Glass Houses Read online

  “I told her no, Krekor, without thinking about it. But if I had thought about it, I should have told her that I keep an M-16 and a rocket launcher in my kitchen. An M-16 is a kind of rifle, yes?”

  “Yes. A very good kind of rifle. Also very powerful. What would you do with an M-16 aside from scaring the poor woman to death?”

  “It is perhaps not the worst of outcomes, Krekor.”

  Gregor got up and got his sports jacket from the back of the couch. It was probably only just cool enough to wear a sports jacket, but he wore them all the time, even in the middle of July, and most of the time he wore a tie, too. It was no use trying to be somebody you were not. He couldn’t have turned himself into a “hip” person or a “cool” person just for Bennis. He had to admit he didn’t even want to. Maybe that was the key. Maybe she could sense, from that, that his commitment to her was not everything she wanted it to be.

  This was so insane, Gregor began to wonder if he had started listening to soap operas in his sleep. Maybe he sleepwalked and turned on the set and watched—what? It used to be that soap operas were on only during the day. Now there was the Soap Channel, and he was fairly sure they got it on their cable tier.

  “Tcha,” Tibor said. “You’re off somewhere again. Aren’t you going to breakfast?”

  “Right away,” Gregor said.

  There was something heavy in the pocket of his sports jacket. He reached in with his hand and came out with the Palm Pilot Bennis had given him as a present the Christmas before last.

  He’d had no idea he was carrying it around.

  2

  Gregor Demarkian was a man who needed—even demanded—a certain amount of regularity in his life. In the years since he had come to live on Cavanaugh Street, breakfast at the Ararat had become one of the hallmarks of that regularity. It wasn’t quite as satisfying as a full-bore professional schedule, when you knew where you had to be every minute of every hour and there was a secretary at the end of the hall keeping tabs on it, but it had the advantage of being considerably more personal. The Ararat had the virtue of being always the same in its general outline, although always different in its particulars.

  Today the Ararat was in a bit of a fuss. Gregor and Tibor always arrived for breakfast as soon as the doors opened, and there were rarely as many as five or six other people there to open up with them. Now the entire street seemed to be out early. Even Donna Moradanyan was having breakfast out, although she never did that anymore now that she had Russ to feed at home. Gregor wondered where Russ was. Donna was sitting with her son, Tommy, and one of the older Ohanian girls and Grace Fineman, who lived in Donna’s old apartment in Gregor’s building. Gregor tried to remember which of the Ohanian girls this was. There were so many Ohanians, Gregor could never keep track of them.

  In spite of the crowd, nobody had taken the large window booth with its low benches covered with cushions, the one old Vartan Melajian had tarted up to look like what he imagined a bazaar restaurant would look like in Yekevan. Of course, Vartan had never been in Yekevan. He was of Gregor’s generation, which meant it was his parents who had come over on the boat, and they had both been dead before he decided to open the Ararat. Gregor had always had the sneaking suspicion that what the booth actually looked like was the reception room in a brothel. It didn’t matter. Nobody would have been rude enough to make fun of Vartan over his decorating schemes—except his children, and they didn’t count—and the tourists absolutely adored the thing. People called up and made reservations just for the booth.

  Gregor slid in on the bench on one side and waited for Tibor to slide in on the other. The window looked directly out onto Cavanaugh Street, and from the direction he was facing Gregor could see Ohanian’s Middle Eastern Food Store already open for business, with big round apple baskets and displays of vegetables set up outside. It was good the Ohanians had all those children. If they’d had only one or two, there might have been a mutiny over the day-today responsibilities of opening up and getting the vegetables out this early.

  Linda Melajian came over with two cups, two saucers, and the coffeepot. She put the saucers down, placed the cups in them, and started to pour. She had not brought over menus. She knew Gregor and Tibor wouldn’t need them.

  “What do you think?” she said. “Have you talked to her?”

  “I’m not even awake yet,” Gregor said.

  “You will be in a minute,” Linda said. “I saw her go up the street to Dimitri’s place to buy the paper, and she hasn’t come back down again. I keep telling Dimitri to come in for breakfast, but he still doesn’t have anybody to help him in the store. To tell you the truth, I don’t think he wants to spend the money to hire somebody. It’s hard when you don’t have family, if you know what I mean. Anyway, I think she’s very distinguished—Miss Lydgate, I mean. Donna says to call her Miss Lydgate, not Ms. They don’t use Ms. in England. Or something. You want eggs and sausage?”

  “No,” Gregor said. When Bennis had first been away, he had taken a certain amount of satisfaction in eating all the things she used to yell at him for eating, but now the novelty had worn off, and eggs and bacon just made him feel tired and overful. “I’ll have orange juice and a melon and cheese. Something good for the cheese. Gruyere?”

  “If you want, but it’ll cost you extra. The stuff is like twelve dollars a pound, even wholesale,” Linda said. “So what’s the deal? Is Bennis about to descend on us again so we’re trying to make sure we can’t tell her you’ve been eating like a pig?”

  Tibor cleared his throat. Twice.

  Linda gave them both a withering look. “Well, she hasn’t moved out, has she? Her furniture is still here, and her apartment isn’t up for sale. If it was, we’d all know it. So she must be coming back.”

  “She must be,” Gregor agreed, “but if it’s anytime soon, I don’t know about it. Why don’t you get me that melon and cheese?”

  “And for me hash browns and sausages,” Tibor said. “And for yourself, more discretion, please. You act like a teenager.”

  “I’m not exactly geriatric,” Linda said. “Never mind. I really do think she looks distinguished, you know what I mean? It must be wonderful to have a job like that. Donna says we shouldn’t all gang up on her, and we won’t, really, but still. Oh, and one more thing. Grade’s group is having a concert downtown at the end of the month, and Donna wants us all to go. I’ve never heard a harpsichord concert. I wonder what it will be like. Do you want water with everything else?”

  “Yes,” Gregor said.

  “I wonder what she thinks of Philadelphia,” Linda added. “I mean, what it looks like to her. I wonder if she likes it.”

  “She hasn’t been here a full twenty-four hours,” Gregor said, “and she got here late last night, at least from what I’ve heard. Give her a minute.”

  “I bet she’s formed impressions, though,” Linda said. “Everybody forms impressions right away. But if you’re going to see the city, night is the time to do it. It looks all lit up and shiny. Did you say you wanted water?”

  “Yes,” Tibor said. “Linda, please, pay attention.”

  “I am paying attention. I’m just a little excited, that’s all. I’ll be back in a minute.”

  Gregor watched her go all the way across the restaurant’s main room, stopping at tables along the way to chatter. He shook his head. “If this is what you’ve all been like,” he said, “it’s no wonder she’s not here yet, if she’s going to be here at all. You’d all fall on the woman.”

  Tibor shook his head. “She will be here, Krekor. She is only snooping. I know this kind of woman.”

  “They had a lot of international newspaper reporters in the Soviet gulag, did they?”

  “They had a lot of everybody in the gulag,” Tibor said, “but in this case, I was talking of the sense of Miss Marple. You don’t have to be an international newspaper reporter to be what this woman is. There is one in every village. Tcha. There is one in every family. I keep trying to tell people, but they
won’t listen.”

  “They’re just being friendly,” Gregor said. “As well as ridiculously nosy. Which is what they’re like. They don’t mean any harm.”

  “She does. Wait and see, Krekor. She will begin to write her articles, and then everybody will see and be upset. But I have tried to warn them.”

  “Well, maybe she won’t even come to breakfast, no matter what you think. It’s her first day. If it was my first day, I’d find all this a little overwhelming. Come to think of it, I did.”

  Linda was back with plates and a tray. She put down two tiny glasses of water and then began to pass out the rest of it. Gregor’s melon was huge and orange and cut in half. The actual item on the menu said only half a melon, but he’d come to an equitable agreement with the Melajians a long time ago.

  “I’ve brought the paper,” Linda said, throwing a copy of The Inquirer down on the table. “They’ve caught the Plate Glass Killer, isn’t that wonderful? Maybe my father will stop being such an idiot when all I want to do is go to the movies with a couple of friends. I mean, honestly, what sense did it make giving me a curfew anyway? He killed those women in the daytime as well as the nighttime. It’s not like I am all right in the sunlight but in mortal peril after dark. I like the whole idea of mortal peril, don’t you? It sounds like something out of a Sherlock Holmes’s story. They all sound so much better educated in England, don’t you think?”

  Linda wasn’t about to wait around to hear what they thought. She hurried off, the tray under one arm the way she must once have carried schoolbooks. Gregor watched her go and then looked down at the paper. The front page was entirely taken up by pictures of the man the police had arrested as the Plate Glass Killer, and the largest headline Gregor had seen on the Inquirer in years. He looked down at the subtitle: “Homeless Man Confesses to Plate Glass Killings.” He looked at the pictures of the man again and said, “Huh?”

  “What is it, Krekor? You are not happy they have caught this Plate Glass Killer.”

  “I’m just surprised at who they’ve caught as the Plate Glass Killer.” Gregor looked through the pictures one more time, then turned to the inside page and looked at some more. The Inquirer had gone all out, as if this were a political assassination. “Tyder Picked Up Once Before,” one of the subheads read. He ran his eyes over those paragraphs quickly: the accused man, Henry Tyder, had been suspected of being the Plate Glass Killer after the murder of Conchita Estevez, who had been a maid living in the house of his sisters. Gregor blinked. The syntax was awful. Somebody had put the article together at the last minute and without sufficient regard to things like grammar, punctuation, and spelling. He looked through the pictures of Henry Tyder again.

  “Why didn’t he confess the first time?” he asked Tibor.

  Tibor was obviously thinking about something else. He was leaning slightly forward, trying to get as full a look at the street as possible. Gregor tapped him on the arm.

  “Why didn’t he confess the first time?” he asked Tibor again.

  Tibor pulled his attention back to the table. “I don’t know,” he said. “Is that unusual? Is it the habit of serial killers to confess the first time they are suspected?”

  “No,” Gregor said. “Quite the opposite. But then, most of them never confess at all, unless they get away with it for so long it begins to make them crazy not to get credit for it. And even then, it’s rare.”

  “So then. Possibly this man was unhappy not to be getting the credit for it.”

  “After only, what, eighteen months and eleven murders?”

  “Tcha, Krekor. It would take you to think of it as only eleven murders.” “It’s not much for a serial killer,” Gregor said. He went back to looking at the paper. There were mountains and mountains of type. He looked into the face of Henry Tyder. It was the picture of him coming out of court after “causing a distubance,” whatever that meant. Gregor thought the man looked extremely pleased with himself.

  “Why did he confess this time?” he asked.

  Tibor brushed this away. “You are the expert on serial killers, Krekor, not me. If I had been in this man’s position, I would have confessed out of feelings of guilt, but serial killers are not supposed to have feelings of guilt. I have no idea why they do what they do.”

  Actually, Gregor thought, almost nobody had any idea why serial killers did what they did. There were legions of psychologists with theories, and the theories ranged through everything from childhood sexual abuse to early addiction to pornography, but nobody really knew. Gregor Demarkian had spent over fifteen years of his life chasing serial killers, the last ten of them directing the first law-enforcement division ever dedicated to doing that and nothing else. He didn’t know either, and he didn’t think that his successor at the FBI Behavioral Sciences Unit knew either. It was ridiculous to call this kind of thing “science.”

  “Still,” he said.

  He was so wrapped up in trying to make sense of it, he didn’t notice that the Ararat had gone almost completely quiet. If he had, he would have been more convinced than ever that the entire population of Cavanaugh Street was on a crusade to drive poor Phillipa Lydgate crazy. Instead, he kept running the most likely scenarios through his head. Henry Tyder confessed because he’d been caught red-handed. He confessed because he wanted the police to know how clever he was. He confessed because he was tired of the entire process and didn’t think he could stop by himself.

  “Crap,” Gregor said.

  Across the table, Tibor cleared his throat again. “Krekor, please,” he said. “You are not paying attention.”

  Gregor thought he was paying far more attention than he should have been. The Plate Glass Killer case was not his case, in spite of the fact that he’d helped out Edmund George when a friend of his had been unjustly suspected, and he wasn’t even sure he wanted it to be. There had been a time when he found serial killers fascinating, but that time was long gone. If there was anything really interesting at all about the Plate Glass Killer, it was that he did not rape his victims, before or after death. That, and the fact that this man—this particular man—had confessed to being the perpetrator.

  “Krekor,” Tibor said again.

  Gregor looked up. Standing next to their table was a woman he had not seen before. She was tallish, and very, very thin, and he hated her on sight.

  3

  Gregor Demarkian was not a man who jumped to conclusions, especially about people. If he had been, he would not have been as effective as he was when he was still in the FBI, and he certainly wouldn’t have been as effective as he had been in the years since, when all people hired him for was his ability to think through a problem without prejudice. He was also not someone who took instant likings and dislikings to people he didn’t know. He was far too aware of how often first impressions were the basis for a trust that benefitted only conmen, and of how too many very good people were messes and losers on first sight.

  The woman standing next to their table was not a mess or a loser. Gregor was willing to bet she’d never been a mess in her life. She was dressed up as if she were going to work at a law firm—or, better yet, as if she were going to work at a law firm on a television program—and she was holding an unlit cigarette in her left hand. Gregor wasn’t put off by the cigarette. Bennis had smoked for years, and all the very old men who had come from Armenia smoked foul Turkish weed nearly nonstop. There was something wrong with the way this woman held hers though. He had no idea what it was.

  Tibor had gotten to his feet. Gregor now got to his, feeling somehow put out that he’d been shocked into forgetting how to behave. You could tell this woman noticed things like that and interpreted them, not always kindly.

  “Krekor,” Tibor said. “This is Miss Lydgate.”

  “That’s right,” Phillipa Lydgate said. “I’m Phillipa Lydgate. You must be Gregor Demarkian. I’ve heard a great deal about you.”

  “How do you do,” Gregor said. It was the kind of thing Bennis would say, when she was tryi
ng to put somebody off. He even sounded like Bennis doing it.

  “Do you mind if I sit down?” Phillipa said. She waited just a split second before Tibor sat down again and then slid onto the booth bench next to him. “I’m sorry to interrupt your breakfast, and I won’t be long; but this looks like the only chance I’ll have to get most of the people around here in a face-to-face. Is this a usual thing in this part of America, going out to restaurants for breakfast rather than eating at home?”

  Gregor sat down again, carefully. They had had a rule when he was still in the FBI. When you were talking to reporters, you had always to assume you were on the record. “I don’t know what’s usual,” he said finally. “On this street it’s something of a tradition.”

  “And everybody on this street is of Armenian ethnicity.”

  It was a statement, not a question. “Of course not,” Gregor said. “Bennis lives on this street, and she’s about as Armenian as pumpkin pie.”

  “It is not only Bennis,” Tibor rushed in. “There is Grace.” He gestured to the middle of the room. “She is there. She plays the harpsichord. And there is Dmitri who runs the newsstand. He is from Russia.”

  “Where is this Grace from?” Phillipa asked.

  “Connecticut,” Gregor said blandly.

  Tibor gestured wildly at the wider restaurant. “Grace Fineman. Her family came from Germany, I think, but many generations ago.”

  “And she’s Jewish,” Gregor said.

  Linda Melajian was suddenly there, carrying the coffeepot and a cup and saucer. She put them down on the table in front of Phillipa, reached into the pocket of her apron and came out with a handful of foilwrapped Stash tea bags.

  “I can get you some hot water if you’d rather have tea,” Linda said. “And I can get you some breakfast if you want it. Not that you have to have it. People come in here and drink coffee in the mornings all the time. There’s no obligation. Tea or coffee?”

  “Coffee will be fine,” Phillipa said.