Hardscrabble Road(55)
“You must be joking.” ”—I’m not,” Beata said. “It will look like you’re sending them away for a reason, because one of them knows something, or because one of them is the murderer. I’m sorry, Reverend Mother, but we’re just going to have to put up with it. It won’t be for long, and I doubt if anybody will be required to testify at the trial, if there is one, except me, since I was the one who saw the body and called the ambulance. I know it’s a problem, and a pain in the neck. And we can certainly talk to the Cardinal and see if he’s willing to mount a rearguard action. But in the long run, he’ll lose, and you’ll look guilty. I think it’s better just to get it over with.”
Reverend Mother licked her lips. “You said there was an old district attorney. Does that mean there’s a new one now?”
“That’s right. The other one died suddenly, and this one was appointed.”
“Is this one… friendly to the Catholic Church?”
“I don’t know,” Beata said. “He isn’t somebody I knew when I was practicing law. He’s got an Italian name. He might have been brought up Catholic.”
“Which could be good or bad,” Reverend Mother said. “I don’t know. I’d better call the Cardinal this morning, I suppose, and talk it out with him. He’s going to do that thing where he doesn’t shout, but it’s worse.”
“I know,” Beata said.
What she didn’t say was that if the new district attorney was an anti-Catholic fanatic, the Reverend Mother could find herself arrested, and it wouldn’t matter at all that there wasn’t going to be evidence enough to bring her to trial. It was the kind of thing she should have been thinking yesterday, when she didn’t come forward with the information that the convent was intimately connected to Drew Harrigan and all his works, and not just because he’d died in the barn.
It was the kind of thing she would have thought of automatically if she had still been practicing law, and it bothered her that she hadn’t thought of it when it really mattered.
THREE
1
John Jackman’s office was not really a neutral venue, although that was what he had declared it was when he decided, the night before, that they would all meet there in the morning. Gregor didn’t really blame him. John was brilliant and young and African-American in a city and state where being all three could propel him into the Governor’s Mansion, someday, and Gregor thought he wanted to get there sooner rather than later. After that, he probably wanted to install himself in the White House, although Gregor tried not to think about that. He could hate politics all he wanted, but he knew that if John ever ran for governor, or president, he’d be doing some speeches in front of the kind of crowd that looked on A&E true crime specials the way other people looked at the front page of the newspaper. At the moment, John wanted to install himself in the mayor’s office, and to do that he had to be perceived as a man who could handle all the crime the city of Philadelphia threw up. He didn’t need a high-profile celebrity murder case in the headlines every day for weeks, or even months. He didn’t need the perception that he was unable to stand up to rich people when they got in trouble; but that perception was inevitable in cases like this one, because rich people had good lawyers who knew the rules of the game. He especially didn’t need to give the present mayor an opportunity to complain about him on the six o’clock news. He now had all these things, and with them the memory of the fact that he had been a first-rate homicide detective. He was on a tear.
He could have used being married, though, Gregor thought, getting out of his cab in front of John’s building. Just up the block, Rob Benedetti was getting out of another cab, looking very unhappy. Gregor decided that he wouldn’t say anything to John about being married, because John would scream and yell, and because the worst of what could be done to him politically probably wouldn’t be given his reputation. Gregor had a hard time imagining anybody convincing the general public that John Henry Newman Jackman was gay. There was another thought that made Gregor wish he never had to think about politics again. It was only in election years that he remembered that a good chunk of his fellow citizens wouldn’t vote for someone who happened to be gay, and a bigger chunk wouldn’t vote for someone who didn’t believe in God, and a yet bigger chunk than that wouldn’t vote for someone who used four-letter Anglo-Saxon words, even on occasion. Of course, all politicians did that last thing, so it was just a question of never getting caught at it in public, but still. Or maybe because. It didn’t matter. He didn’t think this was what the founders had envisaged when they established a nation where citizens could vote.