Glass Houses(124)

“She lived here,” O’Shea said.

“In this apartment?” Gregor said.

“Right,” O’Shea said.

Gregor thought back on the night of his talk with Kathleen Conge and filed away the obvious: she lied the way some people do, to make a story better or to get back at somebody she didn’t like. Gregor wondered which it was.

“Where is Kathleen Conge’s apartment?” he asked.

O’Shea gestured up the hall, and they all trooped after him. The supervisor’s apartment was bigger than the one Bennie Durban had been living in, but not by much, and it had windows out onto the street, which had to give it more in the way of light and air.

Gregor went back down the hall to the apartment that had been both Beatrice Morgander’s and Bennie Durban’s and looked around. There was a door in the middle of the opposite wall just a little ways down.

“That’s the door to the basement?” Gregor said.

“That’s it,” O’Shea said.

Gregor opened it. “It’s not locked? Is that your doing, or wasn’t it kept locked?”

“I don’t think it was kept locked,” the young patrolman put it. “At least, I never got a key to it.”

“Thank you,” Gregor said.

He felt around for a light switch and found it. Light didn’t help much. There was a short flight of steps, no more than a half flight, then a big, highceilinged space with cardboard boxes and old pieces of furniture here and there. He went down the steps and looked around again.

“Where—?” Gregor asked.

O’Shea pointed across the room. “It’s in there. Past that little door.”

Gregor went across the basement room to the “little door.” He opened that and looked inside. It was a dirt cellar, the kind of cellar people used to keep root vegetables in during the winter before the days of common refrigeration. The cellar was now virtually destroyed, dug out into the surrounding earth.

“Isn’t it odd to think,” Gregor said, “that people in the Colonial period didn’t really have what we’d call proper foundations. They built on dirt.”

“Is that relevant?” Rob asked.

“Not particularly,” Gregor said. “Did you set up that appointment I asked you to?”





3


If Gregor Demarkian had myopia when it came to poor Philadelphia, he had just as much myopia, or maybe more, when it came to rich Philadelphia. Like most people in the city, like most people in the country, he tended to assume that “rich Philadelphia” was the Main Line, that the rich had all packed up and moved to the suburbs decades before the rest of the country had even heard of them. He forgot that areas like this one still existed within the city proper. He had forgotten that rich people in the city still found it convenient, and unthreatening, to live in a way that made it easy to see who and what they were.

He got out of Rob Benedetti’s car in front of the Tyder family home and looked around. There were no abandoned buildings here, and he didn’t think there was a single “multiple family dwelling” on this entire block. Cavanaugh Street was well-off. This was a fantasy from a thirties’ movie about debutantes. The houses were built of brick so clean they might have been run through a washing machine. The ground-floor windows were all twice as tall as any man. This was not the part of the city that had greeted the delegates to the Continental Congress. This was the part of the city money built.

Nobody was looking out at them from the front windows. Gregor hadn’t expected there to be. O’Shea and Fabereaux pulled up behind them and parked. They must look like some kind of delegation. It was probably a good thing that all their cars were unmarked. If they had pulled up in police cars, the entire street would probably have exploded.

Gregor went up to the front door and rang the bell. In a moment the door was opened by a maid in a uniform, her dark hair pulled back tightly at the base of her skull under a starched white cap.

“Gregor Demarkian for Mrs. Woodville,” he said formally.

The maid did not seem surprised by the formality, although she must have heard less of it than rudeness in this day and age. Gregor wondered if “trades-men” still went around to the back instead of using the front door. He wondered if anybody cared about things like that anymore, besides a few commentators on the lifestyles of the rich and famous. Even then, he thought, they weren’t likely to be interested in a house like this. Understatement and reserve were not what interested people these days. Ostentation and excess were.

The maid was leading them down a long hall toward a pair of tall double doors. The front foyer was made of inlaid marble tiles, light and dark, so that it looked like a chess board. The formal staircase to the upper floors was marble, too, with thick bannister posts carved into flowing ovals. That must have cost something, even in the nineteenth century. He wondered why people bothered to do things like that.