“Do you remember when the copper pipes were stolen? That big pile of copper pipes? We put in a claim on the insurance, and—”
“He couldn’t have done that all by himself,” Clare said. “That stack of pipes was as tall as a normal house.”
“I think he gets friends to help.”
“So, on top of everything else, you got Hernandez to help you commit insurance fraud, and he brought in a bunch of people you don’t know, or sound like you don’t know. What happened to all those pipes?”
“Oh, they’re back at the site. I wasn’t going to waste them. We put in the claim and then had them hauled back there and said they were new ones, you know. There’s no point spending for them twice.”
Clare was counting to ten in Russian again. This should have been simple. There was nothing to complicate it. Except that Cary Alder always complicated everything.
Clare had never seriously considered what would happen if she got caught. She knew these things didn’t last forever. Everything unraveled eventually. Now she had to wonder if they would put her in prison, or just revoke her citizenship and send her back to Lithuania.
“Did you ask her if she would rather move into one of the affordable apartments at the Alder Arms, or one of those places? It would be more expensive than she could afford, but it would be a nicer apartment in a nicer neighborhood.”
“I tried that once. She wants her own neighborhood. But it wouldn’t work anyway. Those apartments are under the control of the city welfare agencies. You can’t just put anybody in there. You have to go through the agencies, and they’re all running their own hustles.”
“Of course.”
“I just called to let you know. I don’t see what we’re going to be able to do about it. Calm her down for the moment, maybe. If she goes to the housing authority again—”
“Yes,” Clare said. “Yes, I understand the situation. When are you due to get the next scheduled payout?”
“Monday.”
“All right,” Clare said.
“I’ll let you go now,” Cary said. “It’s like I told you. FYI.”
The phone went dead in her ear.
It was always so hard to know what to do next.
But she was going to have to do something.
9
Tommy Moradanyan knew he was in for it as soon as Mr. and Mrs. Demarkian and Javier and Pickles took off for Cavanaugh Street in one direction, and Father Tibor grabbed his arm and took off for Cavanaugh Street in another.
It was after nine o’clock by then, and the sleet had morphed into a full-blown ice storm. The neighborhood was deserted. The people who normally hung out on stoops and sidewalks had disappeared into shelters of one kind or another. The streets were deserted, too. Either the city had issued one of those no-vehicles-on-the-streets-without-serious-necessity orders, or drivers were being a lot smarter than they usually were. The sidewalks were slick. It was hard to stay upright on the pavement, and it was going to get harder.
“Tcha,” Father Tibor said, after a while.
But that was it. Just “tcha.”
It took a little over a block before Tommy couldn’t stand it anymore.
“I’m not a child,” he said finally. “No matter what the pack of you think, I’m not a child.”
“You are fourteen,” Father Tibor said.
“Which is not a child,” Tommy said again. “It’s old enough to think. It’s old enough to need to know.”
“You could always think,” Father Tibor said. “Even as an infant, you could think. Sometimes you could think too well for your own good. Or your mother’s.”
“I know Mom is—I mean, I know this is—”
“Did you hitchhike because you didn’t have the money for the bus?”
“I had the money for the bus one way. I used it to take the bus home. I thought that made more sense. It was more important to get back on time. I started off early enough in the morning to give myself a lot of leeway getting there.”
Father Tibor nodded. “And you have faked identification?”
“Uh—I did a license.”
“And this license says you are how old?”
“Eighteen.”
Father Tibor nearly stopped dead on the sidewalk. “They believed that? At the prison? That you are eighteen?”
Tommy flushed. “I was a little worried about that, too, but it wasn’t any problem. They barely even looked at it. I think it could have said I was a penguin and they wouldn’t have noticed.”
“The next time you decide to go up there,” Father Tibor said, “you will come to me, and I will give you money for the bus fares. You will not hitchhike.”
“It really wasn’t a problem—”
“It is not safe. I am not your mother. I understand this, a little. I talk to him, too.”
“I don’t have your advantages. I can’t claim to be his priest and get a designated hour every week.”
“That was Krekor. But yes, I know.”
“And I wanted to see him. Face-to-face. I wanted to look at him. All that stuff happened and Mom packed us up and took us off and it was like one minute he was there and the next minute he’d just vanished. She wouldn’t even let us see the news. I don’t know. Maybe there wasn’t any news. He pled guilty. There wasn’t any trial.”
“There was some news.”
“Father Tibor, he was the only father I ever really had. And I thought I knew him.”
“We all thought we knew him. Your mother says he was very tense there, at the end, in the last eight months or so. I think back and I cannot remember.”
“I can’t either. I think back and it all seems normal to me. Maybe he was treating me a little more like an adult, if you know what I mean, but there’s nothing odd in that. Does it matter that I think that woman he killed deserved to be dead?”
“I think it matters that you think anybody deserves to be dead.”
“But what she did. Taking money to give kids longer sentences in juvenile hall so the for-profit-prison people could make money off them. Okay, I’ve never really figured out how that worked. But I have the gist of it. Right? That was very bad.”
“Yes,” Tibor said. “That was very bad.”
“But then in a way it doesn’t matter,” Tommy said, “because he didn’t kill her because she was doing it. He didn’t kill her to stop her from doing it. He was part of it, too. Sometimes I sit around and think about it and I get feeling crazy.”
“You must remember that there were other things besides the woman. He tried to kill Krekor, too.”
“Does he talk to you about all this crazy stuff he thinks? About how everything is falling apart and there’s going to be a civil war and blood in the streets and if you don’t have money you’re going to die or be worse than dead and Mom is the perfect target and—it went on and on. I was there for twenty minutes and he never stopped.”
Father Tibor nodded. “Yes, I know.”
“Do you believe any of that stuff?”
“I believe he believes it.”
“Do you think he’s insane?”