by Jane Haddam
“He was having trouble dialing the phone himself,” the police officer said. “He is drug and alcohol free at the moment, but he seems to be having a little trouble adjusting to sobriety.”
A light went on inside Margaret’s head. It was Henry the man was talking about. Henry was trying to make this phone call. Margaret said, “Excuse me just a moment” and went out into the hall. Somebody had to be around. Elizabeth. The maid. Anyone. When she was growing up, this house was always full of people. There were always servants coming out of the woodwork. And there was a lawyer, Margaret was sure of it. There was this new lawyer they had hired to do the work now that Henry had been arrested for something serious. Where was the lawyer?
She went back into the living room. Obviously, the lawyer was not here. The lawyer wouldn’t be here. Nobody was here. She didn’t like the idea of it, herself in this house all alone. She wondered where everybody had gone.
“All right,” she said, picking up the phone. “I’m here. Is it me Henry wants to talk to?”
“I think he wants to talk to anybody,” the police officer said, “except his lawyer. I suggested his lawyer. He wasn’t having any.”
Margaret sat on the couch, waiting patiently. The phone seemed to be handed around and banged on things. There was noise in the background: metal clanging, people talking, someone shouting in the distance. Margaret tried to imagine what it was like, but she couldn’t. She’d never had the least interest in what a jail would be like. She didn’t even watch detective shows on television.
“Margaret?” Henry said. “Isn’t Liz there? Are you really all by yourself?”
“If you want to talk to Elizabeth, you’ll have to call back later,” Margaret said. “She’s gone out. People do go out, Henry. They can’t just wait around here until you get it into your head to call.”
“Don’t hang up,” Henry said.
Margaret looked down at her free hand. In spite of what the policeman had said, Henry sounded very alert and aware, more alert and aware than she remembered him being for years. She bit her lip. There was something wrong with this.
“Don’t hang up,” Henry said again. “I’ve been watching television. Have you been watching television?”
“You know I don’t watch television,” Margaret said. “I don’t know why you do, Henry. It can’t be helping your brain function. The doctor said—”
“They found bodies in a cellar last night,” Henry said, and now Margaret was sure of it. He was like an entirely different person. He was showing not the least sign of years of alcohol abuse. “Lots of bodies. There were pictures on the news this morning. They took out bag after bag after bag.”
“So? It’s not the kind of thing that’s pleasant to think about, is it? And especially not this early in the day. Why should I care that they found a lot of bodies in a basement? Except it wasn’t bodies, actually. Elizabeth talked to somebody this morning. It was only one body. And I still don’t see why I should care.”
“You should care about the house. It was on Curzon Street.”
Margaret felt her forehead. It was a little hot. She was sure of it. She was coming down with something. She was starting menopause all over again. Henry never made any sense. Even when he was clean and sober and talking like a human being, he never made any sense.
“I don’t understand,” she said. “Is this Curtain Street somewhere near here? Is it someone we know?”
“Curzon Street,” Henry said, “and you make an even less convincing mental defective than I do. Give it up, Margaret. Then come down here and get me. I have to get out of here.”
Margaret took a deep breath. “You can’t just get out of there, can you? You have to be released on bond, or something. We tried to get you out of there, and you wouldn’t come. Or you behaved like an idiot and—”
“Come down here. Bring me something. A book. Something that will pass muster at the desk. Then say you have to talk to me.”
“I can’t talk to you any time at all,” Margaret said. “There are visiting hours.”
“This is a jail, not a prison,” Henry said patiently. “I’m being held; I haven’t been convicted. Come down here. I need to get out of my cell and into the visitor’s room. Come down. Say you have to see me. Do it now.”
“I don’t see,” Margaret started.
“Now, Margaret,” Henry said.
The phone went to dial tone. Margaret looked at it. It hadn’t been hung up in the way people usually meant when they said that a caller had “hung up on them.” It hadn’t been slammed. Henry had just stopped speaking to her. Margaret put the receiver back in the cradle and tried to think. She was so angry with Elizabeth, she could barely stand it. Elizabeth was always like this. She got you into something, and then when it had to be taken care of, she disappeared. Margaret hated going down to the jail to see Henry. She hated it even more than she hated going to court, and that had damned near killed her.
She got up and went back out into the hall. The house was still quiet. There was still nobody home. She went back into the study, just in case Elizabeth was hiding out. She wasn’t. She was just gone. Margaret went back to the front hall and tried to think. The only thing she could do was what Henry wanted her to do, go down to that jail and ask to see him. She couldn’t see what trouble that would cause or why she shouldn’t do it. It was a jail. Even in a visitor’s room, he wouldn’t be able to hurt her. There would be policemen everywhere, and there would be those little booths with the bulletproof glass that kept the prisoners away from the real people. Wouldn’t there be? Maybe that was only in prison. She didn’t understand why Henry couldn’t have just gone on doing what he was doing. Eventually, he would have drunk himself to death and that would have been the last she would have had to think about him.
“It’s all your fault,” she said, out loud, as she got her coat from the front closet.
She had no idea who she was talking to.
FIVE
1
Gregor Demarkian found the two clerks waiting for him when he got to Police Headquarters, standing right up against the split door to their inner office as if they were waiting to see a parade go by. Maybe that was what they were waiting for. They weren’t the only ones who seemed to have nothing to do but hang around watching the corridor. Gregor made his way down the corridor feeling as if he’d just committed the crime of the century and was being brought in to court. The perp walk. That’s what they called it now. His head was swimming. He really hadn’t had enough sleep the night before. All the caffeine since then hadn’t helped.
He went through the outer office and up to the split door, where the women were waiting.
“I’m Gregor Demarkian,” he said. “I assume you’re Mrs. Venecki and Mrs. Gelhorn.”
“Ms.,” one of them said.
“Oh, Betty,” the other one said, “don’t get started on all that at a time like this.”
Gregor sorted them out in his head. Martha, who had to be the one who called the other one “Betty,” was a short, trim woman in flat shoes, an A-line polyester skirt, and a twinset. Betty, who wanted to be called Ms., was a tall, heavy-set woman in a jumper and crisp white blouse. They were both middle-aged and doing nothing to hide it. Neither of them dyed her hair.
They stepped back and opened the bottom half of the swing door. “You can come in here,” Betty said. “We’ve got a table to sit at and there’s nobody else here at the moment, although I’m surprised there isn’t. Everybody’s been talking about your coming since you called.”
“Mr. Jackman sent down orders,” Martha said. “He, well, he yelled.”
Gregor suppressed a smile. He had been around John Jackman when he yelled. “Do you think he’s going to be mayor?” he asked. “Or doesn’t he talk about his campaign around the office.”
“It doesn’t matter if he talks about the campaign,” Betty said, “everybody else does. And of course he’s going to be mayor. Nobody in his right mind would vote to reelect that idiot we have her
e now—”
“Now, Betty, I don’t think that’s true. He must have some supporters. It’s supposed to be a close election.”
“It’s going to be close the way New York is close to Tokyo; they’re both on the same planet,” Betty said. “Maybe we can get Mr. Demarkian a cup of coffee or something to eat. He really doesn’t look well.”
“I’m fine,” Gregor said, although he didn’t mean that. Maybe food would be a good idea when he was finished here. Sleep would be a better one, but he didn’t think he would be able to sleep for a while.
Betty was leading him through yet another door, this time to a large, bare room that contained nothing but a long table with chairs surrounding it. The table was not impressive. Its surface was made of wood, and Gregor thought it might have been expensive once, but at the moment it was just battered. The chairs around it were made of molded plastic.
He sat down in one of them, and gestured to the women to sit, too. They sat, Martha upright and prim, Betty leaning back and stretching her legs out in front of her. Martha looked anxious. Betty looked triumphant.
“So,” Gregor said, “do you know why I’m here?”
“It’s because of the boxes,” Martha said. “They’re a mess. I told Betty—well, I told all of them—you can’t really blame us for the boxes, not totally. They didn’t start out like that.”
“Did you get to the first ones?” Betty asked. “The ones on Sarajean Petrazik and Marlee Craine?”
“I don’t know,” Gregor said.
“You would know,” Betty said, “because those two are pristine. Sarajean was before the situation got completely out of hand, and Marlee we cleaned up ourselves when things got crazy. And then things got crazier.”
“Actually,” Martha said carefully, “they’re not all completely messed up. I did try to straighten out the file on Elyse Martineau. And the one on Conchita Estevez, too. I mean, in the early days, we tried and tried. We tried to make them make sense, and when they wouldn’t do that we tried to fix things ourselves. But there’s a lot of work here, Mr. Demarkian. We’re not detectives. We’re not supposed to go rooting around in the evidence and putting it in order. Most of the time, we’d just make a mess of things.”
Gregor nodded. “So how is it supposed to work? The detectives bring you evidence—”
“Evidence samples and files,” Betty said. “They’re supposed to have them all in order and ready to file, and then we’ve got big cabinets in the back where we can arrange things. Physical evidence in the drawers; transcripts and notes and that sort of thing in big loose-leaf notebooks that go on the shelves over-head. They’re supposed to put everything in order, and we’re supposed to take the finished product and just place it where it goes, where it can be found again. If you see what I mean.”
“Yes,” Gregor said, “but these weren’t put in order. How did you get them? Did they come in boxes like that? And who exactly gave them to you?”
“Oh, they both came down and gave us things,” Martha said. “Both Marty and Cord, you know, over the last few months. And they did sometimes bring boxes, just like those. But as often as not they’d just have things in their pockets, or in their hands, or in big brown paper bags.”
“I unloaded at least half a dozen brown paper bags,” Betty said. “You see all these things, you know, about gay men.”
“Will and Grace,” Martha said.
“And Lord only knows I know enough gay men to choke on,” Betty said.
“Betty just came out a few months ago,” Martha said. “We had a party for her at Danny O’Brien’s Pub.”
“And they’re supposed to be so neat,” Betty said, “but you couldn’t prove that one with Cord Leehan. His stuff was in just as much of a mess as Marty’s was. We’d come in here and pour the contents of the bags out on the table and try to sort them out.”
“But we really didn’t have that kind of time,” Martha said. “This is the one evidence room in the city We have hundreds of cases we’re actively handling at any one time. And then we’ve got things we’re keeping because of appeals or because the case has gone cold or because the department just wants to keep the stuff. We keep a lot of it, all of it in most felony cases because there are so many appeals. And just in case.”
“Just in case somebody makes a mistake,” Betty said.
Gregor nodded. He did not say what everybody had to be thinking, and that was that given the utter chaos of the evidence here, the chances that some-body would “make a mistake” were damned nearly 100 percent.
“Okay,” he said. “What about other people? Did anybody ever bring down evidence on one of these cases besides Marty Gayle and Cord Leehan?”
Martha nodded. “Sometimes. That isn’t the way it’s supposed to work, of course. Marty and Cord are supposed to be coordinating things. But every once in a while we got one of the uniformed patrolmen with items for us to file. Those weren’t too bad. I mean, they came labeled, and that kind of thing.”
“Mr. Leehan and Mr. Gayle didn’t label the evidence they submitted to you?”
“Well,” Betty said. “You saw it. That’s how it came in. It wasn’t labeled. It wasn’t in any kind of order. We’re not even sure how much of it is relevant and how much is just stuff that was hanging around that got thrown into the mix.”
“We think they were trying to confuse each other,” Martha said. “They weren’t submitting evidence for the record the way they should have been because they were each trying to trick the other one into thinking they had less than they did. Or does that make sense? We think—”
“We think they both thought it would be better if nobody ever solved that case than if the other one of them did,” Betty said. “Hell, I made a mess of it, too.”
“That’s all right,” Gregor said. “I got the gist of it. Just tell me you didn’t send over anything that could be labeled physical evidence—”
“Oh, no,” Betty said. “We just sent over lists of that. But that stuff is handled by the technicians, and they’ve got their heads on straight. And the Medical Examiner’s Office, of course, and they’ve got their heads on even straighter.”
“I’m not gay,” Martha said. “I’m married with two children. Grown up now. But Betty is my friend.”
Gregor cleared his throat. “Here’s what I want to do,” he said. “I want to get those boxes back here because this is where they belong, and they aren’t doing anybody any good over at Rob Benedetti’s office. In the meantime, I want to sit down with the two of you and make an outline of this case from the very beginning, starting with, what’s her name—”
“Sarajean Petrazik,” Martha said.
“Yes, that’s right,” Gregor said. “Starting there, and going right to last night. I want the names of the victims in order, where they were found, if anybody was picked up for questioning, what physical evidence exists that pertains to that particular crime. I want to write it all down, and I want to look at it. Can you help me do that?”
“Of course we can,” Martha said.
“My guess is that we’d better,” Betty said, “or Mr. Jackman will start yelling again.”
2
I was, Gregor thought later, the Mount Everest of organizational projects. At the end of the first hour it was barely done, and they had sucked in three more clerks and a uniformed officer to help. At the end of three hours, it was beginning to look as if it would finally come into shape, and they were up to three uniformed officers and enough clerks to stock a typing pool. Then the boxes came back from across town, and Gregor had to scatter people around the evidence office and down the hall just to start looking into them.
From his point of view, though, things were better within half an hour of their starting because by then he had some idea of what was going on in the case as a whole. His head, though, didn’t call it a case. It only called it “the mess.” He kept reminding himself that he didn’t know what they had here yet. He did, however, have a list of the women who had been identified
as victims of the Plate Glass Killer, where they had been found, and who, if anybody, had been picked up for questioning in their deaths. It wasn’t much of a list. Even the very basics of this case witnessed to the disorganization wTith which it had been handled. Still, it was a start, and Gregor stopped wandering the hall supervising the sorting every once in a while to look at it.
Sarajean Petrazik
alley behind Independence Hall
bookkeeper Green Point Affordable Rentals East
Marlee Craine
alley behind Food King, Meacham
secretary Philadelphia Cares
Conchita Estevez
alley behind house SH
Henry Tyder
maid live-in Tyder/Beaufort/Woodville household
Rondelle Johnson
alley Curzon Street
Bennie Durban
on public assistance
Faith Anne Fugate
alley Devereaux Street
Tyrell Moss
deputy comptroller Green Point Property Management
Elizabeth Bray
alley Marchand Staples
bookkeeper Morgan Atlee Merchant Bank
Elyse Martineau
alley Coles Center
Dennis Ledeski
secretary and receptionist Dennis Ledeski CPA
Catherine Mishten
Dumpster alley Garland’s
account manager Marshfield Houghton Appliance Center
Mylena Kasentoff
alley Landerman Road
