Glass Houses(103)

“The idea wasn’t to get a bunch of old women out on their hands and knees killing themselves at some godawful hour of the morning.”

“I’m younger than you are, Tyrell Moss, and you know it. You’d better get going. Rabiah and Mardella won’t wait forever. By the time you get down there, they’ll be pulling each other’s hair.”

Rabiah and Mardella were far too dignified to actually pull hair, but Tyrell knew what Claretta meant. He ushered her out into the hall and then locked his door behind him, not once but three times. He wondered what it would be like to live in the kind of place where people didn’t lock their doors at all. Moving to rural Indiana didn’t seem feasible, so he led Claretta down the hall and down the stairs. The elevators were out of order. The walls in the halls, though, were free of graffiti, because he had applied the same principle to this apartment building as he had to the street. You can’t count on other people to keep you decent. You have to be willing to do that yourself. He’d organized half the residents to paint and to watch for vandalism. It had taken a few months, but after that he had no longer had to look at squiggly notices for HOT PANTS 4447 every day on his way down to work.

They got out onto the street. Tyrell looked around. The neighborhood was nearly deserted. This was a place where few people had regular jobs, and so few people woke early and got on their way. There were a few, though, especially since welfare reform had put a five-year lifetime cap on benefits, and Tyrell always opened in time for those people to get their coffee to get on their way.

He didn’t bother to open the store at the front. Instead, he used the alley—the alley where Faith Anne Fugate had been found—and went to the back. Mardella and Rabiah were still there, standing carefully in front of the door, which was wide open. They weren’t fighting, though, because they were busy taking the hide off Charles Jellenmore.

Charles saw Tyrell come out of the alley and headed right for him. “This wasn’t me,” he said. “It wasn’t anything to do with me. If these two bitches don’t—”

“What did you say?” Tyrell asked.

“Don’t you do that,” Charles said. By now he was shouting. He had a good base voice. He could be heard at least a state or two away. “Don’t you damned dare fuckin’ do that. These fuckin’ bitch hos aren’t gonna pin no damned—”

“Shut the hell up,” Tyrell said. He could shout louder. He had learned to shout where it counted. “Shut the hell up, do you hear me? You sound like the pet nigger at a Klan rally. And I use the word the way it was invented to be used, not the way—-oh, what the hell. Charles, how are you ever going to get your act together if you lose it the first time there’s trouble? What do you think you’re doing? You’ve got to—”

“I’m not going to stand here and put up with that talk,” Mardella said.

Tyrell took a deep breath. “Mardella,” he said, “stay out of this now for just one more second, will you please? Charles has been rude. Charles will apologize. Won’t you, Charles?”

Charles looked like he was far more likely to kill somebody, and Tyrell sympathized. But it had to be done, and they both knew it.

Charles looked at the ground. “Yes,” he said, being careful to put that “s” on the end and not to say “yeah.” “Yes, I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Ms. Ford. I’m sorry, Ms. Orwell. I got excited.” Then he looked up at Tyrell. “It really wasn’t me,” he said. “I didn’t do nothing. Anything. I didn’t—”

“Okay,” Tyrell said. “Relax. Let’s see what we’ve got here.”

Mardella Ford mumbled something under her breath. The last of it sounded like “friends.”

“It wasn’t none of my friends neither,” Charles shot out. “Any of them. Either. How you supposed to remember all of that? How you supposed to doit?”

“Never mind,” Tyrell said again. He walked up to the door and looked through it into the back storeroom. It was the oddest thing. He went and looked down at the door. The lock had not been forced. There was no splintering on the doorjamb. “Huh,” Tyrell said.

“He has the keys,” Mardella said. “He could have just waltzed in here—”

“I don’t have no keys,” Charles said. “This—this—” Unable to say “bitch,” he apparently couldn’t say anything at all.

Tyrell really did sympathize. The churchwomen were by and large good women. They worked hard. They held jobs and raised grandchildren left homeless by mothers who drank and drugged; they helped adopt the block and clean it up; they taught Sunday school; they wore those hats. Unfortunately, some of them were like Mardella Ford.