Hardscrabble Road(97)

“You sound very, very sarcastic.”

“I am feeling very, very sarcastic,” Alison said. “But that’s all I can be. I really don’t know why this started, or why anybody would pick me to start it about. First I was all over the airways. There was even a piece up about me on Matt Drudge’s Web site. Then I was the object of the inquiry. Then the inquiry was called off but I was suddenly on Ellen Harrigan’s list. And, trust me, that one is all over campus by now. I’m going to have to change my name to Red Emma if this keeps up.”

Gregor thought about it. “You never met Drew Harrigan, not even once?”

“Not even once.”

“What about Dr. Tyler, do you know? Had he met him?”

“You’d have to ask him,” Alison said, “but I think he had. But that makes sense, doesn’t it? Dr. Tyler writes political books, lots of them, so far off the left end of the spectrum they’re practically on Mars. The evil corporations are brainwashing us all to believe we really want to eat hamburgers instead of raw vegetables and tofu on whole grain bread. The United States planned and carried out the 9/11 attacks itself, to give the government the excuse to restrict civil liberties. Drew Harrigan had something about Jig Tyler on nearly every broadcast. But I’ve just been sitting here, worried about Thomas Aquinas and the concept of property in twelfth-century Britain.”

“Had you ever met Ellen Harrigan?”

“No,” Alison said. “And from what I could see, I wouldn’t want to.”

“Is she right? Did you have a motive for wanting her husband dead?”

“Well, I was being investigated by the university, and that investigation did disappear as soon as Drew Harrigan’s body was found; but it would have disappeared anyway, because I had every intention of filing a suit, and the university wouldn’t risk that kind of publicity unless it had a lot stronger evidence against me than anything it could have had. I would think that, to kill somebody, you’d have to be desperate, and I wasn’t desperate.”

“What about Dr. Tyler? Would he have had a reason to want Drew Harrigan dead?”

“If you believe his books, he wants half the world dead. I don’t know, really. You’d have to ask him. I’ve met him exactly once, and that was yesterday, when the news came out that it was Drew Harrigan who’d died, and not that homeless man. He walked over here to tell me about it.”

“Why?”

“To offer commiseration from a fellow sufferer, I suppose,” Alison said. “Maybe he just wanted to see what I looked like after all the reports. Anyway, that’s the only time I ever set eyes on him in the flesh. I really couldn’t tell you much about him, not even what he was like. He seemed nice enough here yesterday. He seems anything but nice on television.”

“One more thing,” Gregor said. “This accusation by a student, did it actually have to exist? Did there actually have to be a student making a complaint? If you weren’t allowed to question your accusers, what would stop the administration from claiming that such a complaint had been made in order to, I don’t know, harass you, force you out of your job?”

“The answer is nothing, I suppose, but why would they want to? I’m not a thorn in anybody’s side that I know of. I don’t have an endowed chair that somebody else might want. I don’t get involved in politics, campus or otherwise, or at least I didn’t before all this started. Why would anybody want to go to the trouble?”

“I don’t know,” Gregor said.

And it was true. He didn’t. He had no idea where this line of questioning was going. It was just that here was one more thing that had no reason to be here, one more complication for the sake of complication. He didn’t like it.

What he did like was Alison Standish, and under other circumstances he would have offered to buy her dinner.





2


Most of Cavanaugh Street was dark by the time Gregor Demarkian got back, a three-block stretch of quiet in a city that had recently become so revitalized he sometimes thought it was threatening to turn into New York. There was light spilling out of the Ararat, but he never went there after eight in the evening anymore. There were too many tourists looking around for “exotic” food, and for him. That was what happened when your life became the subject of newspaper articles over and above the ones that reported the cases you were involved in or the testimony you gave at trials. Bennis would understand this. Bennis had spent a good deal of her life being an object of public curiosity. That was something you wanted to happen to you when you wrote books and wanted to sell as many of them as possible, which Bennis did. She took great pride in how many bestseller lists she’d been on and how long she’d been on them. But Bennis wasn’t home, and he was damned—he really was—if he was going to go rushing up to the apartment to see if she’d left a message on his answering machine. She hadn’t left a message on his answering machine now for over ten days, and he’d checked for one far too often.