Glass Houses (19 page)

“Tomorrow will be fine,” Gregor said. “Tonight, I'm meeting with a psychologist I'm thinking of recommending to Russ.”

“Russ is still on the case?” Rob said. “Great, I'm glad. I'd never have expected those women to put up with him.”

“Henry Tyder hasn't been declared incompetent yet. He's the one who wants to put up with Russ.”

“Ah,” Rob said. “All right. This gets more interesting by the minute. See you tomorrow morning. I'll assign one of the desk jockeys to it and have it all organized. Good luck with your psychologist.”

“Thanks,” Gregor said. Rob had already hung up. Rob was like that.

Gregor put the phone back in the cradle and then his head in his hands. The building was quiet. Even old George Tekemanian didn't seem to be watching television. Usually, that television was on full blast. You could hear Oprah clucking for blocks. He didn't want to get up and go to the window again. He didn't want to read. He didn't want to go back to Tibor's. He didn't want to watch television. That last one wasn't all that surprising because he didn't ever want to watch television. He only turned it on for the news, and the last time he'd turned the news on for any length of time was on and right after 9/11. He had no idea what he was supposed to do now. He had no idea what to think.

Finally he got up and got his jacket from the back of the chair he'd tossed it on when he'd first come in from Tibor's. Bennis's luggage was still everywhere. In his bedroom, three of her sweaters were now lying across his bed. He had pictures of her. He had her underwear in his chest of drawers. He had her special brand of tea in his kitchen cabinets. All of these things had been comforting during the long weeks while she was away, but now they were—he didn't know what. Wrong. Frightening. A terrible testament to the fact that you could be married to someone without ever standing up in front of a priest and making it official.

If he stayed here any longer, he was going to go insane. His only choice was not to stay here.

He made sure he had his keys and headed out the door.

I
n the end Gregor
met Alison Standish and her psychologist for dinner. He really had no reason not to. It might have been different if he and Alison had actually been having an affair. He kept telling himself that Bennis should assume he had been having an affair with
someone,
given her disappearance and her lack of explanations and all the other nutsy behavior she was prone to. Gregor was sure that any other man would have been having an affair, if not several, and one or two of the ones he had known while he was still with the Bureau would have been married to one of his affairs by now. The problem was that Gregor could not quite figure out why he and Bennis weren't married yet. In fact, in every way that really mattered, they were—or had been, up until recently—and then he couldn't explain what was going on. He knew couples who had been legally married for thirty years who were less settled in with each other than he and Bennis had been until she took off without giving him any idea of where or why she was going.

He spent the afternoon researching single-state serial killer cases and then doing VIPER searches for out-of-Pennsylvania cases that matched the MO of the Plate Glass Killer. He had the codes he needed to access the system. Being a consultant for police departments had enabled him to keep those current. Of course, he had them all on his computer at home. It would have been easier for him to go home and get it all done there. Instead, he'd gone to a local branch of the Philadelphia Public Library and searched through his wallet for the place where he'd written down the passwords he needed. He had a lot of passwords tucked away on the backs of business cards. It took him awhile to find the right one.

In the end he might as well not have bothered. There wasn't a thing like what he was looking for anywhere in the system. He came across only two open cases where the killer did not sexually assault his victims before or after the murders. One was in Oregon with reports in Washington and Northern California, one was in Texas with reports in Oklahoma and New Mexico, and in neither case did the killer slash his victims' faces with glass. As for the single-state cases, they were even less helpful. There were no other cases in Pennsylvania at all. Gregor would never have imagined that Pennsylvania was a particularly low-crime state, but there it was. At least as far as serial murder was concerned, Pennsylvania was practically the epicenter of Eden.

He made it to the restaurant ten minutes ahead of time. He had to wait in
the little front foyer for his table to be ready, and then he felt as if he were going to explode. The Ascorda Mariscos was not one of the restaurants he had shared with Bennis. Alison had brought him here the third or fourth time they'd gone out to eat together.

“It's sort of the same only different,” Alison had said. “It's Portuguese food. It's a lot like Middle Eastern food. The Mediterranean is a lake.”

That had made a lot of sense at the time, although Gregor hadn't been able to figure out why. He was tired, even though he didn't think he'd done much of anything during the day. The seating hostess came up to him and beckoned him inside. The restaurant wasn't particularly expensive, or particularly hip, or particularly anything. It was the kind of place academics went when they made enough money to eat out on a regular basis but not enough to eat out in the kind of places Bennis went to when Bennis bothered about eating in a restaurant away from Cavanaugh Street. He had started thinking about Bennis again. He sat down and ordered himself a large scotch on the rocks.

When Alison came—on time, because Alison was always on time—Gregor was on his second scotch, and he had begun to fiddle with the cell phone to see if he could figure out how he could use it to access the Internet. He knew it was possible to get on the Internet with this phone; he'd just never tried it before. Alison sat down and looked at his drink.

“Lionel will be here in a moment,” she said.

Gregor put down the phone. “Did you tell him what this was about?”

“Oh, yes. He's very interested. In fact, he's interested no matter what way it turns out, if Henry Tyder is the Plate Glass Killer or if he isn't. There's apparently something called voluntary homelessness, which is something new in research. Not in fact, I suppose. Anyway, he says Henry Tyder is voluntarily homeless.”

“Yes,” Gregor said, “I can see that.”

“Did you see Bennis?” Alison asked. “Is that what the scotch is about?”

“No,” Gregor said, “I didn't see Bennis.
That's
what the scotch is about.”

“Well, it had to go one way or the other,” Alison said. “There's Lionel now. Let me go get him.”

Lionel turned out to be an enormously tall man with a nose that looked like a parrot's beak. Gregor had never seen something so outsized or so out of proportion. He stood up when the man came to the table. He sat down when the man sat down. He was vaguely aware of Alison introducing them and of Lionel Redstone ordering some kind of wine. Gregor didn't understand wine. Wine was fruit juice. He didn't like fruit juice, even when it wasn't alcoholic. And when it was alcoholic, it gave him a headache.

The waitress came to take their orders and he ordered something. He thought it had shrimp in it. Lionel Redstone ordered an “ascorda mariscos,”
which was the fish-and-bread soup they'd named the restaurant after. He was going on and on about something.

“So,” he said, finally breaking through Gregor's fog, “you've got to see that Henry Tyder is an interesting man just on the grounds of the voluntary homelessness. If he's also a serial killer, it will be a bonus. If he's just been wrongly accused because the police thought he was homeless, and he gets let off now that they realize he's not, that would be a plus, too. Not a plus for Henry Tyder, you understand. A plus for the research.”

The waitress was already bringing salads. Gregor wondered how long he'd been fuzzed out. He forced himself to focus. “They're not going to release him any time soon,” he said. “The police seem pretty convinced that they have the man they're looking for.”

“Only pretty convinced?” Lionel Redstone asked.

Gregor shrugged. “Serial killer investigations are tricky things. There are a lot of false hopes. I'd say that they're as convinced as they're ever likely to be in any serial killer case.”

“And this is because Mr. Tyder is homeless?”

“No,” Gregor said. “This is because Mr. Tyder confessed. Granted, now, he confessed to police officers without benefit of counsel, and there's every likelihood that the confession will not be admissible as evidence in court, but he did confess. Police officers and district attorneys tend to take confessions seriously.”

“And do you?” Lionel Redstone asked. “Do you take the confession seriously? Do you think Henry Tyder is the Plate Glass Killer.”

“No,” Gregor said.

“Oh, my,” Alison said, “that really didn't sound convincing.”

“No, it didn't,” Lionel said.

Gregor had finished his scotch. He hadn't touched his salad. He didn't like salads. Bennis was always trying to get him to eat them.

“Well,” he said carefully, “here's the thing. There's something just
wrong
about Henry Tyder.”

“Do you mean he shows signs of mental illness?” Lionel asked.

Gregor shrugged. “It depends on what you mean by mental illness. Everybody shows some sign of mental illness by some of the more common definitions. It wasn't that kind of thing I was thinking of. John Jackman—”

“The Commissioner of Police John Jackman?” Lionel asked.

“And the one who's running for mayor,” Gregor said. “That's the one. Anyway, John said that he was convinced that Henry Tyder had murdered somebody sometime, even if he wasn't the Plate Glass Killer; and I know what it was that made him think that because you can feel it when you talk to him. But I don't know that I'd say it was because he'd murdered somebody once. It doesn't have to be that.”

“What would it be?” Alison asked. “What kind of things?”

“I don't know,” Gregor said. “I've only seen him the one time. Maybe my impression would change if I got to know him. And I do intend to get to know him. You have to, in cases like this. But on first acquaintance he just came off as
wrong
somehow. And that's the best that I can do. Except that it was like looking at one of those trick pictures. You know, the one with the lady sitting at a vanity mirror and then if you look at it another way, it's really a skull. Optical illusions.”

“You think Henry Tyder is creating an optical illusion?” Lionel asked.

“No,” Gregor said. “I think Henry Tyder
is
an optical illusion. I don't necessarily think it's something he's doing on purpose. I think it might be something he just is.”

“You're making no sense at all,” Alison said.

“I know,” Gregor said. “I'm doing the best I can. Russ has seen more of him. I don't know if he's got the same impression. You should ask him.”

“Russ is Henry Tyder's attorney?”

“Yes,” Gregor said. “And I'm officially going to be working for the other side. But you know, movie thrillers notwithstanding, it's rarely the case that the police and district attorney just don't care about the truth as long as they get a conviction. It's not true here. Nobody wants to see this man go to prison if he isn't the Plate Glass Killer. If anything, they're desperate to make sure they haven't made a mistake.”

“But they don't think they have made a mistake,” Lionel said, “because of the confession.”

“Exactly,” Gregor said.

“Do they realize that people often make false confessions for all kinds of reasons?”

“Of course they do,” Gregor said. “They're police officers. They do this all the time. But juries don't. Juries tend not to be able to see why anybody would make a false confession. Ever.”

“Ah,” Lionel said.

Gregor almost laughed. That was the kind of thing a psychologist was supposed to say. Ah. He picked at his salad just as the waitress came back to clear.

“Go right ahead,” he said, backing away from the plate.

She gave him an odd look and picked up. Alison and Lionel Redstone had both finished their salads. Gregor thought this was something to do with academia. All the academics he knew liked salads.

“What are you thinking about?” Alison asked him.

“Salads,” Gregor said, because it was the truth.

Alison didn't look as if she believed him. Gregor was about to say something more on the subject of false confessions and Henry Tyder when the cell
phone he had left next to his water glass began to vibrate. In a split second, his mind went completely, irrevocably blank.

“You've got a call,” Alison said helpfully.

Gregor picked up the phone, flipped it open, and pushed the tiny button that gave him the display.

It was his own number at home that came up on the caller identification line.

B
ennie Durban had been
watching the news all morning, picking it up at television wall displays at electronics places and in bars. Most of the time, places like that wouldn't bother with the news no matter what was happening. The last time Bennie could remember there being news absolutely everywhere was on 9/11. But this was local. This was Philadelphia. This was their very own serial killer. If it had been up to Bennie to tell people how to feel, he would have wanted them to be proud. But of course, nobody asked him.

When Bennie saw Henry Tyder's face for the first time, he stopped dead. Part of it was the thing that had to be expected. The Plate Glass Killer wasn't some homeless bum whose brain was a mass of mush too far gone to remember how to read a bus schedule. Bennie knew that. People were afraid of bums, but the truth was they almost never caused any serious kinds of trouble. They smelled bad, and they threw up on the sidewalk. They were disgusting and vile. They weren't violent, mostly, because they didn't have the energy. Not becoming a bum was one of Bennie Durban's primary rules for life. It was why he went on working these grub jobs when he could have made more money doing delivery for one of the dealers in the neighborhood. The dealers always wanted you to sample their stuff. Bennie knew what that was about. The dealers wanted you addicted because if you were addicted you cost less money. Bennie didn't even drink beer. Alcoholism ran in families. His mother had been an alcoholic. Ergo. He giggled a little at the ‘ergo'. Maybe his mother was still an alcoholic. He had no reason to think she was dead. Maybe she was still sitting in the middle of the living room in that stiff, high-backed chair, with both her feet planted on the ground, watching soap opera after soap opera until the bottle of scotch gave out or she did. Her mind had turned to mush long before Bennie left home. It was just that she had his father to cover for her.