“This afternoon,” Asha said. “He was supposed to go to Mr. Donahue’s office about the mortgage. It is a terrible thing, what is happening with the mortgage. People call all hours of the day and night. Men come to the door and give me papers that I don’t understand. They put big signs up in front of the house. They say they are going to put me into the street and with the children. There was a sign there yesterday and only this morning it was taken off. Mikel was very upset.”
“Of course he was very upset,” Gregor said.
Bennis brought the coffee over along another cup and poured out for both of them. “Give me your keys,” she said to Asha. “I’ll go over and babysit.”
Asha looked at Bennis blankly.
“Oh, Lord,” Bennis said. “You didn’t bring your keys. Did you lock your door?”
Asha was trying very hard to think. “The door locks by itself,” she said finally. “You pull the door and it locks by itself.”
“Why did I know that was going to be the answer?” Bennis said. “Okay, let me get dressed and I’ll wake up Steve Tekemanian.”
“Why Steve Tekemanian?” Gregor asked.
“He’s the only one I know with burglar’s tools,” Bennis said.
Gregor wanted to ask why Steve Tekemanian had burglar’s tools, but Bennis was gone and Asha had gone back to crying.
“All right,” he said. “So Mikel went out for an appointment this afternoon—”
“They came and took the sign down from the door,” Asha said, “and Mikel had an appointment with Mr. Donahue. He took time off for the appointment. But maybe it was too much time off, because he got nervous. He paced up and down. He got very … agitated?” She let out with a string of Armenian, none of which Gregor understood.
Gregor tried again. “So,” he said, “Mikel was home for that, and he was upset, and then you said he left early for his appointment.”
Asha drank half her coffee in one gulp. Gregor thought it must have scalded her throat. She showed no signs of noticing.
“He thought of something,” she said. “He thought that everybody was trying to show that there was no mortgage on our house from this big bank, but he thought maybe that was the wrong way to look at it. We did have a mortgage on our house, from our bank, from the American Amity Savings Bank. He thought we should go to see the mortgage at the Amity Savings Bank and then—” She stopped suddenly. “This is wrong. I don’t understand it and I am getting it wrong.”
“That’s all right,” Gregor said. “It’s probably not something we need to know. He thought of an idea, a way to approach the problem with the big bank. Then what did he do?”
“He called Mr. Donahue,” Asha said. “At his office. At Mr. Donahue’s office. Mikel called him but he was not in. And the people at the office didn’t know when he would be back. And Mikel was still very nervous. And he said he would go and look himself, to find this thing he’d thought of. And then he left.”
“And that was when?”
“It was just after lunch,” Asha said. “It was just about noon. Mikel always eats his lunch at eleven o’clock. He gets up very early in the morning.”
“Did he say where he was going to check this thing?”
Asha nodded. “The Hall of Records. I remember the name. It was like a name from a textbook in Armenia. The buildings all had names like that.”
“All right,” Gregor said. “That makes sense. I saw him after lunch, maybe at two o’clock or so—”
“You saw him?” Asha said. “And he was all right? He was alive?”
“He was certainly alive,” Gregor said. “He was in a big hurry. He didn’t stop to talk. But it makes sense because I was at Homicide, and there are a lot of government buildings in that area. I think he could have been coming from the Hall of Records. I’ll have to check a map. He was in a hurry and he said he had an appointment.”
“Yes, yes,” Asha said. “He had an appointment. He had an appointment with Mr. Donahue.”
“And did you call Russ’s office?”
“I thought that the appointment was going on for a long time. I thought that might be good news. And then when I did begin to worry, it was too late. When I called the office, I got only the answering machine. And then I really began to worry.”
“Does Mikel have a cell phone?”
“Yes, of course. Everybody has a cell phone. Bums in the street have cell phones.”
“Have you tried calling his cell phone?”
Asha nodded. “The first time it rang and rang and rang. The other times it only gave me voice mail.”