Glass Houses (33 page)

What she wanted to do—what she should have done—was to open the word processing program and forget about the Internet altogether. What she did instead was to close the AOL welcome window and type in the URL for CNN, because the one thing she could be sure of on the CNN site was that its lead story would have enough of an explanation to go along with it that the reader would be able to understand what it was about. CNN opened and she saw the same picture she had seen on the AOL news window, only bigger, and easier to make out. The police seemed to be surrounded by an army of people, stretching out into infinity. There was more than one body bag.

“Grisly Find in Philadelphia,” the headline said, as if the writers for CNN were the same people who wrote for AOL. And maybe they were. Elizabeth hadn't kept track of corporate takeovers and consolidations any time lately. She read the little paragraph under the headline.

“In the early hours of this morning, Philadelphia police and rescue workers walked seven body bags out of the basement of a house in South Philadelphia. The body bags are believed to contain body parts of victims of a serial killer . . .” and then moved her mouse to click on “more.” Not only did all these places have the same writers, they had the same site designers, too.

The new window was just loading—she had to get a new computer, everything took forever to load these days—when the telephone rang. She didn't pick it up. Ever since Henry had been arrested, they'd depended more and more on the answering machine. The new CNN window had more pictures: more police; more body bags; Gregor Demarkian.

Elizabeth stared for a moment at Gregor Demarkian, and then Russ Donahue's voice came out of the answering machine. “Mrs. Woodville? Mrs. Beaufort? This is Russ Donahue. I called to say that we don't know as yet if what the police found last night will have any bearing on Henry's case, although the rumors all tend to point in the direction of—”

Elizabeth picked up the phone. A shrieking buzz hit her ear, meaning the answering machine had noticed the pickup. Why couldn't they fix something like that?

“Russ?” she said. “It's Elizabeth. I've got no idea what's going on. I don't think Margaret does either. I was just looking at CNN and trying to figure out what happened.”

“Nobody knows what happened,” Russ said. “I don't think even Gregor knows. Except for, you know, the obvious. The police pulled a number of partially decayed body parts out of the cellar of a house where a man who had been picked up before in the Plate Glass case—”

“Wait,” Elizabeth said. “The body parts—or is it bodies?—were in a house where one of the former suspects lived? And they were decayed?”

“Partially decayed, most of them.”

“And the police didn't find them when they checked into this man the first time? They didn't search the house he lived in?”

“Nobody knows what they did,” Russ said. “Everything's a mess, and Gregor is wandering around the neighborhood swearing under his breath, and he never swears. The whole thing is a disaster, but the reason I called is, disaster or not, I can't use it to get Henry out of jail just yet. There's not enough to go on. There's not even enough to be sure that these body parts will turn out to be part of the Plate Glass Killer case. Things are just a mess.”

“All right,” Elizabeth said. “But there's some reason, isn't there, why you would think they would be connected? And CNN would think so? Because that's what this says here.”

“There were rumors last night, yes,” Russ said. “Mostly that some of the parts had been found with nylon cords around them. But the thing is, I didn't
see them. I didn't get any first-hand corroboration from any of the officers on the case—”

“Why not?”

“Because I'm the enemy; they don't talk to me. And Rob Benedetti, that's the district attorney, who does talk to me, wasn't talking to anybody. It would help if you knew if your brother had any connection at all with the house at 11527 Curzon Street.”

“Of course he had some connection,” Elizabeth said patiently. “It's a Green Point house. We own, I don't know, close to half the properties in that neighborhood, I think.”

“I'm going to go in and see if Henry can tell me anything about it, but you know what Henry is like. If he doesn't want to cooperate, he doesn't cooperate.”

“I know.”

“My tendency is to think this is going to be good news,” Russ said. “I mean, not good, you know. It's not good that people died. But good for Henry. I think there will be a connection to the Plate Glass Killer, and I'm fairly sure we'll be able to prove that Henry could not have gotten into that house and then into that basement. But that's just fairly sure. It's not certain.”

Elizabeth looked back at the CNN window and ran the tip of her finger over the picture of Gregor Demarkian's face. She was fairly sure that they would be able to prove that Henry had had no connection to the body or bodies in that basement, but not because he hadn't had access to the basement or the house. Anybody at Green Point had access to the basement and the house. She put it out of her mind.

“Just tell me this,” she said. “Does this make it less likely that even if Henry is convicted, he'd get the death penalty?”

B
ennis was asleep on
the couch when Gregor got home at five in the morning, and up and gone by the time he awoke again at five minutes to eight. Gregor threw himself in the shower and tried to think. Part of him was still boiling obsessively about the mess the Plate Glass Killer case was in. That had to say something—good or bad, he wasn't sure—about what he did and did not feel for Bennis Hannaford. He threw enough cold water on himself to make himself believe he was awake. Then he got dressed and went down the long hall to the apartment's living room and kitchen. Bennis had left him a note on the refrigerator door, held up by a magnet of a frog peddling madly in a butter churn. SOMEBODY NAMED ALISON CALLED, the note said. SHE SEEMS TO THINK YOU SHOULD CALL HER BACK.

If Gregor had spent any time studying literature, he might have been able to figure out what a sentence construction like that one was supposed to mean, but he hadn't, and he was too tired to let himself get sucked into the complicated world of messages and hints. He thought about going to the Ararat and decided against it. It was past the time he usually had breakfast. The people he usually had breakfast with would be finished with theirs and on their way to getting on with their days. Bennis would be there, too, and there might be a whole half hour of messages and hints.

He put water on to boil and found the little box of coffee bags he'd learned to use instead of the percolator. He did not remind himself that Tibor could murder even coffee bag coffee. He got a clean mug from the cabinet and a clean spoon from the drawer. He put them down on the table and found a little stack of glossy paper next to a purple-and-gold box.
BOX HILL CONFECTIONS
, the box said. Then there was a web address:
www.boxhillconfections.com.

He pulled the purple-and-gold box to him and opened it. It was full of small, intense-looking chocolates made into balls and pyramids and rounds. There were only a couple of pieces gone from the top, which had to be big
news. An upset Bennis was a Bennis eating a lot of chocolate. He checked the second layer. It was full.

“There was another box,” Bennis said, her voice coming from behind him at the kitchen door. “I finished those last night.”

“Ah,” Gregor said. His kettle was going off. He turned around and got it off the burner.

“I came back to see how you were,” Bennis said. “You were gone all night. Although my guess is not with a woman named Alison, since she's looking for you, too.”

“I was out at a crime scene,” Gregor said, filling his cup so close to the brim only surface tension kept it from spilling. “Russ was there with me, in case you feel like checking up on my movements. Along with Rob Benedetti, who's the district attorney, and about ten thousand Philadelphia cops.”

Bennis came to sit down at the table. She reached into the purple-and-gold box and got a chocolate with a molded head of King Tut on the top of it. “Lemon cremes,” she said. “The best lemon cremes you can get anywhere. Godiva doesn't even make lemon cremes any more. I really wasn't checking up on you. You were gone all night. You had me worried.”

“I know.”

“You know, I don't have to stay,” Bennis said. “If you're that upset about it, I can move back up to my own apartment. Or take off for London, if you'd prefer. You don't have to stop going to the Ararat for breakfast because of me.”

“I didn't not go to the Ararat for breakfast because of you,” Gregor said, trying the coffee. It wasn't too bad. It wasn't lethal, the way he made it when he tried to percolate it himself. “I was just tired, I'd been out all night. I hadn't had much sleep. I'm completely messed up, and I can't afford to go back to sleep.”

“Why not?”

“Because John Jackman's idea of a good time is to assign two guys who hate each other to partner each other, and then assign that partnership to the head of the most serious case in the city right in the middle of his run for mayor.”

“Did John really do that?”

“Not quite,” Gregor conceded. “There are discrimination lawsuits and court decrees involved. With the partnership anyway. The case is something else. I'm supposed to be getting a call from Rob's office letting me know when I can go down there and start shifting through the material they've got. Assuming they've got any.”

“They've got a serial killer case, and you think they won't have any material?”

“I think that the two idiots who've been in charge of it until now are capable of anything, including not bothering to do the paperwork because the
other guy was supposed to do the paperwork, and you can't blame either of them for the paperwork not being there because it was the other guy's—”

“Wait.”

“Sorry. That's the kind of thing it is. We've got eleven people dead who have been connected to the Plate Glass Killer case. I assume we've actually got some dead bodies who fit a pattern you could call the Plate Glass Killer pattern. After that, I don't know. Here's the thing, Bennis. I don't want to talk about it.”

“You don't want to talk about the Plate Glass Killer case?” Bennis looked surprised.

Gregor shook his head. “I don't want to talk about us. I've been thinking about it. I was wrong before. You don't owe me an explanation. We've been living in each other's laps for years but, you know what, I don't have a franchise. So I don't want to talk about how you feel and how I feel. I don't want to explore our emotions. I never want to explore anybody's emotions. Reading Jane Austen makes me nervous. I just want to let all that go.”

“Yesterday, you wanted a complete explanation, with footnotes.”

“I know. I was wrong. I was very wrong. The whole thing was impossible. I think you were right. I think we need to get married.”

Bennis tilted her head. “There's a catch here. I know there's a catch here.”

“It has to do with franchises,” Gregor said.

“Franchises. What kind of franchises? McDonald's? You haven't been eating at McDonald's again, have you?”

“Detectives working a case have to have a franchise, or they don't have access to information,” Gregor said. “That's why I never bothered to get a private detective's license and that's why I don't operate as a private detective. Private detectives have no franchise. If I get called in as a consultant by the police department, I've got a franchise. Which doesn't mean I don't help people out on a private level, just—”

“Yes, okay, I get it,” Bennis said. “I just don't get what that has to do with us.”

“You don't owe me any explanation. We don't have any kind of an agreement that I remember. I'll accept your offer. We'll get married. Tomorrow, if you want to. We can go down to Maryland. I think they still have that thing where there's no waiting period for a marriage license.”

Bennis took another chocolate out of the purple-and-gold box and stared at him. “There's a catch to this somewhere,” she said. “I just can't see where.”

“There's no catch to the marriage part. I want to marry you, Bennis. I've wanted to marry you for half a decade. To all intents and purposes, we've
been
married for half a decade. Except that there was no formal agreement, and there was no explicit understanding, so I didn't have a franchise. And still don't.”

“Wait,” Bennis said. “I think I get this. If we get married, I'm your wife, and that's a franchise, so you have the right to demand any information you want.”

“Something like that.”

“Why won't you believe me when I tell you that there isn't any information to have? I really didn't do anything but read a lot and have drinks alone on terraces and feel sorry for myself.”

“If that's the case, Bennis, you're even crazier than I think you are, and we're doomed. Think about it. Maryland's a good idea.”

“I had something more like a, you know, wedding in mind. Donna deco-rating. Tommy as ring bearer.”

The phone rang. They both turned to look at the door to the living room. It was propped back with a rubber doorstop. It usually was.

“That will be Rob Benedetti's office,” Gregor said, getting up. “Or some-body calling at the request of Rob Benedetti's office. I've got to get to work.”

“I really would rather have an actual wedding,” Bennis said.

“I really would rather have a life that didn't come apart at the seams every time you have insufficient chocolate in the house. It's time to do something, Bennis. It really is. So let's do it. Oh, and one more thing.”