Glass Houses(121)

Gregor got out and waited on the street until Rob did, too. Then he turned to look at the red door and the rest of the building it was part of. Dennis Ledeski was not an original man. Some of the buildings on this street had been spruced up and reworked to look almost as if they were still surviving in a colonial Philadelphia. Dennis Ledeski’s was not one of them.

Gregor went up to the door and rang the bell. Alexander Mark came out to get him.

“You didn’t have to ring,” he said. “The door isn’t locked. You can come right into the receptionist’s area, which is where I am, without thinking twice about it. It was one of the few things I ever liked about Dennis. I get so damned tired of paranoids.”

“Have you heard from him?” Gregor asked.

“Not a word,” Alexander said.

They all went in to the vestibule, to find Chickie George sitting on a polyester-covered chair in the most spectacular business suit Gregor had ever seen.

“Chickie,” he said. “No, wait, I’m supposed to call you Edmund?”

“Never mind,” Chickie said. “I’ve given up trying. As long as it isn’t in the office or around clients. Margaret Mary told me to say hello next time I saw you, also another nun, a big honcho nun, named Sister Mary Scholastica.”

“I don’t think there are big honcho nuns,” Alexander said. “And I know that isn’t what you call them.”

“Alexander is a very serious Catholic,” Chickie said.

Rob Benedetti looked uncomfortable. Gregor took pity on him. “Listen,” he said, “are we going to be private here? Is there likely to be a client who comes walking through this door any minute now?”

“I canceled all his appointments already,” Alexander said. “Do you want to tell me what all this is about? Was that important, about them all living in Green Point buildings?”

“Fairly important, yes,” Gregor said. “What we came for was to ask you about Debbie Morelli. Don’t look blank. She was—”

“Oh,” Alexander said. “The woman I found. I’m sorry. I didn’t know her. I mean, except as a body. And even then—”

“Yes,” Gregor said. “Exactly. But what I want to know is about the finding. What time of day was it?”

“Early afternoon,” Alexander said. “Very early afternoon. Still very light out.”

“And the body was in an alley,” Gregor said.

“In a service access,” Alexander said, “but that’s what those are, aren’t they? Alleys to the backs of buildings so the garbagemen can get through and the utility people, through into the backyards, except they aren’t really backyards.”

“And that was next to a Green Point building,” Gregor said.

Alexander looked surprised. “You know,” he said, “one of them is a Green Point building. I never thought of that before. It’s got that little green tree symbol on the front of it. I hate those green symbols. They’re as bad as smiley faces.”

“Okay,” Gregor said. “Now, think for a moment. This is a place you knew, right?”

“Right.”

“This wasn’t an abandoned area. The buildings around the alley were in use. You were in the alley. Why were you in the alley?”

“Are we going back to this?” Alexander said. “Am I suspected of being the Plate Glass Killer again?”

“No,” Gregor said. “I’m just trying to understand about the alleys. Why did you go into that one?”

“I didn’t, exactly,” Alexander said. “I was in the backyard. The back court-yard. Whatever those things are supposed to be called. My own building is on the other side of it. I was putting out some foam board. I’d been working on a conversation space for my apartment, working on it myself. I had people in, but they were useless. So I got some foam board and started to make sculptures out of it, but I messed it up, and my super had asked me not to shove the stuff down the chute because it made a mess he had to deal with and it couldn’t go in the incinerator. So I took them out back to where the garbage cans were.”

“What made you go into the alley?” Gregor asked.

“I saw a foot,” Alexander said. Up until now, he had been standing behind what would have been his receptionist’s desk. Now he sat down again. “I’d forgotten that. I mean, not forgotten it, you know, but pushed it out of my memory. I looked up from the cans and I was looking sort of slantwise into the alley, and I saw what looked like a foot wearing one of those thick, heavy shoes. Geriatric shoes. The kind my grandmother used to wear. So I walked a little forward to get a better look, and there was a woman lying face down in the alley. Just lying there.”