Devil House(14)

I opened my eyes. Between the smell I’d been trying to conjure from the ghost of some clothes on the floor and the air freshener making itself inconspicuous somewhere, I had the beginnings of something, a way in.

I begin with rituals like this in part because the more distant a crime is historically, the harder it becomes to know just where to start. Some people focus on what makes their killer tick; others like to render the historical scene as vividly as possible. You see this latter a lot with people who cover the Son of Sam: they want the reader to feel the heat of New York City in the summer, to see the lakes of riotous color dripping down the sides of subway cars and taste the parched pavement on the air during a four-week stretch when it never rains once.

I always end up at the actual scene of the crime, no matter where I begin: that’s my method. A feeling for the coordinates. A sense of place. To arrive on the premises, facts in hand. It helps, when it’s possible, to begin in the same spot where you’ll end up: you get both views this way, the bird’s-eye and the worm’s. But no matter what, I have to get my hands dirty. It matters whose air I’m breathing.



* * *



VICTIMS FEEL HARMLESS, at first: they can’t raise objections, they’re finite objects at rest in a stable field. But in the wake of each victim come waves of hurt: the rooms in which they lived have to be cleaned up; their larger possessions have to be parceled out; the people with whom they had outstanding accounts, material or otherwise, must learn to swallow their complaints. Sooner or later, I’d have to locate any such creditors still among the living, I knew. I hoped to forestall the search as long as I could. Just thinking about it made me tense. Cold calling is a bad look in almost every profession.

But by June I’d made a friend, and he knew more than I did about the neighborhood. It was Ken from the apartments across the street. We’d exchanged several head nods while leaving our houses at around the same hour of the morning a few times, but nothing past that; I was out early one day when he called out to me, his voice gravelly, a lit cigarette in hand. “Hey, the new guy,” he said, waving with the other.

“Gage,” I said.

“All right, Gage,” he said. We shook hands. “Ken.”

“My mother’s idea,” I said preemptively; most people say something about how they haven’t ever met anybody named Gage. Ken cocked his head a little.

“Well, all right,” he said: he had a light tone to his voice, in which I thought I heard a note of correction. “Mom knows best, right?”

“Right, right,” I said.

“Mine still calls me ‘Kenny.’ Makes me feel like a little kid.”

“Whatever they call you for the first few years after you’re born probably sticks with them forever,” I said.

“Maybe that’s it,” he said. “Anyway, where were you before you got to Milpitas?”

“Oh, just up in San Francisco. You?”

Ken laughed; he looked down a little, toward the sidewalk. I wasn’t sure what was wrong with my question. “I’m from here,” he said when he found my face again. “Until pretty recently not a lot of people moved here.”

“Real estate agent says it’s coming up,” I said.

“Well, that’s true,” he said. “It’s growing. New people. Right here next to the freeway, though—don’t take this the wrong way, but most of the people moving here … they don’t move here.”

“Oh, I know,” I said, remembering my first visit to town. “Whitney tried to show me a place in—what was it called? The neighborhood had a name.”

“There’s a lot of that now,” said Ken. I was trying to guess his age without staring too hard: maybe thirty-seven, I figured. His clothes looked freshly laundered and his hair was neatly shaped. “Wolf Trail Crossing or whatever. I think they get to mark up the price if they give a block a name like that.”

“Well, anyway,” I said, “they were a good deal more expensive than this one.”

He looked at me a little sideways; he’d noticed I wasn’t volunteering much. “Yeah, I bet they were,” he said after a second. “Listen, I’m on my way to work, I better get going. You want to get a beer later?”

“Sure,” I said, a little surprised.

“Cool,” he said, with a friendly smile; I thought I heard a note of suspicion in it, but I’d hardly had any company at all since getting to town, and solitude can do strange things to your hearing. “I’m home after five. You’ll be around?”

“Haven’t really figured out many other places to go,” I said.

He laughed again. “I imagine you haven’t,” he said.



* * *



AT ABOUT FIVE-THIRTY that evening, my doorbell rang; it was a cheery two-note chime, and it had to be new—who puts a doorbell on the front of a porn store?—but it sounded, to my ears, like a relic of the 1970s: there was something aspirationally optimistic about it, as if it were trying to climb above its actual station.

Ken produced a six-pack of Tecate and set it down on the coffee table by the couch in the living room. I don’t think I’d seen a Tecate since college. We cracked our cans open simultaneously; the sound caromed off the walls with a weirdly metallic echo. Whoever’d done the refurb on the place hadn’t given much thought to the acoustics.