Glass Houses Read online

  “It’s upstairs,” Donna said, moving around Randy to get the left-hand ground-level door open. “You do have a key to this door as well as to the door upstairs if you want to be secure, although Tibor’s never had any problem and he’s been here for years. Still, this is the city, after all, and—”

  “And there’s a lot of violence.” Phillipa said. “Gun crimes? There were 414 people murdered in Philadelphia last year. Do you keep a gun, Father?”

  Tibor simply said no.

  Donna looked odd. “Well,” she said, “yes. But—oh, well, never mind. You can talk all that out with Russ when we meet him. It’s late now. But I wouldn’t worry about murder or guns on Cavanaugh Street if I were you.”

  “There were 106,078 crimes in Philadelphia last year.” Phillipa said, “if you count other things than murder. Arrests for aggravated assault were up 40 percent. There were 8,701 arrests for aggravated assault alone.”

  “Geez,” Randy said, “you just know that off the top of your head? That’s really good.”

  “I was doing research before I got here,” Phillipa said. “I couldn’t find out what ‘aggravated assault’ meant though.”

  “It means a couple of guys get into a fight in a bar and one of them hits the other over the head with a barstool,” Randy said.

  “No, it doesn’t,” Donna said. “It means an attack where the attacker intends to cause severe bodily harm—with or without a weapon. Gregor told me that.”

  “I couldn’t find out if there were many aggravated assaults in this neighborhood,” Phillipa said. “I was sent a set of statistical analyses of Philadelphia crime broken down by neighborhood, but I wasn’t sure what to call this neighborhood, and I couldn’t find the street in the lists.”

  “Listen to that,” Donna said, punching Randy on the arm. “That’s how a professional works. You can’t get your act together to get five sources for your research paper, and this woman gets detailed crime statistics all the way from London and still remembers them when she gets here.”

  “I settled the thing with the research paper,” Randy said. “I rewrote it.”

  “We should go up,” Father Tibor said. “We are once again in danger of giving Miss Lydgate pneumonia in the rain.”

  Actually, Phillipa had stopped noticing the rain. She found these people fascinating, all of them, and she found it even more fascinating that they weren’t worried at all to be standing around this back alley courtyard after dark. She must have written a million words in the last decade about the tendency of Americans to keep their heads firmly planted in the sand, to refuse to face reality in any way whatsoever—think of the Kyoto Treaty and the mess the Iraq war had become—but she’d never expected to see such a brilliant and undeniable example of it right out front without disguise like this. She had the opening for her first report to the Watchminder already, and she hadn’t even taken her computer out of her briefcase.

  The little group was trooping up the stairs, and Phillipa trooped with it. She wondered again how Donna Moradanyan found it possible to move. The staircase was well lit and not uncomfortably narrow. It ended at a broad landing and a thick wooden door painted a bright enamel red. Donna rushed forward with a set of keys and opened up. Then she stepped back and handed the keys to Phillipa.

  “There it is,” she said. “Two bedrooms, one bathroom, one living room-dining room ell, and a kitchen. I didn’t know what you liked to eat, so I tried to stock the refrigerator with basic things. You know, eggs. And milk and cream and butter. And that kind of thing. I didn’t do it wrong, did I? You’re not a vegan, or keeping kosher, or anything like that?”

  “No,” Phillipa said. “Of course not. That was very kind of you.” She went through into the small entryway and looked out onto a living room twice the size of her own reception room at home, furnished with a long sofa upholstered in a dark, neutral green and two oversized armchairs with ottomans. There was a television, too, although not one of the huge ones she had heard about that took up an entire wall. There was a CD player with a small collection of CDs next to it. She looked, and they all seemed to be of harpsichord music: Domenico Scarlatti, Alessandro Scarlatti, Handel, Bach. The dining ell had a good-quality mahogany table with six matching chairs seated around it. The kitchen, from what Phillipa could see, peering through the door from the dining room, contained a refrigerator that looked to be the size of her bathroom.

  Randy Ohanian came through with her cases. “I’m supposed to put them in the bigger bedroom, right?”

  “Yes,” Donna said. “Unless you’d prefer the smaller one, Miss Lydgate. I’m sorry if I just assumed—well, most people like the bigger one. And I put sheets on both beds, so there’s no problem if you’d like the other better.”

  “I’ll be fine,” Phillipa said, feeling suddenly overwhelmed. She was also feeling guilty. Here were all these gushing, helpful Americans, and she just wanted them to go away. She followed her cases to the door of the “bigger” bedroom. It was the size of Leeds, and there was a bed in it big enough to accommodate a family of four. Her head hurt. She was feeling a little sick.

  “Oh, dear,” Donna said. “We’ve overdone it. I’m so sorry. You must be exhausted. We’ll get out and let you get some rest.”

  “No, no,” Phillipa said. “I’m all right, really.”

  “Nonsense. You don’t look all right, and why should you? It’s a long flight and the hours are ridiculous. I know. We went to London last year. Now, aside from the basics, there are some covered dishes in the refrigerator some of the women from the church made. I’ve labeled them and their ingredients in case you’re allergic to anything. The plates they’re in are all microwave safe. All you have to do is take off their covers and heat them up if you want them. If you’d rather eat out, just go out your front door, down the alley, and turn to the right. The Ararat is just about a block down and across the street. It’s Armenian food, mostly, but if you want something else you can go another couple of blocks and get a Chinese and an Indian place, right next to each other. Oh, and I stocked the bar. It’s in that little wall unit next to the CD player. You open the flap door and you’ll find everything you need. I got gin and scotch and vodka and bourbon and tonic. I wasn’t sure what you liked.”

  “Really,” Phillipa said breathlessly. “I don’t know how to thank you.”

  “Oh, don’t be silly. I did it for Bennis, didn’t I? Bennis is a force of nature. Anything Bennis wants, Bennis gets. Oh, yes, one more thing. You’ve got cable. Three tiers, plus HBO and Showtime. Now, that really is it. Have some rest. We’ll see you the next time you feel ready to face the world.”

  “Nice to meet you,” Randy Ohanian said, pumping her hand three times quickly and then letting it go.

  “I’m right downstairs in the ground-floor apartment if there is anything you need,” Father Tibor said.

  Then they were gone, all gone, out the door. Phillipa could hear them making their way down the staircase, still talking at full speed. She really did not feel well, not even a little bit.

  She went over to the “built in” and opened the “flap door.” There were glasses and an ice bucket, and Drambuie and Benedictine as well as the harder stuff. The ice bucket was full, and had tongs. She took one of the glasses and looked through the bottles: there was Johnnie Walker Black and Glenlivet for scotch. She took the Glenlivet, filled the glass half full, then thought better of it and filled it all the way up. She had no intention of ruining it with water.

  She went over to one of the big chairs and sat down in it. Then she got up and got the remote control from the top of the television set. She sat back down again. She still had her scotch in one hand. She put it down on a small side table next to the chair. She aimed the remote at the television set and pushed the power button.

  Really, she thought. She didn’t remember that Americans talked that fast, or threw so much at you at once, but maybe that was the first of the differences between the Red States and the Blue States. She could put it in her a
rticle along with the story about the alley. And she had no reason to be surprised about the apartment. Bennis Hannaford was a rich woman. She surely had rich friends. The picture on the television screen made no sense to her. She looked at the remote, found a button that said “channel” on it, and pushed that. The channel changed. The program changed. A picture came on that looked like a newsman giving a report, and she stopped at that.

  “In local news tonight,” the man said, “police spokesman Ronald Garrity has confirmed that what is presumed to be the eleventh victim of the Plate Glass Killer was found this evening in an alley on Society Hill. A man found at the scene has been taken in for questioning.

  “There is no information as to the identity of the man at this time, and no word as to whether police consider him a suspect in the series of murders that have been plaguing Philadelphia for the last thirteen months. The Plate Glass Killer—”

  But Phillipa didn’t listen to anymore. She was suddenly feeling infinitely better, and the better she felt, the hungrier she was.

  She got up out of the chair and headed for the kitchen to find out if there was anything really decent to put in the microwave.

  3

  Margaret Beaufort had a whole list of things she considered too outrageous to be tolerated, and on the top of that list were police departments that couldn’t do their jobs. The job of a police department was both simple and undeniable. It was to keep the peace, and keep the people who were likely to cause trouble off the streets and away from decent people. If Margaret had had her way, the people who needed to be kept off the streets would include garbage collectors (unless they were collecting garbage) and day laborers (at any time at all), and the only people allowed to walk around neighborhoods like this one would be the people who lived in them and the people they hired as staff. Margaret was sure that life had been like this once when she was a child. She couldn’t remember ever seeing rough men walking the sidewalks when she was on her way to school. She was sure her mother had never been knocked into by some teenager carrying an enormous music player and paying no attention to where he was going. In fact, her childhood was a golden haze that sometimes seemed more real to her than the life she was living now: going to school every morning in the navy blue uniforms that marked her out as a Sacred Heart girl; stopping on the way home at a little store that sold nonpareils and red hot dollars; driving up into the mountains at the beginning of August to escape the heat. She’d especially liked the driving, even though it had meant riding in the backseat of the Pontiac with her sister, Elizabeth, and later—much later, when things were already beginning to go wrong—with her half brother Henry. It had been a long time since she had had a vacation.

  It had also been a long time since she had been this nervous. Margaret was not, usually, a nervous woman. She had seen herself through three pregnancies and three miscarriages. She had weathered her late husband’s serial affairs in a manner that would have made her mother cheer. She had even managed to tough her way through that most awful time of all, during the protests in the sixties, when it seemed like all the people who should be kept off the streets were actually in the middle of them, carrying signs. She was tall and fair and florid and just slightly running to fat; and if she wanted someone to know she was unhappy with him, she didn’t have to raise her voice.

  Now she tried raising the volume on the television set they kept in the spare room, as if by doing that she could change the content of the story being repeated on it. She’d already listened to this story once, half an hour ago, when it had appeared on the first of the local nightly newscasts she made it her business to watch every evening. The newscasts were the excuse she made for not putting her foot down and making Elizabeth get rid of the television entirely. In their childhood, people of good family didn’t own televisions. They had them in the maids’ rooms for the maids, who couldn’t help watching them because they were uneducated. She didn’t like to think of what it said about both of them that Elizabeth was now addicted to at least three soap operas and would give up an afternoon at the Philadelphia Museum of Art to watch the latest installment of Days of Our Lives.

  Elizabeth was in the kitchen, sitting calmly at the little round table in the breakfast nook drinking tea. Her response to this crisis had not been satisfactory. As far as Margaret was concerned, nothing Elizabeth ever did had ever been satisfactory. Even in their childhood, she had been both an embarrassment and a thorn.

  The kitchen was just across the hall from the spare room. Margaret gave one last look at the television set—they’d gone on to something else anyway; there was corruption in the Mayor’s Office, again—and went to find her sister. She could hear the light chink of china on china as Elizabeth put her cup into her saucer and picked it up again. If she was running true to form, she’d be doing the crossword puzzle when Margaret came in.

  Elizabeth was doing the crossword puzzle. She was also wearing sweat-pants and a sweatshirt, both black and oversized, ballooning around her small, spare frame.

  “Really,” Margaret said. “You look like one of those women in the park, the old ladies who jog and think it’s going to make them younger.”

  “I don’t jog.”

  “I know you don’t. You don’t do anything anymore. Why wouldn’t you come and listen to the story?”

  “I did come and listen to the story.”

  “I mean this time, on CBS.”

  “It was the same story, Margaret. You can’t honestly tell me they gave you any new information.”

  “They might have,” Margaret said defensively. “It’s a breaking story. It just happened. There could be new information at any moment.”

  “But there wasn’t.”

  “No, there wasn’t. But still.”

  “It will all come out in the paper tomorrow, Margaret, or on the news. It’s not so important that I have to hear about it right away. Sit down and relax a little.”

  Margaret didn’t sit down. She went to the window over the sink instead. In their childhood, the family never came into the kitchen except to check on what the cook was doing. Now they ate in here all the time.

  “Doesn’t it matter to you at all? She was our maid. We knew her. A little, at any rate, because she didn’t speak English. But we knew her. And then there were the police, and all that trouble over Henry. He could have been arrested.”

  “Maybe he has been,” Elizabeth said.

  “Do be serious.”

  Elizabeth put down her crossword puzzle. “I am being serious. They said a man had been taken in for questioning, but they didn’t say who the man was, did they? Why couldn’t it have been Henry?”

  “Henry could never commit a murder,” Margaret said, “never mind eleven of them. This was the eleventh, did you know that? Anyway, we discussed all this when Conchita died. You agreed with me that Henry is not, well, not misformed in just that particular way. He isn’t a violent man.”

  “No, he’s not,” Elizabeth said. “But I wasn’t saying that he might have committed the murder; I was saying he might have been arrested for it. It’s not that farfetched, Margaret. The story said the body had been found on Society Hill.”

  “There are a lot of people who live on Society Hill. Henry isn’t one of them. He lives here with us.”

  “He stays here with us when he’s sober,” Elizabeth said, “but he’s not sober a lot of the time, is he? And he does like to hang out on Society Hill. He’s got less of a chance of getting rolled there. He may be a drunk, but he’s not an idiot.”

  “So you think he’s the man in the story, the one they didn’t name? You think that’s Henry. But when the police were here they said he couldn’t be the Picture Window Killer, or whatever it is—”

  “Plate Glass Killer.”

  “—because he had an alibi for one of the deaths. Or something like that. There was a reason he couldn’t be. So they wouldn’t arrest him, would they, since they already knew that.”

  “I don’t know,” Elizabeth said.
/>   Margaret came back to the table and sat down. Now she was more than nervous. She had reached a level of panic the like of which she hadn’t had since menopause, when everything in her life was in panic. It was odd how it went. It was when you were young that you were supposed to be excited and frightened. When you got older you were supposed to mellow into a mature wisdom that made you both calm and happy. She reached into the fruit bowl in the middle of the table and took out an apple. She didn’t really like apples. She didn’t want to eat one.

  “We knew she was going to be trouble, didn’t we?” Margaret asked, noticing with a certain amount of annoyance that Elizabeth was doing the crossword again, “when she first came here. When she first married Daddy. We knew she was going to be trouble.”

  “She’s been dead and buried for thirty years.”

  “She was an alcoholic,” Margaret said stubbornly. “That’s why Henry is an alcoholic. We should have seen that coming a long time ago. We should have had him committed.”

  “You can’t just have people committed against their wills,” Elizabeth said. “Not unless they’re convicted of something, and Henry has never been convicted of anything. He doesn’t even drive.”

  “Still. We should have done something. Daddy would have done something. He did something about her in the end.”

  “She was hospitalized for alcohol poisoning. Daddy had nothing to do with it.”

  “I keep expecting him to show up on one of those programs. American justice. Or Investigative Reports. They’ll do a program on the black sheep of prominent families, and there he’ll be, sleeping on the sidewalk with newspapers all over him and his shoes in shreds. I don’t understand why he doesn’t just come home. I don’t understand why he has to live his life out in public like that.”

  “He isn’t living his life in public, Margaret. He’s just living it away from us.”