Glass Houses

by Jane Haddam

  He went back down to his office and called John Jackman. The woman who answered the phone made no reference to John’s mayoral campaign, probably because it was illegal for her to do it.

  “You don’t have to bother John,” Gregor said. “I just need to know where I can find a clerk named Martha Venecki. Or maybe one named Betty Gelhorn.”

  “They work in the evidence room. Do you want me to get them for you? I’m sure one of them’s on duty down there. They never leave the place unattended.”

  “They run it?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Put me through to whichever one you can find.”

  There were a lot of clicks and beeps on the phone, and Gregor waited. Rob had been honest. This really was a larger office than the ordinary. Unfortunately, that didn’t actually make it large. He looked into the box he had left on top of the desk. Along with the bits and pieces of paper and cardboard, there were things: a key chain with a picture of the Sacred Heart streaming from the breast of Jesus on the heavy plastic weight; two or three metal lipstick cases, the lipstick inside them partially used; an old Texas Instruments plastic calculator, broken; a single man’s tennis shoe, size fourteen. Were these pieces of evidence? Why weren’t they in evidence bags?

  The phone clicked again, and a woman’s voice said, “Martha Venecki here. Is this Gregor Demarkian?”

  “This is Gregor Demarkian. Do you think you could answer a few questions for me? I’m having a little trouble making my way through all this material.”

  There was silence on the other end of the line. Gregor could hear two women talking in the background. They were arguing, but only in the way people did when they were essentially in agreement anyway.

  “Mr. Demarkian?” It sounded to Gregor like Martha Venecki’s voice. “Would you mind very much if we asked you a favor? If you want to talk about the material, do you think you could come down here to do it?”

  “Down to Police Headquarters?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Tell him,” a voice in the background said, “I mean, how can we know if it’s really him? We could be talking to anybody.”

  “Yes,” Martha said, “well, that was Betty Gelhorn. She—”

  “She wrote the summary that’s on my desk.”

  “That’s right,” Martha said. “You do see our problem, don’t you? You could be Gregor Demarkian, but you might not be. We can’t see your face. So if you could come down here—”

  “They’ve done crazier things,” the other woman said. It was suddenly her voice on the phone. She must have taken the receiver from Martha. “It’s not that we doubt you,” she said. “Mr. Jackman said you were going to be going over the Plate Glass material, and we’re more than willing to help you out. It’s that we don’t trust them, you see. We don’t trust either of them.”

  “Give that back to me,” Martha said. “Mr. Demarkian, we really are truly and sincerely sorry. And we’re not worried about our jobs. We’ve been here forever and there are union rules, and besides Mr. Jackman would never fire us. But we don’t trust them. You know who we mean. Those two. And they can make trouble. So we thought it would be better if you came down here and we could see you, and then we could tell you whatever you needed to know.”

  “Tell him we’ll make him some coffee,” Betty said. “And I brought cookies this morning, chocolate-and-peanut butter chip.”

  “If you could,” Martha said.

  “Then he could see the rest of it,” Betty said.

  “There’s more material I haven’t seen?” Gregor said.

  “Oh, Mr. Demarkian, not really. I mean, except for the computer files we don’t have the passwords for. There are just other things we don’t know where they’re supposed to belong, which is entirely outside regulations, you understand, because when officers deliver evidence to us they’re supposed to label it so that we know how to file it. Except some of them don’t. Two in particular. If you get my drift.”

  “I can get there in—what? Half an hour?”

  “Half an hour would be safe,” Martha agreed. “We’ll be ready for you. We promise. Only, there’s one thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Make sure you close and seal all the boxes before you leave. Things disappear from boxes in this case. Whole boxes disappear. We’ve got them numbered, the ones we sent you, so you don’t have to worry about that, but you need to seal them to make sure nobody takes anything out of them while you’re gone.”

  “Yes,” he said.

  Then he hung up and stared at the phone. Things went in and out of boxes in the evidence room? He looked into the one on his desk again. Somebody—Martha or Betty, assuredly—had attached an inventory form, very carefully made out. If things did go missing, he’d be able to check them. That wasn’t as comforting as it should have been. The inventory form for the box on his desk was pages long. It included items like “1” × 3 1/2” paper scrap words Christmas train” and “cardboard cylinder toilet paper roll.” Why had they kept the cardboard cylinder from a toilet paper roll? He moved the box aside and picked up Betty Gelhorn’s summary, but he’d read through it already. It didn’t tell him anything he didn’t already know, and it wasn’t exactly informative even about what he did.

  Delia O’Bannion came back and put a Styrofoam cup on his desk. “I didn’t know what to do about the tuna fish,” she said. “They had five or six different kinds, and I don’t know what you like. I finally got Provencal, because I liked what it looked like.”

  Provengal tuna fish salad. Gregor didn’t want to know. He opened the coffee and drank half of it in one long swig. “Have you ever spent any time working on this case?” he asked Delia. “The Plate Glass Killer case, I mean.”

  Delia shook her head. “I don’t work on cases, not really. I just go around and help people out when they need, you know, assistance.”

  “Have you ever worked for Cord Leehan or Marty Gayle?”

  Delia blushed. “Everybody has. And most of us had to testify at, you know, the hearings. And I was there on the day of the fight.”

  “Ah,” Gregor said.

  “I thought they were going to kill each other,” Delia said. “You hear all these things people say about gay guys and how they’re feminine, but Detective Leehan can really hit when he wants to. And there was blood everywhere. It was awful.”

  “But it was Detective Leehan who got hurt, wasn’t it?”

  “Well, they both had to go to the hospital,” Delia said, “but Detective Leehan was the only one who had to stay. Is this really necessary? I mean, I know you’ve got a lot of work to do to straighten this out, and things, but it seems wrong to me to be telling stories about Detective Gayle and Detective Leehan. I mean, there was a hearing, and they straightened everything out, and now they’re partners and we all have to make the best of it. I think that’s a very sensible plan.”

  “I do too,” Gregor said, “but I think it’s even more sensible to solve a string of eleven murders, and I can’t do that unless I know what evidence we have and what evidence we don’t have and what it all means. Aren’t you worried about the Plate Glass Killer? Or do you think the officers have the right man this time, and he’s sitting in jail?”

  “Well,” Delia said reasonably, “they usually do have the right man, don’t they? I mean, not all the time, obviously, and there was that terrible business with the guard at the Olympic Games in Atlanta, but that was the FBI and anyway, I mean they usually do get the right person. But I never did worry about the Plate Glass Killer, even when we didn’t have anybody locked up in jail. He isn’t like your usual serial killer, is he? He isn’t after people who look like me.”

  It took Gregor a minute to figure this out, but he did. “You’ve got long hair,” he said.

  Delia brightened. “That’s it. I mean, look at it. Either they’re people like Gacy or Dahmer, and they want boys; or they’re after girls, and it’s always girls with long hair parted in the middle. I’ve seen all the
Lifetime movies. I saw the movie about Ted Bundy, you know, with the man who’s married to the sister of the woman who was married to Ricky Nelson. Anyway, the Plate Glass Killer was never looking for somebody like me. So I didn’t worry about it.”

  “Yes,” Gregor said.

  “Do you want me to get you more boxes? There are still lots of them out in the hall.”

  “No,” Gregor said, picking up the paper bag with his sandwich in it. “I have to go over to Police Headquarters for about an hour. Do you think you could do me the favor of sealing the open boxes again so that nobody can tamper with what’s inside them?”

  “Oh, of course, Mr. Demarkian. But you don’t have to worry. Nobody would tamper with them except Detective Gayle or Detective Leehan, and they wouldn’t tamper with them so much as they’d just sort of root around in them, you know, to find out what the other one had. But you don’t have to worry about that, either, because neither one of them is allowed onto this floor unless he’s escorted.” She leaned closer and whispered. “One of the fights was here. Not the big one but one of them. They broke a wall.”

  Gregor got his coat off the back of his chair. He would worry about broken walls later. Right now, he was 99 percent sure he knew how this investigation had to start, but he needed some things confirmed before he was willing to stake his life on it.

  He also needed to find out what had actually happened last night, and he’d do better with that if he could get hold of John Jackman personally.

  FOUR

  1

  For Alexander Mark, the problem of the Plate Glass Killer was not as simple as it seemed. In fact, the entire idea of serial killers—of men, and Sometimes women, who killed because they felt like it, and killed over and over again because they felt like it a lot—broke some kind of circuitry in his head. Alexander Mark understood Good and Evil. It was over the problem of Good and Evil that he had first come out as gay. He had absolutely no use for the kind of person who pretended that gay people weren’t really gay. With a flick of the wrist and a course in aversion therapy, they could become straight. As far as Alexander was concerned, he was born knowing what he was, even if he hadn’t always had a name for it.

  The thing was, he had also become a Catholic, and joined Courage, over the problem of Good and Evil—that time, specifically, over the problem of Saint Augustine. If he had been a different kind of person, he might have wanted to be an Augustinian monk. He was sure he had no vocation to the priesthood; but a monk wasn’t a priest, and a life of books and solitude seemed like just what he was after. It was the herd aspect of it he hadn’t been able to handle; Alexander Mark was not a team player—he didn’t even like team players.

  Now he got out of the cab and looked around at the five-block stretch that the papers referred to only as “Cavanaugh Street.” It was a nice area. Many of the buildings had obviously been turned back to single-family houses, and the few that hadn’t looked more like expensive condominiums than tenement apartment houses. There was a church, brand-new—of course it would be new, Alexander thought, somebody had blown it up only a couple of years ago and it had had to be rebuilt—and a scattering of stores and restaurants: the Ararat; O’Hanian’s Middle Eastern Food Store; Yekevan News. He took the three-by-five card out of the inner pocket of his suit jacket and checked the address. He should have come out here during the mess, when Gregor Demarkian was helping him out. He liked to check out the people who did him favors.

  He looked at the numbers over the doors on one house after the other until he came to the one he wanted. Then he went up the steps and found that the outer door opened automatically, and without the need of a key, onto a small vestibule with a set of mailboxes set into one wall. He looked around and saw that directly across the street was the grandest townhouse of them all, complete with a flagpole sticking out of the second floor, flying the stars and stripes.

  There was no inner door. Anybody could walk up or down just because he felt like it. Either these people were very secure, or very, very stupid.

  He found Gregor Demarkian’s name on one of the mailboxes and pushed the little button just above it. There was a pause and then a buzz, and then a woman’s voice said, “Yes?”

  “My name is Alexander Mark,” he said. “I’m looking for Gregor Demarkian.”

  There was another pause. “Gregor’s out,” the woman’s voice said. “I’m not sure where. Is there something I can do for you?”

  “It’s about the Plate Glass Killer.”

  The intercom went dead again, and Alexander wondered if the woman, whoever she was, was just going to pretend he didn’t exist. Instead, he heard a door opening far up in the stairwell, and two sets of feet coming down the stairs.

  He turned and saw two women coming down to him. One of them was fair and very young and as big as a house. Alexander wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d given birth right there. The other was older, but perfectly, exquisitely beautiful, the kind of beautiful that needed no explanations and did not disappear at thirty.

  “Well,” the beautiful one said, “you don’t look like a serial killer.”

  “Bennis, for goodness sake. What does a serial killer look like?”

  “Charles Manson,” Bennis said firmly.

  “Alexander Mark,” Alexander said. “And I’m not a serial killer, although the police suspected me of being one or said they did. Mr. Demarkian helped me out of that. I just, um, there’s something I needed to talk to him about.”

  “I know who this is,” the fair one said. “You’re Chickie George’s friend, aren’t you? He came to the Ararat and told us all about it. You poor man.”

  “I’m really quite all right,” Alexander said.

  “I’m sure you are, now,” the fair one said, “but at the time. You were away, Bennis, but I remember all about it. Chickie George was spitting bullets.”

  “It’s about one of the other men who were suspected of being the Plate Glass Killer,” Alexander said. He was beginning to feel the need to be very, very patient. The pregnant woman seemed a little scattered. Wasn’t there something about pregnant women going crazy from the hormones, or something like that? He couldn’t remember. “It’s about a man named Dennis Ledeski. Because of Saint Augustine.”

  “Saint Augustine?” Bennis said.

  “Saint Augustine was a Manichaean,” Alexander said. “The Manichaeans believed there were two gods, not one. There was a good God, and an evil one. And history, all of history, was the story of the war between these two gods. And the purpose of every human being’s life was to pick one side and fight for it. Good and evil. Do you see?”

  “Sort of,” Bennis said cautiously. “Are you sure you don’t want to talk to Father Tibor? He tends to be the one who deals with theology.”

  “When Augustine converted to Christianity, he kept most of his Manichaeanism untouched. He abandoned the belief in two gods, and he got rid of the idea that the outcome of the battle was undecided. But he kept the idea of a choice. Every man had to make a choice between God and the devil. Do you see?”

  “Not really,” Bennis said.

  “Augustine is one of the doctors of the church,” Alexander said. “His theology is an integral part of Christian doctrine. And that was the problem. I’m not an Augustinian theologically. I don’t like the dualism. I don’t think life is like that for most people. Good and evil. Black and white. Even most people who choose to do evil don’t think of it as choosing to do evil. They think that what they’re doing is good. They think that it’s the best thing they can do, or that they have to do it because of circumstances, not that they’re deliberately going out to do wrong. And, you see, that’s where I was stopped. I couldn’t think of anybody, not even Dennis Ledeski, as going out to do wrong deliberately, knowing it was wrong, doing it because it was wrong. Don’t you see?”

  “No,” Bennis said.

  “It was because of the pedophilia,” Alexander said. “Most pedophiles convince themselves that what they do is good for the chi
ldren they do it to. They have elaborate explanations and excuses for the activities they engage in. But on some level, you see, they know that the excuses are just excuses. And that haunts them.”

  “And the Plate Glass Killer is a pedophile?” the blonde one asked.

  “Maybe,” Alexander said. “Dennis Ledeski is a pedophile. That’s the thing. I know that. I think even the police know that, they just haven’t been able to catch him yet. But I started to wonder, you see, if it was possible that somebody could become a serial killer as a way to act out the conviction that he was evil to the core. Do you see what I mean?”

  “No,” Bennis said.

  “Mr. Demarkian will see what I mean,” Alexander said. “I’m probably putting it very badly, but it really makes a lot of sense. And that was how I started looking into the other victims. The other Plate Glass Killer victims. I’d always assumed that Dennis was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, and that was how he’d ended up being picked up when Elyse Martineau was found dead. But what if that wasn’t the case? What if he really had killed Elyse Martineau? What if he’d known some of the others?”

  “Some of the other victims?” Bennis asked.

  “That’s right,” Alexander said. “Some of the other victims. What if, in this case, everything we know about serial killers is wrong? What if he isn’t picking on strangers? What if he’s picking on acquaintances or even friends? It would explain a lot of things, wouldn’t it? It would explain why the women are all strangled without any sign of a struggle, or at least one that anybody ever hears about. It would explain why there’s no rape. He doesn’t want sex with older women, he only wants death. He wants sex with boys.”

  “So,” Bennis said. “Is there? A connection between your guy and the Plate Glass Killer victims?”

  “Well, there was a connection with Elyse Martineau,” Alexander said. “She was his secretary. And there’s a connection with one or two of the others. One of them was a client for a short time. One of them worked in the grocery store where Dennis picks up his dinners. He doesn’t cook, Dennis, unless you count the microwave. And then I started to think how odd it was. Does the name Arlene Treshka mean anything to you?”