Fighting Chance(72)

“I take it you’re not talking about Mikel Dekanian.”

“I think the odds are that Mikel Dekanian met some friend of his somewhere and they tied one on but good, and he’ll show up in a couple of hours with egg on his face.”

“Is Mikel prone to that kind of thing?”

“No,” Russ said, “but you don’t have to be prone to that kind of thing to do it. And that is the way these things usually turn out. I’ve seen maybe six of them in my career, and that’s the way all of those turned out. No, it’s not Mikel. It’s not even the mortgage thing. I’ve made some progress in the mortgage thing.”

“If it helps any, Tibor isn’t talking to me any more than he’s talking to you,” Gregor said.

“You know who he is talking to?” Russ asked. “Hannah Krekorian. Hannah went over to the jail to see him yesterday, and he saw her. Agreed to talk to her through those telephone hookups.”

“All right,” Gregor said. “That could be a good sign. Did you talk to her? Did she tell you anything Tibor said?”

“I didn’t talk to her, Donna did,” Russ said. “And from what I gather, he said practically nothing, and she spent the entire visiting time crying and accusing him of things. You know Hannah. And what does that mean, that he’d talk to Hannah and not to either of us?”

“It could mean he’s ashamed of himself,” Gregor said.

“Do you believe that?”

“No,” Gregor said. “At least, not in the way it sounds. I don’t think he killed that woman and now he’s afraid to face us. I think maybe he’s afraid to talk to us because he knows that if he did talk to us, he might not be able to keep his silence about what actually happened. I just wish I could think of what that might be.”

“Right,” Russ said. “I wish I could think of anything. I’d better go home, Gregor. Donna’s probably frantic. And Bennis will be home in a minute. I’ve actually got work to do today.”

“I know,” Gregor said. “So do I.”

“It’s just so strange,” Russ said. “I always knew Tibor was the bedrock of this neighborhood, but I think I always thought of that as an abstraction. It’s just so strange for him not to be here. As if the whole place has emptied out.”

“I know exactly what you mean,” Gregor said.

And he did.





TWO

1

When Father Tibor Kasparian was honest with himself, he had to admit that he was going a little crazy. He was almost certain that he would be allowed to have books if he asked for them. He’d seen that on television once or twice. Even prisoners on death row were allowed to have books. What he wasn’t so clear on was the way it worked. Was there a prison library somewhere, where he could borrow books? He hadn’t seen a prison library or heard of one, but he spent all but an hour a day in this small cell. Anything could be going on out there, and he wouldn’t know about it.

Maybe the problem was that he was not in prison. He was in jail. He had been vaguely aware, before all this happened, that there was a difference, but he’d never paid much attention to it. Jail was where you waited for your trial. Prison was where you served your sentence. He was pretty sure he had that right. He wondered if prison was like this, with small cells with solid doors and almost no way to look out. He wondered if prisoners were like this, not just cooped up but also so bored, it was hard to remember how to breathe. If they were, then Tibor Kasparian was no longer the least surprised that there were prison riots.

Somewhere along the line, Tibor had passed through a barrier, and he knew it. He was bored and lonely and desperately isolated. Things were going on in the world, and he knew about none of them. Things were going on with the case, yes, but they were also going on in the real world. There were elections coming up in a couple of months. There would be political ads and debates and television opinion shows where everybody was lying. There were episodes of Downton Abbey he hadn’t gotten around to watching on Netflix. He had not been in jail for a full calendar week, so the church was all right for the moment. It wouldn’t be all right in the long run. There would be no service Sunday, unless somebody did something drastic. Tibor didn’t see who would or what that would be. Sometime along the line, they would have to get another priest.

He wanted to think that the jails where they kept juveniles were not like this, but he was sure they were. He imagined Stefan Maldovanian locked up in a small room with nothing to do. He imagined Petrak Maldovanian, too, although Petrak would probably be sent to an adult prison. Closed up and bored. Losing their minds. Never making anything of themselves, because there was less and less of themselves to make every single day.