Fighting Chance(26)

Bennis came in dressed in jeans and an enormous cotton sweater that must have been one of the ones she’d bought him.

“I thought we’d avoid going out in public as long as we could,” she said, taking their coffee cups to the coffee machine to fill them. “I looked outside when I got up, and there doesn’t seem to be much of anything out there, but it’s hard to tell.”

“We can’t hide in the house indefinitely,” Gregor said.

Bennis brought the coffee over and went to the stove for whatever else she had made, which seemed to be some kind of omelet. Gregor told himself he was cautiously optimistic. You could never quite tell with Bennis and food.

Bennis sat down across from him. “I wasn’t thinking that you’d hide out indefinitely,” she said. “Or that any of us would. I was thinking that it might be a good idea to get some things settled before you have to talk to reporters. And I don’t see how you’re not going to have to talk to reporters. It would have been bad enough if it was just that some friend of yours committed a murder, or was arrested for committing a murder—”

She stopped, embarrassed.

“I’m sorry,” she said after a moment. “There’s the major part of my brain that says Tibor could not possibly have done a thing like this, and then there’s that little part that can’t get off that damned video.”

“Don’t worry about it too much,” Gregor said. “You’re not going to be the only one.”

“I know I’m not,” Bennis said, “but that isn’t saying much, is it? If his best friends can’t see past the video, what’s going to happen with everybody else? I’ve been staying away from the news channels as much as I can, but other people are going to be watching them. Everybody in the country is going to be watching them. And I don’t see what we can do about it.”

“We can find out what really happened,” Gregor said.

“What if what really happened was that Tibor bludgeoned this woman to death?”

“Then we’ll deal with that when we get there.”

“Do you think we’re going to get there?”

“No,” Gregor said. “I told you that forty times yesterday, Bennis. I’m dead certain that whatever happened in that room, Tibor didn’t bludgeon Martha Handling to death. And don’t go on about how I can’t say why I’m so certain of that, and how it’s probably my intuition and nothing else. It’s not my intuition. I’ve noticed something very wrong. And you can’t see the body in the video.”

Bennis cut her omelet into very small, very precisely square pieces.

“That fell out of your jacket pocket when I hung it up this morning,” she said, pointing at Terry Carpenter’s card in the middle of the table. “Is that who you went to see yesterday after you testified? Is that the person who’s going to help Mikel Dekanian save his house?”

“That’s who I went to see yesterday,” Gregor said. “I don’t know how much help he’s going to be. It seems the bottom line is that the entire mortgage situation is a mess beyond all understanding and nobody actually knows what’s going on. I was in the middle of tearing him a new one when your phone call came through. I was just thinking we were going to have to try another tack.”

“Is there another tack?”

“I can only hope so. Apparently, this isn’t the first time this has happened. Well, we knew that. It’s happened before just to members of the church. But from what Carpenter was saying, it’s happening quite a lot, and I got the impression that at least some of the time, the banks were prevailing and people were being forced out of their homes in spite of the fact that the banks forcing them out didn’t actually own their mortgages. My guess is that there’s something to be done after that, some court procedure, and then people are compensated.”

“I hope they’re compensated out the wazoo,” Bennis said. “How do you compensate people for being put out on the street when you had no claim on them at all?”

“My guess is that ‘out the wazoo’ is nothing at all what we’re looking at. But I did think that we probably ought not to wait to let it get that far. And we should be working on it now. I’ll call Russ later. And I’ll call Chelsea Kevinmeyer’s office and see if I can get anywhere with that.”

“Chelsea Kevinmeyer’s office? Chelsea Kevinmeyer the congresswoman?”

“Your congresswoman,” Gregor said. “Also Mikel Dekanian’s. Assuming they’ll talk to me at all with all this other thing going on, they ought to be happy to jump in and make a fuss in public. She’s put a lot of work into trying to get something done on the mortgage situation. The least she could do is to use Mikel Dekanian’s problem as the basis for a speech in Congress and a couple of press releases. Sometimes if things go too public, the banks will back off. Sometimes.”