On the night before Legrand died, Tyrell laid awake all night in his cell, listening to his cell mate snore. He could see in his mind exactly what must have happened, and it scared the hell out of him worse than prison did because he could see it happening in himself. That was why he had finally let it all go. He was sure he had only two choices: to let it all go, or to die.
Last night, he wasn’t sure he’d had any choices, or that he’d needed them. This was not his problem. He knew he wasn’t the Plate Glass Killer, and he was sure no black man was either. When black men went in for serial killing, they didn’t tie nylon cords neatly around their victims’ throats, and they didn’t act with deliberation. They did what Legrand had done. They got to the point where they couldn’t keep the emotions under the surface.
No, Tyrell thought, pulling the metal barrier up over his head and getting his keys out to open the window grates. This wasn’t his problem the way the others things had been. It was just that he didn’t like to see things like that crowd had been last night. Even some of the police were part of the crowd. People got caught up in the bubble. They did it long term, and they did it short term. Nothing good ever came of getting caught up in the bubble.
He looked up the street and saw Charles Jellenmore ambling toward him, actually on time for once. Charles had his jacket unzipped and he was wearing that long-sleeved T-shirt under short-sleeved T-shirt combination that made Tyrell wild, but his jeans were up around his waist and nothing he had on looked as if he’d gotten it down at the Goodwill when his only choices had been to wear something six sizes too large or go naked.
He didn’t even have music plugged into his ear, playing loudly enough to make him deaf and sending noise all up and down the street at six o’clock in the morning. Well, Tyrell thought, maybe God is listening to me after all.
“Hey,” Charles said.
“Good morning,” Tyrell said. He had the door unlocked. He opened it and wraved Charles through.
“I’m laid out,” Charles said. “I was up all night watching the cops. You see that? There had to be a hundred of them. Dead bodies in Kathleen Conge’s basement. I bet she put them there herself.”
“I watched the news this morning,” Tyrell said. “They’re saying it was older victims of the Plate Glass Killer.”
“It’ll turn out to be the guy what lives in the ground-floor apartment, you wait. He’s crazy. Kathleen told my mother he’s got one whole wall full of pictures of murderers. Jeffrey Dahmer. Guys like that.”
“I know. Bennie Durban. You’ve seen him once or twice.”
“You know? And? Hell, doesn’t anything get to you? They picked you up, and they didn’t even look at some guy who puts up pictures of Dahmer?”
“They did pick him up,” Tyrell said. “After Rondelle Johnson died. They found her in some alley in the back of the place where he works, some Mexican place downtown, I think. Do you really think he put all these bodies in the basement at Kathleen’s?”
“Who else? I mean, for God’s sake, Tyrell, who else would it have been?”
Tyrell looked at the ceiling. “You ever been down to the basement at your place?”
“Sure.”
“And?”
“And what?”
“I listened to the news,” Tyrell said, “and what the news said was that the bodies, the skeletons mostly, were found in a root cellar at the back of the basement. Now, I deal with building inspectors and health inspectors and fire inspectors all the time. You can’t have a dirt basement open to anybody who wants to wander through. You’ve got to brick it up, or you’ve got to seal it off to put it off-limits to your tenants. If you don’t, they’ll condemn the house.”
“So,” Charles said, “maybe nobody knew about the cellar. You know what people are. Maybe the landlord paid off a building inspector or something, and they just pretended like the cellar wasn’t there.”
“Maybe,” Tyrell agreed, “but now you’re talking about a lot of expensive bribes to get out of doing a relatively inexpensive repair. You got this corner of the basement that’s still dirt, you block it off with something, put some drywall between it and the rest of the basement. Something. But it’s cheap, and it doesn’t risk some new guy coming onto the job and refusing to deal.”
“Okay,” Charles said, “so what. That’s what the landlord did. Or maybe Kathleen. Who cares?”
“How did Bennie Durban get the bodies into the root cellar?”
“He did it before it was blocked off.”