Fighting Chance: A Gregor Demarkian Novel (Gregor Demarkian series Book 29) (23 page)

He pulled the door open without thinking twice about what he might find there, and ended up face-to-face with Asha Dekanian. It had started raining sometime in the night. The rain was coming down hard. Asha was wearing a thick overcoat over what looked like it might be a nightgown. Her hair was wet through and plastered to the sides of her face.

Gregor stepped back away from the door to let her in, and immediately heard movement above him on the stairs. Bennis was awake.

“Asha, come in,” Gregor said, “get out of the rain. Are you all right? Are the children all right? What are you doing here?”

Asha scooted in rather than walked, and stood in the hallway while Gregor shut the door behind her. She was shaking so hard, her teeth were rattling. “I didn’t know where else to go,” she said. “I left the house, I was going to go to Mr. Donahue’s, but then I thought, there are very small children there, practically a baby, I would ring on the doorbell and I would wake the baby. But I was already out in the street and I had to go somewhere. I came here. I came here because I thought you could know.”

“Know what?” Gregor asked.

“Know where Mikel is,” Asha said. “He didn’t come home. He had an appointment but he went a little early to see about something and then he called me and then he didn’t come home. It is three o’clock in the morning and he didn’t come home.”

Bennis had come the rest of the way down the stairs. “I’m going to put on some coffee. Or would you prefer tea, Asha? Are the children all right? Are they at home? Is there anybody with them?”

“The children are sleeping,” Asha said. “I left them in their beds. They were sleeping. I had to come. You know Mikel. He would not go out and not come back all night. Mikel does not miss his dinner. I waited and I waited. I thought if I waited long enough he would have to come home. He always comes home. And now it is three o’clock in the morning, and I do not know where he is.”

“I’ll make the coffee and then I’ll run over to Asha’s house,” Bennis said. “Kids have a remarkable tendency to wake up in the middle of these things.”

She went to the back of the house, and Gregor started to urge Asha in that same direction.

“I did not know what to do,” Asha said, crying. “I knew something had to be wrong when he was not home for dinner. He never misses his dinner, my Mikel. Sometimes in Armenia we would be missing dinner because there was no dinner to be had, but here he never misses his dinner.”

It was one of those conversations that was going nowhere, but Gregor let the woman babble. He took her into the kitchen and found Bennis standing at one of the counters, putting out coffee cups.

Gregor herded Asha into a chair and got a cup to put in front of her. “Now,” he said while Bennis watched the coffeemaker. “Start from the beginning. Mikel was supposed to have an appointment.”

“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.”

“All right,” Gregor said.

Bennis popped her head through the door. “I’m on my way. Steve is going to meet me there. He doesn’t want to get started until I get there, though, because he says if he’s going to get picked up by the cops, he wants Mrs. Gregor Demarkian along to get him out of jail.”

“I should go back to get the children,” Asha said.

“You don’t have any keys either,” Bennis said. “And your children know me. They even know Steve.”

“We’re going to call Russ Donahue and see if Mikel ever made his appointment,” Gregor said. “Maybe we’ll go over there and have a talk.”

“I’ve got
my
keys,” Bennis said. “And besides, I know how to get in without them.”

She disappeared from the kitchen door, and Gregor noticed he was not spending his time reassuring Asha Dekanian.

2

Gregor called Russ, at home, but on his cell phone, so that he didn’t wake up the entire house. He did wake up Donna. Gregor could hear her fussing in the background, asking about making coffee and putting out something for everybody to eat. Russ got her calmed down as best he could and agreed to go down the street to Gregor’s to talk. Almost as soon as Russ rang off, Bennis called to tell them she was in the house, with Steve, and nobody had been arrested.

“Can you imagine us getting away with this on Cavanaugh Street?” she asked. “I think Hannah and Sheila stay up all night with binoculars.”

Gregor didn’t believe that it was exactly that bad, but he took her point. This little episode was going to be all over the Ararat in the morning, and it was already nearly morning. There was nothing to be done about it.

He kept hovering back and forth in the hall so that he would hear the doorbell as soon as it rang. He didn’t want Russ pounding the way Asha had.

Russ’s ring was barely any ring at all. The only reason he didn’t walk right through the front door was that he probably thought Gregor had locked it. He had thrown on jeans and a cotton sweater and a raincoat so wrinkled, it must have been balled up in a drawer for months. He looked exhausted.

“I hope we didn’t wake everybody up,” Gregor said. “Asha came here because she didn’t want to pound on your door and get the children out of bed. I didn’t call on the landline for the same reason. I’ve got no idea if any of that did any good at all.”

“You didn’t wake up the children,” Russ said. “Most of the time, I’d have said you couldn’t have no matter what you did. They sleep like rocks. But the past few days, Tommy’s been a little … rocky.”

“Does he know what’s going on?”

“Probably,” Russ said. “Not that we’ve told him anything directly. Donna thinks it’s better if he doesn’t know. He’s been destabilized already. But for God’s sake, Gregor, what are the odds? He’s a very bright kid. He sees the newspaper. He sees the news. He must have a fairly good idea.”

“He hasn’t asked about it?”

“No,” Russ said. “Donna says he hasn’t even asked her. With me—well, I’m a little rocky myself these days. I think he’s gotten the impression that he should stay away from it where I’m concerned.”

“He is a bright kid,” Gregor said.

By then they’d reached the kitchen. Asha Dekanian was sitting at the kitchen table where Gregor had left her, crying into a handkerchief that was no longer much use.

“Oh,” she said when they walked in. “Mr. Donahue!”

Russ went to the coffeemaker and set it up again. Nobody trusted Gregor to make coffee. Nobody trusted Tibor to make coffee either, but nobody was going to mention that now.

“Mikel is missing,” Asha said. “He is not at home. He has not come home since he went out to see you.”

“He also didn’t see me,” Russ said.

Asha Dekanian blanched. “He did not come to your appointment?”

“Not that I know of,” Russ said. “I got back from a hearing and that was before he was due, so I got to working on the case and the next thing I knew, it was after six. And I’d assume that if he came in, somebody would have told me. He was in my appointment book.”

“I suppose your secretaries would have six kinds of fits if we checked with them about it,” Gregor said.

“Probably,” Russ said. “But we could. Everybody’s walking on eggshells anyway. The explosion is likely to be muted. But I don’t think we can wake them up at this hour of the morning to do it.”

“Mikel said you had told him you had good news,” Asha said. “He was very happy about it. And that big sign came down off the front of the house. I was very happy about it.”

“I do have good news,” Russ said. “I actually got the court to grant an injunction. Why they should do it now when they wouldn’t for the last six months is beyond me, but they did it. That means that nobody can go forward with the foreclosure until we’ve been able to bring our entire case into court on the countersuit. And that means that you’re safe in your house for the foreseeable future. Safe from J.P. CitiWells, anyway. If you’ve got a problem with American Amity, that’s something else.”

“There is no problem with our real bank,” Asha said stiffly. “Mikel is always on time with all his payments. Also his payments for electricity and everything else.”

“I think the problem now is to find out what’s happened to him,” Gregor said. “I told Asha here that I’d seen him this afternoon. He was rushing off to an appointment. That could have been his appointment with you. Except I think it was just after lunch, and if his appointment with you was—”

“After three o’clock,” Russ said.

“It seems a little early,” Gregor said. “It seems a lot early. But he was very excited. He didn’t stop to talk. And he looked frantic.”

“He was going to the Hall of Records,” Asha said. “He was going to look there for something to help our case.”

Russ looked puzzled. “The Hall of Records? But why? There wouldn’t be anything there. The only crux of this case is the fact that J.P. CitiWells didn’t use the Hall of Records. They used that online database. If they’d used the Hall of Records, we could have had this whole thing cleared up in a day.”

“There wasn’t anything he could have found there at all?” Gregor said.

“I don’t see what,” Russ said. “The real mortgage is filed there, the one from American Amity Savings. But there’s nothing wrong with that mortgage. And there’s nothing there about J.P. CitiWells.”

“I think maybe there is something he could find,” Asha said. “And then these people, these people from the big bank with the ridiculous name, maybe they wanted to stop him from telling you about it.”

Russ shook his head. “There really isn’t anywhere to go with that. There isn’t anything anybody could have found out that would make J.P. CitiWells want to … uh…”

“Liquidate him,” Asha said firmly.

“Right,” Russ said. “Liquidate him. There really isn’t any reason why somebody from J.P. CitiWells would want to liquidate him. Or anybody else. No matter what they found out.”

“They could go to jail for what they are doing,” Asha said. “They don’t want to go to jail.”