Glass Houses

by Jane Haddam

  He was on a side street he didn’t recognize, in a neighborhood that felt only vaguely familiar, which was very odd for him. He had grown up in Philadelphia, in the city itself, not out in Bucks County or on the Main Line, where nice white people moved so that their children didn’t have to go to school with “all that crime.” He remembered his Aunt Evelyn, sitting at the dining room table on Christmas Eve, explaining to his mother time after time why she shouldn’t stay in the city if she wanted “to see Denny grow up right.” He remembered his mother fuming as she put the dishes away in the sink after the relatives had gone. He remembered Christmas Day, when he and his mother and his father had all piled into his father’s Oldsmobile for the drive out to Wayne. At the time he hadn’t understood what his mother envied, or why she envied it. Wayne had seemed to him like a boring place. It had too much grass and too little of anything else.

  Of course, now that he was grown and in a position to do what he wanted, he hadn’t moved out of the city either; and his ex-wife had had that as one of her complaints before the divorce. One of the things he was doing tonight was trying to remember why he had married her in the first place. It was better to think about that than to think about what he wanted to think about. There was a trick to this thing he did. He had to carry it on just under the surface of his consciousness right up until the moment when it became real. Then he could look it in the face. Now, though, he was alone, and the streets were wet and deserted. Every once in a while there would be lights coming from the front windows of the houses. There were churches, too, real ones, not the storefront variety you found in the kinds of neighborhoods he knew enough to avoid. He wondered why that was. He could understand why the big churches stayed away from the places in the city that he looked for. Big churches meant parishes with money to build them, and people with money didn’t admit to being what he was or wanting what he wanted. The storefronts, though. Those existed to save the souls of men and women who had disintegrated into degradation. You’d think that exactly what they were looking for were the places he was also looking for. How much more disintegrated or degraded could you get than that?

  The thing was, Dennis didn’t think he was disintegrating, and he didn’t think he was degraded. He had thought the whole thing through dozens of times. To the extent that he found himself feeling hunted and scared, he could ascribe the entire effect to the fear that the police would find him or that some-body would. In a different kind of society, in ancient Greece, for example, he would not have been guilty or afraid. It was this time and this place, this country with its puritanical zeal to make everyone holy, that was ruining him.

  He was getting into more familiar territory. He didn’t know how that had happened. He was walking and walking without paying attention to where he was going. He was in one of those neighborhoods now away from the high rises. There used to be a place you could go near Independence Hall, but he had never favored it, and eventually the police had closed it down. He had known they would. The last thing the city of Philadelphia wanted was something like that right next door to where the Declaration of Independence was signed. There was a church, too, but it was barely hanging on. It was a big brick Catholic Church with a big brick school building and a big brick convent right next to it. The school building and the convent were boarded up.

  He remembered his decision to get married. He had been seeing Jillie for months, longer than he had ever seen any other woman, and he was beyond being bored with her. She was too loud and too enthusiastic about everything, and she was too big. She had big breasts, and big thighs, and a big rear. She was like some awful caricature of the Polish-American city girl. What he liked about her was the fact that she was conspicuous. People noticed her because she made sure they did. Her clothes were bright and sparkly, and her voice carried all the way to New Jersey. Nobody had to wonder about Dennis Ledeski and what he liked to do in private. There she was, complete with the big hair and the nonstop jokes about whatever it was everybody had gotten up to in the backseats of cars in their senior year of high school.

  It had been one of those days when he had not been able to deny himself any longer. It had started early, just after breakfast. By just after lunch, he had been in a state of high piss off. Everybody else had a movement to represent them. Even perverts had a movement to represent them. Look at the way the queers had become the New Big Thing, complete with their own talk shows and television shows and magazines. He was doing nothing wrong, and there was nothing wrong with what he was. He felt no differently than any other man, except in this sense: he didn’t deny it as well, and he refused to compromise his integrity to fit into the groove of the bourgeoisie. Besides, what he did was better than what they did because what they did was furtive and sly. He had never been either of those things.

  He had lunch at a hole-in-the-wall diner near his office, and when he was done he couldn’t make himself go back and sit behind a desk. He called Elyse and told her he wouldn’t be back for two more hours. He had a dental emergency, and the dentist was able to fit him right in. Then he’d left the diner and gone walking in the one direction he knew he could find relief.

  One of the things he hated about the situation he was in was the neighborhoods he had to go to to get some relief. When he was younger, those neighborhoods tended to be gay ones. Since the priest pedophilia scandals, though, the “gay community”—for God’s sake, when did queers get a community?—had been less complaisant about allowing “them” to operate in their midst, and the places had moved on to more standard red-light districts. “Adult” districts, they called them now, to stress as far as possible the assumption that no-body would come down there who wasn’t over the age of eighteen. Dennis would have been surprised if most of the hookers were over fifteen, and the cops knew it, too. Everybody knew that the girls who walked the streets up here were barely into high school, if they bothered to go to school at all. Here was the real perversion, even worse than the perversion of being a queer. These guys who went for the teenaged girls were not looking for relationships. They didn’t even think about imparting wisdom or understanding. They only wanted to use those very young bodies in any way that would get them off, and then they wanted to disappear. Dennis Ledeski would have given his life not to have to disappear.

  He knew where he was going because he had been there before. There was a house, just on the edge of the district, the kind of place where in other neighborhoods crack cocaine would be sold. This house was much better taken care of, and it had a tattoo parlor on the ground floor. You could go up there and pretend you were getting a tattoo and then slip into the back when the time was right. If something went wrong, you had an excuse for being where you were.

  On the day Dennis proposed to Jillie, he went up the front steps of this house half convinced that he would never marry. Marriage was not only a trap—that much had been proved in a million movies and in every novel he had ever been given to read in college literature courses—but it was second best. No man could feel for a woman what he felt for a boy, a perfect boy, the one who would carry his legacy into the future as no biological son ever could. This was something the Greeks had known, too. Women were for breeding. You slept with them to get descendants. You couldn’t talk to them. You couldn’t tell them your deepest hopes and fears. You couldn’t discuss the important things, like philosophy and art. Women were half men, and the half that was missing was the soul. Nikos Kazantzakis had said it: “I can never get used to the Western notion that women have souls.”

  On that day Dennis had a boy, a boy he’d seen half a dozen times, one he thought would have everything he needed in a boy. He wasn’t gay, and the boy wasn’t either. He didn’t want to have sex with grown men. He had been thinking for weeks that what he ought to do was find some way to have the boy come to live with him. The best thing would have been to be able to adopt, but he knew better than to try it. The next best thing would have been to find a woman with a son of the right age who understood, as he did, the importance
of that son’s relationship with an older man. He had actually come across a few women like that, but they’d all been black. He couldn’t see himself with a black protegee. There was too much of a difference in background and expectations.

  Now, though, he had this boy, and this boy was waiting for him because he always was. He had no idea where the boy came from. He didn’t know who his people were, or if they even existed anymore. He only knew the boy was here, in the rooms on the floors above the tattoo parlor every time he came.

  He couldn’t put a finger on when he knew something was wrong, but he got lucky. He picked up on the wrongness when he was still half a block away. There was no police car out front. There were no uniformed officers. everything looked normal, but it didn’t. He stopped at a stoop three houses down and waited to see if something would happen. In no time at all, it did. People began to stream out of the tattoo parlor. Most of these people were men. Other people began to come out onto the street from the small convenience stores and sex shops that lined the sidewalks. A number of these people were women, and most of the women were whores. Dennis could feel the palms of his hands getting wet and that strange twisting thing happening in his gut.

  Somebody must have called the newspeople. A van came careening around the corner with the logo of one of the television stations on its side. It screeched to a stop right in front of the tattoo parlor. Five men jumped out, three of them carrying equipment.

  The twist in Dennis’s stomach got worse. He pressed himself against the wall of the store he was standing in front of in the hopes that he could make it calm down, but he couldn’t. The door to the tattoo parlor opened, and three men came out. Two of them were in plain brown suits and standing very tall. The third, handcuffed between them, was bent over at the waist, with his suit jacket over his head. Dennis felt something like a knife thrust into his gut. He knew the man. The jacket-over-the-head strategy might work to keep the press from photographing him, and to keep strangers from recognizing him, but Dennis knew who it was right away. His name was Clark Bordrick, and he practiced law two buildings down from where Dennis had his own offices.

  Just then the people from the street began to crowd in on Clark and on the men escorting him to an unmarked car. Everybody closed in, the hookers and the pimps and the addicts as well as the people who ran the stores. Everybody had the same look on his face. Every pore in Dennis’s body was now pumping out sweat. Somebody threw an egg. Dennis had no idea where it came from. Maybe there were eggs in the refrigerator sections of the convenience stores. The egg landed on the sidewalk right in front of Clark Bordrick’s shoes, spattering white and yellow up the front of his pants legs. Another egg landed behind the plainclothes detective on the right, hitting the tattoo parlor’s front door with a resounding “pop” that Dennis could hear over the restlessness of the crowd.

  What was happening to his stomach was now beyond urgent. The knife was being twisted, twisted, and he knew he had to run. He should walk. To do anything but to walk normally was to call attention to himself in a situation where he could easily get killed. The crowd was like that. He couldn’t help himself. He had to run. He was in so much pain he wanted to double up and fall on the sidewalk, but he knew he couldn’t do that either.

  He got around the corner and down the block, and there was a service alley. He had never understood alleys. There were always a million of them, but he wasn’t sure why, or what they were supposed to do that couldn’t be done just by going out the back doors of the buildings. Maybe some buildings didn’t have back doors. He wasn’t making any sense. He hurt. He wanted to scream. He got down the alley into a bare, bleak back courtyard, a sandy wasteland without living vegetation, full of broken bottles and battered packaging from fast-food restaurants.

  There’s a Burger King around here, he thought, and it was true, but he forgot about it, because his bowels let go, all at once, in a rumbling burst that knocked him on his face.

  He stopped now, where he was, no longer lost. That was why he had married Jillie. For years, that moment in the alley, that long afternoon trying to get himself home and cleaned up without anybody seeing him or knowing what had happened, that whole nightmare was the defining experience of his life. It symbolized to him everything he would become if he went on the way he was going. The Greeks did not matter to him. Neither did the enormous distaste he felt for all things “normal” and middle class. There was only the memory of himself, covered in his own feces and urine, lying flat on his face in the broken glass.

  Later, when all that fuss happened with Elyse, Jillie had accused him of wanting to kill her. She was wrong. He’d never wanted to kill her. He’d only wanted to get away from her. Memories fade, and even that memory faded and changed its meaning. The symbolism began to seem like something else than what he’d thought it was at first. The symbolism began to seem like a message from God, the kind that only saints and martyrs get.

  He was willing to be a saint, but not so willing to be a martyr, so he was moving carefully. He wished the police cars would turn on their sirens. He wished it wasn’t so cold and so wet. He wished a lot of things.

  But he no longer wished to be something other than what he was.

  EIGHT

  1

  The only detective on the case at the scene now was Marty Gayle. Gregor had heard about him off and on for years because he was something of a departmental embarrassment. The Philadelphia Police Department didn’t require its officers to be gay rights activists, but it wasn’t happy with outright flaming homophobia either; and Marty Gayle was a homophobe, complete with a wrongful arrest record that looked like the screenplay for the kind of Hollywood movie that wins an Oscar on the strength of its social commentary alone. Gregor would never have assigned somebody like Marty Gayle to a case like this, and he wouldn’t have kept him on the case if he was having trouble working with a partner; but he wasn’t making those decisions, and he was going to have to live with the ones made by other people. He wondered what the partner was like. Cord Leehan was not somebody he knew even casually. With any luck he’d be somebody who was easier to work with than Marty Gayle.

  Marty Gayle was out here now because he was the first person the precinct captain had thought to call when his two least excitable patrolmen had called in to tell him what they had—or thought they had, Gregor reminded himself. It was the middle of the night. It had to be after ten o’clock. It was pitch dark, and most of the light in this neighborhood was coming from the spots the police had brought in for themselves. Gregor looked around and saw that there wasn’t a single streetlamp broken. It wasn’t that kind of place.

  He was just stepping out of his cab and wondering what to do next when Russ came running up, out of breath.

  “Gregor,” he said. “I’m so glad you’re here. I’m so glad—”

  “I’ll bet you’re glad,” a big man said, coming over to both of then, “but you shouldn’t be, Mr. Donahue, and you know it.”

  “I heard about it from Rob Benedetti,” Russ said, “and I was right.”

  “We don’t know who’s right about what just yet,” the big man said. Then he held out his his hand to Gregor Demarkian. “I’m Marty Gayle. I’m the detective detailed to the Plate Glass Killer case.”

  Gregor filed away, in the back of his mind, the fact that Marty Gayle had said he was the detective on the case—as if he were the only one. “There’s been another Plate Glass Killing?” he asked.

  “No,” Marty Gayle said. Then he walked away.

  Russ watched him go. Gregor thought Russ looked awful. Another day had come and gone, and Russ didn’t seem to have gotten any sleep yet. It was the kind of thing you could do in college, once or twice, but never again.

  Gregor looked at the scene, or what was available to see. There was a small house exactly like a dozen other small houses both on its side of the street and on the other. There was the open door at the front, and the porch, cleared of everything unrelated to the police. There were the neighbors, doz
ens of them, watching from the sidewalk and from other porches. It was hard to see details in the dark.

  “So,” Gregor said, realizing just then that a fine, misty drizzle was coming down, “what is all this about if there hasn’t been another Plate Glass Killing?”

  “It’s your verb tenses,” Russ said. “Watch out for Marty Gayle. He’s like that. There hasn’t been one, but there were more of them in the past than we realized—maybe.”

  “Why maybe?”

  “Because I haven’t been able to get in there,” Russ said. “Oh, I know, I shouldn’t be able to actually get in there. I’d contaminate the crime scene. That’s not what I mean. I haven’t been able to get anyone to tell me anything, and I’ve got a right to know, Gregor. If it turns out there was another Plate Glass Killing, and Henry didn’t even know about it, that’s a clincher. I’ve got a client charged with capital murder. I have a right to know.”

  “Henry didn’t mention any Plate Glass Killings besides the ones that had already been in the papers?”

  “No,” Russ said, “and he didn’t even mention all of those. This is ridiculous. You know this is ridiculous.”

  Gregor looked around again. “Who are these people?” he asked. “Some of them live in the house, isn’t that right? Do you know which ones? Do you know how the police got called in?”

  “I thought you’d be able to get by them,” Russ said, “because you’re working for Jackman now. Officially, at any rate. I thought they’d have to let you in.”

  “Let’s worry about that later,” Gregor said. “Why are the police here? Who called them? What got them out here?”

  “Oh,” Russ said, “wait. I know that. The woman who manages the building. It’s cut up into tiny apartments apparently; at least they must be tiny, look at the house. Anyway, she went to the basement for something and saw a hand—”