by Jane Haddam
Right now he wasn’t able to make himself take out the slim little cell phone he never used but always carried with him and call Alison at her office. He knew she was going to be at her office because these were her office hours, and she was meticulous about meeting them. That was true even if, as she put it, a student was more likely to sign a chastity pledge than come to a professor’s office hours. Once he’d even gone down and sat with her there, being uncomfortable in a straight-backed wooden chair and drinking coffee she’d brought in from a little place down the street. It had even been an office he’d recognized. In his day this part of the building had belonged to the History Department, and Alison’s particular office had belonged to Prof. Warren Harmon Cole. Gregor remembered Warren Harmon Cole because he’d had a lecture he gave every year on America and the Immigrant Experience, about how immigrants never really melted into Americans and never could.
At the moment Gregor was not so much melted as stranded in a sea of traffic. His meeting with Russ Donahue, Henry Tyder, and John Jackman had lasted just long enough to get him caught in the noon rush. He forced himself to get out the cell phone and look at it. Bennis had given it to him, that was the trouble. She had bought him the first year’s calling plan, too. It had been part of her ongoing attempt to make him “part of the twenty-first century.” On the other hand, he had called Alison on this phone before. He’d even asked her to dinner on this phone before. He had no idea why his level of guilt seemed to be rising these days to the point where he no longer knew what the right and the wrong of it was. Bennis hadn’t so much as left him a note. That was the trouble. She’d picked up and left, disappeared for months, and not even so much as left him a note. How was he supposed to know what she wanted him to do?
Somewhere at the back of his mind, Gregor knew that Bennis would, in-deed, expect him to know what she wanted him to do, and that she had left hints, in the shape of her clothes still hanging in his closet and her makeup still clogging all the shelves in his medicine cabinet. But that wasn’t enough, was it? At least, it shouldn’t be. People had to talk to each other. People had to tell each other things. You couldn’t just set things up so that your lover would feel too guilty to do anything much about another woman while you were gone and leave the rest of it for him to sort out for himself.
It was useless. Try as he would, Gregor could never make himself be angry at Bennis. The best he could manage was worried, as in worried about her life and health. Off and on over the long weeks it had occurred to him that there might be something seriously wrong. She could have cancer. She could be having a breakdown. Then he would get impatient. She was Bennis, and Bennis did these things.
He flipped open the cell phone and tapped in Alison’s office number. He refused to call it “dialing,” since you didn’t dial anything on a keypad. She picked up on the other end, and he heard her say, “Alison Standish here.”
“Gregor Demarkian here,” he said.
There was a pause on the other end of the line. “Well,” Alison said, “I’ve been expecting you to call. I’ve been expecting it all morning.”
Gregor frowned. “Was I supposed to? Had we made an agreement I’ve forgotten? I’m sorry.”
“No,” Alison said. “We hadn’t made an agreement. It’s just that, under the circumstances . . . ”
“Under what circumstances?”
There was another long pause on the other end of the line. Finally, Alison said, “Where are you? Right this minute?”
“I’m in a taxicab near the Liberty Bell. In traffic. It looks like it’s going to let up in a minute or two, but right now it’s a mess.”
“Have you been in a taxi all morning?”
“I’ve been in a police station all morning,” Gregor said. “That’s sort of half of what I was calling you about. I don’t know if you’ve seen the news, but the police have arrested a man they think is the Plate Glass Killer. Or at least they say they think he’s the Plate Glass Killer. A friend of mine is handling the defense, and he needs a psychologist. I was thinking of that friend of yours we had dinner with the other night, the one who wrote a book about the psychology of homelessness.”
“The psychology of long-term homelessness,” Alison said. She sounded distracted.
“That’s the one. Although, to tell you the truth, Henry Tyder isn’t homeless. He only lives out on the streets because he gets into conflicts with his sisters, who don’t throw him out of the house, only yell at him. At any rate, I’m fairly sure he’s not competent to stand trial; and even if he is, he wasn’t competent to make a confession without counsel present, but Russ is going to need a lot of help. Can we get together with him again?”
“Gregor,” Alison said, “you’ve been in a police station all morning?”
“Except for breakfast at the Ararat.”
“You haven’t seen the news? Any of it? You didn’t watch any of the local morning programs?”
“I never watch any of the local morning programs. They make my head ache.”
“All right,” Alison said.
“Is there something wrong?” Gregor asked her. “Did I stand you up and forget about it? I’m sorry if I’ve been absentminded lately—”
“No,” Alison said. “No, it’s all right. Anyway, his name is Lionel Redstone, and of course we can get together with him. I think he’d probably be very interested and flattered to be asked.”
“Make it dinner tonight if he’s free,” Gregor said. “That way I won’t waste any time and I’ll have a chance to see you. Unless you’re busy tonight.”
“No,” Alison said, “I’m not busy tonight, except with correcting papers, and that can wait. Only, Gregor—”
“What?”
“Never mind. It doesn’t matter. Look, I’ve got to go over my lecture notes for class. And Jig wants to take me to lunch to apologize, you know, for all that stuff last month. I’ll see you tonight. If, you know, you don’t find something else has come up.”
“Nothing else is going to come up,” Gregor said. “I’m not on staff anywhere anymore. My time is my own, thank God. I’ll pick you up at seven thirty.”
“Meet me at Ascorda Mariscos at eight. I’ll bring Lionel with me if he’s available; and if not, I’ll call you first.”
“Don’t bother. We can still have dinner.”
“Right,” Alison said. “You’ve got my cell phone number, haven’t you? I mean, you’ve called me on it, so you must have it.”
“Of course I have it.”
“Good.”
“I’ll see you tonight,” Gregor said.
Alison hung up—or signed off, or whatever it was you did on a cell phone—and he found himself staring down at the piece in his hand, wondering what in God’s name was going on. Things had not been easy with Alison. The “relationship” hadn’t moved anywhere nearly as quickly as it would have if Bennis hadn’t still been in his life in spirit if not in body. But Alison was one of the most straightforward and unambiguous people he had ever known. She was certainly more of both than Bennis had ever been, and if women were supposed to like an air of mystery around them, nobody had ever told her. What she had just done had sounded uncomfortably like Bennis right before Bennis went on one of her patented tears, and Gregor had no idea at all what had brought it on. Surely it couldn’t be the lack of a physical life, or of a commitment, in this thing they were doing with each other. They had talked about that only last week, and she had not said anything unusual.
The traffic had cleared out. In fact, it had cleared out some time while he had not been paying attention, and they were moving along at a good clip. Gregor recognized most of the neighborhoods they were passing through. By now, either on his own or with Tibor, he had managed to thoroughly reacquaint himself with the city. The cab turned left and then left again and stopped at a light. Then it turned right, and they were at the far end of Cavanaugh Street as he knew and understood it, at the far end of the “neighborhood.” He saw the newsstand with its wire racks of papers
out front. The papers were the usual Philadelphia ones, plus The New York Times, plus the Ethniko Kirix, and papers in both Russian and Armenian. Ha. Let Phillipa Lydgate blither all she wanted about how isolated Americans were and how little they knew about other countries; on Cavanaugh Street they even knew other alphabets.
They passed through to the next block, and Gregor checked automatically for Holy Trinity Armenian Apostolic Christian Church. He was looking at it—down the block and across the street—when the cab came to a halt in front of his own brownstone building, stopping dead in the middle of the street instead of parking, since there were no more places at the curb. Gregor reached into his pocket for his wallet as he turned his head back toward his own side of the street and stopped. For a single half second, he thought he was never going to be able to breathe again.
Then the cabbie said, “Are you all right? Because if you’re having a heart attack, I’m going to call nine-one-one. I don’t do CPR.”
“I’m fine,” Gregor said, getting the money out.
But, of course, he wasn’t fine. He had just seen why it was the cab driver couldn’t pull up to the curb.
The place nearest the fire hydrant—the one almost nobody ever took for fear of being too close and getting a ticket—was occupied by a tangerine orange, two-seater Mercedes convertible sports car, and there wasn’t so much as a tote bag’s worth of luggage sitting in it.
THREE
1
Of all the many things that had changed since Margaret Beaufort had been a girl, one of the things she resented most was the nagging matter of clothes. It used to be that in certain stores, and at certain price ranges, anything you found was likely to be acceptable. It was poor women, not rich ones, who liked to be flashy and conspicuous. That was why such clothes were called “cheap,” not because they were inexpensive (although they were), but because the women who wore them were cheap. They were the sort of women who did not know how to maintain their dignity, or didn’t care.
Margaret Beaufort knew how to maintain her dignity, and cared very much, but she was foiled at every turn by a world in which cheap people had inherited the earth. Saks and Lord and Taylor were full of Spandex and Lycra and shiny man-made fabrics that reminded her of the dresses Chinese taxi dancers used to wear in ancient World War II movies. Women of good family walked around town in tight tube tops that didn’t reach the waistbands of their jeans, and then there was the fact that they wore jeans at all. It was worse than the sixties, when all people really cared about was looking as if they didn’t care about money. The girls she grew up with bought patchwork skirts that fell all the way to the floor and expensive little peasant blouses they’d brought back with them from a vacation to Guatemala. Now there was Paris Hilton, who seemed to have made some kind of pornographic film. At least there was a pornographic film out there “on the Internet” with her in it. There were clothes that made everyone look like a streetwalker. You could go into the best department store in the city and spend three thousand dollars on something with rhinestones outlining the nipples on your breasts. Nobody was safe anymore. Nobody could be sure she was doing the right thing.
Of course, in Elizabeth’s case, it hardly mattered. Everything Elizabeth wore came out of the L.L.Bean catalogue, even the things she wore to church. Margaret had once seen her come down from the choir loft for communion with a pair of L.L.Bean hunting boots peeping out from underneath her robe. It wasn’t fair, and it didn’t help that more people tagged Elizabeth as “old money” than they did Margaret. Here was something else that had changed and that she didn’t like. It used to be that people knew who was old money and who was not. They not only recognized all the right people—because those people were constantly in the papers, in the society news, and famous—but they recognized even the ones they hadn’t seen before. There was a code, and a uniform, and everyone followed it. Now nobody cared about anything but who could spend the most money; and the more outrageously you did that, the more likely you were to be looked up to by the people on the street.
“Do you know what Father said to me once?” Margaret asked Elizabeth.
Elizabeth was just getting out of her light spring jacket, pulled from the closet earlier than usual this year because of the weather.
“What did he tell you this time?” Elizabeth asked.
Margaret ignored the implication of the question. It was true she talked a lot about the things Father had said to her, but that was only reasonable. Their father had been the most important influence in their lives. He’d been the most important influence in many people’s lives. Aside from the fact that he was important to her because he was related to her, he had been important to the country. He had been secretary of the treasury under Eisenhower. He’d been ambassador to Sweden before that. He’d have been governor of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania if he’d stuck out his campaign. He hadn’t because he hadn’t liked the way the press went snooping into his private life, just when he was getting married for the second time.
Margaret put the memory of the second marriage out of her mind. “We were talking about Roosevelt,” she said. “Franklin Roosevelt. And I said he was a bad man because he pandered to people and took away the money people had worked hard to earn, just because they’d earned a lot of it. I couldn’t have been more than twelve. Anyway, he said I was wrong, that the New Deal was a good idea, not only because it helped the people who were poor and starving, but because it put a brake on fortune building. Isn’t that odd to think about? The New Deal putting ‘a brake on fortune building,’ as he put it, although what he meant was that it made it harder for people to climb up.”
Elizabeth closed the door to the hall closet and came over to where Margaret was standing next to the archway into the living room. “Whatever are you talking about? What made you think about the New Deal?”
“The clothes,” Margaret said. “I was thinking how hard it was nowadays to buy clothes because you can’t trust the things you used to: designers, better dresses, good department stores. They all sell clothes for the sort of person who has lots of money and no taste, the vulgar people. It’s as if the only people left with money are vulgar people.”
“We’ve got money, Margaret. It’s not the money we’ve got to worry about at the moment. And we’ll have a lot more money when we take Green Point public, more than any of the people you’re worrying yourself about.”
“I know we’ve got money. It’s just that everybody else has it, too. People who weren’t anybody when we were growing up. And they have more of it. And they have no taste. And then there are the music people, you know, with the videos. It’s all trash these days. You have to be so careful not to become trash yourself.”
Elizabeth went through into the living room, sat down in one of the two big armchairs, and put her feet up on the coffee table. Margaret winced.
“Do you think,” Elizabeth said, “that you could come down off whatever fantasy cloud you live on to at least try to deal with the situation we’re in? Our public stock offering is only months away. It’s not going to be helped if Henry is on trial for being a serial killer.”
“I am dealing with the situation we’re in,” Margaret said. “Although I must admit you don’t seem to want my advice for anything. I think it was very wrong of you to employ that young man to represent Henry. We’ve got our own lawyers. They’ve known the family for years. And they’re more—they’ve got more experience. And prestige.”
“They’ve got no experience at all in criminal law,” Elizabeth said, “unless you happen to get indicted for stock fraud. They’d be useless in a case like this. Henry’s being charged with murder. With two murders.”
“It’s all nonsense,” Margaret said. It seemed to her that the air in front of her eyes had become suddenly thick and solid, so that it rippled. “Henry couldn’t commit a murder. He can’t even commit a robbery. He’s tried. He just fell over drunk, and they had to get us to make him dry out somewhere.”
“I wonder,” Elizabe
th said. “If I had to answer truthfully, I don’t think I’d say that Henry couldn’t ever commit a murder. There’s a lot under the surface of Henry. Most of it isn’t too pleasant.”
“You can’t honestly believe the police are right,” Margaret said. “You can’t think that Henry is this, this whatever—Plate Glass Killer.”
“No,” Elizabeth said, “I certainly don’t think he’s that.”
Margaret felt better. The air had stopped shimmering and warping in front of her eyes. “There, then,” she said, “it was a mistake. It’s just a matter of making sure we stop the mistake before it does any more damage. I think it was very wrong of that judge not to let Henry out on bail. It made it look as if Henry is dangerous.”
“Maybe Henry is dangerous,” Elizabeth said, “even if he isn’t the Plate Glass Killer.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Maybe Henry—well. There was the problem the last time they arrested him. They didn’t arrest him just because he happened to be around at the time. They searched his room. They had that peculiar pile of underwear.”
Margaret flushed. She could remember the day the police had come to search Henry’s room even though Henry hadn’t stayed in it for weeks. It had been beyond embarrassing even to have the police in the house, even with their own lawyers present. Then to have had to stand there while they came up with a dozen women’s panties in one of Henry’s drawers—well, that was—that was something.
“Margaret,” Elizabeth said.
Margaret came back from wherever it was she was. It really was as if the air was changing around her, becoming solid, becoming a place.
“The Plate Glass Killer doesn’t take his victims’ underwear,” she said. “You know that as well as I do. Even the police know that.”
