Glass Houses(104)

“Charles,” he said, “does not have the keys to this store, front door or back. I open up, and I close. He might have left the door open last night, but he didn’t, and I know that because after I sent him home I came back here my-self and looked around, and the door was closed and locked. I tried it to make sure. I always do. Besides, if Charles’s friends were going to break into the store, they’d go to the front and try the cash register. There wouldn’t have been anything in it, but they’d have tried it—”

“Maybe they knew there was nothing in it,” Mardella said triumphantly.

“Oh, hush,” Claretta said. “Stop running your mouth long enough to learn something.”

“Well, that’s the other thing,” Tyrell said. “I don’t carry beer, and they do know that. So maybe they wouldn’t have gone into the front of the store, since they couldn’t get drunk there, but I don’t believe it. And I don’t believe they could get that door open without smashing it in because these are not rocket scientists we’re talking about here. But if they did break into the back store-room, they’d take—I don’t know. I’ve got some tools back here. You could pawn those. I’ve got a set of hubcaps in the corner, brand-new, I’ve been meaning to give to the church for the raffle. They’re sitting there right where I can see them. They haven’t been touched.”

“Do you mean nothing was stolen?” Claretta said. “It wasn’t a robbery after all?”

“Oh, it was a robbery, all right,” Tyrell said. “There are things missing. Somebody took what looks from here like two bottles of Evian water out of the case up on the top there. And the Frito-Lay box is open, too. There looks like a couple of packages of potato chips gone, the big ones. There’s a couple of other boxes open.”

“Why don’t you go in and look?” Rabiah said. “We didn’t like to because, you know, it wasn’t our place; but you could go in.”

“Not until the police get here,” Tyrell said. “Have you called the police yet?”

“We were waiting on you,” Mardella said.

“We’d better call the police,” Tyrell said.

“For some packages of potato chips?” Mardella said. “The police won’t do anything. They wouldn’t do anything if you had half the store stolen, never mind this. What do you want to bring the police into it for?”

Tyrell Moss thought of Faith Anne Fugate, lying in the alley with her tongue sticking out and her face slashed up and that nylon cord around her neck; but he said nothing about her to the churchwomen, who would have thought he was crazy.

“It’s not that a lot was stolen,” he said carefully, “it’s that it looks very odd. Like somebody came in here last night and took just enough to eat and drink because he was hungry. Or maybe because they were.”

“Maybe it was one of the homeless people?” Claretta said. “We have the soup kitchen in the church, but it’s not open all hours. Maybe one of the homeless people got in because he was hungry.”

“You ever known one of those homeless people who could have gotten through this door without having to break it in?” Tyrell asked. “They’re alcoholics. Some of them are mentally ill. Some of them are drugged out. Whoever did this had to have been stone cold sober and in possession of his right faculties.”

“Maybe you’re just mistaken about the door,” Claretta said. “Maybe you meant to check it, but you didn’t.”

“Oh, I definitely checked it,” Tyrell said. “There’s no doubt about that at all. I want the police out here to take fingerprints, and do whatever else it is they do. I don’t like this at all.”





3


Alexander Mark did not feel that he had accomplished much. He did not feel he had accomplished much with Gregor Demarkian—in spite of having made the acquaintance of that beautiful woman, who seemed to go out of her way to be helpful—and he certainly didn’t think he’d accomplished much with Dennis Ledeski. Maybe it had been a silly idea to begin with, just as Chickie said it was. Mark wasn’t really a secretary, even if he was good at it, and he wasn’t a police detective, which was what was needed here. He was just a man who had fallen prey to a delusion. He could practically see the halluci-nations now: Alexander Mark, Man with a Mission, ducking into this phone booth over here to put on tights and a cape.

It would be easier if he understood what he wanted out of his life, but he had never understood that; and one thing that Courage had taught him was that there was a good chance he never would. He only knew he had promised Gregor Demarkian to run the files at the office to see if any of the other women in the Plate Glass Killer case was in them. That was probably busy work invented just to keep him out of the way; but he had promised, and he would do it. Besides, there was something about going into the office when Dennis was not coming in that had always intrigued him. He was fascinated at the idea of being alone with the things that belonged to a man like that.