Glass Houses

by Jane Haddam

  “A hand?”

  “Or part of a hand,” Russ said. “I’m sorry. I’m a mess. But she saw something, and she called the police to come look; and they came, and they found a body, and they called everybody in sight; and now we’re down to this.”

  “Do you know the woman by sight, the one who called? Is she around here? Do the police have her?”

  Russ tried looking around. Gregor could tell he wasn’t finding it easy. “I don’t know,” he said. “She’s a big woman, African American, in a—oh, wait. She’s over there.”

  “Where?”

  “There.”

  Russ was pointing at a little clump of uniformed officers. The big African-American woman was in the middle of them. She did not look under arrest, but she did look like someone the police had every intention of keeping away from the press as long as possible.

  There was something, Gregor thought. Where was the press? They listened to the police band. They should be out and around here by now. He patted Russ on the shoulder.

  “Stay here,” he said. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  It was a long walk over to the uniformed police who surrounded the woman he wanted to talk to, and Gregor wouldn’t have made it at all if he hadn’t known at least three other officers on the way. When he got to where he was going, he found Marty Gayle with no problem.

  “If that’s the landlady, or the super, or whatever,” Gregor said, “I’d like to talk to her for a moment.”

  “And you’re working for Jackman, so I have to let you,” Marty Gayle said. “But I’ve got to tell you, Mr. Demarkian, I don’t like these arrangements. I don’t like bringing in outside consultants, or whatever it is we’re supposed to call them. You’ve never been an actual cop, have you?”

  “I was with the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”

  “In other words, you’ve never been an actual cop.”

  “I have worked with them, Detective Gayle.”

  “I know you have,” Marty Gayle said. “You’ve worked with actual Philadelphia cops. I’ve seen the news stories. I’ve heard the gossip in the department. And it’s very good gossip. Cops like you. Everybody thinks you’re competent. Pretty much everybody thinks you’re brilliant as hell. But that isn’t the issue, is it?”

  “What is the issue?” Gregor asked.

  Marty Gayle looked away, at the front of the house. They were very close. It looked far more chaotic than it had from far away.

  “A police force is a delicate thing,” Marty Gayle said. “It’s a balance of a lot of different elements, and it doesn’t take much to get those elements out of balance. I hate the drug war. Do you want to know why? Because not only is the drug war unwinnable in any sense anybody could want to win it, but it upsets the balance of police forces. It’s too much money, and too much temptation, and that line where everybody teeters between being enough of a rebel to have the imagination you need to do good work and going completely over to the dark side. The drug war messes with that like you wouldn’t believe. That’s why I hate the drug war.”

  “Fair enough,” Gregor said, “but I don’t see what that has to do with me.” “Nothing, really, except that it’s about upsetting the balance. You upset the balance. You’re the wrong psychology. Bringing you in here from the outside is like holding up a sign that says, we’d better get somebody smart from the outside because the dumb cops can’t handle it. Cops are not dumb; they’re like anybody else. Treat them as if they’re dumb long enough and they’ll start to believe it; and when they’ve believed it long enough, they’ll start to dumb themselves down until they fit the description.”

  “I don’t think I’ve ever thought of cops as dumb,” Gregor said. “An individual cop here and there, but not cops in general or as a class. If I did that, Jackman wouldn’t want me here.”

  “It doesn’t matter what you think,” Marty Gayle said. “It matters what the men think, and I know how they think. It’s a big case, but they’re capable of handling it. I’m capable of handling it all on my own, without the advice of the Armenian-American Hercule Poirot.”

  “Do you think Henry Tyder is the Plate Glass Killer?” Gregor asked. Marty Gayle smiled. “The woman you want is named Kathleen Conge. She’s right over there. An African-American Catholic. Philadelphia is full of them. Because of Saint Katherine Drexel. Did you know that?”

  “I don’t know who Saint Katherine Drexel is.”

  Marty Gayle smiled again. “She’s right over there. She likes to talk,” he said. Then he turned away and went back to looking at the house.

  Gregor looked at the house, too, for a moment. The open front door revealed nothing but a narrow hallway full of police officers and the medical examiner’s people. People kept going back and forth in face masks and surgical gloves. He wondered how many other people in the crowd were also residents of this house, and if they were being as carefully watched by the police as Kathleen Conge was. He dismissed the idea that this house looked vaguely familiar. It probably was because so many of the houses in Philadelphia, outside the commercial core of the city, were just like this. And the ones owned and operated by Green Point—he could see the Green Point logo on the building’s front door—were almost like clones of each other, probably because the company was saving money on things like paint.

  He gave one last look at the back of Marty Gayle’s head and went to talk to Kathleen Conge.

  2

  Kathleen Conge had been crying. Gregor could see the tracks the tears had made on her face even in the oddly insubstantial light cast by the spots the police had put up everywhere, but nowhere useful to people outside the house. He looked her over before he went up to introduce himself. She was very heavy, with that ballooning kind of fat that looks as if it must weigh nothing at all, as if it were liquid. She had on one of those wildly flowered dresses fat women seemed to be able to materialize at will. Gregor couldn’t remember having seen one on sale anywhere, ever. Beyond the fat and the clothes, there was not much to see on the surface. She was dirty, but that could be a function of the night and the circumstances. There was grime on her face and hands and streaking stains across the bosom of her dress. Maybe she had been rooting around in the cellar or had fallen when she found the skeleton and panicked. Maybe she was like this all the time. He thought he would not have liked her as the superintendent of any apartment building he had to live in. She had the air of somebody who would be careful to know everybody else’s secrets.

  The trick, Gregor told himself, was to form these impressions without turning them into prejudices. You had to be ready to change your mind if the suspect was other than what you had pegged her to be. Of course, Kathleen Conge was not a suspect, as far as he knew. He just didn’t know what else to call her.

  He made his way through the little circle of cops, stopping to shake hands with two of them whom he remembered from other cases without remembering their names. When he came up to Kathleen Conge herself, she wasn’t looking at him. She was staring straight at the house. She had a handkerchief in her hand and was pressing it to the side of her mouth. He could smell the faint after traces of vomit. She had thrown up at least once, recently.

  He reached out and tapped her on the shoulder. The handkerchief was stained, too, and there were tracks of dirt in the folds of her neck.

  “Miss Conge?” he said. He pronounced it the way it would have been pronounced in French, because it was a French name: Con-gee.

  She turned her head to look at him. Her eyes were very big and very blue. Gregor didn’t think he had ever met an African American with blue eyes before. They were also very vague and watery. She was going to cry again.

  “You got it right,” she said. “My name. People don’t get it right the first time.”

  “I’m Gregor Demarkian,” Gregor said. “I’ve been called in as a consultant by the Philadelphia police—to work on the Plate Glass Killings.”

  “I thought it was all over,” Kathleen said. “When they got that man, and he confesse
d. I thought it was all over. But it was Bennie all the time.”

  “Who’s Bennie?”

  “Bennie lives here.” Kathleen pointed to the house. “Bennie Durban. He’s got these pictures on his walls, all over them. Charles Manson. I know that one. And Jeffrey Dahmer. And one he likes he says is Ted Bundy. He’s got them all up like they were movie stars.”

  “Pictures of serial killers? On his walls?”

  “That’s right. He doesn’t like Dahmer. He says Dahmer was stupid. He thinks these killers were smart. The other ones. And he’s got books. He doesn’t read nothing, really, not even the newspaper; but he’s got books on these people. And things he cuts out of magazines. The police saw it when they came before; but it’s none of their business, that’s what they said. It ain’t against the law to have pictures.”

  Gregor tried to arrange this into some kind of sensible order and couldn’t. “The police were here before?” he asked. “When?”

  “Back awhile ago,” Kathleen Congee said vaguely. “Back when Rondelle was killed, Rondelle Johnson. That was that Plate Glass Killer. They found her in the alley right behind the house, right there, and then the police came looking around and they got to Bennie because Bennie knew her. They took him down to the police station, too, and I thought we was going to have to rent the room; but there he come, right back, and here is he again.”

  “He’s here now?”

  “He’s at work,” Kathleen said. “He’s a dishwasher somewhere. He’ll be back. He can’t go a day without looking at them pictures, and he’s got more of them in a box under his bed. He’s a nasty man.”

  He sounded like one. Gregor made a mental note to ask Jackman to get him a full summary of the events in the Plate Glass Killings case—the names and findings on everyone they had interviewed or suspected of being the Plate Glass Killer, the connections between any of these people and the suspects, the reasons why they had let them all go.

  “Could you tell me what you saw?” he asked. “What made you call the police? Somebody over there, one of the detectives, I think, said you went down to the basement for something and saw a hand.”

  “Not in the basement,” Kathleen said. “The basement’s made of concrete. You couldn’t find no hand there. It was in the cellar, in the back. That’s dirt, that is. Has been since forever. It’s an old house.”

  “There’s a dirt cellar under that house?”

  “In the back behind the washing machines. There’s a door and you go back there and it’s dirt. Women who own this place said it was because that was the way it was during the Revolution War, and nobody can change anything from then because of the Historical Society. I think they was just cheap and didn’t want to spend the money to fix the whole basement, that’s what I think. They fixed the part of it we needed to use, and then that was all the inspectors saw when they came, except they don’t never come. They never do. I hate women like that. High society women. Always talking about history like they was the only ones here. My family was here before theirs was. We don’t want no dirt cellars. But they did. Those women. So in the back there’s a dirt cellar, and that’s where it was.”

  “What were you doing in this dirt cellar?”

  Kathleen Conge shrugged. “I wasn’t doing nothing. I went down to do my laundry and I was walking around, I heard something I thought it must be a rat. I’ve got the keys to the door there. I just opened up and looked inside.”

  “Is there a light?”

  “There’s no light or heat or nothing.”

  “Is there a window?”

  “It’s a cellar,” Kathleen said scornfully. “Of course there wasn’t no window. It’s like a grave with a door in it. That’s what it’s like.”

  “All right,” Gregor said. “But if it’s like a grave with a door in it, and there isn’t any light, how did you see anything?”

  Kathleen Conge’s eyes went black. She turned her head away, back to the front door of the house where the police were beginning to bring out things in bags. Gregor waited.

  Finally, Kathleen looked back. “I don’t know how I saw anything. I just did. I saw it.”

  “You saw a hand.”

  “I saw three hands,” Kathleen said. “Skeleton hands. Bones. Not hands with flesh on them. Just bones.”

  “And you thought at once that they belonged to victims of the Plate Glass Killer?”

  “Of course they do,” Kathleen said. “Who else is they gone belong to? People don’t go salting away bodies in the dirt every day.”

  “But bones,” Gregor said. “Bones are old. They have to be. It takes a certain amount of time for the flesh to rot away. These bones could be very old. They could be centuries old. Maybe the house was built near a churchyard; but the church is long gone, and nobody remembers it was here.”

  “There was a cord with the bones,” Kathleen said. Her voice was now very cold. “I saw it. There was a clear nylon cord just like there was with Rondelle.”

  “And you saw it even though there wasn’t any light.”

  “There was light come from the regular basement where I was. I had all the lights on.”

  “Are those strong lights, the ones in the basement?”

  Kathleen Conge turned away again. “I’m not gone talk nonsense to you no more. I’m only gone talk to the police.”

  Gregor almost told her that she had the right to remain silent, and not just with him, but there was no point to it. He had the information he had come for, and more of it than he had hoped. He wondered if Marty Gayle had spent any time talking to Kathleen Conge just yet. He also wondered what was in the dirt cellar that Kathleen had gone looking for, and why she had gone looking just today. If the skeletons had been as exposed as she said they had been—and he wasn’t sure of that—she might have seen a little something and gone digging for it and then not wanted to say. She couldn’t have been coming to the cellar on a regular basis any time recently or she would have seen them before. She might have seen them before and waited until now to say anything about them, but Gregor doubted it. There was little that was genuine about Kathleen Conge, but she was most definitely genuinely upset.

  She had turned her back to him, and he could see dirt and stains there, too. Up close, he had no trouble discerning that some of the stains were older than others, and that only some of them could have been made by dirt. Kathleen Conge was not a clean woman. She wasn’t going to turn back to him to allow him to say good-bye, so Gregor abandoned politeness and just went. The wind had picked up, and it was beginning to get more than a little cold.

  He made his way through the circle of uniformed police and back into the crowd, looking everywhere for Russ. He did not look for Marty Gayle. He could sit down with Marty Gayle and get that straightened out later. Now was not the time.

  Russ was on the other side of the street now, sitting on the bottom step of a stoop with his legs thrust out in front of him. Gregor started walking over, looking back at the house just one more time, as if it would make more sense if he contemplated it from a distance.

  3

  Russ had stopped trying to get too close to the uniformed officers, but he had not stopped watching, and he was tall enough so that he could see clearly even when he was sitting down. As Gregor approached, he got up, an automatic gesture of politeness Gregor had stopped being used to decades ago.

  “I called Donna,” Russ said. “I don’t know why. Maybe I was bored. I keep sort of coming to and being terrified she’s gone off and had the baby when I wasn’t paying attention.”

  “Not for a couple of months though,” Gregor said. “At least, that was what Lida told me when I asked.”

  “Not for a couple of months,” Russ admitted. “But you know what babies are. They come whenever. Like Bennis, I guess.”

  “Bennis isn’t a baby.”

  “Not physically, maybe. Anyway, never mind. I’m sorry I brought it up. Donna was trying to get me to pump you.”

  “About Bennis?”

  “About you
and Bennis. Bennis isn’t talking.”

  Gregor thought it was a very curious thing indeed, a time when Bennis wasn’t talking to Donna. He let it go. “I just got a very interesting piece of information,” he said. “Did you know that there is a man who lives in this house who was once picked up on suspicion of being the Plate Glass Killer? And that he decorates his walls with pictures of serial killers who are supposed to be his heroes?”

  Russ sat down again. “Really? He thinks they’re heroes?”

  “Well,” Gregor said, “I don’t know what he thinks, although I’m going to find out eventually, and sooner rather than later. He isn’t here at the moment. I talked to the woman who functions as superintendent for the building.”

  “Kathleen Conge,” Russ said. “They wouldn’t let me near her.”

  “I’ve got no idea how credible a source she is,” Gregor said, “but most of what she told me would be easy to check. Does the name Bennie Durban mean anything to you?”

  “No.”

  “You haven’t been through the files on the Plate Glass case? They should have sent you a pile of paper for discovery.”

  “Not this soon, they shouldn’t,” Russ said. “And they’ll take their own sweet time about it, too. Anyway, you have to be on your way to trial to get discovery, and then I have to demand it, or a lot of it. But there would be another way to check. If this guy was picked up on suspicion of being the PGK, it would have been in the newspapers.”

  “Not necessarily.”

  “Absolutely necessarily. The cops have been desperate for months wanting to get something to say they were moving in on this guy. If they were arresting somebody, or even bringing him in for questioning, it would have gotten out.”

  “Not necessarily,” Gregor said. “I know of at least one person in that category who got no newspaper publicity at all because I saw to it.”