“I remember somebody singing,” Adrian said. “In the back, yes. But I don’t recognize his face. Should I? He wasn’t one of the ones who liked to talk.”
Adrian talked to the bums sometimes. Some of them were weepy. He talked to them about God and the Blessed Virgin. Adrian was convinced that the Blessed Virgin could solve all the problems of the world if people would only listen to her.
“Go in back,” Adrian said. “Go to work. We can talk about the Plate Glass Killer later.”
Bennie let himself be pushed toward the kitchen. “He came to the door every single time we put food out this year,” he said. “Every single time I’ve been working anyway. And he would sing. Sing and sing. Strange stuff. Stuff I’d never heard of. Harvest moon.”
They were in the kitchen now. Adrian had come in right after him. The two cooks were working so fast, Bennie was surprised they knew what they were doing. The waitresses looked frazzled.
“The dentist guy is back again,” Maria said when she saw Adrian. “He stuck his hand up my skirt when I was taking the order, and I got Miguel to cover for me. I mean, for—” The rest was a blur of Spanish.
“ ‘Shine on harvest moon,’ “ Bennie said. “That’s how it went.”
The older of the two cooks looked up and sang, “ ‘Shine on, shine on harvest moon. For me and my gal.’”
“That’s it,” Bennie said.
Adrian looked nonplused. The older of the two cooks was an Anglo named Mike. Bennie had never understood how he ended up at the Underground Burrito.
“Why are you singing harvest moon?” Mike said.
“He used to sing it,” Bennie said. “The guy at the back door. He’d come for food and he’d sing.”
“Oh, I remember him,” Mike said. “Don’t you remember him, Adrian? He was okay. Didn’t smell too bad. Didn’t get drooly or throw up. What’s the matter? He die of alcohol poisoning?”
“They just picked him up and charged him with being the Plate Glass Killer,” Bennie said.
“What?” Mike said.
“There’s too much distrust in this country,” Adrian said. “These are the Philadelphia police. They’re smart people. They’re not taking bribes. They know what they’re doing.”
“They just want to make an arrest,” Bennie said. “The city is all upset about the Plate Glass Killer. Nice ladies are afraid to come out of their apartments. They want to make an arrest, and he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. The way I was the other time.”
Adrian made a dismissive motion with his hand. “That wasn’t the same thing. They didn’t charge you with being the Plate Glass Killer. They just brought you in and let you go.”
“He can’t be the Plate Glass Killer,” Bennie said. “He’s brain damaged. He’s a moron. He sings and he makes no sense. And he pisses in the gutters.”
“They all piss in the gutters,” Mike said.
“And none of them can be the Plate Glass Killer,” Bennie said. “Serial killers aren’t like this. They really aren’t. Serial killers have to be smart or they wouldn’t get away with it for so long. Think about BTK. They cops never caught him at all. He turned himself in. If he hadn’t, he’d be at home right now, drinking a beer and laughing his head off at them.”
“You got to wonder what drives guys like that,” Mike said.
Adrian shrugged his shoulders. “If they don’t have the right man, they’ll find it out. It’s got nothing to do with us. Go back to work, Bennie. We need dishes.”
There were plenty of dishes. There were enough dishes to seat the restaurant four times over before they had to wash even one. Adrian went back out to the bar. Bennie opened one of the big industrial dishwashers and started to pull out clean plates and put them into stacks.
Suddenly, the room around him felt closed in and tight. It was as if the air itself had gotten thicker. The waitresses looked as if they were moving through ether. Mike had his mind on a plate of nachos the size of an extra-large pizza.
“You know,” Bennie said. “There’ll be another Plate Glass Killing. Just you wait. There’ll be another woman in another alley, and then what will they do? They’ll have their bum in jail. He won’t be out and around to blame it on.”
Bennie looked around to see if anybody had paid any attention to him, but they hadn’t. They rarely did. He put the stack of dishes onto one of the over-head stainless steel shelves and went back to the dishwasher to unload some more. Here was a question he couldn’t answer. How smart was the Plate Glass Killer, the real one? Was he smart enough to hold back until this Henry Tyder was convicted and sent to jail? Or would that be smart at all? Maybe it would be smarter to kill again, right now, so that his reputation wasn’t ruined by the sight of this pathetic old wino being held up to the general public as the Plate Glass Killer.