Glass Houses Page 6

  Now she sat in the little telephone alcove that had been such a mark of progressiveness and distinction when it had been put in in 1925 and wished she’d listened to herself months ago when she’d wanted to get a cell phone. It would be much better to have this conversation someplace else. Margaret could come down the hall at any moment. If she heard about this just straight off like that, without Elizabeth’s being able to pave the way and frame the situation, she’d go off the handle like—Elizabeth couldn’t think of like what. She couldn’t even remember where the phrase “off the handle” came from, and she certainly couldn’t remember what it meant.

  The voice on the other end of the line was going on in a low, calm way that she liked a great deal. You heard terrible things about pro bono lawyers, but Elizabeth didn’t think this one would be terrible.

  “Excuse me,” she said. “I’m sorry. My mind was wandering. Could you give me your name again?”

  “Russ Donahue,” the voice said. “I’m with Didrickson and Marsh. The Public Defender’s Office asked me to take on the case of your brother, but that was because the police didn’t realize he had any family. He didn’t say. I do understand that you may want to hire a lawyer for him yourselves—”

  “Does he say he wants us to hire a lawyer for him?” Elizabeth asked.

  There was a pause. “Well,” Russ Donahue said, “no. He doesn’t. I did bring it up to him. The possibility, I mean.”

  “And?”

  There was another pause, this time very uncomfortable. “He rejected the suggestion,” Russ said carefully.

  Elizabeth almost laughed. This was perfect. This was better than perfect. “I take it he called us a pair of old bitches who were trying to ruin his life,” she said. “I suppose he said he didn’t want anything to do with us.”

  “Something like that. It was a little more—”

  “Blue?”

  “Right.”

  “Never mind,” Elizabeth said. “He’s been on a drunk, or at least I think he has. He’s been gone for days. He gets like that. But he’s a grown man, isn’t he? I can’t swan in there and hire a lawyer for him if he doesn’t want me to.”

  There was another long pause. Elizabeth wondered what this man looked like, this Russ Donahue. He sounded young and almost terminally personally responsible. It was the kind of thing her own father would have liked. He had been a man who thrived on duty, obligation, and responsibility.

  “Here’s the thing,” he said. “He has been on a drunk. Not as bad as some I’ve seen, in fact a pretty mild one as those things go, but he’s been drinking. And from what I hear from the people around here, that isn’t unusual. He goes drinking and sleeps in the street. That’s why they called the Public Defender’s Office. They thought he was homeless.”

  “He is homeless, when he wants to be,” Elizabeth said. “There’s no use having a home if you won’t go there.”

  “I suppose. But I was wondering if the better thing might not be to have him declared incompetent. I don’t mean insane. I don’t think he’s insane, al-though he’s been saying some very odd things for hours, but he’s been drinking. He’s apparently been abusing alcohol for years, and that kind of thing can addle your mind. Make you, well, almost something like a patient with Alzheimer’s.”

  “Is that how you’d describe Henry? Like a patient with Alzheimer’s?”

  “No,” Russ said, sighing. “But he’s not all there either. Or he doesn’t appear to be. And I didn’t get here in time.”

  “In time for what?”

  “In time to stop him from making a confession,” Russ said, “on videotape. And signing a transcript.”

  Elizabeth put her hand out for something that was not there. Sometimes she found it hard to remember that she’d quit smoking fifteen years before. She looked up at the wall next to the phone, to the little framed-and-glassed picture that had hung there as long as she could remember. It was a picture of a girl in a hoop-skirted antebellum dress, sitting in a field with flowers in her lap. It was the kind of art her own mother had detested, but that her stepmother—Henry’s mother—had found the absolute epitome of what it meant to be married to a Tyder.

  “Mrs. Woodville?” Russ Donahue said.

  “Yes,” Elizabeth said. “Yes, I’m here. I’m sorry. Did he confess just to this murder or to all of them?”

  “To all of them.”

  1 see.

  “It’s nonsense, of course,” Russ said. “He’s no more the Plate Glass Killer than I’m the pope. But he has made a confession, on videotape, as I said; and signed a transcript; and that means that it’s going to take more than talking to get him out from under this. At the very least, it’s going to mean hiring a private detective on his behalf. And I can do that, even on the public defender’s dime, but if you’d rather have it taken care of some other way, we could get him declared incompetent and make you and your sister his guardians. It would at least be a start.”

  “Did they tell you that he’d been accused of this before?” Elizabeth asked.

  “Yes,” Russ said. “Yes, they did. And that makes it even stickier yet.”

  “That was when the murder victim was our maid,” Elizabeth said, “Conchita Estevez. She came from somewhere in South America; I don’t remember where. Isn’t that terrible? When I do things like that I remind myself of Margaret, and then I just get crazy. Anyway, the body was found in the service alley just in the back of here. But he wasn’t found standing over it. And he wasn’t found covered in blood. Which is what happened this time.”

  “Sort of,” Russ said. “The blood part is right, but he’d actually left the alley when somebody saw him with blood all over him and screamed, and that brought the police, and they went into the alley people had seen him come out of, and that was the ball game. But it doesn’t have to be. It really doesn’t. With competent counsel—”

  “Are you competent counsel?”

  “I’m very competent counsel, Mrs. Woodville. But I’m not personally known to you or to your sister—”

  “Are you personally known to Henry?”

  “Not before this evening, no.”

  “But he likes you, I take it. He’s willing to talk to you. He cooperates with you.”

  “He’s willing to talk to me. I can’t tell if he’s cooperating or not. He seems to like calling me his lawyer. You know, telling people things like, ‘If you want to know my birth date, you’ll have to ask my lawyer.’ That kind of thing. Personally, I think it was because he couldn’t remember his birth date. He has, uh, gaps in his memory like that.”

  Elizabeth tilted her head back and let it rest for a moment on the wall behind her. The alcove was tiny, tinier than any closet in the house. She thought of Henry being brought home from the hospital and all the fuss and bother that his mother was capable of, dressed in three kinds of lace and carried in a custom-made Moses basket by the butler, right through the front door and upstairs to the nursery. Elizabeth had hated that butler. She’d hated the very idea of butlers. She was ecstatic beyond belief that Margaret could no longer afford to hire one.

  “Mrs. Woodville?”

  “Yes, I’m here. It’s just that I was thinking, if Henry likes you, and if he’s willing to cooperate with you, why should he have to change? You’ve probably heard something of the way he feels about us. About Margaret and me, I mean. Would it really help him if we threw you off the case and sent in one of our own attorneys, whom he’s unlikely to like any better than he likes us?”

  “That’s true enough,” Russ said.

  “If it’s a question of the money, we can handle that,” Elizabeth said. “You said you were with Didrickson and Marsh, isn’t that right? You’re not full time on the payroll of the Public Defender’s Office?”

  “No, no I’m not. I just do some pro bono work when I’m asked. I—”

  “Well, then,” Elizabeth said, “we can just hire you privately, if it comes to that. We wouldn’t even have to let Henry know, in case he objected to it. W
hich he probably would. If you tell me how much of a retainer you require in a case like this, I can have a check at your office in the morning.”

  “Mrs. Woodville”—Russ Donahue sounded breathless—“it’s not the money. If Henry isn’t declared incompetent, your willingness to pay would be beside the point. If he had assets of his own—”

  “He does have, some. Not as much as Margaret and I do, but some.”

  “Well, those would count, and we’d have to go into those. But I’m not worried about money at the moment. I’m worried about your brother. He’s just confessed to the most notorious series of murders in the history of Philadelphia, and he’s done it when there’s decent circumstantial evidence that he might even be guilty in at least two of the cases. I don’t think you realize that the district attorney wouldn’t be required to prove that Henry killed all those women. He’d only have to prosecute on the two. The fact that he had an alibi for one or two of the others wouldn’t matter because you don’t prosecute somebody as a serial killer. You prosecute for particular individual murders.”

  “Does he have an alibi for one or two of the others?”

  “I don’t know yet,” Russ said. “That’s one of the things the private detective would be for.”

  “Do you have a private detective in mind?”

  “Yes,” Russ said. “Yes, I do. In fact, I know a couple.”

  Elizabeth straightened up. “Then I suggest you go off and hire him and stay on as Henry’s attorney, and we’ll work out the tangles on the money front in the next few days. I need to talk to my sister, Margaret. Will Henry be released on bail? Can we come and get him?”

  “He probably won’t be released on bail until the morning,” Russ said. “I can call you around, say, eight or eight thirty and let you know when the bail hearing will be. I should know by then. You could meet me there if you wanted to.”

  “I think it would be the best thing, yes,” Elizabeth said. “I think it’s almost obligatory, isn’t it, having the family around the accused, showing support?”

  “Yes,” Russ said. “Well.”

  “Will he talk to me?”

  “He said not, before I called.”

  “Don’t bother asking again,” Elizabeth said. “Do what you need to do and call me in the morning, and I’ll come to the bail hearing. I don’t think I’ve ever been in a criminal court before. Not even on Henry’s behalf. He usually just gets falling down drunk and thrown into the emergency ward, and we collect him from there. Thank you for calling me, Mr. Donahue.”

  “Yes,” Russ said again. “Well.”

  Elizabeth placed the receiver into its base. Margaret was upstairs somewhere. She must not have heard the phone ring. Elizabeth would either have to go hunt her out or take a seat in the living room and wait. If she waited, she would be more and more nervous anticipating the fight that surely was going to come. If she went upstairs, she risked interrupting Margaret in one of her nostalgic reveries, where nothing could or did matter but what life had been like, in Margaret’s imagination, in 1962.

  The real trouble was this, and it was Margaret’s trouble as well as her own, although Margaret would never admit it. Elizabeth was fairly certain, and had been from the beginning, that Henry had murdered Conchita Estevez. She thought it at the time he’d been picked up, and she thought it now. Whether she also thought her half brother was the Plate Glass Killer was something else again, but about Conchita she was sure.

  And that made bigger problems than it might seem to on the surface.

  9

  Henry Tyder had been in courtrooms before—he had even been in courtrooms with his sisters before—but those had been shabby places, with low ceilings, and judge’s platforms made out of pressed wood with veneer. This was a different kind of place altogether that they’d brought him to. Maybe the seriousness of the crime decided the seriousness of the courtroom. He tried to remember what it had been like with Conchita but couldn’t. He didn’t think he’d been in a courtroom then. He thought that had all taken place at the police station.

  This courtroom had a ceiling as high as the one on a professional hockey rink, and the judge’s platform was made from something dark and solid looking, like mahogany. Margaret would like this better. One of the things she had always hated about having to bail him out of one thing and another was how tacky the places she’d had to go to had been. He thought of her sitting back there right behind the rail. The low murmuring hum of her voice would be going on and on in Elizabeth’s ear, telling her all the things that were wrong with him and why they were all the fault of his mother. He got a certain amount of mileage out of his mother when his sisters were in the right mood and he was sober enough to convince them he was sober at all.

  Next to him, the tall young lawyer from the Public Defender’s Office finished taking papers out of his briefcase and sat down. Henry liked the tall young lawyer. He wasn’t an idiot. If they’d sent him the kind of lawyer you sometimes read about in the news, the kind that fell asleep at their clients’ trials, he’d have howled blue murder and got Elizabeth and Margaret in. As it was, this was better. The tall young lawyer would work for him, not for his sisters. His concerns would be Henry’s own concerns, not Margaret’s need for public respectability or Elizabeth’s need for demonstrating how Very, Very Progressive she was.

  “Do me a favor,” Henry said.

  “What’s that?” the tall young lawyer said.

  “Tell me your name again,” Henry said.

  The tall young lawyer gave him a funny look. It was a look Henry knew well. It was the look that said that your client was not only a drunk, but had been a drunk so long his mind was not working properly. Henry held his breath, waiting for a sign of contempt or for a lecture. Neither came.

  “My name is Russ,” the lawyer said patiently. “Russ Donahue. You can call me Russ, but you’ve got to remember the Donahue. Because the judge will call me Donahue.”

  “Oh, I know that,” Henry said. “I know about courtrooms. I’ve been in enough of them. Vandalism, you know. And disturbing the peace. When I was younger, you could get arrested for public drunkenness. I don’t know if you can do that anymore. They don’t do it to me.”

  “No,” Russ said. “Usually they don’t do it anymore.”

  “It’s too bad,” Henry said. “They’ve caused themselves a lot of problems. In the old days, if they found somebody falling down drunk, they threw him in the drunk tank. They didn’t leave him out on the street sleeping in the cold. Now it gets cold and people freeze to death and they go all loopy worrying about it, and what for? They should just bring back the drunk tank, like I said. Then they just arrest the guys and throw them in there, and it’s not great but it’s got central heat and nobody is going to freeze to death overnight.”

  Russ Donahue had his head cocked. Henry could tell he was interested. No, that wasn’t the word. Henry could tell he was intrigued. That got them, too, every time. They thought that if you were a drunk, you had to be stupid.

  “I think they send out vans,” Russ said, “from the shelters to bring people in so they don’t die in the cold.”

  “Well, of course they do,” Henry said, “but that’s no use, is it? A lot of the men don’t want to go to the shelters. They get so drunk they don’t want to do anything. And the people in the vans can’t make them go. They can’t force them to go. The police can force you to go. You get arrested and that’s that. It doesn’t matter if you’ve had so much liquor you’d be willing to fight Godzilla in the middle of the street with your bare hands.”

  “Do you get like that, so that you want to fight Godzilla?”

  “Nah. I’m a happy drunk. I drink to be happy. It gets cold enough, I go to Margaret and Elizabeth’s if there’s no room in the shelters. Besides, in the shelters you get robbed. You go to the drunk tank, they take your wallet and your other stuff and hold them until you’re let out; and then nobody can pick your pocket.”

  “Right,” Russ said. He looked more stunned
than ever.

  Henry was beginning to feel positively happy. There was actually a place—just drunk enough, not really drunk—where he felt good; and his big problem became trying to figure out how to stay in the place without going beyond it. This required him to drink in a measured and deliberate way, but the place was one where both measure and deliberation were impossible, and so he almost immediately started to slide. Soon, if he didn’t get out of here on bail, he would start to slide in the opposite direction. He would become sober enough to hate himself and everything he was looking at. At the moment, though, he was in just the right place, sliding back from the abyss of overdrunkenness. That’s what came of spending four hours in the police station not drinking anything but Coca-Cola and water.

  “Now,” Russ said, “we’re going to ask for bail, and I think you’ve got a good chance of getting it. I don’t think you’re a flight risk. If you disappear, we’ve got a good idea of where to look for you. You’re not about to run off to Canada or Wisconsin.”

  “I don’t even know where they are,” Henry said, mock solemnly.

  “Yes, well, you have to understand that we’ve got to be careful though. The judge has no obligation to grant bail in a capital case. You’re going to be charged with one murder tonight. She’s going to know you’ll probably be charged with another sometime tomorrow. And there’s public feeling to consider. There are eleven women dead, and the general public thinks you killed them.”

  “I did kill them,” Henry said.

  “You’ve got to stop that, Henry. You understand that? You’ve got to stop that.”

  “I did kill them,” Henry said again. “They explained it all to me at the police station before you got there. They showed me how I did it. I must have been really drunk; I don’t remember any of it.”