Hardscrabble Road(70)

“And you didn’t recognize him as Drew Harrigan then?” Benedetti asked.

“No,” Beata said. “But he really was a mess, a big one by then. He had vomit all over him. He was, I don’t know, the way they get when they die like that. We’ve never done this with the barn before. It was the Cardinal’s idea this year. But we had two deaths before this one anyway. They die—I don’t know how to explain it—they die bereft of humanity.”

“How did you decide he was dead?” Gregor asked.

“I put my head on his chest to hear if I could hear his heart beating, and then I tried to take a pulse. When those didn’t work, I took the back of my crucifix and held it up to his nose. To see if his breath clouded it.”

“Then what did you do?” Gregor asked.

“I asked Joe to stay with the body. I came back into the monastery, told Reverend Mother what had happened, and we called the ambulance. Then I went back to the barn to wait next to the body until the ambulance men came. They came pretty quickly, actually. They don’t usually, for homeless cases. Not when the person is already dead.”

“And the ambulance men came and took the body away,” Gregor said.

“That’s right.”

“And then what?” Gregor asked.

“And then nothing,” Beata said. “It’s as I said, we’d had a couple of others. We send them to the morgue and we pray for them, but after that, we don’t have anything else we can do for them.”

“But you must have heard the news reports, about the disappearance of Sherman Markey,” Gregor said.

“No,” Beata said.

Gregor raised his eyebrows. “It was all over the news, Sister. It was a major story for at least a couple of days.”

“Mr. Demarkian,” Beata said, “you don’t understand what an enclosure is. We don’t have a television here—oh, we have one. It’s in a storeroom on the second floor and Reverend Mother would take it out if the president were assassinated or there was a nuclear attack. It came out after 9/11 for a couple of days. But mostly it just stays in the storeroom. We don’t watch it. We don’t get newspapers. We don’t get magazines. We are on the Internet.”

“Somehow, that figures,” Marbury said.

“But we’re not really on it, the way most people are. We have a Web portal and a Web site and we answer mail. Or, rather, I do, because as an extern sister I have the right to be ‘outside.’ But for a piece of news to penetrate here, it’s got to be a lot more important than the report of the disappearance of a homeless man in Philadelphia. Even one connected to Drew Harrigan and his drug problems. I did notice that Ben had broken up with J. Lo. Or vice versa.”

“I think she walked out on him,” Giametti said helpfully.

Gregor was about to ask if the monastery had had any contact with the physical body after the ambulance had taken it away, if any of them had been asked to try to identify it, for instance, when the sister who had let them in came to the door and tapped lightly.

“I’m sorry to interrupt,” she said, “but there’s a person here, a woman here, saying she’s come to find Mr. Demarkian. I—she’s uh, a little upset, I suppose. She’s very insistent. And I did say you were all busy, but—”

“—You can’t just keep me standing here,” somebody said, and the voice was such a high, wailing shriek, Gregor winced. “Don’t you know who I am? You can’t just keep me standing here like I’m not anybody and you can jerk me around.”

They all turned in the direction of the voice, because it was coming closer. Gregor could hear the sound of needle-sharp heels clacking into the hardwood floor.

“You can’t just keep me standing here,” the voice said again, and then she was there, right in front of them, like a bad joke.





2


Whoever she was, she wasn’t very steady on those high heels. Gregor looked down and saw the ankle straps straining against ankles that weren’t steady enough to wear them gracefully, and then those heels, at least three and a half inches high, and so thin they looked like toothpicks. The rest of the woman seemed to be of a piece. Her hair was improbably blond and improbably enormous. It was the kind of thing women went in for when they were competing to be Miss Mississippi. The earrings were real, though. There was no substitute for emeralds that looked so perfectly like emeralds as those did, especially at that size. The dress and the coat were just odd. They were both conspicuously expensive, but neither of them fit right. The coat was much too large, its heavy, ostentatious fur slipping off her shoulders every time she moved. The dress was much too small, making her hips look larger than they might have and forcing her breasts to strain against the fabric. She reminded Gregor of Marilyn Monroe, except that Monroe was a woman who commanded attention because of her very presence, and this was a woman who commanded attention because she was decked out so freakishly she made her audience uneasy about what she would do next.