Glass Houses Read Online Free Page B

house.”
    â€œIt was a nightmare.”
    â€œNot for me, it wasn’t. It was a wonderful thing. It was calm. And organized. I remember something Mother said once when we were very small—not to me, to one of her friends. I was playing in the room and they didn’t notice me. She said that somebody they knew lived a very disordered life.’ And I knew what she meant. Immediately. That’s the problem with all this. It’s as if we live very disordered lives.”
    â€œHenry does.”
    â€œI know he does. But I don’t want to. I don’t want that to be me.”
    â€œIf Henry’s in trouble, there’s not much either one of us can do about it. Drink decaf instead of the regular stuff. It’s only going to make your nerves even worse.”
    Margaret did not think her nerves could be any worse than they were, and she did not drink decaffeinated coffee for the same reason she did not eat potato chips. There was a difference between real food and fake, and decent people—people with ordered lives—didn’t eat the fake kind. She got a thickceramic mug out of one of the cabinets and put it to the side. She’d take the coffee into the spare room and see if there would be any mention of the story on the national news, although she doubted it. Philadelphia didn’t have the same influence on the rest of the country that it used to have.
    She was just carefully filling the coffeemaker with coffee when Elizabeth cleared her throat.
    â€œYou know,” Elizabeth said, “there’s one good reason not to worry about any of this yet. One sensible reason, I mean.”
    â€œAnd what’s that?”
    â€œHenry hasn’t called. They get one phone call when they’re arrested, and Henry knows the number here by heart. If he’d been arrested, he would have called.”
    Margaret brightened. “That’s right,” she said. “That’s right. I’d forgotten about that. I wish you’d said that in the beginning. It must have been hours since all this happened. They don’t get these things on the news right away. If he’d been the one they picked up, he would have called by now.”
    She poured water over the coffee, fitted the lid back on the coffeemaker and stepped back to wait for actual coffee to come out the other side. She felt relieved, very relieved, so relieved she almost thought she must have lost weight.
    It wasn’t as good as time traveling back forty years or so, but it would have to do.
4
    I f Bennie Durban could have been anything at all when he grew up, if he could be anything at all now that he was supposed to be something in particular, it would be a particularly brilliant serial killer. Serial killers were the only ones left with any style. All the other outlaws had fallen by the wayside. Bank robbery was a profession for thugs. Instead of Bonnie and Clyde, you had ski masks and armored cars and hand-it-over notes that weren’t even spelled right. You saw the reports on the evening news and they made you cringe. Embezzlement didn’t have the cachet it ought to have had either. Bennie did like listening to stories about really titanic business crime, but lately all the bang-up spectacular bankruptcies had not been about crime but about stupidity. How intelligent could you be if you ran through a hundred million dollars in six years and all you had to show for it was the kind of art that made the Catholic League protest outside the Mayor’s Office? As for being a revolutionary—well. Bennie didn’t see it. Either they wore T-shirts under their sports jackets and talked about the Consciousness of the Proletariat, or theydressed up like street criminals and posed around with machine guns, but in both cases they just looked silly. Serial killers really were the only heroes left. The smartest ones operated for years and never got caught until they were ready to turn themselves in. Some