Glass Houses (38 page)

They stepped back and opened the bottom half of the swing door. “You can come in here,” Betty said. “We've got a table to sit at and there's nobody else here at the moment, although I'm surprised there isn't. Everybody's been talking about your coming since you called.”

“Mr. Jackman sent down orders,” Martha said. “He, well, he yelled.”

Gregor suppressed a smile. He had been around John Jackman when he
yelled. “Do you think he's going to be mayor?” he asked. “Or doesn't he talk about his campaign around the office.”

“It doesn't matter if he talks about the campaign,” Betty said, “everybody else does. And of course he's going to be mayor. Nobody in his right mind would vote to reelect that idiot we have here now—”

“Now, Betty, I don't think that's true. He must have some supporters. It's supposed to be a close election.”

“It's going to be close the way New York is close to Tokyo; they're both on the same planet,” Betty said. “Maybe we can get Mr. Demarkian a cup of coffee or something to eat. He really doesn't look well.”

“I'm fine,” Gregor said, although he didn't mean that. Maybe food would be a good idea when he was finished here. Sleep would be a better one, but he didn't think he would be able to sleep for a while.

Betty was leading him through yet another door, this time to a large, bare room that contained nothing but a long table with chairs surrounding it. The table was not impressive. Its surface was made of wood, and Gregor thought it might have been expensive once, but at the moment it was just battered. The chairs around it were made of molded plastic.

He sat down in one of them, and gestured to the women to sit, too. They sat, Martha upright and prim, Betty leaning back and stretching her legs out in front of her. Martha looked anxious. Betty looked triumphant.

“So,” Gregor said, “do you know why I'm here?”

“It's because of the boxes,” Martha said. “They're a mess. I told Betty—well, I told all of them—you can't really blame us for the boxes, not totally. They didn't start out like that.”

“Did you get to the first ones?” Betty asked. “The ones on Sarajean Petrazik and Marlee Craine?”

“I don't know,” Gregor said.

“You would know,” Betty said, “because those two are pristine. Sarajean was before the situation got completely out of hand, and Marlee we cleaned up ourselves when things got crazy. And then things got crazier.”

“Actually,” Martha said carefully, “they're not all completely messed up. I did try to straighten out the file on Elyse Martineau. And the one on Conchita Estevez, too. I mean, in the early days, we tried and tried. We tried to make them make sense, and when they wouldn't do that we tried to fix things ourselves. But there's a lot of work here, Mr. Demarkian. We're not detectives. We're not supposed to go rooting around in the evidence and putting it in order. Most of the time, we'd just make a mess of things.”

Gregor nodded. “So how is it supposed to work? The detectives bring you evidence—”

“Evidence samples and files,” Betty said. “They're supposed to have them
all in order and ready to file, and then we've got big cabinets in the back where we can arrange things. Physical evidence in the drawers; transcripts and notes and that sort of thing in big loose-leaf notebooks that go on the shelves over-head. They're supposed to put everything in order, and we're supposed to take the finished product and just place it where it goes, where it can be found again. If you see what I mean.”

“Yes,” Gregor said, “but these weren't put in order. How did you get them? Did they come in boxes like that? And who exactly gave them to you?”

“Oh, they both came down and gave us things,” Martha said. “Both Marty and Cord, you know, over the last few months. And they did sometimes bring boxes, just like those. But as often as not they'd just have things in their pockets, or in their hands, or in big brown paper bags.”

“I unloaded at least half a dozen brown paper bags,” Betty said. “You see all these things, you know, about gay men.”

“Will and Grace,”
Martha said.

“And Lord only knows I know enough gay men to choke on,” Betty said.

“Betty just came out a few months ago,” Martha said. “We had a party for her at Danny O'Brien's Pub.”

“And they're supposed to be so neat,” Betty said, “but you couldn't prove that one with Cord Leehan. His stuff was in just as much of a mess as Marty's was. We'd come in here and pour the contents of the bags out on the table and try to sort them out.”

“But we really didn't have that kind of time,” Martha said. “This is the one evidence room in the city We have hundreds of cases we're actively handling at any one time. And then we've got things we're keeping because of appeals or because the case has gone cold or because the department just wants to keep the stuff. We keep a lot of it, all of it in most felony cases because there are so many appeals. And just in case.”

“Just in case somebody makes a mistake,” Betty said.

Gregor nodded. He did not say what everybody had to be thinking, and that was that given the utter chaos of the evidence here, the chances that some-body would “make a mistake” were damned nearly 100 percent.

“Okay,” he said. “What about other people? Did anybody ever bring down evidence on one of these cases besides Marty Gayle and Cord Leehan?”

Martha nodded. “Sometimes. That isn't the way it's supposed to work, of course. Marty and Cord are supposed to be coordinating things. But every once in a while we got one of the uniformed patrolmen with items for us to file. Those weren't too bad. I mean, they came labeled, and that kind of thing.”

“Mr. Leehan and Mr. Gayle didn't label the evidence they submitted to you?”

“Well,” Betty said. “You saw it. That's how it came in. It wasn't labeled. It wasn't in any kind of order. We're not even sure how much of it is relevant and
how much is just stuff that was hanging around that got thrown into the mix.”

“We think they were trying to confuse each other,” Martha said. “They weren't submitting evidence for the record the way they should have been because they were each trying to trick the other one into thinking they had less than they did. Or does that make sense? We think—”

“We think they both thought it would be better if nobody ever solved that case than if the other one of them did,” Betty said. “Hell, I made a mess of it, too.”

“That's all right,” Gregor said. “I got the gist of it. Just tell me you didn't send over anything that could be labeled physical evidence—”

“Oh, no,” Betty said. “We just sent over lists of that. But that stuff is handled by the technicians, and they've got their heads on straight. And the Medical Examiner's Office, of course, and they've got their heads on even straighter.”

“I'm not gay,” Martha said. “I'm married with two children. Grown up now. But Betty is my friend.”

Gregor cleared his throat. “Here's what I want to do,” he said. “I want to get those boxes back here because this is where they belong, and they aren't doing anybody any good over at Rob Benedetti's office. In the meantime, I want to sit down with the two of you and make an outline of this case from the very beginning, starting with, what's her name—”

“Sarajean Petrazik,” Martha said.

“Yes, that's right,” Gregor said. “Starting there, and going right to last night. I want the names of the victims in order, where they were found, if anybody was picked up for questioning, what physical evidence exists that pertains to that particular crime. I want to write it all down, and I want to look at it. Can you help me do that?”

“Of course we can,” Martha said.

“My guess is that we'd better,” Betty said, “or Mr. Jackman will start yelling again.”

I
was, Gregor thought
later, the Mount Everest of organizational projects. At the end of the first hour it was barely done, and they had sucked in three more clerks and a uniformed officer to help. At the end of three hours, it was beginning to look as if it would finally come into shape, and they were up to three uniformed officers and enough clerks to stock a typing pool. Then the boxes came back from across town, and Gregor had to scatter people around the evidence office and down the hall just to start looking into them.

From his point of view, though, things were better within half an hour of their starting because by then he had some idea of what was going on in the
case as a whole. His head, though, didn't call it a case. It only called it “the mess.” He kept reminding himself that he didn't know what they had here yet. He did, however, have a list of the women who had been identified as victims of the Plate Glass Killer, where they had been found, and who, if anybody, had been picked up for questioning in their deaths. It wasn't much of a list. Even the very basics of this case witnessed to the disorganization wTith which it had been handled. Still, it was a start, and Gregor stopped wandering the hall supervising the sorting every once in a while to look at it.

 

 

Gregor looked it over a few times. Here was where it would be useful to know how to use the computer. He wanted an interactive chart that he could add things to and take them out of. For the moment, the ordinary written one would do. He could match it up to what official, stable records there were, the
ones that had not been allowed to fall into the hands of Gayle and Leehan. He sat down at the one free space he'd left in the area and began to match the women, the suspects, and the places with the reports of the first officers at the scene, and then with the reports of the Medical Examiner's Office.

This was, Gregor thought, after he had managed to put together enough of what he needed to call Rob Benedetti, the kind of work that was supposed to have been done on the ground by the detectives assigned to a case before they ever started running around jailing people. At the very least, any homicide detective who wanted to ask for a warrant and serve it should have known what Gregor knew now; but not only was it obvious that Marty and Cord didn't know it, Gregor was sure nobody else did either. And that included the district attorney, the commissioner of police, and the general public, since one of the problems that seemed to be going on here was the fact that the press—starved for information and not averse to just making it up—had taken the ball and run with it. Instead of insisting on getting the information right, the police, and not just Marty and Cord, had let the press wind the whole thing up and turn it into a Christmas party.

He got Rob Benedetti on the phone and told him to be in John Jackman's office in an hour. He called upstairs to John Jackman's office and told him there was going to be a meeting there, and that he should be present at it. Then he went back to matching up his chart with the basic forensics. His eyes were feeling ready to fall out of his head when Betty Gelhorn came to the door and said there were people looking for him.

“A woman and a man,” she said. “A pretty woman.”

Gregor went out into the hall, expecting to see Rob Benedetti and an assistant district attorney. He got Bennis Hannaford instead, and a tall, elegant young man he had met only once or twice before, but whom he recognized instantly.

“Mr. Mark,” he said.

Bennis was looking at the walls and the ceiling and the floor, anywhere but at him. “We couldn't find you. I called your cell a dozen times, but you didn't answer.”