Glass Houses (3 page)

She went over to one of the big chairs and sat down in it. Then she got up and got the remote control from the top of the television set. She sat back down again. She still had her scotch in one hand. She put it down on a small side table next to the chair. She aimed the remote at the television set and pushed the power button.

Really, she thought. She didn't remember that Americans talked that fast, or threw so much at you at once, but maybe that was the first of the differences between the Red States and the Blue States. She could put it in her article along with the story about the alley. And she had no reason to be surprised about the apartment. Bennis Hannaford was a rich woman. She surely had rich friends. The picture on the television screen made no sense to her. She looked at the remote, found a button that said “channel” on it, and pushed that. The channel changed. The program changed. A picture came on that looked like a newsman giving a report, and she stopped at that.

“In local news tonight,” the man said, “police spokesman Ronald Garrity has confirmed that what is presumed to be the eleventh victim of the Plate Glass Killer was found this evening in an alley on Society Hill. A man found at the scene has been taken in for questioning.

“There is no information as to the identity of the man at this time, and no word as to whether police consider him a suspect in the series of murders that have been plaguing Philadelphia for the last thirteen months. The Plate Glass Killer—”

But Phillipa didn't listen to anymore. She was suddenly feeling infinitely better, and the better she felt, the hungrier she was.

She got up out of the chair and headed for the kitchen to find out if there was anything really decent to put in the microwave.

M
argaret Beaufort had a
whole list of things she considered too outrageous to be tolerated, and on the top of that list were police departments that couldn't do their jobs. The job of a police department was both simple and undeniable. It was to keep the peace, and keep the people who were likely to cause trouble off the streets and away from decent people. If Margaret had had her way, the people who needed to be kept off the streets would
include garbage collectors (unless they were collecting garbage) and day laborers (at any time at all), and the only people allowed to walk around neighborhoods like this one would be the people who lived in them and the people they hired as staff. Margaret was sure that life had been like this once when she was a child. She couldn't remember ever seeing rough men walking the sidewalks when she was on her way to school. She was sure her mother had never been knocked into by some teenager carrying an enormous music player and paying no attention to where he was going. In fact, her childhood was a golden haze that sometimes seemed more real to her than the life she was living now: going to school every morning in the navy blue uniforms that marked her out as a Sacred Heart girl; stopping on the way home at a little store that sold nonpareils and red hot dollars; driving up into the mountains at the beginning of August to escape the heat. She'd especially liked the driving, even though it had meant riding in the backseat of the Pontiac with her sister, Elizabeth, and later—much later, when things were already beginning to go wrong—with her half brother Henry. It had been a long time since she had had a vacation.

It had also been a long time since she had been this nervous. Margaret was not, usually, a nervous woman. She had seen herself through three pregnancies and three miscarriages. She had weathered her late husband's serial affairs in a manner that would have made her mother cheer. She had even managed to tough her way through that most awful time of all, during the protests in the sixties, when it seemed like all the people who should be kept off the streets were actually in the middle of them, carrying signs. She was tall and fair and florid and just slightly running to fat; and if she wanted someone to know she was unhappy with him, she didn't have to raise her voice.

Now she tried raising the volume on the television set they kept in the spare room, as if by doing that she could change the content of the story being repeated on it. She'd already listened to this story once, half an hour ago, when it had appeared on the first of the local nightly newscasts she made it her business to watch every evening. The newscasts were the excuse she made for not putting her foot down and making Elizabeth get rid of the television entirely. In their childhood, people of good family didn't own televisions. They had them in the maids' rooms for the maids, who couldn't help watching them because they were uneducated. She didn't like to think of what it said about both of them that Elizabeth was now addicted to at least three soap operas and would give up an afternoon at the Philadelphia Museum of Art to watch the latest installment of
Days of Our Lives.

Elizabeth was in the kitchen, sitting calmly at the little round table in the breakfast nook drinking tea. Her response to this crisis had not been satisfactory. As far as Margaret was concerned, nothing Elizabeth ever did had ever
been satisfactory. Even in their childhood, she had been both an embarrassment and a thorn.

The kitchen was just across the hall from the spare room. Margaret gave one last look at the television set—they'd gone on to something else anyway; there was corruption in the Mayor's Office, again—and went to find her sister. She could hear the light
chink
of china on china as Elizabeth put her cup into her saucer and picked it up again. If she was running true to form, she'd be doing the crossword puzzle when Margaret came in.

Elizabeth was doing the crossword puzzle. She was also wearing sweat-pants and a sweatshirt, both black and oversized, ballooning around her small, spare frame.

“Really,” Margaret said. “You look like one of those women in the park, the old ladies who jog and think it's going to make them younger.”

“I don't jog.”

“I know you don't. You don't do anything anymore. Why wouldn't you come and listen to the story?”

“I did come and listen to the story.”

“I mean this time, on CBS.”

“It was the same story, Margaret. You can't honestly tell me they gave you any new information.”

“They might have,” Margaret said defensively. “It's a breaking story. It just happened. There could be new information at any moment.”

“But there wasn't.”

“No, there wasn't. But still.”

“It will all come out in the paper tomorrow, Margaret, or on the news. It's not so important that I have to hear about it right away. Sit down and relax a little.”

Margaret didn't sit down. She went to the window over the sink instead. In their childhood, the family never came into the kitchen except to check on what the cook was doing. Now they ate in here all the time.

“Doesn't it matter to you at all? She was our maid. We knew her. A little, at any rate, because she didn't speak English. But we knew her. And then there were the police, and all that trouble over Henry. He could have been arrested.”

“Maybe he has been,” Elizabeth said.

“Do be serious.”

Elizabeth put down her crossword puzzle. “I am being serious. They said a man had been taken in for questioning, but they didn't say who the man was, did they? Why couldn't it have been Henry?”

“Henry could never commit a murder,” Margaret said, “never mind eleven of them. This was the eleventh, did you know that? Anyway, we discussed all
this when Conchita died. You agreed with me that Henry is not, well, not misformed in just that particular way. He isn't a
violent
man.”

“No, he's not,” Elizabeth said. “But I wasn't saying that he
might
have committed the murder; I was saying he might have been
arrested
for it. It's not that farfetched, Margaret. The story said the body had been found on Society Hill.”

“There are a lot of people who live on Society Hill. Henry isn't one of them. He lives here with us.”

“He stays here with us when he's sober,” Elizabeth said, “but he's not sober a lot of the time, is he? And he does like to hang out on Society Hill. He's got less of a chance of getting rolled there. He may be a drunk, but he's not an idiot.”

“So you think he's the man in the story, the one they didn't name? You think that's Henry. But when the police were here they said he couldn't be the Picture Window Killer, or whatever it is—”

“Plate Glass Killer.”

“—because he had an alibi for one of the deaths. Or something like that. There was a reason he couldn't be. So they wouldn't arrest him, would they, since they already knew that.”

“I don't know,” Elizabeth said.

Margaret came back to the table and sat down. Now she was more than nervous. She had reached a level of panic the like of which she hadn't had since menopause, when everything in her life was in panic. It was odd how it went. It was when you were young that you were supposed to be excited and frightened. When you got older you were supposed to mellow into a mature wisdom that made you both calm and happy. She reached into the fruit bowl in the middle of the table and took out an apple. She didn't really like apples. She didn't want to eat one.

“We knew she was going to be trouble, didn't we?” Margaret asked, noticing with a certain amount of annoyance that Elizabeth was doing the crossword again, “when she first came here. When she first married Daddy. We knew she was going to be trouble.”

“She's been dead and buried for thirty years.”

“She was an alcoholic,” Margaret said stubbornly. “That's why Henry is an alcoholic. We should have seen that coming a long time ago. We should have had him committed.”

“You can't just have people committed against their wills,” Elizabeth said. “Not unless they're convicted of something, and Henry has never been convicted of anything. He doesn't even drive.”

“Still. We should have done something. Daddy would have done something. He did something about her in the end.”

“She was hospitalized for alcohol poisoning. Daddy had nothing to do with it.”

“I keep expecting him to show up on one of those programs.
American justice.
Or
Investigative Reports.
They'll do a program on the black sheep of prominent families, and there he'll be, sleeping on the sidewalk with newspapers all over him and his shoes in shreds. I don't understand why he doesn't just come home. I don't understand why he has to live his life out in public like that.”

“He isn't living his life in public, Margaret. He's just living it away from us.”

Margaret put the apple back and went to the stove. She'd make herself some coffee. If it was earlier in the day, she could have had the new maid get it for her, but the new maid wasn't living in. Nobody wanted to live in at their house at the moment because of what had happened to Conchita and the fact that it had happened right in their own back courtyard. Conchita. In her childhood, maids were either Irish or black. They had names like Kathleen and Lydia. They spoke English with accents, but they spoke it well.

Margaret pulled the coffeemaker out of the little roll-front wooden appliance port they had had built into the kitchen counter. “I think you'd care more,” she said. “You found her. Wasn't it horrible? Doesn't it matter to you that our own maid was strangled with a nylon cord and her face was all cut up by pieces of glass?”

“Of course it matters to me.”

“You don't act like it. You act as if it had nothing to do with us, but it does. Because it was our maid. Because of Henry. Because of a lot of things. I was thinking before about what it was like, growing up in this house.”

“It was a nightmare.”

“Not for me, it wasn't. It was a wonderful thing. It was calm. And organized. I remember something Mother said once when we were very small—not to me, to one of her friends. I was playing in the room and they didn't notice me. She said that somebody they knew lived a very disordered life.' And I knew what she meant. Immediately. That's the problem with all this. It's as if we live very disordered lives.”

“Henry does.”

“I know he does. But I don't want to. I don't want that to be me.”

“If Henry's in trouble, there's not much either one of us can do about it. Drink decaf instead of the regular stuff. It's only going to make your nerves even worse.”

Margaret did not think her nerves could be any worse than they were, and she did not drink decaffeinated coffee for the same reason she did not eat potato chips. There was a difference between real food and fake, and decent people—people with ordered lives—didn't eat the fake kind. She got a thick
ceramic mug out of one of the cabinets and put it to the side. She'd take the coffee into the spare room and see if there would be any mention of the story on the national news, although she doubted it. Philadelphia didn't have the same influence on the rest of the country that it used to have.

She was just carefully filling the coffeemaker with coffee when Elizabeth cleared her throat.

“You know,” Elizabeth said, “there's one good reason not to worry about any of this yet. One sensible reason, I mean.”

“And what's that?”

“Henry hasn't called. They get one phone call when they're arrested, and Henry knows the number here by heart. If he'd been arrested, he would have called.”

Margaret brightened. “That's right,” she said. “That's right. I'd forgotten about that. I wish you'd said that in the beginning. It must have been hours since all this happened. They don't get these things on the news right away. If he'd been the one they picked up, he would have called by now.”

She poured water over the coffee, fitted the lid back on the coffeemaker and stepped back to wait for actual coffee to come out the other side. She felt relieved, very relieved, so relieved she almost thought she must have lost weight.