Glass Houses(32)

When Bennie saw Henry Tyder’s face for the first time, he stopped dead. Part of it was the thing that had to be expected. The Plate Glass Killer wasn’t some homeless bum whose brain was a mass of mush too far gone to remember how to read a bus schedule. Bennie knew that. People were afraid of bums, but the truth was they almost never caused any serious kinds of trouble. They smelled bad, and they threw up on the sidewalk. They were disgusting and vile. They weren’t violent, mostly, because they didn’t have the energy. Not becoming a bum was one of Bennie Durban’s primary rules for life. It was why he went on working these grub jobs when he could have made more money doing delivery for one of the dealers in the neighborhood. The dealers always wanted you to sample their stuff. Bennie knew what that was about. The dealers wanted you addicted because if you were addicted you cost less money. Bennie didn’t even drink beer. Alcoholism ran in families. His mother had been an alcoholic. Ergo. He giggled a little at the ‘ergo’. Maybe his mother was still an alcoholic. He had no reason to think she was dead. Maybe she was still sitting in the middle of the living room in that stiff, high-backed chair, with both her feet planted on the ground, watching soap opera after soap opera until the bottle of scotch gave out or she did. Her mind had turned to mush long before Bennie left home. It was just that she had his father to cover for her.

What made Bennie stop and stare was this: he knew Henry Tyder. He didn’t know him the way you’d know a friend. Bennie didn’t have any friends. He hadn’t had any in school, and he didn’t have any now. He knew Henry Tyder all the same because Henry was one of the men who came to the back door of the Underground Burrito when the weather got cold, looking for food. This was one of Bennie’s boss’s pet projects, and it drove Bennie completely around the bend. The bums didn’t cause violence, no, but they caused other kinds of trouble and they brought trouble with them. There was the hygiene problem, and there was the problem of the boys who followed them, waiting for them to pass out.

Okay. Bennie had to admit it. He had rolled a few drunks in his time. Especially when he was younger, when he was still living at home. It was one of the few things you could get up to as a teenager that didn’t carry five years in jail. He’d been no good at stealing cars, and he’d even then had that rule about not doing things that would make his brain go. Rolling drunks was a surprisingly lucrative hobby, though, even when the drunks you rolled were like Henry Tyder. It was incredible how much spare change these guys could accumulate in a single day.

Having those bums at the back door was like advertising for muggers. The muggers were there, just out of sight, and they wouldn’t stop with the bums if they saw another easy target in the vicinity. Bennie hated it when Adrian went on and on about how important it was to take care of the “least among us” and then got to fingering that crucifix around his neck as if it were some kind of magic charm. As soon as he started doing that, it was only a matter of minutes before he got into one of those long monologues about his life, about how he had come from Mexico as an illegal wetback when he was only fourteen, about how he had worked the very kinds of jobs Bennie was working now, about how he had saved his money and gone hungry just to put something in the bank every week, without fail. Bennie was sure it was a very uplifting story. Some poor sap who didn’t know any better would hear it and get religion. He wasn’t some poor sap, and he didn’t want to hear it again.

Still, there was no denying it. Henry Tyder was one of the men who came to the back door in the winter when Adrian put out food. He hadn’t just wandered in once either. He’d been there every single time this year.

The television he was staring at was in the bar at the Underground Burrito, which was packed to the gills. This was a restaurant, not a place to get boozed up. Eight o’clock was their prime busy time, along with noon, when they got a rush of secretaries out on their lunch hour.

Bennie wiped his hands on his apron.

“Bennie,” Adrian said, coming by. “You’re supposed to be working. Stop watching television.”

“It’s the guy who used to sing,” Bennie said. “Look.”

Adrian turned to look. He was a short, square man, not fat but almost obscenely muscular, in spite of the fact that Bennie had never seen him work out or heard of him doing it either.

“It’s the man who used to sing,” Bennie said again, as the news show flashed yet another film clip of Henry Tyder being taken into court to be arraigned. “He used to come to the back door and sing. You’ve got to remember him.”