The Man from Primrose Lane: A Novel Page 14

  “So can I—”

  “Fuck, man. Can I see the reports? Can I see the reports? Yes. You can see the goddamn…” Boylan trailed off, looking across the room. “Sorry,” he said. He shook his head. “He couldn’t have sex with her. He couldn’t manage to get it up. So he molested her with a screwdriver. It was still in her when we found the body. He put metal clamps on her tits and wired them to a car battery. It burned her skin off. That stuff stays with you. That’s the stuff you’re going to read about in those files, David.” Boylan made eye contact with the reporter. The man was depressed, David saw. No, not depressed. Haunted. “You really want to have that in your head?”

  * * *

  While he waited for Boylan to copy the police reports, he hunted down the prosecutor’s notes from the trial. “Haven’t looked at the file myself for about twenty years,” said County Prosecutor Martin Baxter, through a window at reception. “They’re probably in the microfilm now. You’re welcome to take a look.”

  The microfilm contained much more material than David had expected. Too much to be just witness statements and transcripts. It didn’t take him long to discover why—the grand jury testimony was included as well.

  Testimony presented to a grand jury in the state of Ohio was kept secret, an exception to the generous public records laws there. Reporters were expressly forbidden to view these documents. Prosecutors claimed they needed this privilege so they could present confidential informants to the grand jury without compromising their safety. The real reason was the grand jury often serves as a rough draft of the trial, a chance for the prosecutor to test a particular strategy to see if it might be accepted by a regular jury. This system allows prosecutors to present a case to a grand jury over and over and over again until they find a strategy that grants them an indictment. In Ohio, there’s an old saying: prosecutors can indict a ham sandwich.

  David played it cool. He printed each page, skimming the testimony as he went along, praying he’d have enough time to print everything he needed before the office discovered the mix-up.

  Trimble had testified in front of the grand jury. A young, ambitious assistant prosecutor named Martin Baxter had led the questioning.

  BAXTER: Did your friend, Ronil Brune, ever talk about kidnapping girls?

  TRIMBLE: Not girls, but women.

  BAXTER: What did he say?

  TRIMBLE: He’d say stuff, like, all women have rape fantasies. That, secretly, they want to be taken and it was an okay thing to do so long as you put them back.

  BAXTER: Did he say how he would do it?

  TRIMBLE: We both came up with ideas. Like, you know, I suggested to weld the hook into the floor of the van.

  BAXTER: What?

  TRIMBLE: But I thought it was all talk, okay? A fantasy of his. I liked to go cruising with him, looking for girls on bikes out in the country. Just for fun but not for real. Just drive by. Kind of like catching and releasing trout. I thought we was just telling stories.

  BAXTER: Tell us what Brune did.

  TRIMBLE: Well, I never saw him do anything, but he talked about it a lot.

  The testimony continued for over forty pages. Each time Trimble incriminated himself, Baxter deflected his answers and implicated Brune. It was clear the young prosecutor was trying a strategy on the grand jury, one that painted Brune as an overbearing control freak, and Trimble as his malleable protégé.

  BAXTER: Did Brune ever bring women back to the house?

  TRIMBLE: Oh, just, you know, girls he was dating. Women, I mean.

  BAXTER: And was he having sex with these women in the house? Was he rough with them?

  TRIMBLE: He couldn’t have sex with them. Had something to do with some football injury. He would ask me to have sex with them. A lot of them were into it. He’d watch. He liked me to put things in them.

  BAXTER: Things?

  TRIMBLE: Vibrators. The top of a bowling pin. Stuff.

  Printing the last page, David realized he’d lost all track of time. It was a quarter to four in the afternoon. He’d never checked in with his editor. He’d forgotten to pick up Boylan’s reports. And he was going to be late getting back to his apartment to meet Elizabeth—they had planned to go running in the park at five.

  * * *

  As soon as he stepped out of the microfilm dungeon and his cell phone could find a signal again, it beeped. Andy, his editor, had left several messages. The last text read simply, Hey, Fuckhead. I’m drinking at the Harbor Inn. Find me.

  By the time he arrived in Cleveland and made his way through the Flats across the swing bridge, to the little brick bar with wood benches and everything on draft, Andy was hammered and angry. “This Brune shit has got to stop,” he said, after buying David a shot of Irish whiskey. “Cindy told me what you’re working on. Fine. It’s a waste of time, but fine. Only, do it in your spare time. I need shorter pieces. And I need more. I need something this week, or we don’t have a paper. And if we don’t have a paper, my kids don’t eat. You don’t want to take food out of my kids’ mouths, do ya?”

  “No.”

  “Good. Then give me twelve hundred words on this science wiz who’s coming to Kent. Tonight.”

  Elizabeth was upset. He was missing dinner again, another lonely night for her in their apartment. He felt himself getting angry, in defense. As if any of this were her fault.

  Back at the office, he thumbed through the notes Andy had copied for him. The scientist was a man named Ronald Mallett. He was a theoretical physicist who had dreamed up a way to twist the fabric of the universe into a loop using high-energy laser beams—much like stirring a cup of coffee until it creates a vortex. He was in town pushing a book.

  It was hard stuff to digest—David had taken Intro to Astronomy at Kent, but this was far more advanced. Essentially, what Mallett was attempting to do was to send a subatomic particle—“information,” he called it—into the past. Moments, mere moments, mind you. But if it worked … well, how fucking cool.

  To his surprise, David discovered Mallett’s number listed online and was able to get the physicist to agree to an impromptu interview a little after eight that evening. Mallett spoke of his father’s sudden death at an early age and how that event had motivated him to pursue this quest for time travel. Unfortunately, Mallett’s device allowed for travel only as far back as the device was turned on. No going back fifty years to save his dad; it was a bittersweet revelation.

  There was only one question David posed that the scientist considered worthy of a little regard. It was this:

  “If this machine you build can one day be made to send information back in time, would you necessarily even need to send it? For instance, I make up my mind to send today’s stock listings back in time to the beginning of the day, so that I can take advantage of the markets. Well, when I turn on that machine at the beginning of the day, that message should already be waiting for me, right? Because I will eventually send it. Now, I use the info to play the markets but then decide not to send that info back at the end of the day. Why do I have to? I already used the information.”

  “What you’re talking about is intentionality,” said Mallett. “You have to have made up your mind to send that information back no matter what.”

  But David wondered.

  He turned in a draft at 1:17 a.m., a little past deadline, but he didn’t think Andy would care that much. It was titled “Master of the Universe.” It wasn’t anything to tack to the fridge. The science talk was too dense even with his generous use of blue-collar metaphor, and the writing could be kicked up a bit. But it was finished.

  The next afternoon, as David sat at his desk in the offices of the Independent, his eyelids pulling toward the floor by invisible weights, his face unshaven, his mind full of misery following a morning spat with Elizabeth, his heart beating dreadfully as he feared he was letting Brune’s mystery sneak away while he was occupied by other things, Andy walked by and patted him on the head.

  And that felt good, didn’t it? To be
liked again? Sure. Sure it did.

  Besides, there was still time left in the day to do a little research on Brune. He could make it to Medina before the records room closed if he left right now. He wondered what secrets he might …

  * * *

  … discover in the police reports Boylan copied for you in Medina?” asked Russo, leaning slightly on the partition that corralled the jury. “What did you find?”

  “An interview with Riley Trimble, the man sitting there.” David pointed over to the defendant, a gaunt man not yet fifty, with gray hair, cut short. He wore an orange jumpsuit a couple sizes too large but his hands were not cuffed. David could still feel the animalistic terror he’d felt when he’d first spotted Trimble’s face in the dark, outside the window of his car, floating, ghostlike, across a dirty lawn.

  Russo walked to his table and picked up a few sheets of paper. He handed one to Trimble’s lead attorney, Terry Synenberger, and walked another to Judge Siegel. “State’s exhibit, H. Police report taken by Medina Detective Shane Somersby, dated October 27, 1984. David, why was that report of particular importance to you?”

  “I found it interesting for a couple reasons,” said David. “At the time this report was taken, Brune was a suspect in the murder of Sarah Creston, which is why they were interviewing his roommate, Trimble. The police were told that Trimble had lived with Brune that summer and they wanted to know if he had seen anything strange at the house. According to that report, Trimble told the detective that he had moved back to his parents’ house in Marietta on September tenth, 1982. I found that interesting because Sarah was abducted on September sixth. Her body was discovered September ninth, and the turtle trappers who found the body said it must have been dumped that day, because they had been in the area the day before and had seen nothing. If Brune had kidnapped Sarah and taken her back to his house like he did with the women he later raped, then I thought it was very likely Trimble knew about it, or was possibly even an accomplice. I thought it was interesting that he moved out of the house the day after Sarah’s body was dumped. That suggested to me that maybe he wanted to distance himself from a crime scene. Also, the detective at one point asked Trimble if he’d be willing to volunteer his fingerprints and take a lie detector test. Trimble refused.”

  “It was shortly after this that you met Riley Trimble for the first time, is that correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “Mr. Neff, could you tell the jury, please, about that first encounter?”

  “Yes, I can,” said David. “The first time we met, he asked me if I wanted a blow job.”

  * * *

  How long before I’m back in a courtroom? David wondered, four years later. How long before it’s me in that orange jumpsuit?

  He was in a rental, a blue compact vehicle that was less a car and more a Japanese torture device of some sort, zooming along I-80 toward the smooth foothills of western Pennsylvania—the Bug would never make it through the mountains. The wheel was uncomfortably low and the seat dug into his spine. If there hadn’t been more important things to worry about—such things as I’m the only suspect in the attempted murder of the man I’m researching and Did Elizabeth have an affair with the Man from Primrose Lane and When do the withdrawals start—he’d have been a little more consumed by it. He’d already put Synenberger on retainer. And even though Synenberger knew well that he could afford the blue-blood rate now, the lawyer would only take $2,500. “After the Trimble debacle, I owe you one,” he had said. “Besides, this is going to blow over. It’s silly.”

  He had considered, briefly, ending his quest to find the true identity of the Man from Primrose Lane. If Sackett learned he was still digging, he might be mad enough to arrest him for obstructing justice or intimidating witnesses. Might be persuasive enough to get the prosecutor on board. But if this became a thing … if the bottom dropped out and they indicted him for attempted murder based on circumstantial evidence … it was important to gather all the information he could about the victim before that happened. If he could figure out who the Man from Primrose Lane really was, before he’d started calling himself “Joe King,” maybe a more likely suspect would present himself.

  And much like the Sarah Creston case, he realized, he didn’t think he could quit if he wanted to. His wife’s fingerprints had been found on the man’s bedpost. Fuck the real identity of Joe King’s killer—the real mystery he was compelled to solve was how Elizabeth came to be in that house on Primrose Lane. He didn’t believe his wife had cheated on him. Not with an old hermit. Anyway, cheating wasn’t in her nature. He was the only family she really had, other than Aunt Peggy. Would she risk that? He didn’t think so. Then again, he’d never imagined she could commit suicide.

  The gun from his safe-deposit box was a bit of luck, actually. Sackett and Larkey were so sure it was the murder weapon, perhaps they’d rethink their investigation when ballistics proved it hadn’t been used in the crime.

  He was halfway to Bellefonte, on the edge of a mountain, when the withdrawal began to take hold. It happened suddenly and he knew at once what it was. It started with a sense of vertigo, as if he were leaning his head against the window of a very high apartment, looking at the cars below and feeling the distance that separated him from the ground, imagining the sweep of the wind that would cradle his body if he fell through the glass. He pulled to the shoulder of the interstate highway, opened the door, and puked onto the gravel. The remnants of an Egg McMuffin and a large coffee became an abstract painting on the ground. When he sat up, he felt lighter, as if his brain had shrunk an inch in diameter and was swimming around inside his skull, bumping into bone.

  David stopped for a ginger ale and Tylenol at the next rest stop and for a while the symptoms subsided. It wasn’t until he neared the Bush House Hotel that he felt the first warm rush of fever drift across his forehead.

  David trucked his luggage inside and secured the largest apartment in the hotel—a four-room suite on the top floor, overlooking Spring Creek. There was no elevator and he felt too sick to climb the three flights of stairs to his room just now, so he left his bags with the concierge. He asked for directions to Zion Elder Care, current residence of Carol Dechant, last surviving relative of the Man from Primrose Lane’s alter ego, Joe King.

  “She’s visiting with her son right now,” the receptionist told him. “Room 119, end of the hall.”

  It was a small and yellow room. Carol Dechant lay in her bed, which was raised so that she could see Dr. Phil on the television. In a chair beside her sat a thin man, fortyish, with large bifocals: her son.

  “Mr. Dechant, your mother has a visitor,” said the receptionist, a largish man with a lisp. Then he quickly left. It was obvious to David that he did not care for Carol’s son.

  “Who are you?” the man asked.

  David ignored his tone and put on a smile—hard to do when he felt so much like throwing up. He put out his hand over Carol’s body. It was shaking slightly. He couldn’t hold it straight. “David Neff,” he said. “I’m a reporter from Akron working on a story about Joe King.”

  The man took his hand. “Spencer Dechant,” he said. “Do you know my mother?”

  David sensed alarm in Spencer’s voice. Why was he afraid?

  “No,” he said, and looked to Carol for the first time.

  She was at least eighty years old, and her skin had taken on the translucent sheen of the aged. She stared at the television but David could tell she wasn’t processing anything. Her right eye was a mottled cataract. Gone was the sparkle of life but it was clear she had once been a stunning young thing with long blond hair. He understood at once the reason Spencer was afraid—his mother was senile. It was the boy who must be directing the lawsuit for the Man from Primrose Lane’s assets. Soon Carol would be dead, and as the sole heir, Spencer stood to inherit millions. Perhaps he justified it by believing it’s what Carol really wanted as he scribbled his mother’s signature on the forms their lawyer left for her.

  “She’s h
aving an off day,” said Spencer.

  “Does she have any on days anymore?”

  “Of course,” he said. “All the time. Just yesterday she beat me at rummy. She’s very lucid most of the time. Just an off day. Like I said.” He paused to swallow. “So what brings you out here? If you’d called first, I could have warned you about this. I just hope she’s feeling better tomorrow. I’d hate for you to waste such a long trip.”

  “Uh-huh.” David rubbed his chin. He looked at the TV for a moment, pretending to be interested in Dr. Phil’s assessment of teenage newlyweds, but in his head he imagined pulling out a cigarette from the pack he kept in his pocket, the pack he could feel pressing up against his thigh at that very moment, imagined placing it in his mouth, tasting the poison, the sweet chemicals soaking into his tongue. His stomach lurched again. There was nothing left to throw up, though, and it passed.

  “Did your mother ever tell you if she knew who the Man from Primrose Lane really was?”

  Spencer shook his head.

  “Did you even ever ask her?”

  “No,” he said.

  “Identity thieves prey on family and friends first. Did your mother have any close friends who disappeared? Any friends of hers have sons who disappeared years ago, in a weird way, unannounced?”

  “If she did, she didn’t tell me.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “Spence,” said David.

  “Spencer.”

  “Spence. I admit that I’m a little out of practice. Haven’t reported on a story in over four years. Wasn’t particularly good at it when I was doing it regularly, to tell the truth. But I think you’re lying to me about something.”

  “I…”

  “Maybe not lying, Spence. But you’re holding something back.” David began to walk around the bed. As he did, the man hunched in his seat, possibly expecting the writer to punch him. “I can see it in your eyes. It’s the same look my kid gives me when I catch him doing something wrong. You think that if you tell me your secret, I’m going to make it so that you don’t get a piece of that money. But, Spence, I don’t give a shit about that money. I don’t care who gets it. I don’t even care, not really, that you’re taking advantage of your invalid mother to get at that money. It’s every man for himself, anyway. Isn’t it, Spence? Besides, she’d do it herself if she weren’t so far gone, wouldn’t she?”