Glass Houses (25 page)

“I could try,” Bennis said. “If you leave you're name and number, I'll tell him about it when he comes in. But if your brother isn't—”

“Yes, I know,” Elizabeth said, “it sounds ridiculous. I sound ridiculous to myself. It's just that. Well. Never mind. It's Elizabeth Woodville, as I said, at 555-2793, here in Philadelphia.”

“It's likely to be some time tomorrow. If he's out late—”

“Yes, Miss Hannaford, I understand. And I apologize again for disturbing you so late at night and on your first night home.”

“It's quite all right, really.”

Elizabeth put the phone back into the receiver. The room she was in was small and without windows. She should have been claustrophobic, but she wasn't. It felt like a cocoon in here, and Margaret's humming couldn't penetrate.

What if there really was a new Plate Glass Killing? What would that mean?

Elizabeth didn't think it would matter one way or the other.

I
t was the time
change that was getting to her, Phillipa Lydgate was sure of it. She had been up early and out all day; and for a while there, around noon, she had been ready to collapse. Now it was nearly ten o'clock, and she was wide awake and raring to go. The city of Philadelphia had the look she loved most about cities, the one where the streetlights glowed in the darkness and glistened in reflection on rain-coated streets. The traffic was not bad. In spite of everything she had heard about American cities, she didn't feel threatened in this one. The truth was, she never felt threatened in cities. What she did feel, at the moment, was exasperated. It had been a long day, and she didn't think she had even a paragraph's worth of material to put into a column.

There was a newsstand on the corner of wherever it was she was. She thought it must be a relatively wealthy area, since there were lots of little stores and the people walking around were mostly white. Of course, they were only
mostly
white, so it was possible that this was a semidepressed neighborhood, but with a good facade, so that it wasn't really noticeable. She stopped at the newsstand and bought a copy of
The Inquirer,
which she should have done first thing this morning. It hadn't occurred to her. The man behind the cash register was South Asian, but people here would say Indian or Pakistani. The South Asians were everywhere really. Phillipa couldn't get over the way they had spread.

She turned back to the street with the paper under her arm and looked around. Most of the stores sold clothes or shoes and were shut up for the night, but their windows were not hidden behind protective metal shields. Two of the stores were bookstores, and both were open. The first one was a specialty store. All the books were about travel to one place or another, or about the places you might travel to. She stood for a while before a display of books about various aspects of Islam: the Koran; some commentaries on the Koran; a history of the Moorish occupation of Spain; a cookbook about the foods of Tunisia, Morocco, and Algeria; a large volume on the history of Islamic art. There were two or three people in the store. One of them was at the cash register in the back, buying a stack that had to be a foot tall.

Phillipa went down the block and across the street and looked into the windows of the other bookstore. This was a general bookstore, but not the kind she was used to hearing about in America. There were no best sellers in the windows, and no displays of teddy bears or mugs. The front window was full of a display of the books of what it called “Beat America,” which seemed to have something to do with Beatniks. Phillipa knew some of the names of some of the writers—Jack Kerouac, certainly, and Alan Ginsberg, who was a gay rights activist—but most of the others meant nothing to her at all.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti.
A Coney Island of the Mind.
She searched her memory for it and came up blank. She went to the other window and found another display, this one on “Square America.”

If the display on Beat America had made her feel blank, the one on Square America made her feel blanker and gave her the uncomfortable feeling that she was failing to get a joke. The window on Square America was less crowded, though, and through it she could see all the way to the back of the store, where there seemed to be some kind of coffee bar. At least people were sitting in chairs at little tables and drinking coffee while they read books. Phillipa had heard of this. The Barnes & Noble chain of bookstores had coffee bars, which were supposed to make people forget that they were owned by corporate behemoths who cared nothing for literature and only worried about the bottom line.

She stepped back and looked up at the facade of the store. It was called Belles Lettres, and nothing indicated that it was owned by any kind of corpo-rate behemoth at all. It reminded her of Shakespeare & Company in Paris, except that it was cleaner and seemed to be better organized. Americans were always such maniacs for cleanliness and order. It was as if they were afraid of the messy smelliness of real life. She looked back at the Beat America display again. Then she made up her mind—it had been hours since she'd put any caffeine into her body—and went inside.

The inside of Belles Lettres wasn't a quiet place. The people in the coffee bar all seemed to be talking to one another. Phillipa made her way to the back, past displays of Jose Saramago's novels and the poetry of W. B, Yeats. There was also a little pile of books of essays by V S. Naipaul. She made it to the coffee bar and looked around. Only two of the tables were empty. The rest were, if anything, overoccupied.

The one closest to the coffee machines themselves was occupied by an impossibly tall, impossibly thin, impossibly fit young man with blond hair who sat with his chair tilted back against the wall and his long legs stretched out in front of him.

“All I'm getting at,” he was saying, apparently to the room in general, “is that the whole concept of serial killing as an art form, the whole schtick Mailer was so enamored of back in the seventies has been thoroughly discredited. Destruction and creation are not really two sides of the same coin. Destruction is easy. Creation is hard.”

“Yes,” another young man said, from another table. He wasn't nearly as attractive as the first one. He was short, and dark, and Phillipa was willing to bet that if he'd stood up, he'd have been pudgy. “But you need destruction. You need it to create.”

“Sometimes creators inadvertently destroy,” the first young man said, “but
that's not the same thing as destruction for destruction's sake. Camus was wrong. Sartre was really wrong. The murderer is not an existential hero; and to the extent that he is, he only proves that existentialism is empty of human value.”

“But there isn't anything a thinking person can do in this life except despair,” the dark one said. “The existentialists proved that. And if we want to be fully human, we have to act within that despair and against it. So—”

“So what we should do is go out into the streets and strangle middle-aged women with nylon packing cords?”

Phillipa sat down at one of the empty tables and was immediately presented with a menu by a young woman wearing head-to-toe black except for her apron, which was a bright and uncompromising white.

“I'm Vanessa,” the young woman said. “Can I get you something, or would you like to take some time to look at the menu?”

Phillipa gestured in the direction of the two young men. “Do they know each other? Do they come here often?”

“Dickie and Chris? I suppose they know each other. I mean, they talk in here all the time. I don't know if they know each other outside of here. because of the thing, you know.”

“No,” Phillipa said. “What thing?”

“Well,” Vanessa said. “Dickie goes to Penn, which is an Ivy League school, very hotshot and up there. Chris goes to Saint Joe's, which isn't either. It's a good place, you know, but it's not one of the best. Anyway, the rumor is that Penn turned Chris down. Except, you know, I mean, you can see it. He's a lot smarter than Dickie, and he's read more, too. And Chris likes to rub it in as much as possible.”

“And this—Dickie—keeps coming back for more?”

“Some people will do anything for pain. Do you want me to get you something? You're English, aren't you? I'm not sure the coffee will be up to what you're used to. We've got a pretty good premium blend, though. And it isn't Starbucks.”

“Are you worried about a Starbucks moving into this neighborhood?”

“There already is a Starbucks in this neighborhood,” Vanessa said. “It's on the next block.”

“Has your business fallen off significantly since it moved in?”

“It moved in three years ago,” Vanessa said. “But it wouldn't bother our business. It doesn't have books. I could get you an espresso. We have a guy who comes in here every once in a while who's from Italy. He says the espresso is pretty good.”

Phillipa reached into her purse and brought out her notebook. “An espresso would be lovely,” she said.

“There's another rumor,” Vanessa said, “that Chris is going to enter the priesthood. Saint Joe's is a Catholic university. Anyway, some of the girls from there who come in here in the afternoon said that he was looking into entering the seminary. Now there's a depressing thought.”

“Oh, no,” Phillipa said. “He's much too intelligent to be religious.”

Chris brought his chair's front legs down to the floor with a thump. “It's not just silly,” he said. “It's dangerous. And it's narcissistic. It's the philosophy of people who knew very little outside their own suffocatingly restricted world.”

“T. S. Eliot said ‘there will be time to murder and create.'”

“He said it,” Chris said, “but he wasn't advocating it, for God's sake. Prufrock isn't an admirable character. He's Eliot's picture of the debased modern man. And the Plate Glass Killer isn't even a Prufrock.”

Vanessa was suddenly standing there with a coffee in her hands. Phillipa hadn't seen her go get it.

“It's all this stuff about the Plate Glass Killer,” she said. “I think everybody's disappointed. They all thought he'd be more romantic or crazier. You know, somebody like Charles Manson. Instead, he's just a broken down old man who doesn't make any sense. Can I get you anything else?”

“No, thank you,” Phillipa said.

“Chris isn't disappointed, though,” Vanessa said. “It fits all the stuff he says about the existentialists. Just wave if you need me for anything.”

Phillipa uncapped her pen and started to write. It was perfect, this scene, this place. It was just what she'd been looking for.

F
or Dennis Ledeski, it
had been a long night. It didn't help that the rain that had been falling on and off all day was now coming down in a steady stream or that the entire world seemed to be full of police cars without their sirens on. Dennis didn't mind police cars with their sirens on because the sirens meant they were looking for somebody else but him.

He was on a side street he didn't recognize, in a neighborhood that felt only vaguely familiar, which was very odd for him. He had grown up in Philadelphia, in the city itself, not out in Bucks County or on the Main Line, where nice white people moved so that their children didn't have to go to school with “all that crime.” He remembered his Aunt Evelyn, sitting at the dining room table on Christmas Eve, explaining to his mother time after time why she shouldn't stay in the city if she wanted “to see Denny grow up right.” He remembered his mother fuming as she put the dishes away in the sink after the relatives had gone. He remembered Christmas Day, when he and his mother and his father had all piled into his father's Oldsmobile for the drive out to Wayne. At the
time he hadn't understood what his mother envied, or why she envied it. Wayne had seemed to him like a boring place. It had too much grass and too little of anything else.

Of course, now that he was grown and in a position to do what he wanted, he hadn't moved out of the city either; and his ex-wife had had that as one of her complaints before the divorce. One of the things he was doing tonight was trying to remember why he had married her in the first place. It was better to think about that than to think about what he wanted to think about. There was a trick to this thing he did. He had to carry it on just under the surface of his consciousness right up until the moment when it became real. Then he could look it in the face. Now, though, he was alone, and the streets were wet and deserted. Every once in a while there would be lights coming from the front windows of the houses. There were churches, too, real ones, not the storefront variety you found in the kinds of neighborhoods he knew enough to avoid. He wondered why that was. He could understand why the big churches stayed away from the places in the city that he looked for. Big churches meant parishes with money to build them, and people with money didn't admit to being what he was or wanting what he wanted. The storefronts, though. Those existed to save the souls of men and women who had disintegrated into degradation. You'd think that exactly what they were looking for were the places he was also looking for. How much more disintegrated or degraded could you get than that?

The thing was, Dennis didn't think he was disintegrating, and he didn't think he was degraded. He had thought the whole thing through dozens of times. To the extent that he found himself feeling hunted and scared, he could ascribe the entire effect to the fear that the police would find him or that some-body would. In a different kind of society, in ancient Greece, for example, he would not have been guilty or afraid. It was this time and this place, this country with its puritanical zeal to make everyone holy, that was ruining him.

He was getting into more familiar territory. He didn't know how that had happened. He was walking and walking without paying attention to where he was going. He was in one of those neighborhoods now away from the high rises. There used to be a place you could go near Independence Hall, but he had never favored it, and eventually the police had closed it down. He had known they would. The last thing the city of Philadelphia wanted was something like that right next door to where the Declaration of Independence was signed. There was a church, too, but it was barely hanging on. It was a big brick Catholic Church with a big brick school building and a big brick convent right next to it. The school building and the convent were boarded up.