“Marbury and Giametti are good officers. It’s not that. It’s that the whole thing is taking too much time. I know. I shouldn’t lose my grip. But from the beginning, the whole thing—when I get my hands on Bruce Williamson, I’m going to kill him.”
“People threaten that all the time,” Gregor said.
“I know,” Rob Benedetti said, “but I mean it. I mean, you know, you absolutely know, that Drew Harrigan could never have been in rehab. If he had been and had gone missing, they would have notified the court. They would have had to. That’s a condition of these things. Always. Which means Bruce Williamson knew that wherever Drew Harrigan was going, it wasn’t rehab.”
“Not necessarily,” Gregor said. “He might just have agreed to rehab without the controls. He isn’t required by law to impose the controls. He’s the judge.”
“He’d have known something was wrong if they didn’t want the controls,” Benedetti said. “I hate these guys, did you know that? Guys like Bruce Williamson. And he isn’t the only one. Guys who are so damned impressed with money and fame that they think they’re doing the right thing running an entirely separate justice system for the big guys. Williamson is not known as an easy judge, did you know that? If you’re a black fifteen-year-old caught with a handful of coke in your pocket, you’re going to jail. If you’re a black sixteen-year-old, you’re going to an adult prison, and to hell with what we all know is going to happen to you there. But if you’re Drew Harrigan, or Alexandra Brand—”
“—Alexandra Brand lives in Philadelphia?”
“She was here filming a movie,” Benedetti said. “Got drunk as a skunk one night at some private club downtown, got in her car, ran a red light, hit a homeless woman pushing around one of those carts, and just up and left the scene.”
“Wait,” Gregor said. “I remember that. I do. It was in the papers non-stop for about three days and then it disappeared.”
“She pled and Williamson gave her probation. No community service, nothing. Just probation. And the old woman was dead. This is the problem, Mr. Demarkian. This is supposed to be a country of laws and not men, and we’re neck deep in a celebrity culture that makes the way the Brits treat royalty look egalitarian. It’s insane.”
“Why didn’t Drew Harrigan plead guilty and get probation?” Gregor asked. “If Williamson will sit still for a movie star who commits a hit-andrun homicide, why wouldn’t he sit still for Harrigan?”
“We weren’t buying,” Benedetti said. “We went in there—I went in there—and told them flat out that I wasn’t going to accept a plea bargain. I was going to insist on going to trial, and if Williamson and Harrigan’s people tried to get around me, I was going to go to the press. That put what’s his name, Savage, that put him up the wall, and there was a guy there from Harrigan’s sponsoring network, LibertyHeart, those people. That guy wasn’t happy, either. Maybe they were worried about the audience.”
“I take it you weren’t around when Alexandra Brand had her problems?”
“No,” Benedetti said, “and she’d have had more problems if I had been. But it’s not just judges like Williamson. It’s some of the cops, too. You know what all that means with Harrigan screaming and yelling. Somebody was paid off. Maybe more than one somebody. The guys don’t even see it as bribery. They’re starstruck. Everybody is. And I guess they don’t see the point in bothering people who matter with what they do to people who don’t, which is what they think of the people who live on the street. Does it bother you that we’ve all seen pictures of this guy Sherman Markey, and I’ve even seen him in person on at least two occasions, and none of us can recognize him when we see him?”
“I’ve never seen pictures of him,” Gregor said.
“Yeah, I know, but it’s like I said. I saw him in person. And if he passed me on the street today, I wouldn’t know who he was. I wouldn’t even begin to know. It’s things like that that get me nuts. This doesn’t even feel like a case, do you know what I mean? If it wasn’t for the Harrigan connection and we found this guy in the alley out back, the entire system would conspire in making us drop it. It isn’t important. These people die all the time. Move on to something that needs to get done.”
The door opened and Marbury and Giametti came in, looking more than a little exasperated.
“It’s not our precinct, and the only reason we’re here is to report back to where we belong,” Giametti was saying. “They’ve got detectives to handle cases like this, and we’ve got a job to do we aren’t doing.”