by Jane Haddam
He reached into his pocket and looked at his money. He should have stolen a wallet. A man who looked as he looked now would have a wallet, one with cards in it. As far as he could see, he had a couple of hundred dollars, enough to buy food for a few days. What he was supposed to do then, he didn’t know. He only knew he could stay here, and he couldn’t leave while they were watching all the exits.
There was, of course, one place he could go. It was empty because it was kept empty, for him, at all times. It was private, because he preferred privacy, and even his sisters knew it. Better yet, none of the passkeys would work. It had its own lock, and he knew where and how to get the key. It would not be difficult to go there. He had done it before when he wanted to. The only problem was that it was the worst possible place he could be if he was ever found.
It was, however, becoming increasingly desperate. The police commissioner, the black guy whose name he could never remember, was running for mayor; and he was running on the theme that the present mayor was grossly incompe-tent, which happened to be true. The last thing this guy needed was for some addled alcoholic bum to get away clean from the city jail, and here Henry was, away. No, it made sense to do the one thing it was possible to do. It just didn’t make him feel good.
First, he had to go to the Liberty Bell, because that was the only way he knew to orient himself to the correct building. It was three blocks north and two blocks west, and Henry made the trip carefully, blending into little knots of tourists when he could. He could never get over the number of tourists who came to Philadelphia, usually just to see things like the Liberty Bell and Independence Hall. It seemed like a waste of time to him.
He got to the building and looked up and down the street, but the street was deserted. It usually was, although all the buildings on it were occupied. There weren’t many stores, that was the thing. In this neighborhood, people got up and went to work, and everything was quiet. He counted down the buildings on the west side of the street and came to the one with the red door. He was relieved to see that it was still the only one on the street with a red door, and that Green Point hadn’t changed the color scheme while he’d been wandering around, not paying attention. He went into the vestibule to the place where the mailboxes were and got his fingers under the bottom ridge of the box unit. It flicked out almost as soon as he touched it. He put two fingers of his right hand underneath and snaked up behind. He felt the little paper envelope with the key in it right away. He flicked his fingers against it and it fell to the floor.
He leaned over and picked it up. The apartment was a floor-through, the one on the top floor of this building. The top was imperative, because that way nobody would ever see him while they were going in and out. He climbed up the steps—if they managed to get him out of this, he was going to demand another apartment, in a building with an elevator—and saw nobody at all the entire time he was on his way up. The building was deadly quiet. Nobody was home.
When he got to the top floor, he looked around to make sure he was still alone, but he didn’t see how he wouldn’t be. He got the key in the lock and the door open. He went inside and locked up. There were two bolts in here that he’d put in himself, on one of those days when he was not as drunk as Everybody thought he was. There were a lot of those days. It was a complicated story.
He walked through to the living room and then to the bedroom. He looked around and sighed.
It was all still here. It would have to be. Nobody knew what was in this apartment. It was his one real secret place. It was his one secure place, and that was what mattered.
He sat down on the bed and picked up Sarajean Petrazik’s scarf. It was the first thing he’d taken. He kept it, always, lying across the pillows on a pristinely made-up bed.
FIVE
1
It was not the way Gregor Demarkian liked to bring a case to an end. After all, he’d been trained by an organization that took cohesion and structure so seriously, it often let those things get in the way of common sense. Now it was not common sense that was getting short shrift but just about everything. He hadn’t realized what a mess a pair like Marty Gayle and Cord Leehan could create. He didn’t really know if this case would ever recover from it.
That was not the sort of thing he wanted to tell Rob Benedetti right now, so he concentrated on trying to understand the city as they passed through it in Rob’s car. Detectives O’Shea and Fabereaux were in another car, which was good, because they talked nonstop, and Gregor wanted to think. Here was the problem. For most of the names on his list, the list of real victims of the Plate Glass Killer, there were no witnesses, and no suspects. Only Tyrell Moss, Alexander Mark, and Henry Tyder had been picked up near victims’ bodies, or sort of near them. In all the other cases, the record was a complete blank. At this late date, there was virtually no chance to go back and find people who might have been at or around the scene at the time. Even if you find them, the chances that they would accurately remember anything were close to nil. It wasn’t as if anybody had witnessed the actual murder or found the body and reported it—Gregor stopped.
“Rob,” he said.
“What is it? Do you know this part of town?”
Gregor didn’t know any part of town. “Let me ask you something,” he said. “Who found the bodies.”
“What do you mean, who found them?”
“Just that,” Gregor said. “They didn’t come floating in off the street and plant themselves at their local precinct station. Who found the bodies? How did the police department come to know that there were any bodies at all? Think of Arlene Treshka. She was in an alley. Henry Tyder found her. Other people saw Henry covered in blood and went looking, and they found her, too. That was how she came to the attention of the police. What about the other bodies? Who found them?”
“Ah,” Rob said. He shook his head. “Do you know something? I have no idea. Isn’t that in the reports?”
“It might be in there somewhere,” Gregor said, “but at the moment, looking through the reports is like picking up ten pounds of rice one grain at a time. But somebody must have found the bodies. Even if it was just some guy going out into a back alley and seeing the body lying there and calling the police; somebody must have found them.”
“Well, Tyrell Moss found Carol Ann Fugate,” Rob said. “And the other one, the one who’s missing—”
“Dennis Ledeski?”
“No, the kid,” Rob said. “Bennie Durban. He found Rondelle Johnson, but not on his own. There was a whole crowd of people. I remember that because I asked Marty if he was absolutely sure he was looking at a Plate Glass Killing. I mean, it’s not a neighborhood where murder, or even random murder, is unknown. But Marty was adamant.”
“Mmm,” Gregor said.
He could have given a very long talk about what Marty Gayle had the right to be adamant about and what he didn’t, but that didn’t even begin to cover the things he wanted to say. They were coming up to Dennis Ledeski’s offices, something Gregor knew by the fact that the car was slowing. It wasn’t a bad neighborhood: old townhouses that had been converted into professional offices; a few expensive coffee shops; a big newsstand on one corner, covered with copies of today’s Philadelphia Inquirer.
The car pulled to a stop, double parked, in front of a small building with a bright red door. The driver looked over the seat to where Rob and Gregor were in the back.
“I’m going to have to go find a space. You’re looking for that one right there.”
Gregor got out and waited on the street until Rob did, too. Then he turned to look at the red door and the rest of the building it was part of. Dennis Ledeski was not an original man. Some of the buildings on this street had been spruced up and reworked to look almost as if they were still surviving in a colonial Philadelphia. Dennis Ledeski’s was not one of them.
Gregor went up to the door and rang the bell. Alexander Mark came out to get him.
“You didn’t have to ring,” he said. “The door isn’t locked
. You can come right into the receptionist’s area, which is where I am, without thinking twice about it. It was one of the few things I ever liked about Dennis. I get so damned tired of paranoids.”
“Have you heard from him?” Gregor asked.
“Not a word,” Alexander said.
They all went in to the vestibule, to find Chickie George sitting on a polyester-covered chair in the most spectacular business suit Gregor had ever seen.
“Chickie,” he said. “No, wait, I’m supposed to call you Edmund?”
“Never mind,” Chickie said. “I’ve given up trying. As long as it isn’t in the office or around clients. Margaret Mary told me to say hello next time I saw you, also another nun, a big honcho nun, named Sister Mary Scholastica.”
“I don’t think there are big honcho nuns,” Alexander said. “And I know that isn’t what you call them.”
“Alexander is a very serious Catholic,” Chickie said.
Rob Benedetti looked uncomfortable. Gregor took pity on him. “Listen,” he said, “are we going to be private here? Is there likely to be a client who comes walking through this door any minute now?”
“I canceled all his appointments already,” Alexander said. “Do you want to tell me what all this is about? Was that important, about them all living in Green Point buildings?”
“Fairly important, yes,” Gregor said. “What we came for was to ask you about Debbie Morelli. Don’t look blank. She was—”
“Oh,” Alexander said. “The woman I found. I’m sorry. I didn’t know her. I mean, except as a body. And even then—”
“Yes,” Gregor said. “Exactly. But what I want to know is about the finding. What time of day was it?”
“Early afternoon,” Alexander said. “Very early afternoon. Still very light out.”
“And the body was in an alley,” Gregor said.
“In a service access,” Alexander said, “but that’s what those are, aren’t they? Alleys to the backs of buildings so the garbagemen can get through and the utility people, through into the backyards, except they aren’t really backyards.”
“And that was next to a Green Point building,” Gregor said.
Alexander looked surprised. “You know,” he said, “one of them is a Green Point building. I never thought of that before. It’s got that little green tree symbol on the front of it. I hate those green symbols. They’re as bad as smiley faces.”
“Okay,” Gregor said. “Now, think for a moment. This is a place you knew, right?”
“Right.”
“This wasn’t an abandoned area. The buildings around the alley were in use. You were in the alley. Why were you in the alley?”
“Are we going back to this?” Alexander said. “Am I suspected of being the Plate Glass Killer again?”
“No,” Gregor said. “I’m just trying to understand about the alleys. Why did you go into that one?”
“I didn’t, exactly,” Alexander said. “I was in the backyard. The back court-yard. Whatever those things are supposed to be called. My own building is on the other side of it. I was putting out some foam board. I’d been working on a conversation space for my apartment, working on it myself. I had people in, but they were useless. So I got some foam board and started to make sculptures out of it, but I messed it up, and my super had asked me not to shove the stuff down the chute because it made a mess he had to deal with and it couldn’t go in the incinerator. So I took them out back to where the garbage cans were.”
“What made you go into the alley?” Gregor asked.
“I saw a foot,” Alexander said. Up until now, he had been standing behind what would have been his receptionist’s desk. Now he sat down again. “I’d forgotten that. I mean, not forgotten it, you know, but pushed it out of my memory. I looked up from the cans and I was looking sort of slantwise into the alley, and I saw what looked like a foot wearing one of those thick, heavy shoes. Geriatric shoes. The kind my grandmother used to wear. So I walked a little forward to get a better look, and there was a woman lying face down in the alley. Just lying there.”
“So you went up to her,” Gregor said.
Alexander threw his hands in the air. “There had been news reports about the Plate Glass Killer even then, Mr. Demarkian. I got out my phone and called the cops. Except I had to go back to the courtyard to do it because being between the buildings screwed up the phone signal.”
“Now, think carefully. Go back and check and make sure when we’re done here,” Gregor said. “Is there any way directly into that alley?”
“No,” Alexander said confidently. “If you want to get into the alley, you either come through from the street or you come out one of the back doors of the houses on that courtyard and then come around.”
“Exactly,” Gregor said.
“Exactly what?” Rob said.
Gregor sighed. “Don’t forget,” he told them. “The body on Curzon Street was not in an alley. It was in a basement.”
2
This was the part Gregor liked the least, the part where you had to go somewhere on foot to find something you needed. Well, not on foot, of course. There were cars. Still, he would have preferred the life of some-body like Nero Wolfe, who never left his apartment and had people come to clean and make food for him. Maybe he even had something like that. Lord only knew, he didn’t cook much these days. The women on Cavanaugh Street did it for him, and brought over covered dishes full of yaprak sarma and stuffed grape leaves and halva. He wondered if they would go on doing that now that Bennis was home. They tended to assume that a woman in the house meant that there was already somebody there who, not only would cook, but could. Bennis’s idea of cooking amounted to something frozen or leftover she could heat up in the microwave.
He didn’t want to be thinking of Bennis now. It was difficult to think past the enormous boulder she had landed on his head, and that was when he was deliberately not remembering it. It didn’t help that he was not able to sort out his emotions about her news, or that he had the sneaking suspicion that what he really was was angry. Father Tibor was always trying to make him read murder mysteries, both the modern ones and the ones from the golden age, and the reason he didn’t like the modern ones too much was that they were far too full of angst. Hercule Poirot employed his little gray cells and sometimes was found deep in contemplation. Nero Wolfe drank exotic beer and complained about the stupidity of the police. Miss Marple shook her head at the wickedness of human nature. If any one of them had lived in this time and place, they would have been candidates for a psychiatrist’s couch. Hercule Poirot would be trying to muster the courage to come out of the closet. Nero Wolfe would be confronting his agoraphobia. Miss Marple would be slipping into Alzheimer’s and unable to remember her own name, never mind the clues, on her bad days. Gregor didn’t know what had happened to people.
He looked out at the steadily worsening neighborhoods around him and wondered what had happened to those people, too. He didn’t remember Philadelphia being this bad, or this brutal, when he was growing up. Of course, it was better now than it had been when he was living in Washington and still at the FBI. The crime surge of the seventies had been mastered, or just passed. Still, there was something viscerally wrong about these places he was seeing now. They weren’t just poor. All of Cavanaugh Street had been poor when he was growing up, and in many ways much poorer than these places were. There was something wrong at a fundamental level here, something that went beyond poverty and ignorance and the rest of the usual suspects. When Gregor was in the FBI, he had always thought of the predators he tracked as being anomalies. They were born without something other people had. Lately he wondered if sociopathology was more a matter of circumstance than genetics. There were neighborhoods now that seemed to contain nothing else or at least to be run by nothing else. Not even the larger society touched them.
They were pulling up to a curb now, and Gregor realized that the block was familiar. It looked oddly stark and empty in the full light of day.
“Absolutely,” Gregor said. “It’s a waste of time, mind you, but I know what I’m doing.”
“If it’s a waste of time, why are you doing it?”
“Just to make sure I’m not making a mistake.”
He got out onto the sidewalk. The sign that said “Curzon Street” was halfway down. One of the things the boys on Cavanaugh Street had done all those years ago was to steal street signs and pile them up in front of somebody else’s front door. This looked like the result of random destruction, of the urge to damage for the sake of damage. He turned away from the sign and looked at the house. The yellow police barriers were still up. There was a young patrolman standing guard at the door.
Rob blushed. “It’s the neighborhood. Until the detectives sign off on the scene, we keep it sealed and we keep it guarded. If we don’t guard it, the seals won’t mean anything.”
Gregor wanted to ask who in the name of God would want to break into a house like this, but he didn’t, because there was a part of him that already knew the answer. He went up to the young patrolman at the door.
“Did you get our call?”
“Yes, I did,” the patrolman said. “Nice to meet you, Mr. Demarkian. I’ve seen you on the news.”
O’Shea and Fabereaux had just pulled up. Their car brakes squealed in that way they did when they needed a repair job, and before the car was fully stopped they got out. Gregor didn’t think he’d ever seen anybody do that except in the movies.