Glass Houses (31 page)

Bennie had been bored out of his skull in school, too, but not because he understood too much. The thing was, it wasn't because he understood too little either. The things they wanted him to learn seemed straightforward enough, just useless. Did it matter where and when and by whom Napoleon had been defeated at Waterloo? Did it matter what the white whale was supposed to signify in
Moby-Dick?
His days were full of questions like that, and the farther along he got the more of them he had. Going day after day had made him feel tied up and in jail. School was like jail because they told you when to sit and when to stand and when to move from one place to another. They even made you get permission to go to the bathroom. He would sit for hours in small chairs with note-books open on the swing desks, scribbling in notebooks because he knew that if he did not scribble, the teacher would come down the row and demand to know what he was doing. Usually, he wasn't doing anything except daydreaming or wondering what it would be like to get the teacher in a back alley somewhere and slit her throat. When Bennie dreamed about murder, he always dreamed about knives. Knives were cleaner than guns, and they made less noise.

One thing Bennie Durban had never done, and that was to fantasize about killing his mother. It was a disappointment, really. He'd read through a dozen or more serial killer books—always the factual ones, never the novels. He hadn't fully understood the difference between “fiction” and “nonfiction” when he'd started to read on his own, and he'd been angry as hell to find out that some books were full of lies people just decided to make up—and one of the things he had noticed was that nearly all the great serial killers had had problems with their mothers. Bennie didn't have problems with his mother as much as he had no use for her. She drank, and she hung around the house, and beyond that she didn't seem to do anything at all. If there was a point to her life, he'd never discovered it.

Serial killers, Bennie had thought, when he had wrapped up work and got his jacket to go home, were secret geniuses. They were people who were really smarter than everybody else, but appeared to be more stupid. They were people who had not been properly rewarded for the good they had done in the world. They were people who understood that there was only one way to be really alive, and that was to live on the edge all the time, on the single point before destruction. That was the only time anybody was ever fully and completely real.

Except, Bennie had thought, he never felt like that. He never felt even a little real. He certainly didn't feel real running a dishwasher or walking alone through the wet streets of Philadelphia to get back home. The waitresses always had boyfriends who picked them up at the kitchen door when their shifts were over. It was a brilliant example of the way in which the world was not fair.

It had been one thirty when Benny came around from Curzon Street and saw the police and the cordon and the crowd. He had stopped in his tracks. This wasn't necessarily a bad omen. This was not a good neighborhood. Things happened here all the time. Maybe there had been a fight or a drive-by shooting or even an automobile accident. Bennie remembered once when a car coming around the corner at the kind of speed you usually saw in police chases had hit a woman jaywalking in the center of the block. There was blood everywhere, and ambulances, and for months afterward you could find flecks of black, dried blood on the pavement. He remembered when the guy in the top-floor apartment of the building across the street from his had thrown his girl-friend out the window five stories down. She'd hit the street skullfirst and burst open like a puffball mushroom.

He had sidled up to the edge of the crowd and asked the first person who didn't look hostile, “What's this? What's going on here?”

It was not somebody he knew. He wouldn't have asked somebody he knew. It was a tall black man with a head shaved bald, wearing the uniform of a UPS driver.

“It's over at Kathleen's house,” the man said. “You probably don't know Kathleen. They say they've got a body from the Plate Glass Killer.”

“How can they have a body from the Plate Glass Killer?” Bennie asked. “Didn't they just arrest the Plate Glass Killer?”

“An old body,” the man said. “A skeleton, or practically. I don't know. I'm just standing out here watching.”

“It wasn't just a body,” a woman had said. She'd been standing right in front of the UPS driver. Now she turned around. She wasn't anyone Bennie knew either. “It was four or five bodies, maybe more. Skeletons, most of them. I went up to the line for a while and listened. But you don't want to be up there. It's nasty.”

“How do they know if they're from the Plate Glass Killer if all they are is skeletons?” Bennie asked.

“Got cords around their necks,” the woman said. Bennie had thought she was white at first, but she was not. She looked black mixed with some kind of Asian. He wished people could decide what they were and stick to it. “Cords don't disintegrate like flesh,” the woman said. “They're made of nylon, aren't they? Plastic. Everything is plastic. If he'd been smart enough to use a regular cord, that would have rotted away, too, and nobody would have been the wiser.”

“Wasn't one of the tenants at Kathleen's place picked up as the Plate Glass Killer once?” the UPS man said. “It was a long time ago, and they let him go. But he was picked up. I remember it.”

“The white boy,” the woman said.

“That's the one,” the UPS man said. “I remember it. Kathleen had laughing fits for weeks, said the boy wasn't bright enough to know when to come in out of the rain, never mind killing a lot of women without the police being able to pin him on it; but maybe she was wrong. Maybe he was the Plate Glass Killer all the time.”

“They got somebody else now who's supposed to be the Plate Glass Killer,” the woman said. “Maybe he used to live there. Those are old bodies. Maybe he came in from the outside and stashed them in the root cellar and then something happened and he couldn't anymore—”

“There was that renovation they did a few years ago,” the UPS man said. “Finished part of the cellar to be a laundry room.”

“That was Kathleen's idea,” the woman said. “A laundry room. What kind of nonsense is that? A laundry room. There are Launderettes all over the neighborhood, and the landlords don't have to fix the machines when they break.”

“Maybe they just got the wrong man again,” the UPS man said, “and the right one was the white boy who lives at Kathleen's. You know what the police are like. They can't tell their asses from their elbows half the time.”

“Oh, I know,” the woman said. “I got a nephew got sent to Camp Hill, and
what for? Because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and the police were just too damned lazy to go looking for anybody else.”

Bennie had been backing up for some time by then, and as soon as the woman showed signs of going on at length about Camp Hill, he'd disappeared down a side street and started to walk. He'd thought, even then, that it would make more sense to find a place to be and then to stay there. If there were police combing the city looking for him, he'd be easy to find if he was on his feet and moving in the open. The problem was, he had no place to be. He never did. He had no family to speak of, except his mother, and he didn't know where she was anymore. She got thrown out of apartments and trailers and rooming houses on a regular basis. She ended up in treatment on a regular basis, too. For all the moaning and groaning the news shows did about how there were no treatment options for addicts, there were enough of them so that his mother was always only a step away from a twelve-step experience. She didn't take it very seriously, and she never stuck with it longer than it took to elude the authorities and get her hands on a bottle, but she was always in and out of the things.

If it had been earlier in the day, he could have gone to a bar or a restaurant. He could have gone to McDonald's and sat in the back with a single cup of coffee and one of the newspapers people were always leaving around. There had to be an all-night McDonald's in the city someplace. He just didn't know where it was. He walked and walked. He wondered if any of it was true. If there were bodies in the root cellar of his own house, where had they come from? Maybe there was a serial killer nobody had ever heard of, a serial killer so good that the police didn't even realize they were looking at victims of a serial killer at all. Bennie did not think that would be a very good thing. A serial killer nobody ever heard of lacked some quality, some
charisma,
that made serial killers great. Bennie would not have wanted to be anonymous himself. Half the point was in letting the police know you were there and daring them to catch you.

He didn't want to be picked up again as the Plate Glass Killer. He especially did not want to be picked up if there were bodies in the root cellar. He knew everything he had done in his life. He was not one of these guys who blacked out and had no idea where they had been the night before. He knew he had not put any bodies in any root cellar, ever, and wouldn't have. It was a strategy. Frederick and Rosemary West had used it. It wasn't his kind of thing. He liked the idea of Ted Bundy leaving bodies in the open in the woods, leaving them where the animals could get them and stray hikers could stumble over them. Bodies, Bennie thought, deserved to be exposed.

He walked and walked, and then it was four o'clock in the morning. He could see a line of red against the horizon. The dawn was coming. He couldn't go back to his apartment, but he couldn't not go back either. If he disappeared on them, they would be sure to think he was guilty. They would be sure to
think he was running away. Serial killers never ran away except when they were escaping from prison.

It was early and it was cold and he was tired, and he hadn't the faintest idea of what he was supposed to do next.

T
yrell Moss could only
remember having lain awake this restlessly twice before in his life. Once was on the night before he was first set to be transported from the Eden Hall Avenue Jail to the “real” prison at Malvern. He was nine-teen years old, and it didn't matter what he'd been saying or doing all through the long botch of his trial; he was scared to death. Some of the men who went away to prison disappeared forever. They vanished out of the world as surely as if they'd been put to death, although most of them hadn't. Others came back to the same streets they had left, and when they did they were something worse than just changed. They had this odd flatness behind their eyes. It was as if prison did something to a part of you nobody could see, the part that made you who and what you were. The men who came back were almost like zombies. They had no emotions close to the surface. Maybe they had no emotions at all.

The second time Tyrell hadn't been able to sleep all night was the night before his friend Legrand Hollis was executed. It had been a very odd night. They hadn't even been in the same prison. There was no death row at Malvern. If you were going to die, they sent you over to SCI-Rockview; and you sat there, usually for years. Egrand had sat there for five years, and most people were expecting him to sit for five more, when all of a sudden it was over. Tyrell hadn't understood much about the death penalty then, or the courts, or the laws, or how any of that worked. He didn't understand much about any of that now, but at least he had a foothold on it because getting a foothold on it after Legrand was gone was what had made him start going to classes. On the night Legrand had died, though, it might as well have been magic. Now you see it, now you don't. Now he's just sitting there, waiting forever and complaining about the food. Now he's gone and it's as if he vaporized in front of your face, exploded into a cloud of smoke.

Tyrell was not from a churchgoing family. He wasn't from much of a family at all. By the time he'd come along, “family” had reduced itself to mothers and children all over the neighborhood, and men who belonged to nobody and nothing who went in and out. Sometimes, in his last days at Malvern, when he was cleaned up and trying to make himself do right, he would go to motivational classes given by an earnest young reverend who was trying so hard, he sweat when he talked. The reverend was white and obviously nothing like poor. He was even more obviously somebody who had never been really
poor. He talked about faith and love and letting God do it. He talked about the way crime and violence hurt not only its direct victims but the men who committed it and their wives and families and children. Tyrell had wanted to take the reverend by the hand and lead him down to the very streets on which he'd grown up. He'd wanted to show him what he didn't know but thought he did. The reverend talked sometimes about “homelessness” and “families without fathers,” but it was as if he were reading a picture book.

Here, Tyrell had wanted to say. Here, look at this. On these three blocks, there are only three married couples, and all of those couples are over sixty-five. On these three blocks, every single woman over the age of twenty-five has had children by at least two men. So have most of the girls under eighteen. Nobody goes to a job. Even the old people are on Social Security. The only employment most of the people here know is prostitution or pimping or dealing, and almost everybody deals. Even the people who hate drugs deal. It's one of the few ways money comes into this place. There are two local public schools, an elementary and a middle school. The elementary school has no heat in the winter except in one wing. The middle school has doors that lock and unlock automatically, like the doors on prison cells. Most of these people have never been five miles away from this neighborhood. The only way they know there are other ways of life is by what they see on television. Even then the only part of it they believe is the stories about rap singers on VH1. Most of them do not learn to read well enough to function at a desk job. Many of them do not learn to read at all. It isn't entirely the fault of the schools. The level of casual violence is so high that most teachers wouldn't dare give a failing grade for fear of being hit right at the front of their class or knifed when they walked out to the street to go home.