She says, “Why wait to call the guy?”
I don’t tell her that I’ve been getting emails from strangers, I’ve been in contact with some of the press in Detroit, and I’ve seen my name lambasted as a hack on some of the murder blogs around the Internet. I’m worried that the more often people learn of my presence here digging around, the more likely I am to find myself opening my hotel door to a .38 snub-nosed pistol pointed at my face. In a couple of weeks, after my kids have left, I’ll reach into the danger zone, and anybody with a beef can pop me if they want, but right now I am limiting my exposure.
What I also don’t tell Paula is that the man she’d met, even if he’s not super-comfortable on the grip end of a murder—even if he’s just a plain, good guy—is among the least likely to provide new information. The prosecutor’s office cultivates a shut-it-down mentality when it comes to controversy. There’s no way some APA will open his heart, share a cup of coffee at Starbucks, and say, “You know who you ought to look at? The people who sign my checks.”
TERESA CALLS ME when I’m on my way out of the hotel to get lunch the next day. She’s in the parking lot with food for us, so I meet her in the lobby. We embrace for a long time, then separate.
Up in my room, we sit on my bed and eat. She’s brought a loaf of French bread, some vegetables from her garden, some meats from a deli, and a Diet Coke for me. I pretend, for a while, that I am doing the right thing; but after we’ve eaten, the truth takes over. I know that I am spending time with Teresa for the very reasons my father left my mother for Paula: a hole in the world opened up and he was shown something he’d never have with my mom, and he walked through that hole and disappeared from us.
I think about my kids. I think about Teresa and whatever life she’s built, the little I know of it.
“You’ve been with your boyfriend for ten years,” I tell her.
“Maybe I’m not happy.”
I don’t tell her what I think: that nobody is fully happy, that every relationship on the planet is tainted by measures of unhappiness yanking at the seams of delight in them.
SLIDING WINDOWS
I spend a night wandering the downtown corridor on foot. I park outside the Lafayette Coney, get a hot dog with mustard and onions, and start walking, staying out of alleys.
I keep to the sidewalks and stroll. I pass Comerica Park where the Tigers play. A game is on, the stadium lights illuminating the block with spillover. The old baseball park from my youth, Tiger Stadium, is a dirt-covered lot now, cloaked by darkness a few miles away.
I pass a row of bars, hard-core rap shaking their foundations. Most of the streetlights are burned-out. A few people stare at me, but mostly nobody pays much attention. It feels good to disappear into the concrete.
It’s hot out, maybe ninety degrees. I’m wearing my combat boots and jeans, a hoodie over my tank top. I tie the hoodie around my waist and sit on a curb near the river and I’m a small dot beneath the looming Renaissance towers where my high school buddies had rented rooms on Devil’s Night to watch the city burn. I can see the lights of the Ambassador Bridge to Canada glowing in the distance, spanning the sheen of the river.
I get a text from Teresa that says she misses me today, wants to see me soon. I feel comforted by her, but I don’t know how to process that. Comfort isn’t the highs and lows of drama, not the thrill ride I’d grown up thinking love is.
Regardless, comfort and Teresa both seem like a distraction. I’ve come back to Detroit for the case, not to feel good about myself. So I don’t text Teresa back that night. Walking back to my car, I pass the Joe Louis fist suspended in the median on Jefferson Avenue. I cross traffic and stand beneath it. I put my hand on the fist and let my fingers linger.
The next morning I wake up early, click my television to the Tot Mom trial, then put it on mute. I have breakfast in bed and make notes:
1. Where is the privately funded polygraph Busch supposedly failed (administered by Lawrence “Larry” Wasser)?
2. Talk to Lamborgine.
3. Talk to Vince Gunnels.
4. Call Dietz, Raj, and Hunt.
5. Name of the dry cleaners guy?
6. Talk to Gunnels’ sister in Butte.
7. Talk to McKinney Jr.
8. Talk to Bridget.
9. John’s sister works for Feiger!
10. Carl Leiter also represented CB alongside Burgess.
11. Reni
Feeling defeated, I blow the list off and watch Ultimate Fighting on cable for an hour, work out in the gym, then spend the remainder of the morning in the lobby, glued to my laptop, looking for titles to the Fox Island properties, Michigan-based charitable foundations of the seventies, Adam Starchild, and two committee members in the Fox Island Lighthouse Association alongside John McKinney Jr., even though I still cannot prove that Fox Island is directly linked to the case.
In 1978, shortly after the OCCK murders ended, I find, the Department of Natural Resources’ Waterways Division set a new list of ecological goals for South Fox Island, one of which was to preserve the integrity of, and protect from desecration, an ancient gravesite on the land. Somewhere in my stack of papers there’s an official statement from a cleared suspect in the OCCK murders in which he directs the police to “go up there north” if they wanted to find the truth. Shelden’s island, North Fox, was scoured at the time, with the police reportedly turning up nothing of substance. South Fox was apparently never touched, but was later discovered to have been used for drug-running operations.
I GET CHINESE takeout for lunch, eat it in my room, and watch more Ultimate Fighting. I try to nap. I get up and shower during a rainstorm that’s set in. When the water is spraying my face, I think I hear a window sliding open.
I get out and pull back the curtains, stand in my towel after I’ve showered. The window hasn’t been moved, I don’t think. I watch the rain until it clears and becomes a red swath in the distance over Northwestern Highway.
I keep thinking about Fox Island being another skeleton key, like the prosecutor’s offices, that will open every door.
TERMINAL
On July Fourth, my wedding anniversary, I call my kids early, knowing they’ll be out watching fireworks tonight. I don’t reach them, leaving a voice message instead. I spend the early part of the night in my hotel room watching cable, eating barbecued ribs and collard greens from a local soul food carryout, and listening to bottle rockets go off outside the hotel.
I feel lonely. The Fourth is normally a family night for us. We don’t celebrate our anniversary but we always went to the fireworks, which I never really enjoyed but tolerated yearly to witness the joy my kids found in them. I thought of this as creating memories, but what my kids will likely remember is not my admiration of their folly but the grimace I sometimes wore with each explosion. When I think of fireworks, I think of fingers being blown off, or of being at summer camp one year when a boy taped a cherry bomb to the belly of a frog, or the images of Holocaust victims I was forced to watch in Hebrew school on a black-and-white reel-to-reel, how the bodies were lined up and stacked like already-charred wood, how the dead had been burned into their dying.
It’s macabre, I know.
I watch cable until midnight, mostly more news about Tot Mom. Reporter Nancy Grace won’t shut up about it. Ms. Anthony certainly looks guilty, but a trial, if the system is working, will determine that in the end.
The OCCK grand jury, I soon learn from Cathy, will disband without charges being brought and without anybody in the public knowing what or whom was discussed. In the absence of a working system, like in the OCCK case, there is only private investigation and public appeal. Sometimes people appear to contemplate violence. Like Tom Ascroft once told me, “The prosecutor’s worst nightmare is that I get diagnosed with a terminal illness, because then what’s going to stop me?”
In his position, I might consider violence, too. An eye for an eye, when you’re out of options, can seem reasonable. I hope I’m not another overzealou
s reporter, a one-man lynch mob in my assumptions about the case. This is why I haven’t returned any calls from members of the press, several of whom have gotten a line on my cell.
I want to be sure about what I know and don’t know before I talk to anybody.
IN THE MORNING I start making calls, trying to track what happened to Reni Lelek, the female police officer from the newspaper photograph beside Tim King and John McKinney, Birmingham’s first female officer. I call newspapers, I call police stations. When I find out Reni’s actually alive, I just sit there on the edge of my bed with my cell phone in my hand. The ghost is walking, I think. How could I have been so wrong? What made me think she was dead? The Birmingham PD tells me that Reni retired a few years ago and lives in Arizona. I try to find her on Facebook but can’t. I find someone who appears to be her daughter, though, still living in Michigan.
I dig a little deeper and get a work number for the woman, but when I call they won’t put me through. Everybody has moved on. Maybe I should, too, I think. It’s eleven a.m. and I haven’t eaten breakfast. I’ll go do that, I think, but when I get into my car, I end up skipping food and merging onto the freeway back to Dexter, where I park again and walk into the nature preserve.
The air is wet and the smell of foliage fills my lungs and I sit on a large outcropping and stare off and think about Reni.
My sister, whom I’d been unable to get ahold of, calls me on my cell and I answer quickly. She sounds frantic. Her husband is coming home from a vacation with his parents, and she needs to get her house cleaned, she says. Then she doesn’t say anything for a while, and I just listen to the silence with her.
“I don’t want you to leave, Jason,” she says finally.
“I know,” I say.
“I feel sad. You’re always welcome at my house,” she tells me.
“I know it,” I say. “I wish I lived here, but I don’t.” When I say it, I know it’s true, this wanting to be near to her, to Detroit, to something like pain, but the kind of pain that feels like home to me.
When we hang up, I lie back on the outcropping, thinking of my sister and of how to get in touch with Reni. My skin is damp from the humidity and a slight breeze eventually chills me for a minute. I don’t feel very fucking good, I want to tell somebody, but there’s nobody to tell it to. Maybe I’m grasping at straws. Maybe I didn’t come out here to prove I can solve the case, but to prove that I cannot.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY, TIM
I have dinner with Teresa at a Thai place in Birmingham. I stare at her throughout dinner, and she’s silent after claiming she’s tired. I find myself wondering if I could spend my life with her.
We sit in the park near the Birmingham Police Department and eat ice cream after dinner. I stare at the small brick building where the Birmingham PD lost their part of this case to the Michigan State Police in the 1970s. Nothing about the building has changed, only right now the flowers around it are in bloom with a series of sprinklers popping up in small bursts instead of the deadly cold air that surrounded it during the winters of ’76 and ’77.
Teresa and I take a walk through a neighborhood of Mayberry-like homes where a teenaged boy on a longboard dive-bombs a hill out front of his house. We watch him and then Teresa hugs me and we stand in the street like that. I can hear the kid laughing at the end of his block, where a girl hugs him and mimics us.
Back in my hotel, alone, I get a text from Teresa.
My favorite part was the walk, she says.
Me too, I text her back.
I’d wanted those kids’ lives down at the bottom of the hill, mimicking what it’d meant to be old and on your way out.
At three a.m. I wake from a dream in which Cathy’s oldest still-living brother, Chris, won’t speak to me because I’ve drawn attention to the case and put their father under a microscope by the press and police.
In real life, the cops called Barry King this week and requested his DNA, but it wasn’t the Michigan State Police or the Oakland County Prosecutor’s Office who called, it was a Detective Don Studt, an original task force member whom the Internet sleuth Helen Dagner appeared to have a convivial relationship with, as witnessed by dozens of email and snail mail correspondences between the two, spanning years. Detective Studt telephoned King at his residence and requested a cheek swab.
I sleep briefly again, then wake before dawn wondering why Erica McAvoy, Kristine’s sister, hasn’t returned a few phone calls I’d recently placed to her. She hasn’t returned my emails, either. Maybe she’s intuiting that I want to ask her about the document containing possibly revealing information from back in 1977 about her mom’s boyfriend, a guy who used to visit her mom while she was bartending at Hartfield Lanes. The document says this guy, her mom’s lover, was an associate of John at the time, the man who Helen Dagner maintains confessed to her in the Big Boy in Alpena, but it doesn’t say how they were known to one another.
When questioned about the boyfriend years later, Erica and Kristine’s mom denied the man’s existence. Maybe she was protecting somebody, even herself, or maybe she truly never knew a man who knew John. In either case, she refused public statements for thirty years, and I’m suspicious of that—not of the implications of silence, but of the strength of conviction needed to silence oneself.
Today, I realize, is Timothy King’s birthday.
FATHERS
I’ve driven back to Barry King’s house to retrieve the extra files that he’s set aside for me, about two thousand pages of transcripts from the state police and FBI, some of which even Barry hasn’t read yet.
I park in the street and walk up to the front door, where I notice the doorknob has become worn with age. It’s the same doorknob Timmy, as Barry calls him sometimes, would have twisted to come in and out of the house. I look around at the tidy yard. A lot of money has been spent on landscaping, but the doorknob is exactly as it should be: familiar, just in case.
I sit in the living room with Barry King and his relatively new wife, whom he calls his “bride.” Tim’s mom has long passed by now, and Barry’s nearing eighty but he still has a youthful smile widening between rosy cheeks. Reading glasses hang around his neck, and he appears to be extremely sharp, vibrant almost, although he’s walking slower and says he’s feeling more tired than he did at seventy-five. We chat, and then Barry’s wife busies herself in the kitchen while I’m shown the documents. I take them in my car to a FedEx Office and spend two and a half hours photocopying them, looking over my shoulder.
When I get back to Barry’s house, I peek into the downstairs office at an old photo of Tim in his hockey uniform. It’s been a popular photo in the press all these years, so I feel almost like I’m looking at an original Babe Ruth baseball card, at history. When I’m back in my car later, I think about how much Barry loved his son, how much any man loves his son and would go crazy in Barry’s position.
I’M ON THE freeway and I get a call from my dad. My kids are coming to visit me in a few days, and he’s scheduled to take us to a Tigers game. We’ve all been looking forward to it, especially my son. But when my dad calls, he’s upset at me for other time constraints I’ve placed on him. The kids will be here only for a week, and I want them to see old friends, not just my dad. I’ve told him that we can visit during the ball game and then maybe go to dinner another night. But my dad wants more than that, and he gets angry when he can’t have it.
I explain our schedule. I tell my dad that I’m taking the kids to Lake Michigan.
I say, “We’re spread thin.” I want my kids to visit with my sister, and I want them to meet my dad’s son from his second marriage, Max, who will be visiting from Florida, where he’s attending college.
My dad hasn’t spoken to Max in at least five years. It’s no different with Max than it was with me as a kid, growing up trying to figure out how much love is the right amount of love to let yourself give to this man, and, afterward, to anybody else. My dad, when he hears that I’m going to see Max, launches into a tirade.
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“You’re going to shunt me aside?” he says. I can hear his pulse rising through the shakiness of his breath. I don’t answer him. I feel so many things, some of them fear. “You want to keep your fucking kids from me?”
I try to keep my eyes on the road but my pulse has risen to meet my father’s. I feel the road swerving in front of me on the freeway.
“Hey,” he says after a few beats. “Fuck you and fuck your kids. They don’t ever have to know who their grandfather is.”
I feel like I’m seven again. I’m about to get hurt or I’m just in trouble and I don’t know why and even though I sense that I’ve done nothing to deserve whatever happens, I still feel guilty for my father’s anger.
I pull onto the shoulder of the freeway, spraying up gravel behind me until my car stops. I can hear my father hollering at me through the phone but I place it on the dash now, on speaker, and I press my face to the steering wheel while I breathe.
I feel like I’m supposed to make things better.
“You want to go to the ball game?” he continues, shouting. “Then go to the fucking ball game. I’ll put the tickets in my mailbox!” I can hear him breathing heavily, and then he finally says, “What do you think about that?”
I wait a long time and then I take him off speaker and I tell him, quietly, “You’ve never come to visit your grandkids. My son is twelve and he doesn’t know who you are. My daughter saw you once, when she was six. That was ten years ago.”
“So what?” he says.
Cars are flying by me on the freeway.
After a while of not answering him, I just hang up.
I check a voice message that came through while my father was yelling. It’s Erica, finally returning my messages. She wants me to drive to Okemos tonight and have dinner with her and her father.
The Kill Jar Page 14