“It’s Rob Benedetti running the show, as far as I can tell.”
“It ought to be a homicide detective running the show,” Russ said, “and Rob Benedetti is going to do what John Jackman wants him to do, because he thinks John Jackman is going to be the next mayor of Philadelphia.”
“Is he?”
“In a walk.”
“I don’t understand why you’d want to watch something like this,” Gregor said. “Don’t you get enough of this at work all day?”
“I don’t get any of this at work all day,” Russ said. “I don’t practice criminal law. I probably should. What do you need a lawyer for that you’d come over here in the night?”
The door to the room swung open a little farther than it was, and Donna came in carrying a long tray with enough food on it to keep Gregor for three days, plus a tall glass of mineral water, a linen napkin, a full set of silverware, and a little white ceramic cup full of whipped butter. There was a TV table open and discarded against the wall near the bookcase. She put the tray down on that and straightened up.
“There,” she said. “That should keep you. I’ll leave you two alone to talk.”
“You don’t need to leave us alone to talk,” Gregor said. “It’s nothing confidential.”
Donna was out the door and gone.
“It’s because of Bennis,” Russ said. “She doesn’t want you—”
”—Oh, I know,” Gregor said, moving the TV table, tray and all, in front of the other overstuffed armchair. “She should know better, though. I haven’t pumped her about Bennis yet. Do you know what’s going on with Bennis?”
“No,” Russ said. “It’s like the seal of the confessional or something. I’ll admit to its being incredibly annoying.”
Gregor sat down in front of the food and thought that no matter what else was going on, Donna was a true Armenian woman. If somebody said they were hungry, she assumed they had been starving in the desert for forty days and fed them accordingly.
“So, what is it?” Russ said. “You need help solving a case, for once? What will the papers think if they find out the Armenian-American Hercule Poirot comes to a lowly local lawyer when he’s stumped by a fiendish archvillain?”
“You watch too much television,” Gregor said. “And I’m not stumped, if by stumped you mean not able to figure out who committed the crime. I know who committed the crime. I knew it halfway through the morning of the second day. There were really only two or three possibilities. One of them is now dead, and another one isn’t capable.”
“I’d be careful about that if I were you,” Russ said. “I think it was even you who told me that everybody is capable, and it’s bad policy to rule out a suspect because you think he has too fine a soul to commit a murder.”
“I’m not talking about fineness of soul,” Gregor said, “I’m talking about capacity. You can’t murder somebody with a knife unless you can raise a knife and bring it down. That kind of thing.”
“There is somebody in this case of yours who isn’t physically capable of, what, putting arsenic into prescription painkiller capsules?”
“No. Well, not exactly.”
“How did the other one die, this, what’s his name, Sheehy?”
“Frank Sheehy. We don’t know yet, but we’re going to assume poison. They almost always go on the way they’ve started. It’s easier. The ME’s report will be in tomorrow. The thing is, I know who, and I know why, in general at least, two people are dead. But there are other things going on here that I don’t understand, and it bothers me.”
“Are you sure they’re connected with the killings, assuming that should be a plural?”
“No,” Gregor said. “I’m not sure. And that’s part of the problem. Let me ask you something, even if you don’t practice criminal law.”
“Shoot.”
“Does it come under attorney-client privilege if an attorney knows that his client is in the process of committing a crime, and does nothing to stop it?”
“Gregor, attorneys know their clients are guilty of crimes all the time.”
“No, I didn’t say guilty, past tense. I said in the process of. Committing a crime now. Right this second. Is the attorney still protected by attorney-client privilege?”
“I don’t know,” Russ said. “It’s not that easy. Attorneys are friends of the court. That means they have a responsibility to see that trials and court proceedings are carried out ethically. And to an extent I think it would depend on what kind of a crime it was. An attorney can certainly be an accessory, before, during, and after the fact. Some things, though, would be nearly impossible to prove, so impossible that nobody would ever bother, and the attorney involved could certainly stonewall a long time on the principle of privilege.”