Devil House(12)

* * *



FIRST THERE WERE THE POLAROIDS: twenty of them, held together in bunches of five with skinny rubber bands. It was a decent haul for my first venture into the world of what might be out there. Getting lucky is at least fifty percent of good research; I’ve had whole projects go down the drain when I couldn’t make a good connection in the early going.

These pictures, and the clipped newspaper stories that accompanied them, made for a promising beginning. They came from an eBay user in New Jersey called “tru_crimebuff973.” She had all the usual entry-level stuff—local police bulletins with sketches of now nationally remembered suspects; inkjet reproductions of paintings by serial killers on death row: puppies, flowers, clowns; black Zodiac rifle sights against white backgrounds on one-inch badges, a dollar apiece. But among these run-of-the-mill finds, she also boasted several collections of photographs, which she claimed came from estate auctions. I didn’t believe her; but my responsibility is to my story, not to whether the stuff I dig up might be admissible in court.

My guess was they were actually what I call outtakes: crime scene photographs discarded in favor of better, clearer shots, later fished from the trash behind the police station and subsequently passed from hand to hand over the years. Prices decline as the public’s memory of the case fades, and these, in particular, were lowball items as far as the market was concerned—they had no bodies in them, no handwritten annotations, no context beyond the claims attached to them in the listing. Scenes from the investigation of the crimes at Devil House. Even so, they seemed quite inexpensive, given the usual rates of the actual-artifacts market. Some cold cases grow legs of their own. Mine hadn’t.

But verifying the scene was easy, because the renovation, while thorough, hadn’t been a complete do-over—in 1986, the building having until recently been a business, there’d been no porch at all—but the shot on the top of the bundle was a view from the street, and you could see where the addition of the porch had been a pretty hurried surgery. Even with all the smoke long since cleared, the scene remained. The bricks, the awning, the distances between the windows: they were all the same. They were just cleaner now, their details shinier but their general station unchanged. This was my house. This was how it had looked back then.

But the first thing that catches the eye in the shot is the sign, of course. Derrick’s gift for lettering, had things gone differently for him, might have landed him a job on Madison Avenue. It’s not fancy; the clientele it sought to attract didn’t want fancy. They wanted to know that what waited for them inside was wild, and forbidden, and possibly dangerous. Accordingly, Derrick had chosen a style recalling the horror comics of the 1940s and ’50s. The edges of the letters seem to ooze or bleed; only black outlines around each letter, neat and seamless, constrain the runoff. One word hermetically facing the street: MONSTER.

Its lure feels more violent than sexual, but this could be a function of phantom presentiment, and of the secondary work Derrick did after the building changed hands. By the time you see this picture, you probably already know that it used to say ADULT X in the space to the right of MONSTER, a space afterward occupied by the cartoonishly grotesque hairy tongue seen in many of the news stories. The hand that painted this tongue might as easily have extended it farther to the left, blotting out the rest of the original sign: but Derrick left MONSTER intact, either because a tongue all by itself might have seemed too much, or because he was proud of his lettering and wanted to leave it up long enough for more people to see it than the ones who used to come here seeking skin mags and video booths.

First looks mean a lot; I stayed with this frame a moment more. I could see, from my window, a telephone pole, also present in the photograph—but it was clean now; in the photo it had several layers of paper stapled to it, though I couldn’t make out the text. The edges of another house on the lot a little to the north crept into the frame: that house was gone now, though I didn’t know what had become of it. I wondered briefly whether it had been a business or a home. It made a difference: both to my story and to the people who’d either lived or done business there. For now it was just a blank.

Finally, there was a dog who’d just happened to be walking past when the picture was taken. It was of no particular breed: just a dog with dirty golden fur, its mouth open and its tongue hanging out. I was happy to see this dog. A dog brings something cheery to even the grisliest of scenes, or so it’s always seemed to me, and the presence of a second tongue mirroring the painted one on the sign overhead seemed almost like an artist’s choice, an Easter egg for the keen onlooker.

The other shots were all interiors. From them, it’s clear that the Devil House of legend was really only a store into which some people moved their belongings for a short space of time. They’d made it their own, but most of the wares and fixtures remained. There was the old countertop, still boasting a cash register that must have been too heavy for kids to move it; several mattresses on the floor elude the eye, drawn instead to the magazine and video racks amid which they rest. In tighter shots, the squalor of the mattresses is clearer, and the magazines’ titles are legible: DIAMOND COLLECTION. EIGHTEEN AND SHAVED. GIRLS WHO EAT CUM.

This was Anthony Hawley’s store. Hawley is gone by the time this picture gets taken, and Derrick and his friends have been busy redecorating. Their rough work has brought a note of chaos to the already lurid feel of the scene: In the racks, on the tier nearest to the floor, you can see a few copies of Daredevil, the comic book about the blind-lawyer-turned-superhero, and also an issue of Epic, a science fiction magazine from the seventies. On the back wall, in spray paint, you can see all the blind-alley symbols and slogans that would successfully drive the investigation for months: A GENERATION OF VAMPIRES; SORCERER CULT; SET 4 SACRIFICE.