Fighting Chance(42)

In this case, no order seemed to be available. He wasn’t imposing any. The police, as far as he could tell now, weren’t imposing any. And no order was arising spontaneously from the evidence so far.

Everything was just lying around in a jumble.

It was cold on the courthouse steps. Gregor found himself wishing for a coat. Bennis was shivering, but she never wore one.

“Well,” she said. “Now what are we going to do? We promised to go back to the street and tell everybody about everything, but what are we going to say? Hannah Krekorian is going to have another attack of the vapors. And that’s just to start.”

“We’re supposed to have lunch at the Ararat,” Donna said miserably.

Lida Arkmanian was not shivering. She was wearing the same three-quarter-length chinchilla coat she wore everywhere, winter and summer, no matter what. Gregor didn’t know if it was more surprising that she had never collapsed from heat poisoning, or that she had never been doused with paint by animal rights activists.

“We’ll just have to tell them what happened,” Lida said. “Maybe one of them will think of something we haven’t. Maybe one of them will be able to make sense of it.”

“We went to school with Hannah Krekorian,” Gregor said. “Has she ever made sense out of anything?”

“Maybe not,” Lida admitted.

“Well, we’ve got to get back, whatever else we do,” Bennis said. “They’re all probably sitting there at the Ararat waiting. They’re going to think there’s been a shooting or something. Linda Melajian is going to be checking the news every twenty seconds.”

“The news,” Donna said. “Do you think this is going to be on the news? What will they say?”

“This is going to be all over the news everywhere,” Bennis said. “We’d better give up any thought of getting away from it. For all I know, the news vans are going to be back on Cavanaugh Street, and I don’t think Linda can keep reporters out of the Ararat. Maybe we should give Hannah a call and have her bring everybody over to our place so we can talk in private.”

“I’ve got a bigger living room,” Lida said.

“I’ve got to call Russ,” Donna said. “He’s a lawyer. He’ll know all about this ‘nolo’ thing and whatever it’s supposed to mean—”

“Nolo contendere,” Bennis said. “No contest.”

“The judge tried to explain it,” George Edelson put in helpfully.

The women turned to look at him in a way that made it clear they’d forgotten he was there.

“I’m sorry,” Lida said automatically. “We did hear the explanation, but I for one am very stupid.”

“You’re not being stupid,” Gregor said.

They all stood there for a minute, then, awkward.

Finally, Bennis shook herself back to an operational mode. “I’ll go get the car,” she said. “I’ll pick you two up in a minute and we can talk on the way back. But you know what I’d like to know? Why would Tibor have wanted to kill this woman anyway? I mean, why would he have bothered?”

“But we know that,” Donna said. “She’s the judge who’s always sending children to juvenile jail even for small things and sentencing them to years when any other judge would have given them probation, and Stefan Maldovanian was one of his personal projects and he thought Martha Handling was going to send him to jail and have him deported over—”

“Stop for a minute,” Bennis said. “Does that make any sense to you? I mean, really. Why go to all that trouble over an issue like that? What would he have expected to get out of it?”

“Well—” Donna looked puzzled. “Well,” she said again, “maybe he hoped that, with this Judge Handling gone, Stefan Maldovanian would be assigned to another judge, and that judge wouldn’t be so harsh.”

“And for that he’d have killed the woman?” Bennis said.

“Maybe he was just very angry,” Lida said. “That thing, that video, he was pounding and pounding and when I saw it, I thought he might be very angry, he might have lost his temper because of something this woman said, or—”

Lida stopped. She looked puzzled, too.

“Exactly,” Bennis said triumphantly. “I know we all hate looking at that damned clip, but I spent hours looking at it this morning and if you do the same, you’ll see the same. It’s not just that Tibor never loses his temper, although he never loses his temper. It’s that he’s not angry in that clip. He isn’t. He’s supposed to be pounding away at someone’s head, but he’s acting like he’s pounding a nail into a two-by-four. He’s not angry. He’s not even upset. He’s just doing it.”