Glass Houses (7 page)

He stood out in the rain and looked up and down the street. Usually there were people out here: young guys huddled against the sides of buildings, smoking cigarettes; hookers on their way to better places to pick up tricks; women coming out of the AME Church on the corner, clutching pocketbooks as big as roofing tiles across their stomachs. He didn't think he could ever be the kind of black man who voted Republican. He wanted to vote for a brother for president some day, but he'd rather vote for Barack Obama than Colin Powell. Still, he understood things, he understood things that—well—that he'd never have admitted all those years ago. He supposed that was the truth.

He heard footsteps coming up behind him and turned to see who was there. He was not afraid. He might be nearly fifty, but he was still in good shape, and he was built like a truck. Even the punks were afraid of him. He'd made very certain of it because he knew it was going to be the only way he would survive.

The woman coming up to him was slowing down to talk and looking just a little relieved that he was there.

“If it isn't Tyrell,” she said. “I was going to stop in and see if you were around.”

“Hello, Claretta,” Tyrell said. “You want me to walk you home?”

Claretta looked up and down the block. “Not tonight, I don't think. Isn't it wonderful what the rain does? God knew what he was doing when he sent the flood. Water makes it all look clean.”

“They're out there, though,” Tyrell said. “They're sitting in doorways and hiding in vacant buildings. You ever think how odd that is, vacant buildings?”

“What's odd about a vacant building?”

“A building is a piece of property,” Tyrell said. “It costs money to build. If you keep it up and take care of it, you can make money from it. You don't get it handed to you for free. If I owned one of those buildings, I'd do whatever I had to do to keep it going.”

“I don't think anybody owns them,” Claretta said. “I think the city takes them because they don't have the taxes paid on them, and then nobody cares. I wish they'd knock that one down, though. It's a nest of vipers.”

Tyrell thought he was getting wet. Here was the thing he hadn't expected. They didn't just hate him the way they hated the Koreans, they hated him more. It was as if he had done something foul and unforgivable when he opened this store. It was as if he had gone over to the enemy. Of course, it wasn't everybody who felt like that. Claretta didn't. The churchwomen didn't. Still, it was more than just the kids who hung out in the abandoned buildings. It was more than just the people whose opinions he didn't have to consider at all.

“Do you ever wonder if you know what you're doing with your life?” he asked Claretta.

She raised her meticulously plucked eyebrows halfway up her forehead and clucked. “What's the matter with you tonight?” she asked. “You don't think they're going to come and arrest you, do you? The television said they had a man in custody.”

“They took me out to the alley and had me look at her,” Tyrell said. “White woman. Everybody says girl, but she wasn't. Everybody says beautiful. Did you ever notice that? When somebody—well, when one of theirs gets murdered, they always call her beautiful.”

“You want to speak well of the dead,” Claretta said.

“Yes, you do. But she wasn't a girl, and she wasn't beautiful. I could see that in spite of the, well, the distortions caused by the strangling and the cuts. She was a middle-aged woman and a little on the stocky side, and she'd bled all over everything. And her purse was missing. They didn't know who she was because there wasn't a wallet or anything with identification anywhere near her. I don't think the Plate Glass Killer steals things. I think some of the punks came through after she was dead and stripped the body down. Do you know what I did last year?”

“Made more money than me?” Claretta said.

“I took a course over at Saint Joe's. Nights. I got a couple of kids I could trust to take the store Tuesdays and Thursdays from seven to nine, and I took this course in the Adult Education Division. It was a course in the history of
philosophy: Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Kant. I can still remember the names. All these guys, hundreds of years, thousands of years, trying to figure out how people work and what makes them good or bad. None of them seems to have come to any conclusion.”

“People are bad because they want to be bad,” Claretta said gently, “or because they're angry or upset or something is messing with them.”

“Maybe. But sometimes I think the whole world is crazy. People don't make any sense. People spend most of their time doing things that are going to make them miserable and then complain about how miserable they are. People shoot themselves in the foot and then complain that they've been shot. I'm not making any sense.”

“Not much,” Claretta said.

Tyrell shook his head. “I'd better get back inside and make sure Charles hasn't retreated to the television set. You have no idea how much I hate hiphop. And what kind of a name is that? Hip-hop.”

“What kind of a name was doo-wop?”

“Doo-wop was theirs. We had rhythm and blues. You sure you don't want me to see you home?”

“I'll be fine. They've all gone underground. We going to see you in church on Sunday?”

“Probably.”

Claretta went on up the street, and Tyrell stood a little longer in the rain, watching her go, just in case. It wasn't a good idea for anybody to be out alone at night in this neighborhood unless they were armed in one way or the other, and Claretta would never be armed. She didn't understand guns, and she thought of knives as something that went along with forks. The street was so deserted, it felt like a scene in a movie: the end of the world was upon us, and nobody was left to mark its passage.

Claretta disappeared into her building, and Tyrell turned back to the store and Charles Jellenmore. The odd thing was, he remembered the name of the woman in the alley, even though he hadn't heard it until many long days after he'd been arrested and released. It was Faith Anne Fugate, and what made it stick in his head was the fact that it was so close to another name, Caril Ann Fugate, and that was the name of the girl who had been with Charles Starkweather on his killing spree through Nebraska. That had been in 1958, when Tyrell had been two years old. He hadn't even heard about the case until he was in his twenties and on something of a true-crime reading jag. For all the yelling and screaming people did about it, he knew it was not about race. It wasn't races that committed crimes, it was the people in them, and the most important thing about those people was not the color of their skins. The most important thing was—what?

Damned if I know, Tyrell thought, coming back through the potato chips. The woman in the alley had been sad and pitiable. Her coat was that bumpy, nubbly fabric that wasn't real wool, that so many women had when they had no money to buy the real thing. It was brown and washed out, as if she'd had it for many years, and not enough sense to choose something that would brighten up her day. Her gray hair had been pulled back on her head. Her glasses had been made of cheap plastic and were much too thick. They'd lain broken in half on the ground near her slashed-to-ribbons face.

Caril Ann Fugate had been only thirteen when she'd gone murdering with Charles Starkweather. Faith Anne Fugate had been fifty-two on the day she died. Up at the end of the block, boys were lying on the bare wooden floors of an abandoned building, smoking weed and talking about what they were going to do next with their lives, talking pure unadulterated crap that made them feel, for a moment, like conquering heroes.

Charles Jellenmore was flipping through the textbook, but not really looking at it. Tyrell came up to him and pushed the book away.

“Go in back and take a break,” he said. “Ten minutes. Then come back in here, and I've got some shelving for you to do. How are you ever going to make anything of yourself if you can't do math?”

“I'm not going to need to do math,” Charles said. “I'm going to make it on my talent.”

Tyrell supposed that Charles saw himself as a singer, since he was too short to play basketball, but it all came down to the same thing.

E
lizabeth Woodville heard the
phone before her sister, Margaret, did, mostly because she had been waiting to hear the phone ever since the news had come that a suspect was in custody in the Plate Glass Killings. Of course, she'd told Margaret otherwise. She'd told Margaret a lot of things, in the course of living with her, that weren't exactly true. This was bigger than most though. This was bigger than saying it didn't matter whose name went first on the mailbox screwed into the bricks next to the front door, or that she didn't mind Margaret “being frank” when she talked about the relative illustriousness of their marriages. Actually, she
didn't
really mind when Margaret talked about their marriages; it just bored her. A lot of things about being a Tyder bored her. They always had, which was why she had elected to go to college in California, and why she had married a man “nobody on earth had heard of,” and why she'd almost turned down Margaret's invitation to move back home when Michael died.

Now she sat in the little telephone alcove that had been such a mark of
progressiveness and distinction when it had been put in in 1925 and wished she'd listened to herself months ago when she'd wanted to get a cell phone. It would be much better to have this conversation someplace else. Margaret could come down the hall at any moment. If she heard about this just straight off like that, without Elizabeth's being able to pave the way and frame the situation, she'd go off the handle like—Elizabeth couldn't think of like what. She couldn't even remember where the phrase “off the handle” came from, and she certainly couldn't remember what it meant.

The voice on the other end of the line was going on in a low, calm way that she liked a great deal. You heard terrible things about pro bono lawyers, but Elizabeth didn't think this one would be terrible.

“Excuse me,” she said. “I'm sorry. My mind was wandering. Could you give me your name again?”

“Russ Donahue,” the voice said. “I'm with Didrickson and Marsh. The Public Defender's Office asked me to take on the case of your brother, but that was because the police didn't realize he had any family. He didn't say. I do understand that you may want to hire a lawyer for him yourselves—”

“Does he say he wants us to hire a lawyer for him?” Elizabeth asked.

There was a pause. “Well,” Russ Donahue said, “no. He doesn't. I did bring it up to him. The possibility, I mean.”

“And?”

There was another pause, this time very uncomfortable. “He rejected the suggestion,” Russ said carefully.

Elizabeth almost laughed. This was perfect. This was better than perfect. “I take it he called us a pair of old bitches who were trying to ruin his life,” she said. “I suppose he said he didn't want anything to do with us.”

“Something like that. It was a little more—”

“Blue?”

“Right.”

“Never mind,” Elizabeth said. “He's been on a drunk, or at least I think he has. He's been gone for days. He gets like that. But he's a grown man, isn't he? I can't swan in there and hire a lawyer for him if he doesn't want me to.”

There was another long pause. Elizabeth wondered what this man looked like, this Russ Donahue. He sounded young and almost terminally personally responsible. It was the kind of thing her own father would have liked. He had been a man who thrived on duty, obligation, and responsibility.

“Here's the thing,” he said. “He
has
been on a drunk. Not as bad as some I've seen, in fact a pretty mild one as those things go, but he's been drinking. And from what I hear from the people around here, that isn't unusual. He goes drinking and sleeps in the street. That's why they called the Public Defender's Office. They thought he was homeless.”

“He is homeless, when he wants to be,” Elizabeth said. “There's no use having a home if you won't go there.”

“I suppose. But I was wondering if the better thing might not be to have him declared incompetent. I don't mean insane. I don't think he's insane, al-though he's been saying some very odd things for hours, but he's been drinking. He's apparently been abusing alcohol for years, and that kind of thing can addle your mind. Make you, well, almost something like a patient with Alzheimer's.”

“Is that how you'd describe Henry? Like a patient with Alzheimer's?”

“No,” Russ said, sighing. “But he's not all there either. Or he doesn't appear to be. And I didn't get here in time.”

“In time for what?”

“In time to stop him from making a confession,” Russ said, “on videotape. And signing a transcript.”

Elizabeth put her hand out for something that was not there. Sometimes she found it hard to remember that she'd quit smoking fifteen years before. She looked up at the wall next to the phone, to the little framed-and-glassed picture that had hung there as long as she could remember. It was a picture of a girl in a hoop-skirted antebellum dress, sitting in a field with flowers in her lap. It was the kind of art her own mother had detested, but that her stepmother—Henry's mother—had found the absolute epitome of what it meant to be married to a Tyder.

“Mrs. Woodville?” Russ Donahue said.

“Yes,” Elizabeth said. “Yes, I'm here. I'm sorry. Did he confess just to this murder or to all of them?”

“To all of them.”

1 see.

“It's nonsense, of course,” Russ said. “He's no more the Plate Glass Killer than I'm the pope. But he has made a confession, on videotape, as I said; and signed a transcript; and that means that it's going to take more than talking to get him out from under this. At the very least, it's going to mean hiring a private detective on his behalf. And I can do that, even on the public defender's dime, but if you'd rather have it taken care of some other way, we could get him declared incompetent and make you and your sister his guardians. It would at least be a start.”