Glass Houses Read online

  Linda poured coffee into the plain white stoneware cup and blushed. Then she took off again. Phillipa Lydgate watched her go.

  “She’s very accommodating,” she said. “Is that usual? Is there a reason for her to feel so anxious? Is she afraid of losing her job?”

  “Hardly,” Gregor said. “Linda’s family owns this restaurant. Her father started it.”

  “Does he beat her? There must be some reason for the way she behaves.”

  “Vartan Melajian couldn’t bring himself to beat carpets,” Gregor said, “and there’s really no mystery about the way she behaves. She’s naturally accommodating, and she especially wants to accommodate you.”

  “Why me? She doesn’t even know me.”

  “Exactly,” Gregor said. “And you’re exotic, and sophisticated, and from another country. If I were you, I’d get used to it. There are quite a few people here who feel the same way. You’re our celebrity of the moment.”

  Phillipa Lydgate looked around the restaurant. A dozen people were trying to look at her without letting on that that was what they were doing. She reached into her purse and found her lighter.

  “Does this restaurant serve all American food?” she asked, pointing to Tibor’s little plates of hash browns and sausages.

  “It serves American and Armenian,” Gregor said. “It’s just that most people don’t order Armenian for breakfast. Come back at lunch or dinner though. Especially dinner. Dinner is full of tourists. They’re always eating Armenian food.”

  “Be serious, Krekor,” Tibor said. “We’re all eating Armenian food.”

  Phillipa Lydgate looked lost in thought. “So people from other neighborhoods come here,” she said. “Is that a problem?”

  “Why would it be a problem?” Gregor asked.

  “Well, with community feeling. Communities tend to want to defend themselves against outsiders. In some places in the United States, there have been incidents of violence and murder when someone wandered into a neighborhood he didn’t belong in.”

  “Have there?” Gregor said.

  Phillipa Lydgate looked him up and down. “You used to work for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, isn’t that right? And you still have something to do with the police force.”

  “In the first place,” Gregor said, “the Federal Bureau of Investigation is not the ‘police force.’ It’s a federal agency charged with investigating crimes on federal land and against federal law as it applies under the Commerce Clause. In the second place, I have nothing to do with any ‘police force,’ unless one of them hires me as a consultant. Which some of them sometimes do.”

  “Sorry,” Phillipa said. “Let me put that another way. You’ve had a long career in law enforcement, and you still have contact with law enforcement on a regular basis.”

  “Yes,” Gregor said.

  “So you must know of the kinds of violence I’m speaking of. Crown Heights, in New York City, wasn’t it? Where a group of black youths beat an Hasidic Jewish man to death when he wandered into their neighborhood. And neighborhoods in Los Angeles that belong now to gangs: the Crips and the Bloods. And to wander into the other gang’s territory is to die.”

  “Those things absolutely happened,” Gregor said, “although you’ve got the Crown Heights’ story in a truncated version. I’m just not sure what you think they have to do with Cavanaugh Street.”

  “Well,” Phillipa said.

  Gregor looked at his enormous mound of melon. He didn’t want to eat it anymore. He wished he’d ordered his old fry-up this morning, just to confirm Phillipa Lydgate in her prejudices.

  “The boys here couldn’t join gangs,” Tibor said. “Their mothers wouldn’t let them.”

  Gregor gave him a long look. It was hard to tell when Tibor was angry or upset. The years in Armenia before he’d been able to come to America had ensured that because he was always liable to arrest just for being a priest. But Gregor knew Tibor, and Tibor was beyond upset. He was close to exploding.

  “Look,” Gregor said. “Maybe it would make just a little more sense if you’d hold off deciding you knew what was going on until you actually did know. You’ve been here—how long? Twenty-four hours?”

  “Less than fifteen,” Phillipa said, “but it’s not my first trip to America. I’ve been several times.”

  “Where?”

  “New York. Washington. Los Angeles.”

  “Exactly,” Gregor said. “It would be the same if I went to the United Kingdom, visited nothing but Buckingham Palace and Hampton Court, and came back saying I knew what Britain was like. This is a fairly ordinary neighborhood in this city. It’s a little more upmarket than some, and it’s unusual in the number of families with children, because families with children tend to move to the suburbs. But nobody shoots up the landscape here. There are no gangs. I don’t think anybody even owns a gun.”

  “Howard Kashinian owns a gun,” Tibor said. “But Sheila took his bullets, so that he would not make a fool of himself.”

  “Yes,” Gregor said. “Howard. Well, Howard is Howard.”

  Phillipa Lydgate’s cigarette was collecting a long column of ash. “But this state does have the death penalty, doesn’t it?” she asked. “Bennis’s own sister was executed. And there is at least one town where the school board wants to teach the biblical theory of creation instead of science. And there are murders here. I looked them up.”

  “Yes, there are murders here,” Gregor said. “And a school board in Dover, Pennsylvania, did try to mention something called Intelligent Design in science classrooms; but virtually all of them were voted out of office at the next election, so that even if the court case hadn’t gone against them they would still have failed in their attempts to change the curriculum. It’s just not as simple as you seem to want to make it out to be.”

  “There are places in the United States where they wouldn’t be voted out of office, aren’t there?”

  “Yes, I would suppose there are. There are 291 million people in the United States. My guess is that we’ve got some of everything.”

  “And religion,” Phillipa said. “There’s a lot of religion. Most Americans are Fundamentalists of one kind or another, aren’t they?”

  “Have you met many Fundamentalists?” Gregor asked.

  “Well, no, of course not,” Phillipa said. “I mean, you said it yourself. I haven’t been to the more typical places in America, only to the coasts where things are different. I’m talking about the real America now—the Heartland.”

  “What do you mean when you say ‘Fundamentalist’?” Tibor asked.

  Phillipa Lydgate blinked. “Oh,” she said, “you know. They believe in God. I mean they believe He actually exists.”

  Tibor was now beyond upset. Gregor had no idea if Phillipa Lydgate had seen his clerical collar and meant to be offensive, or seen it and thought there was nothing about it to indicate that Tibor might “actually” believe in God. It didn’t really matter because Tibor was going to pop whatever the reason was.

  Gregor was desperately thinking of a way to stop him—stopping Tibor when he finally lost control was not easy. In fact, up to now, Gregor had found it impossible—when Donna Moradanyan was suddenly standing by their table, waving her cell phone in the air.

  “It’s Russ,” she said, thrusting the phone at Gregor. “He wants to talk to you. He says it’s an emergency.”

  TWO

  1

  Gregor Demarkian liked emergencies. At least he liked emergencies of a certain kind: real emergencies—like 9/11 or Hurricane Katrina—were not only godawful but inevitably demoralizing. Not only did they cause real damage, but they left you with the certainty that you were helpless in the face of the real forces of the world. This was why, although he was not himself religious, and couldn’t usually make himself believe in God, he was not dismissive of religious people. The great religions were not fairy tales. They might or might not be true in their particulars, and all of them couldn’t be true at once, but they did prov
ide both coherent narratives that explained the underlying logic of the world and coherent codes of action for living in it. And they mattered, to peoples and to civilizations. They changed the direction of history, even when people weren’t using them as an excuse to fight each other to the death in wars. They changed the direction of individual lives. Not believing didn’t end the wars, and it didn’t end injustice or poverty or superstition either. He was getting to the point where he didn’t much like people who did not believe, or at least the ones who made a great show of their not believing.

  Of course, he would never have thought of any of that if it hadn’t been for Bennis and Tibor. Bennis had taught him about narratives because that was what Bennis did. She wrote fantasy novels that he had a hard time understanding, although he liked to read them because she wrote the way she talked. Reading one of Bennis’s novels meant hearing Bennis’s voice in your head. Tibor had taught him about religion and religions. Before Tibor, he had never met a member of the clergy who could talk in more than platitudes. Now he seemed to meet them all the time. Between the two of them, they had taught him about emergencies, about the ones he liked and the ones he didn’t. It made him think of himself when he had first been a special agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, only three years out of graduate school, sitting in a car at the end of a cul-de-sac on kidnapping detail. In the days when Gregor had first joined the FBI, all new agents were required to have law degrees or accounting degrees. Then when they were trained and hired, they were put on . . . kidnaping detail.

  It was a matter of knowing whether something was about to go seriously and irretrievably wrong or not. It was the irretrievably that mattered. If some-body was dead, you couldn’t bring him back to life. If a building blew up, you could put it back together from the rubble. This was not that kind of an emergency. This was somebody panicking, and in a situation that would give many more opportunities of getting itself straightened out.

  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.”

  “She was making a bang-up society debut,” Jackman said. “The Tyders are one of the oldest families in Philadelphia, a lot older than those people out on the Main Line. And they’re rich as hell. They’ve got three signers of the Declaration in the family, four delegates to the Constitutional Convention, and a list as long as your arm of war dead, from the Revolution to the Civil War on down. And when old Owen Tyder married his first wife—that would be Margaret and Elizabeth’s mother—he converted to Catholicism, and the Tyders have been Good Catholic Laypeople, in capitals, ever since. The cardinal is taking an interest. But even if the cardinal didn’t, I’d have to, because there’s something else you don’t know about Henry Tyder.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The Tyders are Green Point. Green Point Properties. The biggest landlord in the city. They have to own close to a quarter of all the residential rental space in Philadelphia, and the company is entirely privately held. No stock, no stock-holders, at least not until the end of the year, when they’ve got an IPO going out. From what I’ve heard, it’s going to be the biggest IPO for any company based in this city ever; and the Tyders, all three of them, stand to pocket close to a billion dollars off the deal.”

  “My God,” Gregor said. “But what was this Henry Tyder doing living on the street? Is he the one who didn’t get any money?”

  “He’s got money, but they’ve fixed it so that he has limited access to it,” Jackman said. “In fact, he’s got no access to it at
all except through them. I don’t think that little shenanigan would bear scrutiny; but the man’s a drunk, and my guess is that the family lawyers were more than happy to go along to make sure he didn’t go through everything he had, which was considerable, although not as much as the girls got. But that’s not why he was on the street. He was on the street because the sisters keep putting him in rehab, and he doesn’t want to go.”

  “Ah,” Gregor said. “One of those.”

  “Exactly, ‘one of those.’ But you see what I mean,” Jackman said. “If we’re not careful, we’re going to get killed. And the last thing I want is for us to get killed and lose the chance of putting the Plate Glass Killer behind bars. I’d end up heading the police department in Petaluma, California.”

  Gregor paused. “So you think it really is him,” he said. “Russ said on the phone that it was a case of false confession, but you don’t think so. You think he’s the Plate Glass Killer.”

  “Maybe. I think he’s a killer, at any rate.”

  “Is there any reason for this, John, or is it some kind of natural protective ness of the department?”

  Jackman stood up. “Do you know how many of these guys I’ve seen over the years? Over the decades, really. I was a homicide detective. I was chief of police in at least three places. I’ve been an assistant district attorney. I wouldn’t want to convict anybody on my hunches, but this is more than a hunch. I don’t know if Henry Tyder is the Plate Glass Killer, but I do know that he’s killed at least one human being in his life—and not in a war. I can smell it. It might have been this woman, or the one we picked him up on before. It might have been somebody he knew in college or another bum on the street twenty years ago. But he’s killed someone, Gregor. You can bet on it.”

  Gregor would not bet on it. He had seen other men in John Jackman’s mood, and he knew everything that was wrong with it. This was how cases went to hell and killers went undiscovered and innocent men landed in jail. This was the cop’s version of being struck down on the Damascus Road. It was all about zeal and passion and that rock-hard, deep-gut certainty that had everything to do with human weakness and nothing to do with reality.