by Jane Haddam
“I think that’s the usual thing,” Alex said calmly. “They aren’t going to start off assuming that the victim was murdered by a serial killer. It wouldn’t be good police work.”
What would you know about good police work? Dennis wanted to ask. He went across the waiting room and sat down in the best chair instead. There was a small stack of brochures on the table next to it, each titled discretely Ledeski Financial and Tax Services. He rubbed a finger across his mustache. Maybe the mustache had been a mistake. He’d wanted to look—masculine, maybe like Columbo—but instead he thought it made him look like that pudgy little fat guy who played the sleazeball on Hill Street Blues. It didn’t help that he was actually a pudgy little fat guy.
“I’d never been in that alley,” he said. “Not once, not in my life. I didn’t even know it was there. Which was a good thing, I suppose, because there wasn’t ever any evidence for them to arrest me on. And I’d never come on to Elyse either. I mean, for Christ’s sake, who would come on to Elyse? She was a dog if there ever was one. They had to go asking everybody on the planet. They even asked my ex-wife. They even asked my ex-mother-in-law. That must have been sweet. And then they released me and told me I could go back to my life, and where did that leave things? Where did it leave the office?”
“The office seems to be doing all right,” Alex said.
“I’ve had some time to put it back together.” Dennis was vague about this. He was vague about it even in his own mind. “I still couldn’t get single woman to work for me. Not one. Once they’ve arrested you, everybody figures it’s just a matter of time before they arrest you again, because they’ve got the evidence collected. Innocent until proven guilty? You can forget it. And that wasn’t all. They made me look at pictures.”
“Of the body?”
“Yes, of course of the body. She had her tongue hanging out, can you believe that? It’s what happens to people who get strangled. Christ. If I was going to kill somebody, I wouldn’t strangle them. They had pictures of her neck, too, where the cord went in. It ate right through the flesh. You wouldn’t have believed it. And they had pictures of her face. All cut up. Blood crusted everywhere. She was ugly as sin alive, but cut up like that she looked like meat in a butcher shop. I practically threw up.”
“They had to do their job,” Alex said again. He had his briefcase open on the desk. It was a better and thinner briefcase than any Dennis himself had ever owned. “I’ve put the documentation for the Martinson tax job in its own file drawer. We’re going to need an entire file drawer. I’ve scheduled appointments for you at ten and eleven tomorrow, the first with a couple looking to incorporate a quilt-making business and the second with a man being sued for back taxes by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. I don’t know if you really want to take that one, but you can talk to him yourself and see. If there isn’t anything else you want me for, I’ve got an appointment.”
“There isn’t anything else I want you for,” Dennis said. He didn’t say he’d be more than happy never to set eyes on Alexander Mark again, if only he could get a woman to be his secretary. “I still say you have no idea what it’s like. No idea. They damned near ruined my life. I should have sued them.”
“Why didn’t you?”
Dennis stood up very quickly. “A lawsuit isn’t all that easy a thing,” he said. “You don’t just go into court and get yourself vindicated, no matter how right you are. They dig around in your past and try to discredit you. They talk to people. They search through your stuff.”
“But you’d already been searched, hadn’t you? By the police when they arrested you?”
“You bet your ass I’d been searched,” Dennis said. “They even took the computers. Here and at home. They looked through everything I had. They took apart the floor of my closet. They said they put it back, but it was a mess. I had to get somebody in to fix it. They looked through all my personal correspondence. And that doesn’t even begin to cover the two days in jail. That was a treat. Two days in jail.”
“Well, maybe it will be different now,” Alex said, snapping his briefcase shut. “They found the man today actually standing over the body, or something like that. The reports are a little unclear. Still, he was at the scene, and they say he was covered with blood. Maybe they’ve caught him now, and you won’t have anything else to worry about.”
“He was right there at the scene?”
“According to WKYW. Do you want me to leave this up? You could see for yourself.”
“He was right there?” Dennis said again.
“I’ll leave this up,” Alex said. “I’m sorry to be in such a rush, Mr. Ledeski, but it is seven o’clock and I do have an appointment. They haven’t released a name yet, but I don’t think that means anything. I’ll come in a little early tomorrow and make sure you’ve got everything you need for the quilting-business clients. There are some points of law I wasn’t able to make sure of this afternoon.”
“What? Oh. All right. Thank you. You should go home.”
“Yes,” Alex said. He got his Burberry off the standing coatrack in the corner of the waiting room and threw it over his arm. “Are you sure you’re going to be all right? You do know how to turn off the machine.”
“I’m fine,” Dennis said, wishing the man would go. He was always wishing Alex would go, although he had to admit that the man was a very good secretary. In fact, the man was an excellent secretary. He was the kind of secretary legends were made of. Dennis would have thought he could get a much better job than this one and at much better pay.
Alex was going. Dennis could hear his footsteps in the corridor outside, and then that heavy click that meant the front door was opening. He got up and went over to Alex’s desk. The computer screen showed the WKYW homepage (CBS 3—Philadelphia’s Source for Breaking News, Weather, Traffic and Sports). The first story up was the one about the Plate Glass Killer, but it didn’t say much.
He sat down in Alex’s chair—was it possible for gay men to leave AIDS germs on chairs? It couldn’t be. If it was, nobody would be safe in bus stations—and realized he was sweating. He hated this. He always sweat when he was scared, and suddenly he was as scared as he had been that day when the cops showed up and he was sure he knew what they wanted from him. He got rid of the WKYW page and went to WCAU. He’d always liked NBC better than CBS anyway. The Plate Glass Killer was the first story there, too, but it wasn’t much more informative than the other one had been. There was a man, but it didn’t say what kind of man. He was found “near the body,” whatever that meant. The “body” was of a “Caucasian female in her late thirties or early forties.” What was it about the Plate Glass Killer, that he only went for old bags?
Suddenly, he just couldn’t stand it any more. He didn’t want to think about the Plate Glass Killer. What kind of a serial killer didn’t rape his victims before he killed them, or after? He didn’t want to think about the police in his apartment, going through everything, even tapping on the walls. Two or three times he thought they were going to fall right over it, but they hadn’t, and now he was here in his office and they had their eyes on somebody else. Maybe it was going to be all right. Maybe he could go back to a—normal life—in another week or two.
He shut down the browser and began to shut down the computer, working too fast, causing problems. Alex could fix the problems when he came in in the morning. Dennis could still hear his ex-wife on the phone, screaming in his ear, as if he’d come down to her mother’s place and set her on fire.
“I should have known,” she’d shrieked at him. “I should have known that’s what you were. I should be glad I’m not dead in some morgue somewhere. You always wanted to kill me; you always were a murdering bastard, you bastard, you bastard—”
Dennis couldn’t breathe. He really couldn’t. He hadn’t really been able to breathe in months. He saw Elyse’s face in the photographs they’d shown him. One of the cuts was so deep it had nearly severed one side of her nose from the rest of her face. Her tongue w
as purple and swollen and sticking out like a big slab of raw something that had gone bad, that by rights should have bugs crawling all over it.
The computer screen went to black. He pushed the chair away from the desk and got up again. He thought he might be having a heart attack.
6
Alexander Mark did not believe in hyperventilating. It was bad for the heart, and it did nothing at all to relieve the situation that had caused you anxiety in the first place. Actually, Alexander wasn’t sure that what he was feeling was anxiety. It was just that he hated to be “at work,” and especially hated having to hold his tongue around that fetid idiot Dennis Ledeski. What had seemed like a good and reasonable plan a few months ago now felt like a descent into Hell, and Alexander was somebody who thought of Hell as properly taking a capital letter. There was something about Hell nobody ever mentioned in homilies at mass. Hell was a place where mediocrity reigned day by day, without the relief of outright awfulness.
I’m having a psychotic break, Alexander thought, crossing at the light in a half run that was meant to shake the cobwebs out of his head. He wouldn’t have thought it was possible to be made stupider just because he had to spend his time with a stupid person, but here he was. He felt as dull and listless as one of those halfwits who used to sit behind him in high school English courses, telling jokes about snot and pussy while the teacher tried to talk about Shakespeare. Of course, the teacher wasn’t much better at Shakespeare than they were at jokes, but that was another complaint, and Alexander was not having a night of complaining.
The restaurant was halfway up the block. It had smoke-tinted windows that faced the street so that people inside could get a good look at anyone they wanted to on the sidewalk, but people on the sidewalk couldn’t see the people inside. At the moment it was the one restaurant in Philadelphia most likely to be largely frequented by gay men.
Unless you counted the pick up bars, Alexander thought, and he didn’t. He had never been one to go to pick up bars, even before he had become involved in Courage.
He handed his raincoat to the girl at the coat check station and looked down the row of tables to find Chickie George at the end of them, dressed as Chickie always dressed these days—as if he were about to be appointed secretary of state. Alexander made a mental note to call Chickie “Edmund” at least once during this dinner, nodded to the seating hostess waiting at the reservations desk, and headed on back. He could feel men checking him out with every move he made. This might not be a pick up bar, but the men who came here were only human.
That was the problem, of course, Alexander thought. Too many of us think we’re only human.
He got to Chickie’s table and pulled out a chair. “Sorry,” he said. “I was wasting my time watching the news on the computer.”
“At work?” Chickie said.
“There was virtually nothing else to do. It was a long, boring day. Did you see any of it? They’ve arrested someone in the Plate Glass murders.”
The waiter came by. Alexander took one of the menus and put it to the side. He ate here two or three times a month. He knew what he was going to have.
“Are we going to split some decent wine?” Chickie said. “How much time do you have?”
“The meeting’s at ten. Too many of us have jobs that keep us up late. Most of us have real jobs. I’m never going to be dismissive of secretaries again. The work is hard as Hell, and it’s so boring it could make you cry. Get the wine. I’ve only got to go a couple of blocks.”
“Rich Catholic gay guys giving up sex,” Chickie said.
“Stop that or I’ll come to your confirmation hearings when they’re trying to put you on the Supreme Court and call you Chickie.”
Chickie gave the order for both of them, and Alexander handed back the menu.
“So,” Chickie said. “What’s happening? Are you getting anywhere? Do you still think there’s anywhere to get?”
Alexander didn’t smoke, but it suddenly occurred to him that if he had, this would be the perfect time to do it. It amazed him sometimes how much he had been able to give up over the course of his life.
“Of course there’s somewhere to get,” Alexander said, “but I never thought he was the Plate Glass Killer, and you knew that.”
“I never thought you were as sure as you said you were that he was the one you saw coming out of the Hole in the Ground. And even if it really was him, you can’t be sure that the reason he was there was—”
“There’s only one reason to be in the Hole in the Ground, and you know it. It’s because what you really want is six-year-old boys.”
“He could have been there by mistake.”
“Once. If you go into that place once as a mistake, you don’t come back again. Even if you don’t completely realize what’s wrong with it. I saw him there at least four times over the course of two and a half weeks. And then there he was, right on my television set, picked up for the murder of Elyse Martineau.”
“And released,” Chickie said.
“Of course he was released,” Alexander said. “They couldn’t hold him because he almost surely didn’t do it. He may be a pervert, but he’s not that kind of pervert.”
“I don’t know,” Chickie said. “A closet pederast could be a lot of things. Full of rage, for instance. They must have had some reason to arrest him.”
“They arrested me,” Alexander said. “Do you think they had some reason to arrest me?”
“Not much of one,” Chickie admitted. “Although you were definitely in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“If it hadn’t been for your friend Mr. Demarkian, I’d have been in the same mess Dennis is in. I’d have had my name and my face in all the papers. I’d be untouchable. Although I must admit, under the circumstances, I think that with Dennis it’s deserved. He’s getting sloppy.”
“What does that mean?”
“Well,” Alexander said carefully. “There are a few givens. First, he must have stuff around somewhere. Pictures. Contact information. There’s no chance that he’s doing what you and I know he’s doing without having that around. Second, wherever the stuff is, it isn’t in any of the computers anybody knows about. The police took the one at his house and all the ones at the office and ripped them apart before they gave them back, and they didn’t find anything.”
“They weren’t looking for child pornography.”
“No, they weren’t, but they weren’t looking for financial records either,” Alexander said. “They almost surely went through every single file just to see if they could come up with anything that related to the strangulation of plain, middle-aged women, and if there was child pornography there they would have found it. They didn’t. And I haven’t, and I’ve been through every machine in the place four or five times.”
“And you’re very good,” Chickie said.
“I’m very good indeed,” Alexander said.
The waiter was back, with the bottle of wine and the glasses. Alexander let him go through his ritual without paying much attention to him. This was one of the tables that looked out on the street, and he could see people going by on the sidewalk hunched almost double in the rain. He tried to remember what he thought his life would be like when he was thirty-four years old, and he realized he’d never had any idea, never had a single conception of himself as “grown up” and on his own. The best he’d been able to do was novels and short stories about living in Paris and being Very Literary, and even those had felt to him less like prophecy than fantasy. He tried to remember when he’d first realized he was gay and had nothing to go on there either.
“So,” Chickie said. “Where are you off to?”
“I was thinking about what I wanted to be when I grew up,” Alexander said. “And then I realized that, when I was a child, I’d never had any idea what that was. And then I realized that I couldn’t remember a time when I didn’t know I was gay. It’s the way my mind works when I get finished with a day in that man’s office. I end up awash on a
sea of mushiness.”
“You were giving me givens,” Chickie said. He had an odd look on his face. Alexander knew what it was about and decided to let it go.
“Yes, well,” Alexander said. “The thing is, the stuff has to be somewhere. It has to be. But now, he’s getting sloppy. I can tell—”
“You mean you’ve seen him with material?”
“No, of course I haven’t. If I had, I’d have secured some of it and called the police. No. He’s getting in late to the office. Which means he’s staying out late at night. Which means he must think the police are no longer watching him. Not that that stops these idiots half the time. They can know that the FBI has their short hairs wired, and they’ll still go bashing off to get themselves in trouble. There’s no self-control.”
“The police are’t watching him,” Chickie said.
“Oh, I know that. He just doesn’t. He has no idea how these things work. But I think he’s about to get sloppier. Were you paying any attention to the news? They picked up another guy as the Plate Glass Killer, except, as far as I could figure out from Web sites, he was standing right over the body when they caught him. Maybe he really is the Plate Glass Killer.”
“Maybe,” Chickie said, “but he wasn’t standing over the body, he was on the street just past the alley. He was covered with blood though.”
“What station were you listening to? I didn’t see anything like that on NBC or CBS.”
“I didn’t get it from NBC or CBS. They called in one of our guys to be acting attorney. Russ Donahue. You met—”
“Oh, yes. The one with the wife who wraps her building up every time there’s a holiday.”
“She’s not wrapping up too many buildings at the moment. She’s about seven or eight months pregnant. But, yeah, that’s the guy. Anyway, they called and asked if he’d be willing to take it on pro bono, and we’re all for pro bono, so here we are. Henry Tyder is the guy’s name. The one they picked up. Homeless guy living on the street.”
