by Jane Haddam
“So I don’t get it,” Bennis said. “There was no Plate Glass Killer. I understand that. I just don’t know how it’s possible. Why were there so many similarities—”
Gregor looked at himself in the mirror and decided that his tie looked like something the creators of South Park would wear over T-shirts for the Academy Awards. It had a gigantic picture of Sylvester the Cat and Tweety Bird on it, and Tweety Bird was so yellow he looked like he could glow in the dark.
“There weren’t really as many similarities as you’d think,” he said. “You’ve got to remember, you have two men partnered on this case who absolutely hated each other. They couldn’t stand to be in the same room with each other. Each of them thought the other one was Evil Incarnate. I’m not exaggerating the animosity. So they weren’t working together. They weren’t even working separately. They were working first and foremost against each other, and every single thing they did on that case was calculated to cause embarrassment to the other partner.”
“And that made them see a serial killer where none existed?”
“Sort of,” Gregor said. “Sarajean Petrazik was found dead in an alley with a cord around her throat. Then Marlee Crane was found. She wras a middle-aged woman. She was dead in an alley. She had a silk scarf knotted around her neck the way women did in the fifties to look fashionable—”
“And one of them mistook that for a nylon cord?”
“No,” Gregor said. “Although you’re right about one of them. Any time the two of them were at a scene together, the quality of the reporting took a huge jump in quality. It was Marty Gayle who went to the scene in the Marlee Crane case. She was dead in the alley. She had the scarf around her neck, knotted tightly, and there were slight abrasions where the scarf was. So that’s how he wrote it up. You should see the notes on these things. They’re so sketchy they could be hieroglyphics. Anyway, Cord was furious that Marty hadn’t called him to go to the scene. He looked at the notes, saw the vague reference to the scarf, and jumped to conclusions. And the next body to be discovered was Conchita Estevez’s, and she did have a cord around her neck. So Cord Leehan went to the press, and announced that we had a serial killer on our hands.”
“Why didn’t Marty Gayle protest?” Bennis asked. “He must have known that Marlee Crane didn’t fit the description.”
“It really wouldn’t have been in his interests to protest at that point,” Gregor said. “A serial killer case is a serious thing, both in real terms and in terms of what it can do for a detective’s ego if he can solve the thing. Besides, there was Conchita Estevez, and she did have a cord around her neck, and she was found in an alley just like Sarajean Petrazik, and maybe there was a serial killer loose. All Marty and Cord could think of was keeping enough information away from the other one to make sure that only one detective got the credit for solving the thing.”
“Do you know who killed Marlee Crane?” Bennis asked.
“Nobody killed Marlee Crane,” Gregor said. “They exhumed the body a few days ago, just to be sure, but once they went back to the medical reports they became fairly sure that what they had was a simple case of asphyxiation. If she’d been in a restaurant instead of an alley when she choked, somebody would probably have done a Heimlich on her and she’d be alive right now. To be fair to Marty and Cord, although I don’t know why we should be, asphyxiation looks pretty much the same no matter what kind of choking causes it, at least after a few hours.”
“And was it like that with all the ones who weren’t Henry Tyder’s?” Bennis asked. “But, no. You said that that man, the accountant—”
“Dennis Ledeski,” Gregor said. “The pedophile. Yes, he killed his secretary. I knew that the first time I looked at the investigation notes, in spite of the mess they were in. I expect she knew more about his hobbies than he wanted anyone to know. And Bennie Durban killed Rondelle Johnson, as far as we’ve been able to figure as a kind of tribute to the Plate Glass Killer. By then, the case was a big deal, and Bennie was both jealous and desperate to have a part in it. And Debbie Morelli—”
“Oh, don’t tell me,” Bennis said. “Alexander Mark really did kill her?”
“No,” Gregor said. “She was killed by the parochial vicar at Saint Joseph’s Church. A parochial vicar is a second-in-command priest in a parish—”
“I know what a parochial vicar is.”
“Anyway, that was what that was about,” Gregor said. “It’s the same church where Alexander goes to Courage meetings. He was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. As far as we can tell, she’d been blackmailing him for years. Blackmailing the parochial vicar, I mean. They’d gone to school together in Rochester, New York, long before he ever thought of entering the priesthood. He’s got a felony conviction he didn’t tell anybody about when he entered the seminary. He served six months and got three years’ probation. The church might have been okay with it, except that it was a felony conviction for sexual assault. It was before the laws mandating registration for sex offenders, so he was off the hook there; but there was Debbie Morelli, and she wasn’t going away. I’ve promised Rob Benedetti that I’ll go to work on it next week so that they can get their ducks in a row and arrest the man. We’ve already told the archdiocese about the felony conviction.”
“So, okay,” Bennis said, “where are we? First, Henry Tyder killed—”
“No, Elizabeth and Margaret did the killing. Except for Conchita Estevez, Henry never killed anybody They didn’t dare have him do it. He’s a lot more functional than he likes to pretend he is, but he’s still an alcoholic, and his mental stability is erratic. Hell, Elizabeth being the kind of person she is, she didn’t even like to let Margaret in on the actual murders. She got stuck with that because she’s an older woman, and she couldn’t always do all the work herself.”
“And none of them was killed in an alley,” Bennis said.
“Right,” Gregor said. “Elizabeth wasn’t that stupid. Actually, one of the first things I thought of when I was brought into this case was that the killer had to be stupid as hell to keep killing women in alleys. We think of alleys as deserted and empty, but most alleys are functional. They provide access to the rear of buildings, to garbage cans, to equipment sheds. And they’re not always all that out of the way. Hell, the last one, Arlene Treshka, was right off a busy street in the heart of a major shopping area. Successful serial killers don’t kill in public places. They go into the woods, or into basements, or off abandoned exit ramps. They put some time between when they kill their victims and when the police are able to find them. And here we were with bodies in alleys only hours, sometimes, after they’d died. So no, Elizabeth didn’t kill the women she killed in alleys. She killed them in their apartments, Green Point apartments, that she had access to anytime she wanted, whether their owners wanted to admit her or not. But the owners of these apartments did admit her because they were all Green Point employees.”
“They were all bookkeepers,” Bennis said.
“Bookkeepers, assistant comptrollers, minor financial affairs players for various areas of the Green Point holdings. They weren’t working at the main office. Elizabeth wasn’t stupid about that either. When she decided to start draining Green Point of assets, she did it from places where the SEC would never look. The idea was to go public, make it look like Green Point was stuffed with cash, get a great price in the initial IPO, and have their cake and eat it, too. It was a strip job worthy of Enron. The only problem was that there wras no way to pull it off without getting at least some of the secondary personnel to help, and the secondary personnel posed a problem in the long run. So Elizabeth would milk the cash cow at some point—the Green Point High-view Condominium Project was where Sarajean Petrazik worked—and when she had everything she wanted, she’d visit the bookkeeper who’d done the work for her and that would be that. Sarajean Petrazik actually called Elizabeth with her concerns about what she thought was unusual activity in the project accounts. Elizabeth and Margaret agreed to meet Sarajean in
her apartment. Then they killed her and called in Henry. After that, they didn’t wait for a call. When they got done with their work, they committed another murder, got Henry to move the body, and that was that.”
“It’s not all that was that,” Bennis said. “Do you realize how many bodies you have to find explanations for once all this is over? Sarajean Petrazik, Faith Anne Fugate, Elizabeth Bray and Beatrice Morgander were all Elizabeth and Margaret’s, and Conchita Estevez was Henry Tyder’s. Elyse Martineau was Dennis Ledeski’s. Debbie Morelli was the parochial vicar. Rondelle Johnson was Bennie Durban’s. Marlee Crane was accidental. But you’ve still got three more, including the last one. Did Henry Tyder just find Arlene Treshka on the street?”
“Apparently. It will seem less odd if you realize that Henry Tyder was looking to find somebody on the street. It didn’t even have to be somebody in an alley. He’d dragged the other bodies around to get them into alleys; he could drag one more. He’d been looking for a suitable body for weeks.”
“But why?”
“Because the assumption of a serial killer was very useful to all of them,” Gregor said. “Alexander Mark said it, and I’m ashamed to admit it had never occurred to me before. Do you know what’s unusual about the victims of a serial murderer? Nobody ever really looks into the details about them. We use a lot of stock phrases. She was beautiful and kind and had a great future. She was a very special person. Whatever. Once the investigation is set as a serial killer case, the police and the press both stop taking good, hard, microscopic looks into the victims’ private lives and backgrounds. Marty Gayle and Cord Leehan were the best things that happened to the Tyder family. They almost ensured that the victims didn’t get investigated in the one way that might have led back to Elizabeth Tyder Woodville.”
“But why go looking for that last body?” Bennis asked. “Were they trying to get Henry arrested? And why would Henry confess?”
“Because it was the best way to deflect suspicion from them pretty much permanently,” Gregor said. “They’d done what they needed to do to get what they wanted. Now their big problem was the possibility that Marty and Cord would come to their senses and there would be some kind of real investigation. They had to drive home the impression that this was a serial killer case, and they had to set Henry up to look as if he was being persecuted by the police because he chose to live like a bum. What was the result of Henry Tyder’s confession? Everybody, even John Jackman, assumed that it was false, and that if there was one thing Henry Tyder couldn’t be, it was involved in those murders.”
“Oh, I see,” Bennis said. “That he couldn’t be involved in any of them, since they were all strung together as the work of one person.”
“Exactly,” Gregor said. “This really was not a difficult or complicated case. It only seemed to be. Elizabeth Woodville must have some of the most spectacular luck in the world. She should have gone to Vegas instead of indulging in white-collar crime. The chances are that if anybody but Marty Gayle and Cord Leehan had been assigned to the Sarajean Petrazik and Marlee Craine cases, nobody would have imagined a serial killer for a moment, and the last remnants of the Tyder family would have been in jail long before Beatrice Morgander died.”
“And Beatrice Morgander was your key,” Bennis said, “because Henry Tyder was out of commission and the women couldn’t carry her into the alley, since she was too big. So they rolled her downstairs and stuck her in the root cellar instead. And that was all right—”
“—until Kathleen Conge started to go snooping,” Gregor said. “They really should have thought of that, you know. Kathleen Conge always snoops. People like Kathleen Conge always snoop. Are you really going to take an active interest in murder investigations from now on?”
“I always do.”
“You always come in at the end and listen to the explanations and get absolutely clueless.”
“That’s what I’ll do from now on, then,” Bennis said. “You have to get that tie on straight. Donna went to a lot of trouble to throw us this party.”
“The next time Donna gets it into her head to throw a formal party, we should have her committed.”
“It’s an engagement party, for God’s sake,” Bennis said. “It’s supposed to be formal.”
2
Several thousand miles away, in London, Phillipa Lydgate was having a frustrating time on the phone.
“Yes, I do understand he’s a flight risk,” she said, trying to be patient. You had to try to be patient with Americans because they didn’t understand anything. “And I do know he escaped from jail once before; but he had an accomplice then, didn’t he? And I’m not an accomplice. I’m not even anywhere near the jail. I only want to talk to him on the phone.”
The American voice on the other end squawked. All American voices squawked, except the ones that drawled, and they sounded like—Phillipa didn’t know what they sounded like. She didn’t understand how Americans could stand listening to themselves. For that matter, she didn’t understand how Americans could stand being Americans. She looked at her kitchen table, covered with notes and books and scraps of paper and tiny little audio tapes, the entire haul from her stay in Philadelphia, and tried again.
“I’m in London,” she said, talking just a little more loudly than she would have to someone of average intelligence. “I’m a writer from a British newspaper. I’m doing a story on the Tyder family and the murders they committed. I’m sure that if you’ll just talk to a Mr. Benedict, he’ll tell you that’s he’s already talked to me—no, Mr. Benedict—no, he’s the barrister. The”—Philippa racked her brain—“the man who tries cases for the crown. I mean, for the state. All right, then, for the Commonwealth. I’m sorry. We do things differently over here. If you’ll just ask the man, we had a long conversation the day before I had to return to England and—of course there’s somebody named Benedict, Robert Benedict, and he’s—oh, I see. Benedetti. But that’s the same thing, isn’t it? Benedict in English, Benedetti in Italian, Benedictus in Latin, which is where it all comes from, as I’m sure you’ll remember—”
The voice on the phone did not remember. It was typical. Americans never knew any language but their own. And as for Latin, well. The last Americans who knew Latin were altar boys in the Catholic Church before Vatican II. It was all McDonald’s and Burger King and Kentucky Fried Chicken and Taco Bell and that awful pop music, and then they dared to tell the rest of the world how to live.
“I spoke to the,” Phillipa’s eyes suddenly caught the end of a note, “the district attorney,” she said, more confidently. “And he said—yes, I understand that Henry Tyder has his own lawyer, but—. All I want is for someone to ask Mr. Tyder if he would be willing to be interviewed for a British—. Yes. Yes. Well, it isn’t my fault that he had an apartment hideaway, as you put it, and I didn’t get it for him, so I don’t see—. No. No. But—”
The person on the other end of the line had hung up. Phillipa stared at the buzzing receiver in her hand and then put it down. It was typical. It really was. All Americans were typical. Even Henry Tyder was typical. It didn’t matter, race or class or gender, they were all typical, and they got more typical the longer you talked to them. It; wasn’t her fault that Henry Tyder’s sisters had given him an apartment to hide away in and then helped him to hide away in it, or that the police had gone to so much bloody fuss to get him out of it and back into jail again, and it surely wasn’t her fault that the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania allowed people like the Tyders to lay waste to the landscape and grind the poor in the dust. That was what America was like, after all. It was all about grinding the poor in the dust, and giving the rich everything, and then crowing about it as if they’d done a damned good thing. Pah.
Phillipa went over to the word processor and sat down. She had enough in the way of notes to finish her series. She could not only explain, but illustrate, everything that was wrong with Red State America: the mindless patriotism that felt like jackbooted fascism to her; the poor people livi
ng on the streets with no public assistance to help them; the patients dying of cancer and heart disease because they didn’t have a fancy job that would give them health insurance; the superstitious religiosity. Especially the patriotism. She thought of that black man with the little store, the one Henry Tyder broke into when he was on the run, that the black man rented from the Tyder family, and that in-credible display of flags and decals behind his cash register. Red, white, and blue, she thought. They’d have sex in red, white, and blue if they could think of a way to manage it.
She went back to the table with her notes and looked through them. There it was. They had thought of a way to manage it. You could get American flag condoms for use during sex. She dropped the note card and went back to the word processor.
An American Story, she typed. She thought about it a little more. The idea was to let your readers know what you were going to say, without making it seem like you were prejudiced in advance. The idea was to sound like Michael Moore when he got over here, rather than what he sounded like on American radio. She ran the words through her head a couple of more times, then finished the title: How the Tyder Family Got Rich, Got Theirs, and Got Everything.
JANE HADDAM is the author of numerous novels, many featuring Gregor Demarkian, and has been a finalist for both the Edgar and the Anthony Awards She lives in Litchneld Count), Connecticut.
JACKET DESIGN BY DAVID BALDEOSINGH ROTSTEIN
JACKET PHOTOGRAPH OF RAIN ON GLASS
© SAM JAVANROUH / WWW.TOPLEFTPIXEL.COM
JACKET PHOTOGRAPH OF WOMEN
© EVGENY MOKHOREV
WWW.MINOTAURBOOKS.COM
ST. MARTIN’S MINOTAUR
