Fighting Chance: A Gregor Demarkian Novel (Gregor Demarkian series Book 29) (32 page)

“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 finding 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—”

“Can he speak?” Bennis asked, beginning to feel desperate.

“He could after he took a few sips of water,” Sheree said. The bouncing had become so exaggerated, it was surreal. “Then he looked at Father Tibor and said, ‘Don’t you dare.’ Just like that. ‘Don’t you dare.’ Does that make any sense to you?”

“Yes,” Bennis said.

“Well, anyway, we tried to call you and tell you, but you weren’t answering your phone and we didn’t know what to do, so like I said, we called everybody we could think of and we called Dr. Albright to come on out and we’re all just
so
glad you’re finally here—”

Bennis stepped across the threshhold into the old foyer with its twenty-foot-high ceilings. There was a buzzing in her ears.

“I turn the phone off when I’m driving,” she said.

She was about to say that she had been driving that morning, that she’d had errands, that she’d needed to do a hundred things before coming out here.

She never got the chance.

First her mind went absolutely blank.

Then she hit the floor.

2

When she came to, she was sitting in an armchair with her legs stretched out across an ottoman, and she had the vague impression that she was at a cocktail party. It even seemed to make sense that there were doctors and nurses at this party, and that they were all in uniform. Then she made her eyes focus and saw that Gregor was across the room in bed, sitting up, with a large glass of something on ice in front of him. It looked like urine. His face was still a mess, the entire right side of it bandaged and the right eye bloodshot and raw. Even after all these weeks, it was raw.

“What’s that?” she asked, pointing to the glass of yellow liquid.

“Asinine,” Gregor said, looking right at her.

“It’s ginger ale,” Sheree Coleman said, patting her on the arm. “We’ll get you some yourself if you want.”

“I want a pint and a half of Johnnie Walker Blue,” Bennis said. “And I mean it.”

“You may mean it,” Dr. Albright said, stepping into her line of vision, “but we don’t carry it. We did try to warn you in advance. We tried repeatedly.”

“Yes,” Bennis said. “Sheree told me. Is he all right? Is he just all right? What in the name of hell is going on here?”

“I’m sitting right in front of you,” Gregor said. “You can ask me.”

“His throat is very sore,” Dr. Albright said. “I’ll tell you. He woke up. It happens. There’s no way to tell, with coma victims, how that will happen or even if that will happen. I told you that before. They come out of it. They don’t come out of it. He wasn’t brain-dead or even close. There was always a chance.”

“And he’s been listening to everything?” Bennis said. “He knows what’s been going on? He knows what people have been telling him?”

“He seems to know a lot of it,” Dr. Albright said.

“I’m over
here,
” Gregor said. His voice was clear. There was no slur. And he was getting angry.

Bennis looked around the room. Father Tibor was there, but that was to be expected. The Very Old Ladies were there. They came out every once in a while. The rest of the crowd was bewildering. George Edelson was there. Ray Berle and Tony Monteverdi were there. Petrak, Sophie, and Stefan Maldovanian were there. Asha Dekanian was there. Lydia Arkmanian and Hannah Krekorian were there. And Janice Loftus was there. Bennis didn’t know what to make of it. That woman got in everywhere. How did she get in everywhere? There was a guard at the gate of this place, for God’s sake.

“Wait,” Bennis said. “You called this person because you thought she would know where I was?”

“Nobody had to call me,” Janice Loftus said. “I come at least twice a week. I knew he’d wake up eventually. I wanted to be here. I have something important to say.”

“I have something important to hear,” Gregor said. “And I’m going to hear it. Right away. And don’t give me any crap about how I shouldn’t do too much too soon. There are laws in this country about keeping a person incarcerated against his will, and I’ll use them. I’m either going to hear what I need to hear, or I’m going to walk right out the door.”

“Not without help, you’re not,” Dr. Albright said. “And I won’t supply the help.”

“He will.” Gregor pointed at Father Tibor. “And you won’t be able to talk him out of it. I need to know what’s been going on.”

Father Tibor took a deep breath. “The first thing,” he said, “is to know that Russ Donahue is not dead.”

3

After that, Bennis just sat back and listened to them, keeping one eye on Gregor and one on Janice Loftus at all times. The existence of Janice Loftus in this place still did not make sense. Bennis had the horrible feeling that it never would.

It was George Edelson who took charge. “In the first place, Father Tibor is right. Russ Donahue is not dead. Ray and Tony might have shot at him if they’d gotten the chance.”

“It’s not usually a good idea to fire into crowd of people in a not-all-that-large room,” Tony Monteverdi said.

“In the end, he didn’t need to, because this lady over here—” Edelson pointed to Mrs. Vespasian, sitting in a chair and tapping her walking stick on the floor. “—this lady took that stick and hit him sqaure in the stomach, then she put the point of the stick down on his foot. I saw it all, but I didn’t see it, if you know what I mean. She was standing right next to Donahue, Tony and Ray were standing on the other side of the room—”

“We didn’t think it was Donahue we had to worry about,” Ray said. “You could have said something. It would probably have resulted in your not getting shot.”

“Anyway, she whacked him and sort of stabbed him and he doubled over and Tony and Ray came running to jump on him, and that was that. Donahue was hurt but not fatally,” George Edelson said, “and after we got working on the things you’d said, we found pretty much all of it. There was the bribery. Administrative Solutions was paying him to skew his cases so that they’d be more easily resolved by incarceration. Not all the judges were on the take, so they needed some help from other people. We’re rounding up the people. But you were right about the Dekanian mortgage, too. Once we knew where to look, we found the trail. He’d just taken the mortgage and sold it, and it was illegal six ways to Sunday, too. He’d represented it to J.P. CitiWells as unencumbered, which nobody bothered to check, which tells you something about the way those banks were operating.”