Cul-de-Sac

by David Martin

  “What’s that name again?”

  “It’s spelled G-r-o-w-l-e-r, I don’t know if that’s pronounced Growler or Growl-er. The way it ended up, the girl’s share went to J. L. Penner who owned the other two-thirds of the property and who was the uncle to both the victim and the killer.”

  “You said this Hope Penner was a minor.”

  “Yes … seventeen when she was killed. The uncle, J. L. Penner, died last year, his estate has been in probate ever since but I guess it got settled recently because it says here that Cul-De-Sac was sold a month ago to a couple from North Carolina, Paul and Ann Milton.”

  Camel asked Michael if he had any details on the murder … where it occurred or what the motive was.

  “No, nothing like that in these files. A few other names are mentioned though. Lawrence Rainey and Judith Rainey, a married couple who worked for J. L. Penner and were left a small sum in his will. Elizabeth Rockwell was executrix.”

  Camel asked if he had phone numbers and addresses, Michael said he was sorry but no.

  “Mikey does anything in your files mention elephant.”

  “Mention what?”

  “Elephant.”

  “As in Dumbo or pink or what?”

  “As in I don’t know. A reference to elephant came up, I’m not sure how it connects to anything.”

  “What’re you working on?”

  “Mikey, Mikey.”

  “I should know better than to ask?”

  “Right.”

  “No elephants, Teddy.”

  “Okay.”

  “You see the old man today?”

  “Every day.”

  “He and mom are coming over for dinner tonight, why don’t you come with them?”

  “Love to Mikey but I can’t, not tonight.”

  “Soon then.”

  “Absolutely. Thanks for the information.”

  Camel got on the phone to people he knew and three hours later had pieced it together: Seven years ago J. L. Penner, his niece Hope Penner, and his nephew Donald Growler were living at Cul-De-Sac. The niece was seventeen, a young lady who liked to party hard. The nephew was twenty-six, a handsome (his teeth were normal) but strange young man who kept a collection of severed animal heads in his room. Apparently the cousins were having an affair that turned bad, Donald Growler killing Hope Penner and using an axe to cut off her head which he then placed on a shelf in his room at Cul-De-Sac.

  Camel went back to check on Annie who was still asleep. The blanket had slipped off her shoulders revealing an abundance of freckles, Camel remembering some of them individually. He gently pulled back that dark red hair to see if her ears still stuck out the way they did when he first met her and Camel was twenty-five years old and Annie Locken was ten.

  11

  “Dromedary or Bactrian?” She demanded upon being introduced to Mr. Camel. Her mother said be nice but the precocious girl was already launching a bubbly lecture on what she’d learned in school about the one-humped dromedary camel and the two-humped Bactrian camel, how they store fat not water in their humps, “bet you didn’t know that,” and have a double row of eyelashes to protect their eyes from sandstorms and they can also close their nostrils completely shut, “I bet you can’t.”

  Camel considered this a moment then squeezed his nostrils with forefinger and thumb.

  “Without using your hands!” she squealed, bending forward to laugh, covering her mouth, going red in the face … Annie’s mother telling her with little effect to settle down.

  Camel was out of the army and recently hired by the D.C. police force as a uniformed patrolman. Friends had invited him down to their beach house on Cape Hatteras along with other of their friends, people he didn’t know, everyone assembling for a four-day weekend … eleven in all, six adults and five children (four boys and one Annie Locken).

  She was buoyant, funny, curious, and self-aware, bouncing between arrogance and vulnerability, trying out varieties and possibilities of who she wanted to be. At age ten Annie was all arms and legs, monkeylike and coltish, she had a long neck, she had little ears that stuck straight out and proved useful to keep her hair away from her face, finger-hooking dark red tresses behind those protruding ears which then held as securely as barrettes. Her eyes were blue and green, she was liberally freckled.

  No one who knew Annie as a child would claim innocence on her behalf, at least not an innocence that means free from guile, unaware of effect. Rather, her considerable charm arose from what often is mistaken for innocence: a lack of complication. When she was happy she bounced up and down and laughed with big eyes and snorted through her little nose, she clapped her hands. Hurt, Annie wept openly and with a depth of feeling that made it seem she would never stop weeping … until it didn’t hurt anymore, then tears were gone, forgotten, traceless. Angry, her face clouded and her brows knit and her thin lips drew tight … Annie could’ve been modeling for an illustration in an anthropological text on classic human facial expressions. Asked a tough question, she would scrunch up her face and from the corner of her mouth a tongue tip would peak.

  When the beach-house children played games that weekend Annie was guardian of the rules, chooser of sides, arbiter of out and safe. She was famous for making the boys cry … she’d get them down in the sand and force them to say uncle. Perhaps out of character for such a tomboy she preferred wearing dresses and in fact Camel never saw her in jeans or shorts. But she was always coming back to the beach house with those dresses torn and dirty, her hands and face looking as though she’d been working with coal. Annie’s mother would send her from the dinner table to wash, Annie returning to fall wide-eyed upon barbecued chicken as if she were more than hungry for it, she was enraged that food was out there on a plate instead of in her belly where it clearly belonged. As she ate, barbecue sauce stained her mouth then up around her cheeks until she resembled a vampire well fed.

  The day’s play would scuff Annie’s knees and palms, when her mother immersed her in the evening bath you could hear Annie throughout the house screeching from the effect of water and soap on cut and scrape … but after that bath Annie would come out clean and flanneled to sit among the adults, usually close to Teddy Camel, and apply a fresh set of Band-Aids in a performance of care and self-admiration to match any woman adorning herself with jewelry.

  She had a crush on him, Camel was a policeman and also there was about the man some dark gravity that tugged at a girl so full of light and bounce. She would come loping up from the beach and spot Teddy in the group of adults and beeline for him to throw herself salt-wet upon his lap, draping an orangutany arm around his neck.

  Her mother would tell her to stop pestering him.

  “He doesn’t mind,” Annie would say … then look hard with predator-narrowed eyes at Camel and demand, “Do you?”

  He would reply that her mother was right, she was a pest, and Annie would stick her tongue out, then run away to terrorize the boys who always stood when she came around, junior officers in the presence of their superior.

  Her mother would say to Camel, “She’s in love with you.”

  “I’m in love with her too,” he’d reply.

  No one took it wrong and Camel’s actions with the girl were always correct. They went together for seashore walks and one evening they sat on the beach as the sun set behind them, Camel and Annie watching the sea change its mind from bright invitation to dark warning. On these times alone with her he never spoke to Annie or touched her in ways he wouldn’t have done in her mother’s presence, or her father’s had he been alive, yet Camel felt strangely on guard whenever he was with Annie as if one part of himself sat in watchful judgment of another part.

  Early in his career as a D.C. patrolman he had aided in the arrest of a man in his mid-thirties, a long-necked hillbilly being charged with having sexual intercourse with a girl of twelve. Camel kept an eye on him at the station house while paperwork was being assembled. The man lined up words in his head … and when he finally got
them straight, he said, “I didn’t exactly rape her you know.”

  Camel told him to save it for the detectives.

  “You don’t understand how it was. She’s always coming out of the bathroom wearing a towel that don’t quite reach, always running around in her underwear … wanting to wrestle with me.” He pronounced it rassle. “I even told her, ‘Hey, I’m your mom’s boyfriend, not yours.’ Didn’t do no good, she’d come in my bedroom in the morning, her mother already off to work, and she’d ask me could I do up the back of her dress and she—”

  Camel told him he didn’t want to hear it.

  The man nodded in total agreement. “Ain’t nobody going to want to hear it, I know that … I know it.”

  Camel held the man in utter, violent contempt as he continued his pathetic plea: “Ain’t nobody … no cop, no judge, no jury … nobody going to want to hear how that innocent little girl would come crawling into my bed when her mom wasn’t at home, wearing nothing but panties and little training bra, asking me to rub her back. Twelve years old, okay … but she’s got titties and she gets her period and—”

  “Listen, asshole,” Camel finally told him. “She’s a child, you’re an adult. Doesn’t matter what she does, you’re the one responsible.”

  He was nodding. “I know that, yessir I know that. I know what I did was wrong in the eyes of the law but—”

  Wrong in Camel’s eyes too. “While you’re in prison I hope you get fucked up the ass on a regular basis.”

  This fairly took the man’s breath away. When he finally was able to speak he told Camel, “You’re a hard man.”

  People were always saying that about him.

  The summer Camel first met Annie when she was a girl and he was a man, the eleven people staying at the beach house slept on cots and couches, in bedrooms and sleeping bags. Married couples were granted bedrooms, the three older boys tripled up, Annie shared a bed with the youngest boy who was hardly more than a toddler, and Camel took a sleeping bag and mosquito netting out onto the porch.

  The last night of the long weekend, three A.M. and Annie was suddenly all elbows and knees next to him.

  “What’re you doing?” he asked.

  “Charlie has stinky feet.”

  Camel laughed.

  “He does! I hate stinky feet. I told him to wash his feet before he came to bed but he didn’t and now the whole bed stinks like his feet, I’m not sleeping there.”

  “You’re not sleeping here either.”

  “You got stinky feet too?”

  Camel laughed again and started pushing her out of the sleeping bag but his hand slipped to grasp by accident a breast bud, hard and small like a golf ball. Annie reacted by locking her legs around him and becoming very still, waiting for what came next … Camel’s voice turning cold: “Get out of here.”

  “What?”

  “Go back to bed with Charlie or find somewhere else to sleep, you can’t stay here.”

  “Why not?”

  “Go on now,” he insisted, demonstrating with stony voice that he didn’t intend to make this into a game.

  “You didn’t kiss me goodnight.”

  “Get out of here.”

  “You kissed me goodnight last night, in front of everybody … why can’t you now?”

  “Go on, get out of here.”

  “Give me a kiss and I’ll leave.”

  He tossed aside the sleeping bag and stood.

  “You afraid of me?” she asked.

  In a way he was. “I’m going to find your mother, let her deal with you.”

  “Okay, okay.” Annie got to her feet too.

  Camel was holding the mosquito netting aside for her when, passing in front of him, she went up on tiptoes to kiss him quickly on the lips. And said, “I love you.”

  “Go to bed.”

  “I know what that is,” she said, touching him.

  He pulled on the netting to make it come down between them. “I hear or see you again tonight,” he warned, “and I’m waking up your mother.”

  “Tattletale.”

  “Get out of here.”

  “Grouch.”

  He listened to her bare feet padding across the porch and into the house, then Camel lit a cigarette and thought assiduously of older women he’d known, women who rouged their faces and drew their eyebrows as arches not found in nature, who laughed cigarette-husky and drank whiskey neat, women with slack bellies and breasts that sagged from weight and time, whose brambles grew thick-black from thigh to heavy thigh.

  The next morning as everyone was getting ready to leave he debated telling Annie’s mother what had happened but Annie and her mother were already in their car … Annie rolling down a window and throwing him a big kiss the way Dinah Shore did at the end of her television show. He didn’t throw one back, he just waved.

  Although Camel remained friends with the people who owned the beach house he didn’t accept any of their subsequent invitations and eventually forgot about the girl.

  Eleven years later she called. He couldn’t place her name. She repeated it several times then became so angry she hung up on him. But called right back. “Annie Locken goddamn it I had a crush on you.”

  Then he remembered.

  Annie explained she was in charge of inviting people down to the beach house this summer … would Teddy come? He begged off. She persisted: teasing, flirting, assuring him there’d be lots of people there for protection.

  “Protection?” he asked.

  “In case I try to crawl in bed with you again, I’m twenty-one now,” she pointedly informed him.

  “Which still makes me fifteen years older.” He was speaking to a grown-up voice but picturing a ten-year-old girl.

  “Things have changed.”

  Camel didn’t realized how much until he arrived at the beach house and discovered he was the only person Annie had invited.

  12

  Clouds came in low, dark, thick enough to awaken hundreds of sodium-vapor lamps well before their usual hour, Teddy Camel standing at the window of his office looking out across those acres of ugly yellow orange illumination. When he heard Annie in the other room he went to the connecting door, knocked, gave her time to collect herself, then went in.

  She’d put the blue dress back on but not her shoes, Annie sitting on the edge of the bed looking embarrassed like a woman who’d gone home drunk with a man whose name she couldn’t recall.

  Camel asked how she was feeling, she said fine but she spoke in a very small voice.

  Going over to sit next to her he almost asked what she meant when she said, right before passing out, that she was sorry about their baby … Annie had gotten pregnant that summer they spent together fourteen years ago when she was twenty-one and he was thirty-six? And never told him? That’s what all those phone calls were about, the calls he never returned? But instead of going into any of that he said he had some information on Cul-De-Sac. “You feel like talking just yet?”

  She slipped off the bed and walked to the sink, washed her hands and face, dried off with paper towels, then turned around. “I have to call Paul, see if he’s okay … tell him where I am.”

  “Why don’t I borrow your truck, drive to Cul-De-Sac, get your husband, bring him back here, maybe we can thrash it out what he and that other guy are up to.”

  “Thrash it out?”

  “Talk it out.”

  “No I think you meant what you said the first time, you can thrash the truth out of anyone can’t you?”

  Why was she mad at him? “I could try to get to the bottom of it, yeah.”

  Annie checked her watch. “It feels a lot later than five.”

  “Overcast. So what do you think, bringing your husband here?”

  “I’m not sure how to explain you to Paul.”

  “Is he jealous?”

  “He’s a man.”

  “I meant—”

  “He gets jealous, yes. When we were first married he wanted to hear about my old boyfriends.” Pa
ul would actually get sick to his stomach listening to her but still kept insisting Annie tell him everything.

  Teddy wondered what she had told her husband about that summer fourteen years ago.

  “I have to call him right now.”

  “The phone’s in the other office.”

  Annie went to make the call but returned almost immediately, the line was busy. She sat next to Camel as he laid out what he’d learned about the homicide at Cul-De-Sac seven years ago. Camel asked her how long she’d known her husband.

  “It’s our third wedding anniversary, I met him about a year before we were married.”

  “Do you know where he was living seven years ago, what he was doing?”

  “Paul wasn’t connected with any murder if that’s what you’re getting at.”

  “Your husband—”

  “His name is Paul.”

  Camel stood. “Well you think Paul is involved in something criminal … but you also think he’s not the kind of man who’d break the law, that’s what you said, a super-straight arrow—”

  “Don’t interrogate me.”

  He looked surprised then nodded … Annie was right, without noticing it he’d slipped into his old role as homicide detective, ferreting lies.

  “The only criminals Paul has ever met are the ones he worked with in a prison program called Our Brothers’ Keepers.” She explained what she knew about the program, run by a religious organization and dedicated to helping former convicts make a fresh start.

  Camel said it could be a connection. “Say he meets a prisoner who knows the Cul-De-Sac killer, finds out something was stashed in the building and—”

  “That man last night, could he be the killer?”

  “I don’t think so, Growler’s still in prison and according to the description I got there was nothing unusual about his teeth.”

  “Who?”

  “Donald Growler.” Camel pronounced it Grow-ler. “He’s the one who killed his cousin in Cul-De-Sac, you ever hear your husband mention that name?”

  “No.”

  A knock on the hallway door, Annie coming off the bed to stand behind Camel who was sufficiently roused by her frightened reaction that he drew a .357 magnum revolver from the holster on his belt. “Yeah?”