Devil House(19)

To stuff and smoke and set on an empty stake;

And if in the long nights of the long winter

It still stares at you with its aching smile,

And when you name it, and lean to it longingly,

Its eyes seem to cloud in the firelight

And it turns from you, slowly, in the stinging smoke—

What is it but one more head?

In Savage Coast I tried to let Alan Halprin speak for himself. Son and presumptive heir to wealthy parents, he’d anticipated a windfall when his parents died; but his sister, Jessica, suffered from delusions, and couldn’t take care of herself. So they’d left her the estate, a sprawling neo-baroque complex overlooking the Pacific; it had been their opinion that hospitals were beneath her. The will further stipulated that a nurse stay on the property with her, although whether she genuinely required acute care became an important question at her trial.

To Alan, they’d bequeathed any cash left over; to them, this seemed like a fair division of the estate, but he decamped immediately to Hollywood, quickly squandering half his inheritance on cars and dead-end investments. The remaining half ought to have been plenty, and he might have done well for himself, but he could also see the more likely end awaiting him: dwindling assets, work for hire.

So he drove back to his childhood home in a Spider Veloce he’d paid for in cash, and there he lay in wait, hidden by the riotous coastal overgrowth. He’d brought along a pickax in his JanSport backpack. He crushed the nurse’s head when she came out one morning to water the zinnias; the first blow knocked her down, and the second one finished the job. But he hadn’t counted on his sister’s increasingly paranoid state; all the knives in the kitchen had been transferred to her dresser drawers, and she made short work of Alan when he came in through the back door: quietly, she thought, but not quietly enough.

The court was more sympathetic to Jessica than to Alan. The prosecution brought out huge blowups of the nurse’s shattered skull: hers had been a senseless death. It was an easy case to take sides in. A sick woman stalked by a jealous brother, an act of self-defense.

This had been enough to keep the jury from dwelling too long on the hideous list of indignities she’d visited upon her brother’s body over the next several weeks: the police don’t sniff around the mansions of the wealthy, so she’d had plenty of time alone with the body before anyone’s suspicions had been aroused. The long days she’d spent in the estate, enacting further mutilations upon the pliant cadaver at leisure until, an artist completing her work, she finally dismembered it, were awful to contemplate. To understand the particulars, I felt, was to feel pity for the person who had borne the brunt of them.

So I wrote Savage Coast in part to speak up for Alan, who was no prize, but whose death meant that one person’s story had never been told. It’s how my mother raised me: I think of the candle maker who wants to be king. I try to let him at least hold the keys to the castle in his hand, even if he never gains entry.

But as my time atop the foundations of Devil House grew longer, my long-cultivated stances toward victim and perp, as they call them at the conventions, began to pull at their moorings. It was an uneasy feeling for me. I resisted it, but I followed the facts where they led: to the other bodies, to the neighborhoods in which they’d lived and died, to the streets beyond them and the highway above. Measure, measure again, then cut. It’s what you’re supposed to do, if you’re honest.





7.


FOUR BLACK-AND-WHITES PULL UP in front of the building at exactly 4:30 a.m. It’s November 2, 1986: in bigger towns, Halloween parties probably are still going strong, but here it’s quiet. An onlooker, in the dark, might take the garish graffiti all down the door that faces the street as seasonal decoration, an invitation to trick-or-treaters who might otherwise skip the house by the freeway. But as the arriving officers begin to ascend the porch steps, they take note of the devastation around them, which is general.

Broken bottles are planted out front, jagged sides up. It’s like something out of an old cartoon but for the stench, which you can’t miss: these are Thunderbird and Ripple empties, their cheery upside-down labels like distress flags, raised foil highlights glistening in the dark. Mingling with their winey sweetness is a smell of fresh soot: vaguely runic shapes have been burned onto the concrete walkway. Off to one corner, atop a broomstick jutting up from a patch of grass at an angle, there’s a mannequin’s head, its hair scorched to the roots, its eyes painted matte-purple. If this particular detail is meant to scare people away, it’s strangely positioned: only one officer sees it going in, but the later inventory confirms his impression.

Across the steps that lead to the front door, someone’s scattered dozens of small animal bones—chicken, fish—and these, as boots advance across them, break the carefully observed quiet with a chorus of loud snaps. Everyone freezes, on the lookout for traps; but no lights go on inside the building, and no sounds come from within. The team leader waves two officers around to the back of the house, where there’s a door that used to be an employee entrance; it’s padlocked, but the wood is warped and splintered. Anybody could easily kick it open from either side.

The remaining two officers stand guard near the patrol car—it’s only paces from the scene; the lot is small—their guns drawn in case anyone tries to run. From their position, these two have the best view of the proceedings. They get only seconds to take it all in: the element of surprise is indispensable in a raid. In the glint of the streetlight, they note that the planks of the porch have been painted in alternating colors—red, black, two reds, another black, recurring voids in a crimson field. On the front door, silver paint: a pentagram inside a circle that heralds a riot of words in red that bleed over into the doorframe and onto the outer siding both right and left: