Fighting Chance: A Gregor Demarkian Novel (Gregor Demarkian series Book 29)

by Jane Haddam

  Gregor gave the driver the instructions, and the driver looked visibly annoyed. “You could’ve walked there,” he said. Then he took off, and Gregor tried to get himself oriented.

  It turned out the driver was right. Gregor probably could have walked there. The ride was so short, it was almost embarrassing.

  The destination was unmistakable. The block was packed solid with police cars, mobile crime unit vans, ambulance, medical examiner’s office cars, and God only knew what. There was crime scene tape up at their end of the block, and Gregor was sure there would be crime scene tape up at the other end. There was a uniform directing traffic.

  “I don’t think you’re getting through this,” the driver said as the uniform came up to warn them off.

  The uniform was another policewoman. Gregor cranked down his window and gave her his name. “I was told—”

  “Detective Berle,” the woman said. “We were warned. You can come on through, but we can’t let the vehicle in. There isn’t any room.”

  Gregor got out his wallet and dumped a twenty-dollar bill on the front seat next to the driver. It was twice what the meter read.

  “Is the Homicide Division building somewhere around here?” he asked.

  “Right around the corner,” the policewoman said. “Right on our doorstep, so to speak. Why?”

  “I’m just trying to figure out where I am,” Gregor said.

  Gregor made his way through the vehicles, a little surprised that none of them was a news van. He found the alley by heading for the real logjam, and just as he came up to the opening, four men came out, carrying something in an evidence bag. It was not the body. It was too small.

  A moment later, Ray Berle emerged from the melee. He looked tense as hell. “Come on back,” he said. “The kid says you can identify the body. He says he can identify the body. We want a second opinion.”

  “It’s somebody I know?”

  “Well, that’s the question, isn’t it?” Ray said. “Maybe it’s somebody you know, and maybe what we’ve got here is a psychopath. And don’t ask what this has to do with the thing with the priest, because we don’t know it has anything to do with it. It’s just that we took one look at this guy’s name, and it’s not a hard name to remember. Also, what’s the odds the kid stumbles on two bodies in one week?”

  The alley was narrow and there were too many people in it. Gregor followed Ray Berle as best he could until they came to a short line of doors and even more people, bunched up together and looking like they were doing nothing. A stretcher and a body bag lay on the ground a little to the side of the center door.

  Just then, Gregor saw Petrak Maldovanian. He was sitting off to the side, just outside the door. He looked as dejected, and as oddly small, as his brother had looked in juvenile detention.

  It was astonishing how small trouble could make someone look, when it really got hold of him. Petrak, like his brother, had to be taller than six-three.

  Petrak stood up as soon as he saw Gregor. “Mr. Demarkian,” he said. “Mr. Demarkian. I didn’t do anything. I just found him, he was in the door, and it was where I was told to go, and then I called them. I called the police. I wouldn’t have called the police if I’d killed him, and why would I kill him? What did he have to do with me?”

  Tony Monteverdi emerged from the building. “Don’t ask me what’s going on here,” he said. “Right now, I just don’t know. The kid here says the body belongs to a man named Mikel Dekanian.”

  “What?” Gregor said.

  “He says he knows him from church,” Tony said. “He says you know him from church. Am I hearing this right?”

  “Holy Trinity Armenian Christian Church,” Gregor said. “Yes, that would be right. If the body is Mikel Dekanian, that would be right. There aren’t that many Armenian churches in the city. A lot of us go there.” Gregor paused for a moment. “It’s Father Tibor Kasparian’s church. He’s the priest there.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Tony said. “Yes, of course, why wouldn’t it be? Will you come in here and see if you can confirm identification of the body?”

  Gregor went into the cramped dark space that must be used as a service area. There were mops and brooms leaning against the wall. There were buckets in a stack near a utilitarian back staircase. Mikel Dekanian’s head had been bashed in at the back, so that there was a crater the size of a boulder just at the curve coming down from the crown. Tony touched the corpse’s shoulder and moved it just a bit, so that the head fell back and the face was clearly visible. It was Mikel Dekanian’s face.

  Gregor nodded.

  “Well, that’s one less mystery we’ve got to solve,” Tony said. “Do you have any idea at all what this guy was doing in this neighborhood? The kid says he lives, the guy lives, over near Cavanaugh Street, and that isn’t anywhere near here. Does he work near here? Does he have relatives?”

  Gregor shook his head. “He works for a guy named Howard Kashinian. I don’t know what he does. Kashinian is a wheeler-dealer sort of person. He’s got interests in some city construction. It might be that.”

  “Would any of that be in this neighborhood?”

  “I don’t think so,” Gregor said. “I don’t know, really. I don’t pay that much attention to Howard.”

  “The kid’s got quite a story,” Tony said. “Sounds like James Bond.”

  “Do you think he killed Dekanian?”

  “We don’t know,” Tony said. “But if he did, he did it yesterday and then came back to call us. The body’s been cold for at least eighteen hours.”

  “Eighteen hours,” Gregor said.

  “Is that significant to you?” Tony asked.

  “Remember our meeting yesterday?” Gregor said. “I saw him when I was coming out of that. He was in a big hurry. He said he had an appointment. He said he’d been to the Hall of Records.”

  “Was he headed this way?” Tony asked.

  Gregor nodded. “I think he was.”

  “You’d better go talk to the kid. He said he wanted to talk to you. He said we could listen in. We’re going to.”

  3

  Petrak Maldovanian was sitting just where he had been when Gregor first saw him. He still looked very dejected and very small. When he noticed Gregor standing over him, he said, “Everything Stefan has said is true. They tell you they want you to tell the truth. Then when you tell the truth, they don’t believe you.”

  “Let’s start from the beginning,” Gregor said. “What the hell are you doing down here? Why are you in this alley?”

  “Because,” Petrak said. “He told me to come here. He called me on this phone—” He took a small black phone out of his pocket and waved it. “—and he told me to come right away, that I had to meet a man and talk to him, and if I met this man and talked to him, then we would be able, Stefan would be able—it’s a whole pile of crap and I should have known it was a whole pile of crap.”

  Gregor took the phone out of Petrak’s hand and turned it over and over. It was made of cheap black plastic. He opened it up. It took him less than half a minute to find the video. He closed it up again.

  “Where did you get it?” he asked.

  Petrak shrugged. “It was in the hallway,” he said, “in the back, where the evil judge was. I went to look for Father Tibor and also for Mr. Donahue and I looked in the bathroom, and then I heard noise, so I went on back. And I went into the room where the noise was coming from, and there was Father Tibor and Mr. Donahue and Dr. Loftus and I think there might have been other people. And there was blood everywhere, and I sort of stumbled in some of it and then I got scared and backed out, and then I don’t know, the police were there, and then … it was just lying in the hallway. The phone was.”

  “And you picked it up.”

  Petrak nodded. “I didn’t think about it. It was just there and I picked it up, and I went back out into the foyer and more police came and I forgot I had it. And then later I found it in my pocket when I was home. And I looked at it.”

  “And
?”

  Petrak gestured to the phone in Gregor’s hand. “And then I looked at it. And there were things on it. There were calls and voice mails from the man from Administrative Solutions. That was the name. Administrative Solutions. This is the private company that runs the prisons. You know about that?”

  “I know about that.”

  “There were rumors that this judge, she was taking money from the prison company to put people in jail for long times,” Petrak said. “And I looked at the phone and I thought I could see how there were things there that would prove that to be true. So I used the phone and I called the man.”

  “Which man?”

  “You can see in the address book,” Petrak said. “Mark Granby. He works for the company that runs the prisons. I called him and then, later, I went to see him. And I told him, I told him that if he could pay a judge to put people in prison, he could pay one not to put people in prison, and I wanted Stefan sent home and I would give him back the phone if he would, if he would make sure that Stefan came home and did not go to jail.”

  “Marvelous,” Gregor said. “Have you told any of this to the police?”

  “No. I was waiting for you.”

  “You should have been waiting for Russ Donahue,” Gregor said. “You’re going to need a lawyer.”

  “I do not think Mr. Donahue is a very good lawyer,” Petrak said. “I think he should not have allowed the evil judge to hear Stefan’s case.”

  “I don’t think that’s usually in the power of the defense attorney,” Gregor said. “How did you get here today? How did you just happen to find the body?”

  “It did not just happen,” Petrak said. “I got a call on the phone. I have the phone on me all the time because I can’t leave it at home, because Aunt Sophie looks through everything. I was at school and the phone rang and I thought it was my own phone, maybe, but the ring tone was wrong. And I saw it was this phone and I answered it and it was him, and he told me I was supposed to come here, I was supposed to meet a woman about Stefan and it had to be very secret. So I came.”

  “Do you remember the name of this person?”

  “Yes,” Petrak said. “I do. It was a silly name, so I remembered it. Lydia Bird.”

  “Do you know who this person was supposed to be?”

  “I think she was a judge, or somebody who worked for a judge. Mr. Granby didn’t say that. Only that I was to come and meet here because we had to talk if Stefan was going to come home. He said it was hard to do because Stefan had committed a very serious job and every judge would want to put him in jail, but now there was this one but she had to talk to me. So I thought she was a judge.”

  “And this conversation,” Gregor said. “It took place when?”

  “This morning at ten o’clock.”

  Gregor looked at him in astonishment. “You had a phone call this morning at ten o’clock from Mark Granby.”

  “Yes.”

  “At ten o’clock this morning.”

  “Yes.”

  “Petrak, I don’t know what you’re trying to pull here, but you can’t, you can’t lie to the police in a case like this. You could be prosecuted just for lying to them, never mind for everything else that’s going on. And it doesn’t make any sense for you to lie to me, either.”

  “I am not lying to you,” Petrak said.

  “Petrak, for God’s sake,” Gregor said. “At ten o’clock this morning, I was in Mark Granby’s office myself. I was there from quarter to ten till quarter after. And he made no phone calls. He didn’t leave the office even once. He didn’t call anybody. I was there.”

  “He called me,” Petrak said. “I recognized his voice.”

  “You recognized Mark Granby’s voice,” Gregor said.

  “It was familiar as soon as it started to speak,” Petrak said. “He whispered, but it was familiar. And he told me who he was.”

  “You said the name was in the address book,” Gregor said. “That’s how you found him in the first place. Did the name come up in the caller ID when you answered the phone?”

  “No,” Petrak said. “It was just a number. I didn’t think about it.”

  “Petrak, for God’s sake,” Gregor said. “The only way Mark Granby could have called you at ten o’clock this morning is if he’s figured out a way to be two places at once, and—”

  “And that’s impossible,” Petrak finished for him.

  Gregor was thinking that it wasn’t necessarily impossible at all.

  FOUR

  1

  Father Tibor Kasparian had been waiting for Krekor Demarkian all day. He had been waiting from the moment old Mrs. Vespasian slammed the communicator phone down into its receiver, stood up, and stomped off with her two aged minions behind her. The minions had not said anything, but they never said anything, except to Mrs. Vespasian herself, and then almost always in Armenian. Mrs. Vespasian was, indeed, very, very old. It didn’t matter. She was in remarkable shape, and she knew her own mind and followed it.

  Tibor assumed the Very Old Ladies had gone straight to the nearest phone they knew how to use and called Krekor and told him all about the video. That would be bad enough, but Tibor suspected that Gregor had known all along that the video was faked. The real problem would be what else Krekor would have figured out. In most things, Tibor would have trusted Krekor with his life, but this was not most things. In this case, Krekor would be unreliable.

  When the guard came to tell him he had visitors, he did think about refusing to see them. The guard said his visitor was “your lawyer, Mr. Edelson, and some people.” As soon as Tibor heard that “your lawyer,” he knew there was no point in arguing. They called George Edelson “your lawyer” only when Edelson and the mayor, and Krekor himself, were pulling something.

  Tibor thought of half a dozen legal protests to being forced to see visitors he didn’t want to see, but he knew they wouldn’t matter. It wouldn’t matter if he threatened to file a lawsuit for the violation of his civil rights. They wanted to talk to him now. They were going to talk to him now.

  Or talk at him.

  Tibor submitted to the handcuffs and the leg irons and all the rest of it. The trussing up had ceased to depress him, and now only made him feel foolish. He allowed the guard to follow him down the hall. She kept just behind him, with a hand on his elbow, until the very end, when she went just ahead and guided him down a hallway he hadn’t expected. Unexpected or not, Tibor knew what the hallway was. They weren’t taking him to the booths with the phones and the bulletproof glass. They were taking him to the big conference room where he had met George Edelson for the first, and he’d hoped the last, time.

  When they got to the door of the conference room, the guard opened it and stood back to let him go inside. Tibor saw George Edelson standing near the window with his hands behind his back. The guard ushered Tibor in and then took the handcuffs off. By then, Tibor was trying his best not to look at the other end of the conference table.

  Krekor Demarkian was sitting at the other end of the conference table, breathing fire.

  If Tibor didn’t know it was impossible, he would have said that Krekor Demarkian was actually breathing fire.

  Tibor sat down, as far away from Krekor as he could get.

  Krekor stood up.

  “I’d invite you to stretch your legs,” Krekor said acidly, “but you can’t do that, because you’re in leg irons.”

  George Edelson cleared his throat. “I think shouting is not necessarily the way we want to proceed with this.”

  “I think shouting is exactly the way we want to proceed with this,” Krekor said, marching up from his end of the table until he was standing over Tibor like a large tree entirely filled with the wrath of God. “‘I have the right to remain silent.’ For the love of God. ‘I have the right to remain silent.’ What the hell did you think you were doing?”

  “But he does have the right to remain silent,” George Edelson said. “The right to refuse to incriminate himself is one of the most funda
mental—”

  “He’s not refusing to incriminate himself,” Krekor said. “I’ll bet you anything that if you look back at all the statements he’s made since this thing started, you won’t find a single case where he says he refuses to incriminate himself. He didn’t even say that in court. He’s not refusing to incriminate himself, because he can’t incriminate himself, except maybe as an accessory after the fact, and—” Krekor turned to hover directly over Tibor’s face. “—you will not try to tell me that it’s just your way of trying to put it when your first language isn’t English. Not only is your English better than mine, but you’ve got an apartment full of detective novels and courtroom dramas and police procedurals and I don’t know what else, and you know the proper formula better than the lawyers do. You know it better than the judges do. And do you know how I know that’s true? Because you said it over and over and over again and nobody caught it, not even the judge at the arraignment, and all I did was think about how odd it sounded and not know why.”

  “It made sense, Krekor,” Tibor said. “You do not understand the circumstances. It made sense.”

  “Wait,” George Edelson said. “He’s okay with being an accessory after the fact to murder, but he won’t lie?”

  “There isn’t a single thing in this mess you’ve caused that makes sense,” Krekor said. “And don’t think I’m not telling the truth here. This is a mess that you caused, all on your own, even though you didn’t murder Martha Handling.”

  “Krekor, please,” Tibor said. “It’s wrong of you to do this. I am an old man. Yes, I know, I am not so old as you, but I am old and he is young. He is very young. And it doesn’t matter what happens to me. It doesn’t—”

  “I could say you wouldn’t last a month in state prison,” Krekor said, “because you wouldn’t, but it’s not the point. The point is that it’s wrong. It’s wrong on every level. And you ought to know it’s wrong.”

  “Krekor, please,” Tibor said. “This is, this was an act of madness, a temporary insanity. This woman was evil. Not just misguided, but evil. And she did not listen to reason. She would never listen to reason. And the boy Stefan, very young and now he would be put away in a prison, just as awful as any prison, and she would not listen to reason and so he just snapped. Do you want to ruin a life because he just snapped? Because for one moment he did not know what he was doing? Think about the rest of his life. Think about the lives of the people who love him.”