Glass Houses (51 page)

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 did 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.”

B
ennie 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.

“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—”