The Verdict on Each Man Dead

by David Whellams

  He stayed patient as long as he could. He skipped a fourth scotch, went out to his plain sedan, and began to drive in the direction of Hollis Street, but then slowed to keep from arriving more than five minutes early. The plan was to rendezvous with Henry out on the avenue in front of the stone pillars at 8:55.

  Henry was late. Phil held back at the false gate until 9:05 and eased onto the street, halting in front of Maude’s bungalow at Number 4. He had tried to keep away in recent days, so as not to further alienate the residents; he didn’t need Chief Grady getting complaints of harassment by his Homicide detectives. Now, with the low-angled summer sun fixing the street in amber, the ranks of silent houses spooked him. Susan Powell haunted him, too. Had the killer of Tom Watson tried to play off that tragedy by removing Tom’s body with a sleight-of-hand flourish, convinced he could make the corpse disappear forever, like Susan?

  He moved on to the bottom of the cul-de-sac and parked. The garage door at Number 11 was up, but dusk concealed much of the interior. He identified the trunk of a shiny white Toyota Corolla parked on the left side of the wood structure. Did the Proffets have two cars, or merely a two-car garage, the spare half a man-cave? No, this had to be Selma’s vehicle.

  Lights glowed in two rooms of the house, one up, one down, but the front door and garage lamps hadn’t been switched on. Solar-powered bulbs lined the front flower beds but had barely begun to glimmer. The post light on the lawn was off. Next door, a single orange desk lamp glowed from a window of the Devereau house. All this oblique under-lighting made Phil suspicious, but still he kept his Glock holstered. He glanced back up the road. The air was fusty and Hollis Street began to close in on him, as if it were producing its own weather system. He looked around for something reassuring and glimpsed Jerry Proffet’s pinyon tree in the easement near the house. It was the only sign of natural life on Hollis Street.

  The garage gaped, beckoning the veteran detective. The warm night and the booze he had put back made him sweat, and he thought of Jerry Proffet shivering somewhere nearby.

  Why was the garage door open?

  Phil was known to be a little slack about his equipment, forgetting extra ammo clips when he went out on a Code Delta or leaving his vest at the precinct. Tonight he was armed with his Glock 17 and reloads but lacked a flashlight. He tapped his mobile and held it up, creating a torch and, bonus, giving him access to speed-dial. A quick scan of the garage and he would knock on the front door, pretending that he had freshly arrived.

  He paused at the opening. No stained sink or bloody mop waited, and no sticky lake of blood coated the cement floor, but what did he expect? He flanked the white car and padded to the back wall, making sure not to bump against a ceiling-high rack of rakes and tools. Even in the shadows he noted the perfection of the storage array, all the handles of the rakes and garden implements aligned plumb vertical. He paused. The screen of his mobile cast only diffuse light onto the floor, and he knelt down for a closer view.

  In spite of his offhand prediction to Henry, Phil did not really expect to find blood traces in the concrete, but there they were, five or six drops of red spoiling Jerry Proffet’s perfect suburban pastiche. Phil somehow knew that this was Jerry’s own blood; it was too fresh to be Tom Watson’s. It was all happening again. Theresa Pastern had asked, “What’s the one thing that’s hard to believe about this madman?” Now Phil knew: that the lunatic was willing to spread so much blood around. And what was her last admonition? He should search for the source of the killer’s anger.

  Phil killed the phone and took out his weapon. He considered texting Henry to warn him, but the blood on the cement changed his plan.

  He eased around the grill of the Corolla and managed to miss all the hanging tools. Looking back into the garage, he fathomed the obvious: Selma had parked her car hard by the left wall of the garage to leave room for Jerry to pull in. But where was the husband’s ride? Phil had a vision of the killer fleeing up into the Wasatch Mountains in Jerry’s tidy SUV, a body or two oozing in the back.

  Looking down, he found a red smear on his pants. Blood had transferred from the bumper of the Corolla onto his knee. He was confused. What had happened here, and was he heading into another living room slaughterhouse? The killer had likely taken Jerry prisoner and forced him inside from the garage, where he planned to do … what?

  The garage connected to the house by what in the East was called a breezeway. In this configuration, the walk-through ended at the kitchen entrance. To knock, or not to knock? Phil thought again of calling Henry. He turned back to the garage and noiselessly took an old-fashioned garden spade from the punchboard rack. He laid the shovel on the hood of the white car so that it became an arrow for Henry to follow down the passage to the kitchen.

  He opened the kitchen door.

  The antechamber offered two ways to go, a short hallway off to the right into the entertainment den, or the full kitchen straight ahead. He could make out a giant television in the den. He paused, evaluating the danger, but quickly saw that the kitchen was unoccupied, and so he went that way. It was almost a relief not to find bodies on the floor or blood smeared on the cupboards. The closed-in humidity of Jerry Proffet’s home got to him. He regretted that third glass of scotch.

  The main rooms on the ground level lay beyond the next doorway; this route would take him full-circle through the living and dining rooms to the den and its flat-screen monster. In the heart of the kitchen now, he tiptoed around the chopping-block island in order to advance on the main corridor. The front door off to his left was deadbolted; far to the right, sliding doors exited to the backyard, and they appeared to be locked, too.

  He circled right, coming to the entertainment room. The TV — it had to be a sixty-inch — loomed at an angle across one corner, and although the space was in heavy shadow, he could make out a boat-size couch facing the television. The den was large, but the furniture, including a La-Z-Boy chair, filled it. When did they start making everything so big?

  Phil’s eyes adjusted to the gloom, allowing him to make out the bodies of Jerry and Selma Proffet on the carpet before the La-Z-Boy. He tiptoed forward and knelt down. Both were dead, though only Jerry displayed a wound, a deep hole in his throat. Phil had the feeling of being watched and held his gun higher.

  The watcher moved out from behind the flat-screen. He halted in the silence, waiting. Fifteen seconds. Twenty. Thirty. Ronald Devereau, one-term president of the Hollis Street executive committee, pointed the gun-shaped Taser at Phil Mohlman’s back. The detective spun about, a quarter turn only, but enough to recognize his attacker. Fifty thousand volts launched Detective Mohlman face-first into the rug. Before passing into darkness, he remembered something Theresa had said to him: What’s the one thing you can’t believe?

  Devereau wasn’t intent on killing the policeman with the Taser, but he was perfectly willing to jolt him again if he somehow came awake. Devereau’s thoughts drifted, bright pictures splaying out from his memory. Watson had needed two jolts to keep him down. Maybe the sight of his wife’s head had made him brave. Whatever it took.

  The detective didn’t move, and Devereau was content to stare down at the grouping, fortuitously arrayed, in his fierce view, like icons of a triptych, two dead flanking one unconscious.

  He considered restaging the room to make it appear that the cop had killed the others, but none of these scenarios played persuasively. How could anyone reasonably interpret the flight of Jerry Proffet from the garage (screwdriver in the neck) to the den (boot heel on the throat), and Selma’s demise (choking in front of Antiques Roadshow) so as to incriminate the cop?

  He stuck to his initial plan, though he had to hurry now, for others were coming. He dragged the detective by the heels from between the Proffets to the dining room. As Devereau reached to slide open the patio door, the cop moaned and began to revive. His captor dropped his feet and took a stride back into the room. Phil turned his head
to one side and spat a gout of blood, thick as phlegm, onto the rug. Devereau drove a foot into his face and then stomped on his left knee joint.

  Ronald Devereau credited his survival in this world in equal parts to shrewd planning and benevolent forces outside his control. It was his version of humility. He’d been blessed. Never arrested, let alone charged. Never fingerprinted. Never wounded in battle, though most of his life had unfurled around guns and explosives. His good fortune was bolstered by the precautions he took. Most important, he declared to himself, he possessed Luck. He had endured for twenty years in anonymity because he made smart decisions and Fate rewarded him.

  Until now. With these rash killings he had set his course for the Void (he loved to put capital letters on big-concept words). Rather than castigating himself, he asked: can the Void, Destiny, and Luck merge? He paused in the silence by the sliding doors and looked at the side of his house at 13 Hollis. His plan had been in place for years, and now he stood at the cliff edge of freedom. Reconciled to his own extinction, he drew strength from the certainty of his Fate and savoured the potential gifts of Luck.

  As he dragged Detective Mohlman from the patio to the lawn (bump, bump, bump), he amused himself by counting his lucky moments that evening. Benighted Jerry Proffet had come to see him, all clammy-skinned and worried. How fortunate that it was Antiques Roadshow night and Selma was guaranteed to be in the TV room, just waiting for him after he dispatched her husband. Blessed, certainly, that the older detective, the one he had met three times, had dropped by alone. And lucky that had been ready with the whole neat plan, a full can of gasoline waiting in his own garage.

  A pair of headlights sweeping across the lawn between his house and the Proffets broke his reverie. Caught out in the open like an escaping jailbird, he looked away to avoid the blinding beams. But he didn’t drop the detective’s body, and certainly didn’t panic. He knew who was coming to get him.

  CHAPTER 19

  Henry arrived late, though only by twelve minutes.

  He and Theresa finished clearing the dishes, and Henry walked out for a view of the desert light show. He knew why he loved the West. Others talked about the witching hour or the flash of green on a sea horizon, but all Utahans were intimate with the march to sunset, when the desert sky worked its way across the colour spectrum into indigo blue, purple, and black. Henry shared his wife’s dislike of Hollis Street: it was dark territory, and it didn’t feed off the beauty of the Utah light the way the house on Coppermount did.

  Tonight he would miss the close of day, so he lingered an extra minute.

  He heard Theresa starting to rasp again. He crossed the patio to look for her new inhaler but remembered that the tray with all her prescriptions had been moved inside. He found her on hands and knees in the living room, heaving, engulfed, and he ran to the bathroom for her pills. In the crisis, it didn’t matter to either of them that she had taken her limit of Ventolin. Back in the main room, she rolled onto her side on the Navaho carpet, elbows clutched to her ribs, hands shaking, lips turning blue. All the while, she tried to spit out what wouldn’t come.

  The Ventolin calmed her lungs, or perhaps, Henry thought, the outburst had exhausted itself. Theresa remained on her side, and so, as he had many times, he crouched down to wait for her cue that she was recovering. It came as a wan smile and a fluttering of her eyelids. Had Henry been attentive to deeper clues, he would have seen her look across the carpet to the closet in the hallway, where the oxygen tank was stored.

  Relief swept over him as his wife levered herself up from the floor without further straining or croaking. She smiled. That was something she couldn’t fake.

  “Follow Mohlman,” she directed, her voice as firm as Corrine’s on the 9-1-1 desk at the precinct. For emphasis, and to demonstrate her sinew and will, she squeezed his arm and held him to her side. “Go. Stay safe.”

  Henry took in the placid look on her face. She was magical to him. Theresa had been making pronouncements all afternoon, and he and Phil had found every magisterial statement convincing. She understood the murderer. Henry knew that she was right to highlight the anger and the unhinged mind behind the Watson killings.

  “Do you want to go to the hospital?”

  “No, no. Let me relax. It’s passed. You have to help Phil.”

  “At least let me call Tynan to come over.”

  Henry expected his wife to demur, but she said, “Okay, just for a few minutes to watch the sunset with. I’ll wait up for you, sweetheart.”

  Theresa wasn’t okay and knew that her paroxysms would return in an hour or two, but she understood how important it was that Henry join Phil and participate in the arrest of Jerry Proffet. With all her misgivings, she insisted he go.

  She accompanied Henry out to the car and made sure he left with his .45 on the floor on the passenger side.

  Theresa lounged alone on the patio, enjoying the birdsong at sunset. The new inhaler had kicked in, staving off the tightness in her chest. She dozed, in and out of the world. Elder Tynan was suddenly there, striding from the evening horizon. They had an understanding that he would announce his arrival a hundred yards out whenever he arrived out of the sun. Now, when he was the requisite distance from the patio, he ahemed theatrically. She opened her eyes and smiled at him as he came in and took her hand.

  “Henry called me,” he said, in the even tone of a visiting pastor.

  “You didn’t need to come,” Theresa said.

  “No, but I did. Henry’s worried about you.”

  Theresa valued his friendship, in part because he remained calm at all times and she could learn from his self-possession. Even-tempered men sometimes irked her, but Tynan had helped her master patience. She also trusted his weirdness. He patrolled the red rock formations to the west, monitoring who knows what, for his own purposes. She liked to watch him on his desert prowls. He wore white shirts, like a minister, which he surely was, and they reflected back like flags or sails in the rippling heat. What had Jesus accomplished in his forty days in the wilderness? She had forgotten.

  They spoke little as they waited for night. Twenty minutes into their vigil, the Pasterns’ phone rang. They’d had trouble with their landline but for once, the reception was good.

  “This is Theresa Pastern.” She gave her name up front while she had the chance; a coughing jag might surge at any time.

  “I’m looking for Henry Pastern. This is Stanley Chambers. Your husband called me earlier, said it was urgent. Sorry, I was out.”

  Theresa wasn’t privy to Henry’s call, but she made a guess. “Mr. Chambers, do you live on Hollis Street in West Valley?”

  “Not anymore. But I resided at Number 6 until a few months ago.”

  “In fact, Henry’s over on Hollis right now. I don’t know what he called you about.”

  Concern tinted Chambers’s quick reply. “I do. He wanted my opinion on something. Who’s he planning to visit?”

  “Mr. Proffet.”

  “Okay, then.” Theresa felt him working through Henry’s query. “Can you pass him a message, Mrs. Pastern?”

  Theresa picked up on his edgy tone. “I can get him on the phone right now.” She turned feverish. She didn’t tell Chambers to call Henry directly.

  “He wanted to know whether Tom Watson and Jerry Proffet ever had an open fight.”

  “And?”

  “Not between those two that I’m personally aware of.” Chambers had an accommodating, almost courtly style but his statement seemed vague to her.

  “Between Tom Watson and someone else?” she probed.

  His voice turned steely. “I’m talking about a fight between Jerry Proffet and Ronald Devereau. You see, they both knew about the marijuana.”

  “You should have told Henry before. He couldn’t believe the community association didn’t confront Mr. Watson in some fashion. No one admits it.”

  Ch
ambers paused, avoiding a direct response, letting Theresa work out that he had put his house on the market because of the grow op across the street. “I was president for a while. I quit because I got tired of the politics of the committee. They wanted to regulate everything. They say there’s nothing nastier than street politics, and this was like that. No one but those two residents wanted to continue HASA. Devereau and Proffet live next to one another, and they tried to run the place from their end of the block. They were the only ones who knew about Tom. But two people doesn’t make a quorum.”

  Theresa went for broke. “Did Devereau and Proffet know about the grow house from the beginning?”

  “Not at the outset, no. It was recent. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have entrusted Tom Watson with contacting the Colorado company that owned Number 5.”

  Theresa now understood why Chambers had failed to report all this to Henry. He had known about the grow op before any of the other members of the executive and was ashamed.

  “Did Devereau ever threaten you?”

  But Chambers was gone. Theresa was unsure whether he had hung up or they had lost the link; she cursed the phone service in the desert.

  Instead of calling back, Theresa called Henry’s mobile. It kicked over to his message box. She considered leaving a lengthy account of her conversation with Chambers, but kept it short, allowing her panic to carry the message: “Watch out for Devereau.”

  The Mormon elder had been listening.

  “Tynan, is your truck working?” she said.

  “Never not working. Where are we going?”

  Tynan always dressed in black. His tractor was black and so was his truck. Theresa had watched him barrelling down Coppermount many times, the vehicle coated in desert grime. She ran outside towards Tynan’s house, the Mormon in tow, but by the time they traversed the hundred yards to his driveway, she was winded and he had to prop her up against the frame of his garage while he entered the door code. The door flipped up to reveal the truck. Theresa realized that she had never been in his vehicle, his house, or his garage, which like every other part of the property stood unfinished.