“Why not call him now?”
“Because it’s late,” Kate said. “It’s very late. If he’s home, he’s going to want to rest, or he’s going to be already resting. If he’s not home, he’s not in a place where I can talk to him in peace. I’ll call him first thing in the morning. Get me the number. You were the one who said he wakes up early every day to have breakfast at some restaurant.”
“At the Ararat on Cavanaugh Street at seven,” Chickie George said. He hesitated. “All right. I suppose. I’m not happy about the delay, but I suppose. But no later than that. If he still doesn’t know by tomorrow afternoon, I’m going to tell him.”
“How will you know if he knows?”
“I’ll ask him.” Chickie leaned forward and took the notepad that sat beside the telephone—another guest-lawyer note, Kate thought, another message from the land of the secretaries. Chickie took the pen out of the inside said. pocket of his jacket and wrote the number on the pad. “There it is,” he said. “You don’t even need an area code.”
Kate picked up the notepad and put it squarely in the middle of the felt blotter. “First thing tomorrow morning,” she said. “I get in here at seven anyway.”
Chickie stood up. “It’s the one thing I don’t like about public interest law,” he said. “Too many of the people who do it seem to assume that the world is full of enemies, and offense is the only defense they can play.”
“The world is full of enemies,” Kate said. “The fact that human nature won’t allow the revolution to succeed won’t change that.”
“I’ve got to go downstairs and do some work on the single-room occupancy thing,” Chickie said. “The people who are on the other side of that aren’t enemies. They’re just trying to do what they’re trying to do.”
“Trying to throw the poor into the street and let them starve?”
“You don’t believe that any more than I do,” Chickie said. “Never mind. I’m going to go work. First thing tomorrow morning, or I do it myself.”
Kate waited patiently as Chickie left the office and went down the hall.
He was very young and very angry, and it wasn’t certain that he’d learn to understand all the things she had learned to understand in the long years since she’d left Philadelphia and stopped being a society wife.
She waited until she was sure he must have gone down the stairs, that he couldn’t possibly be about to pop back in again to give her one more part of this lecture. Then she pulled the piece of paper with Gregor Demarkian’s phone number on it off the notepad and tore it into very tiny pieces.
She didn’t know what she would say to Chickie tomorrow afternoon, but she would think of something. She had no intention of giving up what little advantage she had in this case just because Chickie George thought Gregor Demarkian was “a good guy.”
THREE
1
It had been a long day, and not a good one, and Gregor Demarkian wanted to walk. It was what he usually did to clear his mind. He hated being in truly rural areas for very long, because there were no sidewalks, and walking any length in any direction was difficult. He hated bad weather, for that very reason, although he’d gone long distances in heavy rain and moderate snow. He left Rob Benedetti’s office after it was already dark and realized, in less than a block and a half, that this was never going to work. He didn’t mind wind, but he minded it when it pushed hard cold at him like needles. All his joints had begun to ache. His neck felt stiff enough to snap off his body like a plastic pearl on one of those little add-a-pearl necklaces the girls used to have when he was a child. He knew he was in trouble when he started thinking about himself when he was a child. Other people were sentimental about their childhoods. He was not. Growing up poor was either a lifelong ticket to neurosis or a prelude to something else, and he had the something else.
He stepped into a tiny hole-in-the-wall magazine store just to get out of the cold and think. There was a television on the wall showing the news, and the story that was up was the one about Frank Sheehy. Gregor could still hear the noise in Rob Benedetti’s office when the confirmation had come through, but he didn’t want to think about that, either. There was something all wrong about this case. He just couldn’t put a finger on what it was. Everything was sideways. Nothing fit what it should. He wished he knew something more about Drew Harrigan, but when he asked people he got nothing more than clichés and nothing less than venom. To know him—or to know of him—was to hate him. That was clear. What wasn’t clear was the personality behind the bombast. It was as if the man had been invented, from scratch, out of old bits and pieces of political speeches.