The Man from Primrose Lane: A Novel Read online

  “Mr. Trimble,” David said, through the window, as loudly as he could. “Mr. Trimble, please stop that.”

  Trimble’s penis disappeared under the shirt in an instant. Trimble stared back at him, a look of anger at David’s supposed trickery. “Who the fuck are you and how do you know me?”

  “I came down to talk to you about your old scoutmaster. About Ronil Brune.”

  “Why the hell you outside my house at two in the morning?”

  David didn’t know how to answer that. He hadn’t prepared for this. His mind was a dark void. And still he hadn’t managed to start the car. The door wasn’t even locked, he realized.

  “Are you stalking me?” asked Trimble. “What the hell do you want?”

  “Do … do you think Ronil Brune really killed Sarah Creston and those other two girls?” he asked.

  “What?” he crinkled his nose at David as if he smelled sewage. “You a fucking reporter? Get the fuck out of here.” Trimble turned toward the house and started walking away.

  David rolled down his window. “I don’t think he killed anyone.”

  Trimble stopped but didn’t turn.

  “Obviously, Brune raped those women. But he wasn’t a murderer. All those women he let go, even when he was supposedly killing these children. That’s not how it works. Serial killers don’t suddenly start not killing their victims. Their violence escalates.”

  Trimble looked back at him. “I know he didn’t do it,” he said. “I tried telling the prosecutor. But he was so sure. Said he had cat hair or something that showed Creston was at his house.”

  “But when Creston was abducted, you lived there, too. And a day after she was found, you moved back here, to Steubenville, to be with your parents. What made you leave so quickly?”

  “I got a bad case of shingles,” he said.

  “That’s what you told your boss at work?”

  “Yeah.”

  “If I track him down, is that going to jibe with what he remembers? What was the name of your doctor?”

  “I didn’t see no doctor.”

  “Well … that doesn’t make much sense,” said David. “How do you know it was shingles if you didn’t see a doctor?”

  “You’re confusing me,” he said, and he was turning now, walking back toward the car. “I remember now. Yes. I saw a doctor, yes. Company’s doctor or something. The fuck is it to you, anyway, Encyclopedia Brown?”

  “Did you kill Sarah Creston?” There. It was out. Like dice thrown from a cup.

  Trimble smiled. “C’mere,” he said. “Get out of the car.”

  David rolled the window up quickly and started the car. Something hit the window, a loud THUMP. He looked over. It was Trimble’s dick, still hard and dripping. Had the talk of murder turned him on more? David thought so. Trimble started pumping his body against the car.

  Finally, David clicked it into drive. The moment the car lurched forward, Trimble shot his load, trailing semen along the side of the reporter’s car like a racing stripe from hell. David found an all-night wash in the next suburb and spent a half hour disinfecting his car, trying not to puke.

  * * *

  David returned to the apartment in Cuyahoga Falls just as the sun peeked over the horizon. Elizabeth was in the shower, preparing for another day of teaching. The dining room smelled strange. Like liquor or some musk, like a strap of leather lying in the sunshine. He couldn’t place it. He assumed she had read one of those thick, glossy mags the night before, the kind with the pull-tab cologne samples.

  His notes were spread over the table, arranged into piles labeled by Post-it-note tombstones: Sarah Creston, Donna Doyle, Jennifer Poole. There was a new stack, too, pages of new reports on the unsolved abduction and murder of a girl from Steubenville that had occurred two years after Brune was already in prison. She had lived two blocks from Trimble’s house.

  How many more girls should there be? he wondered often. How many am I missing?

  He thought, again, of Elizabeth’s sister. It was tempting to let the pull of his obsession take him there, to believe Trimble may have abducted Elaine as well. He understood the allure of trying to lump every little girl abduction to one bogeyman. Sometimes even good detectives did that. Better to think one man was responsible for all the horror. But there was no sign that Trimble had even scouted the region north of Akron. And he would have stood out like a transient in the ritzy section of Lakewood where Elizabeth had lived.

  David spent his spare time searching for some bit of circumstantial evidence to connect Trimble to Donna and Jennifer. Though Sarah’s was the only murder for which Brune was convicted, David had spoken to the detectives in charge of Donna and Jennifer’s cases and had been told their files had been closed, their deaths long ago attributed to Brune due to the fact that those animal hairs were found on Jennifer’s body, hairs identical to those that had come off the carpet in Brune’s house and van, and Donna had been wrapped in a plastic bag that had been traced back to the bedspread in Brune’s master bedroom. “You can’t kill a man twice,” one detective told him.

  How long do you look for something that doesn’t exist before it becomes a delusion? Before it becomes an obsession?

  “You’re home,” she said from the doorway of the bathroom, naked but for a terry-cloth towel wrapped around her hair, diamond drops of water on her small breasts reflecting the light from the window.

  “Sorry about last night.”

  “You need to sleep.”

  “I need to go to work.”

  “But you haven’t slept. You look like crap.”

  “I’ll be fine. I’ll grab some coffee.”

  “It’s dangerous to drive like that. Why don’t you lie down for a half hour?”

  God, her voice was grating sometimes, wasn’t it? It bit into his head with sharp teeth. He could feel the headache growing behind his eyes. “Can’t,” he said. “I have an article due today.”

  “Then why did you drive to Steubenville?” This was the tone she used with him all the time now. Why couldn’t she see how important this was?

  “I had to meet him. I had to see Trimble.”

  “What’s the hurry? The girl was murdered over twenty-five years ago.”

  He shook his head. “We’re talking in circles,” he said.

  “You’re being stupid about this.”

  “Do you think I want to spend all night on the road?” Shut up, he thought. Shut up. Shut up. Shut your pie-hole before you give me a migraine.

  “So stop.”

  His field of vision collapsed into a gray dot. Motes of light danced at the edges. “Goddamn it, I can’t.”

  She walked into the bedroom and slammed the door.

  David returned to his notes, tall sheets full of his longhand, summaries of Brune’s files. He never heard her leave, even though she must have walked right by.

  Two hours later he still sat at the dining room table. He had gone through Jennifer’s file again and found nothing he could use to place Trimble in her path the day of her death. But a few pages into Donna’s paperwork, he caught his breath at the sight of one word: Hap’s. He set that report aside from the others. Then he rooted into the box for a detective’s interview with Trimble he’d found in Medina. Hap’s. There it was again.

  Hap’s was a meat processing plant in Marshallville. In 1982, the year Sarah Creston was murdered, Trimble had worked as a butcher there. And in 1980, the year Donna was murdered, the man who had discovered her body had written, under occupation, Meat Cutter, Hap’s on the statement he gave to the detective.

  The man’s name was Burt Wrenn and David found him still listed in the white pages.

  “’Lo?” said a frail voice on the other end of the line.

  “Hi, Mr. Wrenn? I’m a reporter who is researching the Donna Doyle case.”

  “Yeah? They catch him?”

  “Well, the police executed Brune four years ago and—”

  “Not Brune. The fella that lived with him. The guy that worked
next to me. Girlish name.”

  “Riley?”

  “Yessir. Riley Trimble. He …

  * * *

  … done it,’ he told me,” said David.

  “Objection, Your Honor!” yelled Synenberger, standing. “Hearsay.”

  “Mr. Wrenn is unfortunately dead and cannot be subpoenaed to testify for this jury,” said Russo.

  “Your Honor, please,” said Synenberger. “This is ridiculous.”

  “In 1980, Mr. Wrenn reported his suspicions about Trimble to the police,” said Russo.

  “No such document has been entered into record,” countered Synenberger.

  “Because none exists, Your Honor. We believe it was purposefully ‘misplaced’ by the Medina County prosecutor in order to deflect doubt during Brune’s trial.”

  “Your Honor, now this man is impugning the integrity of a respected county prosecutor in order to squeeze this hearsay into record,” said Synenberger. “Can we draw the line here, please?”

  “State of Ohio would like to enter into record a video deposition of Mr. Wrenn, conducted shortly before his death earlier this year.”

  “Objection, Your Honor. The defendant, at that time, had just been charged and had yet to obtain legal counsel.”

  “That is incorrect,” said Russo. “Trimble was afforded a public defender, who was present for the deposition. It clearly satisfies the requirements set by Crawford v. Washington.”

  “Objection overruled,” said Siegel. A young woman wheeled a TV stand in front of the jury.

  “Mr. Wrenn’s deposition,” said Russo, “taken in the presence of the public defender, two weeks prior to Wrenn’s death due to lung cancer.”

  The screen crackled to life. Members of the gallery craned their necks to get a better look. On the television, the body of a weathered old man sitting on a hospital bed came into focus. Burt Wrenn’s nose was obscured by some breathing apparatus that gave his voice an off-putting nasal whine. He spoke at the camera, appearing to address the jury directly. “I, Burt Wrenn, being of sound mind, do offer the following testimony and swear that it is the whole truth, under God.

  “In 1980, I worked beside Riley Trimble at Hap’s in Marshallville. He and I separated out the different cuts of meats from the body of a cow. Or pig. Deer in the fall. We spent a lot of time in close quarters, talking about family and where we were from. On several occasions I know I talked to him about the spread of land I have in Marshallville. There’s nothing on it except an oil well and an access drive. I told him how I would go there in the fall to hunt and I told him how it was the perfect place to get deer because it was on a road that wasn’t much used, and out of sight of any house. There’s a field of bluegrass there that the deer like to congregate on around dusk. Couldn’t have been three weeks after we talked about it that they found that girl, Donna Doyle, lying on the grass by that access road.

  “I was suspicious of him, right away. He was always sort of shady. Too smart to be working at the meat market, for example. And he pretended to be stupid. A couple times he’d accidentally say a word that was way over everyone’s head and he’d blush and say he’d heard it on the news and the other guys would rib him about it for days. It just creeped me out, though. I remember one word—verisimilitude. Who uses a word like that in conversation? I had to look it up.

  “When the cops questioned me after they found the girl on my property, I told them about Riley. But I never heard from them again.

  “And then I saw on the news that his roommate was arrested for raping all those women and my first thought was, I bet they did this together. I bet they killed Donna together. I’d never met Brune. But Riley knew all about my field. After David Neff told me that Riley was living at Brune’s house back then and had moved back to Steubenville the day Sarah Creston was found, I was sure of it. I just don’t see how Riley couldn’t have been a part of these girls’ murders. He certainly knew how to cut his meat.”

  The video ended.

  Synenberger shot out of his seat. “Your Honor, is this a deposition or a testimonial? I didn’t hear a single question posed.”

  “Defense council didn’t ask any,” said Russo. “But they were present. They had their chance.”

  Synenberger raised his hands at the judge. But Siegel only shrugged. “It is what it is. Take your seat, Terry.”

  Russo let the room fill up with silence for a moment as his assistant wheeled the TV cart back to the corner of the room. “What did you do after Mr. Wrenn relayed this important information to you, David?”

  “I immediately took it to the police, the Canton police, actually, because that’s where Donna was from.”

  “We of course have already learned from prior testimony by Canton detectives that they quickly reinterviewed Trimble. They also had the Bureau of Criminal Investigations and Identification compare a fingerprint found on a plastic bag that had been found near Donna’s body. That fingerprint, we now know, matched Riley Trimble,” said Russo, pointing dramatically at the defendant, who stared back at David. “Did that surprise you, David?”

  “No,” he said.

  “Why not?”

  “By the time the results came back from the lab, I was already convinced that Trimble was the man who murdered Donna Doyle, Jennifer Poole, and Sarah Creston.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Neff. No further questions, Your Honor.”

  “That’s lunch, folks,” said Judge Siegel. “Defense will cross when we return in an hour.”

  David looked to Synenberger. Caught his eye. The lawyer winked and then turned away.

  * * *

  “Where are you, David?” asked Katy, drawing the sheets around her naked body. “Where do you think you are?”

  “Shit, Katy. Where the fuck am I?” He rolled off her and sat up. He looked around the room, his rooms, that is, at the Bush House Hotel.

  Katy sat back against the headboard, using her left hand on the frame to pull herself up. “I came out here to surprise you,” she said. “Only one hotel in Bellefonte. But when I opened the door, there you were, passed out on the floor like some heroin addict. I thought you were dead. I almost called for an ambulance but then you started talking in your sleep and I knew you were okay, more or less. Anyway, I cleaned you up, got you in bed. You stopped talking around five in the afternoon. But you kept me up all night so I guess I dozed off after that.” She looked at the clock on the nightstand: 11:32.

  “I’ve been asleep for twenty-four hours?”

  “Longer, hon,” she said. “It’s eleven-thirty in the morning. You passed out Friday night. It’s Sunday now.”

  He’d never slept so long in his life. He wondered if there really might be some brain damage involved.

  “Kate, I’m sorry,” he said.

  She blushed. “Don’t apologize,” she said. “Why do you think I came out here? I just don’t really like you thinking I’m your dead wife when we’re bumping uglies. So let’s cool it until later.” She laughed but he could also see that she was, in some very basic feminine way, quite shook up over their sudden and weird first sexual encounter.

  “I’m famished,” he said at last. “How about some pizza?”

  * * *

  Lucarelli’s Pizzeria was located in a two-story rock building atop Lamb Street, in an allotment overlooking Bellefonte proper. Frank resided in the apartment above the restaurant and his son, who hand-rolled dough beside a large oven as David and Katy ate, brought him down after their plates were cleared. He was a tiny man, covered in liver spots the size of large freckles, bent over an aluminum cane. He wore suede slippers and a long tweed coat tied around his waist. Carol had once been this man’s lover, sometime before her dead brother’s name had been used by a hermit from Akron. Frank sat in the booth beside Katy without acknowledging her presence.

  “Some baked ziti, Dominic,” he said. “And a coffee. Not decaf.”

  Dominic disappeared into the kitchen, muttering something from the motherland under his breath.

  U
ntil his son returned, Frank stared at the table in silence, his bottom lip moving slightly of its own accord. He has some palsy, thought David. Something degenerative like Carol, but not Alzheimer’s, and not that far along.

  As soon as the fumes from the high-octane coffee hit his olfactory center, drifting up from a ceramic mug in spindly fingers, Frank awoke. His dark eyes opened and surveyed his neighborhood as he sipped the drink loudly. When his eyes found Katy, he winked. He set the mug down.

  “I knew when I did it I’d be haunted by the decision my whole life,” said Frank, looking up at David. “Ever since I was a little kid, when faced with a decision, I listen to my heart and my heart tells me if I should do it or no. And all my life, if I get a feeling of unrest in my heart, I choose no. Every time except that day. But he was so goddamned insistent.”

  “Who?”

  Frank smiled. “I am not as senile as I appear,” he said. “I thought of going to the police. Don’t know why I never did. I guess I got a little scared. I made a deal with the devil one day, forty-some years ago. Summer of ’69. I sold the identity of my girlfriend’s dead brother to a man in bed with the Philly Mafia.”

  “Did you get his name?”

  Frank leaned forward. “As a matter of fact, I did.”

  * * *

  “Back in the sixties, the Italian Mafia that ran those parts of Philly not controlled by the Irish had a capo who scouted this area for protection rackets, bookies, and small-time poker games,” said Frank, between bites of baked ziti. “Name was Angelo Palladino. Ruddy little fella. Couldn’t grow a beard. Just a thin mustache. Why they made Ange, I don’t know. Fucking stupid move on their part, I thought at the time, because Ange was a real mouth breather, you could tell. Figure that’s why they set him out on the far territories, the little towns like Bellefonte, here. Used to come in to my shop, used to come in here and expect a tithe. Like I needed protecting. But I go along to get along and I will say I had use for them a few times in my life and they was always forthcoming when I needed certain services, so que fucking sera, okay? Okay.