The True Detective

by Theodore Weesner

  Honor and Praise for the True Detective:

  “A harrowing psychological study of the effects of kidnapping and child molestation on the victim, the abductor, their families, and the investigating detective.”

  —American Library Association, (ALA) 1987 Notable Book List

  “The True Detective is tough-minded, but subtly done. The language, the details, the progress of the POV sections—everything serves Weesner’s total effect brilliantly. And while it deals with a sensational, even loaded subject, ultimately I’d say the novel is that rare achievement, a wise book, and maybe the saddest book I’ve read. That it’s also a page-turner is a marvel.”

  —Stewart O’Nan, acclaimed author of Emily Alone and Last Night at the Lobster

  “The True Detective is a wrenching novel to read. It is a crime novel that more than any other I have read that takes in the whole situation of the crime. There are no obvious villains here, or easy answers. This is not a genre novel. It belongs on the literature shelf.”

  —David Guy, USA Today

  “Weesner seems to have a pipeline into the minds of young people when they are confused and in trouble . . .” (The True Detective is) “. . . a compulsively readable thriller that is to the nuclear family what Hiroshima was to the nuclear bomb, and the best account yet of its detonation.”

  —Joseph Coates, Chicago Tribune

  “Theodore Weesner, author of the much praised The Car Thief uses his moving story of the abduction, rape and murder of a 12-year-old boy to raise the kind of moral questions that no caring person can ignore today.”

  —Marilyn Stasio, Fort Worth Morning Star Telegram

  Praise for The Car Thief:

  “When it first appeared in 1972, The Car Thief took its place as one of the great coming of age novels of the twentieth century. Forty-five years later, it brings back a lost moment in America’s past, the brash young auto industry on an exhilarating joyride, Michigan’s Motor Cities roaring with life. Ted Weesner’s seminal novel demands a second look for its marvelously rendered young protagonist, the unforgettable Alex Housman; for its courage and wisdom and great good heart.”

  —Jennifer Haigh, New York Times Bestselling Author of: Broken Towers, Faith, Mrs. Kimble and The Condition

  “A remarkable, gripping first novel.”

  —Joyce Carol Oates

  “The Car Thief is a poignant and beautifully written novel, so true and so excruciatingly painful that one can’t read it without feeling the knife’s cruel blade in the heart.”

  —Margaret Manning, The Boston Globe

  “Weesner lays out a subtle and complex case study of juvenile delinquency that wrenches the heart. The novel reminds me strongly of the poignant aimlessness of Truffaut’s The 400 Blows. Beneath its quiet surface, The Car Thief —like its protagonist—possesses churning emotions that push up through the prose for resolution. Weesner is definitely a man to watch—and read.”

  —S. K. Oberbeck, Newsweek

  “What The Car Thief is really concerned with emerges between its realistic lines—slowly, delicately, with consummate art. Perhaps Mr. Weesner himself put it best: ‘In my work, I guess I wish for nothing so much as to get close enough to things to feel their heart and warmth and pain, and in that way appreciate them a little more.’ Judging from this book, his wish has been fulfilled . . . and then some.”

  —Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, The New York Times

  “A simply marvelous novel. Alex emerges from it as a kind of blue-collar Holden Caulfield.”

  —Kansas City Star

  Honor and Praise for Winning the City:

  “Winning the City is a fine novel, a crisply written story about a young boy’s struggle to define himself.”

  —James Carroll, Ploughshares

  “A courageous author . . . No one better has a handle on heartbreak— he reminds me of a latter-day Dreiser who writes better, stylistically . . . What is so special about Weesner is the emotional precision.”

  —Joseph Coates, Chicago Tribune

  “. . . a knockout! . . . Dale’s struggles to win in a world whose odds are stacked against outsiders . . . leads to a heartbreaking kind of disillusionment and courageous maturity.”

  —Dan Wakefield, Boston Globe

  “Winning the City tells of a young athlete ‘nearly driven out of mind with all he knew,’ but Mr. Weesner’s own mind is superbly clear on every page. He is an extraordinary writer.”

  —Richard Yates, New York Times Bestselling Author of Revolutionary Road

  THE TRUE

  DETECTIVE

  by

  Theodore Weesner

  This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this novel are either fictitious or are used fictitiously. Places are named, but only to suggest reality. None of the persons who appear in these pages is intended to represent anyone, living or dead.

  THE TRUE DETECTIVE—e-pub edition

  Astor + Blue Editions LLC

  Introduction, Copyright © 2012 by Theodore Weesner

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof, in any form under the International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by:

  Astor + Blue Editions, LLC

  New York, NY 10003

  www.astorblue.com

  Publisher’s Cataloging-In-Publication Data

  Weesner, Theodore. THE TRUE DETECTIVE—epub edition.

  ISBN: 978-1-938231-11-7 (paperback)

  ISBN: 978-1-938231-10-1 (epdf)

  ISBN: 978-1-938231-09-4 (epub)

  Originally published by Avon Books

  © 1987 an imprint of HarperCollins USA.

  1. Murder and suspense crime—Fiction 2. True Crime; child abduction—Fiction 3. Small town detective in desperate manhunt—Fiction 4. Confused Predator and determined cop—Fiction 5. Sexual crimes police procedural—Fiction 6. Portsmouth (New Hampshire)—Fiction 7. American crime story—Fiction I. Title

  Book Design: Bookmasters

  Jacket Cover Design: Ervin Serrano

  New Introduction:

  THE SEXUAL REVOLUTION WENT VIRAL IN THE 70S, LEAVING countless sexual simpletons in its wake. Due to internet porn, the trend has yet to burn off in the new century and anyone’s guess is as good as mine in estimating the degree of blindered sexual simplicity that has flowed over all like a shallow flood dampening the soles of every pair of shoes.

  The True Detective is an account of several casualties in the revolution, a sexually obsessed twenty-one-year-old college student, a bewildered senior investigator trying to understand, and an innocent twelve-year-old boy who wanders directly into the jaws of the new pathology. In a seaside town in New England a sudden ‘incident’ startles the town in its headlong rush into the restoration of things new on old footings and foundations. Explicit pervasive sex, let out of the closet, is in the process of changing everything everywhere for everyone.

  ###

  AS A NOVELIST I found myself exposed to the material of this novel on a visit to Detroit with my twelve-year-old son to watch the University of New Hampshire hockey team compete in the NCAA playoffs. Alas, something was immediately terribly wrong throughout Detroit and nearby Oakland County. The news was blasting from newspaper headlines and TV screens. Four children, two boys and two girls, ages twelve, thirteen, eleven, and ten had in recent weeks been abducted from the streets, harbored for several days each, sexually violated, and put to death, their bodies left along roadsides to be discovered by passersby. The threat in the air was so palpable I did not allow my son out of my view for our three days of watching tournament hockey games, having lunch at Elias Big Boy, driving north to Flint in a rental car to show my son where I had grown u
p, how far I had walked to school, and to give him his first driving lesson in the cemetery where my father lay buried under a simple marker.

  Returning home to New Hampshire, unable to dislodge from my mind what was one of the most charged atmospheres I had ever known, I conferred with my editor in New York and entered into a contract for the writing of a non-fiction account of the Oakland County child killings. Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood had been one of the most compelling reading experiences I had known and my mission as a fiction writer was to bring similar qualities of artful prose to the powerful drama I had seen unfolding along the Woodward Corridor into Oakland County.

  Moving to Rochester, Michigan with my wife and three children, I gained permission to tag along with investigators from a Special State Police Task Force committed to solving the serial crime. While interviewing detectives as well as family members, I mapped out and visited all locations, reconstructing as accurately as possible—in a loose leaf notebook—every moment and detail having to do with the crime spree. Like the State Police detectives, my writing and investigating—my seeking to understand—was meant to culminate in the apprehension, conviction, and punishment of the killer.

  Alas, no killer was apprehended and my personal In Cold Blood was not meant to be. With hundreds of pages of prose, returning to New Hampshire, I felt informed enough in my analysis of a new sexual pathology having come into existence (one confirmed by Ted Bundy, by the way, on the eve of his execution in Florida), that I used one of the family profiles, together with my imagination, to write a novel dedicated to a single child and a single detective. I called the novel The True Detective and saw it published successfully by Summit Books in 1987 and by Avon in 1988 as a mass-market paperback. Given the unfulfilled literary aspirations I brought to the task, always wanting to see the book appear in a quality literary paperback, I’m pleased to see it published here as an ebook, and hope that readers will appreciate not only its literary but its true-crime characteristics.

  Theodore Weesner

  Portsmouth, New Hampshire, 2012

  TO TED, ANNA, AND STEVEN

  Who haunt every night the hallways of my mind

  Prologue

  Portsmouth, New Hampshire, 1981

  MURDER STOPPING AT A SMALL TOWN MAY HAVE THE EFFECT of a nail dropped into the mechanism of town life. In large cities, by contrast, any number of murders may be processed and left behind daily, and only a glut creates a stir. A town or small city, even as it has no choice but to continue on its way, is likely to pause. It will look within, may gaze even harder and longer if the crime seems to have stepped down from a bus coming in from Boston or New York, L.A. or Atlanta. Questions will be asked. Why here? Did we do something? Is this the start of something new?

  A new bridge bypassing Portsmouth offers a view that could be from a plane. Below, where the river opens to the Atlantic, are the town’s older bridges, the Route 1 Bypass and the Memorial Bridge. There, too, are its white and blue and cream-colored pleasure boats in stalls, its Naval Shipyard work sheds painted battleship gray, and the immediate merging of sky, river mouth, and ocean. Close upon the shore are the town’s brick buildings and narrow streets, pressed by rows of wooden houses and old tree tops, held throughout by salt water washing into the town’s coves and harbors, creeks and bays. Directly under the bridge a depth of water pours one way or another in its tidal slide, and as always a lobster boat is sputtering by, leaving a thin white wake in the swollen green surface, drawing along a gull or two like toys on a string.

  The antique seaport of thirty-odd thousand is on the northern border of New Hampshire’s momentary coastline, and the wide river coming and going is the Piscataqua. The new bridge turning through the sky is spliced into Interstate 95, three lanes going each way, leaving the ground like a long line drive, curving east in its trajectory north, cresting above the water at 165 feet—a dozen feet less at high tide—and returning to earth in another state. Southbound (Live Free or Die/Bienvenue Au/New Hampshire) and northbound (Welcome to Maine/Vacation Land), the green superstructure is intended to carry civilization into New England’s high corner well into the coming century.

  Sea sounds and smells are here in all seasons. Over land and water gulls and sea ducks complain and argue, buoys and ships’ bells clang and hammer, and the clam flats and rock formations with their catch basins and green beards—unlike the blond beaches on the nearby ocean proper—perk and hiss and send off their foul breath at low tide. There are old docks and piers and seawalls around town, too, covered with generations of minuscule barnacles and crustaceans, which at a distance are not dissimilar from other colonies up on shore. There is life underwater, too, where seaweed-black lobsters the size of baseball gloves thumb-strut throughout the dark mystery as if they have seen it all, as if there is nothing new under the sun.

  On land, where the town is in the process of becoming a small city, wood-framed houses along the narrow old streets are being salvaged and painted yet again, and the occasional red brick mill or shoe factory is being converted to offices, apartments, boutiques, cafés. It is a town being rediscovered and repopulated, and along its old waterfront streets and in its wooden-floored mom-and-pop grocery stores, the term mixed blessing has found new currency, But so, elsewhere in town, have the terms paradise, and pride, and not so rarely, San Francisco of the East.

  When the local lieutenant of detectives dresses up it is in a necktie and possibly a V-neck sweater under a wool shirt jacket from Kittery Trading Post; not dressing up, he dispenses with the necktie. An early riser, he often takes a walk in his town on Saturday morning, while his wife Beatrice sleeps in. He walks in town, or about the waterfront, or through a neighborhood. He may walk through one of the old downtown cemeteries and try to perceive something of life in a reading of markers. Or he may drive to one of the nearby beaches, to stroll and see what has washed up overnight. He will pick up broken glass if he sees it, if its edges have not been washed smooth, and deposit it in a trash barrel as he returns to his car. And he may stand for a time near the seawall at Wallis Sands and watch gulls and squads of sandpipers work the beach within its roar and mist, as waves roll in and break and leave behind a glistening effervescence of table scraps.

  What he enjoys above all is to watch the far-off smudges of boats to see if they are advancing, like time, on the horizon. A child’s pastime, he often thinks. And he often thinks, too, that it is one of the pastimes to which he would introduce children, if he had children, even as this thought has reminded him lately of an account by a lawyer acquaintance whose path he is forever crossing at the courthouse or in the police station. More than once, in elevator and marble lobby, the man has told him of walking with his son and daughter on the beach at Ogunquit, passing through the grassy dunes and happening upon two naked men lying together—well, more than lying together, the man has said, one man, it seemed, but then two—just as the sun was coming up and he was walking with his son and daughter.

  Gilbert Dulac is fifty-two years old and twenty-six years a policeman, an overweight, oversized immigrant of French Canadian birth—he carries 260 pounds on a frame six feet four inches tall—and he has regarded the town as his for a dozen years or more. The feeling is a consequence, he knows, of being a policeman, of being a detective and the lieutenant of detectives, and of the town being small enough to understand, but also of being an immigrant, even if it was only to shift down, some thirty years ago, from Quebec, more as a neighbor marrying in than as a foreigner putting down roots. Like other immigrants, as immigrants know if others do not—as they believe their seriousness to be the country’s secret weapon—he is more aware of the ideals of his adopted land and life than are the natives, and it is this added charge which gives him satisfaction in his self-appointed role, one he exercises quietly, as town father in an American town.

  Everyone should be so lucky, he reminds himself ever more often as time slips along and his horizons seem to diminish at a quicker rate. Children would have been the greater
good luck, he has always thought; that he has none is his life’s only deep-seated regret. Children, just one or two, would have provided all that he and Beatrice might ever need or want to move on into the shadows ahead, and into the darkness. He’d have them out this morning, in fact; he’d have chased them out of bed whatever their ages and taken them for a stroll on the beach, just as he always went with his own father on Saturdays when he was a boy and his father was free from work, when they’d take their sea green Hudson Hornet down to the garage and hang out with the other men and boys and speak of cars and motors, of geese and Atlantic salmon, of Rocket Richard, of Lindsay and Howe.

  It was in 1981 then that an incident happened to startle the town in its headlong rush into restoration, new brick walkways, and new taxes. On a Saturday evening in February, a twelve-year-old boy walking home close to downtown disappeared, leaving only traces of circumstantial evidence. Like a creature lifting out of the water, the incident sent a chill through the area, stole a beat in the town’s preoccupied preening upon its new wardrobe; all the world paused, if it knew it or not.

  PART ONE

  MAGAZINE PHOTOGRAPHS

  SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 14, 1981

  CHAPTER 1

  HERE IS ERIC WELLS, ON VALENTINE’S DAY, LYING ON THE living room floor, giving love a chance. Chin in hand, he keeps catching himself looking all the way through the TV screen where otherwise, on buzz saw feet, the Roadrunner is zipping everywhere. The old screen’s black-and-white images don’t quite matter now. Red colors keep coming up there. Blushes of valentine red. He is twelve years old and the colors are raising a warmth in him.

  The card was in his desk at school yesterday. At the time he could only sneak a glance, but as he carried it home after school, trying to ignore that it was in his pants pocket, bending with his leg, its red colors kept stirring in him. Taking it into his bedroom, he closed the door. He looked at it and looked at it. If valentines were such mush, he wondered, why did it feel so good?