Glass Houses(55)

“Back awhile ago,” Kathleen Congee said vaguely. “Back when Rondelle was killed, Rondelle Johnson. That was that Plate Glass Killer. They found her in the alley right behind the house, right there, and then the police came looking around and they got to Bennie because Bennie knew her. They took him down to the police station, too, and I thought we was going to have to rent the room; but there he come, right back, and here is he again.”

“He’s here now?”

“He’s at work,” Kathleen said. “He’s a dishwasher somewhere. He’ll be back. He can’t go a day without looking at them pictures, and he’s got more of them in a box under his bed. He’s a nasty man.”

He sounded like one. Gregor made a mental note to ask Jackman to get him a full summary of the events in the Plate Glass Killings case—the names and findings on everyone they had interviewed or suspected of being the Plate Glass Killer, the connections between any of these people and the suspects, the reasons why they had let them all go.

“Could you tell me what you saw?” he asked. “What made you call the police? Somebody over there, one of the detectives, I think, said you went down to the basement for something and saw a hand.”

“Not in the basement,” Kathleen said. “The basement’s made of concrete. You couldn’t find no hand there. It was in the cellar, in the back. That’s dirt, that is. Has been since forever. It’s an old house.”

“There’s a dirt cellar under that house?”

“In the back behind the washing machines. There’s a door and you go back there and it’s dirt. Women who own this place said it was because that was the way it was during the Revolution War, and nobody can change anything from then because of the Historical Society. I think they was just cheap and didn’t want to spend the money to fix the whole basement, that’s what I think. They fixed the part of it we needed to use, and then that was all the inspectors saw when they came, except they don’t never come. They never do. I hate women like that. High society women. Always talking about history like they was the only ones here. My family was here before theirs was. We don’t want no dirt cellars. But they did. Those women. So in the back there’s a dirt cellar, and that’s where it was.”

“What were you doing in this dirt cellar?”

Kathleen Conge shrugged. “I wasn’t doing nothing. I went down to do my laundry and I was walking around, I heard something I thought it must be a rat. I’ve got the keys to the door there. I just opened up and looked inside.”

“Is there a light?”

“There’s no light or heat or nothing.”

“Is there a window?”

“It’s a cellar,” Kathleen said scornfully. “Of course there wasn’t no window. It’s like a grave with a door in it. That’s what it’s like.”

“All right,” Gregor said. “But if it’s like a grave with a door in it, and there isn’t any light, how did you see anything?”

Kathleen Conge’s eyes went black. She turned her head away, back to the front door of the house where the police were beginning to bring out things in bags. Gregor waited.

Finally, Kathleen looked back. “I don’t know how I saw anything. I just did. I saw it.”

“You saw a hand.”

“I saw three hands,” Kathleen said. “Skeleton hands. Bones. Not hands with flesh on them. Just bones.”

“And you thought at once that they belonged to victims of the Plate Glass Killer?”

“Of course they do,” Kathleen said. “Who else is they gone belong to? People don’t go salting away bodies in the dirt every day.”

“But bones,” Gregor said. “Bones are old. They have to be. It takes a certain amount of time for the flesh to rot away. These bones could be very old. They could be centuries old. Maybe the house was built near a churchyard; but the church is long gone, and nobody remembers it was here.”

“There was a cord with the bones,” Kathleen said. Her voice was now very cold. “I saw it. There was a clear nylon cord just like there was with Rondelle.”

“And you saw it even though there wasn’t any light.”

“There was light come from the regular basement where I was. I had all the lights on.”

“Are those strong lights, the ones in the basement?”

Kathleen Conge turned away again. “I’m not gone talk nonsense to you no more. I’m only gone talk to the police.”

Gregor almost told her that she had the right to remain silent, and not just with him, but there was no point to it. He had the information he had come for, and more of it than he had hoped. He wondered if Marty Gayle had spent any time talking to Kathleen Conge just yet. He also wondered what was in the dirt cellar that Kathleen had gone looking for, and why she had gone looking just today. If the skeletons had been as exposed as she said they had been—and he wasn’t sure of that—she might have seen a little something and gone digging for it and then not wanted to say. She couldn’t have been coming to the cellar on a regular basis any time recently or she would have seen them before. She might have seen them before and waited until now to say anything about them, but Gregor doubted it. There was little that was genuine about Kathleen Conge, but she was most definitely genuinely upset.