The Dark House

by John Sedgwick

  “You ran him over?” the officer asked.

  “Yeah, right here,” Schecter said. “Smashed him against the house.”

  “Jesus.”

  Rollins reached into his pocket and pulled out the tape recorder. “Here.” He handed the officer the tape from his tape player. “This has everything on it. It explains everything.”

  The officer looked down at the tiny cassette in his hand.

  “Yeah—everything that happened here,” Rollins said angrily. It was so hard to make the man understand. “I had the tape recorder going in my pocket when he tried to kill me. He told me how he’d killed my cousin. He chopped her up. He—” Rollins couldn’t continue. “Look, everything that happened is on the tape.” He tapped the cassette with his index finger. “Just listen to the tape.”

  “Okay—I’ll pass it on to the detectives.” The officer turned back to Sloane, who was screaming in pain as he was being shifted onto a gurney.

  Another officer charged out of the house. “Hey, guys,” he shouted. “We got a body inside.”

  “That’s what I was telling you,” Schecter said irritably.

  “We got a name off his driver’s license—Henry Rollins,” the officer shouted.

  “He’s my father,” Rollins said.

  “Your—” the officer near him said. “Oh, Jesus.”

  Flies were buzzing around his father’s corpse, and the kitchen wall behind him was splattered with blood. The air was heavy with the smell of death. Rollins’ stomach burned, every part of him hurt, and his head felt clogged, backed up with tears that would not fall. He was lost and alone. Rollins pulled out a chair from the kitchen table and dropped down into it. He was afraid he might collapse otherwise.

  Police photographers were taking flash pictures of the crime scene from a variety of angles. A thin man in a short-sleeved shirt was crouched by the body, his head turned slightly away from the odor.

  “We got the son here, Frank,” one of the cops told the man.

  “Oh, good.” The man stood up. He was a lanky redhead. He had on latex gloves, and he stripped them off with a rubbery sound. The man reached out a bare hand toward Rollins, who shook it limply. “Detective Frank LeBeau,” the man said. He gestured across to another man by the sink. “And that’s my partner, Detective Tom Jencks.”

  Rollins gave the men his name.

  LeBeau had the medics throw a sheet over the body. “We’ll take it out in a minute,” he told them. “But we need to go through some stuff here first.” He turned back to Rollins. “I know it’s a tough time for you, but there are some questions we’ve got to ask.” He took a seat in a chair across from Rollins. “Were you here when your father died?”

  Rollins nodded.

  “What happened?”

  Rollins touched his hand to his forehead. It felt wet and clammy. “God—where to begin.”

  LeBeau went to the sink and poured a glass of water. “Take your time,” he said, handing it to him.

  Rollins sipped the water gratefully. “He had a gun,” he began.

  “That one there?” LeBeau pointed to the rifle that was on the floor in the corner of the kitchen. It must have landed there after Sloane knocked it from his hand.

  Rollins nodded. “I thought he was going to shoot me. I grabbed for it, we fought, and the gun—the gun went off.”

  Had he shot his father? Had he?

  “What made you think he’d shoot you?”

  “He was pointing it right at me.”

  “Why’d he do that?” the other detective, Jencks, asked.

  Rollins took a breath. “Because of Neely.”

  Jencks again: “What’s neely?”

  “Neely. She’s my cousin. Or”—his voice dropped—“was.” Rollins tried to explain about Neely’s disappearance and his growing suspicions about his father’s involvement. But each line of explanation seemed flimsy and incomplete. As Rollins went along, he kept having to stop, to back up, to add a detail or two to bolster his account. Still, he plodded on, for nearly an hour, parrying questions from these two men. And his father’s corpse right there, bearing silent witness to his son’s full understanding.

  The thought came to him gradually, but it built and built until it had the power of hard fact: He hadn’t killed his father, nor had his father killed himself. They had done the deed together. Their hands were together on the trigger. Both had fired the fateful bullet, and therefore neither had.

  Rollins held nothing back. The story was over now; what was done was done; he had no secrets anymore. He told about his driving habits, and his tapes, and his discovery of the dark house. He told about Marj and Schecter. He told about Sloane. He told how Sloane had killed Neely, then tried to horn in on Neely’s ten-million-dollar inheritance. He told about his mother, about Wayne Jeffries and the crash on the highway. For Schecter’s sake, he said nothing about Tina. For his own sake, he left out Heather. These two were behind him now, but they had pushed him ahead. LeBeau mostly listened, taking careful notes in his notebook, asking only for a few points of clarification. But as the tale went on, he seemed to grow more sympathetic. He occasionally shook his head or looked over at Jencks in amazement, or muttered “God Almighty” under his breath.

  Finally, Rollins reached the part about becoming convinced that his father was involved in Neely’s disappearance and his realization that her body was hidden in the septic tank out in back of the house.

  “Wait a second now,” LeBeau said. “Here?”

  “Yeah, in the back.” Rollins took him to the window and pointed. “It’s out there, just past the edge of the lawn. When my father figured out I knew—that’s when he pulled the gun on me. Later, when Sloane showed up, that was where he was going to dump me.”

  LeBeau glanced at his partner. “Okay,” he said. “We’ll take a look at it later.”

  “Oh, and I found this.” Rollins pulled Neely’s wristwatch from his pocket, and passed it to the detective. “It’s Neely’s watch. It was in a drawer upstairs.”

  LeBeau hooked a pencil point under the clasp. “We might be able to get some prints off it,” he said. He set it down on the table. “Ten twenty-three,” the detective told Rollins. “Think this is when she died?”

  “I guess so.” Rollins went hollow at the thought of his father raping Neely, knocking her unconscious, then relying on Sloane to finish her off.

  LeBeau turned the watch over. “E. P.?”

  “That’s Elizabeth Payzen, Neely’s friend.”

  “The beneficiary,” LeBeau said.

  Rollins nodded.

  “She still alive?”

  “She died yesterday. That’s what set everything in motion.”

  “God, what people won’t do for money,” LeBeau said.

  Rollins led the detectives upstairs to the bureau where he’d found the wristwatch. There, LeBeau carefully bagged up the other pieces of jewelry as well as the box itself. When he came back, they reenacted the shooting, with LeBeau himself taking the part of Henry Rollins. Tracing the angle of the gunshot, LeBeau climbed up onto the chair and, with a penknife, extracted a bullet that had embedded itself in the ceiling. He held it up in a gloved hand. “This is what did it.” The bullet seemed almost pristine.

  LeBeau finally gave the medics clearance to lift his father’s body onto the gurney. Rollins trailed behind it across the driveway to the waiting ambulance. Jerry Sloane had been taken away in the other ambulance by then, but his and Schecter’s cars and the whole area around them had been cordoned off with yellow police emergency tape. Schecter was outside, talking to one of the officers. “I was just helping out a friend,” Schecter was saying.

  After the ambulance drove his father away, Rollins led LeBeau and several other officers outside to the septic tank. He passed the curled-up body of the dead dog, Scamp, on the way. “That was my father’s dog,” Rollins said. “Sloane shot it.”

  “Okay,” LeBeau said. “We’ll take care of it.”

  As Rollins stood by, a cou
ple of policemen pried back the cover of the septic tank, and then jerked their heads away when the stench hit. “Oh, man. It’s full of crap in there,” one cop said, his hand up against his face.

  “What did you expect?” another one said.

  They decided to leave that part till morning, when they could summon the local septic tank service—Red Top, just as his father had said—to drain it.

  “It looks to me like you’ve been to hell and back,” LeBeau told Rollins as they returned to the house. He made it clear to Rollins that neither he nor Schecter were under any formal obligation to stay in Townshend that night. “No one’s charging either of you with anything,” he said. “But I’d appreciate it if you’d stick around.”

  The detective drove them back to the Mountain View Inn in Woodstock. It was nearly three in the morning, and Rollins barely spoke to Schecter on the way, just gazed numbly out the window at all the dark houses they passed. The place was run by LeBeau’s brother-in-law, so Rollins and Schecter were able to secure a couple of small rooms up on the top floor even though the inn was theoretically all booked. Rollins had never been so exhausted when he dropped into bed. Still, sleep did not come. He kept seeing lights flaring, bodies tumbling. Pipes must have gone through the wall right by his bed, because he could hear water flowing and gurgling all night long.

  He called the hospital the first thing in the morning.

  It took a few minutes for a nurse to bring Marj to the phone. “Oh, Rolo, you’re there!” she exclaimed. “God, I was so scared! When nobody answered that phone last night, I—”

  “Father was pointing a rifle right at me when you called.”

  Marj gasped. “He was going to shoot you?”

  “It looked like it.” Rollins took a breath. “He’s dead now, Marj.”

  “Your father? He’s—?”

  “We fought over the gun. It went off and—”

  “He’s dead?”

  “The bullet went in under his chin. He died right away. Oh, God, Marj, it was—I can’t even say what it was. Then Sloane came and—oh, God. I found Neely’s body. It was in the septic tank. My father raped her that night, then banged her around and Sloane shot her. They took her up here and stuffed her in the tank. It’s all so awful, I can’t tell you. Wait—you there?”

  “I’m here,” she said quietly.

  “It’s over now, Marj. The police have Sloane, and I’m safe. I’ll be done here soon. The detectives need me just a little longer, and that’ll be it. I’ll be back in a few hours.”

  “Why didn’t you call me last night? I was scared out of my mind. I thought something terrible had happened to you.”

  “I couldn’t, Marj. I was so busy with the detectives, and then, when I got back, it was so late.”

  “I was up, Rolo. You think I could sleep? You could have called. I was up all night.” Her voice caught, and Rollins thought he heard her crying. “I was afraid you were dead. Dead, Rolo.”

  “I’m—sorry—I—”

  More soberly: “I don’t think I can take any more of this.”

  “But it’s over, Marj. Over.”

  “It won’t ever be over.”

  Rollins was frightened by her tone. “Please, Marj, don’t talk that way.”

  There was a knock on the door. “Time to go,” Schecter shouted to him. “LeBeau’s here.”

  “Just a second,” Rollins shouted back. Then he returned to the receiver. “Look, I’ve got to go. Just hang on a little longer. Okay, Marj? Please?”

  “Okay, Rolo. I’ll try.”

  Detective LeBeau handed Rollins and Schecter some coffee he’d picked up at a Dunkin’ Donuts. “Thought you might need something.” Then he drove them back to the house on Bald Mountain Road. The place looked drab in the early morning light, which revealed more starkly the peeling paint and untended shrubs. It seemed destined for tragedy. Several news vans were in the driveway, their satellite dishes elevated to beam the story back to the home station. Over a dozen reporters and cameramen had gathered behind the yellow emergency tape, which now ran from the side of the house out to the trees. They converged on the three of them the moment they emerged from LeBeau’s unmarked Chevrolet, shouting so many questions that Rollins couldn’t quite make them out.

  LeBeau raised his arms to keep everyone back. “Later, guys, please.” He managed to clear a path through them all for Rollins and Schecter, and then raised the yellow tape to allow them to pass through to the backyard.

  The two-man Red Top crew was already there. They’d driven their tank across the lawn, flattening several of the croquet wickets on the way. The air stank of raw sewage. “I think we’re about halfway down,” one of the policemen said, shouting to LeBeau over the heavy chugging of the Red Top pumps and the horrid slurping sounds coming from inside the tank. It took about ten more minutes, but finally the Red Top man handling the thick hose made a signal to the driver, who shut off the pump, bringing silence to the surrounding field.

  “All right, let’s get this over with,” Pete, the hose man, said. He was in faded red overalls, and from the expression on his face there was no doubt this was the last place on earth he wanted to be. The driver retracted the hose onto a big spool on the side of the truck, and then four or five uniformed policemen crowded around the open septic hole while the hose man got down on his knees to look inside. “Hand me that flashlight, wouldja Larry?” he told the driver. Larry climbed out of the truck to pass him a long metal flashlight. The hose man thrust the flashlight into the hole, and then poked his head down into it. “Oh boy,” he said when he pulled his head back out.

  “What’s he see in there?” one of the reporters shouted. Rollins turned: Three or four bulky cameramen had aimed their cameras at him, and a couple of technicians extended long boom microphones his way. Then one of the reporters stepped over the tape to steal a closer look, and three or four others followed. In moments, the whole press contingent was streaming across the lawn. The police chief himself, a burly character named Wexler, raised his arms and shouted to everyone to move back, and then directed a couple of his men to cordon off the area with their cruisers. They came around from the other side of the house, lights flashing, right across the lawn, flattening yet more wickets.

  “Okay, let’s have a look there,” Chief Wexler said once the cruisers were in place and the media were under control. He took Pete’s flashlight and crouched down to peer into the hole himself. “Well, it’s a body all right.”

  “How in hell we gonna get it out?” a lieutenant asked.

  “You can help us with that, can’t you, Pete?” the chief said to the hose man.

  “I’m not messing with no bodies,” Pete said.

  He turned to the driver, who was gazing into the hole. He was extremely slender, with a prominent Adam’s apple. “How ’bout you, Larry? You’re skinny enough.”

  “Aw, shit,” Larry said. “It’s always me.” He went back to the truck and put on a pair of heavy work gloves. He sat down by the hole, with his feet in, and then several policemen grabbed him by the arms and lowered him through the narrow opening.

  “Careful you don’t step on her,” the chief shouted.

  “I know, I know,” Larry said.

  Finally only his two arms were visible out the opening, and then they disappeared, too. “Okay, I’m down,” came a hollow sound from inside. “Hand me the flashlight.”

  A cop obliged.

  “You see her?” the chief asked.

  “Sure do. Goddamn.”

  “Well, bring her up,” the chief said.

  Minutes later, as the cameras doubtless zoomed in from behind the squad cars, a bit of grimy skeleton rose out of the hole. A portion of the rib cage, it looked like, with one arm limply attached. “Holy mother of God,” Rollins heard one of the reporters say. The bones themselves seemed delicate, like some sort of artwork, but they were blackened with what must have been excrement, and strips of rotted flesh clung to them in places. Rollins watched with a leaden feeling.
Neely. The golden hair, the bright smile, the keenness and joy—all gone; only a few scraps of skin and bone remained. Without a word, the policeman standing by the hole took the segment gently in his gloved hands and laid it down on a canvas sheet that had been stretched out by the hole.

  “Hang on. Here’s some more,” Larry said from underground. A butterfly-shaped pelvis with a long piece of one leg bone dangling off it came up. The cop laid that down on the canvas, too. Then, one by one, other grime-splattered bones emerged, some a few feet long, others just an inch or two. Finally, a skull. It might have been a prehistoric pot except for the few strands of golden hair that still adhered. The wisps of hair sparkled yellow in the sun. “Jesus,” a reporter said. The policeman set the skull down on its side.

  “That’s it,” Larry yelled up finally. “I don’t see no more.”

  “Okay,” Chief Wexler shouted down. “Good work, Larry. We’ll haul you out.” The policemen reached down into the hole to grab Larry’s hands. They braced themselves, then, their faces red with effort, pulled Larry out again.

  Larry’s boots, elbows and much of his front were black with sewage. “I’m never doing that again,” he said. “No fucking way.”

  Some reporters shouted for him to come over and answer some questions, but Larry waved them off. “I’m done, guys.” With his gloved hands, he tried to wipe off some of the thicker blobs, but succeeded only in smearing it. “God, I stink,” he muttered. He and Pete climbed back into the big truck and turned it around. The police guided the truck back around to the far side of the house. They undid the police tape, and let the truck pass back through to the driveway.

  A man in khakis with the word FORENSIC on his nameplate came up to LeBeau, who was still standing with Rollins. “I’ve got some preliminaries for you,” the man said. “Real rough.”

  “Let me have ’em,” LeBeau said.

  “Caucasian female, about five-six or five-seven. I think we’re looking at about a three-or four-centimeter indentation of the temporal lobe of the skull.”