Glass Houses

by Jane Haddam

  The two detectives came up to the door where Gregor and Rob were standing.

  “You’ve looked this place over?” Gregor asked.

  “Not really,” O’Shea said. “We did a cursory run through, but we’re going to keep the barriers up at least a few more days so that we can get up to speed. With the situation the way it is, with Marty and Cord, you know—”

  “Yeah,” Rob Benedetti said.

  “It’s okay,” Gregor said. “I won’t touch anything. I just want to see. First, I want to see something out here. There’s an alley?”

  “Right to the side of the house,” O’Shea said.

  “It goes to a back courtyard?” Gregor gestured in the vague direction.

  “Right to the back,” O’Shea said again.

  “And there’s no door directly onto the alley?” Gregor said.

  “There’s a door at the back,” Fabereaux said. “You asked us to check and we did. There’s a door at the back that goes to the little space where the garbage cans and stuff are kept until somebody brings them out on garbage day. But there’s nothing directly onto the alley.”

  “Let’s see,” Gregor said.

  O’Shea and Fabereaux led the way, and they tromped around down the alley and into the back. There was not so much “courtyard” here as there had been at the last place. The houses were closer together and more run down. Gregor saw what he had come to think of as the usual things: used and broken hypodermic syringes, used and ripped condoms, broken bottles, crushed aluminum cans.

  Gregor paced up and down the alley, then around to the back, to the door. The door was almost in the center of the building’s back wall. He counted steps. He made his way back around to the front of the house and the street.

  “Do you know anything about this neighborhood?” he asked the assembled company. “Do you know if it’s likely that there would be people in the alley and the back at any time of day?”

  “Not likely, I wouldn’t think,” O’Shea said. “That’s not where the junkies and the gangs hang out. They go to abandoned buildings.”

  “And are there abandoned buildings in this neighborhood?”

  “Several,” O’Shea said.

  Gregor nodded. He gestured up the steps, and they went past the young patrolman and into the front vestibule. It was an ordinary front vestibule, not all that different from the one in his own building on Cavanaugh Street. The difference was mostly in the state of repair, which was abysmal, and the fact that several of the mailboxes had been forced open and vandalized.

  The young patrolman came in, got out a set of keys, and opened the inner door. Gregor thanked him.

  “All right,” Gregor said. “Let’s look at the logistics. Bennie Durban lived here, am I correct?”

  “He did,” O’Shea said. “He might still. He’s just missing at the moment.”

  “He’s halfway to Montana,” Fabereaux said. “Trust me.”

  “Where’s Durban’s apartment?” Gregor asked.

  They took him down a short hall. The young patrolman took out his keys again and opened up. The apartment wasn’t exactly on the first floor and wasn’t exactly in the basement. The windows seemed to be both underground and overground at the same time. Gregor looked around.

  “Mr. Durban had a hobby,” he said.

  “I don’t see why wre can’t arrest them just for doing things like this,” Fabereaux said. “I know there’s a First Amendment, but for God’s sake. Who pins up pictures of serial killers who isn’t likely to be one himself? Eventually, anyway. I didn’t mean—”

  “I know,” Gregor said. “I don’t think Mr. Durban is a serial killer, not yet. Can you tell me where Beatrice Morgander lived?”

  “She lived here,” O’Shea said.

  “In this apartment?” Gregor said.

  “Right,” O’Shea said.

  Gregor thought back on the night of his talk with Kathleen Conge and filed away the obvious: she lied the way some people do, to make a story better or to get back at somebody she didn’t like. Gregor wondered which it was.

  “Where is Kathleen Conge’s apartment?” he asked.

  O’Shea gestured up the hall, and they all trooped after him. The supervisor’s apartment was bigger than the one Bennie Durban had been living in, but not by much, and it had windows out onto the street, which had to give it more in the way of light and air.

  Gregor went back down the hall to the apartment that had been both Beatrice Morgander’s and Bennie Durban’s and looked around. There was a door in the middle of the opposite wall just a little ways down.

  “That’s the door to the basement?” Gregor said.

  “That’s it,” O’Shea said.

  Gregor opened it. “It’s not locked? Is that your doing, or wasn’t it kept locked?”

  “I don’t think it was kept locked,” the young patrolman put it. “At least, I never got a key to it.”

  “Thank you,” Gregor said.

  He felt around for a light switch and found it. Light didn’t help much. There was a short flight of steps, no more than a half flight, then a big, highceilinged space with cardboard boxes and old pieces of furniture here and there. He went down the steps and looked around again.

  “Where—?” Gregor asked.

  O’Shea pointed across the room. “It’s in there. Past that little door.”

  Gregor went across the basement room to the “little door.” He opened that and looked inside. It was a dirt cellar, the kind of cellar people used to keep root vegetables in during the winter before the days of common refrigeration. The cellar was now virtually destroyed, dug out into the surrounding earth.

  “Isn’t it odd to think,” Gregor said, “that people in the Colonial period didn’t really have what we’d call proper foundations. They built on dirt.”

  “Is that relevant?” Rob asked.

  “Not particularly,” Gregor said. “Did you set up that appointment I asked you to?”

  3

  If Gregor Demarkian had myopia when it came to poor Philadelphia, he had just as much myopia, or maybe more, when it came to rich Philadelphia. Like most people in the city, like most people in the country, he tended to assume that “rich Philadelphia” was the Main Line, that the rich had all packed up and moved to the suburbs decades before the rest of the country had even heard of them. He forgot that areas like this one still existed within the city proper. He had forgotten that rich people in the city still found it convenient, and unthreatening, to live in a way that made it easy to see who and what they were.

  He got out of Rob Benedetti’s car in front of the Tyder family home and looked around. There were no abandoned buildings here, and he didn’t think there was a single “multiple family dwelling” on this entire block. Cavanaugh Street was well-off. This was a fantasy from a thirties’ movie about debutantes. The houses were built of brick so clean they might have been run through a washing machine. The ground-floor windows were all twice as tall as any man. This was not the part of the city that had greeted the delegates to the Continental Congress. This was the part of the city money built.

  Nobody was looking out at them from the front windows. Gregor hadn’t expected there to be. O’Shea and Fabereaux pulled up behind them and parked. They must look like some kind of delegation. It was probably a good thing that all their cars were unmarked. If they had pulled up in police cars, the entire street would probably have exploded.

  Gregor went up to the front door and rang the bell. In a moment the door was opened by a maid in a uniform, her dark hair pulled back tightly at the base of her skull under a starched white cap.

  “Gregor Demarkian for Mrs. Woodville,” he said formally.

  The maid did not seem surprised by the formality, although she must have heard less of it than rudeness in this day and age. Gregor wondered if “trades-men” still went around to the back instead of using the front door. He wondered if anybody cared about things like that anymore, besides a few commentators on the lifestyles of the r
ich and famous. Even then, he thought, they weren’t likely to be interested in a house like this. Understatement and reserve were not what interested people these days. Ostentation and excess were.

  The maid was leading them down a long hall toward a pair of tall double doors. The front foyer was made of inlaid marble tiles, light and dark, so that it looked like a chess board. The formal staircase to the upper floors was marble, too, with thick bannister posts carved into flowing ovals. That must have cost something, even in the nineteenth century. He wondered why people bothered to do things like that.

  Elizabeth Woodville was waiting in a large wing chair in the living room. Above her head was a chandelier even more spectacular than the one in the foyer. The rug under her feet was Persian, and Gregor would have bet anything that it was both authentic and antique. She stood up and then looked from one to the other of them.

  “Good afternoon,” she said. “There are rather more of you than I was expecting.”

  O’Shea and Fabereaux looked uncomfortable. Gregor held out his hand. “I’m Gregor Demarkian. We’ve met, on occasion, although you might not remember.”

  “I do remember,” Elizabeth said. Then she looked up, toward the door to the living room. The maid was still standing there. “Will you bring in the tea cart, please? We’ll need equipment for five. I expect most of these gentlemen drink coffee.”

  There were murmurs of assent, even more uneasy than the looks had been a few moments before. Gregor considered the possibility that rooms like this had been built to intimidate people. Elizabeth gestured to the chairs around her. None of them looked comfortable.

  “Please,” she said. “Sit down. I take it you think I can help you in finding Margaret and my brother. I can help you with Margaret, of course. But that’s because she isn’t really missing.”

  “I know,” Gregor said.

  “She’s not really missing?” Rob said.

  “She panicked,” Elizabeth said, waving a hand dismissively. “If you knew Margaret, you’d know that isn’t all that unexpected. She tends to panic. She’s upstairs in her bedroom. I’m supposed to calm you all down before I let you know she’s there.”

  “The thing is,” Gregor said. “Your brother isn’t really missing either.”

  “Isn’t he?” asked Elizabeth. “He is as far as I’m concerned. I have no idea where he’s taken off to. And I suppose this seals it. It’s practically another confession, taking off like that.”

  Gregor did not want to sit in a chair. He paced to the window instead. From there the street looked like any other street, not particularly rich, not particularly poor. He wondered if anybody in this house ever stood at the window and looked out.

  “I was going to ask to see the place where Conchita Estevez was found,” he said, “but then I realized it didn’t matter. I assume that there would be some anomalies between that murder and the others we’ve finally pinned down to the Plate Glass Killer now that we’ve been able to sort through the information. For one thing, she’s only technically a victim of the Plate Glass Killer. That murder your brother committed by himself.”

  “And the rest of the murders?” Elizabeth said. “He had accomplices?”

  “No, not so much that,” Gregor said. “The rest of the murders, he didn’t commit. Russ Donahue was right about that. He felt the confession was fake, and it was fake. But then, John Jackman was right about something, too. He said that he thought Henry Tyder was guilty of some murder, somewhere, sometime, and of course he was. He killed Conchita Estevez, and then he put her body in the alley and dressed it up to look like something the Plate Glass Killer had done. Which wasn’t hard, because he’d dressed up all the other bodies the Plate Glass Killer was supposed to have killed.”

  “Henry is wandering around stumbling over corpses and dressing them up to make them look as if they’ve been murdered by a serial killer?” Elizabeth said. “That’s a little farfetched, isn’t it? I mean, Henry is a little odd, but I don’t think he’s that odd.”

  The maid came in with a tall silver cart. On its top shelf there was a coffeepot and a teapot and little piles of cups, saucers, spoons, and napkins. On its bottom shelf was a set of covered silver dishes. She wheeled the cart up to Elizabeth Woodville and disappeared.

  “It wasn’t a matter of stumbling over corpses,” Gregor said. “That part bothered me, too, in the beginning, but then I realized—all that was necessary was for Henry Tyder to know where the corpses were. And, of course, he did, but they weren’t in alleys. They were in apartments. Except for Conchita Estevez, of course. He wouldn’t have killed her here. He would have known that, had he tried, you’d have had a fit. Maybe he really did kill her in that alley.”

  “I would have had a fit if he’d killed her at all,” Elizabeth said.

  “Maybe,” Gregor said. “But maybe not. But that’s isn’t the issue at the moment. You all got a break, you see, when the police seemed to start identifying the bodies of women you’d never heard of as victims of the Plate Glass Killer. Because you knew, just as I knew, just as Mr. Benedetti here knew, that in a serial killer case, an alibi for one murder ends up being an alibi for all of them, at least as long as the murders were linked. So if you thought about it at all, the fact that the first detectives assigned to this case went around claiming every middle-aged woman murdered in the city as a victim of the PGK was a plus.”

  “I’m a middle-aged woman,” Elizabeth said. “I should think the saner response on my part would have been to worry that so many middle-aged women were killed.”

  “Oh, not all of them were killed,” Gregor said. “That’s what’s so awful about a case where the investigating detectives have gone round the bend. Everything got shoved into a folder and nobody paid much attention to any of the details. They will, now. The police department has three or four people sifting through the mess of this investigation to find out who did what to whom. And I wouldn’t presume to know all of it. But I know this. You murdered Sarajean Petrazik and Faith Anne Fugate and Beatrice Morgander and Arlene Treshka. Just those four. I got sidetracked, for a while, by the fact that a number of the other women on the police PGK list were also residents of Green Point buildings, but that isn’t surprising, is it? Green Point is the largest landholder in the city. A good quarter of Philadelphia lives in Green Point buildings. But what mattered wasn’t Green Point buildings. What mattered was the kind of trouble they caused.”

  “If people cause trouble in buildings,” Elizabeth said, “they get evicted. Even with the rent laws the way they are, they get evicted. And what makes you think I would know who was causing trouble anyway? We have an entire corporation full of people who do the day-to-day.”

  “You do,” Gregor said, “but you still do some of it yourself. I know that because you went to see Tyrell Moss. In case you don’t know who that is, he’s an ex-con who owns a small convenience store in that same neighborhood where the fresh body was found with the skeletons. You went to see him your-self soon after the body of Faith Anne Fugate was discovered and Moss was picked up on suspicion and then released. His description of you was exact.”

  “Don’t be silly,” Elizabeth said. “Why would I go see one tenant of one building?”

  “To scope out the area and make sure Henry hadn’t made a mistake,” Gregor said. “Because that was Henry’s role in all this. He had to get the bodies out of the apartments and into alleys, and he had to tart them up so that they looked like they were the victims of serial killers. But none of you watches enough true crime. Serial killers are almost always driven by sex. They rape their victims or their victims’ corpses. If they can’t perform sexually, they use instruments, broom handles, whatever they can find. There was no sex here, anywhere. There wasn’t even the suggestion of sex.”

  “So what do you propose?” Elizabeth said. “That I went around murdering harmless middle-aged women I didn’t know for—what? I didn’t need their money. And I have tenants who cause trouble every day. Maybe you think Margaret and I di
d it together, like a modern-day version of Arsenic and Old Lace. But then we would have had to use poison, and you haven’t said anything about poison being used.”

  “No,” Gregor said. “Poison wasn’t used. But you and Margaret were in it together. You had to be. Neither one of you could have committed any of these murders by yourself. Neither of you is strong enough. And you had to be strong, to strangle four healthy women, even if they were knocked out at the time.”

  “Knocked out?” Elizabeth looked amused.

  “Well, we’re going to have to double check,” Gregor said. “But my guess is, yes, knocked out. With something like ketamine hydrochloride, I’d expect. I can’t see either of you, or Henry, running around buying illegal drugs off the street. That one’s legal, and vets have it. Routinely have it.”

  “You still haven’t explained to me why I—why we, that is, are running around killing middle-aged women,” Elizabeth said.

  Gregor smiled. “Mrs. Woodville, for God’s sake. They were all book-keepers.”

  EPILOGUE

  1

  Bennie Durban was picked up on a charge of shoplifting by the local police in Cleveland, Ohio, on April 1st, and it went a long way to proving that God had a sense of humor that only he, and not the police, thought he was wanted for being a Very Important Serial Killer. Maybe, if Bennie Durban had been the kind of man who read newspapers, he might have avoided the next several days. The Cleveland police were more than happy to lock him up for a few days to straighten it all out, and when they did they got the Philadelphia police thinking about the death of Rondelle Johnson. It was not Bennie Durban’s finest hour. It was not the Philadelphia Police Department’s finest hour either, but they hadn’t had much in the way of fine hours since the story of the Plate Glass Killer investigation had hit the newspapers. John Jackman, though, was still ahead of the incumbent mayor by double digits in the polls, and that was enough to make his anger only equal to that of Moses in front of the Golden Calf, rather than that of God at Sodom and Gomorrah.