Glass Houses(19)

“I don’t think you can blame Henry’s mother for Henry, Margaret.”

“Why not?” Margaret said. “You can’t blame Father. He was a good and decent man. You can’t blame any of our side of the family. If there’s one thing we don’t have, it’s alcoholics. Never mind street bums. Homeless people. What rot. It makes them sound like the victims of Simon Legree, but they’re not. They’re just street bums. And that’s all Henry is. It’s shameful enough, but he’s not a murderer.”

“Maybe not,” Elizabeth said.

“I have to go lie down,” Margaret said again. “I think you’re going to regret it, hiring this man we don’t know to do a thing like this. He’s going to get into all our secrets, and then what will happen? He’ll sell them to the newspapers, and Henry won’t be the end of it.”

“Do you really think we have any secrets the newspapers would care about? Do you think the newspapers would care about us, these days?”

“I have to go lie down,” Margaret said yet again, too aware that this was the third time and she hadn’t yet managed to make herself get moving. The air was patterning and bending in front of her eyes again. She knew something Elizabeth did not know, something she had never told anybody. And that was the key. She had never told anybody; and nobody else had found out about it because if they had, it would have come out when Henry was arrested the first time.

It was wrong of Elizabeth to say that it didn’t matter what kind of a person Henry’s mother had been. Of course it mattered. Heredity was far more important than most people gave it credit for. Besides, Henry had that woman’s eyes, and it was the eyes Margaret remembered from that day in his childhood when she had found him in the back near the utility shed where he was not allowed to go. None of them were allowed to go there because that was where the chemicals were kept to clean the back courtyard and to deal with things in the house that required something stronger than soap and water. He’d had blood on him that day, too. He’d had blood all over his face and arms and down the front of his shirt, and the only reason nobody ever found out about it was that he’d burned the shirt when he was done. She could remember the little fire he’d made, just into the alley, when he thought nobody was looking. She could remember him rolling around in the mud puddles there to disguise what it was he had smeared all over him like war paint on an Indian.

She turned away from Elizabeth and started across the foyer to the stairs. She would go up and take off her stockings and call for some tea and look at her photographs, and after a while she wouldn’t remember anything about any of it at all.





2


Dennis Ledeski had been following the news since it first hit, but there was a deep and insistent part of him that was convinced it was all a sham. He’d been expecting a sham for some months now, although nothing as elaborate as the arrest and detention of Henry Tyder seemed to be. Now he was sure that the police must see Henry Tyder the way he himself saw him. Certainly Rob Benedetti—he’d met Rob Benedetti, and you didn’t get to be district attorney of the city of Philadelphia by being an idiot—didn’t believe this latest thing, would know by looking at him that Henry Tyder could not be the Plate Glass Killer. Of course, there was the bit about the confession. Some of the confession tape had even been leaked to one of the news stations. It was impossible to keep anything secret anymore. But the part of the confession tape that had been leaked could have been faked. The whole charade could have been staged to see which of the real suspects started to jump. There could be a police shadow on him right now. All he had to do was look in the wrong direction, and it would be over.

It was impossible to keep anything secret anymore.

He’d been sitting in the office for nearly an hour, watching the news on his small portable television and not going for his cell phone. It wasn’t his regular cell phone he was worried about. That one wasn’t even expensive, and it had no more technological capability than any other phone. He still remembered, though, thinking the whole thing through: the need to get rid of the actual machine in the event he was found out; the need for “plausible deniability,” as they put it in politics. He was sweating. Thick rivulets were trailing down his skull and the back of his neck, making the collar of his shirt damp. He thought it would feel good, strangling a woman. He could imagine himself doing it to his ex-wife and all three of her best girlfriends. Every single one of them fit the victim profile for the Plate Glass Killings.