Fighting Chance(36)

“I’m working on it,” Sam said. “No matter what you guys think, it’s not my fault if a sitting judge is a world-class nutcase who goes and gets herself murdered. I hope she’s satisfied wherever she is right now. We told her it was for her own protection.”

Gregor and George rounded the final gauntlet of pasteboard partitions and came to Sam Scalafini and his big bank of controls. Scalafini did not get up. His shirt was so tight across his upper body, it looked like his collar was strangling him. Gregor pegged him as someone who would not get up for anything short of a major natural disaster.

George Edelson did not sit, although there were chairs available. “Gregor Demarkian,” he said. “This is Sam Scalafini.”

“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.”