Free Glass Houses by Jane Haddam Page A

some.”
    â€œWell, 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.”
    â€œDoes he have an alibi for one or two of the others?”
    â€œI don’t know yet,” Russ said. “That’s one of the things the private detective would be for.”
    â€œDo you have a private detective in mind?”
    â€œYes,” 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?”
    â€œHe 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.”
    â€œI 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?”
    â€œYes,” Russ said. “Well.”
    â€œWill he talk to me?”
    â€œHe said not, before I called.”
    â€œDon’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.”
    â€œYes,” 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 haveto 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
    H enry 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