“We barely had to look at all,” George said. “They picked that up just poking around. And if it does turn out that Martha Handling was taking bribes—”
“I think we have to assume she was taking bribes,” Gregor said. “There’s too much smoke in too many places for that one to be without fire. I think the real question is whom she was taking bribes from.”
“But that’s obvious,” George said. “From Admin Solutions.”
“I agree,” Gregor said. “That’s almost certainly going to turn out to be true. But just because she was taking bribes from one source doesn’t mean she wasn’t also taking them from another. We need to look into—I need to look into—what else she might have been up to. Because the more I hear about Martha Handling, the more she seems to have been up to.”
“I was a prosecutor once,” George Edelson said. “You don’t want to get me started. It’s why I quit, to tell you the truth. I hated being that way to everybody—”
The man who plowed into George Edelson seemed to come out of nowhere, as if he were running. The two men collided and they both went down. Gregor’s first thought was that the man was running from the police, but no police were following, and in the tangle of the two bodies on the ground, the running man had come to a full stop.”
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” George Edelson demanded. “I could have you arrested for this—”
The running man was on top, so Gregor held a hand out to him first. The running man stood up, and Gregor was shocked.
“Mikel?” he said. “Mikel, what are you doing here? And why were you running? You could have hurt somebody.”
“He hurt me,” George Edelson said as he got to his feet. “And he ruined this suit. It’s got a tear in the jacket sleeve, would you look at that.”
“Please,” Mikel said, “I am very late. I have an appointment and I will not be on time and if I’m late, I may lose the house. I have to go.”
“Tell me you don’t have a meeting with somebody Russ knows nothing about,” Gregor said. “You do understand that you don’t understand the law—”
“Please,” Mikel said. “Excuse me very much,” he said to George Edelson.
And then he took off.
Gregor and George Edelson watched him go.
“I could have him arrested,” Edelson said.
“Don’t do that,” Gregor said. “He’s in the middle of some kind of unholy mess with his mortgage and he spends all his time worried he’s about to be thrown out of his house.”
FOUR
1
Father Tibor Kasparian trusted himself in almost everything, but he was beginning to find that he was not able to tolerate boredom. It was also true that he had not expected to be bored. He blamed himself for that. He usually had more foresight. Still, the way things had been, with the woman lying dead there on the floor, and everything he knew, and everything that had to be done—well, it hadn’t occurred to him that he would have time to be bored, or mental space that wouldn’t be occupied by the whole teeming mess of it.
This was the kind of thing that happened to you when you didn’t think ahead. And nobody ever thought ahead in an emergency.
One of the things he had thought ahead about was what he would have to do while he was in custody, and that was not to talk to anybody he knew, ever. In a case like this, your best friends became your worst enemies, because you couldn’t lie to them, and you didn’t even want to. It had been almost more than Tibor was capable of to keep his head turned away from the crowd in the courtroom.
There they were, sitting in a little row: Bennis and Donna and Lida Arkmanian. There was Gregor, in a seat just behind them. If it had been anything else that happened, other than this, he would have discussed all his options with Gregor before he’d done anything at all. Then he would at least have known whether what he was going to do had a chance in hell at working.
The way things were, he had to keep his fingers crossed and hope. He was not an idealist, and he was not an innocent. He did not expect people to be naturally good at heart. He did not believe that there was no evil in the world. He most certainly did not believe that justice would always be done.
What he couldn’t get past was that he was not only bored, but lonely, too. He was so lonely, his head felt empty of everything, and he didn’t think he could fill it with books, even if he had any. The essential knot was untie-able. His only hope was not to say anything to anybody. His only chance of a way out of this mess was to let nobody know anything. And all the people he wanted to talk to would want answers to exactly those questions he did not want anybody to ask.