No, he said, that’s what Ashton thought when he sent it to me, too, because the way the place looked, it just felt like something a bunch of teenagers would do. And that was the sense of the case when it first broke. Some outlets jumped the gun a little. I found out the actual story early on, and then I had to make some decisions.
I reserved the several questions I had for the moment, hoping I’d still remember what they were when he got done.
Derrick Hall, OK, he continued. Darren Waters. Actually did live in Milpitas at one point. Held a job on the Ford line until his habits caught up with him. Like Joe, he bounced around a lot. San Francisco, Oakland. But because he’d held a job at one point his addresses were a little easier to trace if I put in the legwork, right up to when he falls off the map. Now, the only way his face ever turns up again anywhere is if some asshole puts his name out there and somebody prints a “How They Found the Porn Store Killer” piece. Not me. No way. He’s Derrick Hall now. He’s got a mom and dad who care about him, not the boys’ homes where he actually grew up and didn’t learn any applicable job skills and which graduated him to the street as soon he turned eighteen. He’s got a future ahead of him where the good things that happen rise to higher stations than meeting Joe at a shelter and learning, over a cold can of Hormel chili, that they both used to be into monster movies on TV when they were kids. Like me. Like you, too, right? Like you.
So you found him and talked to him, I said.
No, he said. I found some guys who knew him when he died. Darren, anyway, he says, is in the line of fire right next to Joe when the police arrive, but they only get him in the leg. “Only,” right? He had to pull the bullet out himself in the underpass that night. With his fingers. He was making a joke out of it within a year or two, which is how I know about it, from those guys. He would say, of any garbage he had to eat, that it was better than having to pull a bullet out of your own leg just to be able to sleep.
And Alex? I said.
Alex is possibly still in San Jose, he said.
San Jose? I said.
San Jose, Alex was actually from there, he said, or at least most recently from there, when you don’t have a fixed address it gets hard to say where you’re really from. Anyway. Once I started messing with the details it felt like it wouldn’t matter if I moved a few of the principal players around. Nobody cares about the actual details of anything, they just want the feeling they get when the story punches their buttons. Ashton sent me an initial report he ran across. It felt exciting, it felt lurid. But once I started digging, I couldn’t get the dirt off my hands. I’m the guy who found out what the actual story was, and the actual story was different from the one they pitched me.
Why didn’t you just tell that story instead, I said.
Because I couldn’t, he said. For a whole lot of reasons I couldn’t. Some of them just easy technicalities, like not being able to chase down enough biographical details about people who’ve fallen off the map; only then, sometimes, even if you can track down their families, the last thing they want is to rehash how someone they loved and cared for had to fall off the face of the earth and stay there because of their proximity to a murder scene. Think about it. And then there’s the kinds of stories people want to read, I talked to you about that earlier, it’s a very important question in the field: drug addicts, lost souls, they make great victims when your perp is some sociopath mowing them down in flophouses or whatever. But this isn’t that. This is self-defense. You can try to break new ground with how a bunch of guys on drugs in a house they’re squatting didn’t deserve to get shot and APB’d just for defending their home, but—
Self-defense? I said. I pictured Marc Buckler, I pictured Evelyn Gates. It seems like a stretch.
Self-defense, he said, look it up, Christ, all over the country people shoot drunks who happen to have wandered into their back yards, on the Fourth of July, say, Memorial Day, whatever, castle doctrine it’s called, you have a right to defend yourself within your domicile, it’s a very old legal position. If I’m in your house without your say-so, then you have the right to consider me a threat. I thought about this long and hard and I know that’s the applicable statute here, in recent years it’s kind of been hijacked by gun nuts to justify opening fire on whoever they want, but I feel like there’s something deeper in it, not property rights, none of that, more like something on the books to protect you when the emissaries of the king decide you’ve got something the king wants, you have to have something somewhere that says to the crown, this far and no farther, that’s how I look at it, maybe I’m on my way to becoming some sad survivalist guy, plenty of stories there, those guys are pretty into dreaming about defending themselves with deadly force. I mean, don’t get me wrong, nobody deserves to get killed, but what are these guys supposed to do, everybody’s already thrown them away and they’ve got nothing, just nothing, and nobody was using that building for anything, they weren’t hurting anybody, would it have killed these people to just leave those guys alone, just do something else instead of fucking with the one thing they had that belonged to them? Would it have been so bad to just write it off? They could have done that. They could have just turned the other way. All three of these guys were nomadic enough by nature that they were going to pull up stakes reflexively sooner or later. And instead they just take bullets in their legs, they’re back out on the street with nowhere to live, strung out, desperate, scared, hurt. They drift, and they drown. No reason. And all the while I’m looking around, new construction going up, no room for anybody who doesn’t already have money, all these people just invisible to the Evelyn Gateses and the Marc Bucklers, less than invisible, nonexistent. And I thought about it, and I thought about it, and I thought about it, and after a while I just couldn’t stand it.
But Alex made it out, anyway, he said, and I tracked him down, he can be hard to understand but I got enough of the real story from him to turn it into what I got, a real enough story that people would maybe read it and care about it instead of just filing and forgetting it the way they do with every other story where some burnout gets kicked to death or set on fire or shot dead, at most a story like that gets half a day of social media outrage and then crickets, so I did what I did, I told Alex I was going to do it, he thought that was funny, he never laughs about anything but I got a little laugh out of him about that; he said, well, everybody was a teenager once, and then he zoned out again, he spends most of his time in the zone, who can blame him, people who live on the street see stuff every day that would crush your spirit but they just keep going, and then somebody writes an exposé for the Times or whatever every other year and people wring their hands, nothing does any good, but I got scared somebody would figure it out because the details of the scene were the same, all three of those guys really did dress up the store to look like a witches’ coven, if you saw the crime scene photos you’d think they went on to become rich artists or something—
I did see them, I said, they’re attached to your manuscript.
Right, yeah, he said
What about Angela? I said.
There is no Angela, he said. I wanted Alex to have another friend in the world. You know. His actual story is hard.
There was a silence in which I wondered why he hadn’t told me Alex’s real name, but I felt that in Alex we were somewhere near the center of something delicate, and I didn’t want to break any membranes that weren’t yet ready to break.
About the manuscript, though, he said as Angela West evaporated into the air. Can you send it back? I get paranoid about it. I don’t know what I’m going to do next, but I know I need to be the only person who has a copy.
Sure, I said, there’s a shipping place down the road.
Can you go there tomorrow? he said.
* * *