“So you went up to her,” Gregor said.
Alexander threw his hands in the air. “There had been news reports about the Plate Glass Killer even then, Mr. Demarkian. I got out my phone and called the cops. Except I had to go back to the courtyard to do it because being between the buildings screwed up the phone signal.”
“Now, think carefully. Go back and check and make sure when we’re done here,” Gregor said. “Is there any way directly into that alley?”
“No,” Alexander said confidently. “If you want to get into the alley, you either come through from the street or you come out one of the back doors of the houses on that courtyard and then come around.”
“Exactly,” Gregor said.
“Exactly what?” Rob said.
Gregor sighed. “Don’t forget,” he told them. “The body on Curzon Street was not in an alley. It was in a basement.”
2
This was the part Gregor liked the least, the part where you had to go somewhere on foot to find something you needed. Well, not on foot, of course. There were cars. Still, he would have preferred the life of some-body like Nero Wolfe, who never left his apartment and had people come to clean and make food for him. Maybe he even had something like that. Lord only knew, he didn’t cook much these days. The women on Cavanaugh Street did it for him, and brought over covered dishes full of yaprak sarma and stuffed grape leaves and halva. He wondered if they would go on doing that now that Bennis was home. They tended to assume that a woman in the house meant that there was already somebody there who, not only would cook, but could. Bennis’s idea of cooking amounted to something frozen or leftover she could heat up in the microwave.
He didn’t want to be thinking of Bennis now. It was difficult to think past the enormous boulder she had landed on his head, and that was when he was deliberately not remembering it. It didn’t help that he was not able to sort out his emotions about her news, or that he had the sneaking suspicion that what he really was was angry. Father Tibor was always trying to make him read murder mysteries, both the modern ones and the ones from the golden age, and the reason he didn’t like the modern ones too much was that they were far too full of angst. Hercule Poirot employed his little gray cells and sometimes was found deep in contemplation. Nero Wolfe drank exotic beer and complained about the stupidity of the police. Miss Marple shook her head at the wickedness of human nature. If any one of them had lived in this time and place, they would have been candidates for a psychiatrist’s couch. Hercule Poirot would be trying to muster the courage to come out of the closet. Nero Wolfe would be confronting his agoraphobia. Miss Marple would be slipping into Alzheimer’s and unable to remember her own name, never mind the clues, on her bad days. Gregor didn’t know what had happened to people.
He looked out at the steadily worsening neighborhoods around him and wondered what had happened to those people, too. He didn’t remember Philadelphia being this bad, or this brutal, when he was growing up. Of course, it was better now than it had been when he was living in Washington and still at the FBI. The crime surge of the seventies had been mastered, or just passed. Still, there was something viscerally wrong about these places he was seeing now. They weren’t just poor. All of Cavanaugh Street had been poor when he was growing up, and in many ways much poorer than these places were. There was something wrong at a fundamental level here, something that went beyond poverty and ignorance and the rest of the usual suspects. When Gregor was in the FBI, he had always thought of the predators he tracked as being anomalies. They were born without something other people had. Lately he wondered if sociopathology was more a matter of circumstance than genetics. There were neighborhoods now that seemed to contain nothing else or at least to be run by nothing else. Not even the larger society touched them.
They were pulling up to a curb now, and Gregor realized that the block was familiar. It looked oddly stark and empty in the full light of day.
“Here we are,” Rob said. “Do you actually have some idea of what you’re doing here?”
“Absolutely,” Gregor said. “It’s a waste of time, mind you, but I know what I’m doing.”
“If it’s a waste of time, why are you doing it?”
“Just to make sure I’m not making a mistake.”
He got out onto the sidewalk. The sign that said “Curzon Street” was halfway down. One of the things the boys on Cavanaugh Street had done all those years ago was to steal street signs and pile them up in front of somebody else’s front door. This looked like the result of random destruction, of the urge to damage for the sake of damage. He turned away from the sign and looked at the house. The yellow police barriers were still up. There was a young patrolman standing guard at the door.