Hardscrabble Road(51)

“The trick about the homeless problem,” she said, “is getting anybody to realize there’s a homeless problem at all. We notice homeless people when they scare us. When they don’t scare us, it’s as if they’re ghosts. We look right through them. We don’t see them at all.”

The homeless person Gregor Demarkian was not seeing at the moment was Sherman Markey, and it made him very, very worried.





TWO



1


For Ellen Harrigan, the worst thing the night before had not been being taken to the morgue to look at the dead body. The worst part of yesterday had been coming back to the apartment and realizing she had no idea of what she was supposed to do. She tried to remember how her mother had been when her father died, but that didn’t work. When Ellen’s father had died, Ellen’s mother had been immediately surrounded by Ellen’s aunts on both sides of the family. Nearly a dozen women had crowded into their house and brought casseroles, cleaning buckets, Mass cards, and gossip. They had arranged for the funeral, catered the wake, and called Father Henfrey about having a novena said for the repose of Ellen’s father’s soul. Ellen had no idea who was going to do all that now. There would have to be a funeral, but Ellen didn’t know how to arrange one, and didn’t want to know. She didn’t know if Drew should be buried from the Catholic Church or not. He never went to church unless he was out on the road touring, and then he went because his fans went, or lots of them did. It had been forever since Ellen went to church, too. You got away from things like that when you no longer lived where you were supposed to. She did still believe in God, because it was stupid not to, and the only people who didn’t were liberals and secular humanists, who were even worse than liberals. Still, she couldn’t just sit in the apartment day after day now that Drew was gone. She was going to have to do something.

She didn’t know when she had decided that she ought to go into Drew’s office, but as soon as she arrived at the office doors, she knew it had been the right thing to do. Drew’s offices were on the fifteenth floor of a tall building in the center of the city, a self-contained suite with big double glass doors with the words DREW HARRIGAN: HEART ON THE RIGHT SIDE stenciled onto them. Ellen shuddered at the sight of them. She’d always hated that thing about Drew’s organs being all on the wrong side of his body, and she still resented the fact that there was a right side for them to be on.

She pushed through the double doors and walked into the lobby. Nobody was at the receptionist’s desk, but that made sense. It was far too early.

Her head hurt, just a little. Somebody had given her a sedative last night, but it hadn’t put her to sleep. It hadn’t done anything for her that she could tell. She was cold in this office, in a way she hadn’t been outside, although it was freezing outside. She looked at the walls. They were covered with big, outsized pictures of Drew. They were posters for books and the radio show and the television show, which hadn’t gone over too well.

She had no idea what she was going to do next—she had imagined herself walking in and meeting the receptionist, or something; maybe she had just imagined herself walking in to find the staff all assembled and ready to listen to her—but while she was working it out, Martha Iles came into view, realized she was there, and stopped.

“Ellen?”

Ellen Harrigan hated that voice. She truly hated it. It had everything in it she had learned to fear, early. Wellesley. Harvard and the Kennedy School of Government. Girls sitting at the front of the class in the desks right in front of the teacher’s own, their hands always in the air. It mattered only a little that Martha was so plain she might as well have been a chipmunk.

“Ellen, what are you doing here?” she said. “I’ve got a right to be here,” Ellen said. “This was Drew’s office. It’s going to be mine, now. It’s going to be mine because he’s dead.”

“Yes,” Martha said, sounding exasperated. “We know he’s dead, Ellen, it’s been on the news all night. But we have work to do. Drew wasn’t just a person, he was an enterprise, and dead or not we’ve got obligations we’ve got to fulfill.”

Danielle Underwood came out from behind the partition that led to the offices in the back. She was prettier than Martha, and her accent wasn’t anywhere near as awful, but Ellen knew that she was much the same. All these women were alike, really, all these women with careers, thinking they were better than everybody else, thinking they were special. Ellen took great satisfaction in remembering that these days, when you called somebody “special,” you weren’t talking about how bright they were.