Fighting Chance: A Gregor Demarkian Novel (Gregor Demarkian series Book 29) (7 page)

“Markham Street?” Gregor said.

“It’s practically right behind us. Think about it for a minute.” Bennis handed over her phone. “I’ve got it downloaded. All you have to do is hit Play.”

Gregor hit Play.

For what seemed like forever, the video—it looked handheld, and not very well. The picture kept bouncing all over the place—the video went on and on and on. Tibor was holding the outsized gavel. He was raising it over his head. He was bringing it down. He was raising it over his head. He was bringing it down.

“For God’s sake,” Gregor said.

“It was the most watched video of the day on YouTube before somebody complained about the violence and they took it down,” Bennis said.

“What’s YouTube?”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Bennis said. “You know what YouTube is. It’s the Web site where Tommy Moradanyan put up that video he made of the cats getting into the cabinets in Donna’s kitchen. And I keep telling myself that the way these things work, they’ll never let that in as evidence in a trial, but you know what? I don’t really know that. And it looks like—it looks like.”

“You can’t see the body,” Gregor said. He had started the video playing again. “Where’s the body?”

“Presumably it’s on the floor under where Tibor’s arm is going—where it’s—oh, for God’s sake, Gregor, this can’t be right. There has to be some other explanation. He can’t have done that.”

Gregor had gone very, very cold. “Who took the video? Where did the video come from?”

“Nobody knows at the moment,” Bennis said, and now she was crying. “The first thing I thought of was that it must be a security tape, but I’ve been talking to John’s office all day, and according to them, there’s not really any security tape, because something was wrong with the security tape. I don’t know.”

“If this isn’t a security tape,” Gregor said, “then somebody must have been standing there with a camera filming this on purpose. A phone camera, something like that. And if what was going on was that Tibor was bludgeoning someone to death, then the person taking the video was either part of the project or a bystander who decided to film it instead of running off to get help.”

“If you’re asking me if I think it’s possible that some bystander came along and filmed a murder instead of calling 911, then yes, I think that’s possible. I don’t think it’s possible that Tibor ever bludgeoned anybody to death. Ever. Tibor is not a violent person. He’s never been a violent person.”

“You can’t see a body,” Gregor said. “There’s blood on the gavel in the first frame. It doesn’t start out clean and get bloody.”

“Does any of this make any difference?” Bennis asked. “Because it doesn’t make any difference to me. And Tibor’s in jail somewhere, and he won’t talk to Russ. And he won’t talk to me or Donna. And he sent word that he wouldn’t see you, either. And I’m going completely and absolutely crazy, Gregor, I really am.”

Out on the street, everything had begun to look familiar. The cab slowed and began to pull to the right. The houses looked down-at-heel and pinched. The one belonging to Mikel Dekanian had a foreclosure notice plastered over its front windows, as if the dispute about the mortgage were already settled.

Bennis leaned forward and threw another pile of bills into the front seat next to the cabbie. The front door of 1207 opened and a small, dark head peered out. Then the door swung wide.

“Let’s go,” Bennis said. “We don’t want to give anybody any ideas.”

They went. They went quickly. Asha Dekanian grabbed Bennis by the arm as soon as she reached the top of the steps and pulled her inside. Gregor was inside a moment later, and the door was shut.

“I watched the whole time,” Asha said. “I watched the whole street. There wasn’t anybody there. Nobody knew you were coming here. It will be all right.”

“We go through to the back and out the back door and there’s an alley. Where they keep the garbage cans. Then we go down that three houses and that’s the back door to our place. With any luck, nobody will know you’re home,” Bennis said.

“It is a complete impossibility,” Asha said. “Father Tibor is a very good man.”

Bennis looked away. Gregor took note of the fact that, even under the thick accent, it was impossible not to hear the faint wobble of doubt. Asha Dekanian must have seen that video, too.

Bennis was already chugging down the long center hall toward the back. The house was very shabby but meticulously clean. It reminded Gregor of the way houses and tenements had been on Cavanaugh Street before everybody started making serious money.

What was at the very back was the kitchen, and it was not only very clean but also newly remodeled. There was something in a cast-iron pot on the stove that smelled familiar. Gregor was too distracted to recognize it.

Asha rushed ahead of Bennis and got the back door open. She held it wide and stuck her head out to look up and down the alley.

“It’s all right,” she said. “There’s nothing here. There’s nobody. You should move fast, just in case.”

Gregor wondered what circumstances in Asha Dekanian’s life in a Soviet country had taught her how to do this, and then he was out the door himself. The garbage cans were set up against the back walls, all of them decently closed.

“I noticed it when the kitchen guys were here,” Bennis said, moving them both along. “They brought a lot of their equipment in from the alley, and I stood out here one morning and got myself oriented. It’s a good thing I did, too, because I never would have guessed. This is us. The steps suck. We should have them fixed.”

The steps did suck. One of them was nearly off. Gregor marched up them and into his own kitchen—that fully remodeled kitchen that always made him think of
House Beautiful
magazine.

Bennis closed the door behind them. “Give me a minute and I’ll make some coffee. Or get you a shot of something serious if you want it. I’ve been forcing myself not to all day. I’ve also been forcing myself not to scream.”

Gregor put his bags down on the kitchen table and then sat. Bennis moved away to fuss with the coffee things. Gregor got his phone again and watched the video one more time.

Bennis came and sat down across from him. “Listen,” she said, and she was crying again. “I know this can’t be true. I know it. Tibor can’t have done this thing. But the more I hear, the worse this gets. Worse and worse. And that woman who died. She was that judge, you know, that Martha Handling he was so upset about. He was on the local news talking about her not a week and a half ago. And this other woman, this Janet somebody, who says she came in and found him—found him killing—Gregor, I don’t know what to do. Russ is losing his mind,” Bennis said. “Donna called me up a couple of hours ago, scared to death that he’s suicidal.”

“And he left word that he wouldn’t talk to me? And all he’ll say is—?”

“Is that he has the right to remain silent,” Bennis said. “Yes. According to what the people in John Jackman’s office have been able to find out, anytime anybody tries to talk to him, all he’ll do is take the Fifth. But Gregor, it’s not just that he won’t talk to any of us—he won’t talk to anybody. They had a guy come down from the Public Defender’s Office, and Tibor wouldn’t talk to him either. He just keeps saying he has the right to remain silent.”

“You’re right,” Gregor said. “Whatever’s going on here, it’s not that Tibor murdered somebody.”

Bennis brightened. “Do you mean that? Are you sure?”

“I’m absolutely sure,” Gregor said. “Unfortunately, I don’t know why I’m sure.”

Bennis’s face fell again. She got up from her chair to tend to the coffee. Gregor could see that she had also started crying again.

THREE

1

By the time Janice Loftus was released from the courthouse, she had been hanging around for
four hours,
and she was fighting mad. Even the more than slightly relieving fact that she had not been required to go down to a police station somewhere didn’t help. Rights were much more than being left alone, no matter what those idiots in the Teabaggers Party said, but being left alone was certainly a right. Janice had not been left alone. She had been harrassed and intimidated. She had been accused of a dozen things she couldn’t possibly have done. She had been asked questions nobody had a right to ask and been told—all right, not outright—that if she didn’t give the answers, it would be very suspicious.

Very suspicious.

They really thought she was going to fall for that kind of thing. No wonder so many people of color were in jail. It would be hard to stay out of jail if your schools absolutely sucked and you barely had a fourth-grade education and you were subjected to tactics like
that.

In a free society, your thoughts were you own. It didn’t matter what you thought. It only mattered what you did. Or sometimes it did matter what you thought, and America wasn’t a free society, and—

Janice couldn’t think straight. Every muscle in her body was twitching, going off like a string of firecrackers. It took everything she had not to run down the street. It took more than everything she had not to say something nasty to the reporters who ringed the building and crowded the halls.
There
was something that would be all over the place in a minute. The police had had no business accusing her of taking that video, and no business confiscating her cell phone as evidence.

She was around the corner and down the street and—well, she didn’t know where she was, exactly. She’d been walking without looking where she was going. Now that she looked around, she thought she might have landed in a very bad neighborhood. It was wrong to categorize people by what they looked like but even so, the people around her right now made her very nervous. She was the only white person she could see.

The important thing was not to be afraid. Predators against women were always male, and they were always on the lookout for fear. You couldn’t look intimidated. You couldn’t give out vibes that said you were intimidated.

The taxi emerged out of nowhere. It could have been sent by God in a poof of smoke but Janice didn’t believe in God. God was not just the opium of the people. God was the Big Lie that kept everybody else in line.

Janice ran out into the street and raised her hand. The cab pulled over immediately.

Janice grabbed the door and hopped in. She shut the door behind her with a slam. She gave the address of the offices of Pennsylvania Justice. Then she buried her head in her bag so that she couldn’t see what was going on outside.

As an example of white skin privilege, getting that cab had been pretty spectacular. Janice was willing to bet the cab wouldn’t have stopped for anybody else on the street.

The offices of Pennsylvania Justice were apparently not very far away. At least, the cab didn’t take a long time, and the meter didn’t go up much. Janice tried to think, but she really couldn’t remember where anything was in relation to anything else.

She carefully counted out too much money and put it into the cabdriver’s hand. She got out of the cab and shut the door carefully and slowly behind her. The worst of the evidence of shock and angry was draining away. She was able to walk slowly toward the door in front of her without giving the impression that she was afraid of the cabdriver and wanted to get away from him quickly.

Pennsylvania Justice had a storefront office with a plate glass window, with private cubicles in the back for anything that shouldn’t be seen by the general public. They wanted to encourage walk-ins, people with problems who might be intimidated by the stiff formality of an ordinary office.

Janice went through the plate glass door and looked around. There was a waiting area with cheap plastic chairs and no one in them. There were three even cheaper desks where one man and two women were working away at computers. The computers were anchored to the desks with thick chains.

One of the women looked up from whatever she was working on and said, “Oh! Janice. Are you all right? We’ve all been so worried about you. And Kasey wants to talk to you. We’ve been calling you and calling you, and you never answered your phone.”

“I don’t
have
my phone,” Janice said, the indignation rising up in her throat like bad shellfish. “I had to leave it at the door. And then I ran out of there and I forgot it. And now I don’t know if I’m ever going to get it back.”

“Oh, my God,” the other woman said. “Are you all right? Did they get rough with you?”

There was a rumble and a bump and another woman came out from the back, where the private cubicles were. She was extremely tall, and extremely slender, extremely electric. Her hair was a cascade of red that ended at her waist.

“Oh,
Kasey,
” Janice said. “Oh, thank God.”

“They took Janice’s cell phone,” one of the women said. “Just look at her. She’s
shaking.
”

Kasey looked her up and down, and Janice felt immediately better. There were people who said it was a bad idea to have Kasey as head of Pennsylvania Justice, because she fed into all the stereotypes that said no organization could succeed without playing into the sexual demands of men, but Janice wasn’t having it.

“I’m glad to see you,” Kasey said. Her voice had an odd flat tone Janice was never able to define. “We’ve been watching the news back here all afternoon.
Did
they rough you up? Physically?”

“Oh, no,” Janice said. “There wasn’t anything physical. But there wouldn’t have been, would there? There were security cameras everywhere.”

“Probably,” Kasey agreed. “Come on back here and talk. We’ll get you a cup of coffee or chamomile tea or whatever it is you’re drinking these days.”

“Chamomile tea,” Janice said. She was very grateful that Kasey had remembered. Most people in her position wouldn’t have. “Except maybe there weren’t security cameras everywhere, because some of them looked like they had paint on the lenses. Does that sound crazy?”

Kasey turned back toward the cubicles, and Janice followed her.

“It really was incredible,” Janice said as they wound their way to the very back. Kasey’s cubicle was no bigger than any of the others. That was the kind of person she was.