by Jane Haddam
“Can he speak?” Bennis asked, beginning to feel desperate.
“He could after he took a few sips of water,” Sheree said. The bouncing had become so exaggerated, it was surreal. “Then he looked at Father Tibor and said, ‘Don’t you dare.’ Just like that. ‘Don’t you dare.’ Does that make any sense to you?”
“Yes,” Bennis said.
“Well, anyway, we tried to call you and tell you, but you weren’t answering your phone and we didn’t know what to do, so like I said, we called everybody we could think of and we called Dr. Albright to come on out and we’re all just so glad you’re finally here—”
Bennis stepped across the threshhold into the old foyer with its twenty-foot-high ceilings. There was a buzzing in her ears.
“I turn the phone off when I’m driving,” she said.
She was about to say that she had been driving that morning, that she’d had errands, that she’d needed to do a hundred things before coming out here.
She never got the chance.
First her mind went absolutely blank.
Then she hit the floor.
2
When she came to, she was sitting in an armchair with her legs stretched out across an ottoman, and she had the vague impression that she was at a cocktail party. It even seemed to make sense that there were doctors and nurses at this party, and that they were all in uniform. Then she made her eyes focus and saw that Gregor was across the room in bed, sitting up, with a large glass of something on ice in front of him. It looked like urine. His face was still a mess, the entire right side of it bandaged and the right eye bloodshot and raw. Even after all these weeks, it was raw.
“What’s that?” she asked, pointing to the glass of yellow liquid.
“Asinine,” Gregor said, looking right at her.
“It’s ginger ale,” Sheree Coleman said, patting her on the arm. “We’ll get you some yourself if you want.”
“I want a pint and a half of Johnnie Walker Blue,” Bennis said. “And I mean it.”
“You may mean it,” Dr. Albright said, stepping into her line of vision, “but we don’t carry it. We did try to warn you in advance. We tried repeatedly.”
“Yes,” Bennis said. “Sheree told me. Is he all right? Is he just all right? What in the name of hell is going on here?”
“I’m sitting right in front of you,” Gregor said. “You can ask me.”
“His throat is very sore,” Dr. Albright said. “I’ll tell you. He woke up. It happens. There’s no way to tell, with coma victims, how that will happen or even if that will happen. I told you that before. They come out of it. They don’t come out of it. He wasn’t brain-dead or even close. There was always a chance.”
“And he’s been listening to everything?” Bennis said. “He knows what’s been going on? He knows what people have been telling him?”
“He seems to know a lot of it,” Dr. Albright said.
“I’m over here,” Gregor said. His voice was clear. There was no slur. And he was getting angry.
Bennis looked around the room. Father Tibor was there, but that was to be expected. The Very Old Ladies were there. They came out every once in a while. The rest of the crowd was bewildering. George Edelson was there. Ray Berle and Tony Monteverdi were there. Petrak, Sophie, and Stefan Maldovanian were there. Asha Dekanian was there. Lydia Arkmanian and Hannah Krekorian were there. And Janice Loftus was there. Bennis didn’t know what to make of it. That woman got in everywhere. How did she get in everywhere? There was a guard at the gate of this place, for God’s sake.
“Wait,” Bennis said. “You called this person because you thought she would know where I was?”
“Nobody had to call me,” Janice Loftus said. “I come at least twice a week. I knew he’d wake up eventually. I wanted to be here. I have something important to say.”
“I have something important to hear,” Gregor said. “And I’m going to hear it. Right away. And don’t give me any crap about how I shouldn’t do too much too soon. There are laws in this country about keeping a person incarcerated against his will, and I’ll use them. I’m either going to hear what I need to hear, or I’m going to walk right out the door.”
“Not without help, you’re not,” Dr. Albright said. “And I won’t supply the help.”
“He will.” Gregor pointed at Father Tibor. “And you won’t be able to talk him out of it. I need to know what’s been going on.”
Father Tibor took a deep breath. “The first thing,” he said, “is to know that Russ Donahue is not dead.”
3
After that, Bennis just sat back and listened to them, keeping one eye on Gregor and one on Janice Loftus at all times. The existence of Janice Loftus in this place still did not make sense. Bennis had the horrible feeling that it never would.
It was George Edelson who took charge. “In the first place, Father Tibor is right. Russ Donahue is not dead. Ray and Tony might have shot at him if they’d gotten the chance.”
“It’s not usually a good idea to fire into crowd of people in a not-all-that-large room,” Tony Monteverdi said.
“In the end, he didn’t need to, because this lady over here—” Edelson pointed to Mrs. Vespasian, sitting in a chair and tapping her walking stick on the floor. “—this lady took that stick and hit him sqaure in the stomach, then she put the point of the stick down on his foot. I saw it all, but I didn’t see it, if you know what I mean. She was standing right next to Donahue, Tony and Ray were standing on the other side of the room—”
“We didn’t think it was Donahue we had to worry about,” Ray said. “You could have said something. It would probably have resulted in your not getting shot.”
“Anyway, she whacked him and sort of stabbed him and he doubled over and Tony and Ray came running to jump on him, and that was that. Donahue was hurt but not fatally,” George Edelson said, “and after we got working on the things you’d said, we found pretty much all of it. There was the bribery. Administrative Solutions was paying him to skew his cases so that they’d be more easily resolved by incarceration. Not all the judges were on the take, so they needed some help from other people. We’re rounding up the people. But you were right about the Dekanian mortgage, too. Once we knew where to look, we found the trail. He’d just taken the mortgage and sold it, and it was illegal six ways to Sunday, too. He’d represented it to J.P. CitiWells as unencumbered, which nobody bothered to check, which tells you something about the way those banks were operating.”
Gregor made a confirmatory grunt.
George Edelson said, “Yeah, I know,” and went on. “Once we started looking, we found stuff going back just about four years. Mortgages. Trusts. The bribe thing.”
“When they opened the office,” Bennis said. “When he went out on his own.”
“Was it?” Edelson said. “He was smart about it. You have to give him that. He wasn’t buying fancy cars and he wasn’t gambling or doing any of that other stuff. No mistresses. Just steady streams of money. If they were all like this, we wouldn’t catch half of them.”
“He went out on his own,” Bennis said. “He left a big firm to do it. And Donna was always worried that they wouldn’t have enough money to get by, because she was staying home with the children and she wasn’t working. But they never did run short that she could tell. And maybe we should have known, because his partner, that Mac Cafton, he was short all the time.”
“Whatever it was,” Edelson said. “Martha Handling was going to turn herself in and blow the whistle on everybody, and he went to talk to her that day to see if he couldn’t get her to see what he thought of as reason. Martha Handling never saw reason, and she was infuriating on a regular basis, and Donahue just picked up the gavel and smashed her. And, as you said, Father Tibor found them, and the rest was you talking in chambers the day you got shot. What’s more interesting is the phone.”
“I kept trying to tell you about the phone,” Sophie Maldovanian said.
“The phone,” Edelson sa
id, “was the key to the end of it. Donahue and Tibor here made the video, then Donahue was supposed to send it to YouTube and ditch the phone. But the corridor was already full of people, and when he got out there, he couldn’t do anything without somebody noticing. He tried going toward the back, to the back door, and out that way, but he still wasn’t unobserved. Then Dr. Loftus here started screaming, and Russ went back to the chambers, because part of the plan was that Donahue was going to find Tibor in the act. He had the phone in his pocket, and he started hurrying, and it dropped out. It took him a couple of seconds to realize it, but when he turned back to retrieve it, Petrak here was picking it up.”
“It was just lying there on the floor,” Petrak said. “I didn’t even think about it.”
“When Petrak didn’t turn the phone in, and nobody else did, and there wasn’t any sign of it, I think Donahue thought he’d gotten lucky with that one,” Edelson said. “When Mikel Dekanian called up and told him what he’d found at the Hall of Records, the record of the sale, the documents with his forged signature on them, Russ told him to meet up at that alley, and as soon as Mikel got there, he killed him. I don’t think it occurred to Dekanian that Russ was responsible for what he’d found.”
“It didn’t occur to him,” Asha said. “He called me and said to me he knew what the banks had done to hurt us. Then he said he had an appointment with Mr. Donahue, but he did have an appointment with Mr. Donahue. That’s why he went downtown in the first place.”
“He did have an appointment with Donahue,” Edelson said. “It was just later in the afternoon and in Donahue’s office. Anyway, that’s about all you don’t know. Except that Russ Donahue has decided to plead not guilty. And that Tibor has been charged as an accessory after the fact.”
“Idiot,” Gregor said.
“Yes, Krekor,” Tibor said. “I am an idiot. We have established that.”
“Mark Granby,” Gregor said.
“Ah,” Edelson said. “That one’s good. He managed to get out of the country. He turned up in Guatemala and was spotted almost immediately. Then he tried to claim political asylum. Nobody could figure out what he thought he was doing. The Guatemalan government kicked him out in a week.”
“Good,” Gregor said.
“Finished,” Dr. Albright said. “And I do mean finished. Now. This is a mob scene. You’re going to put him back in that coma. I want you all out of here, now. Except for Mrs. Demarkian. You can stay if you behave yourself.”
“I’ll behave myself,” Bennis said. She meant it, but she wasn’t entirely sure she wouldn’t faint.
Sheree Coleman began shooing everybody out of the room, making little clucking noises. She sounded like a chicken.
Tibor and Ray and Tony and George and the rest of them went more or less quietly, saying good-bye to Gregor and telling them how happy they were.
Only Janice Loftus was recalcitrant. “But you don’t understand!” she insisted. “I have important information. You’re getting the whole case all wrong—”
Sheree Coleman gave her a sharp little shove in the small of her back, and Janice Loftus disappeared, still screeching.
4
Father Tibor came back for just a moment after all the others had left. “I wanted to say that I am glad to see you again,” he said. “And to say that you were right, about Russ.”
“I’m right about you, too,” Gregor said. “The right course of action here is not to fall on your sword. We’ll work this out. There will be a way. Maybe we’ll even get a judge who hasn’t been bribed by Administrative Solutions.”
“Tcha,” Tibor said.
Then he went back out the door.
Bennis got up and went all the way over to Gregor in bed, something she hadn’t done yet. She sat down on the mattress and stroked his forehead. He didn’t like things like that. At the moment, she didn’t care. She wanted to touch him.
“You should find out when they’re going to let me out of this place,” he said. “It must be costing you a fortune.”
“I’ve got money.”
“Which isn’t the point,” Gregor said.
“What is the point?”
Gregor looked away. Bennis knew that body language. It was the way Gregor was when he had to say something that hurt.
“Donna,” he said finally. “I really was aware of a lot of what was going on. I remember your being here. I remember Tibor being here. I even remember John Jackman once, if I wasn’t dreaming it.”
“You weren’t dreaming it,” Bennis said. “He came out three times that I know of, and every time he was swearing at you. You got a lot of people annoyed.”
“I don’t remember Donna coming out.”
“Ah,” Bennis said.
“I didn’t really expect her to come out,” Gregor said. “Under the circumstances. But I’m worried about how she is. And how Tommy is. I’ve been worried about that since I realized what was going on.”
“Tommy isn’t Russ’s biological son.”
“I know. But he’s the only father Tommy has ever known.”
“It’s not as bad as you think,” Bennis said. “I don’t think she’s angry at you. She certainly isn’t angry at me. She’s just numb, mostly. And she’s not here.”
“Where is she?”
“Her parents took her to Corfu for a month, with the children, of course,” Bennis said. “I think they’re going to take her back again when the case finally goes to trial. I think she just wants to be away from it.”
“Has she seen Russ?”
“Once,” Bennis said. “Before she left. And no, I don’t know how the interview went, and neither does anybody else. She went in alone and in tears. She came out alone and in tears. She didn’t want to talk about it.”
“All right,” Gregor said.
“You’re beginning to look exhausted,” Bennis said. “Maybe Dr. Albright is right. Maybe we should stop all this before we put you back in a coma.”
“I don’t think comas work like that,” Gregor said.
Bennis stroked Gregor’s forehead again, and as she did, his eyes closed, and he was immediately deeply and calmly asleep. She didn’t know if comas didn’t work like that, but she knew he wasn’t in a coma now, because the way he was sleeping was different from what she remembered from before.
In a world that was now infinitely dark and far away, Donna Moradanyan Donahue would have known what to say about this.
THE GREGOR DEMARKIAN BOOKS BY JANE HADDAM
Not a Creature Was Stirring
Precious Blood
Act of Darkness
Quoth the Raven
A Great Day for the Deadly
Feast of Murder
A Stillness in Bethlehem
Murder Superior
Dear Old Dead
Festival of Deaths
Bleeding Hearts
Fountain of Death
And One to Die On
Baptism in Blood
Deadly Beloved
Skeleton Key
True Believers
Somebody Else’s Music
Conspiracy Theory
The Headmaster’s Wife
Hardscrabble Road
Glass Houses
Cheating at Solitaire
Living Witness
Wanting Sheila Dead
Flowering Judas
Blood in the Water
Hearts of Sand
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
JANE HADDAM is the author of more than thirty novels, but is best known for her books featuring Gregor Demarkian. A finalist for both the Edgar and the Anthony Awards, she lives in Litchfield County, Connecticut.
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
FIGHTING CHANCE. Copyright © 2014 by Jane Haddam. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.minotaurbook
s.com
Cover art by Doron Ben-ami
eBooks may be purchased for business or promotional use. For information on bulk purchases, please contact Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department by writing to [email protected].
The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request
ISBN 978-1-250-01235-7 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-4668-4871-9 (e-book)
e-ISBN 9781466848719
First Edition: September 2014
