Hardscrabble Road(89)

“It seemed like that to me, too,” Gregor said. “But mostly it seemed as if this wasn’t her idea. Would Neil Savage pull this kind of stunt?”

“You mean, ask her to come to us with a list? Maybe. I don’t know what lawyers would do. I never know what Savage is going to do.”

The phone on Benedetti’s desk rang, and he reached for it. Gregor went back to looking at prints on the walls. There were a couple of judges and lawyers, meant to look old. The judges were in wigs. There was one of Clarence Darrow from some newspaper’s editorial cartoon so ancient that the man was hooking his thumbs into his suspenders in front of the jury.

Rob Benedetti put down the phone and said, “Shit.”

“Excuse me?” Gregor said. Here was a difference between the Federal Bureau of Investigation under J. Edgar Hoover and the real world: in the Bureau in those days they had been trained not to swear with more diligence than they had been trained how to shoot, and if they were caught swearing in public they were suspended from duty for two weeks.

Rob Benedetti was staring at his phone and running his hands through his hair. “That was the ME’s office,” he said. “They got the body first thing. They’ve got it up on a slab. In the meantime, there’s something he thinks we need to know.”

“What’s that?” Gregor asked.

“They did a fingerprint check,” Benedetti said. “Whoever that is, it isn’t Sherman Markey.”





TWO



1


When Marla Hildebrande first saw the ID drawing up there on the television screen, her thought was: Oh, God, Frank has robbed a liquor store. Her next thought after that was, simply, that ID drawings were never any good. They never looked like the person the police were looking for. Then she began to feel uneasy. The sound was not on on the set. It never was, on the office set, unless somebody got interested in something and decided to turn it up. Marla was never entirely sure why Frank had the set in the office to begin with. He said he wanted to be ready if there was an assassination. Assassinations were one of those things he thought likely, on general principle. Marla had always secretly believed that he was interested in expanding the operation into cable. It was the kind of thing he would do, and he was young and ambitious, in spite of the lounge-around-the-office-couches-act he liked to put on for employees. That was Princeton. Never let them see you work.

She went across the field of desks to the little control panel for the screen and turned the sound up only slightly. It was past closing time and most of the women who worked in the bullpen were gone. It always bothered Frank that the secretaries and typists went home as soon as the closing bell rang, and Marla had never been able to explain to him about the differences between careers and jobs, or professions and simply earning a living. That was Princeton, too. Marla came from a long line of people who had had jobs and not careers and been more interested in earning a living than establishing a profession. You didn’t drive yourself into the ground physically and emotionally when you weren’t much interested in the job and really only wanted to make enough to pay for the house, and the vacation, and a night out every month at the nearest chain restaurant. Marla had to give Frank this: he never despised those things. They weren’t what he wanted for himself, but he didn’t look down on the people who did want them.

Frank couldn’t have held up a liquor store, she thought, and leaned in to hear what was going on. But the story had changed. The story on the screen now seemed to concern puppies.

Marla had a sudden urge to let it go, as if what she was about to do next was going to determine what that ID drawing meant. She knew you couldn’t change the past. She knew that. She just felt as if she could. She reached out for the controls and flipped to CBS, but the story there was about the presidential campaign, which hadn’t even started yet. She looked long and hard at the face of the Democratic candidate, who wasn’t the Democratic candidate yet, since the convention hadn’t happened, and then switched compulsively to NBC. It felt disloyal, somehow. Frank was devoted to ABC and Peter Jennings. He said he liked his Americans to be Canadians.

NBC had the ID drawing up. Marla turned the sound high, much too high, and then turned it back down again. On the other side of the room, one of the two lone secretaries still at her desk made an annoyed noise and shuffled papers noisily.

“… police are asking the public’s help in identifying this man, found dead this afternoon in an alley near the office of the Philadelphia District Attorney. Originally believed to be a homeless…”

Marla didn’t hear the rest of it. She felt emptied of air. Once, when she was very small, she’d fallen from the top of a slide in Roger’s Park, right next to her house. It wasn’t a high slide, but it was wavy, so you bumped and sank as you went down, and she’d wanted very much to know what it felt like to go down. Then she’d gotten to the top of the ladder, and all of a sudden it had felt completely hypnotic. She was up here, the ground was down there, it was calling to her. The next thing she knew she was on the ground, and she couldn’t breathe. This was like that. She couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t think. She couldn’t move.