Glass Houses (36 page)

“No,” Bennis said.

“It was because of the pedophilia,” Alexander said. “Most pedophiles convince themselves that what they do is good for the children they do it to. They have elaborate explanations and excuses for the activities they engage in. But on some level, you see, they know that the excuses are just excuses. And that haunts them.”

“And the Plate Glass Killer is a pedophile?” the blonde one asked.

“Maybe,” Alexander said. “Dennis Ledeski is a pedophile. That's the thing. I know that. I think even the police know that, they just haven't been able to catch him yet. But I started to wonder, you see, if it was possible that somebody could become a serial killer as a way to act out the conviction that he was evil to the core. Do you see what I mean?”

“No,” Bennis said.

“Mr. Demarkian will see what I mean,” Alexander said. “I'm probably putting it very badly, but it really makes a lot of sense. And that was how I started looking into the other victims. The other Plate Glass Killer victims. I'd always assumed that Dennis was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, and
that was how he'd ended up being picked up when Elyse Martineau was found dead. But what if that wasn't the case? What if he really had killed Elyse Martineau? What if he'd known some of the others?”

“Some of the other victims?” Bennis asked.

“That's right,” Alexander said. “Some of the other victims. What if, in this case, everything we know about serial killers is wrong? What if he isn't picking on strangers? What if he's picking on acquaintances or even friends? It would explain a lot of things, wouldn't it? It would explain why the women are all strangled without any sign of a struggle, or at least one that anybody ever hears about. It would explain why there's no rape. He doesn't want sex with older women, he only wants death. He wants sex with boys.”

“So,” Bennis said. “Is there? A connection between your guy and the Plate Glass Killer victims?”

“Well, there was a connection with Elyse Martineau,” Alexander said. “She was his secretary. And there's a connection with one or two of the others. One of them was a client for a short time. One of them worked in the grocery store where Dennis picks up his dinners. He doesn't cook, Dennis, unless you count the microwave. And then I started to think how odd it was. Does the name Arlene Treshka mean anything to you?”

“No,” Bennis said.

“She's the woman who just died,” Alexander said. “The woman they found that old guy standing next to in the alley. Usually, with serial killer cases, you hear all about the victims, one after the other. Their pictures are everywhere. But so much nonsense is happening with this that nobody ever hears Arlene Treshka's name at all. So I decided I ought to look into her. Into who she was, and what she did. And she—”

“Has connections to this Dennis Ledeski?” Bennis asked.

“She's got connections to everyone,” Alexander Mark said. “It's the oddest thing. The more I put out feelers, the more connections I found, and yet she wasn't anybody who had the kind of job or life that you'd expect to kick up all the principles in a murder case. So I thought that if I could talk it out with Mr. Demarkian, I could—”

The outside door swung open, and Alexander turned to find a small, thin, tense woman in fussy clothes standing in front of him. He was not the kind of person who took a dislike to people on first sight, but he didn't like this one, not in the least. She reminded him of a long line of women he labeled in the back of his head as the kind who made him happy he was gay. There were other women—like this Bennis person—who did not.

Bennis and the pregnant woman didn't seem to like the fussy woman any more than Alexander did himself. He chalked that up to the good taste of both of them.

“Well,” the pregnant woman said. “Miss Lydgate. Were you looking for us?”

“I was looking for Gregor Demarkian,” Miss Lydgate said. Her accent was soft, but unmistakable. It occurred to Alexander that he liked constipated Brits even less than he liked the American kind. “It's imperative that I find him. I've got a deadline.”

“He went down to the District Attorney's Office,” Bennis said. “I don't know when he'll be back. When's your deadline?”

“In any decent country there would be public transportation worth riding on,” Miss Lydgate said. “And the food. No wonder so many Americans are fat as pigs. You can't go a block without being assaulted by Philly steaks. I can't imagine who eats Philly steaks.”

“I do,” Alexander said pleasantly. “Usually with a decent little burgundy.”

“I know about you,” Miss Lydgate said. “You're one of those New Age Republicans who doesn't care if your country turns into a theocracy run by Fundamentalist mental defectives as long as you get your tax cuts. I have to make my deadline. I insist that you tell me where Mr. Demarkian is right this minute, or I'll write what I have and he'll be sorry as hell.”

“I did tell you where he was,” Bennis said. “He's at the District Attorney's Office. You can find the address and phone number in the blue pages in the phone book. It's really not Mars, you know.”

“If Americans had the faintest idea what a real education looked like,” Miss Lydgate said, “these things wouldn't happen with such relentlessly repetitive frequency.”

Then she turned on her heel and walked out, stomping ineffectively on very high heels that Alexander kept hoping would trip her up.

“Maybe I'll stay out of the line of fire this afternoon,” he said. “If you'll let me leave a message, he can get back to me after he's murdered that woman.”

Bennis laughed. “Never mind. I've got a way to get in touch with him, assuming he's learned to use the text-messaging thing on his cell phone, which he might not have. But let's go upstairs and try to head Miss Philippa Bloody Lydgate off at the pass and get you a chance to talk to him. We don't have much to drink besides terrible coffee, but that ought to do as well as anything after a blast from what's her name.”

“She's very rude,” the blonde one said, looking pained. “I don't think I've ever met anybody that rude in all my life.”

“Just wait till you see what she prints in the
Watchminder,
” Bennis said, heading up the stairs.

Alexander headed up the stairs after them. He did not try to look back through the transom window to catch another glimpse of the furious Miss Lydgate.

I
f there was one
thing Bennie Durban knew for sure, it was that it wasn't possible to stay on the run forever. You could stay out of sight, unknown to the police, or even known to them but not exhibiting anything they could get a handle on; but you couldn't take off on foot and just go without running into trouble sooner rather than later. It might be different if you had the resources to leave in a big way, but Bennie wasn't sure it would be. If you had a car, it was registered somewhere. If you stole a car, it would be reported. If you bought a hot car that had all the right paper, you had to pay for it up front, and that kind of thing wasn't cheap.

What occurred to him, almost right away, was airplanes. At least it occurred to him by the next morning, after he'd spent the night in one of those abandoned buildings where the junkies hung out and the bums didn't usually go because they got rolled. But he wasn't a bum. He wasn't wasted on wine. He wasn't half senile. He was as sharp as he had ever been because turning the corner onto his block to see enough police piled up in front of his door to stock a Lawrence Sanders movie was enough to make anyone sharp. Right then he had known that the most important thing he could do with himself for the next few hours was to disappear, and he had done it. Being in that abandoned house was like one of those old
Twilight Zone
episodes where there never was any explanation given for why things were completely weird. The junkies were so close to immobile, they might as well be dead. Then they would run out of what it was they were streaming on and jump up and start screaming. Bennie could never understand what they meant.

The first thing he did the next morning was to find one of those electronics stores that kept a hundred televisions all turned to the same station, so that he could watch the news. Almost the first thing he saw on those television sets was a picture of himself. It was the picture he had had taken for his high school yearbook, so that he was not only younger than he was now but different in every other way. He was even different from the way he had actually looked in high school. He rubbed the flat of his palm against the stubble that had grown out of his face overnight. Some of the fancier high schools on the Main Line let their seniors take yearbook photographs in the clothes they actually wore, but his high school had not been fancy. They had insisted on a jacket and tie, and when he hadn't had one they had found a set for him, along with a worn but respectable white button-down shirt, as if he were about to be a junior salesman for a life insurance company. He found himself wondering, suddenly, if that was the kind of thing the people who had graduated from his high school had gone on to do. Some of them had gone to college. He remembered the little squealing parties they had given outside the Guidance Counselor's Office when
one of them had been accepted somewhere, and the long list of colleges they had decided to attend that had been appended to the program at the end of the year assembly.

It was, he thought now, just the kind of thing he hated. It wasn't doing what everybody else did and doing it well that proved intelligence. It wasn't making good grades on tests and better grades on report cards because you never did anything to get a teacher upset. Intelligence was a divine spark. He'd read that somewhere. It was a divine spark, and genius was a piece of the divine will; and the man who had one or the other was special, marked out, unlike the rest. There were people who thought Bennie Durban was stupid, but that was not the case. He wasn't even book stupid. He had had no trouble deciphering Nietzsche, and he'd only been fifteen the first time he tried.

The trick, he decided, having gotten as much of the news as he was going to be able to get, was to find a way to be somebody else just long enough to get out of the city and out of the state. The very best thing would be a plane, but the more he looked into it the less likely it seemed to be. Ever since 9/11, it turned out, there was a lot more hassle about getting on and off a plane. Even to buy tickets, you had to have some form of ID, and to get onto the plane you had to have a picture ID. The only ID Bennie Durban had was his driver's license, and he couldn't use that. He could buy a new ID, but that was even more expensive than buying a clean hot car. Then there was the problem of what he looked like. He didn't look like the man the police were looking for in connection with a bunch of body parts found in a basement. He did look like a wino and smelled like one, too. He hadn't had a chance to take a shower. All his clothes were back at the house, which was still half occupied by police officers. He smelled of sweat and of the restaurant. His hair was so dirty, it left grease on his fingers when he ran his hand through it.

The first order of business was money, and that was the easy part. Bennie had never shown much talent for anything, but he was a pretty decent pick-pocket. He'd been able to keep himself in spending cash all through high school by the simple expedient of always riding public transportation in the morning. He'd get on the bus broke except for the fare and get off with two or three wallets in his back pocket. He'd even become very adept at spotting the people who would have cash and the ones who wouldn't. You didn't want to go after the guys in the expensive suits with the good leather briefcases. Guys like that who rode the bus were low-level associates at the better law firms. They had cards but practically no cash because they spent all their money trying to look like they were already one of the partners. You didn't want young women either. They were always on hyperalert, tense as hell that some idiot was going to try to grab them. It was near impossible to distract them enough so that you could take their money without their knowing it. The best bets
were always middle-aged guys in work uniforms, the kind of guys who made up the male population of the neighborhoods where he'd grown up. Those guys liked cash, as much as possible, to flash around. It was what made them forget that they were completely unimportant on the face of this planet, as far beneath the bastards who ran the place as any street-sleeping bum.

Bennie didn't like the idea of a bus. The enclosed space was the wrong thing to look for. It was too easy to get caught in an enclosed space. He started walking out toward the edges of the city. People were looking for him, but he was hoping that those people were mostly looking for the him of the high school photograph. He hadn't seen a policeman drawing on the news.

He got to a stretch where there were nothing but gas stations and pawn shops. Pawn shops were a bad bet. The people who patronized them were broke, and the guys who owned them knew every trick there was to know. That was their job. The gas stations were dangerous, but if you found the right one, set up in the right way, you could hit a bonanza.

Bennie went by two that had those fancy credit-card-payment setups at the pump. People used those because they preferred using credit cards to cash. He went by another one because the bullet-proof kiosk jutted out into the area reserved for the islands. There wasn't a single pump that couldn't be seen from the clerk's little desk. What he wanted was a place that did repairs and towing as well as sold gas. He wasn't looking for customers as much as he was looking for mechanics.

He went by two pawn shops in a row, both of them showing row after row of large television sets just inside their plate-glass front walls. The next place was a body shop that didn't sell gas at all, and Bennie stopped there. He had no idea what time it was, but he assumed it was sometime into the working day because the place was busy and so was the street. Two of the garage bays were open, both showing cars up on lifts. The open space between the front of the shop and the street was full of cars, none of which looked as if it could run.