Fighting Chance: A Gregor Demarkian Novel (Gregor Demarkian series Book 29) (22 page)

“Excuse me?” Gregor said. He said it because he didn’t want Bennis to say anything. And Bennis was about to say something.

“Oh,” Janice Loftus said. “Yes. Well, I’ll save that for another time. But it’s important, especially for prominent people. Americans are obsessed with celebrity, of course, that’s why nothing can ever get done. The plutocrats make sure there are lots of circuses, even if there isn’t a lot of bread. But we can use their tactics against them if we’re smart. The more celebrities who come out for fair trade and for—”

Debbie was back with Janice Loftus’s water and Gregor’s imam bayildi. Janice stared at the imam bayildi as if it were a space alien. Debbie got out of the way fast.

“Well,” Janice said. “That’s … that’s very … you don’t see that much anymore. Real food from real cultural cuisines. Everything’s franchised and frozen and packaged these days.”

Back in the days when Bennis smoked cigarettes, this was when she would have lit up.

Janice Loftus stared at the imam bayildi a little longer, as if it could tell her something she needed to know. Then she dragged her eyes back to Gregor and said, “I’m sorry to bother you in the middle of the night”—the apology was mechanical—“but I tried to talk to the police and nobody would listen to me. Except they kept trying to imply that I must have killed Martha because she used to be my roommate, which is the silliest thing I’ve ever heard. If I was going to kill Martha because she was my roommate, I’d have done it when she actually was my roommate. And I thought about it. Let me tell you. I thought about it a lot.”

“Have you thought about it since?” Bennis asked.

Janice Loftus ignored her. “The thing is, she did it twice that I know of, and one more time that I don’t know of because of course I don’t belong to those kinds of clubs. But even twice is a pattern, isn’t it? And patterns are what matter. But the police are just being the police, and they won’t listen. I thought maybe you’d listen.”

“I’ll listen,” Gregor said. “To tell the truth, you were on my list to talk to eventually anyway.”

“Well, I hope it wasn’t about that nonsense about how I must have wanted to kill her because she used to be my roommate and I hated her,” Janice said. “I don’t hate people. It uses up too much energy and we need the energy, all we can get. There’s so much work to be done.”

“Martha Handling used to be your roommate,” Gregor said.

“At Bryn Mawr College,” Janice said. “You know what kind of place that is. One of the original Seven Sisters. All those rich girls with Porsches and cashmere sweaters and parents working on Wall Street. The teachers really tried to raise everybody’s consciousness, but it was a losing battle for most of those girls. They just absolutely believed they deserved every one of their privileges.”

“And Martha Handling was one of the ones who believed that?” Gregor asked.

“Well, yes,” Janice Loftus said. “Of course she believed that. Even I believed that in the beginning. It’s very hard to separate yourself from your background. And in those days, I just idolized my father. I thought he walked on water. I didn’t realize what he was doing to me. I didn’t realize that abuse didn’t have to be physical to be abuse.”

“Wait,” Bennis said. “Loftus.
Patrick
Loftus? You’re Patrick Loftus’s daughter?”

This time, Janice Loftus did look at Bennis. “Don’t sound so impressed. There’s nothing to be impressed with. It’s not like my father ever did any real work. He didn’t dig ditches or grow food. He wasn’t even a change agent. He was just a greedy man who knew where to get money.”

“Patrick Loftus,” Bennis said. “The man who founded Pacific Microsystems. The man who invented—”

“The very tool that lets the government spy on its citizens and get away with it,” Janice Loftus said. “If you think that’s an achievement, I think you live a very impoverished life.”

It was time to head this off at the pass.

“Let’s get back to Martha Handling,” Gregor said. “She was your roommate in your freshman year?”

“That’s right,” Janice Loftus said. “You could pick your own roommate if you already knew someone, and I did know someone, a girl in my house at Miss Porter’s, but, well, we didn’t get along, and I don’t think she wanted to room with me any more than I wanted to room with her. So I told the college to pick for me and I got Martha Handling.”

“And that was bad, too?” Gregor asked. “Right from the beginning?”

“Oh, no, it wasn’t too bad at the beginning,” Janice said. “I mean, the woman was a complete fascist, but I didn’t know about fascism then. And she was just like everybody else, really. Except the whole thing was her idea.”

“What was her idea?” Gregor asked.

“Patrick Loftus,” Bennis said. “Miss Porter’s. For God’s sake.”

Janice had gone back to ignoring her. “It was her idea that we should work together to cheat,” Janice said. “We all had this absolutely terrible teacher for history. He wanted everybody to know dates and all that kind of thing, and he went on about battles and things and he was really old and he had tenure. Bryn Mawr is a very progressive place. There are wonderful teachers there, teachers who understand gender and race and class and know how to put you right into history. And make you understand what things mean. But he wasn’t one of them, and he had tenure, of course, so we were stuck with him.”

“Why didn’t you drop the course?” Bennis asked.

“It got too late to do that,” Janice said, “and then it was a requirement if you wanted to take other history courses, and almost all of us wanted to do that because you have to if you want to major in Women’s Studies or political science or sociology. We had a test every third week, and when he handed back the first one, a lot of us knew we were going to fail. We just knew it. There wasn’t going to be any way to avoid it. And that’s when Martha said she had the idea.”

“An idea to cheat,” Gregor said.

“Martha said that the reason people got caught cheating is that they went about it by themselves,” Janice said. “She said people who cheated were always ashamed of it, so they tried to hide it, not just from the authorities but even from themselves. So they did all the stupid stuff that everybody knew about already, and they got caught, because it wasn’t hard to catch them. She said what we ought to do was work as a team. She said if we worked as a team, it would be almost impossible to catch us, because no one of us would be doing any of the things they were expecting. Oh, I don’t know. It sounded good at the time, and I didn’t want to fail.”

“What could you have done that was so different?” Gregor asked.

“Martha said she’d seen it in a movie,” Janice said. “I don’t remember the name of the movie. It isn’t anything you’d recognize. The course was this big lecture thing twice a week, and then the class was broken up into seminar sessions that met at different times, with only ten people in each of them. And there were about ten of us, and only one of us in the first one. So, what we’d do, the one of us in the first session would take two copies of the test when it was handed out and also two blue books. Then that person would hand in her blue book very early and bring the extra copy of the test and the extra blue book back to the dorm and we’d make copies of it. And while we were doing that some of the others of us would be filling in the answers in the blue books. And then when that was done, when the seminar sessions were over, some other couple of us would find a way to get the blue book out of the pile and the fixed one into it. We’d go to his office right when the seminar was letting out and one of us would distract him and the other would do the things with the books. The rest of us would have the test answers going in and we wouldn’t have to do all that.”

“And that worked?” Bennis asked. “Really?”

“It worked for months,” Janice said. “I don’t think it would have, except that he always used test days to meet students, so he was pretty much distracted or he’d be out of the room in the hall talking to somebody. It was a two-semester course and it worked for everything except the big midterm at the end of the first semester, and that was a scramble, but I think it would have worked all the way through if Martha hadn’t turned us all in.”

“She turned you in,” Gregor said. “That means she turned herself in.”

“We didn’t think we had to worry about it,” Janice said. “What kind of an idiot turns herself in in a situation like that. But she did. One day when the year was finally over, she went to the dean of students and spilled the whole thing. We all got F’s in the course, and we all got excluded from the college for a semester. That meant we had to leave campus and stay away for the whole next fall semester before we could come back. But Martha didn’t get excluded. She got put on probation and she just went on attending classes and living in the dorm as if nothing had ever happened. And if you ask me, she knew that was going to happen. She knew that if she blew the whole thing, she wouldn’t get punished much at all.”

“All right,” Gregor said slowly. “I would think that would be a natural reaction on the part of the administration, though.”

“Was it a natural reaction that they almost treated her like a hero?” Janice asked, sounding frustrated. “Everywhere you looked, you saw little notes in the alumnae magazine and the college newsletter, saying how awful we all were and what a wonderful person she was for coming forward and doing the honorable thing. It was worse than infuriating, it really was. And then, two years after all that, she did it again. She got this job as a camp counselor for the summer and the counselors pulled these pranks, like crop circles, and she was one of them and then she turned herself and all of them in. One of the girls in the year below us was one of the counselors. She told us all about it. And it was the same thing. It was almost as if she hadn’t done anything wrong.”

“Oh, my God,” Bennis said. “I know what she’s talking about. The thing about the black balls at the Athenaeum Club.”

“Exactly,” Janice said.

“Does somebody want to explain it to me?” Gregor asked.

“It doesn’t matter,” Janice Loftus said. “It’s a pattern, can’t you see that? She gets herself into these things. She even started the first one. Maybe she started all of them. She gets into them and then she blows the whole thing up and she not only doesn’t get punished, people tell her how wonderful and principled she is. It’s like a thing.”

“And you think she was doing that here?” Gregor asked.

“There were all those rumors about her taking bribes,” Janice said. “And they were more than rumors. A lot of people just knew, even if they couldn’t prove it. You can’t tell me you think she was the only judge taking bribes from these people, and there have to be other people in the system taking them, too, not just judges. There have to be. And she’d done it at least twice before, and now look at it.”

“Three times,” Bennis said. “It was just that way with the Athenaeum thing. She was the only one who wasn’t forced to resign.”

“If she was taking bribes, I’ll bet you anything she was going to blow up the whole thing,” Janice Loftus said. “And if somebody was going to murder her, I’ll bet it’s one of the people who was taking bribes, too, or the person who was giving them.”

“And if that’s what happened,” Bennis said, “then whoever killed the woman wasn’t Father Tibor.”

3

Gregor Demarkian would have liked to tell Bennis that he never believed Father Tibor had killed Martha Handling, but after they saw Janice Loftus off in a cab, he couldn’t get a word in edgeways.

“None of the motives the police came up with made any sense at all,” Bennis insisted as they walked down the street to home. “And don’t tell me the prosecution doesn’t have to prove motive. You know as well as I do that juries want motive, and besides, you need motive for making sense of it. And there was never any motive for Tibor that made any sense.”

“Just try to consider this one thing,” Gregor managed when they came in through their front door. “Taking bribes as a judge isn’t like cheating on a history test. Or even ten. You go to jail for taking bribes as a judge.”

“Bet she thought she wouldn’t,” Bennis said. “Bet she thought she’d get probation.”

“She’d be disbarred.”

“You can be rehabilitated by the bar,” Bennis said. “My brother Bobby’s done it twice.”

“Your brother Bobby wasn’t a judge,” Gregor said.

“Nobody in his right mind would hire Bobby as a lawyer, never mind make him a judge,” Bennis said, “and that is, again, beside the point. If you can prove this woman was taking bribes, then—”

“Then what?”

“Then we’ll be able to get Tibor out of this,” Bennis said. “And yes, I know how he’s been behaving, but forget it. There’s got to be some explanation of it. And we’ll find it out, and everything will be all right. My God, I feel sleepy for the first time in days.”

Gregor did not feel sleepy, but he went upstairs and did the ritual bedroom thing anyway. Bennis threw on a nightgown and was alseep, on top of the covers, on her side of the bed, before Gregor had finished brushing his teeth.

Gregor watched her for a while, in that way when he was surprised to find he’d ended up here. She was a beautiful woman awake and a beautiful woman asleep. Gregor often found her not quite real.

He was exhausted, but he knew he wasn’t going to sleep. He went downstairs in his pajamas and his robe and took his briefcase to the kitchen table. There he opened up his laptop and brought up the files he’d been given on the case. Then he took out the wads and wads of paper and spread them out.

He was still bent over the piles and piles of them at three o’clock in the morning, when the doorbell started ringing and somebody started pounding on the front door.

PART THREE

ONE

1

Gregor Demarkian had always thought of himself as the sensible one on Cavanaugh Street, the one who didn’t accidentally leave his doors open all night, the one who didn’t open up to strangers on the doorstep. There was something about the frantic ringing and pounding that went right through him. His first thought was that somebody must have been hurt on the street. He’d never known Cavanaugh Street to have a mugging, but that didn’t mean it was impossible. His second thought was that one of the people he knew was in the middle of an emergency and just too frantic to think of the phone.