Fighting Chance(62)

“Really?” Bennis said. “About what?”

Debbie Melajian came over with her pad. “Bennis, are you going to stick to coffee or do you want something serious to drink? My mother was betting on something serious to drink.”

“I’ll have a Drambuie on ice,” Bennis said.

“I’ll have a double Scotch on the rocks except not much on the rocks. And make it Johnnie Walker Blue if you still have a bottle somewhere.”

“We’ve got it in the back for you,” Debbie said, “not that you drink it often. Do you want me to bring dinner after? Bennis has already had—”

“Imam bayildi,” Gregor said. “But give me about twenty minutes to finish the Scotch.”

“Absolutely,” Debbie said, and whisked away with her pad.

Bennis was giving him One of Those Looks. “I take it that whatever this Aha Moment was, it wasn’t good news,” she said.

Gregor shrugged. “It’s not good news and it’s not bad news. It’s just one of those things we all should have thought about before, but we didn’t.”

“And what’s that?”

“There’s a video out there that looks as if it shows Tibor pounding that gavel into Martha Handling’s head,” Gregor said.

Bennis snorted in exasperation. “Of course there is,” she said. “What do you think we’ve all been worried about from when this started—?”

“Yes, yes,” Gregor said, “but think about it. This was a juvenile court. They don’t go bonkers over cell phone cameras in adult courts anymore, but they still do in juvenile courts. You can’t take a cell phone into a juvenile court if the cell phone has a camera in it.”

Debbie brought over the drinks and put them down on little square napkins. Gregor picked his up and took a long gulp of it. You shouldn’t gulp Johnnie Walker Blue, but he didn’t care.

“Bennis,” he said. “The police are convinced that that video was made by a cell phone. But if it was made by a cell phone camera, it couldn’t have been made by anybody who came in through the front door of that courthouse except judges and security personnel, because they’re the only ones who aren’t walked through a metal detector and don’t have their pocketbooks and briefcases and backpacks X-rayed.”

“I still don’t see—”

“Bennis, think,” Gregor said. “And this is the problem with cases like this, where everybody thinks they already know what’s going on. None of the people we know were in that corridor leading to the corridor to the chambers could have had a cell phone on him. But if that video was made with a cell phone, somebody must have. The police are going to check all the cell phones of all the people who were there, but it isn’t going to make any difference, because all those phones will have been lying on the check-in table in little manila envelopes. None of those people could have brought a cell phone into Martha Handling’s chambers and taken that video. And no security personnel or other judges did that either, because none of those people were there until after the murder.”

Gregor felt a certain amount of satisfaction that Bennis was looking confused.

“Well,” she said, “maybe somebody had a digital camera, a cheap one, or something—”

“That would have been caught at the desk, too.”

“Somebody had to have taken that video. We all saw it. I still have the wretched thing on my phone.”

“I agree,” Gregor said. “But the video has to have been taken by a phone brought in by somebody who didn’t come through the front.”

“And that would be?”

“The most obvious person,” Gregor said, “would be Martha Handling herself. She would have come in from the parking lot in the back, since she drove to work. She would have had her phone on her, obviously. There are only two things wrong with that.”

“What are those?”

“First,” Gregor said, “there’s the fact that the video was not taken on her phone. The police found her phone. They checked it out. The video was not taken with that. But there’s also the fact that the only way that video makes sense, or the only way I can see at the moment, is if somebody had the phone on him, walked in on the crime being committed, and started filming almost by remote control. But the way things are, that cannot be the way it happened. The secretaries and the assistants were all out at a funeral. The judges who were in were in their courts. Nobody unauthorized could have come through that back door either, because although the camera right at the door was blocked by paint, the other cameras in that parking lot weren’t.”