by Jane Haddam
He didn’t even have music plugged into his ear, playing loudly enough to make him deaf and sending noise all up and down the street at six o’clock in the morning. Well, Tyrell thought, maybe God is listening to me after all.
“Hey,” Charles said.
“Good morning,” Tyrell said. He had the door unlocked. He opened it and wraved Charles through.
“I’m laid out,” Charles said. “I was up all night watching the cops. You see that? There had to be a hundred of them. Dead bodies in Kathleen Conge’s basement. I bet she put them there herself.”
“I watched the news this morning,” Tyrell said. “They’re saying it was older victims of the Plate Glass Killer.”
“It’ll turn out to be the guy what lives in the ground-floor apartment, you wait. He’s crazy. Kathleen told my mother he’s got one whole wall full of pictures of murderers. Jeffrey Dahmer. Guys like that.”
“I know. Bennie Durban. You’ve seen him once or twice.”
“You know? And? Hell, doesn’t anything get to you? They picked you up, and they didn’t even look at some guy who puts up pictures of Dahmer?”
“They did pick him up,” Tyrell said. “After Rondelle Johnson died. They found her in some alley in the back of the place where he works, some Mexican place downtown, I think. Do you really think he put all these bodies in the basement at Kathleen’s?”
“Who else? I mean, for God’s sake, Tyrell, who else would it have been?”
Tyrell looked at the ceiling. “You ever been down to the basement at your place?”
“Sure.”
“And?”
“And what?”
“I listened to the news,” Tyrell said, “and what the news said was that the bodies, the skeletons mostly, were found in a root cellar at the back of the basement. Now, I deal with building inspectors and health inspectors and fire inspectors all the time. You can’t have a dirt basement open to anybody who wants to wander through. You’ve got to brick it up, or you’ve got to seal it off to put it off-limits to your tenants. If you don’t, they’ll condemn the house.”
“So,” Charles said, “maybe nobody knew about the cellar. You know what people are. Maybe the landlord paid off a building inspector or something, and they just pretended like the cellar wasn’t there.”
“Maybe,” Tyrell agreed, “but now you’re talking about a lot of expensive bribes to get out of doing a relatively inexpensive repair. You got this corner of the basement that’s still dirt, you block it off with something, put some drywall between it and the rest of the basement. Something. But it’s cheap, and it doesn’t risk some new guy coming onto the job and refusing to deal.”
“Okay,” Charles said, “so what. That’s what the landlord did. Or maybe Kathleen. Who cares?”
“How did Bennie Durban get the bodies into the root cellar?”
“He did it before it was blocked off.”
“The only body they said anything about wasn’t decomposed,” Tyrell said. “Or at least it wasn’t decomposed all the way. That was on the news this morning, too. That means it was killed fairly recently.”
“Maybe they just blocked it off,” Charles said.
“Maybe,” Tyrell said. “But I doubt it.”
“Maybe he broke in,” Charles said. “Maybe nothing. What’s with you this morning. You’re talking like some guy playing a detective on television.”
“I know,” Tyrell said.
He unlocked the cash register. He had his operating cash in a plastic envelope in the inside pocket of his shirt. He picked it up from the bank every morning and worried himself sick going the six blocks to the store. He got it out now and started pouring dimes and quarters into the respective sections of the drawer.
“He’s missing, did you know that?” he asked Charles. “Bennie Durban, the guy who lives over at Kathleen’s. He’s disappeared.”
“Well, I sure as hell would,” Charles said. “The cops pulled a bunch of bodies out of the cellar at the place I lived, I’d be in Las Vegas by now.”
“Right,” Tyrell said.
He doubted if Charles could find Las Vegas on a map, never mind get there with no money when the cops were looking for him. Come to think of it, he doubted if Bennie Durban could do that either. The kid had to be out on the streets somewhere, wandering around. He had to be scared to death. He might even be dangerous. But that wasn’t the point.
“Watch the front for a minute, will you?” he asked Charles. Then he went into the storeroom and got out his copy of the big Philadelphia phone book. Usually, he used only the little hand-sized one that took in this neighborhood and the ones immediately around it, but now he was going way out of his comfort zone.
This was one thing he could not have anticipated, back when he was sitting in prison thinking it was time for him to get right with himself and right with the Lord.
Real life seemed to require a lot of taking responsibility for things that most people thought were none of their business.
3
Elizabeth Woodville heard the news just after breakfast. She would have heard it earlier, but she was having one of those days when it just seemed easier to give in and let Margaret have what she wanted. To do that, she had to sit at the dining room table while breakfast was brought in by the latest of a series of maids who lasted just long enough to hear what had happened to Conchita and then scurried off—all Henry’s fault, Margaret would say, and none of their own, or the way they treated their help. Margaret sat at the foot of the table, where their mother had once sat, and rang a little bell whenever she wanted anything. She wanted everything, and often. She forgot that in the days when their father and mother had both been alive, breakfast had been laid out as a buffet on the sideboard, and the help had been called only when the coffee was about to run out.
Elizabeth was not in the mood to go through another endless round of what had and had not been done in this house when their mother had been alive. She was less in the mood to listen to Margaret’s repetitive rant about Henry’s mother and all that was wrong with her. For the first time since the night on which Henry had been picked up, she’d gotten a good night’s sleep, and without any jerky little dreams starring the death penalty. She wanted to spend her day drinking tea and reading books and watching television only rarely, with the cable stations on, so that she didn’t see any news. Either that, or going over the papers for the IPO one more time, or going over the books the accountants had left copies of for her because the SEC had to sign off on them. It used to be easier to do deals like this. Elizabeth was sure. If it hadn’t been, American capitalism would never have gotten off the ground.
She finished two pieces of toast and two cups of Earl Grey tea while Margaret was giving a running commentary on the contents of the least riveting sections of the newspaper.
“Oh, look,” Margaret said, “the Zellenhalls are selling that monstrosity they’ve got out in Wayne. I never understood what they wanted with a house in Wayne anyway. Nobody lives there. It’s the German blood, probably, wouldn’t you think? They probably had something to hide during the war.”
Elizabeth wondered if Margaret really believed half the things she said, or if she just said them on the principle that civilized people conversed during meals and stayed off the subjects of religion and politics. It seemed a bit much even for Margaret to equate owning a hideous house in a tacky town with collaboration with the Nazis. Elizabeth took her napkin off her lap and folded it on her plate. There were no napkin rings in the Tyder house. Napkin rings were the mark of people who had inadequate standards of cleanliness. You put your dirty napkin in the ring and used it, still dirty, the next time a meal came around. Elizabeth literally couldn’t remember if their mother had used napkin rings or not. It was not the kind of thing she remembered.
“I’m going to get some work done on my book,” she told Margaret.
Margaret sniffed. “You’ve been working on that book forever. You’re never going to finish it. And I don’t see why you
’d want to finish it anyway. Even if you could find somebody to publish it, why would you want somebody to? It’s like you’re invading your own privacy. You’d certainly be invading mine.”
Elizabeth was going to say that if she changed the focus just a bit, and put it on Henry, she could surely find a publisher for it now. True crime sold very well. She didn’t say it because she didn’t want to end up in another argument. Maybe later this afternoon, she’d go to mass. It was a way to get out of the house without having to meet anybody she knew, except in circumstances where it would not be rude to refuse to talk. That sounded good. The part about getting out of the house sounded especially good.
She went to the den and shut the door. She booted up the computer and watched the icons flicker onto the desktop. She opened AOL and signed on without thinking about it. Then, just a split second too late, she realized what she’d done.
The picture on the AOL welcome screen was a cliche out of dozens of crime and horror movies. It reminded Elizabeth, at once, of the opening scenes of The Amityville Horror. It was dark. There were police and ambulance personnel and a bright yellow police line. Somebody was being carried out of a house in a body bag.
“Grisly Find in Philadelphia,” the headline said, and then, in that annoying way AOL had recently become accustomed to: “Find Out What It Means to Famous Case.”
Elizabeth tapped the fingernails of her left hand against the top of the desk. The sound they made was faintly metallic. “A famous case” could be any case at all. John Wayne Gacy was a famous case, and it had happened in Philadelphia, too. The police could be hauling bodies out of some house Gacy had had contact with that they didn’t know about before. The welcome screen kept changing, from news to entertainment to lifestyle to Elizabeth didn’t know what. None of the headlines delivered any real news. All of them were designed to make you want to go someplace else, follow a link, stumble your way to even more advertisements. The only reason Elizabeth kept on with AOL was that she’d been on it so long it felt like too much trouble to change: all that unsubscribing to newsletters and e-mail discussion lists and resubscribing under a new e-mail address; all that time spent getting used to a different system. She moved the mouse and clicked back to the original set of headlines. They still told her nothing very informative.
What she wanted to do—what she should have done—was to open the word processing program and forget about the Internet altogether. What she did instead was to close the AOL welcome window and type in the URL for CNN, because the one thing she could be sure of on the CNN site was that its lead story would have enough of an explanation to go along with it that the reader would be able to understand what it was about. CNN opened and she saw the same picture she had seen on the AOL news window, only bigger, and easier to make out. The police seemed to be surrounded by an army of people, stretching out into infinity. There was more than one body bag.
“Grisly Find in Philadelphia,” the headline said, as if the writers for CNN were the same people who wrote for AOL. And maybe they were. Elizabeth hadn’t kept track of corporate takeovers and consolidations any time lately. She read the little paragraph under the headline.
“In the early hours of this morning, Philadelphia police and rescue workers walked seven body bags out of the basement of a house in South Philadelphia. The body bags are believed to contain body parts of victims of a serial killer . . .” and then moved her mouse to click on “more.” Not only did all these places have the same writers, they had the same site designers, too.
The new window was just loading—she had to get a new computer, everything took forever to load these days—when the telephone rang. She didn’t pick it up. Ever since Henry had been arrested, they’d depended more and more on the answering machine. The new CNN window had more pictures: more police; more body bags; Gregor Demarkian.
Elizabeth stared for a moment at Gregor Demarkian, and then Russ Donahue’s voice came out of the answering machine. “Mrs. Woodville? Mrs. Beaufort? This is Russ Donahue. I called to say that we don’t know as yet if what the police found last night will have any bearing on Henry’s case, although the rumors all tend to point in the direction of—”
Elizabeth picked up the phone. A shrieking buzz hit her ear, meaning the answering machine had noticed the pickup. Why couldn’t they fix something like that?
“Russ?” she said. “It’s Elizabeth. I’ve got no idea what’s going on. I don’t think Margaret does either. I was just looking at CNN and trying to figure out what happened.”
“Nobody knows what happened,” Russ said. “I don’t think even Gregor knows. Except for, you know, the obvious. The police pulled a number of partially decayed body parts out of the cellar of a house where a man who had been picked up before in the Plate Glass case—”
“Wait,” Elizabeth said. “The body parts—or is it bodies?—were in a house where one of the former suspects lived? And they were decayed?”
“Partially decayed, most of them.”
“And the police didn’t find them when they checked into this man the first time? They didn’t search the house he lived in?”
“Nobody knows what they did,” Russ said. “Everything’s a mess, and Gregor is wandering around the neighborhood swearing under his breath, and he never swears. The whole thing is a disaster, but the reason I called is, disaster or not, I can’t use it to get Henry out of jail just yet. There’s not enough to go on. There’s not even enough to be sure that these body parts will turn out to be part of the Plate Glass Killer case. Things are just a mess.”
“All right,” Elizabeth said. “But there’s some reason, isn’t there, why you would think they would be connected? And CNN would think so? Because that’s what this says here.”
“There were rumors last night, yes,” Russ said. “Mostly that some of the parts had been found with nylon cords around them. But the thing is, I didn’t see them. I didn’t get any first-hand corroboration from any of the officers on the case—”
“Why not?”
“Because I’m the enemy; they don’t talk to me. And Rob Benedetti, that’s the district attorney, who does talk to me, wasn’t talking to anybody. It would help if you knew if your brother had any connection at all with the house at 11527 Curzon Street.”
“Of course he had some connection,” Elizabeth said patiently. “It’s a Green Point house. We own, I don’t know, close to half the properties in that neighborhood, I think.”
“I’m going to go in and see if Henry can tell me anything about it, but you know what Henry is like. If he doesn’t want to cooperate, he doesn’t cooperate.”
“I know.”
“My tendency is to think this is going to be good news,” Russ said. “I mean, not good, you know. It’s not good that people died. But good for Henry. I think there will be a connection to the Plate Glass Killer, and I’m fairly sure we’ll be able to prove that Henry could not have gotten into that house and then into that basement. But that’s just fairly sure. It’s not certain.”
Elizabeth looked back at the CNN window and ran the tip of her finger over the picture of Gregor Demarkian’s face. She was fairly sure that they would be able to prove that Henry had had no connection to the body or bodies in that basement, but not because he hadn’t had access to the basement or the house. Anybody at Green Point had access to the basement and the house. She put it out of her mind.
“Just tell me this,” she said. “Does this make it less likely that even if Henry is convicted, he’d get the death penalty?”
THREE
1
Bennis was asleep on the couch when Gregor got home at five in the morning, and up and gone by the time he awoke again at five minutes to eight. Gregor threw himself in the shower and tried to think. Part of him was still boiling obsessively about the mess the Plate Glass Killer case was in. That had to say something—good or bad, he wasn’t sure—about what he did and did not feel for Bennis Hannaford. He threw enough cold water on himself to make himself believe he
was awake. Then he got dressed and went down the long hall to the apartment’s living room and kitchen. Bennis had left him a note on the refrigerator door, held up by a magnet of a frog peddling madly in a butter churn. SOMEBODY NAMED ALISON CALLED, the note said. SHE SEEMS TO THINK YOU SHOULD CALL HER BACK.
If Gregor had spent any time studying literature, he might have been able to figure out what a sentence construction like that one was supposed to mean, but he hadn’t, and he was too tired to let himself get sucked into the complicated world of messages and hints. He thought about going to the Ararat and decided against it. It was past the time he usually had breakfast. The people he usually had breakfast with would be finished with theirs and on their way to getting on with their days. Bennis would be there, too, and there might be a whole half hour of messages and hints.
He put water on to boil and found the little box of coffee bags he’d learned to use instead of the percolator. He did not remind himself that Tibor could murder even coffee bag coffee. He got a clean mug from the cabinet and a clean spoon from the drawer. He put them down on the table and found a little stack of glossy paper next to a purple-and-gold box. BOX HILL CONFECTIONS, the box said. Then there was a web address: www.boxhillconfections.com.
He pulled the purple-and-gold box to him and opened it. It was full of small, intense-looking chocolates made into balls and pyramids and rounds. There were only a couple of pieces gone from the top, which had to be big news. An upset Bennis was a Bennis eating a lot of chocolate. He checked the second layer. It was full.
“There was another box,” Bennis said, her voice coming from behind him at the kitchen door. “I finished those last night.”
“Ah,” Gregor said. His kettle was going off. He turned around and got it off the burner.
“I came back to see how you were,” Bennis said. “You were gone all night. Although my guess is not with a woman named Alison, since she’s looking for you, too.”
“I was out at a crime scene,” Gregor said, filling his cup so close to the brim only surface tension kept it from spilling. “Russ was there with me, in case you feel like checking up on my movements. Along with Rob Benedetti, who’s the district attorney, and about ten thousand Philadelphia cops.”
