Fighting Chance: A Gregor Demarkian Novel (Gregor Demarkian series Book 29) (21 page)

Real as the McBain stories were, though, they were nothing at all like real police work, or real murders. Real murders were, almost invariably, mind-numbingly stupid. All the studies said that less intelligent people were more likely to commit violent crimes than more intelligent people. Gregor thought that might be hiding something more sinister. Maybe more intelligent people were less likely to get caught committing violent crimes than less intelligent people. Maybe there were, out there somewhere, dozens of bodies buried on the assumption that they’d died of natural causes, or accidents, or simple old age, when they’d actually been cleverly done in by family and friends.

Maybe, but Gregor didn’t think so. The kinds of crimes that made for interesting books and television shows were probably in reality very rare. Most intelligent criminals turned out not to be as intelligent as they thought they were. Most murders consisted of sudden and irrevocable losses of control: two guys who got liquored up and infuriated in a bar when one or both of them had a weapon; the nineteen-year-old boyfriend who promised to babysit and found out he couldn’t stand the sound of the baby crying; the mental defectives who thought a gun meant nobody could say no to them and ended up being resisted by the owner of the convenience store they’d set out to rob.

There was a reality show out there called
World’s Dumbest Criminals.
Gregor did not like reality shows as a rule, but he thought that one had a point. Stupid, he’d once heard somebody say, is an unlimited resource. He liked the line from Isaac Asimov better: “Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.”

In this thing with Tibor, it was less the violence he was concerned about than the events that followed the violence. There were all those people in the corridor. There was the picture sent out by the woman who had eventually found the body. There was Tibor’s behavior, which was not only strange but strange in a particular way.

He walked the street for a while until it got dark. He found himself getting annoyed over the fact that it was still daylight saving time. Not that any daylight was being saved at the moment. It was late, and it was September.

He was very tired and very hungry. He found a streetlight bright enough to read his watch by and saw that it was close to eight. He’d have missed dinner at the Ararat while everybody else was there. Bennis would make him something if he asked, but Gregor had learned that it was better not to ask. Bennis seemed to approach cooking as an adversary competition. She was competing with the food, which wanted to be edible, but would not win.

He got his phone out and called her. She sounded enormously relieved when she heard his voice. That surprised him.

“How am I supposed to know what’s going on out there?” she asked. “You could be walking around the streets of Philadelphia in a fog. And some parts of Philadelphia, you shouldn’t do that in.”

“I’m getting a cab. You’ve probably had dinner. Could you meet me at the Ararat anyway? Maybe you could call ahead in case the place is busy tonight? Linda will find a place for us if she knows we’re coming.”

“Yes, of course I can,” Bennis said. “You haven’t eaten? That means you really were wandering around the streets of Philadelphia thinking.”

“I shouldn’t be long,” Gregor said.

He closed up and stepped out into the street to hail a cab. This was not something worth arguing about, because Bennis was right.

The cab was just turning into Cavanaugh Street when Gregor realized what it was that had been bothering him, and then he wasn’t sure it made any difference. He made the driver stop just outside the Ararat’s front door, gave him a decent-enough tip, and got out onto the sidewalk. Bennis was right where he could see her, sitting in the booth that bordered the big plate glass window. Gregor wasn’t sure how he felt about that. That was the same booth where he and Tibor had had breakfast together for years.

He dragged the briefcase with the papers and the laptop in it into the Ararat. He should have stopped at home and dropped it off. He waved to Debbie Melajian when she waved to him. Her sister Linda opened the restaurant in the morning and worked through lunch. Debbie came on just after lunch and closed up after dinner.

Gregor went over to the booth and slipped in across from Bennis.

“What do you have in that thing?” Bennis asked. “It looks like you’re carrying rocks.”

“It feels like I’m carrying rocks,” Gregor said. “It’s my laptop plus enough paperwork to denude the forests, and none of it is going to make any difference that I can see. I have, however, had what you and Donna like to call an Aha Moment.”

“Really?” Bennis said. “About what?”

Debbie Melajian came over with her pad. “Bennis, are you going to stick to coffee or do you want something serious to drink? My mother was betting on something serious to drink.”

“I’ll have a Drambuie on ice,” Bennis said.

“I’ll have a double Scotch on the rocks except not much on the rocks. And make it Johnnie Walker Blue if you still have a bottle somewhere.”

“We’ve got it in the back for you,” Debbie said, “not that you drink it often. Do you want me to bring dinner after? Bennis has already had—”

“Imam bayildi,” Gregor said. “But give me about twenty minutes to finish the Scotch.”

“Absolutely,” Debbie said, and whisked away with her pad.

Bennis was giving him One of Those Looks. “I take it that whatever this Aha Moment was, it wasn’t good news,” she said.

Gregor shrugged. “It’s not good news and it’s not bad news. It’s just one of those things we all should have thought about before, but we didn’t.”

“And what’s that?”

“There’s a video out there that looks as if it shows Tibor pounding that gavel into Martha Handling’s head,” Gregor said.

Bennis snorted in exasperation. “Of course there is,” she said. “What do you think we’ve all been worried about from when this started—?”

“Yes, yes,” Gregor said, “but think about it. This was a juvenile court. They don’t go bonkers over cell phone cameras in adult courts anymore, but they still do in juvenile courts. You can’t take a cell phone into a juvenile court if the cell phone has a camera in it.”

Debbie brought over the drinks and put them down on little square napkins. Gregor picked his up and took a long gulp of it. You shouldn’t gulp Johnnie Walker Blue, but he didn’t care.

“Bennis,” he said. “The police are convinced that that video was made by a cell phone. But if it was made by a cell phone camera, it couldn’t have been made by anybody who came in through the front door of that courthouse except judges and security personnel, because they’re the only ones who aren’t walked through a metal detector and don’t have their pocketbooks and briefcases and backpacks X-rayed.”

“I still don’t see—”

“Bennis, think,” Gregor said. “And this is the problem with cases like this, where everybody thinks they already know what’s going on. None of the people we know were in that corridor leading to the corridor to the chambers could have had a cell phone on him. But if that video was made with a cell phone, somebody must have. The police are going to check all the cell phones of all the people who were there, but it isn’t going to make any difference, because all those phones will have been lying on the check-in table in little manila envelopes. None of those people could have brought a cell phone into Martha Handling’s chambers and taken that video. And no security personnel or other judges did that either, because none of those people were there until
after
the murder.”

Gregor felt a certain amount of satisfaction that Bennis was looking confused.

“Well,” she said, “maybe somebody had a digital camera, a cheap one, or something—”

“That would have been caught at the desk, too.”

“Somebody had to have taken that video. We all saw it. I still have the wretched thing on
my
phone.”

“I agree,” Gregor said. “But the video has to have been taken by a phone brought in by somebody who didn’t come through the front.”

“And that would be?”

“The most obvious person,” Gregor said, “would be Martha Handling herself. She would have come in from the parking lot in the back, since she drove to work. She would have had her phone on her, obviously. There are only two things wrong with that.”

“What are those?”

“First,” Gregor said, “there’s the fact that the video was not taken on her phone. The police found her phone. They checked it out. The video was not taken with that. But there’s also the fact that the only way that video makes sense, or the only way I can see at the moment, is if somebody had the phone on him, walked in on the crime being committed, and started filming almost by remote control. But the way things are, that cannot be the way it happened. The secretaries and the assistants were all out at a funeral. The judges who were in were in their courts. Nobody unauthorized could have come through that back door either, because although the camera right at the door was blocked by paint, the other cameras in that parking lot weren’t.”

“So—what then?” Bennis asked. “Somebody didn’t walk in on Tibor? I don’t understand—”

“I think,” Gregor said, “that that video was staged, and it was staged with a readily available instrument. The police found Martha Handling’s phone. There must have been another phone, somewhere available.”

“What other phone?” Bennis asked. “Whose phone?”

“What if the rumors are true,” Gregor said, “and Martha Handling was taking bribes to put juveniles in jail for longer sentences than they would usually get for the kinds of crimes they committed. Let’s say she was doing that—would she take calls relating to that on her regular cell phone?”

“Oh, I see,” Bennis said. “You think she had another phone. Maybe one of those throwaway ones. And it was—what? Lying somewhere in plain sight?”

“Right,” Gregor said. “Someone walked into the room, saw Tibor doing whatever he was doing—”

“I’d like to know what that was,” Bennis said.

“Grabbed the phone and then did something with it,” Gregor said. “Whoever it was had to have taken the phone away. It’s entirely possible that Tibor didn’t even realize that the person was there, if he was in fact the person who committed the murder. If he wasn’t, and the scene was staged, then they staged it together. But whoever it was took the phone away, and the phone wasn’t found on him or her during the investigation. Which means that either the person ditched it, or he wasn’t one of the people found on the scene and interviewed immediately. And we’ve got a candidate for that. The guy who runs local operations for Administrative Solutions, the company that runs the prisons, was in the courthouse that day. And we’ve got security tape to prove it. And he’d want to take that phone away with him. And nobody would have checked him going out.”

Gregor saw Bennis’s face fall.

“It’s progress,” he said gently. “It’s not much, yet, but it’s progress. And that the man from Administrative Solutions killed Martha Handling over the bribes he was paying her makes more sense as a motive than that Tibor did it for no reason we’ve been able to find out yet.”

“But don’t you see?” Bennis said. “It doesn’t even start to prove that. If it was the way you just worked out, then this Adminstrative Solutions man still has to have come in to find Tibor pounding away with that gavel, and if that’s the case, then Tibor could still have committed the murder, and I just don’t—”

“Ahem,” somebody said, right next to Gregor’s ear.

Gregor would have jumped out of his seat, except that the way the booth was constructed wouldn’t allow it. He did bang his knee against the table’s wood.

Bennis looked frigid.

Standing next to their table was a squat, frazzled-looking woman in ballet flats and Native folk art jewelry. Gregor recognized her, but only vaguely. He thought of her as the lady that screamed.

“Excuse me,” the woman said. “I’m very sorry to bother you, but I’ve been waiting and waiting. For hours. Because you always come in. Then I thought you weren’t coming tonight and I thought I’d go to your house and try there. It’s very important. My name is Janice Loftus, and I know all about Martha Handling.”

2

Bennis Hannaford Demarkian was the sanest woman Gregor knew, but every once in a while she took an instant dislike to somebody, and once she had done that, all bets were off. She took an instant dislike to the squat woman standing next to their table, and the reaction was so strongly visceral, Gregor had expected her to explode. The reality was that Bennis did not explode. When she was mortally, irrevocably offended, she got so polite, she could make your teeth bleed.

If Janice Loftus had noticed Bennis’s deep freeze, she gave no sign of it. Gregor guessed that she hadn’t noticed it. Janice Loftus was the kind of woman who wouldn’t notice much of anything, and especially wouldn’t notice other people’s reactions to her or anything else. She talked a mile a minute. Her eyes darted all around the room. Her hands fluttered and waved.

Then she pushed herself onto the bench beside Bennis and stared across the table at him.

Bennis moved because she had to. She was wearing the face of her own great-grandmother, who had been the most austere and unforgiving hostess on the Main Line. She had had to be, because she was married to a real live robber baron.

Debbie Melajian came over to the booth, looking just a little puzzled. “Can I get you something?” she asked Janice Loftus.

Janice Loftus looked back. “They’ve got something,” she said. “I don’t have to compromise myself any more than I already have. You should order in fair trade coffee, that’s what you should do. You’d get a lot more business from socially responsible diners.”

“I’ll get you some water,” Debbie said.

“The bottled water industry—”

“It’s just water from the tap,” Debbie said. Then she sped off toward the back.

Bennis looked like she was about to breathe fire.

“People are much smarter about these things than they used to be,” Janice Loftus said, “but not enough of them are, and too many people don’t care. Bottled water—corporations are taking over our water supply. What are we going to do when it’s gone? And what they call soft drinks—”