Glass Houses (6 page)

“He could have been there by mistake.”

“Once. If you go into that place once as a mistake, you don't come back again. Even if you don't completely realize what's wrong with it. I saw him
there at least four times over the course of two and a half weeks. And then there he was, right on my television set, picked up for the murder of Elyse Martineau.”

“And released,” Chickie said.

“Of course he was released,” Alexander said. “They couldn't hold him because he almost surely didn't do it. He may be a pervert, but he's not that kind of pervert.”

“I don't know,” Chickie said. “A closet pederast could be a lot of things. Full of rage, for instance. They must have had some reason to arrest him.”

“They arrested me,” Alexander said. “Do you think they had some reason to arrest me?”

“Not much of one,” Chickie admitted. “Although you were definitely in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“If it hadn't been for your friend Mr. Demarkian, I'd have been in the same mess Dennis is in. I'd have had my name and my face in all the papers. I'd be untouchable. Although I must admit, under the circumstances, I think that with Dennis it's deserved. He's getting sloppy.”

“What does that mean?”

“Well,” Alexander said carefully. “There are a few givens. First, he must have stuff around somewhere. Pictures. Contact information. There's no chance that he's doing what you and I know he's doing without having that around. Second, wherever the stuff is, it isn't in any of the computers anybody knows about. The police took the one at his house and all the ones at the office and ripped them apart before they gave them back, and they didn't find anything.”

“They weren't looking for child pornography.”

“No, they weren't, but they weren't looking for financial records either,” Alexander said. “They almost surely went through every single file just to see if they could come up with anything that related to the strangulation of plain, middle-aged women, and if there was child pornography there they would have found it. They didn't. And I haven't, and I've been through every machine in the place four or five times.”

“And you're very good,” Chickie said.

“I'm very good indeed,” Alexander said.

The waiter was back, with the bottle of wine and the glasses. Alexander let him go through his ritual without paying much attention to him. This was one of the tables that looked out on the street, and he could see people going by on the sidewalk hunched almost double in the rain. He tried to remember what he thought his life would be like when he was thirty-four years old, and he realized he'd never had any idea, never had a single conception of himself as “grown up” and on his own. The best he'd been able to do was
novels and short stories about living in Paris and being Very Literary, and even those had felt to him less like prophecy than fantasy. He tried to remember when he'd first realized he was gay and had nothing to go on there either.

“So,” Chickie said. “Where are you off to?”

“I was thinking about what I wanted to be when I grew up,” Alexander said. “And then I realized that, when I was a child, I'd never had any idea what that was. And then I realized that I couldn't remember a time when I didn't know I was gay. It's the way my mind works when I get finished with a day in that man's office. I end up awash on a sea of mushiness.”

“You were giving me givens,” Chickie said. He had an odd look on his face. Alexander knew what it was about and decided to let it go.

“Yes, well,” Alexander said. “The thing is, the stuff has to be somewhere. It has to be. But now, he's getting sloppy. I can tell—”

“You mean you've seen him with material?”

“No, of course I haven't. If I had, I'd have secured some of it and called the police. No. He's getting in late to the office. Which means he's staying out late at night. Which means he must think the police are no longer watching him. Not that that stops these idiots half the time. They can know that the FBI has their short hairs wired, and they'll still go bashing off to get themselves in trouble. There's no self-control.”

“The police
are't
watching him,” Chickie said.

“Oh, I know that. He just doesn't. He has no idea how these things work. But I think he's about to get sloppier.
Were
you paying any attention to the news? They picked up another guy as the Plate Glass Killer, except, as far as I could figure out from Web sites, he was standing right over the body when they caught him. Maybe he really is the Plate Glass Killer.”

“Maybe,” Chickie said, “but he wasn't standing over the body, he was on the street just past the alley. He was covered with blood though.”

“What station were you listening to? I didn't see anything like that on NBC or CBS.”

“I didn't get it from NBC or CBS. They called in one of our guys to be acting attorney. Russ Donahue. You met—”

“Oh, yes. The one with the wife who wraps her building up every time there's a holiday.”

“She's not wrapping up too many buildings at the moment. She's about seven or eight months pregnant. But, yeah, that's the guy. Anyway, they called and asked if he'd be willing to take it on pro bono, and we're all for pro bono, so here we are. Henry Tyder is the guy's name. The one they picked up. Homeless guy living on the street.”

Alexander cocked his head. “Alcoholic? Or drug addict?”

“I have no idea,” Chickie said. “He could just be crazy, for all I know. And it might be nothing. Homeless guy wandering through the alleys, comes on a fresh body and ends up covered with blood. He could be out on the street again in another three or four days. Unless they pitch him somewhere to dry him out, and then it'll take about two weeks.”

“Still,” Alexander said. “Dennis will take it as an excuse. Watch it happen. And then I think we can nail him.”

“You can nail him,” Chickie said. “I'm just along as the guy who tells you how crazy you're being. You could get yourself killed, whether you understand that or not. Even if this guy isn't the Plate Glass Killer, he might think it was worth his while to get rid of whoever could expose the other thing.”

“It's like I told you,” Alexander said. “It's like a dam has broken somewhere. We've normalized so much abnormal behavior—”

“I don't think my behavior is abnormal,” Chickie said.

Alexander waved this away. “Define ‘normal.' Or don't, because that's where we start getting into problems. How about, we've normalized so much
forbidden
behavior. It's like the walls between ourselves and barbarism were really a set of overlapping layers; and the more we've stripped away, the less protection we have from the truly savage.”

“Nothing I do is truly savage, Alexander. I did things like that once, but it's been a long time. And part of the reason I did things like that was because everything and everybody around me said that what I was was foul and diseased and wrong. I had to get over that part to start living a normal life. And I do live a normal life.”

“I know you do.”

“And that church that you're so committed to says that what we are is ‘objectively disordered.' Or maybe it was ‘profoundly objectively disordered.' I don't really remember.”

“You can be profoundly objectively disordered without being foul and diseased and wrong.”

“I don't think so,” Chickie said. “I have this conversation with Margaret Mary all the time, but what it comes down to is, I don't think so. And what you're doing is going to lead to a very lonely old age—lonely and isolated.”

“You don't think that's how most gay men end up?” Alexander said. “How many aging gay men do you know who've been to bed with a thousand people—literally, a thousand people, if not more—and who suddenly find themselves wrinkled and sagging and all on their own? Or, worse, running off to plastic surgeons to fix things.”

“I also know lots of gay men who've been in committed relationships for decades. You do, too,”

“Yes, I do.”

“Maybe we shouldn't get into this,” Chickie said. “The food ought to be here any minute, and I don't feel like fighting tonight. What do you do at those meetings of yours, anyway? Is it like AA?”

Alexander laughed. For Chickie George, everything was like AA. For a while there, while he was coming out of his “Chickie” phase and becoming “Edmund” on a permanent basis, he was going to three different kinds of meetings and not being able to explain why he thought he needed any one of them.

The waiter brought the salads, two large bowls with enough greenery between them to put in a lawn, and Alexander went back to looking out at the people on the street. He'd meant what he said, to Chickie, about barbarism. He saw it more and more, not in the big things—not in “Islamofascism” or the war in Iraq or the death penalty in Texas—but in the little ones: the three boys who beat a homeless man to death in Florida; the twelve-year-old in Chicago who killed his five-year-old neighbor to see what it felt like; the legions of teenagers on the streets with tattoos and piercing that would have made an African tribesman faint. It was there in the music and the movies and the art. It was there in the entire cultural aesthetic—ghetto and white trash had become the benchmarks of social acceptance. Most of all, though, it was there in the sex, because sex was the most basic thing there was.

“When was it,” Alexander asked Chickie, “that sex became the only thing about us that really counted?”

“The only thing about gays?”

“No,” Alexander said. “The only thing about any of us. When did liberty come to mean getting your rocks off in whatever way you wanted to without interference? And if that's the rule, if that's what we're all after, if being free means that—then why is what Dennis Ledeski does wrong?”

T
yrell Moss always had
the television turned on to CNN in the back of the shop because if he didn't he had to put up with one of the boys listening to MTV. It was just one of the dozens of things that had not occurred to him when he first made policy for himself and opened up in this neighborhood. He could remember himself very well, sitting in a little hole-in-the-wall chicken place with his last, and only really decent, parole officer, laying it all out on a napkin, step by step and bit by bit. Dickinson that man's name had been, and Tyrell was pretty sure that Dickinson had never really thought Tyrell was going to get away with it. That was all right. Tyrell hadn't been sure of it either. Given his history, it was much more likely that he would have ended up dead.

Now he stared at the television screen without really seeing it. The story he'd been caught by had finished seconds ago. There was a commercial for some kind of headache remedy on the screen. He rubbed his hands together and looked through the narrow doorway into the store proper, almost automatically. Every other shopkeeper in this neighborhood was Korean. Every single person he met who lived in a twelve-block radius complained about it. The Koreans should not have all the stores in the neighborhood. The Koreans should not be taking our money. Now that he was here, though, it didn't mean they'd cut him any slack.

Out at the front counter, Charles Jellenmore was standing by the cash register, his algebra textbook propped up against a display of Slim Jims. Tyrell doubted if Charles was studying, but the charade served its purpose, so he didn't complain. Among those policies he'd decided for himself before he started, one of them had been to be careful of what
kind
of kid he hired if the kid was on parole. Tyrell knew it from experience. There were two kinds of kids who got into trouble in a neighborhood like this. The good kind were just being stupid. The bad kind were bad to the very bottom of their souls.

He went out into the store. “Quiet night,” he said.

Charles shrugged. “Just the rain. You look at that story on the news?”

“At that one and another one on CNN.”

“I bet the dude they arrested was white. I just bet it.”

“They didn't say,” Tyrell said. “But I'd bet it, too, if you want to know. Serial killers are usually white.”

Charles stopped pretending to half look at the textbook. “You serious? Usually?”

“Yep. It's like every race has its preferred form of crime. We don't do much of that kind of thing.”

“I thought with white people the deal would be money,” Charles said. “Embezzlement. You know, those guys on the news, they've got private jet planes all fitted out like strip clubs; they're stealing more of it and not paying their taxes.”

“That form of crime,” Tyrell said, “is preferred by anybody who gets around enough money. You ought to pay attention to that textbook. If you're going to stay out of jail, you're going to have to stay in school. That's not me; that's the court.”

“They only picked you up because you black,” Charles said. “You know it. Dead white girl in an alley, you're right here, they just figured they were home free. You're lucky to be back here and not in jail.”

“I'm going to go get some air,” Tyrell said.

He walked down the long aisle that held potato chips and candy and went out the plateglass doors to the street, sighing a little as he went. It wasn't that
he thought Charles was entirely wrong. He was not one of those black people who tried to convince himself that racism had disappeared with the Civil Rights movement. He thought he knew enough about human beings to know that it would never be entirely eradicated. It was just that he thought that dwelling on it, making it the reason and excuse for everything you did and everything that happened to you, was counterproductive. He looked back on the last twenty-five years—five getting the down payment together so that he could get the store; twenty running the store and making it work—and he couldn't think of a single time when worrying about the jerks in the world would have made one bit of difference to the way things turned out. Part of the trouble with people like Charles was that they had no idea how difficult it was to do something like this. They thought stores and money fell from the sky on some people rather than others. They lived their entire lives in the passive voice. It wasn't what they did that mattered, but what happened
to
them. It wasn't what kind of person they were that mattered, but how they got rolled by the “system.” Tyrell could remember talking about the “system” when he was Charles's age. He hadn't had the faintest idea what he'd meant by the term, and he didn't think Charles did either.