Devil House(37)
DANIEL REED (PARAMEDIC): We got the call about—was it two hours ago, Vince? Two hours ago. Hour and a half. Severe bodily injury was all we heard but when we got here they told us just to sit tight. I can sit tight here as easy as I can anyplace else, they can get us on the radio if they need us, so I sit tight. When they brought her out, from what I could see, a lot of blood, she looks hurt, possibly in shock. I wanted to put a blanket over her but I didn’t want to get in the way and she was in handcuffs. To me she looked like one of those crazy—what were they—
VINCENT ROSSETTI (PARAMEDIC): Manson girls!
REED: The Manson girls! You seen them? All whacked-out on something, all dressed up like—
ROSSETTI: Halloween, man.
REED: Halloween, you know? Anyway all I know, the two injury victims, the two—
ROSSETTI: The two alleged victims.
REED: Right, the two alleged victims, thank you, we were supposed to take them to the hospital, but they didn’t end up going to the hospital, because—
ROSSETTI: We can’t do anything for them, is what he’s saying.
REED: We can’t do anything for ’em. You know what I mean? I don’t mean to sound hard-hearted, but you see a lot of stuff on this job.
* * *
EITHER THE CHYRON OPERATOR DIDN’T GET AROUND TO inserting the names of the three people whose conversation makes up the last frenzied minute-plus on the tape—three people talking to the camera all at once, finishing one another’s thoughts, framing questions for themselves in order to make sense of the scene before them—or somebody forgot to pass their names along to him. They stand in an undecorated frame; they could be anyone. They are a nameless chorus whose song the censor didn’t see fit to pass along to the public. It took me two days to locate the spot in the parking lot where they’d been standing; everything’s different now, so I had to go by shadows and light at the exact right time of the early morning according to the paramedics’ log. It seemed like a pointless effort in the end. The turnover inside the complex was total by the time I got there. Their brief testimonies stand apart from the case as it went forward. There is no way to compare their reporting to the matters in question, save asking you. It was too late for that by the time I got here.
WOMAN 1: She was always nice to me!
WOMAN 2: That is a nice lady. This can’t be right.
MAN: There’s no way. People are saying she cut up those guys and sacrificed them or something. There’s no way.
WOMAN 2: She’s just a teacher!
WOMAN 1: I don’t believe it.
MAN: Somebody was saying she did it right there on the beach. In the middle of the night, they were saying. It sounds so awful but there’s no way.
WOMAN 2: There’s no way.
WOMAN 1: She tracked blood all the way down the hall, I heard. Bloody footsteps. I don’t believe it, but here we all are.
MAN: What kind of person does that?
WOMAN 1: This is a safe place! What kind of person?
WOMAN 2: I don’t know. They say it was her, but I don’t know.
WOMAN 1: And she was always so nice.
WOMAN 2: I know! And it’s safe here, like you say. I don’t believe it. I just don’t.
3
Devil House
1.
KNIGHTS REALM
Derrick didn’t have a regular shift at Monster Adult X. His arrangement with the store was informal but reliable: he showed up when he could and helped out where needed. Anthony Hawley wanted to help Derrick out, because Derrick’s presence haunting the racks had lent an agreeable energy to the often otherwise empty store back when it sold comic books. Then he’d persuaded Hawley to let him do busywork for store credit now and again—straightening up the racks, or running a vacuum over the dingy carpet. Hawley could still remember the frustration, in his younger days, of getting turned down for easy jobs on the grounds that he lacked experience; before he made the shift to dirty movies and magazines, he told Derrick he’d be welcome to stay on if he wasn’t bothered by the new stock. “You’re eighteen, though, right?” he asked feebly when he’d made the offer. Derrick laughed and said something about September birthdays, though he wouldn’t actually turn eighteen for several months. But vice economies avoid the radar. Anthony Hawley wasn’t going to demand to see his ID.
He felt confident about Derrick, who showed promise, with his canvas backpack smartly slung over his arm everywhere he went. In Hawley’s day, wearing your backpack around town after school would have been a kind of social suicide, but Derrick made it work; once, when business was slow, Anthony’d caught him cleaning it with a fresh toothbrush, the way you might with a pair of shoes you wanted to keep new. It left an impression: Derrick didn’t idle. When he ran out of tasks, he sought out more to do, and when there were no more tasks to be found, he tended quietly to his own affairs.
The arrival of the new stock didn’t seem to faze him. One day, half of it arrived all at once on a pallet from Encino: several hundred pounds of pornography, tightly shrink-wrapped in plastic and vacuum-sealed. In the supply closet there was a giant stack of comics Hawley had paid cash for and couldn’t return; the supply closet claimed more of Derrick’s interest than the store could. Plenty of teenage boys would have been willing to risk a shoplifting charge to get their hands on the torrid stuff now glistening under fluorescent lights inside the revamped Valley News, but Derrick couldn’t see himself as one of those guys who openly ogled Playboy at the barbershop. All this harder stuff seemed a little gross. Any reading he did behind the counter consisted of comics dead stock.