Hardscrabble Road(33)
“What coincidence was that?”
“One of the extern sisters at Our Lady of Mount Carmel walked into the Hardscrabble Road precinct station with the hat and the old guy who’d tried to file the report the first time,” Benedetti said. “Just before you walked into this office, I got on the phone to everybody in creation and started the wheels rolling. There was a death at Our Lady of Mount Carmel that night; we’re trying to find out what happened to the body. I want to send Marbury and Giametti out to the monastery—do you know about that, it’s nuns, but it’s still called a monastery?”
“You can get that from EWTN and Mother Angelica.”
“Right. Okay. Anyway, here we are. We have the hat, and granted there are a lot of watch hats and a lot of them are red, the coincidences are piling up beyond what seems sensible. What scares me, what I really can’t get out of my brain, is that this might be my fault. I thought I was being clever. I got Sherman Markey killed.”
“Do you really think that’s likely?” Gregor asked.
“I don’t know,” Benedetti said. “It’s that kind of thing. I don’t know Drew Harrigan well enough to know what he’d go for, and I don’t know who his accomplice is at all. I haven’t got a clue as to what’s likely in this case. I just know I’ve got a hat, and no Markey, and that when Harrigan walks out of rehab, I want to be standing there personally with the handcuffs. There’s celebrity free ride for you. I got an experiment for you to do sometime. Go find some black kid off the street, up for possession for the first time. Offer to pay his way to some fancy total immersion rehab place. See if you get anywhere with the judge.”
“Who was the judge?”
“Bruce Williamson.” “Oh, God.” “Exactly. I’m going to get you a car, take you over to see the guys, okay? It’s better that than have you wasting time looking for taxis when it’s nearly lunch hour. They said you didn’t drive.”
Gregor didn’t drive, but it wasn’t the kind of thing he wanted to go into at length, so he just stood up, got his coat, and got moving.
2
A few moments later, sitting in the back of a plain black unmarked sedan—where did they find the cars they bought for police departments and city governments?—Gregor Demarkian found himself turning Drew Harrigan’s book over and over in his hands. He didn’t like the man’s face. It was too round, too smooth, too well taken care of, too smug, although he didn’t like to make judgments like that about photographs. You couldn’t tell if somebody was smug or not from a photograph, just as you couldn’t really tell if a defendant was remorseful by the fact that he didn’t show any emotion while he was in the courtroom. Gregor hated people who came up with entire screenplays’ worth of motivation and character development from a few quick glimpses of a person under extreme emotional distress. Not everybody cries when told that the person they love most is dead. Some people can’t break down in public, and wait to do it until they’re alone. Not everybody looks guilty and haunted when he feels guilty and haunted. Some people go numb with guilt and look like they’re made of stone. This was why Gregor had never really been happy with the idea of trial by jury. It was made worse by the fact that attorneys deliberately attempted to seat the least educated and least literate jurors they could find, on the assumption that the stupid are more easily influenced than the bright, and not by facts and evidence.
Gregor opened the book at random. The paragraphs were short. There was a lot of white space at the top and the bottom and the margins. Obviously, Drew Harrigan didn’t expect his average reader to have a doctorate in literature from Yale.
You know what really gets me about liberals? Liberals never met a criminal they didn’t like. Doesn’t matter what he’s done. Doesn’t matter that he’s just slaughtered thirty people in a bank he’s been robbing. Doesn’t matter he’s spent his entire life ripping people off and beating people up and being good for nothing, you arrest him and some liberal will come running to say it’s all society’s fault. You know whose fault that is? Yours. It’s your fault if this piece of scum kills thirty people in a bank. You get up every morning. You go to work. You put in your time. You pay your bills. You stay out of trouble. And it’s your fault, this guy tried to rob a bank, and instead of putting him in jail we should give him an income twice as much as what you’ve got and send him to therapy to talk about his childhood.
Gregor sucked in air. That was—what? Trite. The sort of thing that had been around for twenty years or more. He wondered if Drew Harrigan’s audience was young enough not to realize that Harrigan was just repeating things that had been said a hundred times before by a hundred other people. It was disturbing to think they might be older, and looking to hear the same things they’d been hearing for as long as they could remember. Gregor flipped through a few more pages.