Fighting Chance(28)

“Good morning, Mr. Demarkian,” she said. “If you’ll come this way. They’re waiting for you.”

“They?”

Ophelia had turned her back to him and was walking away down the hall. “You and I have always been on good terms,” she said, “but you have to understand where I’m coming from. It’s him I care about. This is not going to be good for him.”

“If you’re talking about this meeting, I agree with you,” Gregor said. “But I’m not the one who asked for the meeting.”

Ophelia stopped outside a door, opened it a bit, and said, “I know you didn’t. But I think maybe you should have turned it down.”

Then she swung the door wide open, and Gregor went in.

Inside the room there were chairs and low occasional tables. It seemed to be a waiting room of some kind. John Jackman was on his feet and pacing. The other two men were sitting down. One of them, in defiance of decades of city regulations, was smoking a cigarette.

Ophelia closed the door behind her as she went. The two sitting men stood up. John Jackman stopped pacing.

“Well,” he said. “Here you are.”

“Here I am,” Gregor said. “But Ophelia’s right, John. I shouldn’t have come. It’s one thing you talking to Bennis on the phone. But having me here—”

“I’m going to get into trouble for worse things than having you here,” John said. “This is George Edelson, and, the one with the cigarette, Dickson Greer. They’re both my aides. They both have official titles that would make your ears bleed. They’re both getting into trouble with me.”

Dickson Greer put his cigarette out in a little cup made of tin foil he’d produced from his pocket.

“Look at the idiot,” John said. “African American men have some astronomically high chance of getting early heart attacks, and he thinks he’s the Marlboro Man.”

“Just feeling a little tension,” Dickson Greer said mildly.

John gestured Gregor to a chair, but he didn’t wait to see if Gregor sat, and he didn’t sit himself. He went back to pacing.

“The first thing you should know,” John said, “is that George here went to see Tibor yesterday afternoon.”

“And Tibor agreed to see him?” Gregor asked.

“Not exactly,” George Edelson said. “I threw my weight around. There was no way he could refuse to be in a room with me. I got a secure room. I thought I could—we thought I might be able to—”

“I thought that if I could get Tibor into a room with somebody who was good at talking sense to people, we could talk sense to him,” John said. “He’d already refused to see you or Bennis or Russ Donahue, or any of the other usual people, so I sent George. George is a lawyer. Hell, everybody here is a lawyer except you. We did a little voodoo, and George went in as Tibor’s attorney of record.”

“I thought he’d refused to talk to an attorney,” Gregor said. “Bennis said something about Tibor being offered a public defender and turning it down.”

“Yeah,” John said. “There was that.”

Gregor shook his head. “Did Mr. Edelson here manage to talk any sense into him?”

“No,” George Edelson said. “Not even close. I don’t know this man, Mr. Demarkian. I only know he’s a friend of John’s, and of course yours. But after that session we had yesterday, I can’t say I agree with the idea that he isn’t capable of murder. I’d think he was capable of anything.”

“I wouldn’t go so far as to say anything,” Gregor said.

John Jackman grunted. “Is that some roundabout way of saying you think he did commit this murder? Because I have to tell you, Gregor, the only reason I don’t believe it is because it’s Tibor. If this were anybody else on the face of the planet, I’d think this was open-and-shut.”

“I know,” Gregor said.

“Well?” John Jackman said.

Gregor decided that sitting down was the better part of something or other. He sat.

“I don’t know,” he said finally. “I presume the motive is supposed to be Tibor’s anger with this person for giving harsh and unwarranted sentences to juveniles—”

“It’s worse than that,” Dickson Greer said. “You know we have private contractors running the prisons here in Pennsylvania?”

“Don’t look at me,” John Jackman said. “That’s Harrisburg is what you’ve got there. It’s almost made me ready to run for governor. I mean, what the hell did they think was going to happen?”