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

by Jane Haddam

  “I wish we were,” Gregor said, “but we’re not. Not yet. I’m getting there. Next thing: we have security camera tapes for movement in this corridor for the relevant times. There are a lot of people on those tapes, but we’ll stick to the ones we know were later in Martha Handling’s chambers. They included Father Tibor here, Russ Donahue, Petrak Maldovanian, and that woman, Janice Loftus—”

  “But I’m here,” a thin little voice came from the back of the little crowd that had begun to gather around Gregor’s lecture. There was a rustling and a string of apologies and the squat little woman came to the front, panting. “I wanted to talk to somebody, and nobody would talk to me at the police station and nobody would talk to me at Pennsylvania Justice and nobody understands, nobody does, but it’s very important. And I thought there would be police here and I could talk to them because they wouldn’t be able to go anywhere if they were guarding it, and then—”

  “You can stay here and follow along if you keep quiet until I’m done,” Gregor said. “In fact, you might even be a help.”

  “But I have something to say!” Janice Loftus said. “And it’s important!”

  “You can say it later,” Gregor said. “Now, where was I? Ah, people in the corridor who were also, certainly, in Martha Handling’s chambers later. There’s another person of interest in the corridor, but we can’t place him in Martha Handling’s chambers. That doesn’t mean he wasn’t there. That person was Mark Granby, the local executive in charge of operations for Administrative Solutions of America. Administrative Solutions of America is the company that runs prisons in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. They get paid by the ‘inmate day,’ as they put it. For each inmate, they get paid a set sum for each day the inmate is incarcerated. That means the more inmates, and the longer their sentences, the more money Administrative Solutions makes.”

  “I don’t understand what this has to do with Petrak,” Sophie Maldovanian said. Gregor looked up to see her way in the back, with Russ and Petrak himself. He hadn’t noticed her come in.

  “I know you say Petrak was in the corridor and I understand he was in the chambers, but he was just looking for Mr. Donahue, and Mr. Donahue was in the chambers and so was everybody else. There’s no reason to think Petrak did anything he shouldn’t have done except go wandering back there.”

  “I’ll say the same thing to you that I said to Dr. Loftus,” Gregor said. “For the moment, keep quiet. All right? Okay. Mark Granby was a very interesting person to find on that security tape, because as part of its attempt to make as much money as possible, he was systematically bribing judges, corrections officers, state evaluating psychologists, and a fair number of other people involved in the process. He was doing this here, and with Martha Handling. Martha Handling was taking money for incarcerating the juveniles that came before her, as often as she possibly could and for as long as she possibly could. And she had been taking it for at least the last few years. And that meant that there were rumors, and there were suspicions—and rumors and suspicions often led to investigations.”

  “Was there an investigation?” Russ Donahue asked. “I heard all those rumors, too, but I could never figure out if anything official was happening.”

  “Nothing official was happening yet,” Gregor said, “but it was on its way and it was inevitable. I heard the same rumors, some of them from people in the Bureau, and once it gets there, something’s going to follow. So Martha Handling was getting a little squiffy. Dr. Loftus here told me that she had a tendency, when she was involved in something she could get into trouble for, to rat out early and thus get the benefit of being the person with the most to trade for favorable treatment.”

  “It wasn’t just favorable treatment,” Janice Loftus said. “She got off scot free of everything and hailed as a hero half the time.”

  “Possibly,” Gregor said, “but that doesn’t really matter, in a way, because for whatever reason she was thinking of turning herself in, she was thinking of turning herself in. Mark Granby told me that himself when I talked to him. And if Martha Handling turned herself in, and if she talked her head off when she turned herself in, then Mark Granby was going to go to jail for a long time. And that makes him, as you can see, our prime suspect when it comes to motive.”

  “It doesn’t explain what the motive for Petrak was supposed to be,” Sophie said. “What was the motive for Petrak supposed to be?”

  “In the beginning,” Gregor said, “the idea was that Petrak, knowing that Judge Handling was the one most likely to give Stefan a long sentence, was looking to get Martha Handling out of the way so that Stefan’s case would be moved to another judge.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” Sophie said.

  “Maybe,” Gregor said, “but that was the thinking. Ever since the death of Mikel Dekanian, the thinking has been that Petrak may be something of a sociopath.”

  “That’s just persecution of immigrants,” Janice Loftus said furiously. “That’s exactly the kind of thing you people would think up to say.”

  “And that’s possibly true, too,” Gregor said, “but it’s largely beside the point. We don’t know that Mark Granby came down the corridor toward Martha Handling’s chambers, but we do know he could have, and since he could have, we’re going to put him on the list. Dr. Loftus here is also on the list, because Dr. Loftus knew Martha Handling for many years, and there’s always the possibility that there is something in their past that hasn’t come to light yet.”

  “Ridiculous,” Janice said.

  “I told you to be quiet,” Gregor said. “If you’ll all follow me, we’ll get on to the next part.”

  Gregor went off down the hall, and the crowd followed him. It was almost all of the crowd, and not just the people whom he had brought along himself.

  He stopped near the bathrooms and pointed back at the security camera on the ceiling. “That’s the last functioning camera,” he said. “It points in the other direction, so it can see people going toward the bathrooms, but it can’t tell us who went into the bathrooms, or who went past them and into the farther corridors. Or, for that matter, who went into the bathrooms and who then came out and went down the other corridors toward Martha Handling’s chambers. But there are some things that must have happened by necessity. The murderer must have been the first person to go down the corridors to Martha Handling’s chambers.”

  “The first person to go down to Martha Handling’s chambers was Father Kasparian here,” Ray Berle said.

  Gregor shook his head. “No. Father Tibor was the first one to come down the corridor to the bathrooms, but he did enter the bathrooms. All the other people came afterwards, but we don’t know who went into the bathrooms and for how long. So Father Tibor goes into the bathroom, and when he comes out, he sees one of our suspects going off down the corridor in the other direction from the court, and he follows. You should follow.”

  They followed. The crowd thinned out a lot, but it did not thin absolutely. Gregor was half surprised that Ray Berle and Tony Monteverdi didn’t shoo them all off.

  He walked first down one corridor and then the other and stopped when he got to Martha Handling’s chambers.

  “All right,” he said. “Two things. One is that although Father Tibor isn’t particularly old, he is not in the best shape, courtesy of many years of abuse in a dictatorship. When he saw the murderer going down the hall, the murderer was probably already nearly to the next corridor. Tibor walks slowly. The murderer, on the other hand, is young. He was fast. Very fast. He walked through this door and found Martha Handling occupying it. He closed the door behind him. The gavel was on the desk, probably in the stand that was there and empty when the body and Father Tibor were later discovered. The murderer picked up the gavel and smashed the woman’s head into the mess you all saw. He did it quickly. He did it viciously. And just as he was finished, Tibor—who had been following him and saw him go through the door to Martha Handling’s chambers—came in and found him finishing up.”

  “And
you think you can prove that,” Ray Berle said.

  Gregor opened the door to Martha Handling’s chambers and shooed them all in.

  “You’ve got only one other alternative,” Gregor said. “It was either that, or somebody else walked in on Tibor, and Tibor went on pounding the woman’s head in for nearly a minute and a half before he noticed anybody was there.”

  “You’re the one with only one more alternative,” Tony Monteverdi said. “You’re trying to tell us that Father Kasparian here walked in to find somebody bashing in the head of a woman and responded to that by—what? Arranging to fake a video of the murder? Are you serious?”

  “I’m very serious,” Gregor said. “And it’s not as strange as you think it is. It’s exactly the kind of thing Tibor would do, if the circumstances were right. The murderer is young, as Tibor told me himself. He has his entire life ahead of him. He has people who love him and would be hurt if his life were ruined. And, what’s more, Tibor is sure he knows this person, that what he’s seen must be an act of temporary insanity, a blowup that got out of control. And he wants to save this person’s life. Martha Handling’s cell phone is on her desk. So is the cell phone she uses to make the calls to Administrative Solutions and to other people she knows who are part of the bribery scheme. The murderer picks up this phone, and they stage the murder video—which wasn’t all that good once you started to really pay attention to it. It doesn’t show the body on purpose, of course, because Tibor wasn’t hitting the body. But that video has sound, and if you turn it up, you can hear the gavel hitting the floor, a hard wooden crack, not the squish the body would have made. But Tibor had promised to help him. And the murderer thought it would be more than just the video and the cover-up. He thought Tibor would plead guilty. And when somebody pleads guilty, all investigation stops. It didn’t occur to him that in Tibor’s addled brain, covering up a murder would be acceptable, but lying would not.”

  “That one—” Tony Monteverdi pointed at Tibor. “—must be a world-class loon.”

  “I have not admitted to this,” Tibor said. “I go back to my right to remain silent.”

  “They made the movie. The murderer left the room and went into one of the corridors to send the movie to Facebook. And then the murderer came back, supposedly following an odd noise, which was part of the cover-up, too, because it was the only way the murderer could explain all the blood he had on him. I don’t think either he or Tibor expected that anybody else would come in, but of course there were a ton of them, and Janice Loftus got there first. As it turned out, that was actually good news. It made the cover-up story all the more plausible. From then on out, the murderer told his story absolutely truthfully, except he started it the second time he came into this room.”

  “And you think my Petrak did this,” Sophie said. “You think he’s a psychopath. You think I wouldn’t know that he was a psychopath. He lives in my house. I would have noticed if he was a psychopath. I’d have picked up something.”

  “You’d be amazed at how often nobody does,” Tony Monteverdi said.

  “You honestly think my Petrak did this,” Sophie said. “You’re an idiot. You’re a complete fool.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” Russ Donahue said. “Of course he doesn’t think Petrak did this. He thinks I did.”

  Gregor could hear the stillness of the room around him as if somebody had died. He looked around to find Bennis and Hannah and Sheila and the Very Old Ladies. Hannah looked confused. Bennis looked too shocked to move.

  Then a shiver went through her as if she’d had an electric shock. “But, Gregor,” she said. “That’s not possible. It isn’t—”

  “He’s the only one Tibor would have done it for,” Gregor said. “He’s the only one who might possibly have known where Judge Handling’s chambers were. And he’s the only one who had any reason to kill Mikel Dekanian. Because Tibor is wrong, Bennis. This wasn’t a sudden loss of temper—a righteous fury because of the way Martha Handling operated—that got out of hand before he knew it. This was part of a pattern. He was taking bribes from Administrative Solutions. And if we look into the Dekanian mortgage mess, if we go to the Hall of Records and look, just as Mikel Dekanian did, we’ll find out that it was Russ who took out that mortgage with J.P. CitiWells. Because that’s the only thing that makes any sense.”

  “But, Gregor,” Bennis said.

  It was then that Gregor saw the gun. It was a surprisingly big gun, and he was a little upset with himself because it hadn’t occurred to him that Russ would have one.

  “You came in the back,” Gregor said. “That’s another nail in the coffin, Russ. You knew how to get into that back door, which means you must have a code, and you could only have gotten it if somebody authorized to use it gave it to you. And then there’s the fact that Petrak recognized the voice on the phone. He did recognize it. He was just so sure it had to be Mark Granby calling him, he took the fact that it was familiar to mean it was Granby’s. That was your good luck. But good luck doesn’t last forever, and you don’t have much in the way of skill. You’re not very good at this. And I’ve got two police officers here with guns of their own. Do you really think you’re going to get out of here? What would be the point of even trying?”

  “I’m not expecting to get out of here,” Russ said. “I don’t even want to.”

  Gregor was just thinking that that would have to be just as true as everything else, when the gun went off in his face.

  EPILOGUE

  October 23

  1

  Going up the drive, Bennis Hannaford Demarkian had been feeling dull and futile, a woman carrying out a mission that could not mean anything to anybody. When she got closer to the front door of Glenwydd House and saw Sheree Coleman standing at the large front window, obviously looking out for her, she went completely cold.

  It wasn’t that she hadn’t considered that Gregor might die. She’d considered it every single day since Russ Donahue shot him in the face. She’d been convinced he was gone when the event itself happened. She woke up in the middle of the night, hearing that gun go off and seeing Gregor’s face explode in blood. Then she’d sat up in bed and had no one to turn to. She couldn’t talk to Gregor, because he was in a coma. She couldn’t talk to Donna because … well, nobody could talk to Donna these days.

  Sometimes she thought it was all wrong, the way she was taking this thing. It was as if she had turned into one of those adolescent jerks she had known so well growing up. It was as if she could not get off herself. It was Gregor who was lying there helpless, scheduled to be dead. Thinking about that only made her more and more aware of how isolated she was, without him. It also made her more and more aware of how isolated he was. People came from Cavanaugh Street to see him. They sat in his room and talked about nothing that made any sense to her, but they talked.

  She brought audiobooks that he probably couldn’t hear, or absorb. She brought them because she’d read too many stories about coma victims who woke up after years and remembered everything that had ever gone on around them. She thought the stories were probably not true.

  It was Tibor who came to see him most often, coming out to Bryn Mawr in a hired car that must have cost him a fortune because he wouldn’t let anyone else drive him. It was Tibor’s visits that made Bennis hope that Gregor’s coma was a complete blank. The only person who blamed Tibor Kasparian for what had happened was Tibor Kasparian, but it didn’t help to know that. It didn’t even help Tibor to know that. The guilt was so deep and had become such a part of him that he was like the walking dead. Bennis was sure that the only reason he hadn’t committed suicide was that he thought he deserved to go through this trial for being an accessory after the fact and then to go to jail for it.

  She knew from what he’d said to her that the only reason he didn’t plead guilty was that she’d told him Gregor wouldn’t like it, and he knew that that was true.

  If Gregor were dead now, there would be nothing to stop him.

  Bennis was fin
ding it hard to make it the rest of the way up the walk. Her body felt heavy. Her shoes felt filled with lead. Sheree was up there, in the window, bouncing up and down and waving. Then she disappeared.

  Bennis hesitated. That did not make a lot of sense. Sheree was a bouncy person, but surely she knew enough not to bounce when someone had died. And why would it be Sheree waiting for her to give her the news? It would be Dr. Albright, or even Tibor, because Tibor would have been there since early this morning.

  The lead feeling lifted just a little and her heart began to pound. Sheree had not returned to the window. Nobody else was visible in the window. There was just that ridiculous potted tree and one of those unbelievably silly modern sculpted armchairs. The big window had not been a part of the house when the Cadwalladers and the Finchleys lived in it. She’d never wondered before whose idea it had been to put it in.

  The important thing was not to jump to conclusions. She should not have jumped to the conclusion Gregor was dead, and she should not be jumping to the conclusion now that something good must have happened, that there was about to be news she would want to hear.

  She turned into the last bit of walk, the one aimed directly at the front door, and saw that the door was open.

  Sheree Coleman was standing in it, bouncing away. “Oh, Mrs. Demarkian!” Sheree started squealing as soon as she saw Bennis on the pavement. It was still quite a walk. Sheree had to screech to be heard. “Mrs. Demarkian, where have you been? We’ve been calling and calling for hours. And we called everybody we thought might know where you were, and they’ve been piling in here for hours, and now the room is full of people and Dr. Albright is about to pitch a fit. And we called and called, and nobody could find you, and we didn’t know what to do.”

  Bennis had reached the door now. She thought she might have stopped breathing. “He isn’t dead,” she said.

  “No, he isn’t dead,” Sheree said. “He’s just the opposite. It happened right after breakfast this morning. Father Tibor was there, talking to him, and of course he wasn’t eating, he had a tube, and I went in to check it, and all of a sudden he opened his eyes and tried to say something, but nothing came out. So I went running to tell everybody and I got some water on crushed ice and brought it back and he was still wide awake and trying to say something, so I gave him something to drink. And he took a sip and then he took another sip—”