Glass Houses Page 7

  “You don’t remember any of it because you didn’t do it,” Russ said. He sounded infinitely, elaborately patient. “They found you near that woman, and they figured they had their arrest in the Plate Glass case and they ran with it. You didn’t do anything but be in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  “But I confessed.”

  “People make false confessions every day. If they locked you up and refused to give you bail, there would be another Plate Glass Killing in a month, or two; and then they’d be flat on their, excuse me, flat on their backs—”

  “Asses,” Henry said helpfully.

  “You can’t go around saying you did it,” Russ said. “You got that? I can get you out of this mess you’re in, but not if you go around saying you did it. You’ve got to do and say just what I tell you to and nothing more—or less. Can you do that?”

  “Sure. I’ve been doing it for Elizabeth and Margaret for years. Especially Margaret. Except when I’m drunk.”

  “And that’s another thing,” Russ said. “For the duration of this situation, you can’t get drunk. We’re going to clean you up, dry you out, and make you look respectable, so if you do have to go into court for a trial the jury will be sympathetic to our side and not of a mind to dismiss you as a lowlife. If you do get drunk while you’re out on bail, you’re likely to find yourself right back behind bars, especially if it’s during a trial. No judge is going to let you sit at the defense table spiked to the gills. Is all of this clear to you?”

  “Sure it is.”

  “Good.”

  “People are drunk in court all the time though,” Henry said. “I’ve got an uncle like that. He’s never falling down drunk, you know, or slurring his words, but he’s never sober. Starts drinking at breakfast and keeps it up the whole day. Just enough. You know what I mean, just enough?”

  “I know what you mean, Henry, but from what I’ve seen of your arrest record, you’re not really good at knowing what’s just enough.”

  “No,” Henry said. “I’m not.”

  And since that was the truth, he sat back and gave it a rest for a while. He didn’t turn around to look at his sisters, even though he had seen them come in and knew they were there. They were literally right behind him, and he didn’t want to get into a conversation. He looked at the prosecution table and saw that he had lucked out there, too. Instead of the usual junior assistant district attorney just old enough to have graduated from kindergarten and not really clear on how to proceed in a real court, he had the district attorney himself, complete with that cotton-candy pompadour that made him look like he was about to sing doo-wop for a street quartet. The district attorney had come with three assistants, two of them women, and a secretary with a short-hand pad.

  The door behind the judge’s platform opened and the judge came out, and Henry was nearly struck dumb. This was beyond lucking out. This was Annabel Draydon Wallace, the first black woman to have been named a judge in Philadelphia and a kind of force of nature. She was as tall as most men. Some of the articles about her—and they appeared in TIME and People as well as The Philadelphia Inquirer —said she was six feet when she was out of her shoes, and she always wore high-heeled shoes. She was no skinny little super-model either. She had weight on her. She looked like the Queen Elizabeth II in the midst of a full ocean voyage.

  “Damn,” Russ Donahue said. “They must have gotten her out of bed for this.”

  It was true, Henry thought. The more serious the crime; the more serious the courtroom, in every way. He had broken through to the big time in the criminal justice system. He could only do better if he blew up a federal building or drove a plane into a skyscraper, and he didn’t have the skill for one or the guts for the other. This was enough, really. He felt more than a little proud of himself. Maybe he would one day get sober and get a job and get a wife and have children and grandchildren, and this would be the kind of story he would love to tell them.

  But he wouldn’t do any of those things. He didn’t want to do any of those things. He just wanted to drink in peace and sleep where nobody would bother him about it, even if that meant sleeping on the sidewalk.

  Judge Wallace banged her gavel on the desk and sat down. The room sat down with her. Somebody said something to open the court, but Henry’s mind had been wandering. He didn’t see who it was or hear what was said. He suddenly wondered if this happened in every court, and if he’d missed it every time.

  Judge Wallace leaned forward and looked at the prosecution and defense tables. “Before we start,” she said, “I want to get something perfectly clear. Those doors back there are locked at the moment, and I’ve put extra officers on them to make sure nobody gets in, because the corridor is full of reporters. We’ve got all the major networks, broadcast and cable, and everything from The Inquirer to the Weekly World News. Now there is going to be no way, over the course of this situation, to keep the press out indefinitely. If there’s a trial, we’ll have to find ways of accommodating them. But that doesn’t mean I’m going to put up with grandstanding and publicity hogging from either of you. You got that? There is a list of procedural questions to be decided here, and as far as I’m concerned they can go either way. If I see one of you giving an interview outside with a microphone stuck in your face, I’ll start thinking the other side has a lot of merit in their procedural requests. And don’t either of you forget it.”

  “Your Honor,” the district attorney said, “my office is going to be expected to—”

  “Your office has an official press liaison. Let her give the interviews for the next few weeks. We need to have a plea entered here, then we need to make some arrangements. So let’s get on with it. Mr. Donahue, will you and Mr. Tyder approach the bench.”

  “Oh,” Margaret said, from right behind Henry’s head.

  Henry felt Russ’s hand touch his elbow, and he stood up again. Up and down. Up and down. A courtroom was like church, at least as he remembered church. He got up and folded his hands in front of his waist, the way he’d seen people do on court shows once or twice.

  Then something happened, and he was never later able to say exactly what it was. Maybe it was just that the room was too stuffy, or the people were too stuffy, or everybody was being so serious all the time. He hated being serious. It made him jumpy. He hated this, too, because he had a feeling that he was going to have to take it seriously; in the long run, there could be a lot of trouble if he didn’t do everything exactly right. He felt the twitching in his arms and legs that always signaled the start of one of those episodes that had gotten him picked up in the past. He tried to listen to people talking, but he couldn’t hear their words. It was as if he were far underwater, and they were not. He would be pleading not guilty, he knew about that. Russ Donahue would be asking the judge to let him have bail, and the district attorney would be asking her not to. He would be saying that Henry was dangerous to the public, a frothing animal intent on committing murder and worse, out of control, out of the mainstream, out of this world.

  “Out of this world,” Henry said, in the loudest voice he could manage.

  The judge leaned forward and opened and shut her mouth. Henry didn’t hear any of it. He didn’t hear Russ Donahue, who was talking, too. He didn’t hear Margaret and Elizabeth, who were probably hissing at him.

  “Out of this world,” he said again. And then, because it was the only thing he could do, it was the only way he could go on being in this room and not die, he jumped up onto the table and began to dance. People didn’t think he could do something like that. People thought he was so broken down he couldn’t do anything at all. They were wrong. When the fire got into him, he could do anything.

  “Out of this world,” he shouted. “I’m going to Venus. I’m going to Mars. I’m going to Jupiter.”

  His voice was getting louder and louder. It was past the point of singsong and onto the other thing, the great fiery thing where everything inside him let loose at once and tried to get out, the vast rotten blackness
of him, the well of anger that went all the way down. He was aware that he wasn’t making sense anymore. He was aware that he was just screaming, screaming, and screaming; kicking things off the table, not because he wanted to kick them, but because they were in the way. Somebody had a hand on his leg. Somebody else was trying to get on the table with him. He didn’t give a damn anymore. He hadn’t given a damn in the first place. He only wanted to get it all out, all of it, and if he had to scream until the walls fell down, he was going to do it.

  Then two police officers grabbed both his legs at once and he fell, sideways and down, into the arms of two others.

  PART ONE

  THRONING STONES

  ONE

  1

  Gregor Demarkian was too old to spend his time having anxiety about “relationships,” and he was more than too old to spend it trying to discover just how women think. At least that was what he had been telling himself these last few months since Bennis had been gone. It might have been different if he’d known where she had gone, or if she’d taken her things out of his apartment before she went. Instead, she’d disappeared without a trace, and every time he went to his closet her coal black, five-ply cashmere turtleneck tunic hit him smack in the face.

  This morning, he was trying to figure out what to do about the other “relationship” he’d suddenly acquired, if you could call it a relationship at all. Here was a fine mess he’d gotten himself into. When he’d first asked Alison Standish to dinner, all he’d really had in mind was dinner. He was tired of eating alone. Now they’d had dinner a couple of dozen times. He still didn’t know what he felt about her. He still didn’t know what he felt about Bennis. And he could sense, every time he left Cavanaugh Street to take Alison to her favorite sushi place, that Alison was beginning to wonder why he never spent the night.

  He stared at himself in the mirror over his bathroom sink and thought he ought to get out and to the Ararat before he started to go crazy. Either that or find something to work on. He’d had a few calls for his services in the last few weeks, but nothing big, and now he was chafing at the boredom. Women, work. In Gregor’s day, a man was supposed to have all that settled by the time he was thirty, and then it was just a matter of sticking with routine. Gregor liked routine. He liked predictability. He especially liked never having to wonder, even for a split second, what it was all supposed to mean.

  “Krekor.” Tibor was out in the living room, pacing.

  Gregor finished shaving and reached for the sweater he had left on the towel rack. Here was a dilemma he hadn’t expected to have the first time he asked Alison out. What was he supposed to think when he was ordering her a drink wearing something Bennis had bought him. This was a continuing problem, since Bennis had bought him half the things he owned.

  “I will think you have fallen in,” Tibor said.

  Gregor got the sweater over his head and headed down the small hall to the living room. There were a series of framed pen-and-ink drawings on one of the walls in that hall, each a different scene from a Civil War Era household. Bennis had bought them and put them up the second month they were seeing each other because she said that Gregor’s apartment looked like the accommodations in a lunatic asylum. That was hilarious. If anybody should know something about lunatic asylums, it should be Bennis.

  He couldn’t keep going on like this. Even Tibor was beginning to think he was going round the bend. He came out into the living room and found Tibor looking down on Cavanaugh Street out of Gregor’s big picture window.

  “Is something actually going on at this time of the morning?” Gregor asked. “I can’t believe you’re watching a mugging.”

  “I’m watching the woman I told you about. Miss Lydgate.”

  “She’s on the street?”

  “On the way to the Ararat, yes. At least, that’s the way she’s going. Where else could she be going?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know her. You’re the one who said she was odd. Interestingly enough, Donna said the same thing.”

  “Why interestingly?”

  “Because you and Donna don’t think the same things are strange most of the time, and neither of you usually thinks anything is strange at all. She must be some woman, this Miss Lydgate. Is she young?”

  “In her fifties, I think,” Tibor said. “But a good fifties. Very trim and fit. But very aggressive as well, Krekor. I don’t like her. And I truly do not trust her.”

  Gregor dropped into his one overstuffed armchair—Bennis had bought him that, too, or at least made him buy it, after she’d thrown out all his old furniture because she thought it was the kind of thing they used to outfit FBI interrogation rooms—and began to root around under the coffee table for his shoes. The coffee table had a small stack of books on it. The book on top was Gregor’s last foray into crime fiction: The Devil’s Right Hand, by J. D. Rhodes. The book just under it was Bennis’s own Zedalia in Winter.

  He found the shoes and put them on. Tibor was still standing at the window. He was small and spare and tense, and he had never lost the look that made people spot him, at first sight, as “foreign.”

  “I went to the Web site of this newspaper she writes for,” Tibor said. “I went to look at the archives for her other articles.”

  “That was sensible,” Gregor said. “What did you find?”

  “The woman is an idiot,” Tibor said. “Either that or she’s a liar. And the rest of the people who write for the paper are not much better. It is astonishing, Krekor, let me tell you, how ignorant a person can be and still be paid money for their opinions.”

  “Something you could say about most of the newspaper reporters in this country. Why is she on Cavanaugh Street anyway?”

  “She is here to report on Red America.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Red State America,” Tibor amended. “I know. It is very confusing.”

  “But Pennsylvania isn’t a Red State,” Gregor said. “Or at least, it wasn’t in the last election. She should be in Nebraska or Kansas or someplace like that.”

  “She would have culture shock so severe, it would take hospitalization to cure her.”

  “Ah,” Gregor said.

  “And it is not a matter of little import,” Tibor said. “The things she writes in the paper are the things people will believe about America. People who have never been here, and who will probably never come. They will make decisions when they vote in their home countries; they will make decisions in their private lives on this misinformation. America is a place where everybody has to hold three jobs just to make the rent and eat. America is a place where if you do not have money you do not get medical care. America is a place where there is no unemployment insurance and no pensions for old people—”

  “What?”

  “Yes, I am serious, Krekor. And if it was just a matter of ignorance, I wouldn’t mind. She is here. We can show her the truth. But it is not a matter of ignorance. It is a matter of malice. And now there is this Plate Glass Killer and the homeless man they have arrested, and I am thinking she is working herself up to write about it. Wrongly. She is working herself up to make this into an example of what it is not.”

  Tibor came away from the window, and sat down on the couch. Part of the foreignness were the clothes, Gregor thought, the cheap black suits always just a little too small and a little too tight, as if he had not been able to afford more material. There was something Bennis had tried to change that she hadn’t been able to make budge. Bennis bought Tibor clothes, and as soon as he put them on, they looked like all the other clothes he had ever had since the day he had first arrived in America from the old Soviet Union.

  “We should not have given her the apartment,” Tibor said. “That’s what I am thinking. But maybe I am wrong. If she had gone somewhere else, what would she have thought? The inner city. Somewhere like that. And then there is the fact that it is a favor to Bennis, who usually has much better taste in friends.”

  “Bennis has no taste in friends,�
�� Gregor said. “Bennis knows everybody on the planet and half of them are lunatics more unreliable than she is. Which brings us to our usual impasse. You don’t know where she is, really?”

  “No, Krekor. I don’t know where she is. I would not lie to you. If I knew but I wasn’t allowed to tell, I would tell you that.”

  “Not even a clue? What about Miss Lydgate. Would she know?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think so. She perhaps saw Bennis somewhere recently, that is possible.”

  “But?”

  “But I do not believe that Miss Lydgate is really a friend,” Tibor said. “She is mean, and when she is not that she is malicious, and Bennis does not have patience with either. I wonder if they have a mutual friend that Bennis perhaps does the favor for. If I knew where Bennis was, Krekor, I would call her myself. I would ask her about this woman and what she is doing here.”

  Gregor stood up. “Well,” he said, “nobody on Cavanaugh Street has heard from Bennis in four months, not even Donna Moradanyan. Maybe she’s gone through a wormhole. Is that a word? I took Tommy to the movies last weekend. I was never so confused in my life. Let’s go have breakfast. If you don’t like what Miss Lydgate is doing, maybe you can corral her and tell her what you think.”

  “Tcha, Krekor. She wouldn’t listen. Or she would write an article about how Americans refuse to face reality. This is a major theme of hers. Americans should be miserable because the country is horrible; but they’re not miserable, so they must be delusional. Over and over again. Then she mixes up federal and state law, she gets federalism wrong. When I was still studying for my citizenship test, I did better than this. And I have put out my flag.”

  “I didn’t know you had a flag.”

  “I had it in a box in the closet to put out for the Fourth of July because Donna has asked me to. I have put it out this morning, so that she would have had to pass it on her way out of the courtyard. She wanted to know if I kept a gun.”

  “What did you tell her?”