by Jane Haddam
He left his door open while he waited, so that he could see who came in the door. And when the man did come, Mark was almost sure that he couldn’t really be the man. Because when the man did come, he was a boy.
He was a boy Mark recognized.
Mark thought he was going to die on the spot.
The rule of thumb was simple. If you could see them, they could see you. He had seen this boy at the courthouse on the day Martha Handling was killed. He had seen him twice. The first time had been at the very beginning, when Mark came up the front steps. The boy had been with that ridiculous woman who carried signs at demonstrations. It wasn’t the important woman, who was the head of Philadelphia Justice, but the squat little one who shrieked a lot. She had gotten through the first barrier, only to be stopped at the courtroom door, because the court was not going to allow her to be a spectator. She talked to the boy. Mark had thought he knew what she was doing. She was trying to get the boy to tell the guard at that door to let her in. The boy was not cooperating.
The second time Mark saw the boy had been later, downstairs, in the corridor where Martha Handling’s chambers were. That was the time Mark thought the boy might have seen him. At the courtroom door, the boy had been too preoccupied with dealing with the squat woman. In that back corridor …
Well, in that back corridor, a lot had been going on. Martha Handling was already dead.
Mark got up out of his chair and went to the door of his office. The boy was talking to the receptionist. He looked up and stared right into Mark’s face, but he didn’t look as if he’d recognized anybody.
“I’m Mark Granby,” Mark said, holding out a hand. “Why don’t you come in where we can talk? I liked your résumé very much. I think we have some real possibilities here.”
The boy looked confused. The receptionist also looked confused. Mark practically dragged the kid out of the front room and into the office. Then he closed the office door and locked it.
“Sit down,” he said, not sounding as happy-crappy as he had outside. “I know who you are. You’re the brother of the kid whose case was on when Martha Handling got killed.”
The boy was looking around the office, unhappy. “It looks like the office of a bureaucrat,” he said. “It should look like the office of a capitalist.”
Mark knew what the kid meant.
“I’m Mark Granby,” he said, “like I told you outside. Who are you? And don’t tell me you aren’t going to give me your name, because I can find it out.”
“I am Petrak Maldovanian,” the boy said.
Then he didn’t say anything else. Mark stared at him. Petrak stared at the room, at the walls, at the desk, out the windows. Mark thought if this kept up much longer, he would scream.
“Listen,” Mark said. “If we’re going to do business, we should do business. It’s not going to make much sense saying this was a job interview if we take forever. People will know something is up. Especially since I don’t actually have a job opening and I’m not going to hire you for anything. What do you want?”
Petrak looked down at his hands. “I found a cell phone,” he said.
“You told me that on the phone.”
“It was not an ordinary cell phone,” Petrak said. “It was a prepaid cell phone, the kind you can get at stores and right away use without a plan.”
“Yes,” Mark said. “And you think it’s mine?”
“At first I thought it was my brother Stefan’s,” Petrak said. “It had his picture on it, and pictures of other people. The other people looked like they could be his friends. But I have talked to Stefan, and it is not his phone.”
“All right,” Mark said. This was going to take forever.
“I looked at the phone and I found things,” Petrak said. “I found the video. The video of Father Tibor with the gavel. The one that was on the Internet.”
It took everything Mark had not to react to that one. There had to be dozens of city cops looking for the source of that video. If this boy had brought that video into the office—but then, what else could he have done? And what was Mark supposed to do now?
“You think this was my cell phone?” Mark asked. “You think I took the video of the priest killing—?”
But Petrak Maldovanian was shaking his head vigorously. “No, no,” he said. “It would not be your phone. It had your name and number on the contacts list. You do not put your name and number on your own contacts list. I think this was the phone of Judge Martha Handling. I think it was not her regular phone but a special phone she had. I saw her regular phone. It was on the desk in the room where she was. Where her body was.”
“Was it?” Mark said.
“It was a nice phone, her regular phone,” Petrak said. “I envied it.”
There wasn’t a single thing Mark could think of to say to that.
The boy twisted in the single visitor’s chair. It was an uncomfortable chair. Mark wasn’t expected to have visitors.
Mark thought he was going to go crazy. The kid just wouldn’t get on with it. He was looking around the room again.
“All right,” Mark said finally. “You found this phone, and you found my name on it. And it’s got the video on it. Maybe somebody just downloaded the video from the Internet. Everybody else on the planet did.”
“No,” Petrak said. “It’s a video made on this phone. You can see it. You can tell when a video is made on the phone. It’s different when it’s been downloaded.”
Mark didn’t know if that was true. He did know where to go next. “Fine,” he said. “Show it to me.”
This time, the boy shot him a look of complete and utter contempt. “I do not have the phone with me,” he said. “I would not bring the phone with me. I have it in a safe place. I will give it to you—I will give it to you after.”
“After I give you money,” Mark said. “So far, you haven’t given me any reason to think it might be worth any money. To me, at least.”
“I don’t want money,” Petrak said.
“You don’t? What the hell else could you want?”
Petrak seemed to come to some great decision. “I have looked at the phone over and over again,” he said. “I have come to the conclusion that it is a phone belonging to Judge Handling—”
“You’ve said all that,” Mark interrupted.
“—I have listened to the messages on the voice mail. Three of these voice mail messages are from you.”
“So?”
“One of these messages talks about my brother, Stefan. You say you are sending her the picture. You talk about what my brother, Stefan, has done and that he should be locked away for long because he is a—” Petrak searched the ceiling. “—a psychotic.”
“Psychopath,” Mark said dryly. “And you still want to tell me you don’t want any money?”
“When Mr. Donahue told us that it would be Judge Handling who would be the judge for Stefan’s hearing, he said that there were many rumors that Judge Handling was taking bribes to send people to the juvenile prison for long times. I didn’t understand that exactly, but Mr. Donahue explained that your company, you and your company, you run the prisons as a capitalist company and the government pays you money for every prisoner you have in your jails. You gave Judge Handling money to put people in your prisons and that is a crime and you could go to jail for doing it.”
“Go on,” Mark said.
“In this I think I am entirely correct,” Petrak said. “Also I think that if I gave this phone to the authorities, they would look through it and they would find these things, and they would arrest you and send you to jail. I think you would not want this to happen.”
“Nobody wants to go to jail,” Mark agreed.
“I think that if you pay one judge to send people to jail, you must pay other judges to send people to jail,” Petrak said. “I think it is never just one. I think also if you can pay a judge to put somebody in jail, you can pay a judge not to put somebody in jail.”
“Why would I pay a judge n
ot to put somebody in jail?”
“I think you could do that if you wanted to,” Petrak said. “I think I will give you back the phone if you will do that for my brother, Stefan.”
“From what I hear, your brother, Stefan, is on track to be deported.”
“Tcha,” Petrak said. “You are not about the deported. You are about the jail. You will pay a judge, the new judge for Stefan, so that he does not go to jail. After that, I will give you the phone.”
“After that, you’ll use the phone to get me to give you money.”
“No,” Petrak said.
Just that. No. As if that were all that needed to be said.
And maybe it was.
Of course, Mark didn’t actually have another juvenile judge in his pocket. Martha Handling was the only one he had found. Juvenile judges seemed to be a lot stickier than adult court kind. But he could see that Petrak Maldovanian didn’t know that, and Petrak Maldovanian had that damned phone.
“All right,” Mark said. “But first, you’re going to do something for me. You’re going to strip, and then we’re going to go through your clothes and that backpack. We’re going to look in the pockets and the seams and the book spines and everywhere. Because if you’re wired, I want to know it now.”
3
It was after six o’clock when Russ Donahue looked up from the papers on his desk and realized that time had passed. It was already dark outside, in spite of the everlasting daylight saving time that was going to go on until November.
He ran that through his head a couple of times. Mikel Dekanian was supposed to have come by for an appointment about the papers Russ was working on now. The girls in the office should have noticed that. He should have had some notification from somebody that Mikel had not come in.
Russ looked at the enormous pile of paperwork on his desk, which was only about a third of what he’d been trying to look through on the computer. Computers were great, but sometimes he found it easier to concentrate if he could just lay things out on paper.
Today, that had not been the case. Today, no matter how he’d moved things around, or set them up as charts, or put them in columns, nothing made any sense. He could see no way out of the tangle. He had managed to get one thing done, at the very beginning of the day, which would keep the bank from foreclosing for the foreseeable future, but the rest of the day had been a wash.
He got up from behind his desk and went out into the reception area. The offices around the perimeter were all dark. The receptionist had gone home. Most of the secretaries had gone, too.
Russ heard a sound and turned to see Mary Langdon just heading out from the back of the offices, her enormous shoulder bag slapping at the side of her body like a wrecking ball. That had to hurt.
“Mary?”
Mary was Max’s personal secretary. She was the one he went to when he got crazy about money, not enough money coming in, too much money going out, the entire small firm project ending in a heap of debts. Mary was a very calm person.
“Russ,” she said, “I thought I saw a light under your door. Are you all right?”
“Yes, of course, I’m fine,” Russ said. “But I had an appointment. With Mikel Dekanian, you know—”
“The mortgage case,” Mary said. “I do know. Isn’t that awful, though? The poor man hasn’t ever had anything to do with J.P. CitiWells, and they still manage to screw him up. He was supposed to come in today?”
“A few hours ago,” Russ said. “You didn’t see him?”
“Well, no, I didn’t, but I’m not the best one to ask about that. I’m not usually out front here. But if he’d come in, I’m sure somebody would have told you about it. Unless you were out, of course.”
“I went out for lunch, but that was at around noon. He was supposed to come in at three thirty.”
“Maybe he got hung up somehow and forgot to phone,” Mary said. “Or maybe he didn’t forget to phone but somebody forgot to give you the message. That’s happened a couple of more times than I like to think about. Would you like me to call him for you so you can find out what’s going on?”
“What?” Russ said. “No, that’s all right. I’ll look into it in the morning. I probably ought to be going home myself.”
“You probably should,” Mary said. “Donna’s probably frantic. See you tomorrow, then.”
“See you tomorrow.”
Russ watched her leave.
Then he went back into his office and packed up as much of the paper as he could get into his briefcase.
He didn’t see what good it was going to do, but he had to try.
FIVE
1
By the time Gregor had finished visiting offices, he had a stack of paper on him heavy enough to break his back, and enough new files on his computer to last him for days. It was not well sorted and organized paper. The police had their suspect, even if one or two of them wasn’t completely happy with who and what they had. The prosecutor was happy with who and what he had. And he had every reason to be. If the man now in custody for the murder of Martha Handling had been anybody at all but Father Tibor Kasparian, Gregor himself would have been happy with who and what they had.
In ways that Gregor barely wanted to think about, that bothered him. He didn’t expect himself to pay attention to every crime committed everywhere, or even every murder. There were a lot of them, and most of them were not even minorly interesting. Gregor had always counted himself lucky that he had not spent his childhood immersed in detective fiction. He hadn’t read any detective fiction at all until he was in middle age and Father Tibor had given him some. Then he’d spent a few months reading through the writers Tibor called the Great Masters: Christie, Sayers, Stout, Chandler, Hammett. He’d found something to like in most of them, and found Christie far more perceptive than he’d thought he would. But the only one of the lot that he’d felt was really real was a writer named Ed McBain.
Real as the McBain stories were, though, they were nothing at all like real police work, or real murders. Real murders were, almost invariably, mind-numbingly stupid. All the studies said that less intelligent people were more likely to commit violent crimes than more intelligent people. Gregor thought that might be hiding something more sinister. Maybe more intelligent people were less likely to get caught committing violent crimes than less intelligent people. Maybe there were, out there somewhere, dozens of bodies buried on the assumption that they’d died of natural causes, or accidents, or simple old age, when they’d actually been cleverly done in by family and friends.
Maybe, but Gregor didn’t think so. The kinds of crimes that made for interesting books and television shows were probably in reality very rare. Most intelligent criminals turned out not to be as intelligent as they thought they were. Most murders consisted of sudden and irrevocable losses of control: two guys who got liquored up and infuriated in a bar when one or both of them had a weapon; the nineteen-year-old boyfriend who promised to babysit and found out he couldn’t stand the sound of the baby crying; the mental defectives who thought a gun meant nobody could say no to them and ended up being resisted by the owner of the convenience store they’d set out to rob.
There was a reality show out there called World’s Dumbest Criminals. Gregor did not like reality shows as a rule, but he thought that one had a point. Stupid, he’d once heard somebody say, is an unlimited resource. He liked the line from Isaac Asimov better: “Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.”
In this thing with Tibor, it was less the violence he was concerned about than the events that followed the violence. There were all those people in the corridor. There was the picture sent out by the woman who had eventually found the body. There was Tibor’s behavior, which was not only strange but strange in a particular way.
He walked the street for a while until it got dark. He found himself getting annoyed over the fact that it was still daylight saving time. Not that any daylight was being saved at the moment. It was late, and it was September.
&n
bsp; He was very tired and very hungry. He found a streetlight bright enough to read his watch by and saw that it was close to eight. He’d have missed dinner at the Ararat while everybody else was there. Bennis would make him something if he asked, but Gregor had learned that it was better not to ask. Bennis seemed to approach cooking as an adversary competition. She was competing with the food, which wanted to be edible, but would not win.
He got his phone out and called her. She sounded enormously relieved when she heard his voice. That surprised him.
“How am I supposed to know what’s going on out there?” she asked. “You could be walking around the streets of Philadelphia in a fog. And some parts of Philadelphia, you shouldn’t do that in.”
“I’m getting a cab. You’ve probably had dinner. Could you meet me at the Ararat anyway? Maybe you could call ahead in case the place is busy tonight? Linda will find a place for us if she knows we’re coming.”
“Yes, of course I can,” Bennis said. “You haven’t eaten? That means you really were wandering around the streets of Philadelphia thinking.”
“I shouldn’t be long,” Gregor said.
He closed up and stepped out into the street to hail a cab. This was not something worth arguing about, because Bennis was right.
The cab was just turning into Cavanaugh Street when Gregor realized what it was that had been bothering him, and then he wasn’t sure it made any difference. He made the driver stop just outside the Ararat’s front door, gave him a decent-enough tip, and got out onto the sidewalk. Bennis was right where he could see her, sitting in the booth that bordered the big plate glass window. Gregor wasn’t sure how he felt about that. That was the same booth where he and Tibor had had breakfast together for years.
He dragged the briefcase with the papers and the laptop in it into the Ararat. He should have stopped at home and dropped it off. He waved to Debbie Melajian when she waved to him. Her sister Linda opened the restaurant in the morning and worked through lunch. Debbie came on just after lunch and closed up after dinner.
