Fighting Chance(63)

“So—what then?” Bennis asked. “Somebody didn’t walk in on Tibor? I don’t understand—”

“I think,” Gregor said, “that that video was staged, and it was staged with a readily available instrument. The police found Martha Handling’s phone. There must have been another phone, somewhere available.”

“What other phone?” Bennis asked. “Whose phone?”

“What if the rumors are true,” Gregor said, “and Martha Handling was taking bribes to put juveniles in jail for longer sentences than they would usually get for the kinds of crimes they committed. Let’s say she was doing that—would she take calls relating to that on her regular cell phone?”

“Oh, I see,” Bennis said. “You think she had another phone. Maybe one of those throwaway ones. And it was—what? Lying somewhere in plain sight?”

“Right,” Gregor said. “Someone walked into the room, saw Tibor doing whatever he was doing—”

“I’d like to know what that was,” Bennis said.

“Grabbed the phone and then did something with it,” Gregor said. “Whoever it was had to have taken the phone away. It’s entirely possible that Tibor didn’t even realize that the person was there, if he was in fact the person who committed the murder. If he wasn’t, and the scene was staged, then they staged it together. But whoever it was took the phone away, and the phone wasn’t found on him or her during the investigation. Which means that either the person ditched it, or he wasn’t one of the people found on the scene and interviewed immediately. And we’ve got a candidate for that. The guy who runs local operations for Administrative Solutions, the company that runs the prisons, was in the courthouse that day. And we’ve got security tape to prove it. And he’d want to take that phone away with him. And nobody would have checked him going out.”

Gregor saw Bennis’s face fall.

“It’s progress,” he said gently. “It’s not much, yet, but it’s progress. And that the man from Administrative Solutions killed Martha Handling over the bribes he was paying her makes more sense as a motive than that Tibor did it for no reason we’ve been able to find out yet.”

“But don’t you see?” Bennis said. “It doesn’t even start to prove that. If it was the way you just worked out, then this Adminstrative Solutions man still has to have come in to find Tibor pounding away with that gavel, and if that’s the case, then Tibor could still have committed the murder, and I just don’t—”

“Ahem,” somebody said, right next to Gregor’s ear.

Gregor would have jumped out of his seat, except that the way the booth was constructed wouldn’t allow it. He did bang his knee against the table’s wood.

Bennis looked frigid.

Standing next to their table was a squat, frazzled-looking woman in ballet flats and Native folk art jewelry. Gregor recognized her, but only vaguely. He thought of her as the lady that screamed.

“Excuse me,” the woman said. “I’m very sorry to bother you, but I’ve been waiting and waiting. For hours. Because you always come in. Then I thought you weren’t coming tonight and I thought I’d go to your house and try there. It’s very important. My name is Janice Loftus, and I know all about Martha Handling.”

2

Bennis Hannaford Demarkian was the sanest woman Gregor knew, but every once in a while she took an instant dislike to somebody, and once she had done that, all bets were off. She took an instant dislike to the squat woman standing next to their table, and the reaction was so strongly visceral, Gregor had expected her to explode. The reality was that Bennis did not explode. When she was mortally, irrevocably offended, she got so polite, she could make your teeth bleed.

If Janice Loftus had noticed Bennis’s deep freeze, she gave no sign of it. Gregor guessed that she hadn’t noticed it. Janice Loftus was the kind of woman who wouldn’t notice much of anything, and especially wouldn’t notice other people’s reactions to her or anything else. She talked a mile a minute. Her eyes darted all around the room. Her hands fluttered and waved.

Then she pushed herself onto the bench beside Bennis and stared across the table at him.

Bennis moved because she had to. She was wearing the face of her own great-grandmother, who had been the most austere and unforgiving hostess on the Main Line. She had had to be, because she was married to a real live robber baron.

Debbie Melajian came over to the booth, looking just a little puzzled. “Can I get you something?” she asked Janice Loftus.