Fighting Chance(30)

“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.