MARY ZAVALA (NEIGHBOR): I don’t know her! But she was at the beach earlier, I saw her out there. I went out for a swim. What? No, over at the pool. Nobody ever swims out in the bay almost, you know? It’s too cold! But I have trouble sleeping and we have a pool key so I went for a swim and then I thought I’d just kind of, you know, you’re up late, just look at the sky a little while before trying to go back to bed. And I saw her out there! She had a wheelbarrow and she was standing in the water. I didn’t know who it was. I still don’t know. I live in the other building, right over there, it’s all the same apartments but there’s three buildings. Do you know what they say she did? I don’t really know anything but they sent all those police cars, you saw ’em. She doesn’t live in my building, I don’t think. I know pretty much everybody who lives in mine. But I knew something was wrong! Like I told you I have trouble sleeping and I’m awake a lot, there’s never anybody else awake but there she was. I wanted to go ask her: Is everything OK? But you never know with people. And then I seen her throwing things in the ocean and I said, Oh, I don’t want to know, you know? I went back inside, it’s not my business.
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.
Anthony felt largely the same way about his new inventory, but business was business. For the first few weeks after the big changeover, as shipments of fresh tapes and magazines arrived every other day, he’d found some of it a little exciting—in plenty of places, you’d had to go to ratty movie theaters if you wanted to see this kind of stuff. But being surrounded by porn all day numbs you up in a hurry. After you’ve seen the people who can’t seem to live without it, shuffling in through the door every day, struggling to make eye contact as you change out their bills for tokens, your attitude shifts; even sadder are the ones who don’t struggle at all, who hang around the counter trying to make conversation. They were all friendly enough; he tried not to judge them. But it’s easy to get jaded.
Derrick saw Hawley’s gentle manner with his new customers as worth emulating. There was something desperate in how the people coming in always kept their heads down until the door shut all the way behind them. Everybody needs something. Sometimes a customer, mid-conversation and without any evident provocation, would start regaling Derrick with itineraries of perversions, disgusting things—acts they’d either seen or heard about, unnatural things that sounded like unpolished fantasies half the time—and then his sympathy felt more like pity. But unless they left more mess in the booths than they had to, he bore them no ill will. He couldn’t understand the ones who didn’t clean up after themselves, though. Didn’t they know somebody else was going to have to do it?
One late summer afternoon, he found the back door stuck. He was just going to put in a couple of hours and then head home; his family had been taking great pains to treat him like an adult now that he was almost eighteen. As long as he didn’t make trouble they let him do as he liked, more or less; he had always studiously avoided trouble. It was strange, this feeling of no longer needing permission; you want to grow up until it starts really happening, and then it happens. He’d been reflecting on this a little when he found that his key wasn’t turning in the lock.