by Jane Haddam
“Fake,” he said.
“I am hard of hearing, Father, and you know it,” Mrs. Vespasian said. “So I have a phone my great-granddaughter got for me, it has special powers to help my hearing. And I can turn it up until it is very loud. So I watched that silly video, and then I turned the sound all the way up and I listened. And do you know what I heard?”
“No,” Tibor said.
“Your hand would go up and then it would come down and there would be a thud, a hard thud, the hammer was coming down on a hard place. On wood. You can hear the sound of wood. If the hammer had been coming down on the body of that woman, the sound would not be hard or sharp. It would be … squish.”
Tibor winced. He had heard that squish, and he never wanted to hear it again. He never wanted to think about it. He could barely believe that old Mrs. Vespasian had thought about it.
“Don’t treat me like an idiot,” Mrs. Vespasian said. “I am not a delicate flower. I was in Yerevan at least once when the Turks came. And I was very small.”
“This is not the Turks,” Tibor said.
“This is not a movie of a murder,” Mrs. Vespasian said. “This is a fake. And I have come to find out what it is you think you’re doing.”
“Tcha,” Tibor said.
“If you do not tell me,” Mrs. Vespasian said, “I will go to Gregor Demarkian and make sure he knows that this movie is a fake.”
“Tcha,” Tibor said again.
“At least it will stop him worrying about this fool man who has run away from his wife,” Mrs. Vespasian said. “I have never heard so much fuss and nonsense in my life. I will go now, Father, and I will show this to Gregor Demarkian, and he will know what to do with the information.”
2
Mark Granby was standing at the window of his office, trying to work out his options, when he saw Gregor Demarkian get out of a cab in front of the building. There was no mistaking what that was going to be about. If everybody else had heard the rumors about Martha Handling’s corruption, Gregor Demarkian must have, too. And Gregor Demarkian was supposed to still have friends in the FBI. It was possible he knew a lot more than anybody else. Rumors sparked investigations. Mark hadn’t seen any sign of these investigations, but ever since Martha Handling died, he’d been thinking about them.
And then there was the other thing. Mark had been thinking about the other thing since it first showed up on his doorstep. He still didn’t know what to make of it.
He heard the wheeze of the elevator in the hallway, even though the door of the office suite was closed. He heard the door of the office suite creak open. Everything was cheap, and everything was just a little bit dangerous. But he’d known that when he first came in.
He’d also known that what he was doing was against the law. It would be really nice to say there was some confusion, but he knew he couldn’t try it without cracking up. They had a lot of euphemisms for bribery at Administrative Solutions, but all of them were transparent.
The girl in the outer office came in and announced that Gregor Demarkian was waiting to see him. She allowed as how Gregor Demarkian didn’t have an appointment. She admitted that she should have told him Mark wasn’t there. She had not done any such thing. Gregor Demarkian was somebody she’d heard of. She was impressed by people she thought of as “celebrities” and thought Mark ought to be impressed by “celebrities,” too.
Did the New York office work this cheap? Did they scrimp on the salaries of secretaries so that they got only half-brained reality TV–addled incompetents with no sense at all? If they did, Mark was in much worse trouble than he’d thought he was in.
The girl came back in with Demarkian in tow. He was a massive man, not fat but ridiculously tall and broad across the shoulders. It was like looking at a superhero on a television show, only older.
The girl went back out and did not close the door behind her. Mark got up and did it himself. Then he gestured Gregor to the single visitor’s chair and sat down behind his desk.
“So,” he said. “I was expecting you.”
Gregor Demarkian cocked his head, looking puzzled. “I came up here thinking you were going to stonewall me,” he said. “But you’re not going to do that. Why not?”
“I’ve got my sources of information just like you have,” Mark said. “Some of my sources may even be better than yours.”
“I doubt it,” Demarkian said.
“Faster, then,” Mark said. “I take it there are investigations into Martha Handling and all her works. And she was a piece of work, let me tell you.”
“You didn’t like her.” It wasn’t a question.
“It was hard to like Martha,” Mark said. “There was good reason her secretaries left her practically as soon as they started. Excuse me, personal assistants. We don’t call them secretaries any longer.”
“She was an unpleasant person,” Demarkian said.
“Not really,” Mark told him. “She could be very pleasant and charming on the right occasion, and she didn’t throw full-throttle tantrums. There’s some kind of bizarre connection between judges who are willing to take bribes and full-throttle tantrums. That wasn’t Martha’s problem. Martha’s problem was that she was a fundamentally dishonest person. She was dishonest about things she didn’t need to be dishonest about. It creeped out everybody who had to spend time with her. She’d even push her assistants to do things, steal office supplies and bring them to her house, all kinds of stupid little things.”
“And yet she had a very distinguished career,” Gregor said. “Somebody had to make her a judge.”
“Maybe that just tells you something about the state of things up in Harrisburg,” Mark said. “There are a lot of things that ought to be investigated up in Harrisburg.”
“Did you know Martha Handling spray-painted the lenses of the security cameras in the places she went in the courthouse?”
“Oh, sure,” Mark said. “She told me about that one herself. My God, paranoid? You wouldn’t have believed the woman. She was convinced they were bugging her house and her chambers and just about everything else, everywhere. I thought it was kind of weird. Somebody that dishonest, you’d figure she wouldn’t be that insane about getting caught. But she was.”
“Did you know that she didn’t actually get all the cameras?” Demarkian asked. “Did you know that the cameras in front, right after you came in from the street, and all the way down the corridor on the right to where the restrooms were, were functioning?”
“And they showed me coming in and going down the hall?” Mark asked. “That figures. Did they show anything important, like my going down the hall to her chambers?”
“No.”
“One point for my side.”
“But you must have gone all the way down the corridor to her chambers,” Demarkian said, “because that was the only reason you could have been there. You have no actual business in the courthouse. And you wouldn’t go there to talk to Martha Handling about bribes, or to give her bribe money. It was insane for you to go anywhere near the place. So why were you there?”
Mark considered that. “I was kidding myself,” he said.
“I don’t know what that means,” Demarkian said.
“When I first started with this, when I was first hired by Administrative Solutions and found out what we were doing behind the scenes, I told myself that I’d let it go so far and no farther, so I didn’t end up in jail. I don’t think I ever believed it, not all the way. I think I knew in the back of my mind that when the shit hit the fan, I was going to be over. But I did a pretty good job of kidding myself.”
“And it didn’t bother you that you were paying Martha Handling to give jail sentences to kids for things they’d normally only get probation for? That these kids, some of them as young as eight or nine, that you were incarcerating these kids, taking them away from their families and their schools and their friends and everything they’d ever known and probably ending any chance they would ever have for a real future?”
<
br /> “It wasn’t only kids,” Mark said. “Though between mandatory minimums and the whole ‘law and order,’ ‘throw away the key’ mentality, there was no need to pay judges in the adult courts. There’s one guy in Pittsburgh they call Ninety-nine Klein because he doesn’t like to give sentences less than ninety-nine years. And then he piles on anything extra he can get away with and has them all run consecutively. We’ve got one guy in the state prison doing two hundred twenty-five. It’ll be ninety-nine years before he’s eligible for parole. And all he did was have a gun on him while he was smoking crack.”
“I still think that’s a far cry from locking up children,” Demarkian said.
“Yeah, well,” Mark said. “If you want to lie to yourself about that, you tell yourself there are predatory children. And there are. Predatory children. Born psychopaths.”
“So you went to the courthouse on the day Martha Handling was murdered to talk to her about predatory children?”
“No, of course not. I went there to retrieve a cell phone. Martha being the paranoid nutcase that she was, she wouldn’t talk to me on a regular phone. She brought prepaid cell phones, new ones every few weeks, always entirely different numbers. It was enough to want to make you shoot her on principle.”
“I don’t think it’s entirely implausible that her phone might be tapped,” Demarkian said. “There are investigations ongoing. Somebody could have gotten a warrant.”
“True,” Mark said, “but it’s like I said: She was a paranoid nutcase. We never talked about anything in plain English. If somebody had listened in on our conversations, all they would have heard was gibberish.”
“Then why try to retrieve the cell phone?” Demarkian asked. “That was a big risk to take.”
“Because cell phones store information,” Mark said. “And that wouldn’t be enough by itself, but Martha was making noises about going to the authorities. She seemed to think that if she turned herself in and gave them everything they needed to prosecute—well, everybody—that she’d be in a better position herself.”
“Prosecutors do make deals of that kind.”
“I know they do,” Mark said, “but only if they haven’t got the information any other way. And you don’t get a really good deal unless you go to the authorities before they actually know that anything is happening. And I’m pretty sure they all knew that something was happening, even if they hadn’t got around to nailing it yet.”
“Martha Handling wanting to go to the authorities is more of a motive for murder than for retrieving the cell phone,” Demarkian said.
“Sure it was,” Mark agreed. “But it wasn’t just a motive for me. There were dozens of people involved in these things, and I don’t even know most of them. There were the judges, I know them, but the judges couldn’t do what they were doing without at least some collaboration from at least some of the lawyers, and then there were the guards and the social workers and the psychologists. We paid Martha Handling a set scale of fees for each juvenile she incarcerated for a year or longer, but sometimes to get the back up to do that, she’d have to pay somebody to give her the kind of report she wanted or play the defense just the right way. And we told her—right from the beginning—that whatever was going on with that, we didn’t want to know about it. As far as we were concerned, she could do whatever she wanted with whoever she wanted, but we didn’t want to know about it. And we didn’t. As far as I know, she was flying blind. But that’s the thing. Those people, whoever they were, had to have more of a reason to kill her than I did. As far as I know, those people were completely clean as long as Martha didn’t open her mouth. I was going to be in for it no matter what.”
“Then why try to retrieve the cell phone?” Demarkian asked.
“Because without the cell phone, I thought it would be all ‘he said, she said.’ The cell phone was hard evidence.”
“And did you retrieve it?”
“No,” Mark said. “The day after the murder, I nearly killed myself going in there and trying to find it. I thought the police might have missed it. And before you start—yes, I know that was a crazy idea. But Martha was so paranoid, I thought that if she had it on her, she would have put it somewhere safe. So I went out there a couple of times and went looking around. There was police tape up, but there weren’t all that many people there, and they weren’t really watching. But I couldn’t find it. I thought the police must have it, at first.”
“At first?”
“Well,” Mark said, “I think maybe I ought to tell you about the kid.”
3
Petrak Maldovanian was not a happy person. When he had first started doing what he was doing, he had had only one object in mind. He wanted his brother, Stefan, out of jail, and if he could manage it, he wanted Stefan still in the United States. That second thing was not as important as the first, because if Stefan was deported, it would not be to Armenia. He would be sent back to Canada and their other aunt. Canada was a pretty good place, and safe. It just wasn’t right in Petrak’s lap.
And Petrak had been thinking about it. So far, the experiment with the United States had not been working out for Stefan as he’d hoped it would. The United States was fine, but Stefan himself was behaving like an idiot. Only an idiot ran around shoplifting things in order to join a club. Even if Stefan was being completely accurate and the club was not a gang—and Petrak hadn’t conceded that point yet—even so, it was a stupid thing to do, and a club like that was not a good influence. If they were able to keep Stefan in the United States, then they would have to find him another school. He had to be away from the club and the other boys in it.
Stefan would be away from the other boys if he was in Canada. Petrak now thought it might be a better idea if Stefan went back to Canada.
Stefan could not go back to Canada if he was in jail. Jail was the important thing now. And Petrak hated to see Stefan the way he was in jail, with the jumpsuit and the locks and the way people acted as if he were a wild animal that would turn and savage them without warning and at any moment. Petrak was very sure that this was not a good way to treat people. People would not be better for it. A boy like Stefan would not be better for it. It would change the way he thought of himself, and that would change everything else he did.
This was, really, more than Petrak felt capable of thinking through. His impressions were vague. His feelings were confused. He didn’t know anything about jails or how they worked, or even about Stefan and how he worked. He just had impressions, and the impressions were very strong.
His instinct was to sit back and wait for Mark Granby to do what he had asked him to do. This might take a long time, which made him edgy. He went to see Stefan every chance he got, and he paid attention to what was happening with the case. Nothing was happening with the case. The judge was dead, and everybody was milling around, talking but doing nothing. Stefan was supposed to have another hearing. He couldn’t have another hearing until a hearing was scheduled. As of this morning, no hearing had been scheduled. Not until a hearing was scheduled could they know which judge would preside, and until they knew that, they couldn’t do anything.
“It’s very important,” Mark Granby had said. “We don’t do these things right out in the open. And I can’t go. You have to go.”
Mark Granby’s voice sounded odd. It reminded Petrak of the noise people made in their throats when they were being strangled in the movies. He was also whispering, as if he were close to other people and afraid of being overheard. It made Petrak uneasy.
“You have to go,” Mark Granby insisted.
All Petrak could think of was that the man was setting him up for a mob hit.
The impression of an impending mob hit was so strong, Petrak nearly ignored the whole thing. It occurred to him that Mark Granby now knew something he hadn’t known before. He knew that Petrak had been lying. Petrak did carry the phone on him. He carried it on him at all times. There was no place safe to put it. Aunt Sophie cleaned religiously and often. She’d find i
t no matter where he put it in his room. She’d look at it, too.
And that would be the end of everything.
Petrak thought about the phone. He thought about the mob hit. He thought about the place where he was supposed to be meeting a woman named Lydia Bird. It was a ridiculous name, Lydia Bird. He couldn’t find her name on the list of city employees. But maybe judges were not city employees, and maybe Lydia Bird was not a judge. It was impossibly difficult to know what to do.
In the end, he went, all the way down to the center of the city, in a part of town he knew nothing about. He had a vague impression that he should know where he was, that he didn’t know only because he had come the wrong way around. Since he could not connect that thought to any solid information, he let it go and concentrated on the three-by-five card where he had written down the information.
There were big official-looking buildings all around him, but when he made the next turn, there were mostly small stores and filling stations and pawnshops. Petrak didn’t like pawnshops. They made him depressed.
Petrak made one more turn and found himself in an alley. The alley was lined with big garbage bins, but at the very end of it was a door into the back of one of the brick buildings that backed on the alley. That would be their garbage cans he was passing.
That would be the door he was supposed to go through.
It looked … wrong.
Petrak swallowed his fear and walked all the way down to the door, all the way past the garbage cans. Of course it felt wrong. It was wrong. All the things they were doing here—it was all wrong. It had to be wrong to take a kid like Stefan and lock him up for years for shoplifting a couple of video games.
The last instruction was the easiest to follow: “Don’t knock. Walk right in.”
Petrak did not knock.
He stood in front of the door. He took deep breaths to calm the shaking in his arms.
He grabbed the door and pulled it open.