Cul-de-Sac

by David Martin

  “Broke the rule. You’re supposed to charge someone at the end of an investigation, not the beginning.”

  Camel agreed. “Plus this wasn’t even Gray’s case.”

  “The way I hear it, Gray more or less ordered the detectives to charge you, then he held his breath and stamped his feet until the judge set bail high enough you’d have to stay in here. Why’s Gray got a hard-on for you?”

  “I don’t know if he does, mostly it was like he was worried about something else and I was just in his way.” Having finished the oatmeal and powdered eggs, Camel drank some of the coffee, hot and weak. “You found out anything about that Cul-De-Sac homicide?”

  “Victim was seventeen-year-old Hope Penner, decapitated by her cousin Donald Growler who was convicted and sent—”

  “I know all that. Is this Growler still in prison, does he have a lawyer who’s reopening the case?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “I’d like to find the guy who scared Annie, the guy with the teeth … have a little talk with him.”

  “Why don’t you go to Cul-De-Sac and see if he’s still, hanging around?”

  Camel looked at Eddie. “Does it come as a surprise to you, I can’t make bail?”

  “I made it for you.”

  He didn’t say anything.

  “I put up The Ground Floor as collateral.”

  “Jesus Eddie.”

  “I think they’re going to void bail anyway, maybe even dismiss charges … meanwhile you just have to stay on your best behavior so I don’t lose my place of business.”

  “I would’ve never asked you—”

  “Hey it’s a done deal, they’re processing the paperwork now. I need you out anyway, help me set another trap for that weenie wagger in the parking garage.”

  Camel stood. “Thanks.” But didn’t know what else to say.

  “This ain’t going to be one of those tender moments is it … we start hugging each other and talking about how we value our friendship?”

  Camel assured him it wasn’t. “They finish with my office or is it still sealed?”

  “Don’t know, haven’t been up there … but here’s a bulletin for you. The officer in charge of the investigation, Hope Penner’s murder seven years ago? Gerald McCleany.”

  “The guy who called you out of the blue, asking about me?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “I know there’s something about that case hanging fire, it’s what’s making Parker Gray so twitchy.”

  “I got some addresses.” Eddie unfolded a sheet of paper. “Judith and Lawrence Rainey, worked for J. L. Penner, the victim’s uncle, both testified they saw Donald Growler going up to Hope Penner’s room the day she was killed. Kenneth Norton, friend of Growler’s who originally gave him an alibi then changed his story. And an old girlfriend of J. L. Penner, Elizabeth Rockwell, she also testified against Growler.”

  Camel took the sheet and put it in his pocket.

  “You’re welcome,” Eddie prompted.

  “I guess I’ll need a car.”

  “I tried to tell you when you sold yours there’d be times—”

  “What’re you driving?”

  Eddie looked stricken. “You’re not going to borrow my Ford.” He owned a 1965 Ford Fairlane he’d been restoring over the years, a car he didn’t love as much as his wife and children but close.

  “Come on gimme the keys.”

  He said no again but Camel waited and eventually Eddie handed over the keys though with great reluctance. “There are certain things I have to explain about that car.”

  “Explain on the way. I’ll drop you off at The Ground Floor … no, your house, that way I can check on Annie.”

  “Let her sleep.”

  “You sure she’s—”

  “Teddy she’s in my daughter’s old bedroom safe and sound, let her sleep.”

  27

  She didn’t feel safe or sound, she wasn’t asleep in Eddie’s daughter’s former bedroom either … Annie was on her way to Cul-De-Sac.

  The Nefferings, Eddie and his wife Mary, had been generous and gentle with her but as the hours ground by, as she watched out the bedroom window for signs of light, Annie felt like she would explode if she didn’t do something … take a long walk, run to exhaustion, scream, hurt herself, something. She departed the Neffering’s house before dawn was even a bad promise, Eddie already gone and Mary still asleep. Annie walked fast and without a destination in mind, the cold morning air making it easier for her eyes to tear though she wasn’t crying. After more than an hour of hard walking, revelation came like one of those literary coincidences no one really believes … at the exact moment Annie saw light painting the eastern sky. She caught a cab to the shopping mall’s parking garage and found where she had left Paul’s old pickup. What had finally come to Annie with dawn was what Paul wanted her to remember … now she was going to Cul-De-Sac to find out why.

  As Annie drove she thought about that man with the awful teeth, what he might do to her if he was at Cul-De-Sac. She was frightened of him of course but in a larger sense Annie believed she probably deserved whatever happened to her today … had she gone back to Cul-De-Sac and stayed with Paul instead of replaying golden old memories with Teddy none of this would’ve happened, Paul wouldn’t be dead and Teddy wouldn’t be in jail.

  Driving the truck, trying to remember how to get there, she felt guilt weighing her down like icy slush water that her heart had difficulty pumping, that made Annie heavy and cold … if the man was waiting for her out at Cul-De-Sac, if he killed her, the prospect wasn’t entirely abhorrent, not this particular morning it wasn’t.

  Turning at the brick pillars marking the entrance to Cul-De-Sac’s half-mile lane Annie felt her hands moisten on the truck’s steering wheel. But seeing the building in full daylight for the first time surprised her, the setting was lovely … a gentle tree-covered knoll surrounded by grassy fields with heavily wooded ridges on three sides and not another building in sight. Neither was Cul-De-Sac itself as frightening as Annie remembered. A great square hulk of a building sorely in need of paint and repair, it still retained a certain shabby dignity.

  No sign anyone was here, no vehicles, no man with monstrous teeth waiting for her on the colonnaded porch. She parked the truck to the side of the building but didn’t get out, Annie locking both doors and keeping the engine running, her hands still gripping the steering wheel.

  When she arrived here from North Carolina and finally got Paul to open the door to his workshop up on the second floor, he had put his hand on the brick chimney in that former library and told her several times to remember the chimney. Before he killed himself last night he said, Remember what I asked you to remember. Annie was convinced he’d left something for her, left it in or near the chimney.

  She still hadn’t cried over his death and felt guilty about that too. Had she really called Paul hapless, Annie didn’t remember the occasion. She never meant to hurt his feelings, Paul had been good to her.

  After that summer with Teddy Camel she became involved with a series of men who mistreated her, lied to her, tough guys and sneaks, one of them browbeat her into a three-way with his old girlfriend and another cleaned out her apartment and sold everything to finance a drug habit. But she chose these men, they weren’t forced on her by some higher power, it was Annie who was embarrassing herself … punishing herself, she eventually concluded, for not being good enough to marry Teddy.

  She’d thought Paul Milton was her recovery, a genuinely gentle man who was always careful with her, but look how it turned out … he’d spent all her money just as those other men had, he’d involved himself in something illegal, gone partners with a man who was creepy. Maybe she was attracted to Paul because she instinctively recognized in him a potential for trouble, for extremes. And now he’s done something so extreme he could no longer bear living … what is it, what’s he done here at Cul-De-Sac?

  When Annie finally released the steering wheel she left wet han
dprints. Turning off the engine and unlocking her door, Annie got out of the truck and into a day so piercingly clear that her vision seemed to have improved from normal. The sky was high and blue, clouds flawlessly white, air clean and sharp enough that she took conscious pleasure from the simple routine of breathing. This must be what it’s like when the sun shines over Antarctica.

  She walked to a side door but it was locked, she’d have to go in through that back window again. Annie went around there, the window open as it had been the night before last, she climbed in … easier this time because instead of a dress she was wearing jeans and a white blouse borrowed from Mary Neffering. Annie crept through the storage room and out into the corridor. As she made her way toward the front of Cul-De-Sac she felt like a child cranking a jack-in-the-box … any moment now something would jump out and scare her.

  But nothing did. The building was quiet, no pianos playing, no wall-scratching. She threaded her way through overly warm corridors crowded with cardboard boxes and bundled newspapers and assorted junk. It struck Annie now that this building was sad rather than sinister, a building used, abused, and abandoned, reopened and patched up, then boarded over again and neglected … when it was a hospital, soldiers had died here of lingering wounds, when it was an asylum, women had gone steadily insane here. That girl was killed here seven years ago, Paul had lost his mind here. These walls had absorbed too much sadness, these floors have borne up too much pain … Annie wouldn’t feel settled again until she’d left Cul-De-Sac never to return.

  She went around to the front entrance, to that wide stairway at the edge of the atrium large and shadowy, hungry for light. She continued on up to the second floor, down the hallway-balcony, to the old library where Paul had set up his workshop.

  The heavy hasp was open, the door unlocked. Annie pushed into the room bracing herself for whatever shocking discovery she was about to make … but the room looked as it had when she first saw it two nights ago. The fireplace on the far wall must’ve been magnificent at one time, almost large enough to stand in, but its mantelpiece had been torn out to leave bare brickwork around a gaping hole.

  Annie walked by the big black leather couch Paul had been using as his bed, horsehair stuffing showing like wiry pubic hair in a dozen rips and splits. She noticed the leather was freshly stained, Paul’s blood?

  Seeing his tools lined up so neatly on the shelves made Annie sad for him, such an orderly man and she had made such a mess of his life. Cords to the power tools were neatly coiled, hammers and screwdrivers hung from brackets in order of size, saw blades were glossy with oil, boxes and cans of nails were meticulously organized on various shelves, everything clean, well-maintained, stored properly. Safety equipment was arranged in one section, glasses and shields and fire extinguishers … Annie thinking, Paul never took a chance on anything in his life except me.

  She was at the fireplace now, examining the brickwork and the area around it for messages, clues, a diary, suicide note … finding nothing except a half-smoked cigar on the grate. Moving the fire-screen and bracing herself with one hand Annie bent down into the fireplace and looked up the chimney seeing a rectangle of blue sky way up there at the top … when clouds floated past she felt like she was moving.

  If there’s nothing here, why had Paul repeatedly urged her to remember this chimney? Annie was about to duck back out when she noticed a rag, the edge of a rag sticking up from the rear of the damper. Bending over more she got her hand up there and reached through the open damper into the smoke chamber … the rag, actually a cotton drop cloth, was wrapped around something. Contorting her body, getting soot on the white blouse and jeans, all over her hands and on her face too, Annie finally managed to grip the drop cloth, pulling it toward her, bringing it out of the fireplace.

  It was bundled around a galvanized metal box two feet long, a foot deep and wide … closed with a padlock. She carried it into the middle of the room, the box heavy enough she needed both hands.

  Annie tried to put the truck key in the padlock but of course it didn’t fit, she tried sawing through the lock with a hacksaw but that didn’t work either, and finally she tried banging on the lock with a variety of hammers, making a lot of noise but otherwise accomplishing nothing.

  She sat on the floor to think. The hasp was attached to the box with rivets, if she could drive them out … Annie found a can of spike nails and used them as punches, hammering a nailpoint into each rivet. It took a long time, she repeatedly missed with the hammer and hit her thumb or fingertip, got tired and had to switch arms, but she kept at it, obsessed with getting the box open. When she wiped sweat from her face, the fireplace soot smeared until she looked as if she’d been working the coal … Annie exhausted and filthy by the time the hasp broke free.

  She took a breath before opening the chest, would it be full of money, would it contain a letter from Paul explaining everything … and which of the two would Annie rather find? She slowly raised the lid, squinting in anticipation.

  Two items lay inside the chest: a nine-by-twelve envelope and something wrapped in a section of sheepskin. The envelope was on top, Annie opened it and brought out papers dealing with Our Brothers’ Keepers, the religious program Paul belonged to, an organization dedicated to helping prisoners. One form carried Paul’s signature, he had pledged to help a parolee get a job and find a place to live, had pledged personal responsibility for the parolee’s well-being, religious instruction, and lawful behavior. Another paper named the parolee … Donald Growler.

  That’s the name of the man Teddy said killed the girl here in Cul-De-Sac seven years ago.

  After this surprise Annie pulled from the envelope an even larger one, a copy of Growler’s photograph: the man with the teeth. Paul was in partnership with the man who killed his cousin here in this very building … why?

  Annie raised up on her knees, she wasn’t even trying to make sense of this, not yet … then something else from the envelope, more photographs. She spread them around on the floor, snapshot-size pictures of people having sex. Annie was totally baffled. Paul keeping a secret stash of pornography? It didn’t make sense. Are these photographs why he went crazy, why he killed himself … is Paul in these pictures?

  She examined each of the eleven black-and-white photographs, they were grainy and taken in low light but Annie could clearly see it was the same woman in each shot … a young woman, maybe even a teenager, who had a cute face, small breasts, and long blond hair. The setting was also the same in each picture, a bare mattress on a floor.

  Annie looked carefully at the men who were on top of the young woman, beneath her, spooned in behind, receiving oral sex, giving oral sex, their faces caught full or in profile or partly obscured between the girl’s legs … eleven different men but Paul wasn’t among them. Maybe he had taken the photographs.

  Annie went back to one of the pictures … something familiar about the man’s face. She’d seen him before but couldn’t remember where, couldn’t place him. Looking at all eleven pictures again, something struck her as odd about the angle of the camera, it must’ve been on a ladder or even up near the ceiling. Each photograph covered the precise same area, the mattress squarely in the center of all the pictures even when the young woman and her various partners had rolled at least partially out of view. The camera was obviously in a fixed position, up on a wall or the ceiling, focused on the mattress.

  Annie went through the photographs a third time. The girl knows these pictures are being taken but the men don’t. See how in some of the shots she looks over a man’s shoulder and stares up at the camera … here she’s on her hands and knees with a man behind her, the man’s head resting on her back, maybe he’s just climaxed, and she’s looking up, making a face the way a kid might mug for the camera. In this next picture she’s smiling, this one she’s sticking out her tongue, this one she’s rolling her eyes … the young woman having a private dialogue with the camera, commenting on the men’s performances. But in none of the photographs do an
y of the men look at the camera or in any way acknowledge its presence.

  Where did Paul get these? Annie couldn’t even guess at an answer. Finally she brought out the other item in the chest, whatever was bundled in that sheepskin. This was what made the chest so heavy … something as solid and weighty as a bowling ball. Unwrapping the sheepskin carefully so she wouldn’t drop its contents Annie gasped, even more surprised by this than she had been by the photographs.

  Still up on her knees, hammers and papers and spike nails scattered around her, Annie didn’t sense another’s presence there in the room with her, she didn’t get that creepy feeling that someone was staring at her. In fact if she hadn’t heard a floorboard creak and then turned …

  Satan’s blue face hovered there at Annie’s eye level, a huge dark blue face with demonic eyes and hooked nose, horns and everything just like in illustrations except for one unique feature … Satan’s impossibly large mouth, covered all over with curly black hair, was gashed wide open in a leering grin and from the very center of that mouth stuck a stiffening cock, Satan’s own tongue.

  28

  “Where you going first?” Eddie asked as he and Camel left the state police building.

  Camel checked the sheet of addresses. “Probably this Elizabeth Rockwell, she’s closest. You packing?”

  Eddie looked at him like he was crazy.

  “You don’t carry?”

  “Why would I?”

  Camel’s turn to look at Eddie like he was crazy.

  Eddie said he had a .45 at home. “That sweet little officer’s model I showed you, it’s unregistered.”

  “All mine were taken in as evidence. Tell you what Eddie, can you call Mary and ask her to bring the forty-five to The Ground Floor, I’ll swing by there after I talk with this Rockwell woman. And if Annie’s up to it she can come in with Mary, we’ll all have lunch together.”

  “You interested in food already again?”

  Camel was. Being on this case had sharpened all his appetites, he’d been thinking a lot about how Annie looked as he helped her remove that blue dress.