Devil House(10)
Subsequent developments within the walls that once housed Lonnie Roberts’s luncheonette make up the story that has occupied my days since I left San Francisco, the story I came here to tell. California has a way of erasing its own history; I’m told that the place where Walt Disney first drew Mickey Mouse is a law office now. But among possessions retrieved from Devil House after the killings were some Polaroids of the edifice and interior of Valley News. In them, you can still make out the walls that once belonged to the Sunliner Grill, and the front counter where the cash register once stood. It’s the same counter; the eye immediately classified it as an antique, even if its surroundings are now decidedly modern: the oversized VHS boxes, the lurid magazines, the enormous glass display case filled with dildos and inhalants. There’s a rack of comic books near the door, certainly Derrick’s doing, completely out of place. His hand is also evident in exterior shots: the stylized horror-poster lettering of the sign jutting out from atop the flat-roofed building shows great care and attention to detail, red rounded block letters with clean, brush-free black outlines. It sits at an awkward angle, trying to split the difference between facing the freeway and the street.
Yellow tape went up around the property in 1986. The crime scene stayed largely undisturbed until the final disposition of the case became known; the former Valley News building stayed empty for some time after that, as the right to the deed was in question. Once the contents of the building were no longer in dispute—the tapes and the magazines, the old 8mm projectors and the multicade video machines, the bags of spray-gold tokens and the boxes of off-brand condoms—it was all sent to the landfill. That was in 1990; all that’s deep under several dozen strata of recent history now.
Twelve years later, I moved in. I entered the fully remodeled interior to find the smell of fresh paint still competing with a Coronado Cherry–scented air freshener on the kitchen counter, the visions I’d been hunting for in histories and blueprints and printouts difficult to reconcile with new ergonomic angles and muted hues: the hopeful face of this affordable, cheerful house I’d be getting at a price that wouldn’t have fetched me a closet just a short drive and a bridge away in San Francisco.
4.
PEOPLE BRING EXPECTATIONS to the site of a massacre. It can’t be helped. Often, they’ve formed these expectations in secret—not the small sort of secret you keep because it’s a little unflattering or because it’s nobody’s business, but the deep cover of secrecy afforded by the infinite unlit corners and corridors squirreled away inside the human brain, where wishes and biases and preemptive guesses can be activated and established without the host ever knowing that the process has even taken place. This is a necessary dynamic for us to function in the world: we can’t always be referring back to a table of which opinions we already know we have, which questions we consider already answered. But few things, at any rate, are more powerful than expectations. Blunt force, maybe. Firepower, certainly. Sword and steel. But even those have their limits. The imagination has none.
* * *
THE MURDERS at Devil House were not, of course, the first time Milpitas had been in the news for murder. They weren’t even the first time in its recent history. In 1981, a teenager named Anthony Broussard murdered fourteen-year-old Marcy Conrad without any apparent motive; he showed the body to several friends, who’d all been too afraid to call the police. There was a movie about it a few years later, River’s Edge: it was popular, because people love to tell themselves stories about the grave dangers posed by wayward youth. They always arrive at the same questions—why don’t these young people care? how did they get like this? where were their parents?—but the asking of these questions is an exercise in self-portraiture. They’re not good questions; they’re not even questions. They’re ghost stories masquerading as concern.
I suspected that people in Milpitas had learned this the hard way, and I imagined they wouldn’t be thrilled that a writer was moving to town to write a book about an even grislier local case: one which had somehow managed, for the most part, to duck the radar of the national news media. This was part of what made the case attractive to me: Why hadn’t they swarmed? There are several ready-made narratives to be spun from any local crime story whose details call to mind some earlier communal shock; you just have to plug in a few particulars. The Problem with Milpitas. The Soul of the Suburbs. A Small-Town Boy.
If you live where catastrophe strikes, you’re right to be suspicious of the people who come to gawk. They may dress up their motives—“telling the real story”; “getting it right”—but they’d say anything if they thought it would make you talk. Reporters are like the police. It’s in their interest to tell you whatever you need to hear as long as it makes you cooperate. The same is true, too, of writers with bigger plans, greater ambitions. I had a detective once tell me, by way of declining to answer any further questions from me after a few facts-of-the-case softballs: “Everybody has a motive.” He didn’t elaborate. No elaboration was needed.
By the time I arrived in Milpitas you could track how locals felt about River’s Edge without even having to play gumshoe about it. There were message boards, archived listservs, op-eds in The Mercury News about parole hearings. With very few exceptions, Milpitans felt like their town and its people had been misrepresented—by writers, by actors, by a whole host of moneyed people from the other end of the state who didn’t know the first thing about what it was like to live an hour or more from the big city. It was a raw deal: stay invisible until somebody wants to spotlight your defects. Small communities whose murder cases are just lurid enough to attract the attention of outsiders learn and relearn this again and again; it’s one of the unignorable facts of crime. The less you have to lose, the more it will end up taking from you.