Glass Houses

by Jane Haddam

  “So you saw her, and she hugged you, and she got into the taxi.”

  “She said how good it was to be back. Then she left, yes. It was only about half an hour or maybe three quarters of an hour after you left.”

  “She came to the Ararat?”

  “No, Krekor, she did not. I was coming back from the Ararat and I saw the car, and then I came to your building and I saw her coming out. In a hurry. It was probably because of the television program.”

  “Which television program?”

  “GoodMorning Philadelphia. With that woman. The one with the hair like a balloon. She did an interview. I watched it.”

  “Bennis did an interview. Did she say anything illuminating?”

  “I don’t know what you mean by illuminating, Krekor. She talked about her new book. She has a book she has just finished. New for her. Not with the elves.”

  “Really?” Gregor’s mind calmed down just enough to process this information. “Not a Zed and Zedalia book?”

  “Not a fiction book at all, Krekor. A memoir.”

  “Bennis has been off someplace writing her memoirs?”

  “Switzerland,” Tibor said helpfully.

  Gregor took a deep breath. His lungs felt endless. He could have gone on sucking up air forever. “Let me try to get this straight,” he said. “Bennis has been gone for, what, nearly a year? She hasn’t gotten in touch with me. She hasn’t gotten in touch with you. She hasn’t gotten in touch with Donna. She could have been dead for all that any of us knew. But she wasn’t. She was in Switzerland writing her memoirs.”

  “Perhaps, Krekor, you should calm down and not get excited until after you have talked to her.”

  “I may not be able to talk to her. I may strangle her first.”

  “Yes,” Tibor said. “I think that is understandable. It was not a good thing to do, disappearing as she did. But she’s a complicated woman, Krekor. She isn’t the girl next door. There may be reasons that neither you know about nor I do. You do not understand yet what has been happening.”

  “I understand that I want to kill her,” Gregor said, staring up at Tibor’s ceiling. It was a tin ceiling. Donna Moradanyan had insisted. It was patterned with butterflies.

  “Maybe we could change that coffee for brandy.”

  “No.” Gregor stood up. “There are things I have to do. Phone calls I have to make. She has to come back to the apartment sometime. Her luggage is there. She got part of it in the Bahamas. She didn’t spend all her time in Switzerland.”

  “Perhaps she needed a vacation.”

  Gregor was beginning to feel like he needed a vacation, from this, all of it. This was why he did not like “relationships.” This was why, before he’d met Bennis, he’d either married a woman or left her alone. He had just taken on a case, and his mind was not on his work. It wasn’t even still inside his skull.

  “You know,” he said, “if I don’t kill her myself, I may have to get her a bodyguard. If she’s coming out with some kind of tell-all memoir, there are going to be literally dozens of people looking to murder her, including four sitting members of the United States Senate.”

  2

  It would have been different if Bennis had been at the apartment when Gregor got back from Tibor’s, but she wasn’t, and she wasn’t there the whole long afternoon that Gregor stayed put and tried to concentrate on work. She wasn’t in her own apartment, either, or in Grace Fineman’s. Gregor would have heard her come in through the front door and climb the stairs. All after-noon the only person who did that was Grace herself, who ran in after one rehearsal to run out to another, or to a photo shoot, or something.

  “We’re being profiled,” she announced happily, and breathlessly, as Gregor caught her on the way in. “Isn’t that wonderful? By The Inquirer. I’ve got to be downtown in concert dress in forty-five minutes. I can’t believe how amazing this is. Nobody ever takes harpsichords seriously in the mainstream media. I saw Bennis. Isn’t it wonderful? She’s finally back home.”

  As far as Gregor was concerned, she wasn’t really back home. It made him more than a little annoyed to realize that everyone on Cavanaugh Street had seen her before he did. He retreated to his own living room and considered making the phone calls he had to make for Russ as he’d promised to do. He could hear Grace dashing around banging open doors and drawers. He thought concert dress must be the long, black satin gown she wore to play in on the nights when there were paying customers. From what he remembered, all classical musicians who were women wore those to play. Men wore tuxedos. Gregor had always thought they looked like they were at a funeral. How could they expect to interest a new generation of listeners in classical music if they looked as if the stuff was only good for putting people in the ground? That made no sense. It didn’t even begin to make sense.

  He went to the window and looked out on the street for the four hundredth time. This was not how he had expected to respond to Bennis’s coming back home. Maybe that was because he had expected to see her right away, to be the first one, and to know as soon as he saw her what was or was not happening between them. Now he was so distracted, his mind felt full of fuzz. He wondered what he was supposed to do about Alison this evening. No wonder she had tried to put him off having dinner. She’d seen the interview on Good Morning Philadelphia. Should he go, and if he went, how should he behave. He was suddenly very, very relieved that the relationship with Alison had not moved any farther than it had. He was also very, very clear about what her problems with him had been all this time. Before, he’d been in too much denial to believe them.

  “I am Gregor Demarkian,” he said, out loud. “I do not believe in denial.”

  He also didn’t believe in talking out loud to himself in his own living room.

  He tried to force himself to move away from the window. People came and went on the street, none of them Bennis. Howard Kashinian was home in the middle of the day, which posed an interesting question about why he was not at his office. Howard’s life tended to erupt in IRS auditors every once in a while. Grace left the building and ran a block in black satin and high heels before a taxi picked her up. Taxis loved Cavanaugh Street. One of the Ohanian girls and one of the Melajian girls got out of yet another taxi, carrying shopping bags.

  This time Gregor did manage to force himself away from the window and back onto the couch. He was both surprised and disturbed with himself. He knew his feelings for Bennis were very deep, but he’d never felt this kind of schoolboy agitation in his life. Even with his late wife, Elizabeth, his emotions had been calm and measured and capable of being handled when he needed his mind for his work. And it wasn’t that he had loved Elizabeth less. If anything, he would have said he’d loved Elizabeth more. At the least, he had loved her differently. He didn’t know what he meant anymore. He didn’t know what to think.

  He made himself pick up the phone on the side table. It took him a moment to remember Rob Benedetti’s direct line—his memory seemed to have gone the way of all the rest of his mental faculties—but when he did, he dialed it and waited and introduced himself to Rob’s secretary as if he were a sane man. There was a drumbeat going on in the back of his head now, in concert with all the other upset. Did he love Bennis? Was that it? Was that what Alison and Tibor both saw and he did not?

  The phone picked up on the other end. Rob Benedetti said, “Gregor! Hello! I was expecting you two hours ago!”

  “You were?” Gregor couldn’t remember how long it had been since he had left the police station and Henry Tyder’s odd little act.

  “Jackman called me,” Rob said. “He’s more than a little agitated that you’re going to sign on on the other side this time, but I told him not to worry. It’s not how you work. So you’ve seen him. What do you think? Is he our Plate Glass Killer?”

  “Have you seen him?”

  “Not yet,” Rob said. “I’ve had reports, and some of them are pretty bizarre. I take it that the original report, last night, that he’s some homeless wino o
n the street isn’t exactly accurate.”

  There was a picture of Gregor and Bennis in evening dress in a silver Tiffany frame on the side table at some awards dinner she’d made him take her to. He’d forgotten it was there. In fact he’d used the side table for weeks without ever really seeing it. It was a black-and-white picture because Bennis preferred black-and-white. He picked it up and put it face down on the table.

  “Gregor?”

  “Sorry. No, it’s not quite accurate and it’s not quite not. He’s a Tyder, old Philadelphia money, and he’s apparently got a ton sitting in trusts. He also shares a house with his sisters—”

  “Half sisters,” Rob said automatically. “The women are Owen Tyder’s daughters by his first wife. Henry is the son by the second. First wife was a Day—”

  “Ah,” Gregor said. Bennis’s mother was a Day. Was that going to mean that Bennis and this case were somehow related?

  “—and the second was, what shall we say, interesting. Started out as a show girl in Las Vegas, put her money in real estate instead of self-destruction, and made a pile, met Owen at some charity thing in Washington, D.C. From all reports the daughters were furious. And still are.”

  “Well, that could account for why Henry Tyder doesn’t like to live in his own house,” Gregor said. “But I think it’s more complicated than that. It’s the guilt thing again. He just can’t get past the guilt. I don’t know. For whatever reason, he does spend a lot of his time living on the street. I checked, though. During that last cold snap we had, he was out of sight and into the warm. For all the craziness, he’s shrewd enough when he needs to be.”

  “Do you think he’s crazy?”

  Gregor considered this. “I don’t know if that’s the word for what’s going on. I think there might be some brain damage. He’s been an alcoholic for years, and a druggie at least sometimes. That tends to have an effect on how well a mind works.”

  “But you don’t think he’s incompetent to stand trial,” Rob said.

  “You haven’t made it to trial yet,” Gregor said, “and I’m not sure you’re ever going to. He could make it look like he was incompetent to stand trial if he wanted to. And you’d be left wondering, just as I am, if it’s real or an act. This is a very unusual man.”

  “Then maybe he could be the Plate Glass Killer,” Rob said. “Serial killers are unusual men. Or at least, they seem so to me.”

  Gregor considered this. “Some of them are,” he said. “Bundy was. But most of them seem to follow a pattern, and it’s not a very interesting pattern. Sexual dysfunction. Necrophilia. Even Bundy was a necrophiliac. That odd inability to see the world as if it contained anybody at all except yourself. After you see enough of them, you begin to think of them as a syndrome, with a related syndrome, the symbiotic one, when they do it all with a girlfriend.”

  “And make tapes,” Rob said. “I know that. But this isn’t like that, is it? The Plate Glass Killer doesn’t rape them. There hasn’t been a single sign of sexual assault with any of them, and if one showed up we’d wonder if it was done by the same guy. So it’s not the usual thing.”

  “No, it’s not the usual thing. And that’s enough to give me pause about the entire case. It’s, literally, unheard of for there not to be a sexual element in a serial killer case. And then there’s the problem Russ has been having with the detectives. Do you know something about that?”

  There was an odd little pause on Rob’s end of the line. “Ah,” he said, “Marty Gayle and Cord Leehan. Yeah. They don’t get along too well.”

  “And you think that’s a good idea?” Gregor asked. “On a case like this, maybe the most important case on the books at the moment? Russ said something about how he can’t seem to get the two of them into the same room at the same time.”

  “Yeah,” Rob said. “I know. It’s complicated, Gregor, and there’s a consent decree and, trust me, we wouldn’t be doing it this way if we didn’t have to. Ask John Jackman. Tell me if you think there’s any chance that Henry Tyder is the Plate Glass Killer.”

  “I still can’t tell you if Henry Tyder is the man you want,” Gregor said. “Not on what I have now. The best thing I can tell you is that I’ll sign on if you want. And if I think he is in the end, I’ll say so; but if I think he isn’t, I’ll say so too. And I’m not going to promise not to mention a word to Russ or the defense.”

  “I’m not worried about that,” Rob said. “But you were on this case once before, weren’t you? You came in on the side of one of these guys—”

  “Alexander Mark,” Gregor said. “Edmund George asked me to. There wasn’t any question there, though. It was just Marty Gayle doing his thing. You’d better watch that guy. He’s a hate crime waiting to happen.”

  “Yeah, I know. I know better than you think. I’m fine with all this, Gregor, and I’d really like to have you on board because, trust me, the last thing I want, and the last thing Jackman wants, is for us to go after a Philadelphia Tyder on a charge of serial murder and then not be able to make it stick. Especially with the IPO coming. One of the sisters is a bubblehead, but the other one isn’t, and she’d have us in court in a second if her half brother got acquitted but the arrest screwed up the public offering. Why don’t you come down here tomorrow morning around nine, and we’ll have the materials for you to go over for background. I could do it sooner, I suppose, but we’re a little backed up and taking longer means we’ll at least be thorough.”

  “Tomorrow will be fine,” Gregor said. “Tonight, I’m meeting with a psychologist I’m thinking of recommending to Russ.”

  “Russ is still on the case?” Rob said. “Great, I’m glad. I’d never have expected those women to put up with him.”

  “Henry Tyder hasn’t been declared incompetent yet. He’s the one who wants to put up with Russ.”

  “Ah,” Rob said. “All right. This gets more interesting by the minute. See you tomorrow morning. I’ll assign one of the desk jockeys to it and have it all organized. Good luck with your psychologist.”

  “Thanks,” Gregor said. Rob had already hung up. Rob was like that.

  Gregor put the phone back in the cradle and then his head in his hands. The building was quiet. Even old George Tekemanian didn’t seem to be watching television. Usually, that television was on full blast. You could hear Oprah clucking for blocks. He didn’t want to get up and go to the window again. He didn’t want to read. He didn’t want to go back to Tibor’s. He didn’t want to watch television. That last one wasn’t all that surprising because he didn’t ever want to watch television. He only turned it on for the news, and the last time he’d turned the news on for any length of time was on and right after 9/11. He had no idea what he was supposed to do now. He had no idea what to think.

  Finally he got up and got his jacket from the back of the chair he’d tossed it on when he’d first come in from Tibor’s. Bennis’s luggage was still everywhere. In his bedroom, three of her sweaters were now lying across his bed. He had pictures of her. He had her underwear in his chest of drawers. He had her special brand of tea in his kitchen cabinets. All of these things had been comforting during the long weeks while she was away, but now they were—he didn’t know what. Wrong. Frightening. A terrible testament to the fact that you could be married to someone without ever standing up in front of a priest and making it official.

  If he stayed here any longer, he was going to go insane. His only choice was not to stay here.

  He made sure he had his keys and headed out the door.

  3

  In the end Gregor met Alison Standish and her psychologist for dinner. He really had no reason not to. It might have been different if he and Alison had actually been having an affair. He kept telling himself that Bennis should assume he had been having an affair with someone, given her disappearance and her lack of explanations and all the other nutsy behavior she was prone to. Gregor was sure that any other man would have been having an affair, if not several, and one or two of the ones he had known while he w
as still with the Bureau would have been married to one of his affairs by now. The problem was that Gregor could not quite figure out why he and Bennis weren’t married yet. In fact, in every way that really mattered, they were—or had been, up until recently—and then he couldn’t explain what was going on. He knew couples who had been legally married for thirty years who were less settled in with each other than he and Bennis had been until she took off without giving him any idea of where or why she was going.

  He spent the afternoon researching single-state serial killer cases and then doing VIPER searches for out-of-Pennsylvania cases that matched the MO of the Plate Glass Killer. He had the codes he needed to access the system. Being a consultant for police departments had enabled him to keep those current. Of course, he had them all on his computer at home. It would have been easier for him to go home and get it all done there. Instead, he’d gone to a local branch of the Philadelphia Public Library and searched through his wallet for the place where he’d written down the passwords he needed. He had a lot of passwords tucked away on the backs of business cards. It took him awhile to find the right one.

  In the end he might as well not have bothered. There wasn’t a thing like what he was looking for anywhere in the system. He came across only two open cases where the killer did not sexually assault his victims before or after the murders. One was in Oregon with reports in Washington and Northern California, one was in Texas with reports in Oklahoma and New Mexico, and in neither case did the killer slash his victims’ faces with glass. As for the single-state cases, they were even less helpful. There were no other cases in Pennsylvania at all. Gregor would never have imagined that Pennsylvania was a particularly low-crime state, but there it was. At least as far as serial murder was concerned, Pennsylvania was practically the epicenter of Eden.

  He made it to the restaurant ten minutes ahead of time. He had to wait in the little front foyer for his table to be ready, and then he felt as if he were going to explode. The Ascorda Mariscos was not one of the restaurants he had shared with Bennis. Alison had brought him here the third or fourth time they’d gone out to eat together.