Glass Houses(71)

“Russ?” she said. “It’s Elizabeth. I’ve got no idea what’s going on. I don’t think Margaret does either. I was just looking at CNN and trying to figure out what happened.”

“Nobody knows what happened,” Russ said. “I don’t think even Gregor knows. Except for, you know, the obvious. The police pulled a number of partially decayed body parts out of the cellar of a house where a man who had been picked up before in the Plate Glass case—”

“Wait,” Elizabeth said. “The body parts—or is it bodies?—were in a house where one of the former suspects lived? And they were decayed?”

“Partially decayed, most of them.”

“And the police didn’t find them when they checked into this man the first time? They didn’t search the house he lived in?”

“Nobody knows what they did,” Russ said. “Everything’s a mess, and Gregor is wandering around the neighborhood swearing under his breath, and he never swears. The whole thing is a disaster, but the reason I called is, disaster or not, I can’t use it to get Henry out of jail just yet. There’s not enough to go on. There’s not even enough to be sure that these body parts will turn out to be part of the Plate Glass Killer case. Things are just a mess.”

“All right,” Elizabeth said. “But there’s some reason, isn’t there, why you would think they would be connected? And CNN would think so? Because that’s what this says here.”

“There were rumors last night, yes,” Russ said. “Mostly that some of the parts had been found with nylon cords around them. But the thing is, I didn’t see them. I didn’t get any first-hand corroboration from any of the officers on the case—”

“Why not?”

“Because I’m the enemy; they don’t talk to me. And Rob Benedetti, that’s the district attorney, who does talk to me, wasn’t talking to anybody. It would help if you knew if your brother had any connection at all with the house at 11527 Curzon Street.”

“Of course he had some connection,” Elizabeth said patiently. “It’s a Green Point house. We own, I don’t know, close to half the properties in that neighborhood, I think.”

“I’m going to go in and see if Henry can tell me anything about it, but you know what Henry is like. If he doesn’t want to cooperate, he doesn’t cooperate.”

“I know.”

“My tendency is to think this is going to be good news,” Russ said. “I mean, not good, you know. It’s not good that people died. But good for Henry. I think there will be a connection to the Plate Glass Killer, and I’m fairly sure we’ll be able to prove that Henry could not have gotten into that house and then into that basement. But that’s just fairly sure. It’s not certain.”

Elizabeth looked back at the CNN window and ran the tip of her finger over the picture of Gregor Demarkian’s face. She was fairly sure that they would be able to prove that Henry had had no connection to the body or bodies in that basement, but not because he hadn’t had access to the basement or the house. Anybody at Green Point had access to the basement and the house. She put it out of her mind.

“Just tell me this,” she said. “Does this make it less likely that even if Henry is convicted, he’d get the death penalty?”





THREE


1


Bennis was asleep on the couch when Gregor got home at five in the morning, and up and gone by the time he awoke again at five minutes to eight. Gregor threw himself in the shower and tried to think. Part of him was still boiling obsessively about the mess the Plate Glass Killer case was in. That had to say something—good or bad, he wasn’t sure—about what he did and did not feel for Bennis Hannaford. He threw enough cold water on himself to make himself believe he was awake. Then he got dressed and went down the long hall to the apartment’s living room and kitchen. Bennis had left him a note on the refrigerator door, held up by a magnet of a frog peddling madly in a butter churn. SOMEBODY NAMED ALISON CALLED, the note said. SHE SEEMS TO THINK YOU SHOULD CALL HER BACK.

If Gregor had spent any time studying literature, he might have been able to figure out what a sentence construction like that one was supposed to mean, but he hadn’t, and he was too tired to let himself get sucked into the complicated world of messages and hints. He thought about going to the Ararat and decided against it. It was past the time he usually had breakfast. The people he usually had breakfast with would be finished with theirs and on their way to getting on with their days. Bennis would be there, too, and there might be a whole half hour of messages and hints.