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

“Tcha,”
Tibor said again. He was desperately buying time. He needed time.

“When this is over,” Krekor said, “and it’s going to be over—and it’s going to be over my way, and not yours—when this is over, you are never going to hear the end of it again. Ever. For the rest of your life, I will remind you of this. I’ll remind you over and over and over again. And if I die before you do, I’ll come back as a ghost and remind you of it some more. Of all the stupid, asinine, dangerous things anybody could ever do, this has got to be the prize.”

“Tcha,”
Tibor said yet again, as if he couldn’t force any other sound out of his throat. And maybe he couldn’t.

Before he walked into this room, he’d been absolutely sure of what he was doing and why. He’d been resolved to carry it through.

And now, all of a sudden, he wasn’t sure.

2

The news reports began just after noon, and from the first, Janice Loftus found them confusing. At first she thought Petrak Maldovanian had been arrested, but that turned out to be untrue. What was true was that there had been a murder, and that Petrak had been found at the murder, near the body, doing something. There were a lot of deep, dark hints, the way there always were when nobody actually knew what was happening.

At least two of the local news Web sites contained long articles that were careful to point out that Petrak had been found in the corridors around the chambers where Martha Handling was murdered, and even that he had had blood on him. That was completely typical. Of course Petrak Maldovanian had had blood on him. Everybody had blood on them by the time it was over. People kept coming into the room and wandering around in it, walking over to the body, walking back out into the corridor again. She herself had done it. Martha Handling was lying there so still and so awful looking and she hadn’t been able to help herself.

That was something she hadn’t known until that day. Blood smelled like copper. The whole room smelled like copper. And blood squished. When you stepped on it, it didn’t feel like other things did under your feet. It squished and it slid, and all you wanted was to be away from it.

Janice made her mind blank it out as best she could. That was not the important point now. The important point was that they were going to arrest Petrak eventually. You could tell that much in the news reports. They might have let him go for now, but it wouldn’t be long, and then they would not only arrest him for this murder but for the murder of Martha Handling, too. But that wasn’t right. She had been there at the murder of Martha Handling. She’d walked into the room only moments after it must have occurred. She’d not seen anything, and nothing of what she’d seen had been Petrak Maldovanian.

It was anti-immigrant sentiment—that’s what it was. Janice saw it all the time. She saw it at school, where half her fellow teachers spent their time deriding all the “morons” who couldn’t get their verb tenses right or didn’t know anything about what had happened at Appomattox Court House. Of course, it wasn’t only immigrants who didn’t know those things, but nobody was going to come out and call Americans “morons” in a collegiate setting. They especially weren’t going to call them morons if they were people of color. If there was one sure way to make your career end, that was it.

Unfortunately, the fear and the abhorence of the Other weren’t restricted to the campuses of community colleges. They were everywhere. They were in the news media that put out these stories. In the nice minds of all the nice people who owned little shops in the city, worked for corporations, or drove cars to shop or anything else. The bigotry was even in the minds of the people who worked for organizations like Pennsylvania Justice.

“It’s not accidental,” Janice had tried to tell Kasey Holbrook as soon as she heard the news about Petrak. That was the first time Janice had called. “I know you don’t like to talk about conspiracies, Kasey, but sometimes there are conspiracies. There’s a conspiracy here. It’s the friends of that priest—it’s Gregor Demarkian and those people. They’ll do anything to get him off.”

“And you know that how?” Kasey demanded. “Janice, you’ve got to see reason. We have real work to do here. The lives of dozens of people depend on us and our work. If we get the reputation for being a pack of moonbeam nutcases, nobody will ever listen to us again.”

“That’s a tactic of the patriarchy, too,” Janice said. “Get all the good guys fighting with each other and being scared to do anything because somebody will call them names. I was there, Kasey, I was right there when it happened, and I’m telling you. Petrak Maldovanian isn’t the one who killed Martha Handling. He couldn’t have been. They’re getting together right now to frame him for this murder, and the way you’re acting, you’re going to help.”

“I don’t see how you can blame this on the patriarchy,” Kasey said. “Everybody involved in it seems to be men.”

“Martha Handling wasn’t a man,” Janice said. “She was a male-identified woman, but she wasn’t a man. And it wouldn’t matter if she were a man. The patriarchy isn’t just afraid of women. It’s afraid of everybody. It’s marginalized the whole world, and now it has to watch those marginalized people in case they get ideas. The patriarchy is just as afraid of immigrants as it is of women.”

“I thought that priest you’ve been going on about was an immigrant,” Kasey said.

“He’s a friend of Gregor Demarkian’s,” Janice said. “Don’t you see? It’s the way these things work. He’s one of the most powerful men in the entire city. And this priest is his friend. And he won’t let anything put his friend away. Even though you know the priest has to have done it. He’s got to be like all priests—he can’t stand women, he can’t stand equality, he wants to do his mumbo jumbo and keep everybody in thrall.”

“If you’re trying to tell me it was Gregor Demarkian who killed Martha Handling, I’m pretty sure that was impossible.”

“I just told you it wasn’t Gregor Demarkian,” Janice said. “He wasn’t even there. It was that priest. I walked in and I saw him. He had the gavel in his hand and he was covered with blood. If he were anybody except a friend of Gregor Demarkian’s, they would have—”

“They would have what, Janice? They’ve already arrested him. They’ve already charged him with the murder of Martha Handling. I don’t know what else it is you think they ought to do.”

“It’s all a sham,” Janice said desperately. “Don’t you see that? They arrested the priest, but they’re letting Gregor Demarkian do anything he wants. That’s because this is what he does. He gets people off when there are murder charges—”

“Last time I checked, we were generally in favor of getting people off on murder charges.”

“Only when the charges aren’t true,” Janice said. “That’s what makes the charges so sinister. They’ll maneuver it around so that the priest gets off and it looks like this poor immigrant kid did the whole thing and then they’ll be safe, probably forever. Then even Pennsylvania Justice won’t be able to straighten it out.”

“If they do arrest this kid and there’s reason to think there was a frame, we’ll step in then,” Kasey said. “Be reasonable, Janice. That’s what we do.”

“You’ll let a kid who hasn’t done anything be arrested and convicted and go to jail and then when that’s all over, you’ll step in and help out. After the injustice has been done. When the kid doesn’t have a chance anymore. When his life has been ruined. And you call yourself a social justice organization!”

“It’s getting late, Janice. I’ve got actual work I have to do.” Kasey Holbrook hung up.

Janice couldn’t believe it. You didn’t hang up on one of your best volunteers. You didn’t hang up on one of your most significant contributors, either. Janice knew that she was both those things. And she was not indulging in conspiracy theories, either. She’d been
there.
She’d seen the priest with the blood all over him and the other people coming in and out of the room, and she knew Petrak Maldovanian had not murdered Martha Handling.

She made herself do the whole thing. She closed her eyes and took deep breaths. She repeated her soothing words over and over again:
peace, justice, equality, fairness, love.
It did not work so well as she wanted it to. It had never worked so well as she wanted it to. Sometimes nothing worked. She got so angry and so upset that she couldn’t help herself. She got so angry and upset, she just had to explode.

Sometimes exploding was even the right thing to do.

She did not think it was the right thing to do this time.

She worked at it some more, and eventually she came to a place where her breathing was no longer heavy and she didn’t think she would explode at the first signs of frustration.

She called Kasey Holbrook back and got her assistant instead. She waited for what seemed like forever. When the assistant came back on the line, the message was that Kasey had gone uptown for a meeting, and wasn’t expected to come back to the office until tomorrow. This was so transparently a lie, even the assistant who delivered it didn’t bother to try to make it sound true.

The control slipped, just for a moment. But it was enough.

“Tell Kasey I’ve gone out to do her job for her,” Janice said. Then she hung up the phone herself.

After that, she had to think. She didn’t know if anybody would take her word for anything. This was a deep enough conspiracy that she was sure people were being paid off. If people were being paid off, they wouldn’t want to hear what she had to say. They might even think they had to get rid of her.

She needed something solid to use, something she could show to reporters, something that would corroborate what she had to say.

And she was pretty sure she knew where to get it.

3

When Gregor Demarkian called, Russ Donahue was knee-deep in Petrak Maldovanian’s story, which was not the same thing as his alibi. He was also knee-deep in Petrak Maldovanian’s aunt, who was sort of a global source code for life on Cavanaugh Street. She was very small, but she made Tasmanian devils look composed.

“I’m not an idiot,” Sophie Maldovanian was saying. “I don’t think they’re lily-white little angels, the two of them. I know Stefan stole those things. I knew it before the police ever knew it, and if they’d come to me, I’d have told them. I should have marched him right down to the precinct the first time I found that stuff in his room and turned him in. That would have put an end to it. That would have put an end to it right there.”

“I don’t think it would have been a good idea,” Russ said. He was trying to be careful. He was not Armenian. He didn’t know how to negotiate these things as well as Gregor Demarkian did. Or as well as Father Tibor did.

“I think that, under the circumstances, you might have exacerbated the problem,” he said carefully. “If you’d wanted to do something like that, and you’d asked me about it, I would have suggested that Stefan talk directly to the store. You could have gone with him to the store and he could have made a confession to the people there and given back the items. The store might still have prosecuted, you understand, but it would have looked very good at Stefan’s hearing. I don’t think it would have made much of a difference to Martha Handling, but it would have given us something to work with to stage an appeal. And if we’d caught a judge like Sarah Shore or Margaret Heiss-Landum, Stefan would have walked away with probation. An ankle bracelet at the very worst.”

“Instead I did nothing,” Sophie said, “and look where it landed us. Stefan has been in jail for over a week. And we still don’t know what’s going to happen. I’ve been to visit him every chance I have, and he’s in very bad shape. He’s in
very
bad shape. Yes, for God’s sake. The kid behaved like an idiot and worse, but this is ridiculous. And I don’t want to make the same mistake again.”

“No, of course not,” Russ said.

Sophie Maldovanian saw his confusion. “I don’t want to do nothing,” she said. “With this thing with Petrak. I don’t want to do nothing.”

“But Miss Maldovanian, I’m not sure what we can do. Petrak hasn’t been charged with anything. And I’m not sure what you’re saying. Are you saying that Petrak killed Mikel Dekanian?”

Petrak was sitting in a chair a little behind his aunt. He scowled.

Sophie Maldovanian blew a raspberry. “Of course I’m not saying that Petrak killed Mikel Dekanian. Even if I didn’t know the boy couldn’t commit a murder if his life depended on it, what would be the point of killing Mikel Dekanian? I can’t see anyone wanting to kill Mikel Dekanian, except maybe some of those banks you’re suing for him, and banks don’t do things like that. I think it would be more likely Mikel would want to kill somebody at the banks. And that idiot police officer. Did you hear that idiot police officer? Implying that Petrak killed that judge and Mikel knew something about it, so he killed Mikel. Is that the most asinine thing you’ve ever heard, or what? Even if Petrak killed that judge—and he didn’t do that either, let me tell you, but even if he did—what would Mikel Dekanian know about it?”

“Yes,” Russ said. “Yes, I do see that. But Petrak wasn’t charged, so no matter what the police may have said when you talked to them, they probably aren’t taking that theory all that seriously. I think that they were just trying to come up with a suggestion—”

“They could have said Petrak was the Easter bunny, and it would have been more plausible,” Sophie said.

“I am not the Easter bunny,” Petrak said.

There were times when dealing with Cavanaugh Street that Russ Donahue thought he needed antipsychotic drugs.

“Yes,” he said finally. “But the theory isn’t all that odd. Petrak and Mikel knew each other. Petrak may have said something in Mikel’s hearing or to Mikel himself, or Mikel may have seen something Petrak carried on him—”

“Where?” Sophie demanded. “At church? Because that’s the only time Petrak saw the Dekanians, at church. We don’t live in the neighborhood. It’s not like he’s around there all the time.”

“I know that,” Russ said. “I was just trying to show you how the police were thinking about it when—”

“And Petrak called them,” Sophie said. “He found the body and then he called them. Would he have done that if he had just murdered the man?”