the receptionist and sat down in the waiting area. It was not an unfamiliar place. He’d been to see various district attorneys since he’d started consulting with police departments, and none of them ever seemed to do anything to change the waiting room’s ambience. The carpet was clean but a little worn, and determinedly bland. The pictures on the walls were of nothing that could offend anybody, ever, mostly because they were either of flowers or so abstract as to be indistinguishable from confusion. Gregor knew better than to do that thing about modern art that marked anyone who engaged in it as a provincial idiot—he wasn’t about to start talking about how all the paintings like that looked like something that could be done by a five-year-old child—but in the most private recesses of his brain, he still wondered why anybody bothered. And why, exactly, was good representational work no longer really “art”? He should have paid more attention to his Humanities courses when he was at Penn. He wasn’t sure he’d paid much attention to anything while he was at Penn, besides making damned sure that his grades were as close to perfect as he could get them, to make equally sure that an Ivy League school would take him for his graduate work. Gregor couldn’t even remember having had a strong ambition in any one direction. He hadn’t been considering the FBI while he was in college, traveling by public transportation every day from a Cavanaugh Street that was still poor tenements to the University of Pennsylvania of the late fifites, full of preppies and debutantes, and not all that dedicated to educating the kinds of people who needed scholarships to survive. Now he thought that his only ambition back then might have been to make it out. Making it out was different from making it. Making it meant having a lot of money and your picture in People magazine. Making it out meant just… never having to go back where you’d come from.

And here he was, back where he’d come from. Did it matter that where he’d come from didn’t really exist now any more than the Gregor Demarkian of that period of time existed now? It mattered that Cavanaugh Street was town houses and expensive condominiums and not tenements and railroad flats.

He was up on his feet and walking around the room, looking at the pictures on the walls the way he’d look at pictures in a museum, when somebody cleared his throat behind him. Gregor turned and found a short, wiry, intense young man in a gray suit that didn’t look like it fit him, because no suit anywhere would ever look like it fit him. His body was the wrong shape for suits. This is a man who ought to be a boxer, Gregor thought. But the man was holding out his hand, so Gregor held out his hand, too.

“It’s Mr. Demarkian,” the man said. “I recognize you from your pictures. I’m Rob Benedetti.”

“Ah,” Gregor said.

“Ah?”

“I was wondering what you used for a nickname,” Gregor said. “I’ve heard from several people that you don’t like to be called Bob.”

“Right,” Benedetti said. He seemed to be at a loss for where to take the conversation next, for which Gregor didn’t blame him. He threw an odd look at the pictures on the wall and at Gregor standing to look at them and said, “Why don’t you come into the office and we can talk. John said you were going to help the Justice Project in the search for Sherman Markey.”