by Earl Emerson
According to police, the 13-year-old gave a confused account, while the 10-year-old is believed to be mute. Relatives are debating with the local police about whether or not the boys should be seen by a child psychiatrist. The boy’s grandfather has objected to mental health intervention, saying it would be an invasion of the family’s privacy.
Police, who are still piecing the story together, say the woman died of stab wounds to the neck and upper torso, while the man died of multiple gunshot wounds.
Osbourne, whose body was found near the front door, was apparently trying to leave the apartment when the 13-year-old allegedly gunned him down. No other details are known.
The 10-year-old has been placed with relatives pending further investigation.
The reference to my being mute brought back some scary moments when I knew my brain was trying to figure out whether to simply stop speaking or to go catatonic. There’d actually been a conscious choice on my part. I have no idea what would have happened if I’d given up and stopped everything. As it was, I ceased talking for three months.
The neighbors painted a picture of the widow Wollf and her two intractable sons that centered the initial investigation on us. It didn’t help that Alfred had complained daily to the neighbors about us, or that, after years of no adult supervision, we were as wild as feral cats.
Neil gave them a lot of different stories, which was his habit when confronted by the law.
Their initial reading of Neil was that they had a psychopathic youngster on their hands and they needed to get him off the streets for as long as possible. It didn’t help that Alfred had been shot three times in the torso and twice in the back of the skull, or that Neil fought them when the first officers tried to take the empty gun out of his hands. The whole thing looked too much like a new strain of adolescent psychosis.
To make matters infinitely worse, Neil drew an incompetent, alcoholic public defender.
After our mother’s death, I lasted less than three months with Grandpa Grant. Then it was off to Uncle Elmo, Grant’s eldest son, and his second wife and three children from her former marriage. I was given a spot on the basement couch, my meager belongings stacked beside the couch in cardboard boxes: a few pairs of pants, one pair of shoes, and a suit I’d worn only once. I had a picture book about the American Indian that I carried from house to house like a totem. There was a tiny school photo of my brother—we’d never had the money to buy full-sized photos but each year had copped the samples given out by the photography studio.
At Uncle Elmo’s I eventually put a broom handle through their new color television and was packed off to Aunt Valerie’s. Valerie was a compulsive gossip, who I learned later had told all the neighbors my brother was doing time for murder. The neighborhood treated me as a pariah. I spent five and a half months on her couch.
And so it went.
After high school I moved into a rooming house in the U District and worked nights at the Boeing Renton plant so I could attend college during the day. Two years later I signed up to take the fire department entrance test.
These days no matter what I did, part of my brain remained in Aunt Valerie’s neighborhood in Tacoma, Washington, where the neighbors thought I was the local pariah serial-killer pervert peeper porno-collecting murderer car thief in training.
40. DRY MOUTH
When she returned my call, Vanessa Pennington said she was on her way out and could only talk for a couple of minutes. I told her I had disturbing information about her grandmother’s housekeeper I thought she should know about. She seemed interested and said she would call me as soon as she had more time. On the afternoon of the eighteenth she phoned again. “Are you going to be home for a while?”
“As a matter of fact I am.”
“Do you mind if I come over for a few minutes?”
My mouth went dry at the thought.
I gave directions, hung up, brushed my teeth, checked my hair in the mirror, made sure the buttons on my shirt were aligned in the right holes, and was sweeping nonexistent bread crumbs from the cutting board with a paper towel when she arrived at my door.
I stared for a moment. “Can I come in?” she asked, laughing, then floated in on a gust of cold air. “I hope you don’t mind such short notice. My grandmother just got back from a visit to Guemes Island, and I want to hear what you know about her housekeeper before I talk to her.” She glanced around my living room. “You certainly keep a tidy place.”
“It’s something from my childhood.”
“You really are a video buff,” she said, standing at the bookshelf next to the kitchen perusing titles while I hung up her coat. She glanced down the hallway at the sturdy cherrywood racks on both walls. “How many videos do you own?”
“Eight thousand, give or take.”
“Amazing.”
She took in the television screen in the corner of the living room next to the gas fireplace, the single armchair across the room that announced I spent most of my time alone.
“Tell me what you know about Jackie Dahlstrom. I’ve never fully trusted her with my grandmother, but Nanna seems to like her, and she has so much trouble finding help, once she gets somebody they practically have to set fire to the place before she’ll let them go. Oh, God. You don’t think she lit those fires, do you?”
“The thought crossed my mind, but actually, no.” I tried to explain what I knew about Dahlstrom without confessing to our “date.” I told her I knew Dahlstrom had a cache of stolen credit cards and I believed she was a thief and a scam artist.
Pennington walked over to my kitchen window and gazed out at the choppy water. “I just want my grandmother safe. Look, Paul. I’m going to ask you a favor. I’m going to have a very hard time convincing Nanna to fire Jackie. Could you come up there with me now? Or do you have other plans?”
I never had plans.
The Pennington house was five minutes up the hill. We took Vanessa’s BMW. She’d never driven to her grandmother’s from this area, so I gave her directions up the hillside through the maze of side streets. She parked in front and we walked up to the porch. The weather was still cold and windy, the gray skies black along the horizon.
Patricia Pennington was seventy-eight, but shuffling along in her slippers and mauve dress, she still had a twinkle in her periwinkle blue eyes. Her dyed black hair was mussed in back as if she’d been napping. “So you’re the young man who carried my sorry bones out of this house the night they tried to burn me out?”
“I had help.”
“First rate outfit, your fire department. I mean that. First-rate.”
“Yes, ma’am. I think so too.”
“I saw people from your department up in the hospital. They think a lot of you.”
“Some do.”
She gave me a tour of the first floor, stopping at various photographs on the walls and telling a story about each. Vanessa watched her grandmother’s eyes as the old woman spoke.
Pennington was incredulous that I knew all of the actors in the photos, and most of the producers and directors. “George Cukor,” I said, at one point. “Geraldine Page. Ronald Colman. There’s Dalton Trumbo. What a writer.”
“I absolutely adored him,” she said. “That blacklist was such a horrible time. But he was constantly smoking. That’s what killed him, don’t you know?”
We were into the second room of photos when it became clear that the old woman was flagging. “Nanna,” Vanessa said, “why don’t we sit down?”
When we got her situated in her favorite armchair, she turned on the television with a remote control. Vanessa went to the kitchen to make tea. “So,” said Pennington, after Vanessa was gone and the television was warmed up and competing for her attention, “what’s this I hear about my housekeeper?”
“She’s been seen with stolen credit cards—a lot of them. I don’t think you can trust her. I think you should get somebody else.”
Staring at the television, she said, “She does a good job here.”
Vanessa returned with a tray of teacups and a teapot. “Nanna, she does a terrible job. You know I had to hire a cleaning service to come in once a week.”
“I keep her busy. She wants to be an actress.”
“We could go to a job service and find somebody with recommendations.”
“I hate to put a young person out of work.”
“I’m worried about you up here alone with her. Lieutenant Wollf thinks she’s a criminal and might even rob you.”
“Do you really think that?” she asked, turning from the television to look at me.
“Yes, I really do,” I said.
She looked into my eyes for a long time. “Well, if you say so, I guess I’ll have to let her go. I’ll tell her tonight.”
Vanessa gave me an exultant look and we sat down and had tea. At five o’clock we heard somebody rummaging around in the kitchen. Vanessa took the tea service back into the kitchen, exchanged words with Jaclyn, who I never saw, and came back out to take me home.
We were in her BMW when she said, “Are you planning to eat alone?”
“I was.”
“Listen. Let me take you out for a bite. It’s the least I can do to thank you for helping me with Nanna, and I’d appreciate the company. It was so hard for me in there. I hate confrontations, and when I went into the kitchen, Jackie was just so sugary sweet I wanted to slap her face.”
“I can’t imagine you slapping anybody.”
“That’s the trouble,” she said, laughing. “Neither can I.”
“Sure. Let’s go somewhere.”
We drove to B&O Espresso midway up Capitol Hill on Belmont and Olive. Normally I couldn’t tolerate silence in a car, especially with a woman I didn’t know, but with Pennington somehow it was all right.
The B&O was an eccentrically decorated coffeehouse that served great food, perfect espresso, and legendary European pastries and desserts. Sitting near a silent elderly couple who looked as if they came often, we ordered and chatted about the weather and other inconsequentials. Pennington had an open, easygoing manner that made me feel increasingly—and uncharacteristically—comfortable around her. It helped, too, that I knew there would never be anything between us other than our mutual concern for her grandmother.
She told me she was divorced. “My ex-husband was a stockbroker. He’s out of work now, but he was flying high for a few years. That was his BMW. He took the SUV. I’ve thought about selling it, but it’s paid for.”
I’m good at listening, which was probably what kept her going. She was the third of three girls, the youngest by four years, the baby of the family. She’d been raised in Seattle and drove past her old elementary school every day on the way to work at an import/export business. She’d gone to Western Washington University in Bellingham, where she majored in philosophy and English literature. “Two completely useless majors,” she added, “but my passion at the time—maybe still.”
“How long were you married?” I asked.
“Just under three years. I’m thirty, if you’re doing the math.”
“I wasn’t. I’ll be thirty in a few months.” We compared birthdays. Birth signs. Neither of us believed in astrology, so that didn’t go far. She’d played on two different soccer teams the past couple of years, one coed company team, and one metro-league all-women’s team. She loved soccer and jogging. She never got seasick and she hated camping. Day hikes were a passion with her, however, and she quickly gave me an impressive list of local trails she’d hiked.
“Okay. I’ve told you everything there is to know about me. Now it’s your turn.” Dead silence. She touched my hand and made a valiant effort to pretend she hadn’t noticed. “Also, I want to thank you for helping me with my grandmother. A few months ago I suspected Jackie was dipping into the grocery money. And Nanna’s medicines have been coming up short. I don’t understand people like that.”
I did.
“Now, tell me about yourself,” she said.
When it came to my past, what I handed people was an innocuous stew of half-truths, redundancies, and downright fabrications. But somehow I didn’t want to lie to this woman.
“My father died when I was young. Then my mom passed away when I was in fifth grade. I lived with different relatives until I got out of high school. I worked at Boeing for a while and went to the University of Washington. I wanted to be a teacher, but I took the fire department test instead.”
“How did your parents die?”
“It’s a long story. Two long stories.” Both guaranteed to evoke pity—which I couldn’t abide.
“Have you ever been married?”
“No.”
“Ever come close?”
“No.” Translation: I either can’t commit or there’s something wrong with me that keeps women away.
She gave me a look, the one where they’re trying to figure out if you’re gay. “It occurs to me that there’s a movie of my grandmother’s playing at the Harvard Exit. Rogue River Adventure. I know you’ve seen it, and so have I, but never on the big screen. It’s only a few blocks away, and we just have time to make it if we walk. What do you think?”
What did I think? I thought I liked her. I thought it would be a thrill to sit in front of Rogue River Adventure with the granddaughter of the female lead. As we left the B&O, I thought it would be a thrill to go anywhere with Vanessa.
She buttoned her coat against the night chill. “I have a confession. I didn’t just think of the movie on the spur of the moment. I planned this.” She smiled.
There was nothing to do but smile back.
41. THE SUMMER AFTER TENTH GRADE
Half a block from the Harvard Exit we encountered a beat-up old Chevy double-parked, motor running. A man in leather pants had a woman bent backward across the hood of the car, slapping her. I’d been beat up plenty of times as a kid, so I knew exactly what she was feeling.
They were drawing a crowd, all in all, maybe twenty leery witnesses. He was big and mean-looking, and it was clear nobody was going to step in.
Within seconds I found myself submersed in the feeling I got sometimes, the one that frightened me more than anything else on earth. It didn’t come often, but when it did I knew somebody was in trouble. As usual when the feeling came on, I tried to make my mind go blank.
“Oh, my God,” said Vanessa.
The only reason I hadn’t done anything yet was because my instinct wasn’t to stop the beating or to call the police. My instinct was to kill the guy. Also, Vanessa was beside me. Second dates were few and far between when you killed somebody the first time out.
Approaching at an angle, I stood in the blind spot behind his left shoulder, tapped his right shoulder so he turned away from me at first.
When he turned back his jaw met my fist.
His eyes rolled up into his skull and his knees sagged.
Amazingly, he reached inside his coat and fumbled for a small semiautomatic handgun. Before he could get a grip on the pistol, I hit him again, whereupon he flopped into a crumpled heap. Somebody on the sidewalk said, “God, is he dead?”
I kicked the weapon under the car, where it clinked into a street drain. The woman ran down the street.
Moments later Vanessa and I walked to the box office window at the Harvard Exit. “Aren’t you going to wait for the police?” Vanessa asked.
“They’ll find him without my help.”
I hadn’t been thinking about the police. I’d been thinking the assailant must have had a jaw like a sack of concrete. I had big bones and large knuckles, and I couldn’t remember the last time I got a clean shot at a man and had to hit him twice.
Inside the theater, the wooden floors creaked under our weight as we found our seats. Neither of us spoke.
At least I hadn’t beaten him to death.
Once in high school I’d been out drinking with some older guys when Rickie Morrison spit in my beer and called me a “fag.” Neither offense was much, but the alco
hol laid bare what few mental defenses I had in those days, and in the space of two minutes, before the others could stop me, I beat him up so badly he went to the hospital. My grandmother got the best attorneys available and fought tooth and nail for me until eventually the charges were lost in the system and dropped. Otherwise I might have joined my brother in the juvenile justice system.
I’d always been a scrapper. In eighth grade I’d been the smallest boy in our gym class, yet in a single semester I had six fights, not counting the Jones brothers. You included them, I probably had twenty fights.
At Washington Middle School the Jones brothers made sport out of slapping me around. They were both tall and lanky, both on the basketball team, and either of them could have whipped me alone, though they worked together. They had a friend named Dinkins who they brought along as the court jester. Dinkins always took a turn slapping my face, especially if there were girls in the vicinity. I hated Dinkins most of all. Despite their overwhelming physical superiority, I always fought back, and despite my efforts, I always lost.
I switched schools and between eighth and tenth grades, grew five inches, put on forty-five pounds, and began lifting weights and studying karate from books and videos. I got smart. I got mean. I got my driver’s license. I borrowed my aunt’s car and drove back to the old neighborhood. Dinkins was the first one I caught. I thrashed him until two passersby pulled me off, then I thrashed them. I was out of control.
Two days later Merv Jones, the older of the two brothers, saw me coming and caught me in the jaw with a left hook I barely felt. It was the only decent blow he got in. He’d been playing softball with some friends who could only stand and gape as I proceeded to knock out two of his teeth and close both eyes, payback for a dozen beatings at his hands.
