Fighting Chance: A Gregor Demarkian Novel (Gregor Demarkian series Book 29) (26 page)

Stefan could not go back to Canada if he was in jail. Jail was the important thing now. And Petrak hated to see Stefan the way he was in jail, with the jumpsuit and the locks and the way people acted as if he were a wild animal that would turn and savage them without warning and at any moment. Petrak was very sure that this was not a good way to treat people. People would not be better for it. A boy like Stefan would not be better for it. It would change the way he thought of himself, and that would change everything else he did.

This was, really, more than Petrak felt capable of thinking through. His impressions were vague. His feelings were confused. He didn’t know anything about jails or how they worked, or even about Stefan and how he worked. He just had impressions, and the impressions were very strong.

His instinct was to sit back and wait for Mark Granby to do what he had asked him to do. This might take a long time, which made him edgy. He went to see Stefan every chance he got, and he paid attention to what was happening with the case. Nothing was happening with the case. The judge was dead, and everybody was milling around, talking but doing nothing. Stefan was supposed to have another hearing. He couldn’t have another hearing until a hearing was scheduled. As of this morning, no hearing had been scheduled. Not until a hearing was scheduled could they know which judge would preside, and until they knew that, they couldn’t do anything.

“It’s very important,” Mark Granby had said. “We don’t do these things right out in the open. And I can’t go. You have to go.”

Mark Granby’s voice sounded odd. It reminded Petrak of the noise people made in their throats when they were being strangled in the movies. He was also whispering, as if he were close to other people and afraid of being overheard. It made Petrak uneasy.

“You have to go,” Mark Granby insisted.

All Petrak could think of was that the man was setting him up for a mob hit.

The impression of an impending mob hit was so strong, Petrak nearly ignored the whole thing. It occurred to him that Mark Granby now knew something he hadn’t known before. He knew that Petrak had been lying. Petrak did carry the phone on him. He carried it on him at all times. There was no place safe to put it. Aunt Sophie cleaned religiously and often. She’d find it no matter where he put it in his room. She’d look at it, too.

And that would be the end of everything.

Petrak thought about the phone. He thought about the mob hit. He thought about the place where he was supposed to be meeting a woman named Lydia Bird. It was a ridiculous name, Lydia Bird. He couldn’t find her name on the list of city employees. But maybe judges were not city employees, and maybe Lydia Bird was not a judge. It was impossibly difficult to know what to do.

In the end, he went, all the way down to the center of the city, in a part of town he knew nothing about. He had a vague impression that he should know where he was, that he didn’t know only because he had come the wrong way around. Since he could not connect that thought to any solid information, he let it go and concentrated on the three-by-five card where he had written down the information.

There were big official-looking buildings all around him, but when he made the next turn, there were mostly small stores and filling stations and pawnshops. Petrak didn’t like pawnshops. They made him depressed.

Petrak made one more turn and found himself in an alley. The alley was lined with big garbage bins, but at the very end of it was a door into the back of one of the brick buildings that backed on the alley. That would be their garbage cans he was passing.

That would be the door he was supposed to go through.

It looked … wrong.

Petrak swallowed his fear and walked all the way down to the door, all the way past the garbage cans. Of course it felt wrong. It was wrong. All the things they were doing here—it was all wrong. It had to be wrong to take a kid like Stefan and lock him up for years for shoplifting a couple of video games.

The last instruction was the easiest to follow: “Don’t knock. Walk right in.”

Petrak did not knock.

He stood in front of the door. He took deep breaths to calm the shaking in his arms.

He grabbed the door and pulled it open.

There was no mob hit waiting for him. There were no thick men with machine guns. There was no hired assassin in black spandex with a silencer on his rifle.

There was only the dead body of a man Petrak Maldovanian knew, but took a few minutes to recognize.

THREE

1

It took Gregor Demarkian three calls to George Edelson—and George Edelson seven calls to people as far away as Harrisburg—to get Gregor into the juvenile detention center to see Stefan Maldovanian. It took that long, and yet Gregor still wasn’t sure why he wanted the interview.

Mark Granby told Gregor about “the kid,” and the kid had turned out to be Petrak Maldovanian. That gave Gregor not one, but two possible motives for the murder of Martha Handling, both of them more plausible than the motive now on the table. More than that, it gave him a possible explanation for Tibor’s behavior. That was more than anybody had had up to this point, and it was also the weak spot in the prosecutor’s case. What was even better, that explanation did not require Tibor to have killed anyone.

Still, there were pieces, pieces that didn’t fit, pieces that bothered him. The most logical explanation would be that Mark Granby, or somebody like him, somebody involved in the corruption, had killed Martha Handling before she had had a chance to rat them all out. But even Mark Granby had seen the flaw in that.

“Your priest has been running around like an idiot, doing God knows what,” Mark said. “Do you honestly think he’d do that to protect somebody who was involved in bribery? It makes more sense to go with what the police think and assume he killed the woman because he wanted that kid out of her court. Out of it and not likely to go to juvenile detention for two years. Or more.”

This was, unfortunately, true. If Tibor was not guilty of murder, then he had to be protecting someone, he had to be diverting the blame. Gregor had had a vague inkling of that from the beginning, but it had come up against a wall of logic. The wall said that it was not likely that Tibor would shield a murderer. Tibor was not an idiot. He knew why that would not be a good idea.

But if the murderer were a child, or close to a child, if he was just a “kid” starting out … there might be a possibility there.

“And if you think the kid didn’t have it in him,” Mark Granby said, “let me disabuse you of the notion. He’s as cold as ice. And he means what he says. And he’d thought it all through. He’s got that cell phone hidden away somewhere, and he’s going to hold on to it until I deliver. I didn’t tell him I almost certainly couldn’t deliver, because I didn’t want him giving that damn thing to the police, but he knows what he wants and he knows what to threaten. And then there’s the other thing.”

“What’s that?” Gregor asked.

“He’s got that cell phone,” Mark Granby said. “He says he picked it up on the floor where somebody dropped it, but does that make any sense to you? It was Martha Handling’s cell phone. The only people who would have taken it out of the murder room were people who knew what was on it and wanted to get it away before the police found it. And virtually all of those people are people involved in the bribes, or the actual killer, looking for some kind of edge.”

Gregor thought that Mark Granby didn’t know that cell phone was probably the one on which the video had been made. If it was the one on which the video had been made, then—then what? Then the video was staged. He’d already considered that. And it was just possible that Tibor would stage something like that to protect a kid.
Just
possible.

But was Petrak Maldovanian a kid? He was over eighteen.

“All I can tell you,” Mark Granby said, “is that he was in this office, and he had Martha Granby’s throwaway cell phone. You can take it from there.”

Gregor had no idea where to take it. He wanted to talk to Petrak Maldovanian, but after making a few tries at finding him, he realized it wasn’t going to happen. Sophie Maldovanian had no patience with the entire project.

“He
should
be at school,” she told Gregor, “and if he’s not there, he should be at work. The Ohanians have him lifting boxes and that kind of thing while Mary Ohanian’s ankle heals up. But don’t ask me if he’s gone either place, because I just don’t know. He’s like the Flying Dutchman, that kid is. You never know where he is or what he’s doing, and he doesn’t know it himself.”

Sophie gave Gregor Petrak’s cell phone number, but when Gregor had called it, he was sent directly to voice mail. Maybe Petrak was at school or work and had turned the phone off so he would not be interrupted.

It was after that that Gregor thought about Stefan, and started the round of phone calls that ended with his standing in the foyer of JDF. The place was barren and old, just slightly dirty around the edges, and it had the most depressing aura Gregor had ever experienced. Did they really bring kids to a place like this? Kids as young as seven ended up in juvenile hall. Kids who had done … what?

Gregor had never thought very much about juvenile crime. He was vaguely aware that juveniles could go to jail for actual crimes, but could also go to jail for things that were not crimes for adults, like skipping too much school or being too obviously and consistently sexually active at too young an age. There was something arbitrary about the whole thing. Some kids who were sexually active, even kids who gave birth at twelve or thirteen, got help from the state to set up homes for themselves and their children and accommodations from the schools so that they could stay to graduate from high school. Others got sent to jail. Gregor didn’t know why the decisions were made, or even by whom.

The policewoman at the entry desk apologized when she ran him up and down with one of those metal detecting wands and then made him empty his pockets and walk through a metal detector as well. “We really aren’t being melodramatic about all this,” she said. “We have constant problems—you really wouldn’t believe them. The threat of violence is the worst, of course, but it isn’t the most common thing. It’s contraband that’s the most common thing. Marijuana. Pills. Anything they can use to commit suicide.”

“Suicide?”

“It stands to reason,” the policewoman said. “It’s frightening, coming into a place like this. They don’t think it through. They don’t consider the ways in which the system can help them. They just think they’re looking at the end of the world.”

Gregor thought that if he had ever ended up in a place like this, he would have considered it the end of the world. This was not a system that seemed to offer any help. It wasn’t one in the foyer, and it didn’t become one when he passed through the locked solid metal fire door into the hallways beyond. This was a system meant to cage in people who were dangerous and unpredictable.

Another policewoman met him in the corridor. She had a nightstick at her hip and a huge ring of keys on her belt. “Mr. Demarkian?” she asked. “We have instructions from the office of the governor. It’s usually contrary to regulations to allow visits by anyone but the family and the attorney, and except for the attorneys, we don’t usually allow visits outside of scheduled visiting hours. We do understand that this visit is important and may have long-term implications for Stefan’s case, but we do ask you to keep this as brief as you can. It disrupts the routine.”

“I’ll be as quick as I can,” Gregor said.

“Not that there’s all that much of a routine,” the woman said. “Dispositions in these cases are supposed to be fairly rapid. We need them to be rapid, because we really can’t handle a full-scale education program here. Clients are supposed to come here for a day or two and then go home, or to a full-service facility. And education is important. Education is the key to making sure that these kids don’t end up in the system forever.”

“And does that work?” Gregor asked. “Does education stop most of these kids from ending up in the system forever?”

The policewoman gave Gregor a dry and sardonic look. “No,” she said, “but you’d better understand something else: This one seems to be harmless enough, but there are a fair number of children here who are not. It may shock you to realize it, but there are children in the system who have committed very serious crimes. Crimes of violence. Even murders. If they’re fifteen, the Commonwealth tries them as adults. If they’re younger, you have to find something to do with them.”

“I’m sure you do,” Gregor said, but he couldn’t force himself to say anything more encouraging.

They had come to yet another solid metal door. The policewoman opened it to reveal a tall, cadaverous teenager in a jumpsuit sitting at a laminated table. His hands were not cuffed, but Gregor caught a look at his feet, and saw that his legs were in irons.

“This is Mr. Demarkian, Stefan,” the policewoman said. “He wants to talk to you.”

She went out of the room as quickly as she could, and both Gregor and Stefan heard the door click locked behind her.

Stefan seemed to be in a trance. He stared at the door. He stared at Gregor Demarkian. He didn’t blink. Then, suddenly, he let out a stream of words Gregor mostly didn’t understand.

“Sorry,” Gregor said. “I was born and raised right here in Philadelphia. I know almost no Armenian at all. I can swear a little. I can say hello and good-bye. I can order food. That’s about it.”

Stefan looked around the small, cramped room. “They listen to you,” he said. “If you speak in English or even in Spanish, they hear everything you say. I think they do that even when the lawyers are here. They say they don’t, but they do.”

“If they really do listen in when the lawyers are here,” Gregor said, “you’d have a very good case for a rights violation. That’s not just against the law, it’s against the Constitution.”

Stefan shrugged. “I don’t think they care about anything,” he said. “They are always smiling at you, except when they’re not smiling, and then that is … more honest. When I first came here, they said I would only have to be here one week, but it is now very much longer. And nobody will tell me anything. Even Mr. Donahue won’t tell me anything. He only says the hearing will have to be rescheduled.”