Glass Houses(38)

“Who did?”

“Conchita Estevez. She smelled like cinnamon.”

“That’s why you killed her? Because she smelled like cinnamon?”

“I don’t know what any of the rest of them smelled like. Not even this last one. I don’t know anything about this last one except that there was blood on the ground next to her body. It should have smelled like something, but it didn’t.”

“Go back to sleep,” the guard said. “You’re not making any sense.”

Henry closed his eyes. He could hear the guard moving away. He was making sense. Conchita smelled like cinnamon. In closed rooms, the smell was particularly strong. She hummed Spanish songs to herself when she was working in a room by herself. Even when she thought she was alone, she wouldn’t sing out loud. She had a Spanish prayer book that she kept in the top drawer of the dresser in her room at the top of the house. Her window looked out onto the street from three stories up.

He turned on his bunk again, toward the wall this time. He pulled the blanket up high on his shoulders. He would have liked to disappear under it and reappear when everything was over, whenever that was. He’d looked around, though. The guard was right. This was jail, not prison. It wouldn’t be hard to get yourself out of here, if you planned it right and had someone to help you. It didn’t have to be a particularly intelligent someone.

He closed his eyes. Conchita smelled like cinnamon, but he had never smelled any of the rest of them at all.





SIX


1


Gregor Demarkian firmly believed in facing up to his problems. There was nothing to be gained from evasion, and procrastination positively hurt. He knew that from his professional life, and from the time when his wife, Elizabeth, had been dying. He knew it so well that he sometimes dreamed about it. He had no idea why, when he saw his own number flashing at him from the caller ID line on his cell phone, he put the phone back in his pocket and pretended it had never rung in the first place.

Actually, he thought, getting into the cab that would take him home, he knew exactly why he had done what he had done, and Alison knew it, too. He hadn’t even needed to tell her who had called.

“Listen,” she said, as they stood together on the sidewalk outside Ascorda Mariscos. “I’ve been waiting for this shoe to drop for months.”

“So have I.”

“I know you have. And it’s not as if—well, as if anything had happened. You’re very old-fashioned in that sort of way, did you know that?”

Gregor did, in fact, know that. It was just that he hadn’t thought of it in those terms. “I’m just not eighteen anymore,” he said. “I can’t just hop around, as if it didn’t matter.”

“I don’t think you could ever just hop around as if it didn’t matter. Here’s the cab. Say hello for me.”

“To Bennis? Do you know her?”

“We met once. I’d forgotten all about it, but I got the publication in the mail today. We were on a panel at the Modern Language Association: Women Writers and the Changing Subtext of Gender, or something like that.”

Gregor couldn’t imagine Bennis on a panel discussing something called the “subtext of gender”—or he could imagine it, but only if she were being sarcastic as hell—but he said nothing about it and got into the cab as if it were any other cab, going anywhere else, at any other time. He had his arms full of material for the case, and he should have cared about it. That was especially so because he was doing a favor for Russ, and because he’d seen enough of it by now to know that something was wrong with it. The landscape outside the cab’s windows was unfamiliar and dark. It was too warm for the season, and people were behaving as if it were already June. He wondered why it was that almost all the people you saw on city streets were walking alone.

Here was the thing that he couldn’t quite get out of his mind. He had married young, and to a woman he had known all his life, from that very same Cavanaugh Street he lived on now. Except that Cavanaugh Street wasn’t the same, and that was part of the point. In his childhood, Cavanaugh Street had been an immigrant neighborhood. Gregor and the boys and girls of his generation had been born in the United States, but their parents had universally been born in Armenia, and most of them had come to America fleeing persecution. Armenian was the language they had spoken at home. Armenian was the language he had spoken on the day he showed up at the local schoolhouse to start first grade. There was no kindergarten in most of Philadelphia’s public schools then, and there was certainly no such thing as bilingual education. You got thrown in the water. You sank or swam. As it turned out, Gregor had swum very well.