Fighting Chance(60)

It was after six o’clock when Russ Donahue looked up from the papers on his desk and realized that time had passed. It was already dark outside, in spite of the everlasting daylight saving time that was going to go on until November.

He ran that through his head a couple of times. Mikel Dekanian was supposed to have come by for an appointment about the papers Russ was working on now. The girls in the office should have noticed that. He should have had some notification from somebody that Mikel had not come in.

Russ looked at the enormous pile of paperwork on his desk, which was only about a third of what he’d been trying to look through on the computer. Computers were great, but sometimes he found it easier to concentrate if he could just lay things out on paper.

Today, that had not been the case. Today, no matter how he’d moved things around, or set them up as charts, or put them in columns, nothing made any sense. He could see no way out of the tangle. He had managed to get one thing done, at the very beginning of the day, which would keep the bank from foreclosing for the foreseeable future, but the rest of the day had been a wash.

He got up from behind his desk and went out into the reception area. The offices around the perimeter were all dark. The receptionist had gone home. Most of the secretaries had gone, too.

Russ heard a sound and turned to see Mary Langdon just heading out from the back of the offices, her enormous shoulder bag slapping at the side of her body like a wrecking ball. That had to hurt.

“Mary?”

Mary was Max’s personal secretary. She was the one he went to when he got crazy about money, not enough money coming in, too much money going out, the entire small firm project ending in a heap of debts. Mary was a very calm person.

“Russ,” she said, “I thought I saw a light under your door. Are you all right?”

“Yes, of course, I’m fine,” Russ said. “But I had an appointment. With Mikel Dekanian, you know—”

“The mortgage case,” Mary said. “I do know. Isn’t that awful, though? The poor man hasn’t ever had anything to do with J.P. CitiWells, and they still manage to screw him up. He was supposed to come in today?”

“A few hours ago,” Russ said. “You didn’t see him?”

“Well, no, I didn’t, but I’m not the best one to ask about that. I’m not usually out front here. But if he’d come in, I’m sure somebody would have told you about it. Unless you were out, of course.”

“I went out for lunch, but that was at around noon. He was supposed to come in at three thirty.”

“Maybe he got hung up somehow and forgot to phone,” Mary said. “Or maybe he didn’t forget to phone but somebody forgot to give you the message. That’s happened a couple of more times than I like to think about. Would you like me to call him for you so you can find out what’s going on?”

“What?” Russ said. “No, that’s all right. I’ll look into it in the morning. I probably ought to be going home myself.”

“You probably should,” Mary said. “Donna’s probably frantic. See you tomorrow, then.”

“See you tomorrow.”

Russ watched her leave.

Then he went back into his office and packed up as much of the paper as he could get into his briefcase.

He didn’t see what good it was going to do, but he had to try.





FIVE

1

By the time Gregor had finished visiting offices, he had a stack of paper on him heavy enough to break his back, and enough new files on his computer to last him for days. It was not well sorted and organized paper. The police had their suspect, even if one or two of them wasn’t completely happy with who and what they had. The prosecutor was happy with who and what he had. And he had every reason to be. If the man now in custody for the murder of Martha Handling had been anybody at all but Father Tibor Kasparian, Gregor himself would have been happy with who and what they had.

In ways that Gregor barely wanted to think about, that bothered him. He didn’t expect himself to pay attention to every crime committed everywhere, or even every murder. There were a lot of them, and most of them were not even minorly interesting. Gregor had always counted himself lucky that he had not spent his childhood immersed in detective fiction. He hadn’t read any detective fiction at all until he was in middle age and Father Tibor had given him some. Then he’d spent a few months reading through the writers Tibor called the Great Masters: Christie, Sayers, Stout, Chandler, Hammett. He’d found something to like in most of them, and found Christie far more perceptive than he’d thought he would. But the only one of the lot that he’d felt was really real was a writer named Ed McBain.