by Jane Haddam
TWO
1
Afterwards, Gregor could never remember the order in which things had happened. He did remember wondering what the phone call was about, but mostly because Bennis was not, as she put it, “a crisis kind of person.”
If he’d been asked what he thought the crisis could possibly be, he would have said the very mortgage he was working on. Mikel Dekanian’s mortgage had been a crisis on Cavanaugh Street for weeks. There had even been images out of a silent movie serial: Mikel’s wife, Asha, had come to the Ararat with a head scarf over her head, trailing two young children and weeping uncontrollably because she’d had a letter that sounded as if she would be out on the street before nightfall. Mikel himself had stood on the steps of the church and ranted on and on in a frantic mix of Armenian and English about what he was going to do to the next idiot who called his wife and threatened her on the phone.
It was just one of those things it was impossible to get anybody to take sanely. And although Gregor didn’t blame them, they also made him tired.
The things he did not remember included just who had said what when, and just how long it had taken him to understand what Bennis was trying to tell him.
He wasn’t entirely sure he’d understood it even when he got to Penn Station, and then he was stuck in what felt like an endless round of phone calls and dropped phone calls and areas of no service and the whole insanity that made him hate cell phones.
At the same time, he felt guilty. He knew it was ridiculous, but part of him felt that nothing would have happened if he hadn’t shut his own cell phone off while he was talking to Terry Carpenter. He’d had perfectly good reasons. He didn’t want calls to interrupt the conversation. Interrupted conversations never quite worked out the way you were planning them to. But then the call had come in on the landline, and it had just seemed to be all his fault.
It had taken everything he had not to force the conversation out into the open right there in Terry Carpenter’s office.
“Father Tibor has been arrested,” Bennis said. Gregor could hear the heavy breathing, and everything in him went on high alert. Bennis kept her head almost always, but now she sounded as if there weren’t enough air in the universe to fill her lungs.
“Father Tibor’s been arrested,” Bennis said, “and I can’t—there was blood everywhere. Russ came in and Tibor was on the floor with the body and Russ tried to pull him out and then other people came and tried to pull him out or something, I’m not sure, but everybody had blood on them. Tibor was covered with it and Russ had it all over and other people and then the police came and I wasn’t there, but he’s not talking to me anyway, and—”
“What do you mean he’s not talking to you?”
“It’s on CNN already,” Bennis said. “If you could just get to a television, or bring it up on your phone, I showed you how to bring things up on your phone—”
“Bennis, for God’s sake. I’m in Mr. Carpenter’s office, I can’t talk and I can’t figure out—”
“I don’t want you to talk,” Bennis said. “I want you to get out of there right this minute and get home. Get home as fast as you can. Take an Amtrak Express if you have to. Hire a bloody limousine if you have to. Just get here.”
That was the point at which things got a little hazy. He half thought he’d made a lot of excuses before he slammed out the door and down the hallway and out onto the street to find a cab. Then he was sitting in a plastic molded chair in Penn Station, trying to get his phone to work.
He bought a ticket on an Acela Express. He got it out of a self-service kiosk after checking the board a dozen times, just to make sure the train was running on time. You could never tell with Amtrak.
It took him only five minutes to get CNN to load on his phone, but it felt like an hour, and he had to stop himself from smashing the thing on the ground to punish it for being so slow.
Then he was staring at CNN’s home page and reading the little blurb under the picture of a building. He thought the building might be the court where the incident had happened. He clicked on the link that said FULL STORY.
He read the story three times. It was like reading gibberish.
He looked at the board again. His Acela Express was still slated to be on time. He had half an hour to kill. He tried phoning Bennis.
Bennis didn’t pick up.
He texted her: PICK UP. In capitals. It needed capitals.
He tried phoning her again. This time she picked up.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I had the phone off. I’m very, very sorry. I should have realized you were going to call. But you don’t understand how crazy it’s already been, and it hasn’t been more than a couple of hours. I can’t understand—”
“Stop there. A couple of hours.”
“Just after eleven thirty or eleven forty-five, I think,” Bennis said. “The police were called just after eleven forty-five, and they were all there—Tibor and Russ and Petrak Maldovanian because his brother was arrested for shoplifting or something—”
“Bennis.”
“It doesn’t make any sense. The news says they found him in this judge’s office and he had the murder weapon in his hand and there was blood everywhere. And there was this woman there, not the judge. I’m not sure who she was, but she started screaming her head off and Russ was in the corridor because he was looking for the judge, and I don’t know. Gregor, I wasn’t there.”
Gregor tried to think of what could calm her down, but he had never had to calm Bennis down. “All right,” he said. “You weren’t there. But Russ was there. That’s right, isn’t it? You said Russ was there. Is Russ with you now? Can you put him on the phone?”
There was a long, strained silence. “He isn’t here,” Bennis said finally. “He’s still at the jail, where they took Tibor, and—”
“And he’s working on it,” Gregor said. “That’s what I’d expect. There’s nothing wrong with that. There’s going to have to be a bail hearing. And whatever went on, Tibor shouldn’t be talking to anybody without a lawyer present.”
“I don’t think that’s anything you have to worry about.” Bennis sounded as if she were strangling. “He’s— Tibor isn’t talking. To anybody. According to Russ, all he’ll say is ‘I have the right to remain silent.’ That’s it.”
“But that’s good.” Gregor was trying his best to sound reassuring. “That’s just what he ought to say. Don’t start acting like a ninny and thinking he ought to be talking his head off so that he doesn’t seem to be guilty, because—”
“No, you don’t understand,” Bennis said. “That’s all he would say. Not just to the police, but to anyone. It’s all he would say to Russ.”
“What?”
“And Russ says he presented himself as Tibor’s attorney and Tibor said Russ wasn’t his attorney and then the police pretty well threw him out of the station, and now he doesn’t know what to do and I don’t either. I mean, if Tibor wants another lawyer, I can pay for one. There’s enough money, but Russ says they wouldn’t let me in to see him anyway and it doesn’t sound like he’s made a phone call to another lawyer and does this make any sense to you? Isn’t Russ his lawyer? I mean, isn’t Russ his lawyer to the extent that he ever has a lawyer?”
“I never really thought of it,” Gregor said. “I never expected anything to come up.”
“Tibor can’t have killed anyone,” Bennis said. “He wouldn’t kill anyone. You know that.”
“I do know that.”
“I know you can’t work miracles, but Tibor will talk to you. Maybe you can get him to tell you what happened. Maybe you can get him to stop being an idiot and listen to Russ or somebody, get him to let me pay for another lawyer if he wants to, something, because the way things are now—”
“They’re calling my train.”
“Good,” Bennis said. “Go.”
“I’m moving as fast as I can,” Gregor said.
That was true, but it wasn’t much help to anybody.
2
The Acela Express was an hour and a half late getting into Thirtieth Street Station, and by then Bennis had texted him four times with a link. The problem with riding on a train was that service went in and out with no rhyme or reason Gregor could tell.
It didn’t help that the few seconds of film he was able to see as the connection went in and out was all disturbing.
He was sure it could not be accurate. It seemed to show Tibor kneeling on the floor in a large room, next to a large desk, holding an outsized gavel in his hands. That was all right. It was much like the still picture Gregor had already had a chance to see. Then the film would move a little and it would look as if Tibor was raising the gavel in the air, far over his head. Then the gavel would start to come down, and Gregor would lose service again.
Gregor knew that his best bet would be to calm down and wait until they came to somewhere where he would both have service and where the train was going to be at a full stop for fifteen minutes or more. God only knew that there were plenty of places where the train felt it had to stop for fifteen minutes or more. If the Acela WiFi worked anything like reliably, we could use that. But right this minute, it wasn’t working at all.
When the train arrived, Bennis was not waiting for him on the platform. Gregor got out with his single airline bag and his briefcase and headed straight for the waiting room.
He got to the waiting room and looked around. It was full of people. None of the people looked like Bennis. He tried peering at all the places she’d waited for him before and got nowhere. Then all of a sudden she was there, right next to him.
“Let’s go,” she said, grabbing him by the arm. “I just paid a cab a hundred dollars and promised to pay him a hundred more if he waited for us around the corner. I made him put his off-duty light on.”
“Why do you have a cab?” Gregor asked. “Is something wrong with your car? Did you have an accident? What the hell—?”
“My car is bright orange,” Bennis said, tugging at him without mercy. “It’s the easiest thing to spot in three states. Cavanaugh Street is full of reporters, and I do mean full of them. They’re jamming the street solid, and they’re waiting for you. I called John Jackman, and he sent out some cops to disperse them, but when I left, it wasn’t going very well.”
“They’re waiting for me,” Gregor said.
“Of course they are,” Bennis said. “Who else would they be waiting for? I left by bus. It was the only way I could get out of the neighborhood without being seen. And there isn’t a hope in hell that we’re going to be able to get you back into our house without being bombarded.”
“I couldn’t watch that video you sent me,” Gregor said. “The service problems were ridiculous.”
They were outside. They were around the corner. They were moving so fast, Gregor was losing any spatial organization that he ever had, and he had never had much. Then Gregor saw a cab parked at the curb with its off-duty light on.
“In,” Bennis told him, opening the cab’s door.
She crawled in behind him and handed a thick stack of twenties to the cabdriver.
“Thank you,” she said.
“We going somewhere in particular?” the cabdriver asked.
“1207 Markham Street,” Bennis said.
The driver was an older black man who looked like he’d heard it all by the time he was seven. He pulled away from the curb.
“Markham Street?” Gregor said.
“It’s practically right behind us. Think about it for a minute.” Bennis handed over her phone. “I’ve got it downloaded. All you have to do is hit Play.”
Gregor hit Play.
For what seemed like forever, the video—it looked handheld, and not very well. The picture kept bouncing all over the place—the video went on and on and on. Tibor was holding the outsized gavel. He was raising it over his head. He was bringing it down. He was raising it over his head. He was bringing it down.
“For God’s sake,” Gregor said.
“It was the most watched video of the day on YouTube before somebody complained about the violence and they took it down,” Bennis said.
“What’s YouTube?”
“Oh, for God’s sake,” Bennis said. “You know what YouTube is. It’s the Web site where Tommy Moradanyan put up that video he made of the cats getting into the cabinets in Donna’s kitchen. And I keep telling myself that the way these things work, they’ll never let that in as evidence in a trial, but you know what? I don’t really know that. And it looks like—it looks like.”
“You can’t see the body,” Gregor said. He had started the video playing again. “Where’s the body?”
“Presumably it’s on the floor under where Tibor’s arm is going—where it’s—oh, for God’s sake, Gregor, this can’t be right. There has to be some other explanation. He can’t have done that.”
Gregor had gone very, very cold. “Who took the video? Where did the video come from?”
“Nobody knows at the moment,” Bennis said, and now she was crying. “The first thing I thought of was that it must be a security tape, but I’ve been talking to John’s office all day, and according to them, there’s not really any security tape, because something was wrong with the security tape. I don’t know.”
“If this isn’t a security tape,” Gregor said, “then somebody must have been standing there with a camera filming this on purpose. A phone camera, something like that. And if what was going on was that Tibor was bludgeoning someone to death, then the person taking the video was either part of the project or a bystander who decided to film it instead of running off to get help.”
“If you’re asking me if I think it’s possible that some bystander came along and filmed a murder instead of calling 911, then yes, I think that’s possible. I don’t think it’s possible that Tibor ever bludgeoned anybody to death. Ever. Tibor is not a violent person. He’s never been a violent person.”
“You can’t see a body,” Gregor said. “There’s blood on the gavel in the first frame. It doesn’t start out clean and get bloody.”
“Does any of this make any difference?” Bennis asked. “Because it doesn’t make any difference to me. And Tibor’s in jail somewhere, and he won’t talk to Russ. And he won’t talk to me or Donna. And he sent word that he wouldn’t see you, either. And I’m going completely and absolutely crazy, Gregor, I really am.”
Out on the street, everything had begun to look familiar. The cab slowed and began to pull to the right. The houses looked down-at-heel and pinched. The one belonging to Mikel Dekanian had a foreclosure notice plastered over its front windows, as if the dispute about the mortgage were already settled.
Bennis leaned forward and threw another pile of bills into the front seat next to the cabbie. The front door of 1207 opened and a small, dark head peered out. Then the door swung wide.
“Let’s go,” Bennis said. “We don’t want to give anybody any ideas.”
They went. They went quickly. Asha Dekanian grabbed Bennis by the arm as soon as she reached the top of the steps and pulled her inside. Gregor was inside a moment later, and the door was shut.
“I watched the whole time,” Asha said. “I watched the whole street. There wasn’t anybody there. Nobody knew you were coming here. It will be all right.”
“We go through to the back and out the back door and there’s an alley. Where they keep the garbage cans. Then we go down that three houses and that’s the back door to our place. With any luck, nobody will know you’re home,” Bennis said.
“It is a complete impossibility,” Asha said. “Father Tibor is a very good man.”
Bennis looked away. Gregor took note of the fact that, even under the thick accent, it was impossible not to hear the faint wobble of doubt. Asha Dekanian must have seen that video, too.
Bennis was already chugging down the long center hall toward the back. The house was very shabby but meticulously clean. It reminded Gregor of the way houses and tenements had been on Cavanaugh Street before everyb
ody started making serious money.
What was at the very back was the kitchen, and it was not only very clean but also newly remodeled. There was something in a cast-iron pot on the stove that smelled familiar. Gregor was too distracted to recognize it.
Asha rushed ahead of Bennis and got the back door open. She held it wide and stuck her head out to look up and down the alley.
“It’s all right,” she said. “There’s nothing here. There’s nobody. You should move fast, just in case.”
Gregor wondered what circumstances in Asha Dekanian’s life in a Soviet country had taught her how to do this, and then he was out the door himself. The garbage cans were set up against the back walls, all of them decently closed.
“I noticed it when the kitchen guys were here,” Bennis said, moving them both along. “They brought a lot of their equipment in from the alley, and I stood out here one morning and got myself oriented. It’s a good thing I did, too, because I never would have guessed. This is us. The steps suck. We should have them fixed.”
The steps did suck. One of them was nearly off. Gregor marched up them and into his own kitchen—that fully remodeled kitchen that always made him think of House Beautiful magazine.
Bennis closed the door behind them. “Give me a minute and I’ll make some coffee. Or get you a shot of something serious if you want it. I’ve been forcing myself not to all day. I’ve also been forcing myself not to scream.”
Gregor put his bags down on the kitchen table and then sat. Bennis moved away to fuss with the coffee things. Gregor got his phone again and watched the video one more time.
Bennis came and sat down across from him. “Listen,” she said, and she was crying again. “I know this can’t be true. I know it. Tibor can’t have done this thing. But the more I hear, the worse this gets. Worse and worse. And that woman who died. She was that judge, you know, that Martha Handling he was so upset about. He was on the local news talking about her not a week and a half ago. And this other woman, this Janet somebody, who says she came in and found him—found him killing—Gregor, I don’t know what to do. Russ is losing his mind,” Bennis said. “Donna called me up a couple of hours ago, scared to death that he’s suicidal.”