by Jane Haddam
“Shut the hell up,” Tyrell said. He could shout louder. He had learned to shout where it counted. “Shut the hell up, do you hear me? You sound like the pet nigger at a Klan rally. And I use the word the way it was invented to be used, not the way—-oh, what the hell. Charles, how are you ever going to get your act together if you lose it the first time there’s trouble? What do you think you’re doing? You’ve got to—”
“I’m not going to stand here and put up with that talk,” Mardella said.
Tyrell took a deep breath. “Mardella,” he said, “stay out of this now for just one more second, will you please? Charles has been rude. Charles will apologize. Won’t you, Charles?”
Charles looked like he was far more likely to kill somebody, and Tyrell sympathized. But it had to be done, and they both knew it.
Charles looked at the ground. “Yes,” he said, being careful to put that “s” on the end and not to say “yeah.” “Yes, I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Ms. Ford. I’m sorry, Ms. Orwell. I got excited.” Then he looked up at Tyrell. “It really wasn’t me,” he said. “I didn’t do nothing. Anything. I didn’t—”
“Okay,” Tyrell said. “Relax. Let’s see what we’ve got here.”
Mardella Ford mumbled something under her breath. The last of it sounded like “friends.”
“It wasn’t none of my friends neither,” Charles shot out. “Any of them. Either. How you supposed to remember all of that? How you supposed to doit?”
“Never mind,” Tyrell said again. He walked up to the door and looked through it into the back storeroom. It was the oddest thing. He went and looked down at the door. The lock had not been forced. There was no splintering on the doorjamb. “Huh,” Tyrell said.
“He has the keys,” Mardella said. “He could have just waltzed in here—”
“I don’t have no keys,” Charles said. “This—this—” Unable to say “bitch,” he apparently couldn’t say anything at all.
Tyrell really did sympathize. The churchwomen were by and large good women. They worked hard. They held jobs and raised grandchildren left homeless by mothers who drank and drugged; they helped adopt the block and clean it up; they taught Sunday school; they wore those hats. Unfortunately, some of them were like Mardella Ford.
“Charles,” he said, “does not have the keys to this store, front door or back. I open up, and I close. He might have left the door open last night, but he didn’t, and I know that because after I sent him home I came back here my-self and looked around, and the door was closed and locked. I tried it to make sure. I always do. Besides, if Charles’s friends were going to break into the store, they’d go to the front and try the cash register. There wouldn’t have been anything in it, but they’d have tried it—”
“Maybe they knew there was nothing in it,” Mardella said triumphantly.
“Oh, hush,” Claretta said. “Stop running your mouth long enough to learn something.”
“Well, that’s the other thing,” Tyrell said. “I don’t carry beer, and they do know that. So maybe they wouldn’t have gone into the front of the store, since they couldn’t get drunk there, but I don’t believe it. And I don’t believe they could get that door open without smashing it in because these are not rocket scientists we’re talking about here. But if they did break into the back store-room, they’d take—I don’t know. I’ve got some tools back here. You could pawn those. I’ve got a set of hubcaps in the corner, brand-new, I’ve been meaning to give to the church for the raffle. They’re sitting there right where I can see them. They haven’t been touched.”
“Do you mean nothing was stolen?” Claretta said. “It wasn’t a robbery after all?”
“Oh, it was a robbery, all right,” Tyrell said. “There are things missing. Somebody took what looks from here like two bottles of Evian water out of the case up on the top there. And the Frito-Lay box is open, too. There looks like a couple of packages of potato chips gone, the big ones. There’s a couple of other boxes open.”
“Why don’t you go in and look?” Rabiah said. “We didn’t like to because, you know, it wasn’t our place; but you could go in.”
“Not until the police get here,” Tyrell said. “Have you called the police yet?”
“We were waiting on you,” Mardella said.
“We’d better call the police,” Tyrell said.
“For some packages of potato chips?” Mardella said. “The police won’t do anything. They wouldn’t do anything if you had half the store stolen, never mind this. What do you want to bring the police into it for?”
Tyrell Moss thought of Faith Anne Fugate, lying in the alley with her tongue sticking out and her face slashed up and that nylon cord around her neck; but he said nothing about her to the churchwomen, who would have thought he was crazy.
“It’s not that a lot was stolen,” he said carefully, “it’s that it looks very odd. Like somebody came in here last night and took just enough to eat and drink because he was hungry. Or maybe because they were.”
“Maybe it was one of the homeless people?” Claretta said. “We have the soup kitchen in the church, but it’s not open all hours. Maybe one of the homeless people got in because he was hungry.”
“You ever known one of those homeless people who could have gotten through this door without having to break it in?” Tyrell asked. “They’re alcoholics. Some of them are mentally ill. Some of them are drugged out. Whoever did this had to have been stone cold sober and in possession of his right faculties.”
“Maybe you’re just mistaken about the door,” Claretta said. “Maybe you meant to check it, but you didn’t.”
“Oh, I definitely checked it,” Tyrell said. “There’s no doubt about that at all. I want the police out here to take fingerprints, and do whatever else it is they do. I don’t like this at all.”
3
Alexander Mark did not feel that he had accomplished much. He did not feel he had accomplished much with Gregor Demarkian—in spite of having made the acquaintance of that beautiful woman, who seemed to go out of her way to be helpful—and he certainly didn’t think he’d accomplished much with Dennis Ledeski. Maybe it had been a silly idea to begin with, just as Chickie said it was. Mark wasn’t really a secretary, even if he was good at it, and he wasn’t a police detective, which was what was needed here. He was just a man who had fallen prey to a delusion. He could practically see the halluci-nations now: Alexander Mark, Man with a Mission, ducking into this phone booth over here to put on tights and a cape.
It would be easier if he understood what he wanted out of his life, but he had never understood that; and one thing that Courage had taught him was that there was a good chance he never would. He only knew he had promised Gregor Demarkian to run the files at the office to see if any of the other women in the Plate Glass Killer case was in them. That was probably busy work invented just to keep him out of the way; but he had promised, and he would do it. Besides, there was something about going into the office when Dennis was not coming in that had always intrigued him. He was fascinated at the idea of being alone with the things that belonged to a man like that.
First, as soon as he woke up, he went to mass. He went to mass every day, and every day he received Communion, too, because it was a check on his behavior. You couldn’t receive Communion if you’d been out tomcatting the night before. You couldn’t even if you’d been to bed with a man you loved, or looked through magazines for Calvin Klein advertisements featuring young men in not much. Whenever he thought about Communion, he thought about the one thing that had made him look into what Courage had to offer. It wasn’t, as Chickie thought, a form of self-hate. Alexander did not hate his homosexuality. It just was, the way his height just was, or the color of his eyes. What had brought him to Courage was a protest action staged by a group called ACT UP, where they had invaded Saint Patrick’s Cathedral during a mass given by the cardinal, made a lot of noise, then grabbed consecrated Hosts and trampled them underfoot. Chickie said that was wrong, that the Hosts h
ad not been consecrated yet, but Alexander didn’t see why that should matter. If the Hosts were consecrated, then what had been committed was sacrilege. If they hadn’t been, then what had been committed was only intended sacrilege. In either case, the problem was a lack of respect and honor not only for the Christian religion but for God. Chickie thought he was faking it, but he was not. He believed in God. He not only believed in God, he was fairly sure he had experienced Him.
He called Chickie as soon as he got out of mass. Then he went down to the office to wait. He wondered where Dennis was and what he was doing and whether he really thought he could get away with all this. He opened blinds and started up computers and went around putting the office in order as if it were just any other day. He was sure that if he had been in Dennis’s position, he would have been smarter about it. He certainly wouldn’t have given the help the keys and access to all the computers.
He got up and cleaned off the end tables. The cleaning women were supposed to do it; but Dennis didn’t like paying decent money for his help, so they were mostly useless. He took the magazines off them and wiped them down with a paper towel he’d made slightly damp in the bathroom. He put the magazines back in stacks. The magazines were truly awful, the kind of thing you thought nobody at all ever bothered to read: Masterwork Knitting, Senior Road Travel, Bees.
He was just doing a global search on the files for Marlee Craine when Chickie breezed in, not as flagrant as the old Chickie, but still, somehow, indefinably Chickie. Alexander always thought Chickie could play Rupert Evert in the biopic.
“So,” Chickie said, “I think you’re nuts, you know that. And I’m blowing off work, which I shouldn’t do.”
“Not if you expect to make partner.”
“I will make partner, Alexander. I guarantee it. I always do what I set out to do. Oh, did I mention it? Margaret is taking, uh, final vows, I think it is, in May. I was going to go up. I’d like some company. Somebody who, you know, won’t embarrass me during the sermon.”
“Homily,” Alexander said.
“What?”
“Homily. It’s called a homily in Catholic churches. It’s only a sermon in Protestant ones. Where do you think Dennis has gone?”
“If he had any sense, he wouldn’t have gone anywhere,” Chickie said. “I don’t understand these guys. You see it on all those true-crime shows. They commit a murder and the next thing you know they’re behaving like they have IQs in negative numbers. If he acts like most of them, he’ll just start moving and keep moving. He’ll go to Mexico, maybe, or Canada. Mexico would be better. It would be harder to find him there.”
“I think he’s going to find himself a zone,” Alexander said. “I think he’s going to head for New York, or Chicago, or Los Angeles, someplace big, and find himself a zone. Somewhere where he can get the only thing he wants.”
“Well, that’s probably right,” Chickie said. “Since that’s probably the single stupidest thing he could do.”
“I know. Do you get attracted to six-year-olds, Chickie?”
“No, of course I don’t. What do you take me for?”
“Exactly.”
“Fifteen-year-olds, though,” Chickie said. “I don’t do anything about it. I’ve been a maniac on the subject of age of consent. But I do get attracted to them.”
“There’s a big difference between six-year-olds and fifteen-year-olds,” Alexander said. “It’s that—there’s something about the kind of thing Dennis does, Dennis and all those men, there’s something about that that’s wrong in a way that just being gay is not.”
“I don’t think being gay is wrong.”
“I don’t either, in the sense of evil,” Alexander said. “But I think the Church has a point, Chickie. All our faculties are ordered to some purpose, and our sexual faculties are ordered to procreation. Which means that sexual conduct that does not intend or allowT for procreation is essentially disordered.”
“Only if there’s something disordered about sex between a man and a woman in their sixties,” Chickie said. “We’ve been through all this before. I’ve even been through it with Margaret, although she’s a hell of a lot less dogmatic about it than you are.”
“I’m not dogmatic about it,” Alexander said. “I’m just trying to point out the obvious. There’s nothing about homosexuality, about being attracted to men, or even about being attracted to young men, that’s fundamentally evil. It may be disordered, it may be a temptation that calls us to sin, but it’s not evil. Adam and Eve ate of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and with that all human beings broke down, and this is one aspect of that break that you and I are oriented away from the true nature of sexuality. But it’s just a fact. It just is. What Dennis does is not a fact. It’s a will to destruction. A will to his own destruction, and a will to the destruction of the children he victimizes. Think of it as a one-man sack of Rome by the marauding Visigoths.”
“Was it the Visigoths who sacked Rome?”
“I don’t remember,” Alexander said. He clicked the left side of the mouse spasmotically. “I don’t think there’s anything else here. Do you think he did it? Dennis?”
“Did what?”
“Murdered those women.”
“All those women?” Chickie asked. “The Plate Glass women? I thought they had that solved by now. I thought they had somebody who confessed.”
“I don’t think they believe the confession,” Alexander said. “I think they’re looking for alternatives. That’s why they brought Gregor Demarkian in.”
Chickie looked up at the ceiling. “If you were somebody like Dennis Ledeski, would you kill middle-aged women?”
“Ah,” Alexander said.
And it was true. If he was somebody like Dennis Ledeski, his basement would be full of bodies, but they wouldn’t be the bodies of middle-aged women. As for himself, he didn’t have a basement full of anything. He didn’t have a basement. This was the true dilemma of being a gay man: it was hard to build the kind of stable family you needed as you got closer and closer to old age. It was especially hard if your own family wasn’t talking to you.
“Oh, look,” Alexander said, “here’s something. Isn’t this the oddest thing.”
THREE
1
Bennis had been asleep again when Gregor got home that night, and he hadn’t had either the heart or the stomach to wake her. At least this time she was asleep in bed and not on the couch, so he didn’t feel as if she were poised for flight. In the morning, though, she was up before he was, and as he got into the shower he could hear her in the kitchen, muttering to herself. For a moment he thought it might be possible for them to go back to where they had been before she left, without talking about it.
Of course, where they had been before she left had apparently not been such a good thing. If it had been, she wouldn’t have left. Or something. Gregor made the shower hot enough to peel the skin off his back. Murder investigations were easier than Bennis. Even this murder investigation was easier than Bennis.
He finished his shower, and got dressed, and came down the hall toward the living room and the kitchen. Bennis was still in the kitchen, humming. Gregor could not tell what she was humming because Bennis was—. It was wrong to say she was tone deaf because she wasn’t. She knew how bad she sounded; she was just bad.
He went into the kitchen and found the table heaped with stuff: computer printouts from Martha and Betty; one of Bennis’s papier-mache models of one of her character’s Zedalia houses; a foam container of something from the Ararat. Bennis was making coffee. She was using the percolator, not the coffee bags.
“I could have just gone down to the Ararat and had breakfast,” he said. “You could have come with me.”
“It’s almost ten o’clock,” Bennis said. “You seemed to need the sleep more than the time, so I let you have it.”
Gregor thought about the possible uses for that particular idiom and decided not to pursue it. He sat down at the table and pushed the
printouts away from him. There were more here than he had brought back the night before.
“Did I get a delivery,” he asked, “or a phone call?”
“You got both.” Bennis poured coffee for him, then for herself, and sat down across the table. There was a huge pile of printouts between the two of them. She picked it up and put it on the floor. “There were a bunch of these things that came around eight thirty. There was a note stuck to them. It’s around here somewhere. I think it was from John Jackman.”
“What did it say?”
Bennis gave him a look. “It said ‘SEE? WORKING NIGHT AND DAY.’ And don’t look at me like that. It was written on a Post-it and stuck to the envelope. It wasn’t exactly a secret. It wasn’t signed though; I just thought I recognized the handwriting.”
“You probably did.”
“And there was a phone call from Alexander Mark. He’s one of those men you just sort of look at and think, What a waste.”
“What a waste?”
“That he’s gay,” Bennis said. “I mean, not that I’m against his being gay, you know, but if he were straight—I’m putting this very badly.”
“I think I get the drift. That was all?”
“You’ve got an eleven o’clock meeting on the body find the other day. Rob Benedetti’s office called and said to make sure you were at his office at eleven thirty. He said to tell you you were right, only one of them counted. Was I supposed to understand what that meant?”
“Not necessarily,” Gregor said. “Did Alexander Mark leave a message?”
“Yes,” Bennis said. “He said to tell you that he didn’t find anyone else among Dennis Ledeski’s clients, but all the ones he knew about before lived in Green Point buildings. Was that supposed to mean something to me?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know what you know and what you don’t know,” Gregor said.
“Do you know?” Bennis asked him. “Do you know who killed them, I mean? I’m a little out of the loop on this one. I don’t think I always was.”
