But it only takes him a minute. “There,” he says. “I did this one just a day or so before. Wow. It’s all coming back. It’s like—it’s like the whole experience was highly negative for all four of us, but when I see this, I think, even then I was a guy who knew how to plan something and make it happen, I just didn’t know it.”
He is quiet again, and he’s stopped turning the pages. He stands still and concentrates. He’s looking at a gigantic block-letter 7 that takes up a whole page by itself, drawn in a comic-book style that makes it look three-dimensional, like one of the letters on the Hollywood sign casting its own shadow against the hillside beneath it.
“Hardly even feels real,” he says, staring into the block 7 like a fortune-teller looking for shapes in the crystal ball.
* * *
WE’RE ALONE IN THE GYM, sitting on the apron of the boxing ring; Seth says the time after lunch until his afternoon class is pretty slow most days. I get the feeling that there is no point in trying to hide things from Seth, who reads moments accurately while they’re still developing. His focus may wander, but his mind is very sharp. I tell him that one thing that struck me about his notebook is how closely its contents correlate to some of the reimagining of Devil House, right down to the deployments of symbols and sigils.
“Man, I was living and dying for Devil House,” he says. His voice, almost hushed, sounds like it’s coming from a distant world, some permanently disappeared planet whose hills and valleys he walked when it was real. “It was a special time. When the thing happened in there, no disrespect to the dead, of course, but it hurt us more than it hurt almost anybody. Or maybe I just mean me. I needed a place to hang out, a place to be with one friend instead of in a crowd, a place that felt like I belonged there. Needed. You’d have to be me to really understand.”
In his hands are two of my crime scene photograph finds—not the gory stuff, I don’t have any of that, but the aftermath of the transformation. You can see the porn angel, and the words painted on the walls, and a chalk outline somebody drew on the floor: Seth, or Angela, or Derrick, or Alex. The outline must have seemed especially jarring once the investigation got going—if there are two dead bodies on one side of a room and a chalk outline on the carpet right next to them, the fair assumption is that there’s a third body somewhere. I say to him that I think I get it, at least a little: the care they took to make their work seem real, the cooperative spirit of the enterprise.
“No offense,” says Seth, “but it’s like you’re trying to describe a flavor that you’ve only ever heard about but never tasted yourself. Like, look at this.” His finger rests just above the left lower corner of the shot; all I see is something crumpled-up, nothing that seems to merit real description.
What is it? I ask.
“Alex’s notes,” he says. “He was super-careful about all the words and pictures. All night he stayed focused. I felt like it was a present to me from him: because he knew he was leaving, because he was only half-there a lot of the time anyway but the store had given him life. I freaked out when Derrick said we were going to have to leave, but Alex almost apologized to him. He just seemed sad. I didn’t have much, you know? But he didn’t have anything. So when we started in on the whole thing, Alex gave it one hundred percent, and he’s such a great artist, you know, he always had the touch. Me, I paint first and ask questions later. Alex outlines everything first. Here—”
He snatches a notebook from the small stack of them that sits on the apron between us.
“All this stuff. Page after page. Plans, outlines. I saw him doing it all night while I was just running wild, doing whatever seemed wicked to me: there’s Alex, eyes all screwed up on a fixed point on the page, making sure it’s going to come out as cool as it can be. Throwing it away if it’s not exactly what he wants. First time I’d seen him all the way awake since he turned up again.”
He points again at the crumpled ball in the frame.
“When you see this, it tells you a different story than the story I know. All the stuff you have, the story you’re going to get from it is different from the one I know. From the one we all knew. From the one you’re probably going to tell no matter how hard you try to tell the real one. All this stuff, to me, is something only a few people can understand, and some of them, maybe all of them, aren’t even the same people they were back then, you know? It’s like this stuff can only really be seen by people who’ve already seen it.”
He looks up at a big clock on the wall, and then back at me. For a man who had to teach himself most of the social graces from scratch, he’s a remarkably effective communicator.
“No offense.”
* * *
ONCE, WHEN I WAS IN SECOND GRADE, somebody stole a pencil sharpener off Mrs. Mangano’s desk. There were thirty-one of us in class, and things got chaotic sometimes; she was nearing retirement, and knew to pick her battles. But the missing pencil sharpener had struck a nerve, and she shut down class until she found the culprit, which she did by asking everybody directly, one at a time and in front of all the others, if they were the guilty party.
She kept her calm when she did it; this was the genius of Mrs. Mangano’s art. She didn’t look mad, but she had to’ve been furious, to sweep the day’s lesson plan aside just to recover an item that the school probably bought in bulk, that the supply closet probably held whole boxes of in reserve all year-round.
“Robert, did you take the pencil sharpener?”
“No.”
“Thank you, Robert. Christine, did you take my pencil sharpener?”
“No, Miss Mangano.”
“Mrs. Mangano. Thank you, Christine. Gage, did you take my pencil sharpener?”
I hadn’t, and I said so; it was Patrick Long who’d done it, and by the time she got to him, he was almost grateful to crack. He cried in front of the whole class, and his pranks never again attained the destabilizing character of their pre-confessional days.
So, when I decide it’s time to put the question to him directly, I do it in my best Mangano voice, hoping to harness some of her deceptive ease and confidence. “Hey, just because I have to ask,” I say: “Did you kill Evelyn Gates, and her client, the visitor—Marc Buckler, right?”
He fixes me with a cracked smile. “‘Her client,’” he says. “This case is your whole life right now, and you’re going to make money off of it like a lot of people have over the years, and Marc Buckler’s name is just slipping your mind sometimes, right? Right, OK. Well, Gage, I had a good time showing you around, and I hope I was able to help you a little; and also, I never killed anybody in my life, and I don’t know anybody who did, and I wish you all the best.”
We both stand up; the formalities of the interview have a sacred rhythm almost everybody respects.
“Sorry if that was a sore question,” I offer as he holds the front door for me.
I’m on the sidewalk; he could let the door close, but he waits.
“I’m not sore,” he says. Seth is a very believable guy, and I believe him. “But when I start to see which way something’s going, I usually check out if I think I’m not going to be able to control it. I spent a lot of my life not being in control. Now I know that if I want control, I have to take it. You know?”
He gives me an extra second to study his face; I feel like if there were a murderer behind those eyes, I’d see him now.
“Good luck,” he says, as the door swings gently shut.
DERRICK
“It was different, but it wasn’t a gigantic shock,” Derrick tells me when I ask him what he thought of North Carolina at first. “Pensacola right after Milpitas, now, that was something else. Can you even imagine?”