Hardscrabble Road(37)

Lots of things cleared her head. Chickie George made it…well, there was that “bemused” again. Chickie was standing in the door to the office she had taken over, holding a file folder and looking dejected. The office was so clean it looked as if it were in pain.

“He said he’d get them to check,” Chickie was saying, “and that’s the best I could hope for, really. I don’t know. Maybe we’re wrong. Maybe he isn’t dead.”

“We can always hope,” Kate said, “but if he isn’t dead, where is he?”

Chickie shrugged. “He’s an addled old man. Everybody keeps saying that. Maybe he got his hands on some serious booze and went on a bender.”

“For two weeks? If he went on a bender for two weeks, he would be dead.”

“People go on benders for longer than that,” Chickie said. “No, I know what you mean. Not people in Sherman’s kind of shape. I don’t know. Maybe he fuzzed out and can’t remember who he is or where he’s supposed to be. Maybe he’s just wandering around someplace.”

“In the open? Then why hasn’t anybody seen him?”

“I don’t know,” Chickie said. “Never mind. I know. He’s probably dead. And maybe they’ll do another check and find a corpse they overlooked. The whole thing is just getting so… odd. If you know what I mean.”

“Sure,” Kate said. “There’s another possibility, you know. He could be dead, but not in a morgue. He could have died in some abandoned building somewhere and they just haven’t found the body yet. It’s cold. As long as it’s cold, there’s no smell. You’d be amazed at how many bodies they find in vacant lots once the spring thaws come.”

“From the smell?”

“Exactly.”

“That’s pleasant to contemplate.”

“Pleasant or not, that’s the way things work,” Kate said. “This time, though, we need them to look. I’m not sure we can go on with the case with Sherman missing, and I think we need to go on with the case. It’s important. Harrigan will be out in, what, twenty or so days? We don’t want him to walk. We do have to find Sherman.”

“Can we go on with the case if we find him and he’s dead?”

“I don’t know,” Kate said. “I’ll look into it. And don’t say we should never have reported him missing. We had to, under the circumstances. We probably had to under any circumstances. Have you talked to Harrigan’s lawyers yet?”

“No, I thought you had.”

“I have,” Kate said. Then she decided to let that one pass. “Never mind. It’s all under control. Go back to doing whatever you normally do and I’ll leave you alone until I get something definite going on.”

“I’m supposed to be going to class,” Chickie said. “I haven’t been doing a lot of that lately. Are you sure you want me to go on? You always seem to have so much to do.”

“Most of it has nothing to do with this,” Kate said. “You go.”

Chickie hesitated in the doorway. Then he turned around and walked off, looking like something Central Casting had sent in to play a lawyer. Kate wondered what would happen to him once he passed the bar. A lot of kids said they wanted to go into public interest law, or work with the people who ordinarily wouldn’t have representation, but those big-firm salaries were waiting, and they were bigger and more outside the scale of ordinary experience every day. Penn was a good degree. It wasn’t as good as Yale or Harvard, but it was still a good degree. Somebody like Chickie would have offers.

Kate knew herself well enough to understand that she couldn’t say, for sure, that she would be doing the kind of work she was doing if there had been anything like an alternative when she was first looking for a job. In the end, she was glad she’d chosen the work she had. She’d seen enough of the women who came in the law school classes after hers, who had had offers, not to envy them. If she put in a one-hundred-hour week, it was because she was working on something she believed in, something she honestly thought would make the world better. It wasn’t in order to save Exxon from being sued by the Alaskan fishermen whose livelihoods it had ruined by hiring a tanker captain who couldn’t hold his liquor, or to keep Enron executives out of jail and with their personal fortunes intact after they’d trashed the retirement savings of hundreds of their workers. Neil would probably say she was an idiot, or a Communist, but she was neither. She just didn’t see the point of spending her life, the only one she would ever have, making the rich richer and behaving as if the poor didn’t exist.