Fighting Chance: A Gregor Demarkian Novel (Gregor Demarkian series Book 29)
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“That’s the kind of thing we were hoping you could tell us,” Dickson Greer said.
“I think it borders on being insane,” Gregor said.
“I think it borders on being perverse,” John said. “But here we are. George and Dick will take you to see some people. We’ll give you all the information we’ve got, one way or the other. But we’re all going to be breaking forty laws at once, and if we’re not really careful, we’re all going to end up in jail. We may all end up there anyway if Tibor turns out to be guilty. So watch your ass and try like hell to watch ours.”
FIVE
1
Petrak Maldovanian didn’t have an alarm clock. Instead, he had his aunt Sophie, who was to schedules what Genghis Khan had been to invading Asia. Petrak had never met anyone, ever, who could arrange her life so perfectly that it never deviated from the original plan. Even in an emergency—and Aunt Sophie had five children of her own—she seemed to be operating on some kind of flight plan.
There were definitely advantages to being as organized as Aunt Sophie was. Petrak had learned a lot since he came to live with her. His grades were better and his health was better and he was calmer than ever before. He’d even begun to lose the hair-trigger temper he’d been famous for back in Armenia. Before he’d lived with Aunt Sophie, he’d have said that a temper was something nobody could control. You had a temper, and you and everybody else had to live with it.
The problem with Aunt Sophie’s organization was that it didn’t stop when you needed it to, and this morning Petrak very much needed it to.
He’d been afraid the barrage of inconvenient questions was going to start the night before, but Aunt Sophie had been almost completely silent from the time they came back from the courthouse to the time they went to bed. She hadn’t insisted that Petrak double-check his homework. She hadn’t even looked in on him to make sure he was doing it. There had been something eerie about the way she flitted silently through the apartment, hardly banging the pots and pans when she washed up after dinner.
She was banging the pots and pans now, though. Petrak had been listening to her for half an hour. First there’d be a rustle-rustle-rustle sound as she moved across the kitchen floor. Then there’d be a hard metallic thwack as she slammed a pan down on the stove. The first of the thwacks was the larger frying pan. The second was the smaller one. She must be making bacon and eggs.
“Petrak!” she called up in her flat American voice. “You can’t waste any more time. You have to get to school.”
Petrak did, indeed, have to get to school. With somebody else besides Aunt Sophie, he could have pretended to oversleep and then rushed out the front door in too much of a hurry to answer any questions. Aunt Sophie never overslept, and she didn’t believe in other people oversleeping.
“Petrak!”
Petrak launched himself out of bed and headed for the hall. “Have to take a shower!” he called. Then he raced into the bathroom. He turned the water on. He threw his clothes on the floor. He’d barely managed to get his hair wet when she was at the bathroom door, pounding.
“Petrak, I want you out here right this minute. I want you downstairs so that I can talk to you.”
There was, Petrak realized, nothing he could do. Aunt Sophie had never walked in on him while he was in the shower, but he wouldn’t put it past her, and he could hear that she was scorching mad. This was his fault, but it didn’t make anything any better.
“Just a minute,” he said.
He applied as much soap as he thought he could get away with. Then he got out from under the water, turned it off, and wrapped a towel around his middle.
He was sure he would find Aunt Sophie in the hall when he got out, but he was wrong. The hall was empty. The sound of rustling and banging was coming up from the kitchen.
Petrak went back to his room, carefully selected perfectly clean clothes so that Aunt Sophie didn’t have anything extra to yell about, and got dressed.
He appeared downstairs two minutes later, wearing a black and yellow rugby shirt that was going to make him a target at school all day.
He sat down at the little round breakfast table. “Good morning,” he said.
She’d had her back to him as she was working at the stove. Now she whirled around and glared, and he realized that he had spoken in Armenian without thinking about it.
“I’ve told you,” she said.
“Yes,” Petrak said. “Yes. I’m sorry, Aunt Sophie. I’m a little tired.”
Aunt Sophie turned back to the stove. “I left a message on Mr. Donahue’s answering machine. So that we can find out when Stefan will have his new hearing. They can’t keep him waiting in jail forever, even if somebody did die.”
“Yes,” Petrak said. There didn’t seem to be any point in pointing out that it wasn’t just that somebody was dead, but that somebody had been murdered.
Aunt Sophie got a plate from the cabinet and put it in front of him. She got one of the frying pans from the stove and dumped a pile of scrambled eggs out of it. She got the other frying pan from the stove and offered him the bacon.
Petrak took four pieces. Aunt Sophie was apt to go on about how he ate too much, but also about how he ate too little.
When she was done serving out his food, she sat down across from him. She already had a cup of coffee. He hadn’t noticed it before. She held the coffee cup entirely surrounded by her hands and said, “Well.”
“Well” was not a good sign.
“I don’t think we have to worry about it taking forever,” Petrak said, proceeding cautiously. “I think—”
“Where did you go when you left the courtroom?”
There it was. Here was something else about Aunt Sophie. She never beat around the bush. It was one of the phrases he thought of as “speaking American.”
“Petrak,” Aunt Sophie said.
“I went to look for Mr. Donahue,” Petrak said. “He was gone so long.”
“You went where to look for Mr. Donahue?”
It took everything Petrak had not to shrug. Aunt Sophie hated shrugs.
“I went out into the vestibule where the guard was.”
“And that was it? You just went there? Because that’s not what I heard from the police.”
Petrak pushed food around his plate. “I went out past the guard and looked around. There was a hallway with some people in it and I went down there for a while. Not very far. I really didn’t go very far.”
“You were in the room with Father Tibor before I got there,” Aunt Sophie said. “I heard that woman screaming and I went looking for you and then the police stopped me, and it turned out you were in the room. How did you get in the room?”
“I heard the screaming, too. I was in the hall and somebody started screaming, it was around a corner in another hall, and everybody started running for there, so I went.”
“Did it occur to you at all that it might not be a good idea to go running right for there? That if somebody was screaming, it couldn’t mean anything good?”
“Maybe somebody was hurt,” Petrak said. “Maybe they needed help.”
“I’d like to believe that was your motivation, but I don’t. You do understand that that place almost certainly had security cameras, and that you’ve got to be on them? In the wrong place at the wrong time. And you didn’t find Mr. Donahue.”
“I did find Mr. Donahue,” Petrak said. “He was in the room with the screaming woman and, you know—”
“The dead body,” Aunt Sophie said.
“There were a lot of other people there,” Petrak said. “And there were a lot of people in the hallway in no time. They just came pouring in from everywhere. Except this one guy who went out a side door. I told the police about him. I thought he could be the murderer.”
“A guy who went out the side door.”
“I think he went out the door. He went around the corner to one of the back hallways. He was very strange.”
“Very strange,” Aunt Sophie said.
“Because she was going to send your only brother to jail?”
“Tcha,” Petrak said. “Mr. Donahue said we were going to find a way to stop that. She wasn’t going to send Stefan to jail. And she can’t do it now anyway, and maybe we’ll get a better judge.”
“Petrak.”
“I don’t care,” Petrak said. “And I did see a man, a man in a suit, and he was going away. So if the police talk to me, that’s what I’m going to say. And don’t say they’ll think I’m lying. I’m not lying.”
“You lied about Stefan being here legally,” Aunt Sophie said.
Petrak got up. He had to get out. He had to go to class.
“I’ll go see Mr. Donahue when I’m finished at school,” he said.
Then he bolted upright, grabbed his backpack from the kitchen counter, and bolted out the door.
2
Russ Donahue hadn’t slept all night. He hadn’t even pretended to sleep. He lay down in bed just for a little while, feeling Donna wide awake and trying not to be restless beside him. Then he got up and went into the living room to pace.
The living room of his house took up most of the second floor, leaving the ground floor to the foyer, the kitchen, and the dining room. From the big living room window, Russ could look down on Cavanaugh Street in the dark, and count the houses and apartments of the people he knew.
He’d moved onto the street when he’d married Donna and adopted her son, Tommy. He could remember almost everything that had happened in the years since. He and Donna had their own son now. He was very happy with that, even though he knew Donna would have preferred a daughter. There should be plenty of time for daughters. Donna was young. He was young. In the ordinary course of things, even the bills would clear up, go down, get better.
He couldn’t get his mind off the fact that this was not the ordinary course of things. If the worst happened, if the very worst happened, if Tibor were convicted of murder and sent away to prison, or sent to the electric chair—
Russ didn’t know how to calculate things like that. He would say them to himself the way he did with all his clients who were in serious trouble, but instead of thinking through the options, his mind just came to a stop. He kept seeing Tibor on the floor of that room with the gavel raised over his head. The blood was everywhere. The blood was on Tibor and on himself and on the furniture and on the books in the bookshelves.
And Tibor’s eyes were staring right at him, absolutely flat, absolutely expressionless, absolutely dead.
Donna came out after a while and sat down in one of the big armchairs. She was good about things like this. She didn’t nag. She didn’t prod. She did worry, though, and Russ could feel it.
“You can’t make this all your fault,” she said to him. “If he won’t talk to you, he won’t talk to you.”
“I know,” Russ said.
“He won’t talk to Gregor, either. I talked to Bennis. Gregor is going crazy.”
“I know,” Russ said again.
“You can’t do this,” Donna said. “You’ll make yourself sick. What if you make yourself too sick to work and then he does want to talk to you? What will happen then?”
“He won’t want to talk to me,” Russ said. “You didn’t see him. You didn’t see his eyes.”
“I saw that damned video,” Donna said. “I saw that.”
“You can’t see his eyes in the video,” Russ said.
And that was true.
But it didn’t matter what was true.
And when morning came, Russ left the living room and went upstairs to the master bedroom and took a shower.
If he’d expected the shower to shake him out of the mood he was in, he’d have been mistaken. But he hadn’t expected any such thing. He was numb from head to foot. He thought he could stick a needle into his side and not even notice.
When he came down from showering and dressing and behaving as if nothing were the matter, Donna was waiting for him in the kitchen with a cup of coffee, a glass of orange juice, and his briefcase.
“I didn’t cook anything,” she said. “You’re acting as if you wouldn’t want it. But I will cook something. You only have to say the word.”
“I’m late for the office.”
Donna kissed him. Russ was sure she had. He couldn’t feel it, but he saw her lean over toward his cheek. The boys were not up. That was very odd. They usually woke very early, far earlier than he did himself. Of course, they had both been very restless the night before. Tommy had watched the news, and he was smart enough to understand it. The baby was just good at picking up signals that something was wrong, and when he did, he fussed.
Russ got out of the house as quickly as he could and into his car and then downtown, down to where the traffic was. He loved the sound of the traffic. It made him feel almost instantly better. The whole world had not stopped. There were still people going places.
When he got upstairs, the receptionist was at the front desk, looking bright and blond. The secretaries were typing away in the peripheral offices. The door to Mac Cafton’s office was open, and Mac was standing at the side of his desk, waiting.
Mac Cafton was Russ’s almost-new partner. They’d been together for less than four years, but before that, they worked together for years in a large multi-partner firm that they had both hated. When they had decided to go out on their own, going on together seemed a better idea than trying to fly solo. It had not, however, been easy, and Mac was always on the verge of bleeding ulcers.
Mac moved toward the reception area as soon as he saw Russ come in. Russ gave up any thought of getting into his own office without a conversation.
“Hey,” Mac said.
“Hey,” Russ said.
“You want to come in? I’ve been worried about you.”
The receptionist flashed him yet another big smile. Russ made himself go into Mac’s office.
Mac closed the door behind him. “I have been worried about you,” he said. “You were a mess when you went home yesterday and you look like you’re a mess now.”
“I am,” Russ said. “I’m sorry. I just can’t wrap my head around it.”
“You can go home for the day, if you want,” Mac said. “Or just hang around here and take it easy. I can handle most of what needs to be handled. I don’t know how your clients will feel about having to deal with me instead of you, but we can work around that if we’re careful.”
Russ shook his head. “No. Thank you, but no. I’ve got to snap myself out of this sooner or later. Donna asked me this morning what I would do if Tibor suddenly changed his mind and wanted to see me and I was too sick to do anything about it. I suppose she had a point.”
“I tried to talk to Tibor myself about an hour ago.”
“Did you? How did it go?”
“No joy,” Mac said. “Got told by a very polite policewoman that he wasn’t interested.”
“You should have expected that,” Russ said. “It’s not just me he isn’t talking to. He wouldn’t talk to a public defender, either.”
“I remember, but people can be odd about this kind of thing. I thought he might not want a public defender, because he didn’t want a public defender. And I thought he might not want to talk to you because he was embarrassed.”
“Embarrassed?”
“I know you’re convinced that he couldn’t have committed that murder, but there is an awful lot of circumstantial evidence, and some that’s more than circumstantial. I thought maybe he just didn’t want to talk to his friends, because he wasn’t ready to make explanations yet. I thought maybe he’d take me as his attorney because I was somebody he knew but not somebody he knew well.”
“Okay,” Russ said. “I guess that makes some kind of sense. But he wouldn’t talk to you.”
“He would not.”
; “He can’t keep doing this,” Russ said. “There are formalities. There will have to be an arraignment—”
“In about an hour and a half,” Mac said. “At least, that’s when it’s on the schedule. I’ve had Bonnie checking. Usually the guy has a lawyer and if there are people who are concerned, they find out the whens and wheres through him, but in this case—”
“Yes,” Russ said. “In this case.”
“You’d better be ready for the thing to be a zoo,” Mac said. “Jenn’s been fielding calls from reporters all morning. I saw Cavanaugh Street on the news last night.”
“I didn’t watch the news last night,” Russ said. “There didn’t seem to be any reporters there this morning. Maybe they were chasing after Gregor.”
“Are you sure you’re all right?” Mac asked.
“Yes,” Russ said. He even felt a little all right. Only a little, but it was better than what he’d had up to now. “I’ll be fine. There has to be work I have to do, whether Tibor is talking to me or not.”
“There’s all this stuff about that foreclosure case we’ve been working on,” Mac said. “Your life may feel like it’s stopped, but J.P. CitiWells is a machine. And the machine is moving. Go settle in and I’ll bring you the stuff we’ve been looking at this morning.”
“Right,” Russ said.
“I know it sounds impossible, but they’re actually foreclosing for real this time, and I’m still sure we can prove they don’t hold the mortgage.”
“Right,” Russ said again.
Then he went out of Mac’s office and across the reception area to the door to his own office. Everything looked perfectly normal. Everything looked perfectly sane. Mikel Dekanian needed a lawyer who was paying attention if he wasn’t going to end up on the street with his entire family.
But Father Tibor’s arraignment was in an hour and a half, and Russ intended on being there.
3
Halfway across town, Father Tibor Kasparian lay on the long hard cement cot that was what this jail cell had for a bed and wished he had a book. It could be any book. He didn’t really think he could read right now, but it always made him feel better, and calmer, and more sane, to hold a book. He had never been able to understand people who did not read. He had never been able to understand how they held on to themselves.