Hardscrabble Road(58)

“Calm down,” Gregor said. “It’s not enough that the Abbess is Harrigan’s sister. She’d have to have a motive for killing him. Did she have one?”

“I don’t know,” John said. “We’ve got an appointment to go out there this morning as soon as Marbury and Giametti show up, and you can ask her then. I won’t be able to go along, of course. It’s not my job. But the three of you can handle it and report back. And I have a terrible feeling that the answer is going to be yes.”

“Why?” Rob Benedetti asked.

“Because,” John Jackman said. “Because. And don’t tell me hunches are crap, because I don’t believe that. If it turns out a nun actually killed Drew Harrigan, this really is going to be a Lifetime movie.”

“If it turns out a nun really killed Drew Harrigan,” Gregor said, “this is going to be a major production with Julia Roberts in the starring role. Before you send me out to interrogate somebody, don’t you think we ought to clarify my position with the mayor’s office? He was threatening to arrest me last night.”

“He isn’t going to arrest you,” John said. “He was just saying that for the television cameras.”

“You’ll come say that to the judge if I end up in jail on obstruction charges,” Gregor said.

“Don’t worry about obstruction charges,” Rob Benedetti said. “I’m the one gets to decide whether anybody hits you with obstruction charges or not, and I’m not going to charge you.”

“You may not be here after November,” Gregor said.

There was a lot of noise from outside. The door swung open, and Olivia Hall walked in, looking both dignified and disapproving. “The detectives are here,” she said.

A moment later, Marbury and Giametti came in, holding their coats over their arms and looking as if they would do anything, anything at all, not to have this woman looking at them anymore. They waited, standing, while Olivia took another look around the room. They didn’t relax until she was gone and the door had been shut behind her.

“That was scary,” Dane Marbury said. “That’s always scary. I think that woman could control a prison without bothering to resort to weapons.”

“Never mind that,” John Jackman said. “Did you do what I asked you to do? Did you find anything.”

“Absolutely,” Giametti said. He reached into the pocket of his trousers and came up with a small, folded piece of paper: “334, 335, and 336 Albemarle Street. Those are lots, one of them vacant, the other two with abandoned buildings on them. They’re not in a great location, but they’re not in an absolutely impossible one, either. Drew Harrigan deeded them to Our Lady of Mount Carmel Monastery after Sherman Markey filed his lawsuit for defamation. After, the timing is important. On January twenty-fifth, two days before the last time anybody saw Harrigan alive, the Justice Project went into court on behalf of Markey and had the properties liened so that the monastery couldn’t sell them, which it thought it needed to do because the monastery looked like it was going to sell them, since it had found a buyer.”

“You got all these people out of bed?” John said. “I’m impressed.” “We didn’t need to get them out of bed,” Dane Marbury said. “We did a Google search and found some back stuff in the Inquirer. I don’t know how accurate it all is, but we can recheck when we question. The thing that got us, though, was the timing.”

“Right,” Giametti said. “Harrigan deeded the property after the Justice Project filed their defamation suit.”

“Which means he did it after he’d already gone into rehab,” Marbury said. “Where supposedly he couldn’t get in touch with anybody, because he was in a total immersion, absolute isolation program for sixty days.”

Jackman looked carefully from one to the other of them. “Was that even possible?”

Gregor stirred. “It depends,” he said. “The best guess is that Harrigan was never in rehab at all, but if that’s the case, there has to be some collusion on the part of the judge. That’s Williamson?”

“Yeah,” Marbury said.

“Okay,” Gregor said. “That’s not impossible. The other possibility is that Harrigan’s lawyer has power of attorney and did this under his own steam. But the attorney is Neil Savage, right? One of the more conservative attorneys in the city, conservative in the sense of not liking to go in for legal oddities. So I can’t see him deciding on his own to deed the property over to the nuns in order to shield it from the defamation suit, but I can’t see Harrigan having made provision for what to do in the case of a defamation suit, since they’re not automatic or even usual. Never mind the fact that Sherman Markey, being a homeless man without any assets, probably didn’t look like somebody who was going to end up with heavyweight legal representation.”