Glass Houses (32 page)

Everyone is hurt here, all the time. Everyone lives at a level of rage so high, all the time, that it's almost impossible to think. The world goes by in a fog of something toxic and debilitating. There is neither past nor future. There is only a bubble. This bubble. And inside this bubble, you'd might as well be dead.

Tyrell had thought of telling the reverend that, but he hadn't, and he wouldn't, even now. The reverend meant well. All the reverends Tyrell had ever met had meant well. The problem was they couldn't understand what they were seeing. They put it down to “the black underclass” or “black culture” or something else black; and if there was something Tyrell was sure of, it was that “black” had nothing to do with it. It was harder than that.

Legrand Hollis wasn't a victim of racism in the system. He had committed the three murders for which he was executed. He and his good friends, Jason Lacke and Morrisall Kendall, had kidnaped three Bryn Mawr teenagers who were in town to buy drugs, raped the hell out of them, and then cut them up with these big chromium-plated chef's knives they'd shoplifted from a store downtown. Tyrell had never had a moment's doubt about exactly what it was
that had happened. He could see Legrand standing back against a wall and those three boys out on the street, walking back and forth in the night with their L.L.Bean canvas windbreakers and their hair cut short and combed back and their clothes so clean they could have been hospital scrubs. Tyrell had seen kids like that himself over the years, ambassadors from a fantasy world open only to white people. Except that wasn't true. It was open to Koreans, too. They went back to their nice neighborhoods every night when they chained up their stores. It was even open to some black people, if they were odd alien black people, unlike any black people Tyrell—or Legrand—had ever known.

On the night before Legrand died, Tyrell laid awake all night in his cell, listening to his cell mate snore. He could see in his mind exactly what must have happened, and it scared the hell out of him worse than prison did because he could see it happening in himself. That was why he had finally let it all go. He was sure he had only two choices: to let it all go, or to die.

Last night, he wasn't sure he'd had any choices, or that he'd needed them. This was not his problem. He knew he wasn't the Plate Glass Killer, and he was sure no black man was either. When black men went in for serial killing, they didn't tie nylon cords neatly around their victims' throats, and they didn't act with deliberation. They did what Legrand had done. They got to the point where they couldn't keep the emotions under the surface.

No, Tyrell thought, pulling the metal barrier up over his head and getting his keys out to open the window grates. This wasn't his problem the way the others things had been. It was just that he didn't like to see things like that crowd had been last night. Even some of the police were part of the crowd. People got caught up in the bubble. They did it long term, and they did it short term. Nothing good ever came of getting caught up in the bubble.

He looked up the street and saw Charles Jellenmore ambling toward him, actually on time for once. Charles had his jacket unzipped and he was wearing that long-sleeved T-shirt under short-sleeved T-shirt combination that made Tyrell wild, but his jeans were up around his waist and nothing he had on looked as if he'd gotten it down at the Goodwill when his only choices had been to wear something six sizes too large or go naked.

He didn't even have music plugged into his ear, playing loudly enough to make him deaf and sending noise all up and down the street at six o'clock in the morning. Well, Tyrell thought, maybe God is listening to me after all.

“Hey,” Charles said.

“Good morning,” Tyrell said. He had the door unlocked. He opened it and wraved Charles through.

“I'm laid out,” Charles said. “I was up all night watching the cops. You see that? There had to be a hundred of them. Dead bodies in Kathleen Conge's basement. I bet she put them there herself.”

“I watched the news this morning,” Tyrell said. “They're saying it was older victims of the Plate Glass Killer.”

“It'll turn out to be the guy what lives in the ground-floor apartment, you wait. He's crazy. Kathleen told my mother he's got one whole wall full of pictures of murderers. Jeffrey Dahmer. Guys like that.”

“I know. Bennie Durban. You've seen him once or twice.”

“You know? And? Hell, doesn't anything get to you? They picked you up, and they didn't even look at some guy who puts up pictures of Dahmer?”

“They
did
pick him up,” Tyrell said. “After Rondelle Johnson died. They found her in some alley in the back of the place where he works, some Mexican place downtown, I think. Do you really think he put all these bodies in the basement at Kathleen's?”

“Who else? I mean, for God's sake, Tyrell, who else would it have been?”

Tyrell looked at the ceiling. “You ever been down to the basement at your place?”

“Sure.”

“And?”

“And what?”

“I listened to the news,” Tyrell said, “and what the news said was that the bodies, the skeletons mostly, were found in a root cellar at the back of the basement. Now, I deal with building inspectors and health inspectors and fire inspectors all the time. You can't have a dirt basement open to anybody who wants to wander through. You've got to brick it up, or you've got to seal it off to put it off-limits to your tenants. If you don't, they'll condemn the house.”

“So,” Charles said, “maybe nobody knew about the cellar. You know what people are. Maybe the landlord paid off a building inspector or something, and they just pretended like the cellar wasn't there.”

“Maybe,” Tyrell agreed, “but now you're talking about a lot of expensive bribes to get out of doing a relatively inexpensive repair. You got this corner of the basement that's still dirt, you block it off with something, put some drywall between it and the rest of the basement. Something. But it's cheap, and it doesn't risk some new guy coming onto the job and refusing to deal.”

“Okay,” Charles said, “so what. That's what the landlord did. Or maybe Kathleen. Who cares?”

“How did Bennie Durban get the bodies into the root cellar?”

“He did it before it was blocked off.”

“The only body they said anything about wasn't decomposed,” Tyrell said. “Or at least it wasn't decomposed all the way. That was on the news this morning, too. That means it was killed fairly recently.”

“Maybe they just blocked it off,” Charles said.

“Maybe,” Tyrell said. “But I doubt it.”

“Maybe he broke in,” Charles said. “Maybe nothing. What's with you this morning. You're talking like some guy playing a detective on television.”

“I know,” Tyrell said.

He unlocked the cash register. He had his operating cash in a plastic envelope in the inside pocket of his shirt. He picked it up from the bank every morning and worried himself sick going the six blocks to the store. He got it out now and started pouring dimes and quarters into the respective sections of the drawer.

“He's missing, did you know that?” he asked Charles. “Bennie Durban, the guy who lives over at Kathleen's. He's disappeared.”

“Well, I sure as hell would,” Charles said. “The cops pulled a bunch of bodies out of the cellar at the place I lived, I'd be in Las Vegas by now.”

“Right,” Tyrell said.

He doubted if Charles could find Las Vegas on a map, never mind get there with no money when the cops were looking for him. Come to think of it, he doubted if Bennie Durban could do that either. The kid had to be out on the streets somewhere, wandering around. He had to be scared to death. He might even be dangerous. But that wasn't the point.

“Watch the front for a minute, will you?” he asked Charles. Then he went into the storeroom and got out his copy of the big Philadelphia phone book. Usually, he used only the little hand-sized one that took in this neighborhood and the ones immediately around it, but now he was going way out of his comfort zone.

This was one thing he could not have anticipated, back when he was sitting in prison thinking it was time for him to get right with himself and right with the Lord.

Real life seemed to require a lot of taking responsibility for things that most people thought were none of their business.

E
lizabeth Woodville heard the
news just after breakfast. She would have heard it earlier, but she was having one of those days when it just seemed easier to give in and let Margaret have what she wanted. To do that, she had to sit at the dining room table while breakfast was brought in by the latest of a series of maids who lasted just long enough to hear what had happened to Conchita and then scurried off—all Henry's fault, Margaret would say, and none of their own, or the way they treated their help. Margaret sat at the foot of the table, where their mother had once sat, and rang a little bell whenever she wanted anything. She wanted everything, and often. She forgot that in the days when their father and mother had both been alive, breakfast had been
laid out as a buffet on the sideboard, and the help had been called only when the coffee was about to run out.

Elizabeth was not in the mood to go through another endless round of what had and had not been done in this house when their mother had been alive. She was less in the mood to listen to Margaret's repetitive rant about Henry's mother and all that was wrong with her. For the first time since the night on which Henry had been picked up, she'd gotten a good night's sleep, and without any jerky little dreams starring the death penalty. She wanted to spend her day drinking tea and reading books and watching television only rarely, with the cable stations on, so that she didn't see any news. Either that, or going over the papers for the IPO one more time, or going over the books the accountants had left copies of for her because the SEC had to sign off on them. It used to be easier to do deals like this. Elizabeth was sure. If it hadn't been, American capitalism would never have gotten off the ground.

She finished two pieces of toast and two cups of Earl Grey tea while Margaret was giving a running commentary on the contents of the least riveting sections of the newspaper.

“Oh, look,” Margaret said, “the Zellenhalls are selling that monstrosity they've got out in Wayne. I never understood what they wanted with a house in Wayne anyway. Nobody lives there. It's the German blood, probably, wouldn't you think? They probably had something to hide during the war.”

Elizabeth wondered if Margaret really believed half the things she said, or if she just said them on the principle that civilized people conversed during meals and stayed off the subjects of religion and politics. It seemed a bit much even for Margaret to equate owning a hideous house in a tacky town with collaboration with the Nazis. Elizabeth took her napkin off her lap and folded it on her plate. There were no napkin rings in the Tyder house. Napkin rings were the mark of people who had inadequate standards of cleanliness. You put your dirty napkin in the ring and used it, still dirty, the next time a meal came around. Elizabeth literally couldn't remember if their mother had used napkin rings or not. It was not the kind of thing she remembered.

“I'm going to get some work done on my book,” she told Margaret.

Margaret sniffed. “You've been working on that book forever. You're never going to finish it. And I don't see why you'd want to finish it anyway. Even if you could find somebody to publish it, why would you want somebody to? It's like you're invading your own privacy. You'd certainly be invading mine.”

Elizabeth was going to say that if she changed the focus just a bit, and put it on Henry, she could surely find a publisher for it
now.
True crime sold very well. She didn't say it because she didn't want to end up in another argument. Maybe later this afternoon, she'd go to mass. It was a way to get out of the house without having to meet anybody she knew, except in circumstances
where it would not be rude to refuse to talk. That sounded good. The part about getting out of the house sounded especially good.

She went to the den and shut the door. She booted up the computer and watched the icons flicker onto the desktop. She opened AOL and signed on without thinking about it. Then, just a split second too late, she realized what she'd done.

The picture on the AOL welcome screen was a cliche out of dozens of crime and horror movies. It reminded Elizabeth, at once, of the opening scenes of
The Amityville Horror.
It was dark. There were police and ambulance personnel and a bright yellow police line. Somebody was being carried out of a house in a body bag.

“Grisly Find in Philadelphia,” the headline said, and then, in that annoying way AOL had recently become accustomed to: “Find Out What It Means to Famous Case.”

Elizabeth tapped the fingernails of her left hand against the top of the desk. The sound they made was faintly metallic. “A famous case” could be any case at all. John Wayne Gacy was a famous case, and it had happened in Philadelphia, too. The police could be hauling bodies out of some house Gacy had had contact with that they didn't know about before. The welcome screen kept changing, from news to entertainment to lifestyle to Elizabeth didn't know what. None of the headlines delivered any real news. All of them were designed to make you want to go someplace else, follow a link, stumble your way to even more advertisements. The only reason Elizabeth kept on with AOL was that she'd been on it so long it felt like too much trouble to change: all that unsubscribing to newsletters and e-mail discussion lists and resubscribing under a new e-mail address; all that time spent getting used to a different system. She moved the mouse and clicked back to the original set of headlines. They still told her nothing very informative.