Hardscrabble Road(84)

“They have to do that,” Rob Benedetti said to Gregor, coming to stand very close to him as they both watched the extraction. Benedetti didn’t have a hat, either, and he’d forgotten the gloves entirely. “Even if they don’t get a pulse. Even if they know they’re dealing with a corpse. If there aren’t maggots coming out of the thing, they have to get it out and check it out again, just in case. The last thing we want is to end up killing somebody by accident, or not getting them help in time when we could have.”

“Listen,” Gregor said. “I think I saw this cart come in here.”

“What?”

“I was crossing the street to get to the coffee shop, and this man, this tall, thin man—no, let me back up. This tall, thin person. I just assumed it was a man. Anyway, he pushed a shopping cart pretty much like this one into the alley that leads back here. There couldn’t be two of them, could there?”

“I don’t know,” Benedetti said.

They both looked at Marbury and Giametti, now working with two other officers. The body came up from the well like an unruly beach ball, and then suddenly it was stretched out between the men, one holding the arms, the other holding the legs, a third officer propping up the torso at the middle of the back. They put the body down on the ground just as the ambulances came up out on the street, their sirens screaming into the cold like needles. They got down on their hands and knees and began to pump at the man, to check him out, to try the impossible. It was remarkable how automatic that was, trying the impossible. Even combatants in war, coming up on the enemy wounded, often tried to save them rather than kill them off.

Gregor moved close to get a better look at the man. It was definitely not the one he had seen on the street. This man was short, and chunky, even though he was thin enough, probably from addictions and malnutrition. His clothes, though, were not as worn as you might expect them to be. They were dirty, but not torn, and not frayed. The man’s face was a mass of beard, and that made Gregor stop to think. He saw homeless men on the streets every day. Most of them had stubble, at most. Where did they shave? Or did alcohol make a beard stop growing? It hadn’t on this man. His beard was filthy and full of bits of food and dirt, but it was most definitely there. His hair was not. He was close to bald, and he didn’t have a hat.

Tibor came up to Gregor’s side and pulled on his sleeve. Gregor had had no idea he was still there.

“You should go home,” Gregor said. “This is a crime scene, at least presumptively. You can’t walk around in it without tainting the forensics.”

“I’m not walking around in it, Krekor. I only came because I didn’t know where else to go. Do you know who this man is?”

“No, but I’ve got a guess.”

“Your guess is the Sherman Markey person that has been in the papers?”

“Exactly.”

“I came to say you shouldn’t feel guilty about not noticing,” Tibor said. “They look at you and you look away, it’s not because you’re hard-hearted or don’t care what happens to other people. It’s because they can’t be trusted. So many of them are mentally ill, or on drugs or alcohol, you don’t know what they’re going to do. You worry that they’ll get violent.”

“And that’s supposed to be better?”

“Tcha, Krekor. Life is what it is. People are what they are. We are called by God to be stewards of the earth and His people, but that doesn’t make either the earth or His people suitable for a Disney movie. You’re afraid of what will happen if you make eye contact with them. So am I. So are we all. Personal solutions will not work here.”

“You’d better go,” Gregor said. “That’s the ambulance people coming in.”

Tibor nodded slightly and walked away, down the alley, toward the street. Gregor knew what Tibor had been trying to tell him, but it didn’t make him feel any better. There was something, planted deep inside him by a mother who never turned a tramp away from the door, that said he should be better than that.

The ambulance men were not taking long to decide that the body was just that, a body, and not an emergency. They had pulled back to let the forensics team move in. Gregor didn’t remember seeing that team arrive.

“My mother,” Gregor said to Benedetti, “used to feed homeless people. They’d come onto the street, back when the street was less upscale than it is now. It was tenements, really. They’d come and she’d be sitting on the stoop with a big basket, she and all the other women, working on things for dinner. Peeling vegetables. Breaking up bread to use in these Armenian dishes, I don’t even know what to call them. The men would come by and they would give them food. All the time. Except they didn’t call them the homeless, then. They called them tramps.”