by Peter Straub
I opened the menu. The waitress went to a serving stand on the near side of the bar and came back with a glass pot of coffee. She filled my cup. “Nobody around here can believe it,” she said. “Nobody.”
“I’ll believe anything today,” I said.
She stared at me. She was about twenty-two, and all the makeup made her look like a startled clown. Then her face hardened, and she took her pad from a side pocket of the sleek blue suit. “Are you ready to order, sir?”
“One poached egg and whole wheat toast, please.” She wrote it down wordlessly and walked back through the empty tables and brushed through the aluminum door to the kitchen.
I looked at the blond girl in the bow tie at the end of the bar and at the couples seated at the far tables. All of them had sections of the morning newspaper opened before them. Even the men eating on stools at the bar were reading the Ledger. The waitress emerged from the kitchen, stabbed me with a glance, and whispered something to the girl behind the bar.
The only customers not engrossed in their morning papers were four silent men arranged around a table across the room. The two men in suits affected an elaborate disengagement from the others, who might have been truck drivers, and from each other. All four ignored the cups before them. They had the air of people who had been waiting for a long time. The sense of mutual distrust was so strong that I wondered what had brought them together. One of the men in suits saw me looking at them and snapped his head sideways, his face stiff with discomfort.
My copy of the Ledger lay folded on the table in front of me. I pulled it toward me, turned it over, and momentarily forgot the men across the room and everything I had thought and experienced that morning as I took in the big banner headline. Beneath it was a color photograph of dozens of uniformed and plainclothes policemen standing on the front lawn of a small white frame house. One of the detectives was the joker I had met at the hospital the previous night, Paul Fontaine. Another, a tall commanding-looking man with an indented hairline, deep lines in his face, and a William Powell mustache, was identified as Fontaine’s immediate superior, Detective Sergeant Michael Hogan. Almost as soon as I began to read the article to the left of the photograph, I saw that, among at least a dozen other unsuspected killings, the murder of the unknown man in the passage behind the St. Alwyn and the attack on April Ransom had been solved. A twenty-six-year-old clerk in the Glax Corporation’s accounts department named Walter Dragonette had confessed. In fact, he had confessed to everything under the sun. If he had thought of it, he would have confessed to strangling the little princes in the tower.
The big headline read: HORROR IN NORTH SIDE HOME.
The story all but obliterated the rest of the news. Five million dollars’ worth of cocaine had been seized from a fishing boat, an unnamed woman claimed that a Kennedy nephew had raped her in New York three years before being charged with rape in Palm Beach, and a state representative had been using military planes for personal trips: the rest of the paper, like every issue of the Ledger to come out for a week, dealt almost exclusively with the young man who, when surrounded and asked, “Is your name Walter Dragonette?” by a squad of policemen, had said, “Well, I guess you know.” “What do we know?” asked a policeman pointing a gun at his chest. “That I’m the Meat Man,” answered Dragonette. He smiled a charming, self-deprecating smile. “Otherwise, I must have a lot of unpaid parking tickets.”
The Ledger reporters had done an astonishing amount of work. They had managed to get the beginning of the saga of Walter Dragonette, his history and deeds, out onto the street only a couple of hours after they were discovered. The reporters had been busy, but so had Walter Dragonette.
Dragonette’s little white house on North Twentieth Street, only a block south of the Arkham College campus, was in the midst of a “transitional” area, meaning that it had once been entirely white and was now 60 to 70 percent black. In this lay the roots of much of the troubles that came later. Dragonette’s black neighbors claimed that when they had called the police to complain of the sounds of struggle, the thudding blows and late-night screaming they had heard coming from the little white house, the officers had never done anything more than drive down the street—sometimes they ridiculed the caller, saying that these sounds were hardly rare in their neighborhood, now, were they? If the caller wanted peace, why didn’t she try moving out to Riverwood—it was always nice and quiet, out in Riverwood. When one male caller had persisted, the policeman who had answered the telephone delivered a long comic monologue which ended, “And how about you, Rastus, when you hit your old lady upside the head, do you want us charging there and giving you heat? And if we did, do you actually think she’d swear out a complaint?” Rastus, in this case a forty-five-year-old English teacher named Kenneth Johnson, heard cackling laughter in the background.
After someone was missing for three or four days, the police took notes and filled out forms, but generally declined to take matters further—the missing son or brother, the missing husband (especially the missing husband) would turn up sooner or later. Or they would not. What were the police supposed to do, make a house-to-house search for a dude who had decided to get a divorce without paperwork?
Under these circumstances, the neighborhood people had not even thought of calling the police to complain about the sounds of electrical saws and drills they had sometimes heard coming from the little white house, nor about the odors of rotting meat, sometimes of excrement, that drifted through its walls and windows.
They knew little of the presentable-looking young man who had lived in the house with his mother and now lived there alone. He was friendly. He looked intelligent and he wore suits to work. He had a shy little smile, and he was friendly in a distant way with everybody in the neighborhood. The older residents had known and respected his mother, Florence Dragonette, who had worked at Shady Mount Hospital for better than forty years.
Mrs. Dragonette, a widow in her early thirties with an ironbound reputation and a tiny baby, had moved into the little white house when North Twentieth Street had been nearly as respectable as she was herself. She had raised that child by herself. She put the boy through school. Florence and her son had been a quiet, decent pair. Walter had never needed many friends—oh, he got into a little trouble now and then, but nothing like the other boys. He was shy and sensitive; he pretty much kept to himself. When you saw them eating dinner together on their regular Saturday nights at Huff’s restaurant, you saw how polite he was to his mother, how friendly but not familiar to the waiters, just a perfect little gentleman. Florence Dragonette had died in her sleep three years ago, and Walter took care of all the details by himself: doctor, casket, cemetery plot, funeral service. You’d think he’d have been all broken up, but instead he kept his grief and sorrow on the inside and made sure everything was done just the way she would have wanted it. Some of the neighbors had come to the funeral, it was a neighborly thing to do, you didn’t need an invitation, and there was Walter in a nice gray suit, shaking hands and smiling his little smile, holding all that grief inside him.
After that, Walter had come out of himself a little bit more. He went out at night and he brought people home with him. Sometimes the neighbors heard loud music coming from the house late at night, loud music and laughter, shouting, screaming—things they had never heard while his mother was alive.
“Oh, I’m really sorry,” Walter would say the next day, standing next to the little blue Reliant his mother had driven, anxious to get to work, polite and charming and slightly shamefaced. “I didn’t know it got so noisy in there. You know. I certainly don’t want to disturb anybody.”
Every now and then, late at night, he played his records and his television a little too loud. The neighbors smelled rotting meat and came up to him as he was watering his lawn and said—You put out rat poison, Walter? Seems like a rat or two musta died underneath your floorboards. And Walter held the hose carefully away from his neighbor and said, Oh, gosh, I’m really sorry about that smell. Every now and the
n that old freezer of ours just ups and dies and then everything in it goes off. I’d buy a new one in a minute, but I can’t afford a new freezer right now.
6
WALTER DRAGONETTE’S CURTAINS had been open only two or three inches, a narrow gap, ordinarily nothing but entirely wide enough for two small boys, Akeem and Kwanza Johnson, to look through, giggling and jostling each other out of the way, fighting to press their faces up against the glass.
Akeem and Kwanza, nine and seven, lived across the street from Walter Dragonette. Their father was Kenneth Johnson, the English teacher who had been addressed as “Rastus” by a Millhaven policeman eighteen months before. The Johnson house had four bedrooms and a porch and a second floor, and Mr. Johnson had himself installed in his living room floor-to-ceiling oak bookshelves, every spacious shelf of which was packed with books. Subsidiary piles of books stood on the coffee table, on the nightstands and end tables, on the floor, and even on top of the twelve-inch black-and-white television that was the only set Mr. Johnson had in his house.
Akeem and Kwanza Johnson were much more interested in television than in books. They hated the old black-and-white set in their kitchen. They wanted to watch TV in the living room, the way their friends did, and they wanted to watch it in color on a big screen. Akeem and Kwanza would have settled for a twenty-one-inch set, as long as it was color, but what they really wanted, what they dreamed of persuading their father to buy, was something roughly the size of the oak bookshelves. And they knew that their neighbor across the street owned such a television set. They had been hearing him watch late-night horror movies for years, and they knew Walter’s TV had to be dope. Walter’s TV set was so great their father called up the police twice to complain about it. Walter’s TV set was so bad that you could hear it all the way across the street.
On the night before the morning when Walter Dragonette greeted fifteen armed policemen by telling them that he was the Meat Man, nine-year-old Akeem Johnson had come awake to hear the faint but unmistakable sounds of a grade-A horror movie coming from the speakers of the wonderful television set across the street. His father never let him go to horror movies and did not permit them on the television set at home, but a friend of Akeem’s had shown him videotapes of Jason in his hockey mask and Freddy Krueger in his hat, and he knew what horror movies sounded like. What he was listening to, faint as it was, made Jason and Freddy sound like wimps. It had to be one of those movies he had heard about but never seen, like The Evil Dead or Texas Chainsaw Massacre, where folks got hunted down and cut up, man, right there in your face. Akeem heard a man howling like a dog, sobbing like a woman, roaring, screeching, wailing …
He got out of bed and walked to his window and looked across the street. Instead of meeting as they usually did, Walter’s curtains showed a narrow gap filled with yellow light. Akeem realized that if he got out of bed and sneaked out of the house, he could hide beneath the window, peek in, and actually watch the movie playing on Walter’s big television. He also realized that he was not going to do that. What he could do, however, was wait for Walter to leave his house in the morning, and then just walk across the street and take a look inside that window and at least see if Walter’s TV was the beast it sounded like.
The faint sounds from across the street came to an end as the movie shifted to one of the boring parts that always followed the excitement.
In the morning, Akeem went down to the kitchen and poured milk over his Cocoa Puffs and parked himself at the kitchen table where he could watch Walter’s house through the window. About ten minutes later, his little brother dragged in, rubbing his eyes and complaining about a bad dream. After Akeem told him what he was doing, Kwanza got his own bowl of cereal and sat beside him at the table, and the two of them watched the house across the street like a pair of burglars.
Walter burst through his front door just after seven. He was wearing a white T-shirt and jeans, so wherever he was going, he would have to come back to change clothes before he went to work. Walter hustled down his walk, looked over both his shoulders as he unlocked his car, got in, and zoomed off.
“Okay?” Akeem asked.
“Yo,” said his brother.
They slid out of their chairs and went to the front door. Akeem quietly unlocked and opened it. They stepped outside, and Akeem gently let the door slide back into the frame without quite closing. The brothers walked over their front lawn. The dew pasted grass shavings to their bare feet. They felt funny and exposed when they stepped onto Walter’s front yard and ran up to the window hunched over. Akeem reached the window first, but Kwanza butted him sideways, like a little goat, before he got a good look in through the curtains.
“You take your turn,” Akeem said. “Yo, this was my idea.”
“Me too, I wanna look too,” Kwanza complained, and slipped in front of him when he bent his face again to the uncovered stripe of glass. Both boys peered in to see the enormous television set.
At first, it looked as though Walter had been painting his living room. Most of the furniture had been pushed against the far wall, and newspapers covered the floor. “Akeem,” Kwanza said.
“Where is that thing?” Akeem said. “I know it’s here, no way it ain’t here.”
“Akeem,” his brother said again, in exactly the same tone of voice.
Akeem looked down at the floor where his brother was pointing, and he too saw the corpse of a large, heavy black man stretched out in a swamp of bloody newspapers. The man’s head lay some feet away, rolled on its side so that it seemed to be contemplating the broken hacksaw blade stuck halfway through what had been its left shoulder. The broad back, about the color of the Cocoa Puffs dissolving into mush back on the Johnsons’ kitchen table, stared up at them. Deep cuts punctured it, and sections of skin had been sliced off, leaving red horizontal gashes.
A few houses away, a car started up, and both boys screamed, thinking that Walter had come back and caught them. Akeem was the first to be able to move, and he stepped back and put his right arm around his brother’s waist and pulled him away from Walter’s house.
“Akeem, it wasn’t no movie,” Kwanza said.
Too shocked and frightened to speak, Akeem grimaced at him, frantically gesturing that Kwanza should start running for home right now. “Damn,” Kwanza said, and sprinted away like a jack-rabbit. In seconds they were pounding up their own lawn toward the front door.
Akeem yanked the door open, and the boys tumbled inside.
“It wasn’t no movie,” Kwanza said. “It wasn’t—”
Akeem ran up the stairs toward his parents’ bedroom.
He woke up his father, shaking his shoulder and babbling about a dead man with his head cut off across the street, this guy was all dead, his cut was all cut off, blood was all around …
Kenneth Johnson told his wife to stop screaming at the kid. “You saw a dead man in the house across the street? Mr. Dragonette’s house?”
Akeem nodded. He had begun to cry, and his brother sidled into the bedroom to witness this astonishing spectacle.
“And you saw it, too?”
Kwanza nodded. “It wasn’t no movie.”
His wife sat up straight and grabbed Akeem and pulled him into her chest. She gave her husband a warning look.
“Don’t worry, I’m not going over there,” he said. “I’m calling the police. We’ll see what happens this time.”
Two policemen pulled up in a black-and-white about ten minutes later. One of them marched up to the Johnson house and rang the bell, and the other sauntered across the lawn and peered through the gap in the curtains. Just as Kenneth Johnson opened the door, the second policeman stepped away from the window with a stunned expression on his face. “I think your friend would like you to join him,” Johnson said to the man on his doorstep.
Before another twenty minutes had passed, six unmarked police cars had been installed up and down the street. The original black-and-white and one other stood parked around the corners at both ends of the b
lock. While they all waited, a young policewoman with a soothing voice talked to Kwanza and Akeem in the living room. Kenneth Johnson sat on one side of the boys, his wife on the other.
“You’ve heard loud noises from the Dragonette house on other occasions in the past?”
Kwanza and Akeem nodded, and their father said, “We all heard those noises, and a couple of times, I called to complain. Don’t you keep a record of complaints down at the station?”
She smiled at him and said in her soothing voice, “In all justice, Mr. Johnson, the situation we have now is a good deal more serious than a loud argument.”
Johnson frowned until the smile wilted. “I don’t know for sure, but I’m willing to bet that Walter over there seldom stopped at the argument stage.”
It took the policewoman a moment to understand this remark. When she did understand it, she shook her head. “This is Millhaven, Mr. Johnson.”
“Apparently it is.” He paused to consider something. “You know, I wonder if that fellow over there even owns a freezer.”
This irrelevance was too much for the young woman. She stood up from where she had been kneeling in front of the two boys and patted Kwanza’s head before closing her notebook and tucking her pen into her pocket.
Johnson said, “I can’t help it, I’m sorry for you people.”
“This is Millhaven,” the policewoman repeated. “If you’ll permit me, I want to suggest that your boys have already been through enough for one day. In situations of this kind, counseling is always recommended, and I can provide you with the names of—”
“My God,” Johnson said. “You still don’t get it.”
The policewoman said, “Thank you for your cooperation,” and walked away to stand in front of the Johnsons’ living room window and wait for Walter Dragonette to come back home.
7
AN HOUR AND A HALF before Walter Dragonette was due at his desk in the accounts department, the old blue Reliant appeared at the end of the block. Other cars up and down the street began backing out of driveways and easing away from the curb. The lurking patrol cars swung into the street at either end and slowly moved toward the white house in the middle of the block. Walter Dragonette drove blithely down his street and pulled up in front of his house. He opened his door and put a foot on the concrete.
