Glass Houses(125)

Elizabeth Woodville was waiting in a large wing chair in the living room. Above her head was a chandelier even more spectacular than the one in the foyer. The rug under her feet was Persian, and Gregor would have bet anything that it was both authentic and antique. She stood up and then looked from one to the other of them.

“Good afternoon,” she said. “There are rather more of you than I was expecting.”

O’Shea and Fabereaux looked uncomfortable. Gregor held out his hand. “I’m Gregor Demarkian. We’ve met, on occasion, although you might not remember.”

“I do remember,” Elizabeth said. Then she looked up, toward the door to the living room. The maid was still standing there. “Will you bring in the tea cart, please? We’ll need equipment for five. I expect most of these gentlemen drink coffee.”

There were murmurs of assent, even more uneasy than the looks had been a few moments before. Gregor considered the possibility that rooms like this had been built to intimidate people. Elizabeth gestured to the chairs around her. None of them looked comfortable.

“Please,” she said. “Sit down. I take it you think I can help you in finding Margaret and my brother. I can help you with Margaret, of course. But that’s because she isn’t really missing.”

“I know,” Gregor said.

“She’s not really missing?” Rob said.

“She panicked,” Elizabeth said, waving a hand dismissively. “If you knew Margaret, you’d know that isn’t all that unexpected. She tends to panic. She’s upstairs in her bedroom. I’m supposed to calm you all down before I let you know she’s there.”

“The thing is,” Gregor said. “Your brother isn’t really missing either.”

“Isn’t he?” asked Elizabeth. “He is as far as I’m concerned. I have no idea where he’s taken off to. And I suppose this seals it. It’s practically another confession, taking off like that.”

Gregor did not want to sit in a chair. He paced to the window instead. From there the street looked like any other street, not particularly rich, not particularly poor. He wondered if anybody in this house ever stood at the window and looked out.

“I was going to ask to see the place where Conchita Estevez was found,” he said, “but then I realized it didn’t matter. I assume that there would be some anomalies between that murder and the others we’ve finally pinned down to the Plate Glass Killer now that we’ve been able to sort through the information. For one thing, she’s only technically a victim of the Plate Glass Killer. That murder your brother committed by himself.”

“And the rest of the murders?” Elizabeth said. “He had accomplices?”

“No, not so much that,” Gregor said. “The rest of the murders, he didn’t commit. Russ Donahue was right about that. He felt the confession was fake, and it was fake. But then, John Jackman was right about something, too. He said that he thought Henry Tyder was guilty of some murder, somewhere, sometime, and of course he was. He killed Conchita Estevez, and then he put her body in the alley and dressed it up to look like something the Plate Glass Killer had done. Which wasn’t hard, because he’d dressed up all the other bodies the Plate Glass Killer was supposed to have killed.”

“Henry is wandering around stumbling over corpses and dressing them up to make them look as if they’ve been murdered by a serial killer?” Elizabeth said. “That’s a little farfetched, isn’t it? I mean, Henry is a little odd, but I don’t think he’s that odd.”

The maid came in with a tall silver cart. On its top shelf there was a coffeepot and a teapot and little piles of cups, saucers, spoons, and napkins. On its bottom shelf was a set of covered silver dishes. She wheeled the cart up to Elizabeth Woodville and disappeared.

“It wasn’t a matter of stumbling over corpses,” Gregor said. “That part bothered me, too, in the beginning, but then I realized—all that was necessary was for Henry Tyder to know where the corpses were. And, of course, he did, but they weren’t in alleys. They were in apartments. Except for Conchita Estevez, of course. He wouldn’t have killed her here. He would have known that, had he tried, you’d have had a fit. Maybe he really did kill her in that alley.”

“I would have had a fit if he’d killed her at all,” Elizabeth said.

“Maybe,” Gregor said. “But maybe not. But that’s isn’t the issue at the moment. You all got a break, you see, when the police seemed to start identifying the bodies of women you’d never heard of as victims of the Plate Glass Killer. Because you knew, just as I knew, just as Mr. Benedetti here knew, that in a serial killer case, an alibi for one murder ends up being an alibi for all of them, at least as long as the murders were linked. So if you thought about it at all, the fact that the first detectives assigned to this case went around claiming every middle-aged woman murdered in the city as a victim of the PGK was a plus.”