Glass Houses (50 page)

“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.”

T
his 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.

“Here we are,” Rob said. “Do you actually have some idea of what you're doing here?”

“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.

The two detectives came up to the door where Gregor and Rob were standing.

“You've looked this place over?” Gregor asked.

“Not really,” O'Shea said. “We did a cursory run through, but we're going to keep the barriers up at least a few more days so that we can get up to speed. With the situation the way it is, with Marty and Cord, you know—”

“Yeah,” Rob Benedetti said.

“It's okay,” Gregor said. “I won't touch anything. I just want to see. First, I want to see something out here. There's an alley?”

“Right to the side of the house,” O'Shea said.

“It goes to a back courtyard?” Gregor gestured in the vague direction.

“Right to the back,” O'Shea said again.

“And there's no door directly onto the alley?” Gregor said.

“There's a door at the back,” Fabereaux said. “You asked us to check and we did. There's a door at the back that goes to the little space where the garbage cans and stuff are kept until somebody brings them out on garbage day. But there's nothing directly onto the alley.”

“Let's see,” Gregor said.

O'Shea and Fabereaux led the way, and they tromped around down the alley and into the back. There was not so much “courtyard” here as there had been at the last place. The houses were closer together and more run down. Gregor saw what he had come to think of as the usual things: used and broken hypodermic syringes, used and ripped condoms, broken bottles, crushed aluminum cans.

Gregor paced up and down the alley, then around to the back, to the door. The door was almost in the center of the building's back wall. He counted steps. He made his way back around to the front of the house and the street.

“Do you know anything about this neighborhood?” he asked the assembled company. “Do you know if it's likely that there would be people in the alley and the back at any time of day?”

“Not likely, I wouldn't think,” O'Shea said. “That's not where the junkies and the gangs hang out. They go to abandoned buildings.”

“And are there abandoned buildings in this neighborhood?”

“Several,” O'Shea said.

Gregor nodded. He gestured up the steps, and they went past the young patrolman and into the front vestibule. It was an ordinary front vestibule, not all that different from the one in his own building on Cavanaugh Street. The difference was mostly in the state of repair, which was abysmal, and the fact that several of the mailboxes had been forced open and vandalized.

The young patrolman came in, got out a set of keys, and opened the inner door. Gregor thanked him.

“All right,” Gregor said. “Let's look at the logistics. Bennie Durban lived here, am I correct?”

“He did,” O'Shea said. “He might still. He's just missing at the moment.”

“He's halfway to Montana,” Fabereaux said. “Trust me.”

“Where's Durban's apartment?” Gregor asked.

They took him down a short hall. The young patrolman took out his keys again and opened up. The apartment wasn't exactly on the first floor and wasn't exactly in the basement. The windows seemed to be both underground and overground at the same time. Gregor looked around.

“Mr. Durban had a hobby,” he said.

“I don't see why wre can't arrest them just for doing things like this,” Fabereaux said. “I know there's a First Amendment, but for God's sake. Who
pins up pictures of serial killers who isn't likely to be one himself? Eventually, anyway. I didn't mean—”

“I know,” Gregor said. “I don't think Mr. Durban is a serial killer, not yet. Can you tell me where Beatrice Morgander lived?”

“She lived here,” O'Shea said.

“In this apartment?” Gregor said.

“Right,” O'Shea said.

Gregor thought back on the night of his talk with Kathleen Conge and filed away the obvious: she lied the way some people do, to make a story better or to get back at somebody she didn't like. Gregor wondered which it was.

“Where is Kathleen Conge's apartment?” he asked.

O'Shea gestured up the hall, and they all trooped after him. The supervisor's apartment was bigger than the one Bennie Durban had been living in, but not by much, and it had windows out onto the street, which had to give it more in the way of light and air.

Gregor went back down the hall to the apartment that had been both Beatrice Morgander's and Bennie Durban's and looked around. There was a door in the middle of the opposite wall just a little ways down.

“That's the door to the basement?” Gregor said.

“That's it,” O'Shea said.

Gregor opened it. “It's not locked? Is that your doing, or wasn't it kept locked?”

“I don't think it was kept locked,” the young patrolman put it. “At least, I never got a key to it.”

“Thank you,” Gregor said.

He felt around for a light switch and found it. Light didn't help much. There was a short flight of steps, no more than a half flight, then a big, highceilinged space with cardboard boxes and old pieces of furniture here and there. He went down the steps and looked around again.

“Where—?” Gregor asked.

O'Shea pointed across the room. “It's in there. Past that little door.”

Gregor went across the basement room to the “little door.” He opened that and looked inside. It was a dirt cellar, the kind of cellar people used to keep root vegetables in during the winter before the days of common refrigeration. The cellar was now virtually destroyed, dug out into the surrounding earth.

“Isn't it odd to think,” Gregor said, “that people in the Colonial period didn't really have what we'd call proper foundations. They built on dirt.”

“Is that relevant?” Rob asked.

“Not particularly,” Gregor said. “Did you set up that appointment I asked you to?”

I
f Gregor Demarkian had
myopia when it came to poor Philadelphia, he had just as much myopia, or maybe more, when it came to rich Philadelphia. Like most people in the city, like most people in the country, he tended to assume that “rich Philadelphia” was the Main Line, that the rich had all packed up and moved to the suburbs decades before the rest of the country had even heard of them. He forgot that areas like this one still existed within the city proper. He had forgotten that rich people in the city still found it convenient, and unthreatening, to live in a way that made it easy to see who and what they were.

He got out of Rob Benedetti's car in front of the Tyder family home and looked around. There were no abandoned buildings here, and he didn't think there was a single “multiple family dwelling” on this entire block. Cavanaugh Street was well-off. This was a fantasy from a thirties' movie about debutantes. The houses were built of brick so clean they might have been run through a washing machine. The ground-floor windows were all twice as tall as any man. This was not the part of the city that had greeted the delegates to the Continental Congress. This was the part of the city money built.

Nobody was looking out at them from the front windows. Gregor hadn't expected there to be. O'Shea and Fabereaux pulled up behind them and parked. They must look like some kind of delegation. It was probably a good thing that all their cars were unmarked. If they had pulled up in police cars, the entire street would probably have exploded.

Gregor went up to the front door and rang the bell. In a moment the door was opened by a maid in a uniform, her dark hair pulled back tightly at the base of her skull under a starched white cap.

“Gregor Demarkian for Mrs. Woodville,” he said formally.

The maid did not seem surprised by the formality, although she must have heard less of it than rudeness in this day and age. Gregor wondered if “trades-men” still went around to the back instead of using the front door. He wondered if anybody cared about things like that anymore, besides a few commentators on the lifestyles of the rich and famous. Even then, he thought, they weren't likely to be interested in a house like this. Understatement and reserve were not what interested people these days. Ostentation and excess were.