“Hawley!” says Seth. “Do you know I never actually met that guy, I figure he’s still around here, people tend to kind of settle once they land here, I’ve noticed, though that won’t be true much longer if the rent keeps rising. Whole different subject. But I felt so bad for him, you know, they kept sending news crews to his house, to his office, if a news crew showed up here to talk, well, I mean, I guess there’s you, but that’s different. Did you talk to Derrick?”
I haven’t, yet. “You might want to put on your kid gloves,” he advises me. “It was different for Derrick, because Hawley told them he’d had Derrick working in the store, and so some of the cops started to get a lot of very sick ideas about the whole thing, which then of course became rumors, small towns are like that, and then people started to look at Derrick like his whole life was just a front for something seedy. And he didn’t really need something like that in his senior year with all the big things to be thinking about, you know? I mean college. Life after college. All that stuff. And he’s thinking, This is going to ruin my chance with the colleges, they’ll find out, what do I do if I don’t go to college.
Seth Healey grows quiet; as I’ll learn over the course of our day together, this is something that doesn’t happen very often. There’s a window in his office overlooking the gym; he’s gazing through it, maybe taking stock of the scene, so far from the place we’re talking about—even if, physically, it’s really just a short drive away.
“Not everybody has to worry about the same kind of things Derrick had to worry about back then,” he concludes when he picks up the thread. “It took a toll.”
* * *
WE’RE AT A CHAR-BROILED BURGER STAND half a mile from the gym, seated at an outside table; there are fewer and fewer places like this left in California, but once they were everywhere—fast-food stands before the big players gobbled up all the little ones, relics of an earlier time. Seth has ordered a double patty, no bun, covered in the works and with special sauce; slopped onto translucent wax paper in a plastic basket, it’s a giant, lurid heap of color with steam rising from it. Seth attacks it studiously, without looking up, his lean, wiry frame wholly attending to his task.
People are sometimes offended if you make observations about how they eat—most people don’t think about it much, and some would rather not—but I take the chance, and ask him if he’s always this quiet over lunch. “Always,” he says, wiping his mouth with a paper napkin. “If I don’t devote a hundred percent of my attention to something I’m likely to abandon it halfway through. It’s my brain, right? My brain is like that. I can’t focus and I can’t focus and I can’t focus and then suddenly, bam, there’s something I care enough about to really give it my time and energy, and for that period of time, it’s the only thing I care about. Almost the only thing in the world. Meals, conversations, work. It means I have to warn people, don’t try to tell me two things at once, even though, when I’m the one doing the talking, I can keep almost an infinite number of plates spinning. But it looks different from this side, I guess.”
I wonder aloud whether the intensity of his focus feels like a blessing or a burden.
“Well, it’s both,” he says. “When people don’t understand you, they don’t even try, they just write you off. So you have to really sell yourself. That’s something I had to learn. But the internal benefits of being your own man, it’s something I teach at the gym. For example, I have one of the best memories of anybody. Because I’m all over the place when I talk, people assume my memory’s like that, too, but it’s not. Once I take note of a detail”—he taps his temple with his forefinger, twice—“it’s in here forever.”
The police thought you had an active imagination back in 1986, I say.
“I do have an active imagination,” he says proudly. “But also, I know what I know, and if I say I saw something, it’s because I saw it.”
* * *
THIS, FOR ME, IS THE HARDEST PART of talking with the exiled knights of Devil House: they all know that suspicion coalesced around Siraj, both among the investigating officers and out in the community; they all know that, as a figure in the public imagination, he became a spectral presence, a name that evoked fear without proximal cause. A bogeyman. But Siraj, as they also all must have known, could not be connected to the crime scene in any way. The people who’d pointed fingers at him were busybodies looking for an outsider to blame, long-standing locals eager to shift any blame from their own. Had the Devil House Four talked among themselves, at all, about the net that was closing around Siraj and his family in the days and weeks after the news hit the wires? If anyone could answer, it would be Seth; he would remember.
“I know Derrick felt bad, but that’s just because he’s Derrick,” Seth says, back at the gym. It’s empty now; Seth teaches a class at four-thirty, so I’ll need to make the best use of our time together. “He knew enough to get people to leave Siraj alone. We all did. But he also knew if the finger started pointing at me, they’d send me away again. Once you’ve been in, they’re always looking for an excuse to send you back.”
He’s talking about his time in care facilities—brief stints both times, but acutely unpleasant experiences, brought on by manic episodes when he’d gotten his medication schedule mixed up and his mother hadn’t had the time or the energy to keep it straight for him. Several of the boys he’d known on these wards would only be graduating to even more restrictive environments, and knew it; his old friend knew it, too.
“It would have gotten really bad if they started looking at me,” he says, getting up. “Or Alex. Derrick and Angela could handle the heat, but if anybody’d gotten their hands on my notebooks, they would have made a connection.”
I actually have some of your old notebooks, I say, and he breaks into a smile so big it could power a naval substation.
“Did you bring them with you?” he says, sizing me up, wondering if they might have been in the room with us the whole time, and I tell him they’re in my car.
* * *
WITHIN SECONDS we are halfway through the gym, headed for the parking lot. I’m not quite sure how to read Seth’s eagerness to revisit his younger days; as he’s told me himself, they weren’t always the happiest times. There wasn’t a lot of money left over after his mom paid the monthly bills, and people who’ve spent time behind the locked doors of treatment facilities seldom return with good memories of their time inside. But Seth leads the way back to my car, his monologue gathering steam: “You had these on you the whole time? Wow. Just wow. We were at that table eating burgers and these were just sitting there? Man. Wow.”
I retrieve my backpack from the trunk of my rental car— I always stash it in the trunk, just in case; Seth reaches for it as soon as I have it in my hands. I follow his lead, even though sitting down at a desk or a table away from the wind and the weather feels like the obvious move when handling what are, essentially, antiques.
Each notebook is individually sealed inside its own Ziploc bag, just as they were the day I got them, when I took pictures of every page before returning them to safety. Treasures like these are vulnerable to wind and weather and sunlight and air; they’d been safely stored in a cabinet at the Milpitas house ever since.
In Seth’s hands they are living entities, not artifacts but vital presences in the present day. He grows quiet when he extracts them from their housings; the shock of his silence is considerable, as I’ve been listening to him and making few interruptions for several hours now. He leafs through the pages roughly, his eyes scanning down each one, searching for something. If there is something specific he’s trying to find, it could take ages; Seth’s style back then was a riot of detail, and almost no blank space emerges from the dense thickets of line, shadow, angle, curve, accent, and annotation.