Devil House(18)
He rented a car from Budget. It was a white Ford Taurus, the economy option. At home, he drove a red 1968 Pontiac GTO with cream leather interior, which he pampered by hand every weekend; by the time he got to the offices of Gates Homes, Ltd., he was out of sorts. Evelyn’s receptionist, a high school student working off the books, remembered him later: “He was mad,” she told the detectives. “The way he came in, I thought he was going to hit somebody. I don’t mean to be disrespectful, because now he’s dead, all right? But he was all red and sweaty. Like, hot. He pushed open that door like, I’m going to cause trouble. I kept one hand on the phone just in case.”
Gates took him out for a pick-me-up, presumably to improve his mood; he drank a Manhattan, which records show she paid for with her business Visa. Over drinks, beneath cut-out Halloween pumpkins and cartoon spiders, she showed him printouts of the several other listings he hadn’t inquired about on his previous visit, just in case: Buckler talked fast and interrupted a lot, and she thought maybe she had a live one on the line. She was right. He harbored dreams of a big windfall. His friends kept saying the Silicon Valley boom was just now entering its actual growth spurt. Houses outside the city were still cheap. He wanted in.
They didn’t arrive at the property until after dark. Most realtors will try to get you inside during daylight hours: everything looks more appealing in the sunlight. But Buckler didn’t care that much, and it showed; his only concern was how much it would cost him to make any improvements needed to resell the place at a profit. Minus that motive, he wouldn’t have even gotten out of the car to inspect this property: it was one of the unasked-for listings Evelyn Gates had brought along. She hadn’t intended to show it tonight. It was a semi-distressed property in a nothing neighborhood, the sort of place you might point out to a client when you drove past it. But with a client all wet behind the ears like this, you never knew.
Inside, when the figure emerged from the shadows, Buckler froze right where he stood: he wanted to run, but his fear of the unknown wouldn’t let him pick a direction. Evelyn Gates was standing flash-frozen in genuine horror at the sights that surrounded her, the thousand loving touches that illuminated the magnitude of her miscalculation, the innumerable things she didn’t know or care enough to learn about the people who lived or did business in the properties she’d inherited from her father. Buckler watched her die, the whole sudden scene; when, as she fell, his survival instinct finally kicked in, someone was waiting to block his escape route. It could have been anybody; I have my suspicions, but, for several reasons which I hope to eventually make clear, I’m not inclined to put them down on paper.
I try to honor the dead in my books. It’s one of the things, I hope, that sets me apart a little from my partners in true crime. When I read what others write about places where the unthinkable became real, the focus always seems off to me. Victims spend their entire time in the spotlight just waiting for the fatal blow, on a conveyor belt that leads to the guillotine: I pity their fates, but it’s hard to grieve for them, because the treadmill on which they ran feels specifically designed to kill them. I brought this up at a convention once; I wasn’t exactly shouted down, but a luminary I’ll decline to name told me, on a live mic: “There aren’t any villains in a true crime book. There’s the hero, and there’s his victims.” Everybody in the room laughed. It left a bad taste in my mouth.
I swim against the tide on this when I can, within the limitations of my word count and the known parameters of my readership’s attention span. At the same time, you don’t want to make saints out of everybody: there are plenty of murder victims who, while they certainly didn’t deserve to die any more than anybody else does, weren’t exactly blameless in their lives. Everybody’s complicated. I try to cleave to this precept. It usually pays off, and it hasn’t been a particularly hard habit to keep, because it seems self-evident to me.
Once, in Savage Coast, I wrote about a rich family. I remember telling an interviewer after it came out that I’d had “fun” writing it, which I immediately regretted. The book detailed grisly crimes with real human cost; people who have more to lose often make bigger messes. They’ve never had to clean up after themselves.
It was my third book. The title came from a Randall Jarrell poem, a modern retelling of one of the Greek tragedies—brothers and sisters are always locked in battle to the death when it comes to the old masters, who invariably rise to their theme once the killing starts. I’d read the poem in college: I was up late one night trying to cram as much of the required reading as I could into the twenty-four hours before the final exam, but there’d been no way to understand the action without slowing my pace. To extract anything worth using from the poem, I’d had to read it out loud. It became a sort of self-hypnosis.
I was all by myself in the dorm, late spring in my sleepy Central California town, somewhere between midnight and dawn, caught up in a vision so vast that its import seemed to outstrip the drier themes of the class (Revenge Among the Ancients: it was an elective). A brother was sailing to an island to kill his sister, I still wasn’t clear why; she’d become a priestess since they’d last laid eyes on one another, and her acolytes were now laying hold to her brother to bring him to the altar, where she would dispatch him with great and brutal ceremony.
How strange to stand like a child, and tremble
At a headless body—one more head