“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.”