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

by Jane Haddam

  “Is there another tack?”

  “I can only hope so. Apparently, this isn’t the first time this has happened. Well, we knew that. It’s happened before just to members of the church. But from what Carpenter was saying, it’s happening quite a lot, and I got the impression that at least some of the time, the banks were prevailing and people were being forced out of their homes in spite of the fact that the banks forcing them out didn’t actually own their mortgages. My guess is that there’s something to be done after that, some court procedure, and then people are compensated.”

  “I hope they’re compensated out the wazoo,” Bennis said. “How do you compensate people for being put out on the street when you had no claim on them at all?”

  “My guess is that ‘out the wazoo’ is nothing at all what we’re looking at. But I did think that we probably ought not to wait to let it get that far. And we should be working on it now. I’ll call Russ later. And I’ll call Chelsea Kevinmeyer’s office and see if I can get anywhere with that.”

  “Chelsea Kevinmeyer’s office? Chelsea Kevinmeyer the congresswoman?”

  “Your congresswoman,” Gregor said. “Also Mikel Dekanian’s. Assuming they’ll talk to me at all with all this other thing going on, they ought to be happy to jump in and make a fuss in public. She’s put a lot of work into trying to get something done on the mortgage situation. The least she could do is to use Mikel Dekanian’s problem as the basis for a speech in Congress and a couple of press releases. Sometimes if things go too public, the banks will back off. Sometimes.”

  “By which I suppose you mean not all that often,” Bennis said.

  “There are bureaucracies,” Gregor said. “There are also computers.”

  Bennis had arranged the little squares of omelet into a circle around the edge of her plate. “You might want to rethink talking to Russ,” she said. “Donna called right before we went to bed last night. He really isn’t in good shape.”

  “It’s not surprising,” Gregor said, “but the world won’t stop for anybody, and the notices are already up at the Dekanian house. You must have seen them yesterday.”

  “I did.”

  “So we’ll all have to get to work today, whether we want to or not,” Gregor said.

  “Donna says he feels responsible for it all,” Bennis said. “And I get that in a way, but I don’t in a way, and it’s one of those things. I look at it and look at it and I don’t know what to do.”

  “Today,” Gregor promised, “we’ll think of things to do.”

  The phone on the wall went off with a ring so loud, it made Gregor jump in his chair. His fork hit the floor. His plate tipped sideways and then righted itself, the untouched wedge of omelet never budging.

  “Okay,” Gregor said. “I may be a little on edge.”

  Bennis got up and got the phone. It was a faux-antique black and gold one, made to look like the kind of thing that had been fashionable in the early days of telephones, but mounted on the wall.

  “Hello,” Bennis said. And then, “John? What time is it? And you’re in your office? Now? I mean—okay, yes, I understand. You didn’t have anything to worry about, we weren’t going out anyway. I was a little too worried—okay, yes, just a minute. He’s right here.”

  Bennis held out the phone. “It’s John Jackman. He’s in his office. He wants to talk to you right away.”

  “What time is it?” Gregor asked.

  “Six ten.”

  Gregor got up. “For God’s sake,” he said.

  2

  The place John Jackman had decided would be a good one to meet Gregor Demarkian was not the office of the mayor, but it might as well have been. Gregor thought it was close to certain that there was no place in the City of Philadelphia where he could meet with the mayor without the news getting out. He thought it was almost as close to certain that there was no place in the country where he could do it.

  It was hard to tell which stories would “go viral,” as Tommy Moradanyan liked to put it, but Gregor was very familiar with stories that did just that, and he knew there was no stopping them. The best anybody could do in cases like this was to let them run their course. If you were lucky, they ran it fast. If you weren’t, you would find yourself staring at headlines months down the line, with everybody stoked and ready to roll at the first hint of a development. There were no cases in which these circuses were of any benefit at all to legitimate law enforcement. Reporters liked to imagine that all the publicity helped to mobilize the public to catch perpetrators. It certainly mobilized the public. It didn’t help to catch anything but innocent bystanders, and not even those very often.

  The place John Jackman wanted to meet was in City Hall. Bennis called Gregor a cab. Gregor left the house only when it was waiting at the door. He looked up and down the street and saw nobody he wouldn’t expect to see. He knew that didn’t mean there were no reporters there. He got into the back of the car and tried to force himself to stop worrying about it. There was a reporter in the street or there wasn’t. If there was, the reporter would follow him. If there wasn’t, somebody in City Hall would leak the meeting. One way or the other, it would get out.

  It was too early in the morning for City Hall, but the city was pumping into rush hour. The streets were full of traffic. It moved with reasonable fluidity. It was just about light out.

  When the cab got to where it was going, Gregor got out, thinking there was no one around and that he’d have to search for whatever door he was supposed to enter by himself. Then, just as the cab pulled away, a woman emerged from the darkness near the side of the steps.

  “Mr. Demarkian?” she said. “If you’ll come with me.”

  The woman was African American, and very young, and almost blindingly pretty. Gregor supposed she was one of the horde of young women who always seemed to overrun John Jackman’s offices. They were always supervised by John’s longtime confidential secretary, Ophelia. Ophelia was also African American, and she could have held off a Russian invasion with a good stare and the tapping of her foot.

  Ophelia was waiting for him when he got in the back door and up the back stairs to the second floor. She was neither glaring nor stamping her foot, but she was not happy.

  “Good morning, Mr. Demarkian,” she said. “If you’ll come this way. They’re waiting for you.”

  “They?”

  Ophelia had turned her back to him and was walking away down the hall. “You and I have always been on good terms,” she said, “but you have to understand where I’m coming from. It’s him I care about. This is not going to be good for him.”

  “If you’re talking about this meeting, I agree with you,” Gregor said. “But I’m not the one who asked for the meeting.”

  Ophelia stopped outside a door, opened it a bit, and said, “I know you didn’t. But I think maybe you should have turned it down.”

  Then she swung the door wide open, and Gregor went in.

  Inside the room there were chairs and low occasional tables. It seemed to be a waiting room of some kind. John Jackman was on his feet and pacing. The other two men were sitting down. One of them, in defiance of decades of city regulations, was smoking a cigarette.

  Ophelia closed the door behind her as she went. The two sitting men stood up. John Jackman stopped pacing.

  “Well,” he said. “Here you are.”

  “Here I am,” Gregor said. “But Ophelia’s right, John. I shouldn’t have come. It’s one thing you talking to Bennis on the phone. But having me here—”

  “I’m going to get into trouble for worse things than having you here,” John said. “This is George Edelson, and, the one with the cigarette, Dickson Greer. They’re both my aides. They both have official titles that would make your ears bleed. They’re both getting into trouble with me.”

  Dickson Greer put his cigarette out in a little cup made of tin foil he’d produced from his pocket.

  “Look at the idiot,” John said. “African American men have some astronomically high c
hance of getting early heart attacks, and he thinks he’s the Marlboro Man.”

  “Just feeling a little tension,” Dickson Greer said mildly.

  John gestured Gregor to a chair, but he didn’t wait to see if Gregor sat, and he didn’t sit himself. He went back to pacing.

  “The first thing you should know,” John said, “is that George here went to see Tibor yesterday afternoon.”

  “And Tibor agreed to see him?” Gregor asked.

  “Not exactly,” George Edelson said. “I threw my weight around. There was no way he could refuse to be in a room with me. I got a secure room. I thought I could—we thought I might be able to—”

  “I thought that if I could get Tibor into a room with somebody who was good at talking sense to people, we could talk sense to him,” John said. “He’d already refused to see you or Bennis or Russ Donahue, or any of the other usual people, so I sent George. George is a lawyer. Hell, everybody here is a lawyer except you. We did a little voodoo, and George went in as Tibor’s attorney of record.”

  “I thought he’d refused to talk to an attorney,” Gregor said. “Bennis said something about Tibor being offered a public defender and turning it down.”

  “Yeah,” John said. “There was that.”

  Gregor shook his head. “Did Mr. Edelson here manage to talk any sense into him?”

  “No,” George Edelson said. “Not even close. I don’t know this man, Mr. Demarkian. I only know he’s a friend of John’s, and of course yours. But after that session we had yesterday, I can’t say I agree with the idea that he isn’t capable of murder. I’d think he was capable of anything.”

  “I wouldn’t go so far as to say anything,” Gregor said.

  John Jackman grunted. “Is that some roundabout way of saying you think he did commit this murder? Because I have to tell you, Gregor, the only reason I don’t believe it is because it’s Tibor. If this were anybody else on the face of the planet, I’d think this was open-and-shut.”

  “I know,” Gregor said.

  “Well?” John Jackman said.

  Gregor decided that sitting down was the better part of something or other. He sat.

  “I don’t know,” he said finally. “I presume the motive is supposed to be Tibor’s anger with this person for giving harsh and unwarranted sentences to juveniles—”

  “It’s worse than that,” Dickson Greer said. “You know we have private contractors running the prisons here in Pennsylvania?”

  “Don’t look at me,” John Jackman said. “That’s Harrisburg is what you’ve got there. It’s almost made me ready to run for governor. I mean, what the hell did they think was going to happen?”

  “There have been rumors for months now that Martha Handling was taking bribes for giving unusually long sentences to juveniles. The contractors get paid a certain amount per inmate. The more inmates there are, the more money they get.”

  “Yes,” Gregor said. “That, I’d heard about.”

  “And?” John said.

  Gregor sighed. “It’s the right kind of motive,” he said. “It’s better if Tibor knew that the woman was taking bribes. If she was taking bribes—”

  “We’ve got someone for you to talk to about that,” Dickson Greer said.

  Gregor shook his head again. “But the setup is wrong, somehow. It’s just sort of off. That probably sounds very fuzzy.”

  “It isn’t much to go forward with when that video is all over the Internet and there’s that woman talking to every media outlet she can find and he won’t talk to anybody.”

  “I know,” Gregor said. “But think about it. What’s supposed to have happened, exactly? He had some kind of meeting with her before the court hearing on Stefan Maldovanian, or he ran out to her office to see her before court was supposed to start? That doesn’t make any sense, because there’s no reason why he would have expected to find her in her chambers instead of in the courtroom. She was hearing another case before the Maldovanian case. And he wasn’t there then. Was there any indication that he had a meeting arranged with her—?”

  “Not a thing,” George Edelson said.

  “Well, then,” Gregor said, “I can’t even see a reason why he’d be there in the first place. And then there’s the crime itself. I supposed bludgeoned to death is the correct diagnosis?”

  “We won’t have the preliminary autopsy reports until later this morning,” Dickson Greer said, “but that looks like the way it’s going.”

  “Okay,” Gregor said. “Mr. Edelson says he thinks Tibor is capable of just about anything, but I’ve got a problem with the bludgeoning thing. It’s one of the hardest kinds of murder to commit. It’s virtually never a deliberate choice. People recoil from it instinctively. That’s why, most of the time, when it happens, it happens in a state of rage. Blind rage. It’s the rage I don’t find believable.”

  “You don’t think that man could work himself into a state of rage?” George Edelson said.

  “I think he could work himself into a state of rage,” Gregor said, “but I don’t think it would be blind rage. If Tibor is subject to rage, it isn’t the hot, blind, go-berserk kind of thing. It’s the cold kind. And when you are enraged but cold, you’re still thinking. And if you’re still thinking, if you’re still fully conscious, you’re going to have a very hard time standing next to someone and battering her brains out.”

  “It’s a thought, Gregor,” John said. “But it isn’t much help. I don’t think a defense attorney could get it past a jury.”

  “No,” Gregor said. “I agree with you. But it’s true, just the same.”

  “And is that it?” John said. “Is that the reason you don’t think Tibor did it?”

  “Partly,” Gregor said.

  “What’s the other part?” John asked.

  “I don’t know,” Gregor said. “I just can’t put my finger on it. But it hit me the very first time Bennis told me about this—hit me that something was absolutely wrong. That some part of this is not what it would be if Tibor were actually guilty. And on top of that, there’s that video. Someone must have taken that video. But when? Bennis tells me the first person on the scene was that woman who ended up screaming. But if that’s the case, where’s the person who took the video? Or did she take it?”

  “I don’t think so,” George Edelson said. “They didn’t find a phone on her, and it’s a phone video. I suppose she could have ditched the phone somewhere.”

  “And where was everybody else?” Gregor asked. “There should have been other people. There should at least have been secretaries.”

  “That one, we’ve got an answer to,” Dickson Greer said. “The secretaries were at a funeral of a secretary for a judge who retired a while ago. The judge retired, the secretary died of breast cancer. The whole support staff was out at the funeral and the judges who were in at all were in court.”

  “And this doesn’t feel wrong to you?” Gregor asked. “This doesn’t feel out of whack?”

  “Gregor, I hate to tell you this,” John said, “but that’s no help at all.”

  “I know it isn’t,” Gregor said. “But at the moment, that’s the best I can do.”

  John Jackman looked at the ceiling for a moment and then seemed to come to a decision. “All right,” he said. “We’ve got some problems, and I think the three of us have figured out at least some ways around them. You know and we know that this meeting is going to leak, and when it does it’s going to be crap from here to eternity. But we knew that going in, and we all took the risk anyway. So let’s let that go. The big issue, first of all, is that there is no way the City of Philadelphia is going to be able to hire you as a consultant on this case.”

  “Ah,” Gregor said. “I really didn’t expect you to. I hadn’t even considered it.”

  “Good,” John Jackman said, “because it’s not just the political problems that are insurmountable in this case—it’s the legal ones, too. There are so many conflicts of interest running around here at the moment, it makes my head
spin.”

  “I’ve got a conflict of interest myself,” Gregor said. “He’s probably my closest friend after Bennis. I’m not an objective investigator.”

  “You may not be an objective investigator, but you are an investigator,” John said, “and I’d think you’d be investigating no matter what the circumstances were. So what we’ve done is figured out a way to get the information to you, and also to lay off any charges of impeding a police investigation or that sort of thing.”

  “Would I be impeding a police investigation?” Gregor asked.

  “It would depend on what you were doing,” John Jackman said. “What I want to say here is that I don’t want to catch you not telling us anything you’ve found out. I know that thing you do where you think you have the answer but you don’t tell anyone because you haven’t worked it out yet. I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about information. If you get any information, you pass it along to us. Even if it’s not in the best interests of Tibor Kasparian.”

  “I think the truth will always be in the best interests of Tibor Kasparian,” Gregor said.

  “Don’t bet on it,” Dickson Greer said. “You never know what’s coming out of the woodwork then.”

  “The next thing,” John said, “is a technicality, but the law is full of technicalities. Unless you can get Tibor to talk to you and authorize you to act on his behalf, you can’t go charging around telling people you’re investigating for the defense. The operative word is ‘can’t.’”

  “But I will be investigating for the defense,” Gregor said.

  “Not officially, you won’t,” John said. “Not unless you’ve been authorized by Tibor or Tibor’s attorney. And as we sit now, Tibor won’t even authorize an attorney.”

  “Don’t you think that’s very strange in and of itself?” Gregor asked. “Why won’t he accept an attorney? Why won’t he talk to Russ? Russ is his attorney, as far as he has one.”