No Regrets, Coyote

by John Dufresne

  Wayne said, “It’s a rental, but we won’t be here all that long.” He opened the screen door and let the woman inside. He stood beside her, put his key in the front-door lock, and froze. “It seems we’ve had an unexpected visitor.”

  Out of the darkness I said, “Wayne, we need to talk.”

  The woman gasped, brought her hands to her mouth, and cowered, understandably, against Wayne, who said, “The doctor makes a house call.” He opened the door and invited me in. We stood in the lighted kitchen. Sable leaned against the sink. She folded her arms and unfolded them. She tapped her hands against her thighs. She put her hands behind her back and leaned against them.

  Wayne introduced me to Sable and told me that she’d saved his life. He stood beside her and put his arm around her shoulder. He inquired about my finger. I told him I had been bitten by a pit bull. Wayne whispered in Sable’s ear, and they giggled. Sable’s brown hair was highlighted with blond streaks. She wore jeans, blue sneakers, and a red JESUS IS MY BFF T-shirt. Her eyes were slightly swollen like she’d been crying. Wayne explained how Sable had led him to Jesus Christ, and now he was washed in the blood of the Lamb. They each professed their undying love for Jesus and for each other. Wayne smiled at Sable and kissed the hand he now held in his.

  Sable said, “Dutch is my soul mate.”

  “I thought this would never ever happen,” Wayne said.

  I said, “You haven’t asked me what I’m doing here.”

  Wayne said, “And now that I have a purpose in life, I won’t be coming back to therapy. My problems weren’t in my head after all, but in my soul.”

  I asked Sable if she was okay.

  Wayne said, “We’re getting married.”

  “Otherwise no sex,” Sable said.

  Wayne thanked me for all I’d done for him. I told him I didn’t think we were finished. I asked Sable if she would mind if Wayne and I had a few minutes in private, but Wayne said they’d made a pact never to be more than three feet from each other.

  I said, “Wayne, do you have anything you want to tell me?”

  “Like what?”

  “Your fantasies, perhaps. ‘Weird,’ you called them once.”

  “So you were listening.”

  “You wouldn’t talk about them.”

  “That part of my life is over.”

  Sable said, “Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.”

  I said, “Did you know a girl named Kelly?”

  Wayne stared at me. And then he seemed to deflate.

  I said, “I’m here because you wanted me to know the truth.”

  Sable lifted her arms over her head and mumbled in tongues.

  I said, “You wanted to get it off your chest.”

  “It?”

  “What you did to that girl.”

  Wayne said, “Shut the fuck up, Sable!” Then he hugged her, rocked her, kissed her hair. “I’m sorry.”

  We heard a car door slam outside.

  “You could have done something to stop all this,” Wayne said to me. “You did nothing. You were useless.”

  I watched Carlos and Wayne in a tiny, shadowless interview room through the two-way mirror. Wayne declined his right to have an attorney present. He hated lawyers. Slimeballs, he said. While Wayne was telling his story, EPD officers searched his house. They impounded his computer as evidence, along with his DVDs, his CDs, his crate of pornographic magazines. If Wayne hesitated in answering a question, Carlos clicked the push-button on his ballpoint pen, and when he did, Wayne looked up and spoke.

  “I don’t know what it is. I can’t see things clearly sometimes. Everything gets fuzzy, so I just stare straight ahead. And all the sounds I hear are tinny. When I listen, I can’t tell where one word ends and the next begins—it’s like everyone’s talking Mexican.”

  Carlos said, “What do you have written on the palm of your hand?”

  “My mother’s phone number. In Illinois.”

  “Would you like for us to contact her?”

  “This’ll kill her.” Wayne tapped his foot a mile a minute. He folded his arms across his chest. Carlos clicked his pen. Wayne smiled. “Why don’t you go ahead and call her.” He held up the palm of his hand, and Carlos wrote down the number.

  “Her name’s Diane Stalmok. She remarried some dishwasher at the Chicken Shack after my old man dropped dead on the crapper.” He spelled Stalmok. He said, “She’ll tell you what a nice, quiet boy I am, how I could never have done what you say I’ve done. She’s a clueless twat.”

  Officers found the decomposing remains of a human leg in Wayne’s trash barrel. They called the hazmat team. They switched off the blinking lights on Wayne’s little synthetic Christmas tree.

  “That Kelly was too trustworthy. If it hadn’t been me, it would have ended up being someone else. She was a murder waiting to happen. Her own worst enemy, you could say.”

  The officers found a video of two laughing assailants torturing a disabled man with their carpentry tools. They found a movie called Cannibal Holocaust.

  “I hit her with a twelve-inch cast-iron frying pan. A lot.” Wayne demonstrated how he brought down the pan on Kelly’s head again and again. “She kept asking me to stop. She kept telling me she was sorry. I said, ‘What are you sorry for? You didn’t do anything. I should be the sorry one.’”

  Wayne closed his eyes. “I wish I could take it all back.” He ran his hands over his face. “I’ve always been shy, you know? That’s the source of my troubles right there. I’ve got no personality. I am expressionless, silent. I’m withdrawn so far into myself that I’ve vanished. I wish I could be human. But on the Internet you can be who you want to be, not who you are. I’m liked on Facebook. I’m followed on Twitter. I have a blog.”

  Here’s Wayne’s blog post on the day he kidnapped, raped, murdered, and mutilated Kelly Kershaw:

  I told Ed Heeb at work that I was the poster child for unrealized potential, but that it didn’t bother me. He said, “If you leave it unrealized, it remains potential, and that way you can keep on thinking that you might have been a contender. Very clever, Dutch!” But he’s an assclown, which is why I call him Special Ed. So now I’m eating supper and writing about it. LOL! Had a snack earlier but I can’t seem to fill myself up. Now I’ve got a toasted peanut butter and banana sandwich, a bag of Cheez Doodles, and a can of Bud Light. Life is good!

  The officers found two retractable dog leashes hung on the kitchen doorknob, but no evidence of a dog.

  “I strangled Kelly after she blacked out, just like I strangled the other one.”

  “Vera.”

  “That was her name?”

  “Vera Chapman. Fourteen.”

  “She lied to me.”

  “About?”

  “Told me her name was Annie and she was sixteen. Little shit.” Wayne smiled.

  Carlos clicked his pen.

  Wayne said, “Funny how on TV they said she’d been abducted by two guys in a black car.”

  “Funny?”

  “Was just me and my hammer.”

  Carlos tapped his pen on his notepad. He leaned toward Wayne. “Why?”

  “Did I kill?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t have any reasons.”

  “I have a hard time believing that.”

  “And that’s my problem?”

  “Why these two girls?”

  “The first was just random. Kelly was the chosen one.”

  “And why did you choose her?”

  “She made it easy. She made herself available. She offered herself to me as a sacrifice, you could say.”

  “Have you killed others?”

  “I know what I’ve done here. I’m not making excuses. I don’t behave like this normally. There’s nothing you can do but put me away. Snuff me out. I didn’t kill anyone else, but I can’t promise that I won’t. There’s a beast inside here I can’t control. Am I responsible for who I am? I was made like this. I didn’t choose to be a monster.
Sometimes I disgust myself. But I want you to know that I am capable of goodness, too.”

  “I’ll make a note.”

  “There were other girls. I could have eliminated them, but I said, ‘Dutch, leave them be,’ and I saved their lives if you think about it.”

  “What were your intentions with Sable Chestnut?”

  “Honorable.”

  Carlos clicked the pen.

  “Going to do the right thing and marry the girl.” He smiled. “Till death do us part.”

  Carlos said, “Now we’re going to go through both murders step by step. You’re going to tell me exactly what went on with the girls.”

  Wayne confessed to murdering, butchering, marinating, grilling, and serving cuts of Vera to Myka Flores and two other cashiers at Publix. He told his guests they were eating wild boar—that’s why it tasted gamy.

  “I must have hit her just right,” he said. She never woke up. He strapped Vera in the front seat of his compact car with the seat belt and rested her head on his shoulder as he drove the few blocks home. He parked the car in his backyard and carried her into the house. “As soon as I hit her I wished I could have taken it back.” He opened her up in the bathtub. “I should have checked her for a pulse first, but I suppose she was beyond feeling by then.” He gutted the corpse, let it bleed out, and iced it down before he went off to Home Depot. He had planned the same fate for Kelly, he said, but after raping, beating, and strangling her, he said he lost heart, figured she had suffered enough. “It took me maybe fifteen or twenty minutes to get her completely dead.”

  So why had Wayne come to therapy for those several weeks when he had, it seemed, no intention of ever dealing with the sadistic compulsion that drove him to savagery? What signs had I missed? He claimed to have had a trauma-free, if not exactly blissful, childhood. Loved Mom, respected Dad, made a few friends, wept when his pets died. Maybe that was all a lie, but then why seek therapy for a fictitious self? He told me he’d been picked on by older boys, but claimed he never harbored any revenge fantasies. He was a man who liked to be in control. Anger was a loss of control. Was anger the beast inside he talked about earlier? Orgasm put an end to the chaos of sex and rage and restored order?

  After the interview, on my way to the parking lot, I saw Clete Meatyard leaning against the door of my car, hands in his pockets, cigar in his mouth, and I knew I was in for some unpleasantness. I asked if he’d mind stepping aside so I could open my door. He held out his hand. “Clete Meatyard.”

  “Wylie Melville,” I said. “But I assume you know that.”

  “Did you just tell me to fuck myself?”

  I said, “What’s the matter with you?”

  “Why don’t you tell me what’s wrong with me.”

  “I wouldn’t know where to begin.” I don’t know why I said that, why I felt I had to provoke him. I stepped back, and he smiled.

  “You’ve had a little accident, I see.”

  I held up my bandaged finger. “And I’ll be reporting it.”

  “I have some, what-do-you-call, ‘avuncular’ advice. I’m worried about you.”

  I unlocked the door and opened it. Clete slammed it shut. “Don’t be rude. Listen to your uncle.”

  I crossed my arms. “I’m listening.”

  “All your life you’ve been living in a world of light. I’m worried that you’re about to step into the dark.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Well, the advice part is stay put where you can see who’s coming after you.”

  “Thanks.”

  “People like you have no idea.”

  “People like me?”

  “Like you.”

  “What am I like?”

  “Clueless.” He smiled and chucked my cheek.

  The DA’s mahogany desk was piled with neatly stacked and overstuffed manila file folders. Millard and I sat on two worn leather chairs. Millard gripped the armrests and called my attention to his twenty-gallon fish tank. He told me that watching the fish relaxed him. We stared at the fish quietly for several seconds. He pointed out an electric blue hap, his particular favorite, nibbling on a plant, an Amazon sword, Millard told me. He had a small fridge, a microwave, and a coffeemaker on a glass table by the window. I pictured him here at night, in the comfy chair, feet up on the ottoman, which was now covered in magazines (Oxford American, Lapham’s Quarterly) and files, reading through depositions or whatever it is that lawyers read. In one of those desk drawers, I figured, was a bottle of single-malt scotch and two highball glasses. I asked him if the young girl in the photo on the coffee table was his daughter. It was, but the picture had been taken ten years ago. Millard told me his daughter and he hadn’t spoken in eight years—ever since the divorce. He had a grandson he’d never met. Theo.

  He told me what I already knew about the Halliday case—that it was closed—and said he could find no compelling reason to ask that it be reopened, not solely based on my hunch, at any rate. He crossed his legs and adjusted his tie. He said not every crime in Everglades County could be traced to bad cops and Mickey Pfeiffer. I told him about Halliday’s computer in storage at EPD. He made a note and said he’d look into it. I told him about last night’s assault. He said it would be hard to prove—my word against theirs. He said he’d suggest an Internal Affairs investigation to the chief, but couldn’t promise anything.

  Millard looked out the window at the New River skyline and told me that we were living in the most corrupt county in the state, maybe in the country. Everyone’s hands were dirty. The thieves kept getting reelected. There was no will here among the citizens to change anything. We could have good schools if schools were important to us. We could have honest and responsible government. He told me that sometimes he just wants to toss in the towel and walk away. “We are watching the decline and fall of the American Empire,” he said. “Some days I’m not even sure it’s worth saving.”

  “I caught you at a bad time.”

  He laughed. “I try to do my job.”

  Millard was happy that Wayne had confessed and saved his office a bundle of money in legal fees. He said that what Wayne had done, ghastly as it was, was an aberration. What people like Mickey Pfeiffer and Jack Malacoda did was a way of life.

  He said, “Let me ask you a professional question. When you have someone come into your office and tell you he’s got everything he ever dreamed of having, but he feels empty, what do you say?”

  “I might ask him if there’s something he wants but doesn’t have.”

  Millard sat forward, put his elbows on his knees, and folded his hands. “He wants another life.”

  “I’d tell him it’s never too late to be the person he wants to be.”

  “No, seriously.”

  “I’d say you can have anything, but you can’t have everything. You have to drop the cookie to get your hand out of the jar.”

  “I have these dreams,” he said. “I have a son, and the son is me when I’m seven or eight. And the son has no respect for the man he will become. He won’t do his homework because what’s the point? When I ask him a question, he shakes his head and walks away. When I try to explain myself, he pretends to play a little violin.”

  I left a message on Mrs. Stalmok’s answering machine. I explained who I was and said I’d be happy to speak with her if she had any questions about Wayne. I used to think the worst thing that could happen in a person’s life was the loss of a child, but now I thought that even worse must be to have that lost child take the life of another child.

  Mrs. Stalmok called. She told me how talented her boy had been—could swim like a fish, could have made junior lifeguard, but couldn’t be bothered. He could sing like an angel, but quit the church choir. When he was seven Wayne built a radio that worked. He had squandered his many gifts. He was never much interested in what he was good at. But he was not a cruel child and was never unruly or troublesome. “He grew more and more, I don’t know, blurry,” she said, “like he was losing his edges, his definiti
on. I don’t know how else to explain it. Like he was fading away.”

  I asked her if she would be okay. No, she would not, she said. Ever. I said, “You have your husband, your faith.” She said, “We were strict, but not harsh. We spoiled him a bit, the way an only child is spoiled. You have no idea how much this hurts, how empty and fragile I feel.” And then she told me she almost didn’t go to the state fair that year. She was supposed to work the weekend at the DQ, and if she had, those babies would still be alive, but at the last minute her boyfriend, the shift manager, arranged to get her hours filled, and off they drove to Springfield. In Springfield, at the Mansion View Motel, after a Loverboy concert, Wayne was conceived.

  16

  At the end of Bay’s dock, a five-foot-long absinthe-green iguana was languidly chewing magenta hibiscus flowers from a straw basket that Bay had set out. I sat in a lawn chair on Bay’s patio. He came out with two martinis on a tray and set them on an oak side table. He handed me a black sports watch with a busy black dial face, a half dozen control buttons on the shoulder, and a compass bezel, said he took it off Shanks at the casino bar.

  I said, “Do you think …?”

  The doorbell chimed, and Bay went in to answer the door, saying over his shoulder, “Someone has a story to tell you.”

  The someone was Open Mike. His aftershave arrived before he did. When I asked about the fragrance, he told me it was called Drakkar Noir and said he could get me a case. I said, Thanks for the offer, but no. He said, Gratis. Free for nothing. He clapped his hands clean and held them up. My pleasure. He sat in the third chair, and that’s when he spotted the iguana.

  “What the fuck is that?”

  “Godzilla,” Bay said.

  “We got nothing like this in Gulfstream. Does it bite?”

  “Razor-sharp teeth.”

  The iguana was now up on his forelegs, fanning his dewlap. His scales looked like beads of jade. Open Mike took off his Mets cap and placed it over his knee. Bay nodded. Open Mike cleared his throat and began.