Rob Benedetti was on his feet. They were all on their feet, even Sister Beata. Sister Beata looked as if she were about to be asked to throw the woman out, or as if she wanted to.
Rob Benedetti said, “It’s Mrs. Harrigan, isn’t it? What are you doing here?”
“Looking for Mr. Demarkian,” Ellen Harrigan said. “Mr. Armenian-American Hercule Poirot. I called his place and there wasn’t anybody there. So then I called Commissioner Jackman. You wouldn’t believe how much it took me to find out he was here. You probably think I’m stupid. Everybody thinks I’m stupid. But I’m here.”
“Is there something in particular you want to see me about?” Gregor asked.
Ellen Harrigan turned to face him, looking him up and down. Gregor was interested to note that the looking over didn’t bother him at all. This woman really had no force of personality at all. She was like a gigantic doll. Even her rampages made little or no impression.
She dropped the coat off her shoulders, onto the floor. Gregor got the impression that she made a habit of dropping her clothes on the floor, the sort of thing that Bennis, who had been born and raised rich as sin, would never do. This one not only dropped her coat, she stepped on it. Shades of Barbra Streisand’s first television special.
“I’ve brought a list,” she said. “That bitch at the office said you think I’m a suspect, so I brought a list.”
“A list of what?” Gregor asked.
“A list of all the people who wanted Drew dead,” Ellen Harrigan said. “There are a lot of them. Liberals. Communists, some of them. Traitors. You wouldn’t believe it. They all wanted him dead.”
“Your husband was a public man,” Gregor said carefully, “but at least the way this stands right now, there really isn’t the likelihood that the perpetrator will turn out to be somebody who only knew your husband through his radio program. It’s more likely, you see—”
“—I’m not talking about people who knew Drew only through his radio program,” Ellen Harrigan said. “I’m talking about people who hated him. His syndicators, for one thing. And Jig fucking Tyler. The smartest man in the world. Smarter than all the rest of us. And that woman who works with him who has a Communist cell and makes all her students join it. And that Southern freak over at the homeless people. They all wanted him dead. All of them. You’re not going to make me a suspect just because I’m not politically correct.”
Gregor Demarkian no longer had the faintest idea what this woman was talking about, but he did know one thing.
She was dead drunk.
SIX
1
Alison Standish saw the interoffice envelope on her desk and the man sitting in the chair near the bookcases at the same time, and for a moment she thought the sight of the man was stranger than the sight of the envelope. She was in her coat and had a cup of coffee in her hand. She’d picked it up at a place a few streets away that didn’t use branded cardboard cups to put their take-out coffee in, because she’d learned long ago that she was useless at figuring out what was and was not an acceptable place to buy coffee. Starbucks was out, because it was a large corporation, and it didn’t matter that it hadn’t been a large corporation twenty years ago. Other places were out because they were just too downscale. It wasn’t all right to buy a cup of something nameless from a local deli. Still other places were out because they served “Free Trade” rather than “Fair Trade” coffee, which mattered to people, although Alison couldn’t straighten out why. Coffee tasted like coffee to her. She was sure there were special kinds, with hidden subtleties of flavor, that she could have if she was willing to spend a lot more money than she wanted to to get her caffeine fix in the morning. She was equally sure that the politics of coffee was intricate and nuanced, that many coffee growers in South America treated their workers as no better than slaves, that coffee-growing co-operatives were ready and able to sell her coffee if she was ready and able to pay the extra price it would cost to pay people decently. Hell, she was even ready and able to pay the extra price it would cost to pay people decently. The problem was, she could never keep the brand names straight. She ended up walking down the long halls to her office carrying something that blazed out her lack of sensitivity, her lack of awareness, her lack of political commitment. At least that last part was true. The only thing Alison Standish was politically committed to was Pope Leo IV, and he had died in 855 CE.
The man was vaguely familiar, Alison wasn’t really sure why. She wasn’t paying much attention, because it had suddenly struck her that the envelope was very odd indeed. Interoffice mail came to her mailbox, not her desk. And the last thing the departmental secretaries had any interest in doing was delivering mail to the offices of individual professors.