Glass Houses(9)

The cab pulled up to the corner of Alderman Street, and Gregor paid the driver and got out. At least Russ’s emergency had been convenient. It had gotten him away from Phillipa Lydgate before he did something that would show up in her newspaper, and gotten Tibor away from the conversation, too. Tibor was the least excitable of people, but he had been on the brink. Gregor looked around. It was a typical block for a police station to be on—just a little cleaner than the ones just around it and mostly empty of pedestrians. It was as if people deliberately crossed the street not to have to walk in front of it.

He shook out his raincoat and headed for the front door. There wasn’t a single reporter anywhere, and no camera crews or media trucks, either. He went through the doors into the big open vestibule and looked around. There were no reporters there either.

“Excuse me,” he said to the officer at the desk, a young woman who looked just a little too heavy in the chest for the uniform shirt she wore. “My name is Gregor Demarkian. I’m looking for—”

“Gregor,” somebody said. He shouted it, really, except that it wasn’t exactly a shout. It was just a voice that carried so well it could have been heard in Wilmington without being miked. “There you are. You’ve got to get in here.”

Gregor shook his head. It was John Henry Newman Jackman coming toward him in a suit he could have worn to be on Arsenio, assuming Arsenio was still running. Gregor didn’t know if it was. John looked like the kind of person who showed up as a guest on Arsenio no matter what he was wearing, and it was less because he was African American than because he was one of the most physically beautiful male human beings Gregor had ever seen.

“John,” Gregor said, “for God’s sake. You’re commissioner of police. You’re not supposed to be doing this anymore.”

“Doing what? Never mind. I’m not getting involved in a case. At least, not the way you mean it. I’m just trying to make sure we don’t get whacked with a certain little problem.”

In spite of the fact that Jackman’s voice carried, he could make it low when he wanted to, and Gregor found himself both trying to keep up and trying to hear at the same time.

“What little problem?” he said. “Russ said on the phone he was convinced that the man had been coerced into giving a false confession—”

“Nobody coerced him into anything.”

“—but you can’t possibly be interested in that. People give false confessions all the time, and true ones. You leave that up to the lawyers and the detectives to work through, you don’t jump in and—”

“It’s not because of the confession,” Jackman said.

They were pushing through a swinging door into a corridor with doors lined closely on each side. “What is it, if it’s not because of the confession? What else is going on here?”

Jackman stopped and opened a door. The room was empty. He propped the door open and gestured for Gregor to go in. “It’s not the confession,” he said again; “it’s the cardinal.”

“What’s the cardinal got to do with it?”

“The guy is Catholic. His whole family is. The cardinal is taking an interest.”

By now Jackman was in the room, too. The center of the room was taken up by an enormous, and very cheaply made, conference table. Jackman pulled out a seat and sat down. Gregor stayed where he was.

“Let me get this straight,” Gregor said, “A homeless man has confessed to being the Plate Glass Killer, and the Cardinal Archbishop of Philadelphia, a man who makes the pope look inadequately educated, a man whose principal interests are the theology of the Middle Ages and canon law, has somehow intervened in this mess in order to—what? What does the cardinal want?”

“To make sure the confession wasn’t coerced, for one thing,” Jackman said.

“Why? Was the man a daily communicant at the cathedral? Is he the cardinal’s long lost brother? Is this another thing like the plain chant business at mass where he’s trying to make the church authentic, or whatever it was he was talking about in the paper last week?”

“Do you know the name of the guy we’ve arrested?”

“No,” Gregor said.

“It’s Henry Tyder.”

“So?”

“He’s got two sisters—half sisters, really. Neither of them is homeless. Elizabeth Tyder Woodville and Margaret Tyder Beaufort.”

Somewhere deep inside Gregor’s brain a switch went off. “Wait,” he said. “Margaret Tyder. I remember a Margaret Tyder. But it must have been decades ago. I was at Penn, I think. She was, I don’t know. She was in the newspapers a lot.”