Hardscrabble Road(30)

Gregor followed Benedetti’s retreating back, wondering if he should bother to go into any long explanation of his present relationship to the case. It didn’t help that he didn’t know if he had any relationship to the case, or even if there was a case.

He was explaining about the visit he’d had from Chickie George when he really noticed the room he’d been led into, and then he stopped. It was the most remarkable place he’d ever seen. If there was a paperless office in the United States, this wasn’t it. There were stacks of file folders full of paper everywhere: on the desk, on the floor, on the bookcases in piles obscuring the books, on the seat of the chair Gregor was supposed to sit in. It was like one of those paintings that got titled Schizophrenic’s Hallucination or Paranoid’s Dream. It was beyond a mess. It was a threatening mess.

“Excuse me,” Rob Benedetti said. He reached over and took the files off the chair Gregor was supposed to sit in. Then he held them in his hands for a moment, wondering what he was supposed to do with them. Then he dumped them on the pile on his desk. Given how much was there, a few more probably wouldn’t make a difference.

“Are you spring-cleaning or something?” Gregor asked.

Rob Benedetti went around the desk and took a few file folders off the seat he was supposed to sit in himself. “I’ve been trying to get Carson’s stuff straightened out,” he said. “Carson was, I don’t know. Not exactly caught up. Not that I blame him, mind you. He must have been sick for months before he fell over. My wife is always trying to make me go to the doctor, and like that, because she says this is a job that kills people, but I think that’s going too far. Anyway, Carson must have been sick for a while, because here we are, and there’s a lot of back stuff that needs to be taken care of, and I’ve been going through it piece by piece so that I can figure out what’s going on.”

“How’s it going?”

“You can see how it’s going,” Rob Benedetti said. “Never mind. We’ll get to it or not. I’ll get elected in November or not. In the meantime, we’ve got a Drew Harrigan problem.”

“I don’t,” Gregor said.

“Yes, you do, whether you realize it or not,” Benedetti said. “How much do you know about Drew Harrigan?”

Gregor had been carrying his coat over his arm when he came into the office and laid it down over the back of the chair when he’d sat down. Now he stood up, rummaged around in it, and pulled out the book he’d bought at Barnes & Noble.

“I’ve got this,” he said. “I know he’s very successful. I’ve never heard him on the radio.”

“Did you look at the book?”

“A little.”

“And?”

Gregor hesitated. “It doesn’t seem fair to criticize when I’ve barely read anything but a line here or there, but the lines I’ve read have seemed a little ham-handed and simplistic. Simplistic to the point of being inaccurate sometimes.”

“It’s okay. You can call him an idiot in this office if you want to.”

“I don’t know that he is an idiot,” Gregor said. “I’ve got a tendency to feel that people who become great successes at legitimate endeavors, and even some of the ones who become great successes at illegitimate ones, are probably bright enough. Competition is tough. It’s not easy to make something of yourself, especially not a big something.”

“Maybe,” Benedetti said. “Maybe the truth is that he got to be a big something by pandering to the idiots in his audience. He’s got a lot of idiots in his audience, and you’re hearing that from a man who’s probably closer to Harrigan politically than he is to John Jackman. I’m nobody’s liberal. But.”

“But?”

“But if the man isn’t an idiot, he’s a liar,” Benedetti said. “He has to know that the stuff he says is wrong. He’s got a staff. They call here every once in a while to check things, and we try to be good about providing them with information. We try to be good about providing everybody with information. With Harrigan, it doesn’t make any difference. If it isn’t what he wants to hear, he doesn’t hear it. All I can say is thank God he’s going after the national audience and not just the one here, or we’d all be dead as door-nails from the misinformation.”

“I still don’t see how that makes him my problem,” Gregor said.

Benedetti sighed. “How much do you know about the case so far?” Gregor gave a rundown that included the traffic stop that had revealed a pile of illegal pills on the front passenger seat of Drew Harrigan’s car, the arrest, and Harrigan’s fingering of Sherman Markey.