Fighting Chance: A Gregor Demarkian Novel (Gregor Demarkian series Book 29) (11 page)

“That one, we’ve got an answer to,” Dickson Greer said. “The secretaries were at a funeral of a secretary for a judge who retired a while ago. The judge retired, the secretary died of breast cancer. The whole support staff was out at the funeral and the judges who were in at all were in court.”

“And this doesn’t feel wrong to you?” Gregor asked. “This doesn’t feel out of whack?”

“Gregor, I hate to tell you this,” John said, “but that’s no help at all.”

“I know it isn’t,” Gregor said. “But at the moment, that’s the best I can do.”

John Jackman looked at the ceiling for a moment and then seemed to come to a decision. “All right,” he said. “We’ve got some problems, and I think the three of us have figured out at least some ways around them. You know and we know that this meeting is going to leak, and when it does it’s going to be crap from here to eternity. But we knew that going in, and we all took the risk anyway. So let’s let that go. The big issue, first of all, is that there is no way the City of Philadelphia is going to be able to hire you as a consultant on this case.”

“Ah,” Gregor said. “I really didn’t expect you to. I hadn’t even considered it.”

“Good,” John Jackman said, “because it’s not just the political problems that are insurmountable in this case—it’s the legal ones, too. There are so many conflicts of interest running around here at the moment, it makes my head spin.”

“I’ve got a conflict of interest myself,” Gregor said. “He’s probably my closest friend after Bennis. I’m not an objective investigator.”

“You may not be an objective investigator, but you are an investigator,” John said, “and I’d think you’d be investigating no matter what the circumstances were. So what we’ve done is figured out a way to get the information to you, and also to lay off any charges of impeding a police investigation or that sort of thing.”

“Would I be impeding a police investigation?” Gregor asked.

“It would depend on what you were doing,” John Jackman said. “What I want to say here is that I don’t want to catch you not telling us anything you’ve found out. I know that thing you do where you think you have the answer but you don’t tell anyone because you haven’t worked it out yet. I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about information. If you get any information, you pass it along to us. Even if it’s not in the best interests of Tibor Kasparian.”

“I think the truth will always be in the best interests of Tibor Kasparian,” Gregor said.

“Don’t bet on it,” Dickson Greer said. “You never know what’s coming out of the woodwork then.”

“The next thing,” John said, “is a technicality, but the law is full of technicalities. Unless you can get Tibor to talk to you and authorize you to act on his behalf, you
can’t
go charging around telling people you’re investigating for the defense. The operative word is ‘can’t.’”

“But I will be investigating for the defense,” Gregor said.

“Not officially, you won’t,” John said. “Not unless you’ve been authorized by Tibor or Tibor’s attorney. And as we sit now, Tibor won’t even authorize an attorney.”

“Don’t you think that’s very strange in and of itself?” Gregor asked. “Why won’t he accept an attorney? Why won’t he talk to Russ? Russ
is
his attorney, as far as he has one.”

“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
thwack
s 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.

“I have to go to school now,” Petrak said. “I don’t think you have to worry about me. I don’t think the police are going to think I killed that woman. Why would I kill that woman?”

“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.