Devil House(110)

Those kids, yeah, Gage said, that’s the other thing.



* * *



TAKE SETH, FOR EXAMPLE, he said. You remember Seth, right?

Sure, of course, I said, owns a gym now, kinda closed himself off when he didn’t like the way your interview was going.

OK, yes, he said. Seth is actually Joe. Joseph Caleb Clayton when he was born, just Joe thirty-eight years later when he dies inside the store where he’d been sleeping.

Wait, I said.

I know, he said. I have some leads on who his folks were but there’s only so much you can take. Several arrests for loitering, public urination, the kind of charges mean cops use when they just want to bother someone but also the kind nicer ones use when they’re trying to get somebody housed on a psych ward so they’ll at least have a place to sleep. From the write-ups alone you get the sense that Joe mainly ran into the meaner type. They use the term “non-compliant” to describe him, which is their way of justifying use of force. Later down the line he notches several vandalism charges. Pay phones. Newspaper racks. From this I get a picture of a guy who’s living on the street just trying to get by, and who is hungry, but doesn’t want to hurt anybody, so he’s knocking over newspaper machines for quarters. Maybe he found Devil House because he thought he’d be able to break into the machines back in the arcade, get a couple hundred dollars and stash it in a sock he keeps in a garbage bag. He was pretty burned out by the time he got there. Not everybody on the street is strung out but JC sure was.

There was a crack in Gage’s voice as he spoke. He had been waiting to tell someone about Joseph Caleb Clayton. But Ashton sent you the news story, I said. It was teenagers.

No, he said, that’s what Ashton thought when he sent it to me, too, because the way the place looked, it just felt like something a bunch of teenagers would do. And that was the sense of the case when it first broke. Some outlets jumped the gun a little. I found out the actual story early on, and then I had to make some decisions.

I reserved the several questions I had for the moment, hoping I’d still remember what they were when he got done.

Derrick Hall, OK, he continued. Darren Waters. Actually did live in Milpitas at one point. Held a job on the Ford line until his habits caught up with him. Like Joe, he bounced around a lot. San Francisco, Oakland. But because he’d held a job at one point his addresses were a little easier to trace if I put in the legwork, right up to when he falls off the map. Now, the only way his face ever turns up again anywhere is if some asshole puts his name out there and somebody prints a “How They Found the Porn Store Killer” piece. Not me. No way. He’s Derrick Hall now. He’s got a mom and dad who care about him, not the boys’ homes where he actually grew up and didn’t learn any applicable job skills and which graduated him to the street as soon he turned eighteen. He’s got a future ahead of him where the good things that happen rise to higher stations than meeting Joe at a shelter and learning, over a cold can of Hormel chili, that they both used to be into monster movies on TV when they were kids. Like me. Like you, too, right? Like you.

So you found him and talked to him, I said.

No, he said. I found some guys who knew him when he died. Darren, anyway, he says, is in the line of fire right next to Joe when the police arrive, but they only get him in the leg. “Only,” right? He had to pull the bullet out himself in the underpass that night. With his fingers. He was making a joke out of it within a year or two, which is how I know about it, from those guys. He would say, of any garbage he had to eat, that it was better than having to pull a bullet out of your own leg just to be able to sleep.

And Alex? I said.

Alex is possibly still in San Jose, he said.

San Jose? I said.

San Jose, Alex was actually from there, he said, or at least most recently from there, when you don’t have a fixed address it gets hard to say where you’re really from. Anyway. Once I started messing with the details it felt like it wouldn’t matter if I moved a few of the principal players around. Nobody cares about the actual details of anything, they just want the feeling they get when the story punches their buttons. Ashton sent me an initial report he ran across. It felt exciting, it felt lurid. But once I started digging, I couldn’t get the dirt off my hands. I’m the guy who found out what the actual story was, and the actual story was different from the one they pitched me.

Why didn’t you just tell that story instead, I said.

Because I couldn’t, he said. For a whole lot of reasons I couldn’t. Some of them just easy technicalities, like not being able to chase down enough biographical details about people who’ve fallen off the map; only then, sometimes, even if you can track down their families, the last thing they want is to rehash how someone they loved and cared for had to fall off the face of the earth and stay there because of their proximity to a murder scene. Think about it. And then there’s the kinds of stories people want to read, I talked to you about that earlier, it’s a very important question in the field: drug addicts, lost souls, they make great victims when your perp is some sociopath mowing them down in flophouses or whatever. But this isn’t that. This is self-defense. You can try to break new ground with how a bunch of guys on drugs in a house they’re squatting didn’t deserve to get shot and APB’d just for defending their home, but—

Self-defense? I said. I pictured Marc Buckler, I pictured Evelyn Gates. It seems like a stretch.