Glass Houses (22 page)

“That's why you killed her? Because she smelled like cinnamon?”

“I don't know what any of the rest of them smelled like. Not even this last one. I don't know anything about this last one except that there was blood on the ground next to her body. It should have smelled like something, but it didn't.”

“Go back to sleep,” the guard said. “You're not making any sense.”

Henry closed his eyes. He could hear the guard moving away. He
was
making sense. Conchita smelled like cinnamon. In closed rooms, the smell was particularly strong. She hummed Spanish songs to herself when she was working in a room by herself. Even when she thought she was alone, she wouldn't sing out loud. She had a Spanish prayer book that she kept in the top drawer of the dresser in her room at the top of the house. Her window looked out onto the street from three stories up.

He turned on his bunk again, toward the wall this time. He pulled the blanket up high on his shoulders. He would have liked to disappear under it and reappear when everything was over, whenever that was. He'd looked around, though. The guard was right. This was jail, not prison. It wouldn't be hard to get yourself out of here, if you planned it right and had someone to help you. It didn't have to be a particularly intelligent someone.

He closed his eyes. Conchita smelled like cinnamon, but he had never smelled any of the rest of them at all.

G
regor Demarkian firmly believed
in facing up to his problems. There was nothing to be gained from evasion, and procrastination positively hurt. He knew that from his professional life, and from the time when his wife, Elizabeth, had been dying. He knew it so well that he sometimes dreamed about it. He had no idea why, when he saw his own number flashing at him from the caller ID line on his cell phone, he put the phone back in his pocket and pretended it had never rung in the first place.

Actually, he thought, getting into the cab that would take him home, he knew exactly why he had done what he had done, and Alison knew it, too. He hadn't even needed to tell her who had called.

“Listen,” she said, as they stood together on the sidewalk outside Ascorda Mariscos. “I've been waiting for this shoe to drop for months.”

“So have I.”

“I know you have. And it's not as if—well, as if anything had happened. You're very old-fashioned in that sort of way, did you know that?”

Gregor did, in fact, know that. It was just that he hadn't thought of it in those terms. “I'm just not eighteen anymore,” he said. “I can't just hop around, as if it didn't matter.”

“I don't think you could ever just hop around as if it didn't matter. Here's the cab. Say hello for me.”

“To Bennis? Do you know her?”

“We met once. I'd forgotten all about it, but I got the publication in the mail today. We were on a panel at the Modern Language Association: Women Writers and the Changing Subtext of Gender, or something like that.”

Gregor couldn't imagine Bennis on a panel discussing something called the “subtext of gender”—or he could imagine it, but only if she were being sarcastic as hell—but he said nothing about it and got into the cab as if it were any other cab, going anywhere else, at any other time. He had his arms full of
material for the case, and he should have cared about it. That was especially so because he was doing a favor for Russ, and because he'd seen enough of it by now to know that something was wrong with it. The landscape outside the cab's windows was unfamiliar and dark. It was too warm for the season, and people were behaving as if it were already June. He wondered why it was that almost all the people you saw on city streets were walking alone.

Here was the thing that he couldn't quite get out of his mind. He had married young, and to a woman he had known all his life, from that very same Cavanaugh Street he lived on now. Except that Cavanaugh Street wasn't the same, and that was part of the point. In his childhood, Cavanaugh Street had been an immigrant neighborhood. Gregor and the boys and girls of his generation had been born in the United States, but their parents had universally been born in Armenia, and most of them had come to America fleeing persecution. Armenian was the language they had spoken at home. Armenian was the language he had spoken on the day he showed up at the local schoolhouse to start first grade. There was no kindergarten in most of Philadelphia's public schools then, and there was certainly no such thing as bilingual education. You got thrown in the water. You sank or swam. As it turned out, Gregor had swum very well.

Here was the thing again. It didn't matter how well you swam. You had to swim. You couldn't float. Life was a constant and unrelenting challenge. Every moment of it had to be earned. Every step forward was bought at the cost of constant vigilance. First there was learning English. Then there was learning English without an accent. He didn't know, then, that he was only learning it with a Philadelphia accent. Philadelphia was better than Armenia, as far as accents went. After you got through that part, there was more. There was schoolwork, which had to be near perfect. Rich American kids from the Main Line went to the Ivy League with mediocre grades in those days, but Armenian kids with no money only went if they were spectacular in almost every way. Gregor had made himself spectacular in almost every way. He had been valedictorian of his high school graduating class. It was only the local public high school, but it was a good one in those days. It was a period when the city had taken public education seriously.

He wondered sometimes if he would have applied to the University of Pennsylvania if he had understood that it was not the state university. Penn State was the state university. The University of Pennsylvania was private and Ivy League, and Gregor had gone walking up to his interview without a clue as to what he was getting himself into. He had made the most fateful decision of his life—to live at home and commute, rather than asking his parents to foot the bill for a dorm room—without knowing what he was getting himself into either. The next thing he knew, he was a ghost: academically talented and
a stand-out student in all of his classes, but invisible otherwise to a student body that not only lived on campus but went home to suburbs where the houses stood back on green lawns and the families never raised their voices above a whisper.

He had married Elizabeth because he was a ghost and because he knew he would go on being a ghost when he went to Harvard Business School. The ghostlike quality was a function of something at the core of himself that he could not change. He would only learn to use it to his advantage in the army. Elizabeth, though, was exactly what he needed. Like him, she did not fit any-where anymore by the time she was in her early twenties. She didn't fit in at Beaver College, where she had a scholarship and did live in a dorm, but couldn't dress the way the other girls did and didn't understand the things they talked about. She didn't fit in on the old, immigrant Cavanaugh Street anymore either. They fit together because they understood each other. If they had had children, they would have raised them, scrupulously, to be “Americans.”

This, Gregor thought, realizing that the cab was stuck in traffic yet again, and it was the middle of the night. There weren't supposed to be traffic backups in the middle of the night in Philadelphia. That was for Washington, D.C. This was the difference, between him and Bennis. This was why Bennis's behavior made no sense to him, and why his behavior made no sense to Bennis.

He didn't want to underestimate, for a moment, the hell her childhood had been. He'd heard all about it, and he'd met both her parents and all her brothers and sisters, and he was ready to testify before the gate of heaven that Bennis's growing up had been hell on wheels. But—and this was a significant but—it had not been a childhood of being out of place. If Bennis Day Hannaford was anything, it was spectacularly
in
place. She didn't have to earn the right to be an American. She'd had relatives who'd earned it for her: two signers of the Declaration of Independence; four dead in the Revolutionary War; three delegates to the Constitutional Convention; five congressmen; six senators; two captains; and four ordinary soldiers in the Union army during the Civil War. It went on and on and on. Bennis's family was like a living history of the United States.

It was also a living history of the Philadelphia Main Line, which meant that no matter what she did, how odd she was next to the people she grew up with, she automatically belonged. Subdeb subscription dances, deb balls, country club memberships, women's club memberships, invitations to sit on the boards of charities: all of those things were hers because she was Bennis Day Hannaford, automatically, without any effort on her part. So was admission to the Madeira School and later to Vassar College. So were invitations to fox hunts in Virginia, which she never accepted because she didn't like horses and she had nothing against letting the poor foxes live. So were a hundred other things
that Gregor knew about only vaguely because Bennis was sure enough in her right to them not to care if she had them or not.

And that, right there, was what he had been trying to get at during all these long months she had been gone. That was the issue, the
real
issue, no matter what it was that made her leave or what it was she was going to want to talk about once he finally got home. Gregor Demarkian had had what other people would probably have called an illustrious career. He had been hired by the FBI as a special agent right out of business school. That was good because he had gone to business school in order to be able to join the Bureau. He certainly hadn't been interested in going to work for a widget manufacturer. But the Bureau had obliged, and even in the days when Hoover was in power and didn't much like “ethnics,” it had promoted him rapidly. It had given him the job of forming and implementing the new Behavioral Sciences Unit that was supposed to track the interstate movements of serial killers and compile re-search on how those killers operated. It had introduced him to presidents of the United States and senators and congressmen without number. What it had never been able to do, what even leaving and losing Elizabeth had not done, was make him fit.

The cab was pulling into Cavanaugh Street. He could see Linda Melajian standing on the steps to Donna's front door with Donna's Tommy in tow, talking to Hannah Krekorian. On Cavanaugh Street, Gregor Demarkian fit. It wasn't that he was exactly like the other people who lived here, but they were alike in that one sense—the sense of being the first generation born in America, of having to earn their way to being American—that he needed in order to relax. He was never relaxed around Bennis, no matter how close they got, and he didn't know if he ever would be.

He got out of the cab and paid the driver. He was three blocks from his own house, but he didn't want to come up on it too soon. He really didn't want to pull up to the front door only to realize that both his apartment and Bennis's were dark. He stopped at Ohanian's Middle Eastern Food Store and bought a copy of
The Inquirer
and of the
Ethniko Kirix.
The
Kirix
was a Greek paper, but it carried Armenian news in its English-language section. He never bought the
Kirix.
He had no idea what he was doing.

He went back out on the street and started to walk home, passing the Ararat from the other side so that he didn't get dragged in by somebody who wanted to talk about Bennis. He passed Holy Trinity Church. Its front facade was lit up and one of the doors was standing open. Tibor had become more and more convinced that there were some things on which the Catholics were entirely right, and keeping the church open all day and night so that anybody who wanted to pray could come in and do it was one of them. Gregor had given up giving lectures about safety and security.

He was on the other side of the street from his own house. He stopped in front of Lida's and turned to look up at the flat stone exterior. Donna Moradanyan was pregnant, so nothing on the street was decorated, since she couldn't get up a ladder to the roof in the shape she was in. Gregor missed the decorations. He missed a lot of things.

He looked up and up and up, becoming aware only at the last minute that he was keeping his fingers crossed. He uncrossed them. He didn't like superstitions. He didn't like irrationality. People who filled their lives with omens and talismans scared the hell out of him.

He looked up some more and saw that all the lights in Bennis's apartment were on. He looked again and saw that all the lights in his apartment were, too.

What was more, he could see Bennis herself, moving in front of his own big picture window, back and forth, back and forth, as if she were pacing.

He didn't think she was. Bennis never paced.

H
e got halfway up
the stairs before he accepted the fact that he was a coward. He'd been in his share of shoot-outs. He'd even been in the army. There wasn't a serial killer on earth who frightened him as much as Bennis did. He thought about stopping off at old George Tekemanian's apartment on the ground floor, but old George was visiting relatives out in Bucks County. He thought of going all the way to the top and seeing if Grace was in and not practicing; but Grace was always practicing if she was in, and there was the chance that Bennis would come out onto the landing while he was still on the stairs. There had to be, there really had to be, a better way to do things like this.

He made his way up to his own landing and got out his key. He listened at the door, but if there was somebody inside, she was too far inside to be heard from where he was standing. He thought about Alison, who did not make him crazy like this. He thought about the fact that he knew that that meant that he was never going to be in love with Alison. He thought about the fact that he didn't like the entire idea of being “in love,” since it seemed to have everything to do with emotion and nothing to do with common sense.