Hardscrabble Road(40)

“I don’t think anybody knows what they’re talking about when they’re talking about taxes,” Rob Benedetti said, as he put Gregor into the car that would take him to Detectives Marbury and Giametti. “I mean, what do they think? They’re going to pay for the police department with air?”

The only thing Gregor Demarkian knew about taxes was that he paid them, and he didn’t even know much about that, since Bennis’s accountant figured them for him and all he did was write checks. He got into the car, glad it was running and glad it had the heater on.

“Let me tell you what people think about taxes,” Benedetti said. “They think that the government is spending a gazillion dollars on crap. Programs to bring Bolivian folk music to public schools. Programs to support the Daughters of the War of 1812 in their drive to mount an opera on the war to tour American high schools. Programs to establish an Institute of Broccoli Studies in northwest Tennessee.”

Gregor couldn’t help himself. “Is Tennessee a big broccoli-growing state?”

“How am I supposed to know?” Benedetti said. “That’s not the point. The point is that people think there are millions of these programs and they take up most of the budget, so all we have to do is get rid of the silly programs and we can have all the police and fire protection we want, and it isn’t true. There are programs, but they only take up a little money compared to the rest. When you cut taxes to the point where my own nieces and nephews could afford to pay them out of their allowances—and, believe me, my sister doesn’t hand out Rockefeller-sized allowances—anyway, you see what I mean. It’s completely insane. You should tell John Jackman it’s completely insane.”

“I’ll try,” Gregor said.

“We’ve got six vehicles that wouldn’t start this morning in this precinct alone,” Rob Benedetti said. “That’s six right here around my office. Plus I don’t remember how many state cars that won’t go. We need heated parking spaces. It’s winter, for God’s sake. It’s cold enough to turn rabbit turds into icicles. What do they want from us?”

What Gregor wanted was to get the car moving and out of the way. He had no idea what had started Rob Benedetti on taxes, but just in case it was something he’d said, he wanted to be sure he wouldn’t be able to say it again. He made noncommittal noises—yes, of course it seemed sensible to pay enough in taxes to get the police protection you needed; no, of course it didn’t make sense to think that we could do away with taxes altogether and still have a city worth living in—and thought that politics in an election year was like Armenian Lent. Whether you wanted to take part in it or not, it chased you until it hunted you down.

Which reminded him: Lent was coming up soon. Cavanaugh Street would be full of women cooking lentils in oil. The Ararat would serve him eggs with sausages for breakfast, but Linda Melajian would look disappointed in him when she put the plate on the table, and Tibor would sigh a lot. It wouldn’t do him any good to remind them all that Armenian Lent was one of the things he had wanted so desperately to escape when he left Philadelphia for graduate school.

Finally, the car was on the road and moving, and Gregor went back to feeling as if he were in a road trip movie. He thought he’d done more traveling in cars today than he ordinarily did in any given week, and all to get from one place to the other in a mostly confined area. The activity felt pointless. He wasn’t really all that emotionally involved in finding Sherman Markey, or in anything Drew Harrigan might think he wanted to do. On the other hand, the activity had done what he’d started out hoping it would do. He’d spent most of the day not thinking of Bennis Hannaford at all.

I’m too old, he thought, to have the kind of relationship with a woman that requires me to work hard at not thinking about her.

Marbury and Giametti worked out of a precinct not very far from the District Attorney’s Office. It was their car that wouldn’t start, which was why Gregor was going to them. It was afternoon now, and there were more people on the street, many of them aimless. In spite of the cold, though, Gregor thought it was better in February than in December, because in December it got dark in the middle of the afternoon.

One of the men was waiting at the curb when the car drove up. He was tall and thin and shaggy in a way policemen usually aren’t. In Gregor’s experience, men who joined the police force liked to think of themselves as being in the military. They went in for buzz cuts and too many hours spent working out with weights.

The car drew to a stop and the tall man opened the door at Gregor’s side. He really did not look military at all. His hair came down over the back of his collar. His fingers were so long, they could have been caricatures out of a cartoon about a skeleton. The effect was thrown off by the short police jacket, standard uniform issue. It had been made for a compact, bulky man who loved his G.I. Joe dolls. The skeleton put a hand out to help him from the car.