by Jane Haddam
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.
It wasn’t as good as time traveling back forty years or so, but it would have to do.
4
If Bennie Durban could have been anything at all when he grew up, if he could be anything at all now that he was supposed to be something in particular, it would be a particularly brilliant serial killer. Serial killers were the only ones left with any style. All the other outlaws had fallen by the wayside. Bank robbery was a profession for thugs. Instead of Bonnie and Clyde, you had ski masks and armored cars and hand-it-over notes that weren’t even spelled right. You saw the reports on the evening news and they made you cringe. Embezzlement didn’t have the cachet it ought to have had either. Bennie did like listening to stories about really titanic business crime, but lately all the bang-up spectacular bankruptcies had not been about crime but about stupidity. How intelligent could you be if you ran through a hundred million dollars in six years and all you had to show for it was the kind of art that made the Catholic League protest outside the Mayor’s Office? As for being a revolutionary—well. Bennie didn’t see it. Either they wore T-shirts under their sports jackets and talked about the Consciousness of the Proletariat, or they dressed up like street criminals and posed around with machine guns, but in both cases they just looked silly. Serial killers really were the only heroes left. The smartest ones operated for years and never got caught until they were ready to turn themselves in. Some of them were never ready to turn themselves in.
It was almost six thirty and dark, and Bennie couldn’t see the pictures on his wall without turning on the lights, but that was okay. He knew where and what each picture was, and that was enough. He groped around on his one chair for his jeans and put them on by touch and feel. He didn’t have any curtains, and his window looked out on the street at just below ground level. If he’d had the light on, anybody on the sidewalk could have looked down and seen him naked. He found a sweatshirt and put that on too. In a minute he could turn on the lights. That would help him find his shoes. He always left his shoes on the floor, and they were always hard to find.
He heard a knock on the door and grimaced. “Be a minute,” he said. There was only one person who ever knocked on his door, except that one time when the police came. Bennie liked thinking about the time the police came because he was more flattered than he wanted to admit by the fact that they’d thought he was a serious suspect in the Plate Glass Killings. Bennie felt like that even though he hadn’t yet decided if the Plate Glass Killer was a really intelligent serial killer or not.
“Open up,” Kathleen said. “I’ve got some news for you.”
Kathleen was the woman in 2B, who served as manager and got a reduction in her rent for doing it. Bennie hated her. She was a big black woman who favored bright dresses with flowers on them, and she went out to church twice a week carrying a Bible under her arm. Sunday mornings and Wednesday nights were the only times Bennie felt entirely safe in his apartment.
“Open up,” Kathleen said again.
Bennie turned on the light. It shone first and hardest on the big center picture of Theodore Robert Bundy, the one he had put in the very center of the wall next to the daybed. Bundy was his favorite serial killer, even though he’d gotten caught—and more than once—because Bundy was the one who looked the way Bennie thought a serial killer should look. Besides, Theodore Robert Bundy had gone to law school. You had to be intelligent to go to law school.
“What are you doing in there?” Kathleen demanded. “Are you smoking dope?”
“You could smell it if I was smoking dope,” Bennie called out. “I was getting dressed. I’ll be right there.”
“I hope you had your light out. Why you won’t put curtains on that window, I’ll never know.”
The reason why Bennie hadn’t put curtains on his window was that he couldn’t afford it, just as the reason why he didn’t have a television set was because he’d had to pawn the last one when he was between jobs just after Thanksgiving. Kathleen knew all that. She knew everything about him. She only asked to make him feel embarrassed. It was too bad that if he was a really intelligent serial killer she was the one person on earth he wouldn’t be able to kill.
He opened the door to let her in, and saw her eyes sweep over his floor: two Kentucky Fried boxes with bones still in them; five or six dirty paper plates; half a dozen pairs of dirty socks and three pairs of dirty underwear; a little pile of used plastic spoons. There was more, but after a while Bennie got too depressed about it to go on listing the stuff in his head.
Kathleen marched in and sat down on the daybed. She was too fat to fit in his chair. She gave the stuff on the floor another look, and then looked away. That was good. Tonight there wasn’t going to be a lec
ture.
“I heard it on the television,” she said, looking at the ceiling. “I knew you didn’t have no set anymore, so I thought I’d come and tell you. They arrested a man today for being the Plate Glass Killer.”
Bennie made one of those half-obscene, half-dismissive motions he’d learned from the Spanish guys at work. “They arrested me once for being the Plate Glass Killer. They thought just because I knew Rondelle I must have strangled her. I mean, can you believe that? That’s the way the police think. They make them sound so smart on those true-crime shows, but that’s the way they really think.”
Kathleen turned around and looked at the pictures on his wall. She had to twist herself into a corkscrew to manage it. “It wasn’t just because you knew Rondelle,” she said. “I still don’t get what you see in guys like this. And you can’t blame the police. There’s a serial killer out in the neighborhoods, and here you are with a shrine to Charles Manson.”
“There’s no Charles Manson up there,” Bennie said. “Charles Manson was an idiot. There’s no Jeffrey Dahmer either, no matter what the papers said. God, you’d think I was some kind of F——“ He stopped. You couldn’t say words like “fuckwad” around Kathleen. She got furious.
Kathleen had stopped looking at the wall. “It wasn’t just because you knew Rondelle,” she said again, “and it wasn’t just because of the pictures, and you know it. You can’t follow a woman around like that. It makes her nervous, and people notice it. And it’s pitiful, Bennie. It’s really pitiful.”
“I wasn’t following Rondelle around,” Bennie said. But, of course, he had been. He’d been doing it for months before they found her strangled and slashed in the alleyway in back of the Solid Gold Beaver. He picked up a couple of pieces of garbage from the floor and threw them in the wastebasket next to his chair. One of them missed. “Is that all?” he said. “It’s just the same old same old. It’s just some guy who knew the last woman, so they’re going to hassle him to make the public think they’re doing something.”
“Not this time,” Kathleen said. “You listen to the news. It says this one was standing right next to the body, with blood all over him, and he was a suspect in one of the other ones, too. But they’ve got him this time, Bennie. They found him right at the scene of the crime.”
“There’s been another crime?”
“Number eleven,” Kathleen said. “They didn’t say what her name was because they hadn’t notified the family yet. It was over on Society Hill. She was strangled and cut up like the rest of them, and this man was there. All covered with blood, like I said. And standing over the body. They’ve got him for good.”
Bennie felt everything inside him go very still. “What was his name?”
“They didn’t say his name. They didn’t have a picture of him, either, but they will.”
“Was there a press conference? Did John Jackman talk to reporters, you know, with a lot of microphones and things all together?”
“I know what a press conference is, Bennie. I graduated high school even if you didn’t. No, there was no press conference. Just the report. But there it is. I knew you’d want to know.”
Bennie felt himself breathing more easily. “It’s all right,” he said. “They probably haven’t really caught him. If they were sure, there’d be a press conference. And they’d be giving out his name. This is going to be a big deal if they ever do catch him. There’s going to be stuff on the national news and on Court TV. It”
Kathleen looked back around at the wall again, then turned front and looked him up and down. “I thought you’d be relieved,” she said. “I thought you’d be glad to hear they caught the guy, and they weren’t going after you.”
“They weren’t going after me. They came around and they bugged me for a while, but they gave up. They didn’t have any evidence.”
“They don’t always have to have that much evidence,” Kathleen said. “They can focus on a man for a long time just on a hunch. You ought to know that, living around here.”
“I know that most of the people who get hassled by the police around here are dealing drugs. Or they’re knocking over liquor stores and getting caught on the security tape. What kind of an idiot do you take me for?”
“I don’t think you’re no idiot,” Kathleen said.
Bennie was beginning to feel a little nervous. She was giving him that odd look she did sometimes when she thought there was something about him that didn’t add up. And, of course, she was right. There were a lot of things about him that didn’t add up. He got a couple of more pieces of garbage off the floor and held them in his hands.
“It don’t make sense,” Kathleen said. “You worship these men the way I worship the Lord. You have more pictures of the BLT Killer up there than I’ve got pictures of Jesus in my whole apartment.”
“BTK,” he said.
“What?”
“BTK,” Bennie said again. “Not BLT. BLT means bacon, lettuce, and tomato. It’s a sandwich. BTK means bind, torture, kill.”
“And you think that’s a good thing?
“It’s not a matter of what’s a good thing, Kathleen. It’s not about right and wrong. It’s about intelligence. They didn’t catch the BTK Killer. Did you know that? He turned himself in. If he hadn’t, he’d still be out there, doing what he was doing. He did it for over twenty years without getting caught.”
“And you think that’s a good thing?” Kathleen asked again.
Bennie sighed. “Never mind,” he said. “You never will get it. I’ve got to go to work.”
Kathleen got off the bed. “You ought to go get your GED. You could get a better job than you’ve got. You could make a lot more money. My sister’s girl got her GED and got her certificate for being a nurse’s aid, and now she’s making fifteen dollars an hour.”
“Good for her,” Bennie said. His jacket was hunched in the corner of the couch Kathleen hadn’t been sitting near. He picked it up and put it on. “I’ve got to go, Kathleen. I wouldn’t want to be late for washing dishes at the Solid Gold Beaver. They might fire me again. God only knows I couldn’t stand getting fired again.”
“You shouldn’t ought to talk like that about God,” Kathleen said, but the words were automatic. Kathleen couldn’t let a single small case of blaspheming go by. She moved to the door and looked back into the mess of the apartment. Sort of apartment. It was only one room, with a bathroom the size of a matchbox off one corner.
“I’m going to be glad if they catch the Plate Glass Killer,” she said. “I’m going to be glad I can stop worrying all over that it’s you.”
Then she turned around and went back down the narrow hall to the stairs leading up to the main floor. Bennie watched her go. All the lights in all the hallways he could see were burning brightly. Kathleen was always very good about the lights.
He checked in his jeans pocket for his keys and went out himself. It was really too bad that if he was a really intelligent serial killer, she was the one person he would not be able to kill. There wasn’t a day that went by that he didn’t want to strangle her.
5
It had taken Dennis Ledeski eight months after the police had arrived on his doorstep to find a new secretary, and even then he had only been able to get a gay man so camp he could have been sleeping in the desert with Lawrence of Arabia. Ah, Dennis thought. There was another gay man. Sometimes it seemed to him that all men were either gay or perverted, and when he thought that he felt better, especially about himself. Not that he thought of himself as any kind of pervert. The things that he liked were the things that he liked, that was all. He didn’t hurt anybody. You couldn’t hurt anybody by reading books and looking at pictures. It wasn’t his fault that a lot of old lady feminists in the State Legislature got hysterical over a lot of stuff that was none of their business at all.
He looked down at the end of the hall to where the door that separated the waiting room from the rest of his offices was standing just slightly open. Alexander Mark was packing up his de
sk for the evening, looking as gay as Liberace. Dennis had no idea why men like that actually existed. A lilac, button-down shirt—where did you even find a lilac, button-down shirt? Were there gay stores that sold all the usual things in special gay colors? The tie was a doozy, too. Dennis didn’t know much about high-end men’s wear, but he’d seen that tie before dangling off the neck of the CEO of some aerospace company in an article in TIME about “corporate excess.” It came from some store in London and cost a gazillion dollars. There were the John Lobb shoes, too, but Dennis couldn’t see Alex’s shoes at the moment. Why was it that gay guys always seemed to have so much money? Alex wasn’t buying this stuff on what he got paid to type letters and answer the phones.
Dennis straightened his own tie and shifted his briefcase from one hand to the other. He always felt uncomfortable being around Alex when they were alone, and night was the worst possible time. Late nights were worse still, and this was pretty late at night. It had to be going on seven o’clock. Dennis wet his lips and coughed.
Down at the end of the hall, Alex straightened up and looked around. Dennis had the odd feeling that he would be uncomfortable around Alex even if Alex was perfectly straight. There was just something about the way that man looked at you.
Alex was standing perfectly still. “I’ve left the computer on,” he said. “I thought you’d like to see it.”
“See what?” Dennis couldn’t stand stock-still much longer. He would have to make himself go forward. He would have to make himself enter the waiting room.
“The story on the Plate Glass Killer,” Alex said. “It came over the Internet a couple of minutes ago. They’ve picked up a man on suspicion in the murders.”
Dennis went forward with a rush to get it over with. “They picked me up on suspicion in the Plate Glass murders,” he said, propelling himself into the waiting room in one swift motion, so he didn’t have to think about it. “They held me for two days. And why? Because Elyse was found dead in the alley next to this building and she worked here.”
