Glass Houses(115)

“I wouldn’t call it a waste of time striking out against blaspheming,” Mardella Ford said.

Tyrell cleared his throat again.

Gregor Demarkian turned away from the women and went back to talking to the officer. “Did you find evidence of a break-in?” he asked.

The officer shrugged. “Maybe and maybe not. The door wasn’t forced. There weren’t any windows broken. If somebody who got in who shouldn’t have, it would have to have been because somebody left the door unlocked when they left last night. But Mr. Moss says he didn’t, that the door was locked. So I’d guess that the only way this makes sense is if whoever was in there last night had a key.”

“But you do think there was somebody in there last night,” Gregor Demarkian said. “There is some evidence that the place has been disturbed.”

“Sure,” the officer said. “It’s a storeroom. It’s full of packing crates. A few of them were torn open and packages were taken out. Potato chips. Crackers. A container of peanut butter. There were crumbs on the floor, too, as if some-body ate the potato chips there. But it didn’t amount to much, Mr. Demarkian. It can’t be two hundred dollars’ worth of stuff that was taken. If it hadn’t been for thinking I ought to call in because of the Plate Glass connections, I’d have advised Mr. Moss to just let it go and be sure to be more careful about the door the next time. I’ve seen break-ins in this neighborhood. Windows smashed to hell. Entire cash registers ripped out. This was polite, by comparison.”

“And you’re sure that nobody could have forced that door?” Gregor Demarkian said.

“Absolutely sure,” the officer said. “There were no signs of forced entry at all; and if the place was locked up the way Mr. Moss says it was, then there were two locks a thief would have to get through. Either Mr. Moss is getting forgetful, or whoever got in here last night had keys.”

“Thank you,” Gregor Demarkian said.

Tyrell Moss looked from Gregor Demarkian to Robert Benedetti to the two detectives who had come in with them, and had the oddest feeling. It was that he actually belonged here, with these men, and with these women, too. He had crossed some line somewhere that was more important than the one separating good behavior from bad. He was no longer acting a part, the part of the responsible adult. He actually was one.

Now he just hoped that these men had learned something important enough here to help with the mess the Plate Glass Killer investigation seemed to have become, if Tyrell could believe the reports on CNN.





2


Phillipa Lydgate thought her head was going to explode, That was an Americanism she had never liked—there were no Americanisms she liked; all things American had always seemed to her so obviously thin, so unquestion-ably provincial, that she knew the only reason they were sweeping the world was that American corporations were shoving them down the throats of unwilling masses from Lima to Beijing and around the world again—but in this case it fit so well, she could not let go of it. It was barely ten o’clock in the morning, and she’d had no sleep. She’d had no sleep in all the days since she’d been here. What was worse, she had nothing to show for it. She hadn’t met her first deadline, and she didn’t think she was going to meet her second. Nobody and nothing in this country would cooperate. It was as if the entire population lived in a fog of fantasy. God only knew they had no connection to the real world. This is what came of visiting a Red State—and it wasn’t even a real Red State. God only knew what would have happened to her if she had gone to Ohio, as originally planned, or someplace even worse, like Utah or South Dakota. She was getting nostalgic for the kind of Americans she met in London, or even the ones she knew in Boston or New York. Those were real Americans, she thought. They were Americans with the blinders off. They had some acquaintance with brain cells.

The immediate cause of her upset this morning was Donna Moradanyan Donahue, who was sitting, as pregnant as a whale, at the table in her kitchen, sticking little American flags into cupcakes. The less immediate cause was Tyrell Moss, whom she had interviewed the day before in his store in some godforsaken ghetto she wouldn’t know how to get back to if her life depended on it.

“I understand the rest of you,” she said, pacing back and forth as Donna went on planting flags. The cupcakes were for a party at Donna’s son’s school. How many people could be in that child’s class? There seemed to be hundreds of cupcakes. “The rest of you are comfortable, so of course you’re smug and superior and unthinking. You can’t really help it. It’s the legacy of your class.”