“No,” Gregor said, picking up the paper bag with his sandwich in it. “I have to go over to Police Headquarters for about an hour. Do you think you could do me the favor of sealing the open boxes again so that nobody can tamper with what’s inside them?”
“Oh, of course, Mr. Demarkian. But you don’t have to worry. Nobody would tamper with them except Detective Gayle or Detective Leehan, and they wouldn’t tamper with them so much as they’d just sort of root around in them, you know, to find out what the other one had. But you don’t have to worry about that, either, because neither one of them is allowed onto this floor unless he’s escorted.” She leaned closer and whispered. “One of the fights was here. Not the big one but one of them. They broke a wall.”
Gregor got his coat off the back of his chair. He would worry about broken walls later. Right now, he was 99 percent sure he knew how this investigation had to start, but he needed some things confirmed before he was willing to stake his life on it.
He also needed to find out what had actually happened last night, and he’d do better with that if he could get hold of John Jackman personally.
FOUR
1
For Alexander Mark, the problem of the Plate Glass Killer was not as simple as it seemed. In fact, the entire idea of serial killers—of men, and Sometimes women, who killed because they felt like it, and killed over and over again because they felt like it a lot—broke some kind of circuitry in his head. Alexander Mark understood Good and Evil. It was over the problem of Good and Evil that he had first come out as gay. He had absolutely no use for the kind of person who pretended that gay people weren’t really gay. With a flick of the wrist and a course in aversion therapy, they could become straight. As far as Alexander was concerned, he was born knowing what he was, even if he hadn’t always had a name for it.
The thing was, he had also become a Catholic, and joined Courage, over the problem of Good and Evil—that time, specifically, over the problem of Saint Augustine. If he had been a different kind of person, he might have wanted to be an Augustinian monk. He was sure he had no vocation to the priesthood; but a monk wasn’t a priest, and a life of books and solitude seemed like just what he was after. It was the herd aspect of it he hadn’t been able to handle; Alexander Mark was not a team player—he didn’t even like team players.
Now he got out of the cab and looked around at the five-block stretch that the papers referred to only as “Cavanaugh Street.” It was a nice area. Many of the buildings had obviously been turned back to single-family houses, and the few that hadn’t looked more like expensive condominiums than tenement apartment houses. There was a church, brand-new—of course it would be new, Alexander thought, somebody had blown it up only a couple of years ago and it had had to be rebuilt—and a scattering of stores and restaurants: the Ararat; O’Hanian’s Middle Eastern Food Store; Yekevan News. He took the three-by-five card out of the inner pocket of his suit jacket and checked the address. He should have come out here during the mess, when Gregor Demarkian was helping him out. He liked to check out the people who did him favors.
He looked at the numbers over the doors on one house after the other until he came to the one he wanted. Then he went up the steps and found that the outer door opened automatically, and without the need of a key, onto a small vestibule with a set of mailboxes set into one wall. He looked around and saw that directly across the street was the grandest townhouse of them all, complete with a flagpole sticking out of the second floor, flying the stars and stripes.
There was no inner door. Anybody could walk up or down just because he felt like it. Either these people were very secure, or very, very stupid.
He found Gregor Demarkian’s name on one of the mailboxes and pushed the little button just above it. There was a pause and then a buzz, and then a woman’s voice said, “Yes?”
“My name is Alexander Mark,” he said. “I’m looking for Gregor Demarkian.”
There was another pause. “Gregor’s out,” the woman’s voice said. “I’m not sure where. Is there something I can do for you?”
“It’s about the Plate Glass Killer.”
The intercom went dead again, and Alexander wondered if the woman, whoever she was, was just going to pretend he didn’t exist. Instead, he heard a door opening far up in the stairwell, and two sets of feet coming down the stairs.
He turned and saw two women coming down to him. One of them was fair and very young and as big as a house. Alexander wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d given birth right there. The other was older, but perfectly, exquisitely beautiful, the kind of beautiful that needed no explanations and did not disappear at thirty.