Fighting Chance: A Gregor Demarkian Novel (Gregor Demarkian series Book 29) (13 page)

“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 up 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.”

“And I take it very few people
didn’t
go down that hall,” Gregor said.

“Half the population of Philadelphia went down that corridor,” George Edelson said.

All three of the women had turned around. They were waiting patiently for the conversation to be over. Lida Arkmanian was not going to be patient much longer.

Gregor made the introductions.

“It’s nice to meet you,” Bennis said to George Edelson in her best Main Line debutante voice. Then she turned to Gregor. “Do not get started,” she said. “It’s a public hearing. Donna called Russ and asked about it. If it’s a public hearing, we can be here.”

“It’s very important to let him know he has our support,” Lida said. “Even if he thinks he doesn’t want it. Even if, even if he did something—” She started to tear up.

Donna patted her on the shoulder. “He hasn’t done anything,” Donna said firmly, “except somehow get himself involved in a mess somebody else created. Just you wait. Gregor will figure it all out.”

“It’s definitely a public hearing, and I’m not in the least upset that the three of you are here,” Gregor said. “If I’d thought of it, I’d have had you bring half the membership of the church. I’m for putting as much pressure on him as possible. He’s going to have to start talking to somebody sometime. It would be better sooner rather than later.”

The big swinging double doors at the back of the courtroom opened, and after a bit of shuffling Tibor came in, handcuffed and shackled, dressed in a jail uniform, and flanked by two guards. Gregor saw Bennis tear up and then push the tears back by sheer force of will.

“I thought they didn’t allow that anymore,” she said. “I thought the Supreme Court said the defendant had to be in ordinary clothes.”

“That’s for the jury trial,” George Edelson said helpfully. “The court was afraid that prison clothes would prejudice the jury. They’re prejudiced enough as it is, if you ask me.”

Tibor did not turn to look at them. He stared straight ahead until he got to the defense table. A young, harried-looking man was sitting there. Gregor assumed he was from Legal Aid or the Public Defender’s Office. Tibor sat down next to him and shook his head.

“What’s that?” Bennis demanded.

“My guess is that Tibor is refusing the services of yet another attorney,” Gregor said.

“He turned me down yesterday,” George Edelson said.

“He should have Russ,” Donna said. “He’s always had Russ for everything. He’s got to know he can trust Russ no matter what’s going on.”

“He couldn’t trust Russ to plead him guilty to something he’s not guilty of,” Gregor said. “And he couldn’t trust Russ to hide anything that the court needs to know.”

“Do you think he’s going to plead guilty?” Bennis asked. “Do you think he’d really do something like that?”

“There isn’t a deal on the table,” George Edelson said. “And it’s a capital murder case.”

Lida Arkmanian blanched.

Gregor explained. “Most judges won’t let a defendant plead guilty to a capital murder charge if there isn’t a deal on the table to forgo the death penalty. You don’t want—”

The bailiff was suddenly at the front of the court, droning out a string of words and numbers that went by without Gregor being able to take them in.

Then the bailiff said, “All rise,” and everybody stood up.

The judge who walked in from behind the bench was an older man, tall and broad but also a little stooped. The bailiff announced him as “the Honorable Roger Maris Oldham presiding.”

The judge sat down. Everybody else sat down.

Bennis turned around and leaned as close to Gregor’s ear as she could get. “I know him,” she said. “He went to school with Bobby and Chris. Not that he could stand either of them, mind you, because he was Dudley Do-Right and they definitely weren’t.”