Glass House

by Chris Wiltz

  The ghost lay low for a while, waiting for Thea to become distracted from her book. After reading the same paragraph three times without comprehension, Thea finally put the book face down on her lap. She was stretched out on an old chaise longue that had been in her aunt's bedroom. Next to her, a floor lamp with a fringed shade lit the corner of the slope-ceilinged room. She used an old trunk as a table, her cup and saucer sitting on it, the coffee left in the cup cold. Around the room were pieces of furniture covered with sheets that stirred now and again in the brisk breeze that came through an open window, as if the ghost fluttered from one to another, restless and impatient to assert its will and the guilt of a long and intolerant past.

  The ghost let Thea drift back through her memories for a while, recent ones first, a picture of Burgess and Janine on the porch, a thrill of sexual excitement triggered by the image and by the idea of Janine's being pregnant. Seeing them together had led Thea into bed with Bobby, and for that she was not sorry. She and Bobby had been friends for a long time, and Thea had loved him as a friend first. That was good; she believed that would make their sexual relationship strong and deep and lasting. And when they were making love, her eyes closed so she could only hear and touch and taste and smell, then she could imagine for a time he was that dark, shadowy man who had been in her dreams for many years, dark because she always thought he would be an Italian like her father, shadowy not so much because she could never see his face clearly but because a part of him was menacing, dangerous. Exciting.

  Lying there on the chaise, she closed her eyes, willing this dream man to come to her, and what came to her instead was the man in the hallway in her dream about Lyle and the burglar alarm. She quickly opened her eyes: she didn't want him to be quite that menacing or that dangerous.

  She drifted back again, to the night that she and Burgess sat out in the gazebo together. The ghost was poised now and very still; this was where it wanted Thea to be. Thea remembered the warmth of the air on her skin, the feeling of comfort in the uncomfortable gazebo. Her eyes closed again and she smelled the night-blooming jasmine and heard the soft rustle of nocturnal life in the banana trees. As long as they were in the gazebo, she had been in control, she was dominant: it was her gazebo, the jasmine and the banana trees were in her yard, Burgess had entered her life. And then there was the intrusion of Sonny Johnson. But no, it had started before that, the subtle shift had started when she began thinking about his life, the scar on his arm, what the rest of his body looked like. Then it was his black life and her white life, and after Sonny Johnson she was no longer in control because of the outer trappings of her life, no longer in control because from the street his life had entered hers and with it came her danger, his power, and the possibility of death. And from the darkness of that possibility came the dominance of the male and the female over the black and the white.

  The spark she had kept tamped flared, and that's when the ghost made its move. The ghost shamed her for her attraction to this dangerous, powerful man. The ghost told her she had been used, duped. And, yes, disappointed too: the ghost spoke to her of generosity and caring and told her that goodness in others was expected as a result of those acts. The ghost made her think that all her feelings for Burgess had been negated because she had found out who he was. And then the ghost sat back triumphantly, its work done, expecting Thea to run with these notions.

  Right then Thea understood that her parents’ death and her aunt's intolerance had left within her a place of doubt and confusion, and that her befriending Burgess had been an attempt to find this place of confusion and to confront it and eradicate it. Instead, she found herself wanting to turn her back on Burgess because that is what her aunt would have done, what her parents probably would have done too.

  She wished she'd never found out about Burgess, and it occurred to her that Burgess probably wished she'd never found out either, the way he'd passed her this morning, removing himself from her. She wished she never had to see Burgess again, and the moment she thought that there came the pain of loss, and this loss was not just about Burgess, it was not about the male and the female, it was about the loss of humanity.

  A sudden gust from the window caused the bottoms of the sheets to dance along the floor, and the ghost of Aunt Althea had a small, ineffectual fit of rage.

  Sandy rushed up the walkway to Thea's house, catching one of her expensive high heels between two bricks. It snapped off like a dead twig.

  She limped into the foyer carrying the heel, nails sticking up out of it. “Absolutely nothing is going right,” she said, her fury carrying her voice above the scream of Mr. Robert's saw.

  Thea led her to the back den and closed the door. Sandy sat on the sofa and tried to stick her heel back on her shoe. “What's wrong?” Thea asked.

  “That son of a bitch,” Sandy said hitting the side of the shoe on the sofa cushion next to her for emphasis. “He's taken a week's vacation from the bank. I had no idea until I called this morning to remind him we had parent conferences at school today.” She put the shoe on her foot and stomped on it a couple of times. As soon as she put the slightest pressure on it from the side, the heel came right off. “Bastard. He didn't come home at all night before last. He got in at two this morning and when I asked him where he'd been, he practically bit my head off, told me to go back to sleep, then he was gone before I woke up.”

  “What do you think's going on?”

  Sandy looked at Thea with disgust. “Do you have to ask? It would be better if he was obsessed with some woman. At least I'd know how to fight.” She paused, fighting anger. “I had to go to school alone today. Evan has started biting the other kids. The teacher wanted to know if there were any problems at home.” Her lower lip trembled. She stood up quickly, wanting to pace away her helplessness and fury, but there was a sound of material ripping where the heel of her good shoe caught on the bottom of her silk skirt. “Shit!” she cried and sat down to inspect the damage. She flung the skirt hem away from her. It fluttered to the floor again.

  “Let me see,” Thea said reaching for it.

  Sandy motioned her off with one hand and let her tense body fall back against the sofa. She breathed deeply and turned to Thea. “You know, there was something about the way that teacher asked me if there were problems at home that made me think Lyle Hindermann is the talk of uptown New Orleans.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Oh, you know, Lyle Hinderman, the great protector of the elite. Their own personal blue-blood cop. And behind his back I'll bet they call him crazy and racist. They're a bunch of hypocrites.”

  “People seem to like what Lyle does, Sandy. He makes them feel safe.”

  And he made them feel justified. Yet Thea did not doubt that what Sandy said was true. She had seen them at parties talking to Lyle, asking him questions, listening to his answers with great interest, and she could believe that they took Lyle's seriousness and used it to fuel their gossip. But if they wanted to carry a gun, they talked to Lyle; if anything bad happened, if their houses were broken into, if they were robbed or mugged, they called Lyle. She had done it herself the night Bobby was attacked.

  She heard Zora calling for her and went to the door. “Mr. Robert's done gone,” Zora said, “and them other two boys too. They said they be back sometime tomorrow to finish cleanin up.” She was in her street clothes, getting ready to go herself. Thea walked with her to the front of the house and watched her go out to the Cadillac where Dexter waited, dressed in the new outfit he'd showed up in yesterday, all black leather, a column of gleaming onyx studded with silver, the jacket zipped because he had no shirt on underneath.

  Sandy came up behind her. “Well, I guess I can die now: I've seen everything.”

  Thea was so used to Dexter and the Cadillac that for a moment she didn't know what Sandy meant. “Oh,” she said, “Burgess’ car. He sends it for his mother every day.”

  “But that's not Burgess?”

  “No, that's someone who works for h
im.”

  “He must certainly do well for himself.”

  “Yes,” said Thea, “that's what I thought too.”

  As they watched Zora leave, Thea imagined that Zora, too old, too tired, and too afraid to turn down comfort, convenience, and safety, must nevertheless find her ride in the Cadillac every day rather distasteful.

  Thea was glad when Sandy left so she could indulge her empathy with Zora and, while she was at it, indulge her disappointment too. She could be angry at Burgess for his mother's sake, for the one person who had ever told her it was all right to be angry over her parents’ death. But she had not been angry in those days; she'd been too bereaved, too frightened over her own fate. And whatever anger there might have been had ebbed away into sadness, a sadness she now imagined was not unlike Zora's.

  She went into the living room to cover the birdcage for the night, but her own face stopped her as she passed the rosewood mirror. She would have expected to see sadness there, but what she saw was fear. She did not like this fear; it seemed to her a vile thing. Was she afraid of Burgess, or was she afraid for him? Or was she afraid for them all, for their collective fate? For she was quite certain that such a thing did exist, bigger than any one person's fate, or even one race's fate, bigger than them all.

  25

  On the night of Dexter's parade, Lyle sat over a couple of beers with his partner and friend B.T. in a bar frequented by off-duty policemen. B.T. told Lyle about the parade and how it had all gone down, and about the soul brother who'd headed it up. He acted out, not once but twice, the fit Dexter threw over his car being impounded. “I ain never gon see my Cadillac again,” B.T. wailed in the barroom, and all the cops in the place yelled like Dexter too. B.T. described the car in great detail, the red velour interior, the tinted windows, state-of-the-art sound system, the gleaming chrome, and the way Dexter was dressed, his bright-blue leather outfit, expensive glove-soft leather split down the back as he resisted arrest.

  “Threw a fit over the clothes too,” B.T. said. “Said they was ruined and what we gon do ‘bout it?” B.T. imitated Dexter's agitated, belligerent state, taut muscles, tough, hostile face.

  “Was he on drugs?” Lyle wanted to know.

  “Clean,” B.T. said. “Car too. Clean as a whistle.”

  “Interesting,” Lyle said.

  “Yeah,” B.T. agreed. They mused on it and drank some more beer. Then B.T. said, “Saw your friend Buchanan over there. Thought I should cut the nigger some slack just because he picks up his girlfriend's maid every day.”

  Lyle probably would have said it was just cop's intuition. At the same time, he didn't want to mention it to B.T. quite yet, afraid the pro might laugh it off as amateur hour. Lyle's idea was that the white Cadillac was exactly the kind of car that the Bishop of Convent Street would drive. So instead of going home that night, he headed down to Central Lockup. He went over the Cadillac inch by inch even though B.T. had already seen to that. He found nothing in it to indicate anything about its owner, the car itself seeming to make enough of a statement.

  He got a look at Dexter, but he didn't want Dexter to see him. He found the officers who had questioned Dexter earlier, found out Dexter had been questioned after the cop had been killed in the Convent, and learned that Dexter's only alibi for that night was his girlfriend.

  Lyle ended up spending the entire night at Central Lockup. Before the sun rose he had decided to take a week's vacation from the bank.

  The next morning he watched a flashy young woman wearing a wide-brimmed black hat pay Dexter's fines from a roll of money and go with him to get his car out of the pound. Then he watched Dexter go over every inch of the Cadillac.

  Dexter drove the Cadillac back to the Convent. He parked behind one of the Convent apartments. He and the woman got out of the car. They were having quite an argument, though Lyle was too far away to hear what it was about. They spoke angrily to each other over the top of the car before the woman began walking up the pavement to the back steps. Dexter walked behind her. Abruptly the woman turned around, one hand on her hip, and said something that must have been rather scathing to Dexter. As if she'd hit his funny bone, his arm jerked up and he slapped her hard across the face. The blow knocked the hat off her head. She picked it up and said something else, and he took off his ripped blue-leather vest, threw it down on the concrete and stomped on it. The woman, holding the hat with one hand, the side of her face with the other, turned and went on inside. Dexter kicked the vest off the sidewalk and followed. After a while he came out dressed in a pair of jeans with studs down the sides of the legs and a white shirt. He got in the Cadillac and drove back downtown to Rubenstein Brothers, an expensive men's store, where he bought himself another leather outfit, black this time, with a bomber jacket instead of a vest. He wore it out of the store.

  Dexter returned to Convent Street and went to the lounge across the street from the project, the Solar Club. He left the lounge at four-thirty and drove into the affluent neighborhood off Convent Street, where he picked up three women at three different houses. Two of the houses had been burgled within the last six months. Dexter drove the women into the Convent and dropped them off there. He went back to the affluent neighborhood to Thea Tamborella's house, where he picked up Thea's maid. He stood at the door of the Cadillac like a sentry, formidable in his black leather. He drove her to an apartment house right off Convent Street a few blocks beyond the project.

  From there Dexter drove back to the Convent, to the apartment where he lived with the woman. Nearly three hours passed with no action. At approximately seven forty-five, two men arrived at the apartment. They stayed for about fifteen minutes. Between eight and nine o'clock three more men came to the apartment, two together, one alone. None stayed more than five minutes. Lyle assumed Dexter was dealing drugs from the Convent apartment.

  At two o'clock in the morning, Lyle called it a night. He went home and got into bed next to Sandy, who lifted her head to say his name with a question mark behind it and ask him where he had been. He told her to go back to sleep.

  Lyle could not sleep. He lay very still, his hands clasped behind his head, and thought. There might be no way that he or anyone else would ever be able to find out for sure who had killed the cop that night in the Convent Street Housing Project. If they couldn't, it meant no one would ever be punished for the worst crime of all. If no one was punished, it would happen again. And again. There would be no stopping them. These people had to understand they couldn't kill a cop and get away with it. There had to be some sort of retaliation. Every cop in the department believed that too. Lyle knew that whether Dexter was a cop killer or not, he had too much money to be innocent.

  He stayed in bed a couple more hours, and left the house as dawn was creeping in through the windows. He needed to find B.T. They had a busy day in front of them.

  That night after her reading class, Sherree walked across the Convent to pick up Lucilla at a neighbor's house. It was quiet tonight, too quiet, only ten o'clock and no one at all around. It was funny how quickly things had returned to normal, because this was normal, everyone afraid to come out of their houses, prisoners in their own homes waiting for the sound of gunfire, the bad guys shooting at each other as if it were the Old West. Burgess either couldn't do anything about it or didn't want to do anything about it. It didn't matter; he wasn't doing anything about it.

  Sherree walked alone. Dexter usually met her, but tonight she'd told him she would get one of the men in the class to walk with her. Only there weren't any men in class, no one at all except her and the nun. That was fine with her, meant she got all the attention. The sister had even spent an extra hour with her. She'd made some real progress tonight.

  She was still angry with Dexter. First he had to go get himself put in jail, then he had to take the rest of the money Burgess had given her, and no telling how much more, and go buy himself those fancy new clothes. She didn't care how much she had, she wouldn't spend it on expensive clothes like that. She reme
mbered seeing a black businessman on TV once who'd said, “If it's on your ass, it's not an asset.” That made sense to Sherree; she still shopped at the thrift store. If that was good enough for her, she didn't know why it couldn't be good enough for Dexter.

  They had argued about the money. Dexter was furious that the cops had ripped his blue vest; the only way he was going to get over it, he told her, was to go buy a new one. She told him it was his own fault for driving his black ass around in that Cadillac to begin with. He said she didn't seem to mind getting her black ass driven around town in a Cadillac. She told him it didn't matter what he drove his black ass around town in or what he covered it with, it was still one puny little old black ass. He hit her. And Sherree hadn't gotten over that. She was about ready to tell him to get his puny black ass out of her house.

  But she didn't. She contented herself with telling his friends to get out, all the ones who'd come over after she'd gotten Dexter out of jail, to tell him what a great show it had been, on the news, in the paper and everything. And Dexter sitting around all puffed up, that brand new black leather creaking like the bones of an old millionaire and making the apartment smell like a lawyer's office.

  She didn't tell Dexter to get out, because she liked his male presence there. It made her feel safe.

  Sherree got Lucilla at the neighbor's house and walked home quickly. There was a chill in the air, a cold front coming through, bringing with it perhaps a bit of frost. Sherree cradled her sleeping child, holding her close to keep her warm. As she approached her building, she could see the tail end of the Cadillac parked behind the apartment. She let herself in and called out to Dexter, but there was no answer.

  She went down the hallway, past the bathroom to where the two bedrooms were, and put Lucilla in bed in the first one. She woke up as Sherree put her down, and Sherree spoke softly to her, smoothing back her hair, soothing her back to sleep. Then she went into the second bedroom. The room was dark and she groped around until she found the lamp sitting on the night table next to the bed and switched it on. Dexter was not in bed as she had expected. He had probably walked over to the Solar Club so he could be a hot shot some more.