The Acid King

by Jesse P. Pollack

  “He does now,” Breskin laughed.

  “Yeah,” Howard chuckled. “I don’t know where he’s getting his information from. It isn’t from us. Even if there were devil worshippers, as long as they’re not violating any criminal statutes, there’s nothing wrong with what they’re doing from a police perspective. It’s freedom of religion.”

  “Do the Suffolk County people shoot their mouths off on an average murder case as much as they did with this one?” Breskin asked.

  “I can’t answer that,” Howard replied, nervously laughing. “What you gotta understand here is we work with the county very closely. After you leave, we’ll still have to work with them. However, if I had known it would get this out of hand, I would have answered ‘no comment’ to every question from the start. It just got too carried away. As a small-town police department, we’re not used to walking into the office and seeing fifteen TV crews in there. Usually, we have our coffee and say, ‘Oh, what happened last night?’ and go through the reports.”

  “ ‘So-and-so’s garbage can got run over . . . ,’ ” Breskin offered.

  “Right!” Howard said. “The normal things on the blotter. Maybe a stolen car here or a burglary there.”

  “So, take me back to the beginning,” Breskin said. “How did you first hear about this murder?”

  “I got the call on Monday morning, July 2, from my lieutenant,” Howard replied. “There was a report from a girl that someone had been killed and their body was dumped in the woods.”

  “A girl?” Breskin asked. “So, it would have been a peer of these kids and not a parent? The press reported two different stories about how the police were notified, and I haven’t been able to nail down which one is correct.”

  Howard froze, realizing he had just screwed up. The identity of Jean Wells was supposed to remain secret—and he had just inadvertently given Breskin a big clue.

  “I guess one could make that assumption,” he replied coyly, trying to cover his tracks. He took a quick sip of his drink and lit a cigarette.

  Breskin took the hint.

  “We found the grave site on Wednesday,” Howard continued. “He was surprisingly decomposed. More than we would think for that length of time.”

  “From what I understand, there really was not much left of Gary,” Breskin said.

  “No,” Howard replied quietly. “Mostly skeletal. It was one of those things where you go, ‘Blech!’ ”

  “I would imagine it was one of the most difficult things to deal with,” Breskin said, “even for the hard-core professionals.”

  “Probably not,” Howard replied frankly. “You know what the worst one was? We had a woman dead in her eighty-degree house for two weeks. That was the worst one. You take Vaseline, put it up your nose, and try to pretend it’s something else. I honestly thought this would only make page five in Newsday. When they came and talked to me, they were the ones who put forth the idea of a Satanic cult. Jim O’Neill said to me, ‘Isn’t this the same guy who was arrested for robbing graves?’ They tied it together and BOOM! That set off all the other papers and TV, and they jumped on it.”

  “How did you react to Kasso’s suicide?” Breskin asked.

  “I actually felt sorry for the mother because I know her,” Howard replied. “I don’t think it was done out of depression. I think it was Richard’s final blow to his parents.”

  “Suicide is the ultimate ‘fuck you,’ ” Breskin concurred. “It’s always directed at someone. It’s an act of communication.”

  “And he did it,” Howard said. “Boy, he really gave it to them. I don’t feel sorry for Kasso. I figure he was a waste of life anyway. Somebody said to me, ‘This is worse than the Amityville Horror,’ and I said, ‘Crap!’ I hear Jimmy Breslin wants to do a book on this! If it’s anything, it’s a couple of druggie kids. I also don’t think there’s any cause and effect with the music. You ever watch those old newsreels when rock ’n’ roll came out in the fifties?”

  “Yeah, Jerry Lee Lewis was gonna make people kill each other too,” Breskin replied sarcastically. “Now, there was a circle of kids who were at least told about the murder. How many do you believe knew about it?”

  “I’d say a dozen kids had some knowledge of it,” Howard replied. “I know who you’ve talked to already.”

  Breskin was taken aback by this sudden and unexpected revelation.

  “How do you know who I’ve talked to?” he asked, trying to keep his cool.

  Howard lit another cigarette and inhaled deeply.

  “I know who you’ve talked to,” he repeated.

  “Because you’ve been notified that I’ve talked to them?” Breskin asked.

  Howard remained silent.

  “Look, nothing’s a secret in this town,” Breskin said, visibly frustrated. “I’ve been here long enough to know that.”

  Howard paused for another moment.

  “I’m on vacation, but I check in every day,” he finally replied. “I was in yesterday for a couple hours and asked what was going on, and your name was brought up along with who you were speaking with.”

  “You know, Officer Iannone stopped me on the street the other night,” Breskin said. “I was carrying my notebook in my hand. He said, ‘Hey you! You with the notebook! I know what you’re doing. I’d like your name.’ So, I gave him my name.”

  “You didn’t have to,” Howard admitted.

  “I know I didn’t have to,” Breskin replied, “but at that point, I figured it was much more important to let the cops know I’m on the level than to get all constitutional about it. He said the reason he took my name was that he wanted to protect me if other people complained—that way, he could say, ‘No, we know him. It’s okay. Don’t worry about it.’ What he’s really gonna do is run a check on my name to make sure that I’m not selling drugs and that I don’t have a record. It’s funny, though. Believe me, I have long scheduled a haircut, but because of this story, I can’t get rid of this mop of hair.”

  Howard laughed and thought of his wife, Maureen, a professional hairdresser.

  “We should get my wife to have you sit in a chair for her!”

  “Yeah, I should,” Breskin replied, “but I have to keep it long so the kids will trust me.”

  “Well, the assumption in the department is that you’re working for the defense,” Howard finally admitted.

  “That I’m working for Naiburg?”

  Breskin was stunned by the absurdity of this idea.

  “Could be,” Howard laughed. “You just don’t know. Cops are paranoid.”

  “You know,” Breskin replied, “one thing I am concerned with is how these kids have been ostracized by their community. There has been no outreach to these kids.”

  “This was disastrous,” Howard said. “I wouldn’t doubt the Lauwers family is going to move. When I talked to the parents, they had absolutely no idea their kid was involved with this group at all. We went into that house and probably shattered their image of their kid.”

  “Well, Gary’s parents told the papers he didn’t ever do drugs,” Breskin replied. “Parents disbelieve too.”

  Howard agreed.

  “They’re the worst ones to get to believe anything!” he said. “It’s always, ‘Not my son! Not my daughter!’ It’s always somebody else’s kid. ‘Go get them out of the park, but leave my kid alone!’ The problem is, it’s their kids and they don’t acknowledge it.”

  Howard lit yet another cigarette.

  “I really feel sorry for my kids because I don’t believe ’em,” he laughed. “Everything they say is a lie, and that’s from dealing with kids for years. It’s hard not to think everybody in the world is a scumbag. You can get that way from the constant lawsuits and being dragged into federal court on crap. The last time we went to federal court was because we caught a kid in the park with a beer. We got sued for eleven million dollars. Any cop faced with this is going to say, ‘Screw that!’ If the police don’t have to deal with kids in the park, they’r
e not going to.”

  Chapter 50

  “ YOU LIKE TO DISCOVER PEOPLE. That’s what a Gemini does.”

  David Breskin sat on the grass inside Northport Village Park, having tarot cards read for him by a teenage girl. Nearby, a local cover band was playing the Temptations’ “Just My Imagination” as balloons were inflated, faces were painted, and refreshments were served. It was July 22, 1984, and the third annual YDA Summer Festival, sponsored by the Youth Development Agency of Northport/East Northport, was underway.

  “You usually meet people who want to get close to you,” the girl continued, as her friend Michelle DeVeau sat down beside her. “But you don’t like people getting close to you because as soon as they start knowing everything about you, it frightens you. You don’t like people reading through you and that bothers you. That’s probably why you wear sunglasses—you don’t like people to see your eyes.”

  “No, it’s just very bright,” Breskin quipped. “I squint a lot. What about my love life?”

  “You and your girlfriend are going to break up,” she told Breskin. “This card means the end of a love affair.”

  “I’m gonna have to tell her that,” he chuckled. “She’s in Paris right now.”

  Once the tarot reading ended, Breskin focused on Michelle. He had been hoping to interview her since she’d spoken at St. Paul’s a few nights before, and now, sitting in the Old Park as the band began to play Pure Prairie League’s “Amie,” he would finally have his chance.

  “I hear you knew Gary pretty well,” Breskin said, turning on his tape recorder.

  “Gary and I were really close,” Michelle replied. “I knew him for about four or five years. He was a sweet guy. I’d always come down here looking for him because he was fun to be with. I used to call him ‘Billy Idol.’ I was in love with the guy, you know? I still got one of his hickeys. It won’t go away.”

  Michelle pushed her long brunette hair out of the way to reveal the mark on her neck. Breskin smiled.

  “Yeah, I see it,” he replied.

  “If it ever goes away, I’m going to kill myself,” she joked.

  Suddenly Michelle remembered Ricky’s suicide and thought better of the quip.

  “I’m only kidding about that,” she assured Breskin.

  “Gary got beat up a lot, right?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” Michelle replied. “He was a skinny little guy—an easy target. Gary was a wimp. He was more into peace than fighting. He fought to get people to like him. Why does anybody fight? He’d bought a knife for protection, but I don’t think he carried it around. Gary told me Ricky told him he was gonna kill him, supposedly.”

  “If Gary thought Ricky was really going to kill him,” Breskin said, “why did he go up into the woods with him that night?”

  “Gary was gullible,” Michelle replied. “He was the kind of guy who would believe anything anybody ever said to him. He was very insecure.”

  “Did Gary get on okay with his folks?”

  “All I know is his mom and dad are really nice people,” Michelle replied. “I’d talk to his mom on the phone every once in a while. ‘Hello, Mrs. Lauwers. Is Gary there?’ And she would say in her accent, ‘Oh no, Gary’s not here. You know boys, Michelle; they’re never home.’ ”

  “They don’t think he was involved with drugs, according to the papers,” Breskin said.

  “Gary’s parents were blind to the drugs,” Michelle replied. “Like most parents. He did them to be accepted—like most kids. He liked getting stoned, but he didn’t like all the other stuff.”

  “But he did steal ten bags of angel dust,” Breskin countered.

  “That was for money,” Michelle insisted. “He told me he smoked some of it, didn’t like it that much, and gave it to other people. He’d get stuff and share it with everybody because he wanted to be liked.”

  “What about Ricky?”

  “I couldn’t deal with that asshole,” Michelle replied, disgusted. “He was a prick. People worship him, which is really sick. I’ve seen thirteen-year-old girls running around with Ricky Lives on their T-shirts.”

  “What, in Magic Marker or something like that?” Breskin asked.

  “No,” Michelle replied. “They went to places and got them made. I was gonna kill them. They put around graffiti: Ricky Lives, Dead or Alive. I’m putting around Gary Lives in Our Hearts. I also put the chorus from ‘Fire and Rain’ by James Taylor. I heard it on the radio the other day and someone dedicated it to Gary. I sat there and just started crying.”

  “How did you find out about him dying?”

  “I was over my grandmother’s house and my mom and dad both came in,” Michelle replied. “I knew something was going on. They said, ‘We have something to tell you.’ First thing I thought was ‘Somebody’s dead.’ They said, ‘Gary died.’ I ran into my grandmother’s kitchen, grabbed the biggest knife I could find, and booked out into the backyard. I just started hacking away at a tree, started freaking on a tree. I was like, Why him?”

  “You know, it was healthy for you to do that to the tree instead of yourself,” Breskin offered.

  “That poor tree . . .” Michelle chuckled. “When I found out Gary died, I imagined him the last time I saw him: in his denim jacket, a Billy Idol T-shirt, his jeans, his Led Zeppelin pin, and his Beatles pin. My parents have been watching me with a fine-toothed comb—looking at my wrists, making sure I don’t come in stoned.”

  “What do you think happens when you die?” Breskin asked, still trying to figure out the obsession with death among Northport’s teens.

  “I know Gary went to Heaven and Kasso went to Hell,” Michelle answered confidently.

  “What about Troiano?” Breskin asked. “He’s still around.”

  “I hope he dies,” Michelle fired back. “I really do. There’s not many people I wish death on, but him? I wish death on him, okay? My dream is to get the hell out of here. I want to go somewhere there are no sickos and you don’t get hurt by people. I think my generation is a bunch of lowlifes. No ideals. I’m more like a hippie than anything else. I’d like to be in Woodstock.”

  When the band was finished playing, Michelle led Breskin over to the bandstand to show him all the new graffiti that had appeared since Gary’s murder.

  Breskin noticed one inscription that said, There is no Satan crowd downtown. Kasso was a waste.

  “Who wrote that one?” he asked.

  “Randy Guethler,” Michelle replied.

  Breskin eyed another—To Gary: I love you and I will never forget the fun we had and the time I spent with you. Gary Lauwers will live in my heart forever!—Squishy. Next to the inscription was a drawing of a tearful eye, a heart, and a cross.

  “Who’s ‘Squishy’?” Breskin asked.

  Michelle blushed.

  “Me.” She smiled. “He used to call me Squishy.”

  “Why ‘Squishy’?”

  “Long story,” Michelle said cryptically as she led Breskin back out onto the lawn. “Don’t worry about it.”

  As the two walked out of the bandstand, they passed one more piece of hand-carved graffiti, long since painted over by the village. It read:

  Oh, I wish I was a little bar of soap, bar of soap

  I’d go slidey, slidey, slidey over everybody’s hidey

  Oh, I wish I was a little bar of soap, bar of soap.

  The lyrics to this old campfire song had been left there many years before by a young Ricky Kasso.

  Before drugs.

  Before Satan.

  Before murder.

  Chapter 51

  COLM CLARK SAT RUMMAGING AROUND in the darkness of David Breskin’s rental car, looking for the brown paper sack of beer in the back seat. He and another friend of Gary’s, Dan Petty, had agreed to give Breskin an interview in private, and sat with him in his rental car in the Foodtown parking lot.

  “They should be back there somewhere,” Dan said.

  Colm eventually found the bag and pulled out two bottles, handing one
to Dan.

  “You want one?” Colm asked Breskin.

  “No, I’ve got one, thanks,” Breskin replied before taking a sip from his bottle of St. Pauli Girl. “Was Gary ever into the Satan thing like Ricky was?”

  “He was,” Colm replied, “but it was just the appeal of it, not the actual thought of Satan, and all that. He’d write stuff like ‘666.’ ”

  Suddenly a black cat jumped out of the window of a car parked nearby.

  Dan jumped up in his seat.

  “Holy shit!” he exclaimed. “That cat just climbed out of the window.”

  “That’s all we need tonight: a black cat. Right?” Between screeching crows and black cats, David Breskin was fed up with ominous animals echoing Gary’s murder. “So, when Gary wrote ‘666,’ did he know what it meant?”

  “He had this upside-down cross and this little brown book about Satan,” Dan replied, “and he was just saying all these stupid things, but he never really knew what it meant. He’d read it, but he didn’t really understand it. He really was starting to turn his life around, though. He started playing basketball and was thinking of going into the army or the marines.”

  “What happened that made Gary start getting his act back together?” Breskin asked.

  “It was slow,” Dan replied, “but you noticed him getting more and more friends. He started gaining relationships up at Merrie’s, but he sorta fucked that up when he stole pills from Liz Testerman. She was taking Librium for her back or something. He said, ‘I don’t want you taking these anymore,’ and took a handful of them. I think, after that, he realized he had to face some consequences. Everything was piling up—the things with Ricky and Liz—and I think he realized he shouldn’t have done that.”

  “Did Gary hang out with people like Kasso because he wanted to be accepted?” Breskin asked.

  “He hung with Kasso sometimes,” Dan replied, “but it wasn’t like they were really good friends or nothin’. I don’t know how anyone could be friends with Kasso. He seemed like the type of person who would turn his back on you for drugs or money.”