Glass Houses (16 page)

There were two things he couldn't allow himself to forget about this hiding place. First, that it had been a good idea because it had worked. The police had torn the office apart. They'd gone through all the files. They'd turned the furniture upside down. They hadn't found a thing. Second, that if the police ever did find the cell phone in that particular place, his life would be over. There would be no way to claim that he “didn't really” know the cell phone was there, or that it belonged to somebody else, or that it had been dropped by a client.

He got the wood pieces back in place and then put the cabinet back in place, too. He went out into his office proper and sat down at his desk. He had no need to be this frightened. Even if the Henry Tyder confession was a sham, the police wouldn't pounce before he'd actually done something to make it worth their while. He opened the cell phone and began punching buttons. Nothing happened. Of course nothing happened. It needed to be charged. It had probably needed to be charged for weeks.

Dennis had gone beyond feeling sick. He was hyperventilating. All he needed to do was to have a heart attack now, here, with the door to the office locked. They probably wouldn't get to him on time. They probably wouldn't even realize he needed to be got to. Or, something worse, they would find him alive and find the extra cell phone on him and charge it up and see what was
on it. Could they do that? Would the material he'd downloaded from the Internet still be on the phone after all this time? He wished he knew more about computers. Part of him was convinced that every single thing he'd downloaded would be ready and waiting for the police as soon as they wanted to access it, but not available to him because he wouldn't know how to get to it. He wanted to get out into the air. He wanted to go downtown and find something, find someone, find a place to be.

He managed to get himself to stop shaking. There was nothing he could do about the state of his clothes. Sweat was sweat. It seeped into everything and made it wet. He made sure the cell phone was tucked away in his inside jacket pocket. He could recharge it when he got home. He didn't want to do it here. He wondered what it would be like to be able to have it again. It gave him the ability put his hand out and touch soft, uncorrupted flesh. He wanted to see himself in the eyes of a boy who thought he was God. He wanted to be God, if only for a day. He would change everything.

He got his briefcase up off the floor, put it on the desk, and opened it. There was a little pile of paper inside, but nothing he recognized, and nothing he cared about. It didn't matter. He closed the case and made sure it locked. He closed his eyes and counted to ten, hoping that he wouldn't have to make a mad dash for the bathroom. It wasn't fair. What Alexander was, that was a perversion. Grown men with grown men. Grown men coupled with grown women. That was evolution in action. That was the way the way the human race made babies. That was how we continued ourselves. What he did was not like that. It was not about sex. What he did, what he wanted, that was spiritual.

The churning in his bowels had finally calmed down. He didn't think it would be for long. He got up with the briefcase in his hand and headed for his office door. He unlocked it and stepped out into the corridor. He could hear Alexander's voice in the reception area being polite to someone on the phone. Suddenly he resented everything about Alexander. He didn't just despise it; he'd always despised Alexander. That was easy. What else could you do but despise a man who came to work in lavender shirts? What he felt now was something else. Gay marriages, civil unions, gay pride parades, what had happened to the country? How could sensible, ordinary Americans, the ones who made up the Bedrock of the Nation, how could those people possibly fall for this utter crap that people like Alexander were their own kind of normal. He was the one who was normal. He was the one following in a great and civilized tradition and being persecuted for it only because the Bedrock of the Nation had rocks instead of brains inside its head.

I'm being completely incoherent, Dennis thought. He took a deep breath. He couldn't do this anymore, without some kind of outlet. He was going to
have to go home and recharge this phone, or go out to some of the places he knew to see if there was anything going on. It was broad daylight. Probably not. When you had something society made you hide, you had to do it in the darkness. You couldn't even join one of those groups that was dedicated to making the world better or “educating” the public. Dennis was willing to bet that every single man on the membership list of the North American Man/Boy Love Association had an FBI tail.

By the time he got out into the reception area he was much calmer, if more than a little damp. There were sweat stains all over his shirt, on the front as well as on the back. If Alexander noticed, he didn't indicate it.

“I'm going out,” Dennis said. “I need a breath of fresh air.”

“What time should I say you'll be in, if somebody calls?”

“Tell them I'm out for the day. You can be out for the day. Pack up and go home. We're not going to get anything done here today. I'm sick as a dog, and I'm just not up to it.”

“I've got some work to clear up,” Alexander said.

Dennis wanted to tell him to forget it, but he didn't dare. He'd seen those true-crime programs:
American Justice, City Confidential, Forensic Files.
He could hear the narration in his head. “Alexander Mark thought it was very odd that Dennis Ledeski would be so insistent that he had to leave the office in the middle of the day; and as it turned out, the police thought it was odd, too.” Dennis just bet they would. He bet they'd find everything about him odd. He'd bet they were the same themselves, too, just better at hiding it or denying it.

“Whatever,” Dennis said. “Are you still watching the story?”

“Not really. There won't be much of anything for a few days, and then the best coverage will be in the paper. You really don't look well.”

“I'm not. I'm going home. I'm going to take some stuff and go to sleep.”

Alexander said nothing. Dennis didn't know what he wanted him to say. He held tightly to his briefcase, even though he couldn't remember what was in it, and headed for the front door and the vestibule and the street. He was beginning to hyperventilate again. He had to get outside before Alexander saw him. He had to get somewhere and do something.

There really were times when he wanted to strangle somebody, when he could feel himself pulling at the soft flesh of a neck. They said there was a kick in that if you did it right. You strangled and strangled and got your partner just up against the edge of death and then you released it and him, too. There would be semen everywhere. There would be revelation.

Out on the street, he started to walk. He didn't want a taxi. He didn't want a bus. He didn't want anything that could make somebody remember him.

He was not going home.

T
yrell Moss was having
one of those days. He really
wasn't
one of those black guys who could join up with the Republicans. He had a lot of respect for Colin Powell, and Condileeza Rice, and even Thomas Sowell. He understood why the pastors of some of the churches around here had switched allegiances. He had no idea what those idiot white-boy organizers from the University of Pennsylvania thought they were doing posing around like revolutionaries and calling gangsta rap—
gangsta rap!
—the “authentic revolutionary voice of the struggle.” Even so, it was the Democratic Party that had delivered on Civil Rights, and it was the Democratic Party he had been able to count on for all these years to come through with things like after-school programs for kids who had no place to go that was anything like home and special initiatives to teach kids who couldn't read why they could. He also believed in the justice of affirmative action—firmly believed in it—and there was nobody he could count on in the Republican Party for that.

Today, though, was one of those days. It was one thing to believe in Civil Rights, which he did. It was one thing to believe that black Americans were behind in the race for the American Dream because generations of legalized discrimination had put them there. That was something he believed, too. It was another thing to assume that your behavior had no effect on the way your life worked
at all,
or that the fact that your great-great-grandmother had once been a slave in South Carolina meant you could do anything you wanted and be okay with it. That was what Charles Jellenmore seemed to believe, and Tyrell was about to kill him.

They were in the little utility room at the back. Tyrell could see through the door to the main security mirror over the counter and to the counter itself, which was necessary because the cash register was there. Charles was sitting on a packing crate, looking sullen. Tyrell was standing up. The store was empty.

“What were you thinking?” Tyrell demanded. “
Were
you thinking? Did thinking even occur to you? Two of those guys are on parole, for God's sake. You're on probation. One phone call from me and you go right to jail, do not pass Go, do not collect two hundred dollars. Which, by the way, is about what was in the till last night when I closed up. And you didn't get it. Or anything else. Lord Almighty, Charles, you're not even a good thief.”

Charles mumbled something. Out in the store, the front door bells tinkled. Tyrell looked up at the mirror and said, “What?”

“Z-bok said you was an old man,” Charles said, suddenly very loud. “He said even if you was here, it wouldn't be any trouble—”

“On my worst day,” Tyrell said, “on my oldest, most rheumatoid, most decrepit day, I could take your friend Z-bok and twist him into a pretzel. And
what's with the grammar this morning? You spend a night with Z-bok, you don't know verbs anymore?”

There was a customer in the store. It wasn't somebody he recognized. It wasn't even somebody who looked like somebody he should recognize. It was a white woman, dressed up as if she were a lawyer going to court, or one of those “ladies who lunch” on the way to an expensive restaurant.

“I'd better go get the lady what she wants,” Charles said.

“I'll get the lady what she wants,” Tyrell said. “I'm not finished with you. I should fire your ass right this minute, and you know it. Breaking the lock on the back door, for God's sake. You know I've got security cameras out there. You know I've got them in here.”

Charles mumbled something again, and then, when Tyrell cleared his throat, said, once again too loudly, “Z-bok said we could take out the security cameras.”

“You failed,” Tyrell said.

“We wasn't doing nothing,” Charles said. “We just needed some money and shit, that was all. We was all flat broke and needed some money to—”

“To?”

“Eat,” Charles said.

“Horse manure. I gave you dinner here myself last night, and it wasn't small. And don't tell me Z-bok needed to eat. All that boy ever eats is dope, and you know it. And don't say ‘shit' in this store. And it's we
were,
not we
was.
How do you ever expect to get out of here and get on in the real world if you sound like an ignorant—”

“Watch out,” Charles said. “You'll say one of those words you're always telling me you'll fire me for.”

Tyrell was watching out. That was one of the words he did not say, along with most of the swear words that seemed to constitute more and more of the vocabulary of the kids who came through every year. He could see the woman in the security camera looking over the large display of potato chips near the back wall.

“Listen,” he said, “the good news is that you didn't get anything, and I was the one who caught you. If the alarm had gone off without me here and the police had come, you'd be dead meat. The bad news is I'm mad as hell, and I'm not about to get over it soon. So if you don't want to land in jail, you'll un-load the soda crates and put the stock out while I attend to the lady. Then you and I will have more of a talk.”

“I don't wanna talk,” Charles said. “Talk's a lot of shit.”

“What?”

“Never mind,” Charles said.

Tyrell thought of railing on the kid for the use of the word “shit,” but he didn't have the time. His interior monologue had started up again. What were
you supposed to do in places like this? The answer wasn't as easy as it seemed when one side or the other started putting out their Holy Writ on How to End Poverty in Our Lifetimes. Tyrell wasn't even sure he wanted to end poverty. He wasn't even sure he knew what that was. What he wanted to end was this
thing
half of everybody seemed to be into, this attitude, this mess. There was a part of him that was sure that if they could just get the fathers to stay with the mothers, and the mothers to stay with the fathers, and everybody to go to church and throw out their television sets, it would all turn out all right.

Or maybe not. Tyrell stood at the counter and watched the woman look through the potato chip bags as if she had never seen anything like them before. She was so thin, he thought she would break in half at the middle in a strong wind.

“Can I help you?” he asked her.

She looked up from the potato chips and smiled at him. It wasn't much of a smile. She seemed tense.

“How do you do,” she said, coming forward to the counter. “My name is Phillipa Lydgate. I'm a reporter for the
Watchminder
newspaper. That's in England.”

Tyrell knew what the
Watchminder
was. It had a Web site. He read it every once in a while when his news-junkie soul had run out of news sources closer to home.

“Can I get you something?” he asked. Then, because he suddenly wasn't sure, “They do have potato chips in England, don't they? That's not just an American thing.”