Home>>read Glass Houses free online

Glass Houses(119)

By:Jane Haddam


The best possible solution would be an empty apartment, someplace no one was likely to notice a new tenant. This was not impossible. He was a Tyder. The Tyders owned Green Point, and Green Point, like every other real estate holding company, always found some of the apartment buildings they managed with empty units. The problem was that the rental market had gotten a lot better in Philadelphia these last few years. More people were staying in the city, and more people who stayed were comfortably off and looking for something “nice.” Un-fortunately, it was the “nice” places where people minded their own business. An empty apartment on Curzon or Eldridge was of no use to him at all. Everybody was in everybody else’s business, and nobody took no for an answer when you wanted to be left alone. He thought of Kathleen Conge, who knew so much about her tenants she could give EMS staff the proper blood type in case they were called in to a shooting. What he needed was a place where he could fade into the woodwork, and everybody would be too polite to ask him what he was doing.

It was full light out now. In no time at all, people would be looking at him. His face was on the news. Fortunately, he wasn’t wearing jail clothes any more, or clothes that looked like they belonged to a street person. Passkeys were wonderful things, and Margaret had brought him exactly what he’d asked her for. He’d gotten into a small shop that sold athletic equipment and decked himself out in jeans and sweats. He looked like any other midmorning, middle-class retiree, the kind of man who liked to jog in the park in the mornings and go to the art museum in the afternoons, the kind of man who lived in Philadelphia more because it was home to the University of Pennsylvania than because it was a serious city. He was even clean, thanks to jail, in the physical as well as the addictive sense. He didn’t smell.

He reached into his pocket and looked at his money. He should have stolen a wallet. A man who looked as he looked now would have a wallet, one with cards in it. As far as he could see, he had a couple of hundred dollars, enough to buy food for a few days. What he was supposed to do then, he didn’t know. He only knew he could stay here, and he couldn’t leave while they were watching all the exits.

There was, of course, one place he could go. It was empty because it was kept empty, for him, at all times. It was private, because he preferred privacy, and even his sisters knew it. Better yet, none of the passkeys would work. It had its own lock, and he knew where and how to get the key. It would not be difficult to go there. He had done it before when he wanted to. The only problem was that it was the worst possible place he could be if he was ever found.

It was, however, becoming increasingly desperate. The police commissioner, the black guy whose name he could never remember, was running for mayor; and he was running on the theme that the present mayor was grossly incompe-tent, which happened to be true. The last thing this guy needed was for some addled alcoholic bum to get away clean from the city jail, and here Henry was, away. No, it made sense to do the one thing it was possible to do. It just didn’t make him feel good.

First, he had to go to the Liberty Bell, because that was the only way he knew to orient himself to the correct building. It was three blocks north and two blocks west, and Henry made the trip carefully, blending into little knots of tourists when he could. He could never get over the number of tourists who came to Philadelphia, usually just to see things like the Liberty Bell and Independence Hall. It seemed like a waste of time to him.

He got to the building and looked up and down the street, but the street was deserted. It usually was, although all the buildings on it were occupied. There weren’t many stores, that was the thing. In this neighborhood, people got up and went to work, and everything was quiet. He counted down the buildings on the west side of the street and came to the one with the red door. He was relieved to see that it was still the only one on the street with a red door, and that Green Point hadn’t changed the color scheme while he’d been wandering around, not paying attention. He went into the vestibule to the place where the mailboxes were and got his fingers under the bottom ridge of the box unit. It flicked out almost as soon as he touched it. He put two fingers of his right hand underneath and snaked up behind. He felt the little paper envelope with the key in it right away. He flicked his fingers against it and it fell to the floor.

He leaned over and picked it up. The apartment was a floor-through, the one on the top floor of this building. The top was imperative, because that way nobody would ever see him while they were going in and out. He climbed up the steps—if they managed to get him out of this, he was going to demand another apartment, in a building with an elevator—and saw nobody at all the entire time he was on his way up. The building was deadly quiet. Nobody was home.