Glass Houses

by Jane Haddam

  Rob was unbuttoning his coat. It was what Rob did whenever he was about to deliver a lecture, unbutton his coat or button it. Gregor wondered what he did in the summer. Maybe he buttoned his suit jackets.

  “For Christ’s sake,” Rob said.

  By then Gregor was right behind him. Marty Gayle was behaving as if Gregor didn’t exist, and neither did anyone else within hearing distance.

  “This is a crime scene,” Marty said, gesturing to what was going on behind him. “And you’re not my boss.”

  “No, I’m not your boss,” Rob said, “but John Jackman is, and he’s going to be down here in a split second if I tell him you’re not being reasonable. What’s wrong with you? We’ve been over this and over this. Your own captain’s talked to you. John’s talked to you. The God-damned mayor has talked to you. You can’t do this.”

  “I can’t refuse to talk to a civilian about an ongoing investigation?”

  “If by civilian, you mean Mr. Demarkian here, then he’s not a civilian in any meaningful sense of the term since he’s been hired by the city and the police department as a consultant—”

  “He was hired by that scuzzy little shit’s ambulance chaser.”

  “No,” Gregor said judiciously, “actually, I wasn’t. I talked to the, uh, defense counsel in question, but that was mostly because he’s a friend of mine.”

  “He is on the payroll of this city, and he is a consultant to the police department on this case; and I wasn’t talking about Demarkian and you know it,” Rob said. “You know exactly what this is about.”

  “Detectives don’t have to have partners,” Marty said. “I know they usually do, but they don’t have to. Why don’t we just leave it at that.”

  “We can’t leave it at that, Marty. There was a board of inquiry. You have a deal. Or had one, maybe, because I’m not sure it’s going to last after tonight. You can’t do this. You have to understand that. I think you do understand it. You can’t do it. You have a deal; and if the deal falls apart, you have a suspension—and that suspension could last a very long time.”

  “You try to fire me,” Marty said, “and I’ll file suit for sexual harassment against the department and against that. ” He pointed in Cord Leehan’s direction.

  Gregor looked from the finger to Cord Leehan himself, stopped a little ways off and showing no signs of coming any nearer. He’d met dozens of gay men in his life. They’d ranged from high camp to you’d-never-guess. Cord Leehan was definitely a you’d-never-guess. If anything, he looked like a country singer or a NASCAR race driver.

  Rob Benedetti had now taken off his coat. Gregor had no idea what he thought he was going to do with it.

  “Look,” Rob said, taking a deep and seemingly endless breath, “this is the deal. You don’t have to like him. You don’t have to approve of him. It really doesn’t matter—”

  “It mattered to that idiot psychologist they brought in,” Marty said. “Homophobic. It’s an illness. I can be cured.”

  “All right,” Rob said, “maybe that wasn’t the best way to go. We got through that, right? You’ve got the right to think what you think and feel what you feel. But goddamn, Marty, it sure as hell looks like an illness you’ve got from where I’m sitting. It looks like you can’t control yourself. It looks like you’re behaving like an irrational loon—”

  “Why? Because I’d prefer not to work with a man who isn’t a man and who can’t keep his business to himself?”

  “When in the name of God have you ever known Cord not to keep his business to himself? I mean that. When?”

  “Well, there was that thing last spring about going up to Massachusetts to marry his ‘partner.’ What about his ‘partner,’ Rob? Does he wear a dress?”

  “You’ve met Cord’s partner,” Rob said, “Jason Chisick. What are you talking about? He can’t even talk about his family?”

  “The man’s not his family,” Marty said. “Has everybody gone crazy around here?”

  “You talk about your family all the time,” Rob said patiently. “So does everybody else. There’s nothing wrong with Cord doing it. And it’s beside the point. Again, the point is that you had a deal, and the deal was you’d work with Cord for a year; and we’re not three months down the line, and we’re back to the same old crap. We really are. And don’t tell me it isn’t hurting the investigation because it is. You know it, and I know it. We’ve got eleven women dead—more if tonight is a Plate Glass find—and a man in custody that you didn’t arrest and the city is having a fit and John is running for mayor and you can’t do this. You really can’t. If you go on trying, we’re going to bounce your ass out of here, and that’s going to be the end of it.”

  “When I came onto this force,” Marty said, “it’s his ass you would have bounced out of here—just for being what he is.”

  “When you came on the force, Marty, the department wasn’t even fully integrated. Times change. Take your pick. Get with the program, or I’ll get on the phone to John and we’ll get you out of here.”

  “You’re not my boss,” Marty Gayle said.

  He turned away and walked toward the house. Fewer people were going in and out of the front door now. Gregor had the feeling that the night’s work was about to wind up.

  “Well,” he said.

  Rob Benedetti turned. “Yeah, well. He’s a good detective, Marty is. Or he used to be, before this became the thing he does day in and day out.”

  “Has he been the detective in charge of the Plate Glass Killings from the beginning?”

  “He’s been in this from the beginning, yeah,” Rob said. “In the beginning, we didn’t know we had a serial killer. Cord’s been in it, too, although they weren’t partners then. When we finally realized it was a serial killer case, they both wanted it. You wouldn’t believe the competitiveness.”

  “I think I would.”

  “Is something wrong?” Rob asked. “I mean, besides the obvious.”

  Gregor shook his head. “I don’t know if something’s wrong. Something’s odd, yes, but that could be anything: the time, the place, the fact that Marty Gayle doesn’t like me much. Do you think it would be possible for me to get hold of the complete records on this thing from the beginning? They wouldn’t have to leave the control of the police department. I could go down to John’s office or to yours and look through them.”

  “It wasn’t Marty who picked up Henry Tyder,” Rob said. “It was two patrolmen in uniform. He was just standing there on the street with the dead body in the alley, and he had blood on him, so they arrested him. But here’s the thing. It was Marty who picked up Henry Tyder the first time.”

  “All right.”

  “He picked up the other men we’ve questioned, too. By himself. Without Cord.”

  “You know,” Gregor said, “the thing that surprises me is that Cord Leehan has agreed to go along with this. This can’t be helping his own career.”

  “Yeah, I know,” Rob said. “There was a fight. A big one. A physical fight. One thing I’ve learned from this whole mess, gay men can pack a punch that would make Muhammed Ali proud. Not that Marty is a slouch. Neither one of them is looking very good to the people in Community Affairs at the moment. Okay. Why don’t I introduce you to Cord and then get on the phone to John, who is going to really love being woken up in the middle of the night for the second time in as many hours.”

  3

  It took a little while to figure out why Cord Leehan looked as bad to Community Affairs as Marty Gayle did, but only a very little while. Cord Leehan had not been born to play the part of patient and reasonable victim to Marty Gayle’s muscular homophobe. He hadn’t been born to play the part of patient and reasonable anything. He had a twang that belonged on the old Dukes ofHazzard television show, and a chip on his shoulder the size of Nebraska.

  Gregor caught up to him while he was berating a uniformed patrolman who looked ready to blow up himself, although Cord wasn’t paying attention.

  “How could you let him get
away with this?” Cord was saying. “What the hell is going on here? Everybody in the city knows the agreement in that deal. One of you ought to have been on the phone to me before you even got here. You ought to be damned glad I don’t name every last one of you in a lawsuit.”

  Gregor came up beside him and coughed. “Excuse me,” he said. “I think—”

  Cord Leehan wheeled around on his heels and stopped. “I was going to say you aren’t paid to think, but you are, aren’t you? You’re Gregor Demarkian.”

  “That’s right.”

  “I don’t suppose it occurred to you to call me. Or any of your friends. Benedetti. Jackman. It’s like living in a fun house around here.”

  “I did call John Jackman,” Gregor pointed out. “That’s why you’re here.”

  “You didn’t call him about me.”

  “Yes, I did, as a matter of fact, call him about you. At least in part.”

  “One of these days, I ought to take him out,” Cord said. “I’m going to get him in an alley with nobody looking and just let him have it. I’m going to cut out his dick and shove it down his throat.”

  Gregor coughed again. Over at the front door to “the murder house”—he could already hear the all-day cable news stations calling it “the murder house”—the tech crews were winding things up. Rob Benedetti was talking to one of the ambulance men. Gregor suddenly wandered why they always sent an ambulance to pick up remains, even when they knew that there was nothing of a life left to save. Wouldn’t it make more sense to have a special vehicle to transport bodies from the scene to the morgue?

  His mind was wandering. If it didn’t wander, it had to think about Cord Leehan and Marty Gayle and various bits of the male anatomy shoved down other various bits of the male anatomy. Cord Leehan was standing absolutely still, watching the cleanup.

  “It’s incredible,” he said finally. “It’s been years, two years, since this started. And it never goes away. Never. And they all back him up.”

  “Who backs him up?” Gregor said.

  “The uniformed patrolmen,” Cord said. “The detectives. There are, maybe, two other gay men besides myself in the department. And then I’m guessing. We keep it quiet around here because of things like this. But we had a hearing, and we brokered a deal, and that should have been the goddamned end to it.”

  “Have you been Marty Gayle’s partner all the time he’s been on the Plate Glass Killer investigation?”

  “I was on the Plate Glass Killer investigation before he was,” Cord said. “Hell, I wras the first person to call him the Plate Glass Killer. I found Sarajean Petrazik. And Marlee Craine. There was no Plate Glass Killer investigation before me.”

  “But there might have been a Plate Glass Killer,” Gregor said. “That’s what all this is about, right?”

  “Maybe.”

  “You don’t think so?”

  “Well, look at this from my point of view,” Cord said. “Some woman calls up in the middle of the night, the uniforms come out, find what looks like the remains of one or two women. So they call in. And just in case, they call—not me, but Marty. Always Marty. Because Marty’s not a fag. Marty’s not a queer. Marty’s—”

  “Yes,” Gregor said, “but that doesn’t have anything to do with whether these bodies are the work of the Plate Glass Killer, does it?”

  “Marty Gayle would just love it if there were earlier cases than the ones I found. He’d just love it. It would turn the whole case around. It would make him look like a genius.”

  “And that means—what?” Gregor asked. “That he’d say these were vic-tims of the Plate Glass Killer even when they weren’t?”

  “Hell, he’d do more than that. He’d come along with a length of nylon cord and do the necktie on them himself. He’d do anything he had to do to screw me over.”

  “I really don’t see how finding an earlier victim would screw you over.”

  “It would make him look like a genius. It would make me look like the runner up. It’s the way he thinks. I’m telling you.”

  Gregor had come to the opinion that it was the way both of them thought, and that the whole thing was a worse disaster than he’d imagined. The ambulance had been closed up and was now starting to run its engine. A uniformed patrolman coming out of the door to the house closed it behind him. Gregor could hear the crowd sighing around him.

  “You got lucky,” he said. “That’s a big crowd out there. They could have gotten ugly.”

  “They would have gotten ugly if they’d known they had a fag where they could get their hands on him.”

  “Yes,” Gregor said. He only meant to punctuate the silence. Cord Leehan decided to take offense.

  “Oh, don’t tell me you’re one of those,” he said. “Don’t tell me you go around thinking you know what it’s like to be gay. You don’t know what it’s like to be gay.”

  Gregor didn’t know what it was like to be gay, and he didn’t know what it was like to be a jerk, but Cord Leehan was both; and it was the jerk part that was getting to him. He coughed again—if he kept this up, he was going to sound like Sarah Bernhardt in Camille —and begin to move slowly and cautiously toward the center of the action. Marty Gayle was over there, but not near Rob Benedetti, which was all Gregor asked.

  The police cordon pulled back. The ambulance was trying to get through. The crowd swayed forward, but it was only a sway. The world had gone so cold Gregor wished he’d brought his heavier coat. It might only be that he was very tired. He got cold when he got tired.

  He thought about Bennis, who had told him that he felt cold when he got tired. He’d never noticed it himself. He thought of Alison, who didn’t talk about his bodily states if she could help it. He put it all out of his mind and tapped Rob on the shoulder.

  “There you are,” Rob said.

  “I was talking to Cord Leehan.”

  “Oh, God,” Rob said.

  Gregor stepped back to let two uniforms go by carrying armloads of evidence bags. “Do you realize what a complete mess you’ve got here? The both of them ought to be locked up. And I do mean the both of them. You’ve got at least eleven women dead, possibly more if this turns out to be related. You’ve got a man in jail that even you and John aren’t sure ought to be there. And you’ve got what going on here with this investigation? In the hands of these two?”

  “Yeah,” Rob said. “I know. Everybody knows.”

  “And that’s it? You know? Has it occurred to you, or to John, for that matter—who usually possesses a modicum of common sense—that your real danger isn’t that you’ll jail the wrong guy but that you won’t be able to jail anybody at all? Who’s taking care of business while the two of them are busy spraying testosterone all over each other? Who’s keeping track of the evidence? Who’s double-checking witnesses? Has anybody even bothered to put in a report to the FBI’s Vicom unit?”

  “That we’ve done,” Rob said. “That, I can guarantee you.”

  “How?”

  “I did it myself. Well, my office did.”

  “Case closed,” Gregor said. “You can’t let this go on like this. You really can’t. You need to pull both of them off this case and put it in the hands of a pair of officers who can at least think straight.”

  “We can pull Marty, but we can’t pull Cord.”

  “Why not? He’s not competent on this case, Rob. I don’t care if he’s gay, straight, or a kumquat, he’s not competent to be here.”

  “They may both be nuts,” Rob said, “but it was Marty who put Cord in the hospital.”

  “What?”

  “Not for long. They just kept him overnight for observation. But still. If we pulled them both, it would look like we were blaming the victim.”

  “He was a victim? Marty hit him from behind?”

  “Hell, no. And he hit Marty with the end of a length of metal tubing, but it only sort of bounced off Marty’s head, so Marty didn’t have to be hospitalized. So you see—”

  “I see that the department has
got the most important case it’s had to handle in the last decade in the hands of two detectives who not only hate each other but who can’t be in the same airspace with each other without trying to kill each other. I see that you have just pulled parts to I don’t know how many bodies out of somebody’s cellar, which may or may not have anything to do with the eleven women who are supposed to have been killed by the Plate Glass Killer, and you’re putting that investigation in the hands of those two on top of it. As far as I can tell, they’re not doing their jobs; they’re not even making it through the routine. You had to file an FBI report yourself. Are you crazy? Is John?”

  “Gregor, listen,” Rob said. “Please. There are lawyers everywhere on this one. There really are. We can’t just pull them off. Well, maybe Marty. But we can’t—”

  “Listen,” Gregor said. “It’s probably four o’clock on the morning by now. I want to come down to your office tomorrow around two o’clock in the after-noon. I want you to have every single thing on this case for me to look at. You don’t have to have the actual evidence, but you do have to make sure you can find it, not that it’s just listed on somebody’s piece of paper. I want it all in a pile where I can look at it, and I want an empty office for myself so that I can work on it, and I don’t want you to tell those two idiots where I am. I don’t know if it’s occurred to you yet, but there may not even be a serial killer case here. And that’s just the happiest of the worst case scenarios I can think of.”

  “I know,” Rob said. He took a deep breath. “I know. It’s okay. We’ll do it. Don’t worry. And thanks, Gregor, for taking this on.”

  “Why do I get the feeling that you and John knew what I was taking on and didn’t bother to tell me?” Gregor said. “Never mind. I know why I get the feeling. I’m going to make a point of waking John Jackman at two o’clock every single morning from now until this case is solved. Or cases. Good night.”

  TWO

  1

  There were people who though Bennie Durban was stupid, but that was not entirely true. It was true that Bennie had never been much use in school. Any quick look at his transcripts would have produced a sea of Cs and Ds from an institution not known to give them out freely. If Bennie had known what grade inflation was, he would have known that Willard Dawson High School was the ground zero of a grade-inflation epidemic. Still, grades never told the whole story about anyone. Bennie himself could remember a boy everybody had been convinced was some kind of mental retard, trailing through classes “mainstreamed” because his mother would have nothing to do with Special Education. Then came fall of senior year and the kid had taken the SATs and aced them, straight across the board. It turned out he wasn’t mentally retarded but some kind of genius and bored out of his skull.