Fighting Chance: A Gregor Demarkian Novel (Gregor Demarkian series Book 29) (12 page)

“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.

Breakfast had been one of those infernal breakfast sandwiches. Tibor had never understood those either. Surely, there had to be something wrong with people who ate breakfast sandwiches.

Surely there was something wrong about people like Martha Handling, but that was another kind of puzzle. Tibor was always surprised at how casual and unassuming most real evil really was. He did not mean it was “banal.” It was that so much evil was done as everyday business. People did enormous harm. They made each other suffer. They destroyed any respect they could have had for themselves and for other people. And it was nothing. It was just transactions. It had the same emotional force on their brains as going grocery shopping or getting an oil change for their car.

Surely there ought to be something else there. There ought to be a little spark of protest. There ought to be
something.
But there never was.

Tibor hadn’t known the truth about Martha Handling until yesterday, although he had suspected it. He had reported his suspicions to Krekor, and then to all the people Krekor recommended he talk to. In the kind of novels he read, this would have led to his own murder at the hands of the evil corporation that was paying the bribes that were making Martha Handling do all those awful things.

But that hadn’t happened, any more than what he had really expected to happen. The case was not immediately taken up by the authorities. Martha Handling was not immediately suspended from the bench.

As far as Tibor could see, nothing had happened.

Except this.

A policewoman came to the door and looked in through the small window. “Father Kasparian?” she said. “If you would please put your hands behind your back and then put them through the slot so that I can access your wrists.”

Tibor got up and did as he was told. He found all these things they did to be—hyperbolic? He couldn’t think of the English word. The American justice system, at least in Philadelphia, seemed to treat all prisoners as if they were dangerous animals.

The handcuffs went on. They bit him, as always. Tibor stepped away from the door and turned to face it just as the policewoman was giving him those same instructions.

The policewoman put her key in the lock and opened up. “You’re due in court, Father Kasparian. We need to get you ready.”

“Ready?”

“The van is already waiting,” the policewoman said. “You’ll be going outside, so you’ll need leg irons. We’ve been told you won’t need a jacket. We’re having a very warm fall.”

Tibor had no idea what to say to that. He moved along the corridor at the policewoman’s side. Prisoners came to the doors of the cells along the way and looked out at them.

Everybody was bored. Everybody was mind-numbingly, intransigently bored. Maybe this was true everywhere in the system. Maybe the prisoners on death row did not have their minds wonderfully concentrated, but were only bored.

“If you’ll kneel with your back to me on the bench, Father Kasparian. I’m told they’ve got a lawyer waiting for you at the court. You want a lawyer, Father Kasparian, even if you think you don’t.”

Tibor knelt on the bench and stared at the beige-painted concrete wall. The leg irons did not bite the way the handcuffs did, because he was wearing socks, and the socks kept the metal away from his skin.

That was the hardest thing to get used to.

The metal against his skin.

SIX

1

It was George Edelson who took Gregor across town in a city car, bumping through traffic with a speed and unpredictability that would have been terrifying if the streets had been entirely clear.

“The idea is that I’m already in as much trouble as it’s possible for me to get into, so you might as well be seen with me as with anybody,” George Edelson said. “And this is convenient. The juvenile court is only about a block away from where your Father Kasparian is going to be arraigned, and we assumed you’d want to be on hand for that.”

“I definitely want to be on hand for that,” Gregor said.

Privately, he thought the arraignment would be a good place to jump the gates and throttle Tibor where he stood. Tibor needed to be throttled. Even if he was guilty. Especially if he was guilty.

George Edelson was pulling into a tiny parking lot behind an enormous granite building.

“We’re going to talk to a man named Sam Scalafini. He runs the security operations for all the court buildings in Philadelphia. At the moment, he’s going to be lucky if he doesn’t get fired. So I’m assuming he’s going to cooperate.”

“Security,” Gregor said.

“Think security cameras,” George Edelson said. “In the courts, as in practically every other place these days, there are security cameras.”

They got out of the car and went to a small back door.

A tiny Latina policewoman was standing just inside it. When she saw George Edelson, she nodded and opened up. “Good morning, Mr. Edelson.”

“Good morning, Betta. Is the court still closed?”

“For one more day, yes, sir. We tried to find some way we could open it partially, but there just isn’t any way to secure all the possible entries to the crime scene.”

“What about the cameras?”

Betta snorted. “I think they’re working on it.”

“They’d better be,” George Edelson said.

He took Gregor down a corridor, around a corner, and then to a door that led to a staircase.

“Operations in the basement,” he said. “We’ve had to retrofit all these old buildings. You wouldn’t want to give them up. We’ll never get architecture like this again. Watch your step. The public doesn’t come down here, and neither do the judges. Well, except Martha Handling. She came down here often enough. Anyway, it’s the last place to get repaired.”

The stairs seemed to be in perfectly good repair, but the basement to which they led was a little … dank. It wasn’t so bad that the walls were sweating, but it smelled rank, and it felt oppressive.

There were halls down here, too, but they were made of pasteboard and stood on rollers. George Edelson crashed around them as if they weren’t likely to fall over or skitter into the distance at any slight tap.

Gregor saw the big bank of screens before he saw or heard a person. A moment later, a head popped up and a thick man with dark hair waved at them.

“Sam!” George Edelson said, sounding sarcastic.

“I’m
working
on it,” Sam said. “No matter what you guys think, it’s not my fault if a sitting judge is a world-class nutcase who goes and gets herself murdered. I hope she’s satisfied wherever she is right now. We told her it was for her own protection.”

Gregor and George rounded the final gauntlet of pasteboard partitions and came to Sam Scalafini and his big bank of controls. Scalafini did not get up. His shirt was so tight across his upper body, it looked like his collar was strangling him. Gregor pegged him as someone who would not get up for anything short of a major natural disaster.

George Edelson did not sit, although there were chairs available. “Gregor Demarkian,” he said. “This is Sam Scalafini.”