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

by Jane Haddam

  Breakfast had been one of those infernal breakfast sandwiches. Tibor had never understood those either. Surely, there had to be something wrong with people who ate breakfast sandwiches.

  Surely there was something wrong about people like Martha Handling, but that was another kind of puzzle. Tibor was always surprised at how casual and unassuming most real evil really was. He did not mean it was “banal.” It was that so much evil was done as everyday business. People did enormous harm. They made each other suffer. They destroyed any respect they could have had for themselves and for other people. And it was nothing. It was just transactions. It had the same emotional force on their brains as going grocery shopping or getting an oil change for their car.

  Surely there ought to be something else there. There ought to be a little spark of protest. There ought to be something. But there never was.

  Tibor hadn’t known the truth about Martha Handling until yesterday, although he had suspected it. He had reported his suspicions to Krekor, and then to all the people Krekor recommended he talk to. In the kind of novels he read, this would have led to his own murder at the hands of the evil corporation that was paying the bribes that were making Martha Handling do all those awful things.

  But that hadn’t happened, any more than what he had really expected to happen. The case was not immediately taken up by the authorities. Martha Handling was not immediately suspended from the bench.

  As far as Tibor could see, nothing had happened.

  Except this.

  A policewoman came to the door and looked in through the small window. “Father Kasparian?” she said. “If you would please put your hands behind your back and then put them through the slot so that I can access your wrists.”

  Tibor got up and did as he was told. He found all these things they did to be—hyperbolic? He couldn’t think of the English word. The American justice system, at least in Philadelphia, seemed to treat all prisoners as if they were dangerous animals.

  The handcuffs went on. They bit him, as always. Tibor stepped away from the door and turned to face it just as the policewoman was giving him those same instructions.

  The policewoman put her key in the lock and opened up. “You’re due in court, Father Kasparian. We need to get you ready.”

  “Ready?”

  “The van is already waiting,” the policewoman said. “You’ll be going outside, so you’ll need leg irons. We’ve been told you won’t need a jacket. We’re having a very warm fall.”

  Tibor had no idea what to say to that. He moved along the corridor at the policewoman’s side. Prisoners came to the doors of the cells along the way and looked out at them.

  Everybody was bored. Everybody was mind-numbingly, intransigently bored. Maybe this was true everywhere in the system. Maybe the prisoners on death row did not have their minds wonderfully concentrated, but were only bored.

  “If you’ll kneel with your back to me on the bench, Father Kasparian. I’m told they’ve got a lawyer waiting for you at the court. You want a lawyer, Father Kasparian, even if you think you don’t.”

  Tibor knelt on the bench and stared at the beige-painted concrete wall. The leg irons did not bite the way the handcuffs did, because he was wearing socks, and the socks kept the metal away from his skin.

  That was the hardest thing to get used to.

  The metal against his skin.

  SIX

  1

  It was George Edelson who took Gregor across town in a city car, bumping through traffic with a speed and unpredictability that would have been terrifying if the streets had been entirely clear.

  “The idea is that I’m already in as much trouble as it’s possible for me to get into, so you might as well be seen with me as with anybody,” George Edelson said. “And this is convenient. The juvenile court is only about a block away from where your Father Kasparian is going to be arraigned, and we assumed you’d want to be on hand for that.”

  “I definitely want to be on hand for that,” Gregor said.

  Privately, he thought the arraignment would be a good place to jump the gates and throttle Tibor where he stood. Tibor needed to be throttled. Even if he was guilty. Especially if he was guilty.

  George Edelson was pulling into a tiny parking lot behind an enormous granite building.

  “We’re going to talk to a man named Sam Scalafini. He runs the security operations for all the court buildings in Philadelphia. At the moment, he’s going to be lucky if he doesn’t get fired. So I’m assuming he’s going to cooperate.”

  “Security,” Gregor said.

  “Think security cameras,” George Edelson said. “In the courts, as in practically every other place these days, there are security cameras.”

  They got out of the car and went to a small back door.

  A tiny Latina policewoman was standing just inside it. When she saw George Edelson, she nodded and opened up. “Good morning, Mr. Edelson.”

  “Good morning, Betta. Is the court still closed?”

  “For one more day, yes, sir. We tried to find some way we could open it partially, but there just isn’t any way to secure all the possible entries to the crime scene.”

  “What about the cameras?”

  Betta snorted. “I think they’re working on it.”

  “They’d better be,” George Edelson said.

  He took Gregor down a corridor, around a corner, and then to a door that led to a staircase.

  “Operations in the basement,” he said. “We’ve had to retrofit all these old buildings. You wouldn’t want to give them up. We’ll never get architecture like this again. Watch your step. The public doesn’t come down here, and neither do the judges. Well, except Martha Handling. She came down here often enough. Anyway, it’s the last place to get repaired.”

  The stairs seemed to be in perfectly good repair, but the basement to which they led was a little … dank. It wasn’t so bad that the walls were sweating, but it smelled rank, and it felt oppressive.

  There were halls down here, too, but they were made of pasteboard and stood on rollers. George Edelson crashed around them as if they weren’t likely to fall over or skitter into the distance at any slight tap.

  Gregor saw the big bank of screens before he saw or heard a person. A moment later, a head popped up and a thick man with dark hair waved at them.

  “Sam!” George Edelson said, sounding sarcastic.

  “I’m working on it,” Sam said. “No matter what you guys think, it’s not my fault if a sitting judge is a world-class nutcase who goes and gets herself murdered. I hope she’s satisfied wherever she is right now. We told her it was for her own protection.”

  Gregor and George rounded the final gauntlet of pasteboard partitions and came to Sam Scalafini and his big bank of controls. Scalafini did not get up. His shirt was so tight across his upper body, it looked like his collar was strangling him. Gregor pegged him as someone who would not get up for anything short of a major natural disaster.

  George Edelson did not sit, although there were chairs available. “Gregor Demarkian,” he said. “This is Sam Scalafini.”

  “Yeah,” Sam Scalafini said.

  “Sam’s going to tell you what he told us,” George said. “About why we don’t have viable security camera footage of the events preceding the murder of Martha Handling yesterday. Because, you know, keeping a viable security tape record of the events that go on in the courthouses is just, well, Sam’s job.”

  “Fuck you,” Sam Scalafini said. “And I apologize to Mr. Demarkian if he doesn’t like the language. And I’ll say it again. It’s not my fault if there’s a sitting judge who’s a nutcase. Because that woman was a nutcase. And George here knows it.”

  “You’re talking about Martha Handling,” Gregor said. “She was a nutcase how?”

  “A nutcase about security cameras,” Sam Scalafini said. He let his hands flutter in the air. “Look, they all have a thing about security cameras. The judges and the lawyers both. They’ve all got a bug u
p their asses about confidentiality. We were going to put in microphones a few years ago, and the entire frigging bar had a hissy fit.”

  “Of course they did,” Gregor said. “You can’t record conferences between lawyers and clients, that’s—”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Scalafini said. “That’s all supposed to be secret. It’s frigging insane, if you ask me. You should see the people we get in here. Juveniles, too. Anyway, they didn’t want sound, they didn’t get sound. The problem with Martha Frigging Handling is that she didn’t want anything. The first big issue was her chambers, and that was enough to make us all nuts. There never were any cameras in the chambers themselves. We didn’t even try that one. But she wouldn’t believe us. No matter how many times we told her, she wouldn’t believe us. I even took her down here a couple of times and showed her there weren’t any images coming up from anybody’s chambers. She just thought I was hiding something from her. A secret command post. That’s what she called it.”

  “Martha Handling was an interesting person,” George Edelson said blandly.

  “She came down here and looked around on her own a couple of times,” Scalafini said. “I found her creeping around. Gave me the frigging willies, let me tell you.”

  “I didn’t think that tape came from security cameras,” Gregor said.

  “If you mean the tape of Father Kasparian, ah,” George said, “ah, wielding the gavel—no, it didn’t. For one thing—”

  “There was sound,” Gregor said.

  “Exactly,” George said. “But Sam’s got more to tell us—don’t you, Sam?”

  Sam looked like he was ready to kill somebody. “Ms. Handling didn’t like cameras anywhere,” he said. “She didn’t like them in the hallways. She didn’t like them outside at the door or in the parking lot. She tried to get us to take them all down. And when she couldn’t get away with that—”

  “Even the defense attorneys weren’t okay with that,” George said.

  “When she couldn’t get away with that, she started ‘fixing the problem’ herself. She’d come in really early before anybody was here, take a can of black spray paint, and go walking around spraying the lenses. She made a mess, too, because the paint would drip. And drip. And drip.”

  “Spray paint,” Gregor said.

  “We kept catching her at it,” Sam Scalafini said. “We kept seeing her—”

  “But not at the time, Sam,” George Edelson said. “You should have been looking at those damned monitors, and you should have been able to catch her in the act.”

  “I can’t be six places at once,” Sam said. “And sometimes there were issues.”

  “He means that sometimes one of the cameras went down and he didn’t fix it immediately,” George said. “Because he had issues.”

  “You can go crap yourself, George, you really can,” Sam said.

  “If I crap, Sam, it’s not going to be on myself, it’s going to be on you.”

  “Let me see if I understand this,” Gregor said. “Martha Handling hated security cameras, so she would spray-paint the lenses. But didn’t you clean them off? Even if you missed her in the act, you must have noticed that something was wrong with the pictures on your screen.”

  “Yeah,” Sam Scalafini said. “We did sort of notice it.”

  “The first time,” George Edelson said.

  “George, for crap’s sake. I did something about it the first six times it happened at least, and you know it. It’s just that she was always checking, and you guys were being no help. I’m working security, for crap’s sake. You know as well as I do that I can’t go hauling off against a judge. It would have been my ass. And nobody would have been yelling about how I did the right thing, either.”

  “You could have cleaned the damned lenses off,” George said. “Not the first time. Not the first six times. Every time.”

  “Yeah, and then what? Then a whole crapload of stuff wouldn’t have gotten done and I’d’ve heard about that. And don’t you think I wouldn’t’ve.” Sam turned to Gregor Demarkian. “She’d go around with the spray paint can. And there are lots of security cameras, so we’d get tape of her doing it. She’d cover about six of the things and then she’d go back to her chambers and go searching through it for cameras. Except it’s like I said, there weren’t any in there. After a while, I mean, what the fuck? We knew who was doing it. She wasn’t going to go rob somebody or set a bomb off in the court or something. It wasn’t a priority. It’s damned hard to get spray paint off those lenses.”

  “Coffee breaks were a priority,” George Edelson said.

  Sam Scalafini flipped the bird. “You know what, George? You can kiss my ass.”

  “Let me just try to get this straight,” Gregor said. “There’s no security camera footage of what, exactly?”

  “Of anybody going through the hallways leading from the back door, the one we just came through, to Martha Handling’s chambers. And none from the hall leading from where Martha Handling’s chambers are to the hall that leads to the front foyer.”

  “Okay,” Gregor said. “So, there’s a front foyer. There are security cameras there.”

  “Right,” George said.

  “And then,” Gregor said, “there’s some kind of corridor you can go down, and then—what? You make a turn? And when you make that turn, that’s the corridor Martha Handling’s chambers are on.”

  “Right,” Sam said.

  “So,” Gregor said. “There are security cameras on the hall that leads from the foyer to the corridor that leads to the chambers, but the lenses on the cameras were blacked out on the foyer that leads to the chambers. But they were not covered in that first hallway.”

  “The last one before the end was,” Sam Scalafini said. “You never knew how far Martha—Judge Handling was going to be willing to go. It changed.”

  “But wasn’t there a security guard on duty?” Gregor said. “Shouldn’t somebody have been patrolling the halls—?”

  “Yes!” George Edelson said brightly. “Shouldn’t someone?”

  “Frigging A,” Sam Scalafini said.

  “The point of security is to provide security,” George Edelson said. “That’s why we have security. There is no point to a security system that is run for the benefit of people taking coffee breaks, running out to pick up sandwiches at the all-night deli, not showing up at all and still mysteriously being signed in. Do you want me to go on, Sam? Because I can go on all night.”

  “Frigging asshole,” Sam said.

  “I may be an asshole, Sam, but you’re just one more train wreck in the story of corruption in Philadelphia politics. Hell. You ought to be in the Corruption Hall of Fame.”

  2

  Gregor waited until they got down the street and into the other courthouse before asking any of the obvious questions.

  “You can’t tell me,” Gregor said, “with a straight face, that that man has a chance in hell of holding on to his job after—what was all that, exactly? Corruption? What was he corrupting? He wasn’t doing his job, that I can see, but—”

  “The only reason he isn’t already out of the building is the civil service rules. John is on the warpath. Scalafini will be out on his ear and worse before close of business today,” George Edelson said. “My God, have you any idea how hard John has worked, for years, to clean up the mess in this city? And now this. Some two-bit, punk-assed—”

  The courtroom they were entering was one of the modern ones, with the judge’s bench backed by a flat wooden wall with symbols on it meant to stand in for the old formalities of a court. Gregor preferred the old Depression-era stone-and-solemnity architecture, the kind Bennis called “socialist humorlessness.” They might be humorless, but they gave the impression that somebody was taking the law seriously.

  The spectator’s seats in the courtroom were not packed, but they weren’t empty, either. People sat scattered, but in little clumps. There was a clutch of young men who looked both belligerent and already defeated. There was an elderly African
American couple holding on to each other, the woman crying soundlessly with her head against the man’s breast.

  There was also Bennis, and Donna, and Lida Arkmanian.

  “I think we should be over there,” Gregor said, pointing to the three women. Bennis looked as belligerent as the clutch of young men, but not in any way defeated.

  George Edelson let Gregor lead him to a pair of seats just behind the women.

  “John had half the office going at it all last night,” George said. “Scalafini has been passing out jobs to relatives like they were candy. Nobody was doing any actual work that we can see. And he’s got to have somebody on the inside in human resources, and we haven’t found that person yet. And the worst thing is, if this hadn’t come up, we might never have found it. No, that’s not true. Something as bad as this was going to come up sometime. John’s ready to take his chances on justifiable homicide.”

  “So,” Gregor said, “does that mean there aren’t any usable pictures from the security cameras? We can’t tell who was or wasn’t in the hall?”

  “We’ve got some blurry stuff. Sometimes the spray job was a little out of whack. She was a short woman and her aim wasn’t always accurate. But she was doing it time after time. She wasn’t even really checking to see if they’d been cleaned. She just brought the can and zapped them. But there’s blurry stuff. We’ll give you a copy of all that we have. And then there’s the hall that leads to the hall. The last camera there was spray-painted, but none of the ones leading to the foyer was, so we’ve got all of that clear.”

  “But that’s good,” Gregor said. “We’ve got something then, we know who went into the hall that would at least lead him to the murder scene.”

  “Not exactly,” George Edelson said. “At the end of that hall is where the restrooms are. Everybody and his brother went down that hall. And the usable footage stops just before you can tell who was going into the restrooms and who was making the turn into the next corridor.”