Fighting Chance(43)
“But he couldn’t do that,” Donna said. “He couldn’t pound in somebody’s head just calm and collected like that.”
“Then maybe he isn’t pounding somebody’s head in,” Bennis said. “As everybody keeps mentioning and then forgetting, there’s no sign of a head in that clip, except for Tibor’s. Maybe he’s pounding something else.”
“But,” George Edelson said.
Bennis had her keys out of her oversized shoulder bag. “No buts,” she said firmly. “There isn’t a ghost of an idea of why Tibor would have wanted to kill that woman in the first place. And as far as I can tell, not a single person, not even Gregor and Russ, have suggested a possible motive. Never mind a plausible one.”
“Interesting,” Gregor said.
“I’m always interesting,” Bennis said. “You two stay still. I’ll have the car here in a second.” Then she took off down the courthouse steps to the street.
3
Gregor and George Edelson waited until Bennis came around to pick up Lida and Donna, and while they did, they said not much of anything about anything. Lida and Donna seemed exhausted by the subject. Gregor didn’t blame them. The wind was picking up. Lida kept wrapping her coat more tightly around her chest.
When Bennis had come and the women had gone, Gregor turned to George Edelson.
“You know,” he said, “Bennis is right. There isn’t a plausible motive.”
“Motives don’t have to be that plausible when we have something like that clip,” George said. “And I don’t know what to make of that thing about Father Kasparian not looking angry on it. I mean, maybe he did or maybe he didn’t, but it’s hard to tell anything on those phone videos.”
The two men started walking down the steps to the street.
“Let’s let that go for the moment,” Gregor said. “Do you know what I think is strange? We’ve been talking all day, I talked to everybody except Tibor yesterday, everybody on the Cavanaugh Street end. We talked about the clip. We talked about who saw what in the corridor and the judge’s chambers. You and John and I talked about what I could and couldn’t get away with making a private investigation of this murder. But none of us, not once, ever talked about Martha Handling, except for the security guard—”
“Sam Scalafini.”
“Sam Scalafini,” Gregor repeated. “My point still stands. People don’t get murdered out of the blue. There’s almost always a reason for it. And the reason is almost always either part of the person’s character or part of his situation. Her situation, in this case. Does Tibor, or anybody, bludgeoning a person to death because she might send a kid to do a lot of juvenile jail time make sense to you?”
“It would with a certain kind of person,” George Edelson said. “I’ve seen a lot of rage in my time. Rage can do amazing things.”
“I’m going to have to look at the clip again,” Gregor said, “but I think Bennis is right. I think Tibor isn’t showing any rage in that clip.”
“It’s like I said,” George said.
“I know,” Gregor agreed. “There’s only so much you can tell from a phone video. Did you find the phone the video had been made on?”
“I don’t think so,” George Edelson said. “I’ve got a bunch of notes in my briefcase that I’m supposed to give you before we’re done. And we’re going over to Homicide, and they know all that.”
“But it was a phone video?” Gregor asked. “It wasn’t a security tape.”
“No, we told you,” George said, “there aren’t any cameras in the judge’s chambers.
“So now we’ve got another problem,” Gregor said. “Assuming that is a clip of Tibor murdering Martha Handling, then not only was Tibor murdering Martha Handling, but somebody was standing by recording it. If Tibor was in some kind of frenzy, he might not have noticed that. But what about the person making the video? Why wasn’t that person running off somewhere to call for the police?”
“All right, yes,” George Edelson said. “That occurred to us. Lots of us. Homicide, too.”
“I take it the police have checked the phones of the people found in the chambers when they got there, at least?”
“The clip didn’t come out until a couple of hours after—after. The cops didn’t even know about it when they sent everybody home.”
“So the police haven’t looked at them?”
“No, not that,” George said. “They did get onto it—it’s just that it had been a while. And they’re checking it out. But if they came in the front door, their phones would have been confiscated. And most of them came in the front door. We do have security tape footage of that.”