Hardscrabble Road(88)

“I thought our job was to bring the bad guys in to justice,” Marbury said. “Whoever killed this guy is a bad guy, and he’s connected to our bad guy, he probably is our bad guy. You don’t have enough imagination. The city isn’t divided up into little grids that are completely sealed off from each other. Bad guys go from one precinct to the other all the time. If we get stuck in the bureaucratic maze, we won’t get anything done.”

Gregor gave a moment’s thought to the fact that the lines of jurisdiction were becoming hopelessly blurred. The one constant in this case, the one person who arguably had the right to be in it who was actually following it, was John Jackman, and he was keeping very carefully in the background. Gregor didn’t think that the precinct where Drew Harrigan had actually died had detectives on the job yet. He didn’t know if they knew they were supposed to.

Benedetti waved Marbury and Giametti into seats. “I’ve been complaining about celebrity justice,” he said.

Marbury shrugged. “Everybody does it. If we’d gone along the night we picked up Drew Harrigan, we wouldn’t all be sitting here now. And at least two people probably wouldn’t be dead.”

“You don’t know that,” Giametti said. “You don’t know what this guy died of. You know what it’s like with these guys. They die all the time. We don’t know he was murdered.”

“If he wasn’t murdered, why push the cart into the alley and then call us up to find it?” Gregor said.

Giametti shrugged. “Maybe he died where somebody didn’t want him found, but that doesn’t mean he was murdered. He could have just been somewhere, with somebody, who’d rather we didn’t know…something.”

Gregor thought about it. “What about the phone call?” he said. “Who took the phone call?”

“Carol in the outer office did,” Benedetti said. “The phone rang, she picked it up, she did her usual thing with ‘District Attorney’s Office,’ or however she says it. Some guy said he had a message for ‘her boss,’ by which she presumed he meant me, and then he said that we ought to look out back because there was a dead body on our doorstep. She’s a bright woman. She asked him to hold. He didn’t buy it. He hung up.”

“Did she get the number?” Gregor asked.

“We always get the number,” Rob Benedetti said. “We’ve got the kind of caller ID system an ordinary citizen couldn’t buy if his life depended on it. We’ve got the number. It’s going to turn out to be a public pay phone, probably in the neighborhood. If I was this guy, I’d go use the one right down there on the street.”

“I wouldn’t,” Gregor said. “Remember, I saw him. He was dressed to look like a homeless man. Is that usual, homeless men using public pay phones?”

“The thing is,” Benedetti said, “he might not really have been dressed to look like anything. You see a guy with a cart—”

Gregor thought about it. “Okay, possible. I did pay more attention to the cart.”

“I’d really like to see a study done on what it is about people that makes us tag them as homeless on the street,” Rob Benedetti said. “I know they did a study where somebody went out to Grand Central in New York dressed really nicely and asked for money, and people gave it to him by the fistful, where they wouldn’t give it to the people who looked like they obviously needed it. I think the cart would have been enough.”

“Maybe,” Gregor said. “I’ll admit I can’t remember a thing about the man except that he was tall, and I don’t really know he was a man. It was just a general impression. I wish I knew where Drew Harrigan has been these last four weeks or whatever it was.”

“Me, too,” Benedetti said.

“I wish I knew more about Ellen Harrigan and her list,” Gregor said. “Did that strike you, that that wasn’t the kind of list you’d expect a woman like that to make up herself? Jig Tyler, okay, he’s a celebrity himself. He goes on television. But that other one, that Alison Standish. She might be important at the university, I don’t know. But she’s not—well, quite frankly, she’s not the kind of woman I’d have expected a woman like Ellen Harrigan ever to have heard of. And then there are some of the others. Ray Dean Ballard does what, runs an organization that works with the homeless? Would she have known who he was? Why?”

“Good question,” Benedetti said. “Ballard isn’t even one of the people Harrigan went after on his show. Most of the others are, except for Marla Hildebrande, who does the scheduling for LibertyHeart. What’ve we got?” He looked around the top of his desk and pulled a sheet of paper from the mess. “Jig Tyler. Alison Standish. Ray Dean Ballard. Marla Hildebrande. Kate Daniel. That’s Kate Daniel of the Justice Project, by the way. I assume Ellen Harrigan knew who she was, if only because she was the one spearheading the effort to sue Drew Harrigan on behalf of Sherman Markey. Sherman Markey isn’t on the list, though. That’s interesting. It seemed to me that Ellen Harrigan was blaming Sherman for everything.”