Hardscrabble Road(9)

“I can imagine.”

“So we stepped in,” Chickie said. “We would defend him if he was guilty or not, that isn’t the issue. The issue is competent representation. So we got him out on bail, cleaned him up, got him a room at an SRO—I know, we should have done better, but it was all we could afford—and then we filed a lawsuit for him against Drew Harrigan for defamation. Kate Daniel suggested it about the same time she suggested she come down here and handle this herself. It was a smart move.”

“Kate Daniel is here?” Gregor said. “Handling your defense of Markey?”

“Handling the lawsuit, mostly,” Chickie said. “It really was a smart move. It meant we could be playing offense, which is damned hard to do when your client is a homeless alcoholic and the opposition is a national media star. Anyway, that’s where we were as of two weeks ago. Harrigan was incommunicado in rehab. Sherman was suing. Kate was making life hell for everybody in the office. And then Sherman disappeared.”

“Disappeared,” Gregor repeated. “You mean he took off? He made bail and decided not to hang around and see if he was going to go to jail?”

“You see, that’s it,” Chickie said. “With somebody else, that would have been the first thing I thought of, too. But Sherman isn’t somebody else. You asked me if I thought he was innocent. Well, I do. You’d have to meet him to understand. It’s six of one, half dozen of the other that he’s got the start of cirrhosis of the liver. He can’t think straight from one moment to the next. He forgets things. Hell, he forgets where he is, sometimes. He’s got one thing on his mind and that’s getting enough alcohol to keep himself anesthetized. I can’t see him working out a schedule of pharmacies to go to to make sure he didn’t go to any one so often that he’d be suspected of being an OxyContin addict. And even if you say Harrigan worked out the schedule himself and just sent Sherman, I can’t see the pharmacies serving him. This is not your poster boy for the homeless problem. He drinks, and he not only drinks, he smells. He doesn’t bathe. He doesn’t brush his teeth. He doesn’t use deodorant. It would cost money he’d rather spend on wine.

“You hear all that stuff about the hard-core homeless. Sherman is it. We put him up in an SRO, but we knew he wouldn’t stay. He won’t stay more than a single night in the shelters, either. Those places have rules. They have to. Sherman doesn’t like the rules, because they always mean he can’t drink on the premises. I can’t see Sherman remembering which pharmacy Harrigan told him to go to, not for ten minutes. I can’t see him taking cash—that’s what Harrigan claims, that he gave Sherman cash—and going to a pharmacy and buying drugs. He’d get distracted by a liquor store. I can’t imagine the pharmacist selling him OxyContin, and I can’t imagine a doctor prescribing it for him. The whole scenario is completely bogus. And so is the idea that he would deliberately skip town to avoid the legal hassles. Mr. Demarkian, ten minutes after we got him out of jail, he didn’t remember he had legal hassles. He’s not that mentally coherent.”

Tibor was listening now. “And this person is left to roam the streets?” He seemed stunned.

Chickie George shrugged. “Involuntary commitment is a form of incarceration. You can’t just run around committing people for their own good. There are all kinds of issues involved there.”

“Let’s not worry about false imprisonment at the moment,” Gregor said. “You say he’s missing. Since when?”

“The morning of January twenty-eighth, at least. It might have been earlier, but we went looking for him on the morning of January twenty-eighth, and he was nowhere to be found.”

“Where did you look?”

“We checked his SRO. We should have found him a better place. He might have stayed. But we didn’t have the money, and he’d probably have ended up getting evicted anyway. He can get pretty damned odd on alcohol.”

“Where else did you look?”

“We checked the homeless shelters,” Chickie said. “Actually, those got checked twice. Ray Dean Ballard had his people looking out for Sherman the night before. That would have been the twenty-seventh. They weren’t making a systematic search, though. They were just keeping an eye out for him. We’d just bought him these new, clean clothes and gotten him spruced up a little because of the case. He had a bright red hat. We thought he’d be easy to spot.”

“Who’s Ray Dean Ballard?”

“He’s the guy who runs Philadelphia Sleeps. They’re a homeless service. They run a few shelters, but mostly they run vans to try to get people to go into shelters, especially in this weather. Same thing with soup kitchens, getting social services, getting legal help. They had vans out that night because it was lethally cold, and they had their people looking out for Sherman. And they didn’t find him.”