by Jane Haddam
“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.
He pulled the door open without thinking twice about what he might find there, and ended up face-to-face with Asha Dekanian. It had started raining sometime in the night. The rain was coming down hard. Asha was wearing a thick overcoat over what looked like it might be a nightgown. Her hair was wet through and plastered to the sides of her face.
Gregor stepped back away from the door to let her in, and immediately heard movement above him on the stairs. Bennis was awake.
“Asha, come in,” Gregor said, “get out of the rain. Are you all right? Are the children all right? What are you doing here?”
Asha scooted in rather than walked, and stood in the hallway while Gregor shut the door behind her. She was shaking so hard, her teeth were rattling. “I didn’t know where else to go,” she said. “I left the house, I was going to go to Mr. Donahue’s, but then I thought, there are very small children there, practically a baby, I would ring on the doorbell and I would wake the baby. But I was already out in the street and I had to go somewhere. I came here. I came here because I thought you could know.”
“Know what?” Gregor asked.
“Know where Mikel is,” Asha said. “He didn’t come home. He had an appointment but he went a little early to see about something and then he called me and then he didn’t come home. It is three o’clock in the morning and he didn’t come home.”
Bennis had come the rest of the way down the stairs. “I’m going to put on some coffee. Or would you prefer tea, Asha? Are the children all right? Are they at home? Is there anybody with them?”
“The children are sleeping,” Asha said. “I left them in their beds. They were sleeping. I had to come. You know Mikel. He would not go out and not come back all night. Mikel does not miss his dinner. I waited and I waited. I thoug
ht if I waited long enough he would have to come home. He always comes home. And now it is three o’clock in the morning, and I do not know where he is.”
“I’ll make the coffee and then I’ll run over to Asha’s house,” Bennis said. “Kids have a remarkable tendency to wake up in the middle of these things.”
She went to the back of the house, and Gregor started to urge Asha in that same direction.
“I did not know what to do,” Asha said, crying. “I knew something had to be wrong when he was not home for dinner. He never misses his dinner, my Mikel. Sometimes in Armenia we would be missing dinner because there was no dinner to be had, but here he never misses his dinner.”
It was one of those conversations that was going nowhere, but Gregor let the woman babble. He took her into the kitchen and found Bennis standing at one of the counters, putting out coffee cups.
Gregor herded Asha into a chair and got a cup to put in front of her. “Now,” he said while Bennis watched the coffeemaker. “Start from the beginning. Mikel was supposed to have an appointment.”
“This afternoon,” Asha said. “He was supposed to go to Mr. Donahue’s office about the mortgage. It is a terrible thing, what is happening with the mortgage. People call all hours of the day and night. Men come to the door and give me papers that I don’t understand. They put big signs up in front of the house. They say they are going to put me into the street and with the children. There was a sign there yesterday and only this morning it was taken off. Mikel was very upset.”
“Of course he was very upset,” Gregor said.
Bennis brought the coffee over along another cup and poured out for both of them. “Give me your keys,” she said to Asha. “I’ll go over and babysit.”
Asha looked at Bennis blankly.
“Oh, Lord,” Bennis said. “You didn’t bring your keys. Did you lock your door?”
Asha was trying very hard to think. “The door locks by itself,” she said finally. “You pull the door and it locks by itself.”
“Why did I know that was going to be the answer?” Bennis said. “Okay, let me get dressed and I’ll wake up Steve Tekemanian.”
“Why Steve Tekemanian?” Gregor asked.
“He’s the only one I know with burglar’s tools,” Bennis said.
Gregor wanted to ask why Steve Tekemanian had burglar’s tools, but Bennis was gone and Asha had gone back to crying.
“All right,” he said. “So Mikel went out for an appointment this afternoon—”
“They came and took the sign down from the door,” Asha said, “and Mikel had an appointment with Mr. Donahue. He took time off for the appointment. But maybe it was too much time off, because he got nervous. He paced up and down. He got very … agitated?” She let out with a string of Armenian, none of which Gregor understood.
Gregor tried again. “So,” he said, “Mikel was home for that, and he was upset, and then you said he left early for his appointment.”
Asha drank half her coffee in one gulp. Gregor thought it must have scalded her throat. She showed no signs of noticing.
“He thought of something,” she said. “He thought that everybody was trying to show that there was no mortgage on our house from this big bank, but he thought maybe that was the wrong way to look at it. We did have a mortgage on our house, from our bank, from the American Amity Savings Bank. He thought we should go to see the mortgage at the Amity Savings Bank and then—” She stopped suddenly. “This is wrong. I don’t understand it and I am getting it wrong.”
“That’s all right,” Gregor said. “It’s probably not something we need to know. He thought of an idea, a way to approach the problem with the big bank. Then what did he do?”
“He called Mr. Donahue,” Asha said. “At his office. At Mr. Donahue’s office. Mikel called him but he was not in. And the people at the office didn’t know when he would be back. And Mikel was still very nervous. And he said he would go and look himself, to find this thing he’d thought of. And then he left.”
“And that was when?”
“It was just after lunch,” Asha said. “It was just about noon. Mikel always eats his lunch at eleven o’clock. He gets up very early in the morning.”
“Did he say where he was going to check this thing?”
Asha nodded. “The Hall of Records. I remember the name. It was like a name from a textbook in Armenia. The buildings all had names like that.”
“All right,” Gregor said. “That makes sense. I saw him after lunch, maybe at two o’clock or so—”
“You saw him?” Asha said. “And he was all right? He was alive?”
“He was certainly alive,” Gregor said. “He was in a big hurry. He didn’t stop to talk. But it makes sense because I was at Homicide, and there are a lot of government buildings in that area. I think he could have been coming from the Hall of Records. I’ll have to check a map. He was in a hurry and he said he had an appointment.”
“Yes, yes,” Asha said. “He had an appointment. He had an appointment with Mr. Donahue.”
“And did you call Russ’s office?”
“I thought that the appointment was going on for a long time. I thought that might be good news. And then when I did begin to worry, it was too late. When I called the office, I got only the answering machine. And then I really began to worry.”
“Does Mikel have a cell phone?”
“Yes, of course. Everybody has a cell phone. Bums in the street have cell phones.”
“Have you tried calling his cell phone?”
Asha nodded. “The first time it rang and rang and rang. The other times it only gave me voice mail.”
“All right,” Gregor said.
Bennis popped her head through the door. “I’m on my way. Steve is going to meet me there. He doesn’t want to get started until I get there, though, because he says if he’s going to get picked up by the cops, he wants Mrs. Gregor Demarkian along to get him out of jail.”
“I should go back to get the children,” Asha said.
“You don’t have any keys either,” Bennis said. “And your children know me. They even know Steve.”
“We’re going to call Russ Donahue and see if Mikel ever made his appointment,” Gregor said. “Maybe we’ll go over there and have a talk.”
“I’ve got my keys,” Bennis said. “And besides, I know how to get in without them.”
She disappeared from the kitchen door, and Gregor noticed he was not spending his time reassuring Asha Dekanian.
2
Gregor called Russ, at home, but on his cell phone, so that he didn’t wake up the entire house. He did wake up Donna. Gregor could hear her fussing in the background, asking about making coffee and putting out something for everybody to eat. Russ got her calmed down as best he could and agreed to go down the street to Gregor’s to talk. Almost as soon as Russ rang off, Bennis called to tell them she was in the house, with Steve, and nobody had been arrested.
“Can you imagine us getting away with this on Cavanaugh Street?” she asked. “I think Hannah and Sheila stay up all night with binoculars.”
Gregor didn’t believe that it was exactly that bad, but he took her point. This little episode was going to be all over the Ararat in the morning, and it was already nearly morning. There was nothing to be done about it.
He kept hovering back and forth in the hall so that he would hear the doorbell as soon as it rang. He didn’t want Russ pounding the way Asha had.
Russ’s ring was barely any ring at all. The only reason he didn’t walk right through the front door was that he probably thought Gregor had locked it. He had thrown on jeans and a cotton sweater and a raincoat so wrinkled, it must have been balled up in a drawer for months. He looked exhausted.
“I hope we didn’t wake everybody up,” Gregor said. “Asha came here because she didn’t want to pound on your door and get the children out of bed. I didn’t call on the landline for the same reason. I’ve got no idea if any of that did any good at all.”
&n
bsp; “You didn’t wake up the children,” Russ said. “Most of the time, I’d have said you couldn’t have no matter what you did. They sleep like rocks. But the past few days, Tommy’s been a little … rocky.”
“Does he know what’s going on?”
“Probably,” Russ said. “Not that we’ve told him anything directly. Donna thinks it’s better if he doesn’t know. He’s been destabilized already. But for God’s sake, Gregor, what are the odds? He’s a very bright kid. He sees the newspaper. He sees the news. He must have a fairly good idea.”
“He hasn’t asked about it?”
“No,” Russ said. “Donna says he hasn’t even asked her. With me—well, I’m a little rocky myself these days. I think he’s gotten the impression that he should stay away from it where I’m concerned.”
“He is a bright kid,” Gregor said.
By then they’d reached the kitchen. Asha Dekanian was sitting at the kitchen table where Gregor had left her, crying into a handkerchief that was no longer much use.
“Oh,” she said when they walked in. “Mr. Donahue!”
Russ went to the coffeemaker and set it up again. Nobody trusted Gregor to make coffee. Nobody trusted Tibor to make coffee either, but nobody was going to mention that now.
“Mikel is missing,” Asha said. “He is not at home. He has not come home since he went out to see you.”
“He also didn’t see me,” Russ said.
Asha Dekanian blanched. “He did not come to your appointment?”
“Not that I know of,” Russ said. “I got back from a hearing and that was before he was due, so I got to working on the case and the next thing I knew, it was after six. And I’d assume that if he came in, somebody would have told me. He was in my appointment book.”
