Fighting Chance: A Gregor Demarkian Novel (Gregor Demarkian series Book 29) (31 page)

“They don’t usually get out,” Ray Berle said.

Tibor and George Edelson came back into the courtroom, and Gregor felt as if something could finally get done. Gregor was also gratified to see that Tibor was wearing neither handcuffs nor leg irons. He did look perfectly miserable.

“We got nailed by a guy from the prosecutor’s office,” George Edelson said. “He did not look pleased. My guess is that the blowback from all this is not going to be fun.”

“We’ll worry about the blowback when we get there,” Gregor said. “Let’s just make sure. We’re all ready? We should be there within half an hour, just to keep the security people from losing it. They’re probably losing it already. Everybody set? Russ? You’ve got your car?”

“I’ve got my car.”

“Good. Then we don’t have to wait around for you to get a taxi. Let’s go.”

“Can we go?” Bennis asked.

“I take it you’re going to need a taxi,” Gregor said. “Get there if you can get there. As far as I can tell, anyone can come in who wants to come in, so why not.”

“Excellent,” Bennis said.

“I don’t understand what’s going on,” Hannah Krekorian said.

“I’ll explain it on the way over,” Bennis promised her.

Mrs. Vespasian let out with a stream of Armenian, and the other Very Old Ladies started chattering too. Gregor was glad they were going to be following Bennis and not him.

Gregor watched Tibor watch them all go.

Then the priest turned to Gregor and said, “You’re wrong, Krekor. You are very wrong. About all of this.”

“No,” Gregor said. “I’m not. And I’m going to prove it to you.”

3

They could have gone into the juvenile court in a lot of different ways, but Gregor wanted to go in through the front door, and that was what George Edelson did. They were stopped at the security checkpoint and wanded and sent through the metal detector. Gregor opened his briefcase and let the guard look through it for contraband or weapons. Then they all waited while Ray Berle and Tony Monteverdi came in from the back.

The courthouse was not busy. It was close to the end of the day. Hearings were winding down. Judges were going home. Even so, there were more than a few people milling around, and if a hearing was going on in Martha Handling’s old courtroom, there would soon be more.

“All right,” Gregor said, moving to the head of the corridor that led to the restrooms and, from there, to the rest of the building. “This corridor leads to the restrooms, as you can see. Then it continues to the corridors we’re interested in. There are two things you need to remember. The first one is the security checkpoint we just came through. Nobody is getting into the building through that door without being checked over. Which means that nobody is getting in through that door without a weapon.”

“I stand corrected,” Gregor said. “Police officers can get through that door with weapons. What about cell phones?”

“We keep all our communications devices, yeah,” Tony Monteverdi said. “It’s a safety precaution. In case something happens.”

“Also, I’m not sure it matters about the weapons,” Ray said. “She wasn’t killed by a weapon brought in from the outside. She was killed with one of her own gavels.”

“I agree,” Gregor said. “But maybe not in the way you think I should. Just note. First, you can’t get a weapon or a cell phone in through this door if you’re coming in, but there would be no problem with getting either through this door if you were going out. This may seem like a minor issue, but it isn’t.”

“It explains how somebody took away that other cell phone,” Tony said. “But we know that.”

“The other issue are the security cameras,” Gregor said. “Did they get fixed, by the way? Did somebody come in here and clean them off.”

“The city is getting around to it,” Tony Monteverdi said dryly.

“Wonderful,” Gregor said. “Then I can stay in the present tense. The security cameras along this corridor were all working properly, right down to the one just in front of the restrooms. But the one after that, and all the security cameras leading down to Martha Handling’s chambers, and all the ones in the two corridors leading from Martha Handling’s chambers to the back door where the judge’s parking lot is, and the one at the back door that is supposed to catch whoever’s coming in or going out of the building that way, all those have had their lenses spray-painted with black paint. That means that anybody could walk past the restrooms into the corridors beyond without being spotted, and anyone could walk in through the back door and to the judges’ chambers without being spotted. So far, so good?”

“You gave us this speech before,” Ray Berle said.

“I gave it to you, I didn’t give it to everybody,” Gregor said. “I didn’t give it to Father Tibor here, for instance. I just want to make sure we’re all clear.”

“For God’s sake, Krekor,” Tibor said. “We’re all clear.”

“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.”