Glass Houses

by Jane Haddam

  Elizabeth did know Henry, however, and the more she thought about it, the more uneasy she was with the way this whole thing was going. People were making too many assumptions, the kind of assumptions that turned the world upside down. She kept getting flashes of Henry around Conchita. It had been an episode in their lives that she had found so bizarre she’d actually tried to talk to Margaret about it. Margaret hadn’t listened. Margaret never listened. She had her explanation for everything and anything Henry did. It was his mother’s fault. It was because their father had made such a stupid and incomprehensibly tacky second marriage. And what was worse, Margaret was so sure that Henry was addled by alcohol and living on the street, she was convinced that Henry would never do or say anything they told him not to do or say—that the only reason he was in the mess he was in now was that they hadn’t been clear about how they wanted him to behave. But Elizabeth had been very clear. She had talked to Henry face-to-face a dozen times. He always managed to find some avenue she hadn’t covered, some twist she hadn’t anticipated. And there was Conchita. There was proof positive that Henry had stronger emotions, and stronger drives, than he let anyone know about.

  Margaret was upstairs somewhere. Elizabeth was in the living room. She tried to gauge the odds of Margaret coming down suddenly and couldn’t. Most of the time, when Margaret got nostalgic, she shut herself away for hours and wouldn’t talk to Elizabeth at all. It was no fun reminiscing to someone who countered your every memory with a bucket of ice water. Sometimes, Margaret couldn’t help herself. She just had to show somebody. She just had to try to get Elizabeth in the mood to remember it all. The problem, Elizabeth thought, wasn’t that Margaret didn’t remember it, but that she did. She just remembered it differently.

  She went out into the foyer and stood at the foot of the stairs, listening. Margaret was not moving around. That was a good sign. She went to the back of the front hall and into the little, wood-paneled telephone room there. It was like a booth in an expensive men’s club, circa the thirties, when it was not acceptable to have a telephone in the living room. There was a phone in the kitchen, but she didn’t want to risk it. Besides, she needed the house directory. She wondered what it was like out there, what real people did. Did anybody, even people like Margaret and herself, have house directories anymore?

  The house directory was a Rolodex these days. Margaret thought it was tacky, and wouldn’t use it. Elizabeth went through it and found the number she was looking for. What did Margaret want anyway? To go back to the days when they kept numbers in that little wooden spring box that would pop open at the appropriate letter when you pressed a little lever? To get numbers from the Social Register? Elizabeth was fairly sure that this number wouldn’t even be in the Social Register, although she might be wrong. Her own number was in the Social Register, and she would have had to say she was almost the last person on earth to have been willing to keep that up.

  The number she dialed was ringing and ringing and ringing. Nobody was picking up. Maybe she was out to dinner. Maybe she was asleep. What had it said on the news this morning? She’d just got back to Philadelphia from being away. Elizabeth tried to remember where she’d been away to but couldn’t.

  She got a sudden spurt of inspiration and went through the Rolodex again. Here was why you wanted a Rolodex and not one of those silly spring things or the Social Register. You could always add numbers to the Rolodex. She had added this one just this morning. She got it out in front of her and dialed—was it really right to say you dialed a touch-tone phone?—the only number she had for Gregor Demarkian. It worked.

  The phone picked up on the other end; and instead of the baritone Elizabeth remembered from court, she got a woman’s voice.

  “Gregor Demarkian’s residence. Bennis Hannaford here.”

  “Oh, good,” Elizabeth said. “I just called your apartment and you weren’t there. I’m so glad I found you.”

  “Who are you and why are you so glad you found me?”

  The voice was light, but Elizabeth heard the tension in it. It hadn’t occurred to her that Bennis Hannaford might be defensive about who called her and what they wanted from her, but it made sense. There were those very odd novels she wrote.

  “It’s Elizabeth Woodville,” Elizabeth said. “You probably don’t remember me, although we’ve met. We were on the Harvest Day Committee together. A couple of years ago. I know it’s a very slight reason to claim acquaintance, but I’m almost at the end of my rope. Henry Tyder is my brother.”

  “Henry Tyder?”

  “The man they’ve just arrested as the Plate Glass Killer,” Elizabeth said. “I really am sorry. I am. It said on television this morning that you’ve been away for a while, so you probably don’t know. Last night they picked up my brother, my half brother really, because he was near one of the bodies and had blood on him. They picked him up and charged him with being the Plate Glass Killer, and he confessed. And then this lawyer came along, this Russell Donahue, and he said the confession wasn’t true. That people confess to things they haven’t done all the time, and this was one of those cases.”

  On the other end of the line, Bennis Hannaford cleared her throat. “That is true,” she said. “I’ve heard Gregor talk about it many times. People do confess to things they didn’t do. But I don’t think you have to worry about your brother, Miss Woodville. I know Russ Donahue. He’s an excellent attorney. And Gregor is working on the investigation. I don’t think he thinks your brother—”

  “It’s Mrs. Woodville,” Elizabeth said. Then she wondered why she’d said it. She’d been a widow now longer than she’d ever been married. “I know that Mr. Demarkian is working on the case, and that’s why I called. I thought, perhaps, that you could get me a chance to talk to him privately. Not with Margaret around. Margaret is my sister. Not with the police around. Not even with Mr. Donahue around, although he seems to be a nice enough person. It’s just—I don’t know how to explain it. It’s just something that somebody ought to say. And Margaret won’t say it. She won’t even admit it. But somebody ought to. So I thought I would.”

  “You know,” Bennis said, “it might not matter. Gregor was called out of here not ten minutes ago. By the police. I think they’ve got another body.”

  “Another body?”

  “Another Plate Glass Killing,” Bennis said. “I didn’t really catch the whole thing, and Gregor had to leave in a hurry; but I do know the police wanted him immediately, and Russ did too; and they don’t usually drag him out in the middle of the night if they don’t have a body. So, you see, everything might be all right as far as your brother is concerned.”

  “What do you mean, ‘all right’?”

  “Well,” Bennis said, “if there’s been another Plate Glass Killing, and your brother is in jail, he couldn’t have committed it, could he? And that would mean that in all likelihood he wasn’t the Plate Glass Killer in the first place.”

  “Yes,” Elizabeth said. She did see. She didn’t understand, but she did see. “Miss Hannaford,” she said. “Would you mind? Do you think you could get me a chance to talk to Mr. Demarkian in private even if it does turn out that this is a new Plate Glass Killing and Henry couldn’t have done it?”

  “I could try,” Bennis said. “If you leave you’re name and number, I’ll tell him about it when he comes in. But if your brother isn’t—”

  “Yes, I know,” Elizabeth said, “it sounds ridiculous. I sound ridiculous to myself. It’s just that. Well. Never mind. It’s Elizabeth Woodville, as I said, at 555-2793, here in Philadelphia.”

  “It’s likely to be some time tomorrow. If he’s out late—”

  “Yes, Miss Hannaford, I understand. And I apologize again for disturbing you so late at night and on your first night home.”

  “It’s quite all right, really.”

  Elizabeth put the phone back into the receiver. The room she was in was small and without windows. She should have been claustrophobic, but she wasn’t. It felt like a cocoon in here
, and Margaret’s humming couldn’t penetrate.

  What if there really was a new Plate Glass Killing? What would that mean?

  Elizabeth didn’t think it would matter one way or the other.

  2

  It was the time change that was getting to her, Phillipa Lydgate was sure of it. She had been up early and out all day; and for a while there, around noon, she had been ready to collapse. Now it was nearly ten o’clock, and she was wide awake and raring to go. The city of Philadelphia had the look she loved most about cities, the one where the streetlights glowed in the darkness and glistened in reflection on rain-coated streets. The traffic was not bad. In spite of everything she had heard about American cities, she didn’t feel threatened in this one. The truth was, she never felt threatened in cities. What she did feel, at the moment, was exasperated. It had been a long day, and she didn’t think she had even a paragraph’s worth of material to put into a column.

  There was a newsstand on the corner of wherever it was she was. She thought it must be a relatively wealthy area, since there were lots of little stores and the people walking around were mostly white. Of course, they were only mostly white, so it was possible that this was a semidepressed neighborhood, but with a good facade, so that it wasn’t really noticeable. She stopped at the newsstand and bought a copy of The Inquirer, which she should have done first thing this morning. It hadn’t occurred to her. The man behind the cash register was South Asian, but people here would say Indian or Pakistani. The South Asians were everywhere really. Phillipa couldn’t get over the way they had spread.

  She turned back to the street with the paper under her arm and looked around. Most of the stores sold clothes or shoes and were shut up for the night, but their windows were not hidden behind protective metal shields. Two of the stores were bookstores, and both were open. The first one was a specialty store. All the books were about travel to one place or another, or about the places you might travel to. She stood for a while before a display of books about various aspects of Islam: the Koran; some commentaries on the Koran; a history of the Moorish occupation of Spain; a cookbook about the foods of Tunisia, Morocco, and Algeria; a large volume on the history of Islamic art. There were two or three people in the store. One of them was at the cash register in the back, buying a stack that had to be a foot tall.

  Phillipa went down the block and across the street and looked into the windows of the other bookstore. This was a general bookstore, but not the kind she was used to hearing about in America. There were no best sellers in the windows, and no displays of teddy bears or mugs. The front window was full of a display of the books of what it called “Beat America,” which seemed to have something to do with Beatniks. Phillipa knew some of the names of some of the writers—Jack Kerouac, certainly, and Alan Ginsberg, who was a gay rights activist—but most of the others meant nothing to her at all. Lawrence Ferlinghetti. A Coney Island of the Mind. She searched her memory for it and came up blank. She went to the other window and found another display, this one on “Square America.”

  If the display on Beat America had made her feel blank, the one on Square America made her feel blanker and gave her the uncomfortable feeling that she was failing to get a joke. The window on Square America was less crowded, though, and through it she could see all the way to the back of the store, where there seemed to be some kind of coffee bar. At least people were sitting in chairs at little tables and drinking coffee while they read books. Phillipa had heard of this. The Barnes & Noble chain of bookstores had coffee bars, which were supposed to make people forget that they were owned by corporate behemoths who cared nothing for literature and only worried about the bottom line.

  She stepped back and looked up at the facade of the store. It was called Belles Lettres, and nothing indicated that it was owned by any kind of corpo-rate behemoth at all. It reminded her of Shakespeare & Company in Paris, except that it was cleaner and seemed to be better organized. Americans were always such maniacs for cleanliness and order. It was as if they were afraid of the messy smelliness of real life. She looked back at the Beat America display again. Then she made up her mind—it had been hours since she’d put any caffeine into her body—and went inside.

  The inside of Belles Lettres wasn’t a quiet place. The people in the coffee bar all seemed to be talking to one another. Phillipa made her way to the back, past displays of Jose Saramago’s novels and the poetry of W. B, Yeats. There was also a little pile of books of essays by V S. Naipaul. She made it to the coffee bar and looked around. Only two of the tables were empty. The rest were, if anything, overoccupied.

  The one closest to the coffee machines themselves was occupied by an impossibly tall, impossibly thin, impossibly fit young man with blond hair who sat with his chair tilted back against the wall and his long legs stretched out in front of him.

  “All I’m getting at,” he was saying, apparently to the room in general, “is that the whole concept of serial killing as an art form, the whole schtick Mailer was so enamored of back in the seventies has been thoroughly discredited. Destruction and creation are not really two sides of the same coin. Destruction is easy. Creation is hard.”

  “Yes,” another young man said, from another table. He wasn’t nearly as attractive as the first one. He was short, and dark, and Phillipa was willing to bet that if he’d stood up, he’d have been pudgy. “But you need destruction. You need it to create.”

  “Sometimes creators inadvertently destroy,” the first young man said, “but that’s not the same thing as destruction for destruction’s sake. Camus was wrong. Sartre was really wrong. The murderer is not an existential hero; and to the extent that he is, he only proves that existentialism is empty of human value.”

  “But there isn’t anything a thinking person can do in this life except despair,” the dark one said. “The existentialists proved that. And if we want to be fully human, we have to act within that despair and against it. So—”

  “So what we should do is go out into the streets and strangle middle-aged women with nylon packing cords?”

  Phillipa sat down at one of the empty tables and was immediately presented with a menu by a young woman wearing head-to-toe black except for her apron, which was a bright and uncompromising white.

  “I’m Vanessa,” the young woman said. “Can I get you something, or would you like to take some time to look at the menu?”

  Phillipa gestured in the direction of the two young men. “Do they know each other? Do they come here often?”

  “Dickie and Chris? I suppose they know each other. I mean, they talk in here all the time. I don’t know if they know each other outside of here. because of the thing, you know.”

  “No,” Phillipa said. “What thing?”

  “Well,” Vanessa said. “Dickie goes to Penn, which is an Ivy League school, very hotshot and up there. Chris goes to Saint Joe’s, which isn’t either. It’s a good place, you know, but it’s not one of the best. Anyway, the rumor is that Penn turned Chris down. Except, you know, I mean, you can see it. He’s a lot smarter than Dickie, and he’s read more, too. And Chris likes to rub it in as much as possible.”

  “And this—Dickie—keeps coming back for more?”

  “Some people will do anything for pain. Do you want me to get you something? You’re English, aren’t you? I’m not sure the coffee will be up to what you’re used to. We’ve got a pretty good premium blend, though. And it isn’t Starbucks.”

  “Are you worried about a Starbucks moving into this neighborhood?”

  “There already is a Starbucks in this neighborhood,” Vanessa said. “It’s on the next block.”

  “Has your business fallen off significantly since it moved in?”

  “It moved in three years ago,” Vanessa said. “But it wouldn’t bother our business. It doesn’t have books. I could get you an espresso. We have a guy who comes in here every once in a while who’s from Italy. He says the espresso is pretty good.”

  Phillipa reached into her purse
and brought out her notebook. “An espresso would be lovely,” she said.

  “There’s another rumor,” Vanessa said, “that Chris is going to enter the priesthood. Saint Joe’s is a Catholic university. Anyway, some of the girls from there who come in here in the afternoon said that he was looking into entering the seminary. Now there’s a depressing thought.”

  “Oh, no,” Phillipa said. “He’s much too intelligent to be religious.”

  Chris brought his chair’s front legs down to the floor with a thump. “It’s not just silly,” he said. “It’s dangerous. And it’s narcissistic. It’s the philosophy of people who knew very little outside their own suffocatingly restricted world.”

  “T. S. Eliot said ‘there will be time to murder and create.’”

  “He said it,” Chris said, “but he wasn’t advocating it, for God’s sake. Prufrock isn’t an admirable character. He’s Eliot’s picture of the debased modern man. And the Plate Glass Killer isn’t even a Prufrock.”

  Vanessa was suddenly standing there with a coffee in her hands. Phillipa hadn’t seen her go get it.

  “It’s all this stuff about the Plate Glass Killer,” she said. “I think everybody’s disappointed. They all thought he’d be more romantic or crazier. You know, somebody like Charles Manson. Instead, he’s just a broken down old man who doesn’t make any sense. Can I get you anything else?”

  “No, thank you,” Phillipa said.

  “Chris isn’t disappointed, though,” Vanessa said. “It fits all the stuff he says about the existentialists. Just wave if you need me for anything.”

  Phillipa uncapped her pen and started to write. It was perfect, this scene, this place. It was just what she’d been looking for.

  3

  For Dennis Ledeski, it had been a long night. It didn’t help that the rain that had been falling on and off all day was now coming down in a steady stream or that the entire world seemed to be full of police cars without their sirens on. Dennis didn’t mind police cars with their sirens on because the sirens meant they were looking for somebody else but him.