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

by Jane Haddam

  “I’ve got a bigger living room,” Lida said.

  “I’ve got to call Russ,” Donna said. “He’s a lawyer. He’ll know all about this ‘nolo’ thing and whatever it’s supposed to mean—”

  “Nolo contendere,” Bennis said. “No contest.”

  “The judge tried to explain it,” George Edelson put in helpfully.

  The women turned to look at him in a way that made it clear they’d forgotten he was there.

  “I’m sorry,” Lida said automatically. “We did hear the explanation, but I for one am very stupid.”

  “You’re not being stupid,” Gregor said.

  They all stood there for a minute, then, awkward.

  Finally, Bennis shook herself back to an operational mode. “I’ll go get the car,” she said. “I’ll pick you two up in a minute and we can talk on the way back. But you know what I’d like to know? Why would Tibor have wanted to kill this woman anyway? I mean, why would he have bothered?”

  “But we know that,” Donna said. “She’s the judge who’s always sending children to juvenile jail even for small things and sentencing them to years when any other judge would have given them probation, and Stefan Maldovanian was one of his personal projects and he thought Martha Handling was going to send him to jail and have him deported over—”

  “Stop for a minute,” Bennis said. “Does that make any sense to you? I mean, really. Why go to all that trouble over an issue like that? What would he have expected to get out of it?”

  “Well—” Donna looked puzzled. “Well,” she said again, “maybe he hoped that, with this Judge Handling gone, Stefan Maldovanian would be assigned to another judge, and that judge wouldn’t be so harsh.”

  “And for that he’d have killed the woman?” Bennis said.

  “Maybe he was just very angry,” Lida said. “That thing, that video, he was pounding and pounding and when I saw it, I thought he might be very angry, he might have lost his temper because of something this woman said, or—”

  Lida stopped. She looked puzzled, too.

  “Exactly,” Bennis said triumphantly. “I know we all hate looking at that damned clip, but I spent hours looking at it this morning and if you do the same, you’ll see the same. It’s not just that Tibor never loses his temper, although he never loses his temper. It’s that he’s not angry in that clip. He isn’t. He’s supposed to be pounding away at someone’s head, but he’s acting like he’s pounding a nail into a two-by-four. He’s not angry. He’s not even upset. He’s just doing it.”

  “But he couldn’t do that,” Donna said. “He couldn’t pound in somebody’s head just calm and collected like that.”

  “Then maybe he isn’t pounding somebody’s head in,” Bennis said. “As everybody keeps mentioning and then forgetting, there’s no sign of a head in that clip, except for Tibor’s. Maybe he’s pounding something else.”

  “But,” George Edelson said.

  Bennis had her keys out of her oversized shoulder bag. “No buts,” she said firmly. “There isn’t a ghost of an idea of why Tibor would have wanted to kill that woman in the first place. And as far as I can tell, not a single person, not even Gregor and Russ, have suggested a possible motive. Never mind a plausible one.”

  “Interesting,” Gregor said.

  “I’m always interesting,” Bennis said. “You two stay still. I’ll have the car here in a second.” Then she took off down the courthouse steps to the street.

  3

  Gregor and George Edelson waited until Bennis came around to pick up Lida and Donna, and while they did, they said not much of anything about anything. Lida and Donna seemed exhausted by the subject. Gregor didn’t blame them. The wind was picking up. Lida kept wrapping her coat more tightly around her chest.

  When Bennis had come and the women had gone, Gregor turned to George Edelson.

  “You know,” he said, “Bennis is right. There isn’t a plausible motive.”

  “Motives don’t have to be that plausible when we have something like that clip,” George said. “And I don’t know what to make of that thing about Father Kasparian not looking angry on it. I mean, maybe he did or maybe he didn’t, but it’s hard to tell anything on those phone videos.”

  The two men started walking down the steps to the street.

  “Let’s let that go for the moment,” Gregor said. “Do you know what I think is strange? We’ve been talking all day, I talked to everybody except Tibor yesterday, everybody on the Cavanaugh Street end. We talked about the clip. We talked about who saw what in the corridor and the judge’s chambers. You and John and I talked about what I could and couldn’t get away with making a private investigation of this murder. But none of us, not once, ever talked about Martha Handling, except for the security guard—”

  “Sam Scalafini.”

  “Sam Scalafini,” Gregor repeated. “My point still stands. People don’t get murdered out of the blue. There’s almost always a reason for it. And the reason is almost always either part of the person’s character or part of his situation. Her situation, in this case. Does Tibor, or anybody, bludgeoning a person to death because she might send a kid to do a lot of juvenile jail time make sense to you?”

  “It would with a certain kind of person,” George Edelson said. “I’ve seen a lot of rage in my time. Rage can do amazing things.”

  “I’m going to have to look at the clip again,” Gregor said, “but I think Bennis is right. I think Tibor isn’t showing any rage in that clip.”

  “It’s like I said,” George said.

  “I know,” Gregor agreed. “There’s only so much you can tell from a phone video. Did you find the phone the video had been made on?”

  “I don’t think so,” George Edelson said. “I’ve got a bunch of notes in my briefcase that I’m supposed to give you before we’re done. And we’re going over to Homicide, and they know all that.”

  “But it was a phone video?” Gregor asked. “It wasn’t a security tape.”

  “No, we told you,” George said, “there aren’t any cameras in the judge’s chambers.

  “So now we’ve got another problem,” Gregor said. “Assuming that is a clip of Tibor murdering Martha Handling, then not only was Tibor murdering Martha Handling, but somebody was standing by recording it. If Tibor was in some kind of frenzy, he might not have noticed that. But what about the person making the video? Why wasn’t that person running off somewhere to call for the police?”

  “All right, yes,” George Edelson said. “That occurred to us. Lots of us. Homicide, too.”

  “I take it the police have checked the phones of the people found in the chambers when they got there, at least?”

  “The clip didn’t come out until a couple of hours after—after. The cops didn’t even know about it when they sent everybody home.”

  “So the police haven’t looked at them?”

  “No, not that,” George said. “They did get onto it—it’s just that it had been a while. And they’re checking it out. But if they came in the front door, their phones would have been confiscated. And most of them came in the front door. We do have security tape footage of that.”

  “Of course,” Gregor said, “given a couple of hours, someone who understood how those things worked could have deleted the video from the phone.”

  “Those things are retrievable,” George said.

  “With some work, an expert, and a court order,” Gregor said. “Well, you shouldn’t have too much trouble getting the court order. And assuming the person who took the video didn’t just throw his phone away. And assuming that the person who took the video is one of the people who was found in and around the judge’s chambers when the police got there. Do you see why it’s so important to understand the victim?”

  “Understanding the victim will tell us who took the phone video?”

  “Maybe,” Gregor said.

  They had walked down the street some ways, and Gregor saw they were standing across from the courthouse where the mur
der had taken place. People were going in and out of it. It was not entirely shut down. There were extra police on the steps and at the door, and Gregor was sure that if he went inside, he would find the corridors leading to the judges’ chambers blocked off in all directions. He could just imagine how the other judges were taking that.

  “I’m surprised the police didn’t shut down the whole building,” he said to George.

  George shrugged. “They shut it down yesterday,” he said. “Then they spent the whole night in there. You want to go back and talk to Sam again?”

  “Not now, no. Did you know Martha Handling? Personally?”

  “Everybody in city government knew Martha, more or less,” George said. “I didn’t know her well, if that’s what you mean.”

  “Did you know her well enough to tell me if Sam Scalafini’s description of her was correct?”

  “You mean about her being crazy?” George said. “I don’t think I’d have said crazy as much as I’d have said bitch. I knew about the thing with the security cameras, though. Everybody knew about it. The first three or four times she pulled it, Scalafini got in touch with the mayor’s office and we looked into it. I got sent down to tell her that her chambers had no security cameras in it and the other security cameras were none of her business.”

  “And?”

  “And,” George said, “she gave me a lecture on how she knew what we were up to and how we couldn’t fool her no matter how hard we tried and how she had ways to make us look bad, and on and on and on.”

  “That sounds like Scalafini’s description.”

  “I guess,” George said. “It was just—less Looney Tunes and more Axis of Evil, I guess. She really was a bitch, Mr. Demarkian. A world-class, down-to-the-bone bitch. And that’s before you even consider the possibility that there was corruption going on. That she was selling out to Administrative Solutions of America.”

  “But,” Gregor said, “you haven’t proved the allegations of corruption as of yet.”

  “No,” George said. “We keep thinking we’re getting close, and the feds keep thinking we’re getting close, but it all keeps sort of falling apart. There’s enough on the table now to be pretty sure that something was going on, but we can’t nail just what. Or maybe not. Because that’s another aspect of this. I can’t help thinking that it might have been something else.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like sheer mean,” George said. “She really, really, really was a bitch, Mr. Demarkian. She set out to hurt the hell out of people. In little things as well as big ones. And for no discernible reason. If she knew you were vulnerable somewhere, she went right at you. She even went after John.”

  “John? I wouldn’t think John had a lot of vulnerable points by now,” Gregor said.

  “I wouldn’t have either,” George said. “And I didn’t get the reference. Something about a woman, I think, but I didn’t ask and I’m not going to. Anyway, John is not your standard victim. He let her have it, and as far as I know, she never tried anything on him again. But it goes to show, if you get my meaning here. The woman couldn’t keep an assistant for a year, and even the ones that lasted a year were few and far between.”

  “And somehow this means she was less likely to be involved in corruption than otherwise?”

  “Not that she’d be less likely to be involved in corruption,” George said, “just that the long sentences she kept giving those kids are less likely to be proof of anything except how unbelievably vile she was. She always gave harsher sentences than anybody else, even before we had privatized prisons.”

  “As long as the ones she’d been giving after we got privatized prisons?”

  “I don’t know off the top of my head,” George said. “But if I were going to go after somebody to bribe, Martha Handling would be the one. With other people, if they started to give out those long sentences, you’d be surprised. But nobody would be surprised with Martha. It would just look like business as usual.”

  “You said we had an appointment to see people at Homicide?”

  “Yeah,” George said. “We do. Are you feeling all right? You look kind of funny.”

  TWO

  1

  Janice Loftus was as angry as she had ever been in her life, so angry that she was having a hard time keeping it from affecting her teaching. Janice didn’t believe in anger, any more than she believed in hate. They were useless emotions. They cluttered up your life. They imprisoned you in the past and cut you off from the future.

  Today, though, no matter what they did, Janice found it impossible to keep clear of them. She was beginning to wonder if she had somehow become trapped in the patriarchal paradigm. Aggressive emotions were always patriarchal. Women were oriented toward cooperation, the way all oppressed peoples were, and they were now living in a world where only cooperation would work.

  But there was no cooperation, not from anybody. Even Kasey Holbrook was not cooperating, and that was her job.

  “I want you to stay out of it,” Kasey had said yesterday, when Janice had been trying like mad to make her make sense. “This is a murder case. It’s a spectacular murder case. It’s all over the news. It’s going to be all over the national news in no time flat. It wouldn’t be good for the organization and it wouldn’t be good for you to be right in the middle of it.”

  Janice had begun to feel her head throb, right then and there.

  “But we can’t pretend I’m not in the middle of it,” she said. “I found the body, everybody knows that. I was interviewed on the local news. They’ll play it over and over again.”

  “That’s no reason for you to make your part bigger than it has to be,” Kasey said. “All I’m saying is to lie low and stay out of it as much as you can.”

  “But I can’t stay out of it,” Janice said, the first of a whole series of ugly suspicions blossoming in her brain. “You must be able to see that. I’ll have to testify at the trial—”

  “If there is a trial,” Kasey said, “and even if there is, it’ll be months away. Maybe even years.”

  “But I’ll still have to testify,” Janice said. “And of course there’ll be a trial. That man is a friend of Gregor Demarkian’s. Do you think Gregor Demarkian is going to let him plead guilty? And I don’t see the point of shutting up for a year or two. Don’t you see what an opportunity this is? We’ve been talking about Martha Handling for years. And now we’ve got her. We’ve got everything. The bribe taking, the sentences that went on forever—”

  “We don’t actually have any proof that she ever took bribes,” Kasey said, “and everybody’s known about the sentences for as long as Handling was giving them. Nobody cared, in case you didn’t notice. Harsh sentences are politically very popular with just about everybody but the families of the inmates, and practically nobody will listen to them.”

  “But this is different,” Janice insisted. “She’s a big noise in the news now. Everything about her will come out and be in the papers. Things we couldn’t get any traction on before will be news. And the news will make all the difference.”

  “No,” Kasey said. “It really won’t.”

  That was when Janice realized what was going on. It was a disease, power was. Kasey had it. Kasey was used to getting all the publicity and attention for herself. She was used to making all the waves and seeing herself on the six o’clock news. She obviously hated the idea of anybody else getting a little attention.

  Really, Janice had thought when she finally got off by herself and was able to think. She should have known it all along. She really should have. Kasey had been showing all the signs for years. All that talk about “collegiality” and “leading by consensus.” It was just a lot of words to mask the grab for power. And the power was a soft power because only with soft power could you go on pretending as if you really believed in equality.

  It happened to all of them. It really did. Janice had never belonged to any organization anywhere that was any different.

  By the next morning, she
’d managed to calm herself down. She’d gone in to school and taught her first class. She’d answered a few questions from fellow faculty members and one from a student. Most of her students never watched the news, so they knew nothing about the fact that Janice had become the pivotal element in the country’s most famous murder case.

  Most famous at the moment, Janice reminded herself when she went into her office for office hours.

  She didn’t know what she’d expected when she turned on her computer. She did know that the arraignment was supposed to be today. That had been on the news last night, even though cameras were not being allowed in the courtroom. Cameras in the courtroom were something Pennsylvania Justice strongly supported. The more a record existed of every phase of a case, the more likely it was that they could get innocent people out of jail once the injustice had been done.

  At least, that was the theory. Janice was now fairly sure that Pennsylvania Justice supported cameras in the courtroom because Kasey liked to see herself on television. Some people just couldn’t get enough of being made a fuss of. You saw that with Kasey all the time. She had to be the queen bee at every party. She had to be the person who stood up at the microphone and announced policy at press conferences, and announced the results of investigations, too.

  Somebody else might have given the spotlight to one of the people who did the really important work, but not Kasey. No matter how many hours the volunteer lawyers spent working on cases, no matter how many mountains of material the volunteer researchers looked through to find the kink in the armor of conviction, no matter how much work other people did, it was always Kasey up there, being the Public Face of the Organization.

  Well, Janice thought, that kind of thing always ended badly. That kind of thing ruined organizations. It put an end to all the good work. Janice knew that for certain, because she’d seen half a dozen organizations come apart.

  The first of the Web sites Janice managed to get to load was WTFX, which was, of course, Fox. Janice never watched the Fox News cable channel, because it was nothing but lies and propaganda, but she watched all the local channels in turn, because no single one of them ever seemed to have what she needed for weather.