“I don’t know who Saint Katherine Drexel is.”
Marty Gayle smiled again. “She’s right over there. She likes to talk,” he said. Then he turned away and went back to looking at the house.
Gregor looked at the house, too, for a moment. The open front door revealed nothing but a narrow hallway full of police officers and the medical examiner’s people. People kept going back and forth in face masks and surgical gloves. He wondered how many other people in the crowd were also residents of this house, and if they were being as carefully watched by the police as Kathleen Conge was. He dismissed the idea that this house looked vaguely familiar. It probably was because so many of the houses in Philadelphia, outside the commercial core of the city, were just like this. And the ones owned and operated by Green Point—he could see the Green Point logo on the building’s front door—were almost like clones of each other, probably because the company was saving money on things like paint.
He gave one last look at the back of Marty Gayle’s head and went to talk to Kathleen Conge.
2
Kathleen Conge had been crying. Gregor could see the tracks the tears had made on her face even in the oddly insubstantial light cast by the spots the police had put up everywhere, but nowhere useful to people outside the house. He looked her over before he went up to introduce himself. She was very heavy, with that ballooning kind of fat that looks as if it must weigh nothing at all, as if it were liquid. She had on one of those wildly flowered dresses fat women seemed to be able to materialize at will. Gregor couldn’t remember having seen one on sale anywhere, ever. Beyond the fat and the clothes, there was not much to see on the surface. She was dirty, but that could be a function of the night and the circumstances. There was grime on her face and hands and streaking stains across the bosom of her dress. Maybe she had been rooting around in the cellar or had fallen when she found the skeleton and panicked. Maybe she was like this all the time. He thought he would not have liked her as the superintendent of any apartment building he had to live in. She had the air of somebody who would be careful to know everybody else’s secrets.
The trick, Gregor told himself, was to form these impressions without turning them into prejudices. You had to be ready to change your mind if the suspect was other than what you had pegged her to be. Of course, Kathleen Conge was not a suspect, as far as he knew. He just didn’t know what else to call her.
He made his way through the little circle of cops, stopping to shake hands with two of them whom he remembered from other cases without remembering their names. When he came up to Kathleen Conge herself, she wasn’t looking at him. She was staring straight at the house. She had a handkerchief in her hand and was pressing it to the side of her mouth. He could smell the faint after traces of vomit. She had thrown up at least once, recently.
He reached out and tapped her on the shoulder. The handkerchief was stained, too, and there were tracks of dirt in the folds of her neck.
“Miss Conge?” he said. He pronounced it the way it would have been pronounced in French, because it was a French name: Con-gee.
She turned her head to look at him. Her eyes were very big and very blue. Gregor didn’t think he had ever met an African American with blue eyes before. They were also very vague and watery. She was going to cry again.
“You got it right,” she said. “My name. People don’t get it right the first time.”
“I’m Gregor Demarkian,” Gregor said. “I’ve been called in as a consultant by the Philadelphia police—to work on the Plate Glass Killings.”
“I thought it was all over,” Kathleen said. “When they got that man, and he confessed. I thought it was all over. But it was Bennie all the time.”
“Who’s Bennie?”
“Bennie lives here.” Kathleen pointed to the house. “Bennie Durban. He’s got these pictures on his walls, all over them. Charles Manson. I know that one. And Jeffrey Dahmer. And one he likes he says is Ted Bundy. He’s got them all up like they were movie stars.”
“Pictures of serial killers? On his walls?”
“That’s right. He doesn’t like Dahmer. He says Dahmer was stupid. He thinks these killers were smart. The other ones. And he’s got books. He doesn’t read nothing, really, not even the newspaper; but he’s got books on these people. And things he cuts out of magazines. The police saw it when they came before; but it’s none of their business, that’s what they said. It ain’t against the law to have pictures.”
Gregor tried to arrange this into some kind of sensible order and couldn’t. “The police were here before?” he asked. “When?”