Hardscrabble Road(62)

There were always things like this. They happened. Radio was an odd medium. It was full of people who had little or no self-control. She was expected to deal with the emergencies and put out the fires. She did it.

The folder that really worried her was the one with the red label on it, red for deal with this now, this is an emergency. She pulled it closer to her and opened it. Yes, all right, there were the drug incidents, dozens of drug incidents. Ever since Drew was arrested, the papers had been full of shocked editorials and even more shocked quotes from friends. Nobody had suspected. He’d managed to get away with it for so long. All that was bullshit, and Marla didn’t mind using the word that fit. Anybody who didn’t know Drew Harrigan had a drug problem didn’t know Drew Harrigan. Anybody who thought that Drew Harrigan was successfully hiding the drug problem he had wasn’t on the inside of Drew Harrigan’s operation, or on any of the police forces in the Philadelphia ADI. Drew not only got out of control, he traveled. He drove everywhere. Marla had begun to truly hate that damned Mercedes car, because before Drew had it he had been more than satisfied with being driven around.

By the end, it was only Ellen who was being driven around. Drew was out on the road and out on his own. He liked to stop into places and see if people recognized him, too, and being who he was, being Drew and not NPR, that meant going into the kind of bars with neon signs in their windows advertising Miller beer. If there was one thing Marla had told her people more often than she’d told them only to shoplift in the very best stores, it was to stay out of places where men got drunk on the cheap. There was always some guy who’d decide he hated you just for the sake of giving himself an excuse to beat you up. There was always a bartender with a hot line straight to the local police station. There was always a guy hiding out in a booth in the back who wanted nothing more than to get the National Enquirer a tip they would use on their front page. These were not the incidents Marla was most proud of, because these were not the incidents she had been able to cover up completely. Drew had landed on the cover of the Enquirer on and off. He told people, on the radio and off, that it was a form of persecution. He was just an innocent bystander, dropping into a place for a beer, and this is what the liberals did to him.

Marla always thought that if liberals ever attacked Drew Harrigan, he wouldn’t know what to do about it. They’d beat on him with copies of the collected works of John Dewey, and he’d be reduced to calling in the cops the way he’d once been reduced to calling in the teachers when the bigger kids at school took his lunch money and locked him into his locker.

Marla wondered how much of Drew Harrigan could be explained by the fact that he’d spent grade school as a fat, soft, cringing victim of a little kid, and that by the time he got to be six feet four and four hundred pounds, it was too late to do in the kids he still hated for making his life miserable.

The interesting pieces of paper in this folder did not have to do with Drew’s transgressions per se. Transgressions were part of the game. The interesting pieces of paper in this folder had to do with bribes. That wasn’t what they called them. Neither Drew nor Frank would have said they were bribing half the police departments in Pennsylvania to keep Drew out of trouble. Still, bribes were what they were, and Marla had known, from the first time they paid one, that she had to have a record of what they had given to whom and when. Yes, it was illegal activity and yes, they shouldn’t have done it, but they had done it, and not to keep a record of it was to let the police departments in question completely off the hook. Marla had bank receipts, Internet wire transfers, receipts for SUVs donated to one police department and computers donated to another. She had withdrawals clearly marked “for the Upper Merion PD” and “for Lehigh PD re disorderly stop.” The notes were clear enough so that they could be read by a judge or a district attorney or a jury without having to be translated by her. There was a paper trail a million miles long, which she had planted carefully and deliberately, and with Frank’s full knowledge, as the only way they had to cover their asses in the event of the kind of meltdown they had been subjected to when Drew got arrested for drugs… but the problem was no longer that Drew was arrested for drugs. It was that Drew was dead, almost certainly murdered, and the big question was going to be who had murdered him and why. This file was almost certainly evidence of a motive. Hell, she could go to jail for nothing but what she admitted to in it. Frank could go to jail, too. And to keep themselves out of jail they might have done whatever it was the murderer had done to get Drew out of the way.