Glass Houses(77)
“I can get there in—what? Half an hour?”
“Half an hour would be safe,” Martha agreed. “We’ll be ready for you. We promise. Only, there’s one thing.”
“What’s that?”
“Make sure you close and seal all the boxes before you leave. Things disappear from boxes in this case. Whole boxes disappear. We’ve got them numbered, the ones we sent you, so you don’t have to worry about that, but you need to seal them to make sure nobody takes anything out of them while you’re gone.”
“Yes,” he said.
Then he hung up and stared at the phone. Things went in and out of boxes in the evidence room? He looked into the one on his desk again. Somebody—Martha or Betty, assuredly—had attached an inventory form, very carefully made out. If things did go missing, he’d be able to check them. That wasn’t as comforting as it should have been. The inventory form for the box on his desk was pages long. It included items like “1” × 3 1/2” paper scrap words Christmas train” and “cardboard cylinder toilet paper roll.” Why had they kept the cardboard cylinder from a toilet paper roll? He moved the box aside and picked up Betty Gelhorn’s summary, but he’d read through it already. It didn’t tell him anything he didn’t already know, and it wasn’t exactly informative even about what he did.
Delia O’Bannion came back and put a Styrofoam cup on his desk. “I didn’t know what to do about the tuna fish,” she said. “They had five or six different kinds, and I don’t know what you like. I finally got Provencal, because I liked what it looked like.”
Provengal tuna fish salad. Gregor didn’t want to know. He opened the coffee and drank half of it in one long swig. “Have you ever spent any time working on this case?” he asked Delia. “The Plate Glass Killer case, I mean.”
Delia shook her head. “I don’t work on cases, not really. I just go around and help people out when they need, you know, assistance.”
“Have you ever worked for Cord Leehan or Marty Gayle?”
Delia blushed. “Everybody has. And most of us had to testify at, you know, the hearings. And I was there on the day of the fight.”
“Ah,” Gregor said.
“I thought they were going to kill each other,” Delia said. “You hear all these things people say about gay guys and how they’re feminine, but Detective Leehan can really hit when he wants to. And there was blood everywhere. It was awful.”
“But it was Detective Leehan who got hurt, wasn’t it?”
“Well, they both had to go to the hospital,” Delia said, “but Detective Leehan was the only one who had to stay. Is this really necessary? I mean, I know you’ve got a lot of work to do to straighten this out, and things, but it seems wrong to me to be telling stories about Detective Gayle and Detective Leehan. I mean, there was a hearing, and they straightened everything out, and now they’re partners and we all have to make the best of it. I think that’s a very sensible plan.”
“I do too,” Gregor said, “but I think it’s even more sensible to solve a string of eleven murders, and I can’t do that unless I know what evidence we have and what evidence we don’t have and what it all means. Aren’t you worried about the Plate Glass Killer? Or do you think the officers have the right man this time, and he’s sitting in jail?”
“Well,” Delia said reasonably, “they usually do have the right man, don’t they? I mean, not all the time, obviously, and there was that terrible business with the guard at the Olympic Games in Atlanta, but that was the FBI and anyway, I mean they usually do get the right person. But I never did worry about the Plate Glass Killer, even when we didn’t have anybody locked up in jail. He isn’t like your usual serial killer, is he? He isn’t after people who look like me.”
It took Gregor a minute to figure this out, but he did. “You’ve got long hair,” he said.
Delia brightened. “That’s it. I mean, look at it. Either they’re people like Gacy or Dahmer, and they want boys; or they’re after girls, and it’s always girls with long hair parted in the middle. I’ve seen all the Lifetime movies. I saw the movie about Ted Bundy, you know, with the man who’s married to the sister of the woman who was married to Ricky Nelson. Anyway, the Plate Glass Killer was never looking for somebody like me. So I didn’t worry about it.”
“Yes,” Gregor said.
“Do you want me to get you more boxes? There are still lots of them out in the hall.”