Hardscrabble Road(77)
“Is? Does that mean you’ve found him?”
“Sorry,” Kate said. “Is or was. No, we haven’t found him. And yes, I do know that that means he might be dead. My concern is with what happens if he isn’t.”
“And what happens?”
“He gets handed a murder charge,” Kate said. She looked up from her tea, to the door. “She’s an idiot, obviously. And she’s tacky, and stupid, and all the other things Republicans like you can’t stand. But she’s also very well connected, and she’s rich, and she’s just gone on television and behaved like Joe McCarthy naming names in the United States Senate to take the heat off herself on the subject of the very same murder. I don’t trust you. Not any of you. And I don’t want Sherman arrested for murder.”
“Even if he committed it?”
The cup and saucer they had given Kate for her tea were from the antique Royal Doulton set. The cup was sized for someone who took tea seriously, not as a ladies’ modest substitution for coffee. Kate put the cup into the saucer and sat back.
“Have you ever met Sherman Markey?”
“No,” Neil said. “I’ve seen him on the news. I saw him when he was arrested.”
“He was probably being walked through a bunch of people with his hands behind his back. I haven’t met Sherman Markey either, but my intern has, and he’s adamant. The man’s hands shake. He’s a longtime drunk. His hands might as well have palsy. From everything I’ve heard on the news, Drew Harrigan was murdered because somebody dumped out the insides of his prescription painkillers and refilled them with arsenic. Never mind the fact that with everything I’ve heard about Sherman, he’d be incapable of getting little pills like that open and shut again. If he tried to fill them with arsenic, he’d get the stuff all over himself and he’d be dead before he could deliver the load. Sherman Markey didn’t kill Drew Harrigan.”
“Do you think Ellen Harrigan did?”
“I think that I don’t want Ellen Harrigan to get off the hook by plugging it into a sick old homeless man whose only crime so far was to have done a few chores around Drew Harrigan’s co-op. I don’t want you to use him to help her.”
“Do you really think we’d try to pin a murder on an innocent person just to placate someone like Ellen Harrigan?”
“I think that one thing hasn’t changed since I walked out on you, Neil. I think that the primary business of this place and all the places like it is to look after the interests of the boys in the club. And the girls. I think you’ll do what you need to do to make sure your people are untouched, just the way you always have. Thanks for the tea. It’s damned near impossible to get decent tea in the United States. They don’t know how to make it.”
“Is that what you’re going to do? Walk out on me again? I thought we were talking.”
“We’ve said what we need to say,” Kate said. “And besides, the canary is shrieking again. Lord, doesn’t that woman have a vocal register anywhere within the range of ordinary human hearing?”
Kate was out of her chair. The cup and saucer were back on the cart. She got her briefcase off the floor—Good God, Neil thought, I didn’t even see her bring that in—and leaned over to kiss him on the cheek.
“It really was good to see you, Neil. And it’s oddly comforting to realize that you really haven’t changed.”
Then she was gone, and Neil was sitting by himself in the big, high-ceilinged room, listening to Ellen Harrigan’s voice keening and scratching in the distance. If it was up to him, he would get rid of her. He wouldn’t even consider taking her on as a client. If it was up to him, he’d get rid of all of them, the business people who’d gotten rich in the last thirty years dealing cars or oil or everything in the world at bargain basement prices, the owners of the chains and the superstores and the fast-food places, the people who never went to college and were proud of it, or who went and had no use for any of the things they were supposed to learn there except maybe for accounting. He’d dump the hard-eyed women with their treacly stories about Good Families and Daily Miracles and Traditional Values. He’d dump the fat, soft pastors from Southern churches who wanted to sue the Library of Congress for carrying copies of Bertrand Russell’s Why I Am Not a Christian, and their fat, soft wives with their endless tales about the joys of washing dishes and cleaning out closets for the sake of their families. He’d get rid of all the fat people altogether, all of them, every single one of those people who ate too much bad food and covered it up with polyester and rayon from Wal-Mart and J. C. Penney. He’d make white Christian music illegal and Touched by an Angel unconstitutional. He’d do something, but he would not represent Ellen Harrigan for any reason at all.