Glass Houses(23)

Or maybe not. Tyrell stood at the counter and watched the woman look through the potato chip bags as if she had never seen anything like them before. She was so thin, he thought she would break in half at the middle in a strong wind.

“Can I help you?” he asked her.

She looked up from the potato chips and smiled at him. It wasn’t much of a smile. She seemed tense.

“How do you do,” she said, coming forward to the counter. “My name is Phillipa Lydgate. I’m a reporter for the Watchminder newspaper. That’s in England.”

Tyrell knew what the Watchminder was. It had a Web site. He read it every once in a while when his news-junkie soul had run out of news sources closer to home.

“Can I get you something?” he asked. Then, because he suddenly wasn’t sure, “They do have potato chips in England, don’t they? That’s not just an American thing.”

“We call them ‘crisps,’“ Phillipa said. “I was looking at the varieties you carry. Some of them I’m not used to. You do carry a lot of varieties.”

“I try to carry what sells.”

“But not fruits and vegetables,” Phillipa Lydgate said. “There is no fresh food in the store. Is that because it doesn’t sell?”

Tyrell could hear Charles throwing soda crates around in the back. He thought he’d let it go. It was the only sign Charles had given so far of his anger, and Tyrell knew that Charles’s anger was vast and deep and not about to go away anytime soon.

“It’s not that kind of store,” Tyrell said. “If you’re looking for fresh produce, you can go down the block to the Korean market. Or to a supermarket, of course.”

“Do black people shop in the Korean market?”

“Everybody shops there. It’s handy.”

“Are black people welcome in the Korean market?”

“Mostly anybody’s welcome in any market as long as they’ve got money to spend and don’t make any trouble.”

“Nutrition can contribute to criminality, did you know that?” Philippa Lydgate said. “It’s a fact. Bad nutrition can cause some people, especially some young men, to be prone to violence. The only way to guard against it is to make sure you eat plenty of fruits and vegetables.”

There were times when Tyrell thought he was going crazy, and this was one of them. At least Charles was no longer throwing around soda crates. He was probably eavesdropping.

“Well,” Tyrell said. “Is there anything I can do for you?”

For a moment Phillipa Lydgate looked blank, as if she’d forgotten what she’d come for. Then she said, “I’m sorry, I should have made myself clear. I’m a reporter. I’m doing a series of articles for the Watchminder about life in Red State America.”

“But this isn’t a Red State,” Tyrell said. “Pennsylvania went for Kerry in the last election.”

Phillipa Lydgate didn’t seem to have heard. “I’m interested in your reaction to the arrest of the Plate Glass Killer. You do know that they’ve arrested a man who claims to be the Plate Glass Killer.”

“It was all over the news last night.”

“It’s a white man,” Philippa Lydgate said, “as could have been assumed all along if the police were thinking clearly. Since there are far more white men than black men in the age demographic for heightened levels of criminality, it stands to reason that there will be more white criminals than black criminals. They arrested you once as the Plate Glass Killer, didn’t they?”

“They took me in for questioning.”

“And that was because you are black and not white?” Philippa Lydgate asked.

Tyrell started to relax a little. Ah, he thought. She was one of those. She had a more interesting accent than the sociology graduate students from the University of Pennsylvania, but she was still one of those.

“I think it probably had more to do with the fact that she was found dead in my service alley,” he said, “and that I knew her, although only slightly. And that I’d been in prison for manslaughter.”

Philippa Lydgate blinked. “Manslaughter? There are a lot of black men in prison in America, aren’t there? Juries are much more likely to see black men as likely to be violent than white men.”

“In my case there was no jury. I pled guilty.”

“Did you have a decent lawyer? Poor people often do not have decent legal representation in America because there is no requirement for attorneys to provide free services to the poor as a condition of their continuing in the profession.”

“My lawyer was fine,” Tyrell said. “I just preferred going to jail for manslaughter than going to jail for murder. The time served is shorter. And you get out on parole.”