Glass Houses

by Jane Haddam

  The dishwasher was empty. There was another dishwasher to be unloaded, and this one to be loaded up again.

  Maybe the smartest thing would be for the Plate Glass Killer to wait years and years and years, until Henry Tyder was executed before starting up again. Then he’d have the last laugh on everybody.

  2

  It had been years since Alexander Mark had been in the kinds of places he now went to on a regular basis just to see if Dennis Ledeski was there. What was worse, he hadn’t liked those places to begin with, and he liked them even less now. Alexander was amazed that red-light districts didn’t put an end to sex altogether, heterosexual or homosexual, vanilla or otherwise. If there was ever a brilliant demonstration of what was wrong with the human animal when he considered himself nothing but an animal, here it was. It went beyond the simple ugliness of bodies desperately trying to rid themselves of their minds, or the ultimate ugliness of bodies that had actually managed to do so. It was the narcissism Alexander couldn’t stand. Here were people who existed in the world’s first version of virtual reality. There was nothing for any of them outside their own heads. That was how grown men could justify ruining the souls of barely pubescent boys. That was how other grown men could justify ruining their own. Alexander didn’t care what Chickie said. Too many gay men ended up in places like this, and their natural compatriots were not people like Chickie—or even like Alexander himself—but the Dennis Ledeskis of the world, not gay, just damaged. And wrong.

  Actually, it had been blocks and blocks since Alexander had left the Zone. He just hadn’t been able to get it out of his head. He realized he hadn’t been paying attention to where he was. He looked around and saw that he was only three and a half blocks or so from Saint Bonaventure’s, which was where he had been going anyway, and only a little bit farther from the one bus stop he knew of where he could take a bus directly to Hardscrabble Road and Our Lady of Mount Carmel monastery. He hesitated for a moment—the conversation was better at Our Lady of Mount Carmel; he didn’t know who or what Sister Maria Beata had been before she left the world, but she had a first-rate mind and a first-rate reputation—and then opted for Saint Bonaventure’s. Intelligent though Sister Maria Beata was, Alexander still couldn’t imagine telling stories of the Zone to a nun in a full-bore traditional habit.

  He picked up his pace and tried to get his mind clear of what he had been looking at for the past two hours: the men who all seemed to be hunched into their jackets so that nobody could get a clear look at their faces; the girls who were tired and pockmarked before they were fifteen years old; the boys who were worse. It was one of the great blessings of his life, a true grace, that he had never ended up on a street like that one when he was still in high school and finding his way. He wondered about places like the Zone, about how they had started and what made them still exist. Had there been an equivalent of the Zone in Philadelphia at the time of the signing of the Declaration of Independence? Chickie and other men like him said that places like the Zone would disappear if society would only accept gays and lesbians for what they really were, instead of stigmatizing them as sinful and psychologically damaged for being what they were born to be anyway.

  Here was one of the things Alexander found himself in disagreement with when he talked to most of the men he knew in Courage. He did think that many gay men, if not all of them, were born that way. He surely knew that he himself had been. He couldn’t remember a time when his desires had fixed on girls instead of other boys. He couldn’t remember even a single sexual fantasy in all his years of growing up that had involved a human female. It wasn’t that he disliked human females. Given the ramped-up tendency of straight men to act like Neanderthals just to prove they were straight, Alexander had come to like women more and more over the years. He just didn’t want to sleep with them.

  He got to the block where Saint Bonaventure’s was and was glad to see that the front steps of the church were lit up as if there were going to be a midnight mass. Saint Bonaventure’s was good that way. Father Harrigan liked to keep the place open twenty-four-seven. He even refused to make any concessions to the age of armed robbery, and half the time the Host was exposed on the altar in a gold monstrance with only some little old lady kneeling in the pews to keep it company. Alexander had never heard of anyone coming in and stealing it. Even the crack addicts seemed to want to leave it alone.

  He went up the steps and into the vestibule. He could see through the glass-topped inner doors that the Host was indeed exposed and that the only guardians were two middle-aged men, pudgy and dark, having trouble staying on their knees. He took Holy Water on the tips of his fingers and made the Sign of the Cross, but he didn’t go into the sanctuary. Instead, he headed to the left, opened the door there, and went downstairs. He’d made a study of it once, in the long year when he’d made up his mind to join Courage and live the way he lived now. Every society at every time, in every place where there was writing to leave a record, recorded the existence of homosexual men. That, as far as Alexander was concerned, was all the proof that was needed, that homosexuality was as “normal” as it was possible to be. He understood why some gay men wanted to deny that. He understood less well why straight men and women wanted to deny it. It didn’t matter. What was, was. He didn’t need to deny who and what he was, or pretend to be something else, to make a decision to live differently than he might have been expected to.

  Besides, he thought, there was the other thing. There was the fact that God was here, and that men were obliged to go to God and not the other way around. He wondered if men like Chickie knew that God was here, too, and just refused to come; or if they honestly didn’t see it, or saw God somewhere else. Theology said that at the end of time, everything would be explained. Alexander hoped that was true because he had a lot of questions he wanted answers to. Sometimes he even wrote them down.

  At the bottom of the stairs, he looked left and right and saw that the conference room was full of women. It was the Council of Catholic Women meeting for their “Get to Know You” night, something they did four times a year in the hopes of attracting new faces to do—whatever it was they did. Alexander was a convert to Catholicism. A lot of the little details of parish life were completely beyond him. He went past the conference room to the little warren of classrooms the church used for religious education. They were all empty.

  This is what was needed, he thought. There had to be a way to maintain and preserve civilization, the structure that made it possible for men and women to live in peace and sometimes to do great things, in medicine and architecture and music and art. There had to be a way to maintain the order those things required, without imposing the disorder of punitive laws. Alexander didn’t want to go back to a time when states could pass laws making it il-legal to have gay sex. He didn’t even want to go back to a time when the boys on Queer Eye would be jokes instead of cultural icons. He just wanted to find a way to make society a place where it was easier, not harder, to become fully human.

  He had come all the way back to the conference room without a clear idea of where he was going to go next. He went to the stairs and looked up—would Father Harrigan be in the rectory at this time of night? He wasn’t usually—when he heard a voice behind him.

  “Alexander? Are you all right? Is there a meeting I didn’t remember tonight?”

  Father Harrigan was a thin, red-haired man who looked as if he’d been sent by central casting to play second to Bing Crosby in a Father O’Malley picture. Alexander waited until he caught up.

  “No meeting,” Alexander said. “I was just looking for conversation. And fumigation, maybe.”

  “Fumigation?”

  “I’ve been in the Zone.”

  “Ah,” Father Harrigan said. “Well, that’s all right. Don’t let it discourage you. I think it’s probably inevitable that—”

  “No, Father. I wasn’t in the Zone doing that.”

  “Oh.” Father Harrigan blinked. Alexander could almost see his mind swit
ching gears. “It’s this obsession of yours again. With your employer. Did you follow him, or did you go to the Zone just hoping to run into him?”

  “I couldn’t follow him,” Alexander said. “He left the office early today, and he seems to have disappeared. He’s not at home. And no, I didn’t see him in the Zone. I saw enough else, though, if you know what I mean.”

  “He hasn’t really disappeared, though, has he?” Father Harrigan said, starting up the stairs to the main floor. Alexander followed him. “You just mean you don’t know where he’s gone.”

  “I’m not sure,” Alexander said. “I do have the keys to his apartment, but I don’t like to go in there when I don’t know where he is. I don’t want to get caught at it. All I know right now is that he left the office in a hurry this after-noon, and I haven’t seen him since. He doesn’t answer his phone at home, and he doesn’t answer his cell. And he was sweating when he left.”

  “Sweating?”

  They had reached the vestibule on the main floor. Alexander could see the two middle-aged men, still kneeling. “Like a pig,” he said. “He had rivers of the stuff running down his neck. His collar was soaked through.”

  “He could have been ill,” Father Harrigan said.

  “I don’t think so,” Alexander said. “I think he was scared. I know he was scared. I could smell it.”

  “Scared of what?”

  “That’s a good question,” Alexander said. “He did something in his office today before he left. He moved a filing cabinet. A big one. It isn’t easy to move. I’m in better shape than he is, and I had trouble with it.”

  “And?”

  Alexander shrugged. “I don’t know. But I’ve told you about this. I’ve also felt he was hiding something, that there was something, somewhere, relating to his nighttime life. Maybe whatever it was was under the filing cabinet, and he retrieved it.”

  “If it was under the filing cabinet, wouldn’t the police have found it?”

  “Maybe. I don’t know how good the police are. Do you know who Elyse Martineau is?”

  “Not off the top of my head.”

  “She’s one of the victims of the Plate Glass Killer,” Alexander said. “She was Dennis’s secretary, the one that got the police to search him in the first place. Do you know who Debbie Morelli is?”

  “Another victim of the Plate Glass Killer?”

  “Exactly right,” Alexander said. “She’s the one the police thought I killed.”

  Father Harrigan blinked. “The police thought you’d killed somebody? You never said. And I didn’t see it in the paper. Was this a long time ago?”

  “Not that long. Gregor Demarkian is a friend of a friend of mine, and my friend got him to step in for a moment and save my rear end. It was one of those things. The police thought that I must have killed her, that the Plate Glass Killer must be a gay man because the women weren’t sexually assaulted. Although how that works as a theory, I don’t know. Police theories look in-comprehensible to me half the time.”

  Father Harrigan shook his head. “They’ve caught the man now, though, haven’t they? It’s a good thing. Until a man like that is caught, almost Everybody is under suspicion, and there are the tragedies of new victims.”

  “They’ve got somebody in custody,” Alexander said, “and he’s supposed to have confessed.”

  “That usually does it,” Father Harrigan said.

  “But confessions can be false,” Alexander said, “and the police can coerce them. And now Gregor Demarkian is back, and I’m not entirely sure from the news which side he’s supposed to be on. And there’s something I know, that I probably ought to tell somebody, especially if Dennis really has disappeared.”

  “What do you know?”

  “I know that Dennis knew Debbie Morelli and so did Elyse Martineau.”

  3

  In the cell where Henry Tyder slept—and he slept most of the time—it was warm. They had given him a bath and clean clothes. They had given him dinner on a tray that had reminded him of dinners at prep school: meatloaf, Brussels sprouts, boiled new potatoes, roll and butter, chocolate pudding, milk. The alcohol was draining out of his system, and he was feeling floaty in that odd way that always marked the start of one more try at detox and rehabilitation. The good part was that this time, he was not panicked. This time, he didn’t mind the slide to sobriety. He thought he wouldn’t even mind being sober, as long as he was here and not at home. He had a rough, gray wool blanket and a pillow with a zip-on case that felt scratchy against his cheek. He had the sound of the television coming down the hall at him from the guard station at the end of the corridor. That was all he needed to make his life complete, a television. If there was a television in this cell, he could lie here for hours and keep track of his own publicity.

  He fazed out again, and then in, turning a little on the bunk as he did so. The world was blurred at the edges, but getting sharper. He remembered Conchita. He had liked her because she drove Margaret nearly insane. She did the dishes in the sink. She didn’t trust the dishwasher. She wore a little gold Miraculous Medal on a chain around her neck. It was the only expensive thing she had. He’d always wondered how she’d gotten it. She went to mass at seven o’clock on Sunday mornings. Margaret insisted on that, so that she would have lunch ready when Margaret and Elizabeth got back from the mass that started at eleven o’clock. She made novenas. She spoke English and Spanish both in a soft accent that reminded him of water flowing over pebbles in the bottom of a brook.

  “Bring the ice bucket,” Henry thought, or maybe he said it out loud. He wasn’t sure. It was very quiet in this cell and on this corridor. This wasn’t where he was supposed to be. There was a big place somewhere—he’d heard the police talking about it—where they put people awaiting trial, but he wasn’t there. He was in a precinct. That was his lawyer’s doing. Tomorrow he was going to see a psychologist and have some tests. He had had millions of tests over the years, so many of the same ones over and over that he could pass them without giving them a thought. He knew everything they wanted to hear, everything he had to say so that they wouldn’t lock him up for good for being too out of his mind to come in out of the rain. None of them understood about the rain, or about houses that boxed you in.

  “Bring in the ice bucket,” Henry said again, and then he wondered if there was a name for whatever it was he had, or if he actually “had” something. It wasn’t claustrophobia. He was shut in a little space now, in this cell, but he didn’t feel panicked and desperate. He rather liked the coziness of the arrangement. It was houses that got to him, houses where people lived with the furniture all in its proper place and set times of day for when you ate your meals. It was the whole thing that went along with the houses: the regular schedules, with times to wake up and times to go to sleep, always the same, day after day; the closets and pantries with clothes and cans organized by size or type; the bills filed in little mail holders until they could be taken out and paid, on the first and the fifteenth of every month.

  Maybe it was organization he was afraid of. Maybe that was a thing. Maybe he had a fear of organization. Mostly he thought he had just done what any sane man would do if he had the chance and the courage. He had refused. He had refused to become part of the kind of life that houses represented. He had refused to stuff himself into the confines of day-to-day rigidity. He had sent up a great protest to the Cosmos and the God of Bourgeois Healthiness. He would be neither healthy nor productive nor disciplined. He would have nothing at all to do with an organized life.

  There was a sound out there in the corridor. Henry turned on his cot until he saw that somebody was standing at the bars to his cell. He’d thought that he himself and this guard were probably the only people back here. This is where they would hold drunks and junkies for an hour or two before they could get them into night court, but there were no drunks or junkies in here tonight.

  “Hey,” the guard said, “I got another call from that sister of yours.”

 
; The guard was tall and lanky. Henry liked the look of him.

  “Which sister?” he asked, as if he cared.

  “Mrs. Woodville. That’s what she calls herself on the phone. Mrs. Woodville.”

  They all talked about themselves like that. Henry knew. His mother’s generation had done it, too, although his mother hadn’t done it quite so much. When he thought really hard, he could remember his mother perfectly. She was as clear to him as if she were standing here in the cell. Margaret and Elizabeth had hated her, of course. Especially Margaret. Sometimes Henry hated her, too.

  “What did she want?” Henry asked.

  “She wanted to ask about you.” The guard laughed a little. “They both call up all the time wanting to ask about you. Are you comfortable. Are you eating. Are you willing to talk to them.”

  “I don’t want to talk to them.”

  “I know. And we’ve got rules, and it’s not the time for phone calls. But they call and ask. I don’t see what you think is wrong with that. That’s a good thing, having family who care about you.”

  “They don’t care about me,” Henry said. This was true. Margaret, especially—everything in his life was “Margaret, especially”—was concerned about the publicity, and the survival of the great name of Tyder, and the embarrassment all this was going to cause, but she wasn’t concerned about him.

  “Well, they act like they are,” the guard said. “I wouldn’t throw that in the trash if I were you. Anyway, I just thought I’d tell you she called.”

  Henry turned onto his back, blinking a little. The light was right up there. It was a bare bulb, and very bright, and you couldn’t turn it off. The guard was waiting for him to ask about the news on television, but he wasn’t going to do it. He could see it later if he wanted to. He wondered what he had looked like coming into court. He’d still been in his street clothes. He must have been a mess.