The Man from Primrose Lane: A Novel Read online

  “Came a time during that summer of ’69, when the hippies were tearing up college campuses across the country, and we had a skirmish here in Bellefonte. These three longhairs from State College come down and put a rock through the window of the recruiter’s office. Did it after dark, too. Cowards. Lot of old-country folk called out to Philly saying, ‘Hey, buddy, we pay you for protection, remember? Maybe we should stop.’ And so the boss, he sends out Ange and a couple a men and they take up stake down at the Bush House, where, no doubt, you’re staying. Got to know Ange and his men well that week. Hot as fuck, it was. End of August, Africa hot. Even the niggers stayed inside. Big Ange and his crew would lunch here every afternoon.

  “Eventually, they caught up with those hippies. I’m happy to say they never came south of State College again. Point is, I got to know Ange’s men. It got to where they trusted me a little and to where I let them in on my side project. I think I did it just to be friendly, but it was a fucking stupid move because now they wanted a cut of that action, too. What I did was I made a couple hundred bucks a month making fake IDs for the local high schoolers. And yes, I altered some documents for the hippie draft dodgers on occasion. It wasn’t my war. I didn’t begrudge them their protests on principle, but I do get a little upset when they start trashing places. Anyway, I made fake IDs. I was good at it. Shoulda been an artist. My mother, God rest her, in the ground forty years, my mother—my mother always said I drew like da Vinci himself. Mothers, huh?

  “So one of Ange’s men, his name being Sal, Sal says, ‘Hey, Ange, maybe he could help with the McGuffin situation.’ And I says, ‘McGuffin situation?’ And Ange is quiet for a moment, right? He’s sizing me up, but it hurts his brain too much, you can tell. He tells me all about this guy Sam McGuffin. Some smartypants who showed up in Philly and asked for the don’s help. ‘But McGuffin’s an Irish name,’ I says. But Ange, he just shrugs. Big galoot. McGuffin wanted papers. Documents. Wanted to change his name. And wanted it done right. In exchange, he promised to give the don some financial advice. To prove his worth, this McGuffin character, he tells the don to invest into a certain company several thousands of dollars. The company split twice that week and the don became even richer. More to the point, he became indebted to this stranger.

  “So we make a deal, yes? You see it? They let me keep all of my earnings in exchange for making this McGuffin disappear forever. They were my masterpieces, these papers I made. When making fake IDs for kids, I usually just grabbed a list of Social Security numbers from the office of vitals here in town. Or a birth certificate. You know, something good enough to buy them beer or get them into Mexico or Germany or what have you. But this man wanted a new life and papers that would hold up under the greatest of scrutiny. There is only one way to do this. You must find a person of roughly the same age, within five years will do, but a year is better, of course. Someone who died at a young age, young enough so that they had not yet applied for a Social Security card, young enough that they had never paid taxes. So that the only paperwork they have is that birth certificate. That’s when I thought of Carol.

  “I never dated Carol, all right? I know she says this. But it’s not true. I have only ever had eyes for my beloved Anna, God rest her soul. But yes, I did fuck her. Excuse me. Pardon my fucking French. But I am old and there’s no reason to lie. Yes, she was my goomah, my mistress. Carol, as I’m sure you know, had a brother who died in a terrible car accident when he was just a little boy. More, had he lived, he would have been just as old as Mr. McGuffin claimed to be. Was perfect. So there it is.”

  “So you never actually saw him?” asked David.

  “No, I never did. Ange’s men took the papers back to Philly. A notarized birth certificate, a high school diploma, college transcripts, employment documents from several out-of-state businesses, and a Social Security card, a real one. Didn’t need to doctor that. Back then, you had the birth certificate, you could get a soash. Easy-peasy, Japanesey. McGuffin—he liked the papers so much, he writes me a letter. More financial advice. Invest in Sony, he said.”

  “I spoke to Carol’s son. Says she sent a man to talk to you in 2008. Did you tell all this to that man Arbogast when he came by asking questions?”

  Frank shook his head.

  “Why not?”

  “That man was trouble,” he said.

  “What do you mean?” asked Katy.

  “I asked him why he wanted to know, what business of his it was, and he tells me this story about how the guy I helped was an uncle of his and he needed to find him to let him know that his sister was deathly ill. Been around liars long enough to know a good one, and this fella was terrible. Obviously, this guy was in cahoots with whoever it was sent McGuffin into hiding in the first place. So I told him to go pound salt. When I seen the report on the news about the strange murder of Joe King, it didn’t take me long to realize it was my Joe King they were talking about, the identity I created. As I live and breathe, I am sure that Arbogast or whatever his name is had a hand in his murder. How he tracked him down, I don’t know. There are ways. But they are beyond my means these days, I’m afraid.”

  And the trail was cold again.

  “What answer are you pursuing, Mr. Neff?” asked Frank. “Arbogast’s identity or the reason behind McGuffin’s secrecy?”

  “Arbogast’s real name is probably more important,” he said. “I’m the main suspect in the other man’s attempted murder at the moment and so I’d sort of like to find who’s really responsible before it gets out of hand.”

  “There is one more thing, now that I think about this man. But it’s probably not important. He parked in the crippled space. Had one of those permits but there didn’t seem to be anything wrong with him. Like I said, probably doesn’t mean anything. I used to make crip permits, too. But it’s different.”

  EPISODE NINE

  FEEDING HIS GHOST

  “How are we doing?” David asked Russo, the assistant prosecutor. Elizabeth was at his side, her fingers intertwined with his, as if he might suddenly be blown away, his father walking behind them. They headed for the elevators that would take them to the third-floor cafeteria.

  “We’re doing fine,” he said, clapping David on the back. “Eat something light. Drink something caffeinated. Go over your notes before we head back in.”

  Moments later, they were seated at a table in the lunchroom, a salad and a bag of Cheetos in front of David.

  “It’s so surreal to see you sitting up there,” said Elizabeth. “It’s like you’re the one on trial. I hate it.”

  “It’s the only real defense,” he said. “To tear me down.”

  “Heads up,” said his father, nodding toward the door. Trimble’s mother was making a beeline for their table.

  “Hello, Grace,” said David.

  Trimble’s mother was a lanky woman with hair the color of some sea monster’s ink. Her voice was ruptured and nasal. “You are a selfish prick,” she said. “Making money. That’s all you care about. You don’t care about the truth. You’d probably write that your own mother was a murderer if you thought you’d make a hundred dollars.”

  “Oh, come on,” said Elizabeth. “He hasn’t made anything off the book. He put more money into the research behind it. Get away from us, lady. Go talk to your son. He’s the one who’s hurting your family.”

  “If you were telling the truth, you wouldn’t need to be medicated like a crazy person,” she said.

  “Grace, go sit down,” David said.

  “You’re psychotic,” she said.

  “A little bit,” he said. “Because of your son and his scoutmaster. Because of what they did to those girls, the stuff I had to read about. Maybe I am. Yeah. Maybe. So do you really think it’s smart to piss off a crazy man?”

  Grace no longer looked angry. She looked concerned, the way a woman would look if she suddenly realized she had accidentally walked through a staff door at the zoo and found herself in the lion’s den.

  “Davey,” s
aid his father, shaking his head.

  “Go back to your table, Grace,” said David. “Go …

  * * *

  … fuck yourself, you talentless hack!” The voice was thin and loud and full of rage. “You don’t have it and you never will.”

  “What?” asked David.

  Cindy peered over the top of the cubicle that separated her desk from Frankie’s. “I didn’t say anything,” she said and popped back down. Frankie was out covering a county commissioners’ meeting. The room was theirs.

  David stared at his desk. It was littered with stacks of documents from Brune’s box. A packet of autopsy pictures lay half covered by a stack of police reports but he could still see the ghostly shape of Donna Doyle’s naked backside. Her killer had carved two large gashes across her body there.

  Had he dozed off? Had he been dreaming of Brune’s voice?

  Outside, the sky had grown dim over Cleveland. The setting summer sun hit the Cuyahoga and painted it a deep orange that looked like fire. (As it was the Cuyahoga, it was not outside the realm of possibility that it was, in fact, fire.) He looked at the clock on his computer—almost seven, another lost dinner with Elizabeth.

  He hadn’t called. And he still needed to come up with something to send along to Andy this week, a part of the job that felt like a chore. He was trying to make the most of it. He’d started honing his writing skills on other true crime stories about some of the city’s famous unsolved murders, which he fed to Andy at a semi-steady rate between smaller news pieces on local activists or how much the county was spending on voting machines that could be hacked by retarded monkeys.

  From behind Cindy’s desk came a dramatic sigh.

  “You okay, Cindy?” he called.

  “No.”

  “Wanna talk about it?”

  “No.”

  “Okay.”

  She was already walking to his desk, though, and there was a look of exaggerated exasperation on her face, a look she had long ago perfected. “So,” she began (she was the sort of young woman who often began conversations with the word so, as if you had just been waiting for her to start), “I’ve been reporting on this story for, like, five weeks now and uhhhhhhg, David, I can’t finish it. It’s too confusing.”

  Sometimes when Cindy was nervous, like in pitch meetings with Andy, she rubbed the back of her right ear and then smelled her finger. She thought no one noticed this compulsion, but David had spotted it during his third pitch meeting. He could tell she was getting nervous talking about this story and he hoped that she wouldn’t start rubbing the waxy garbage behind her ear, because he knew that there would be no way for him to hide the fact that he had noticed. And then they would have to talk about it. And David did not ever want to talk about that.

  “What’s the story?” he heard himself say.

  “So there’s this family, right? Rich family. Old money. Something to do with carpeting. So the patriarch dies. But he doesn’t leave a will. He has a little over five million in the bank and the guy doesn’t leave a will. I know, right? Anyway, they think he did it on purpose to punish everyone who was sitting around waiting for him to die. And now the family is tearing itself apart. Brothers fighting brothers. Mothers fighting daughters. Everyone with their own lawyer, everyone sure that they should have the biggest piece of the inheritance. They’ve been fighting each other for fifteen years. That’s the story.”

  “Awesome,” he said. He wasn’t being patronizing, either. There was a lot of room to write about strong characters in a story like that. “Are you looking for a hook?”

  “Yes.”

  David took a moment to think of something to peg such a story on. “What about the house?” he asked, thinking aloud. “They’ve been fighting over all this money, but there’s got to be a big goddamned house somewhere, right? Who’s in the house?”

  “Nobody,” she said. “A judge appointed his oldest surviving heir, a son, as executor of the estate and he got everyone to agree to sell the house and divvy up the profit—it’s the only thing everyone agreed to, actually. But that money is in escrow until everything is figured out.”

  “They can do that?”

  “I guess.”

  “I thought maybe you could make the house a character,” he said. “I saw something like that in Esquire once, I think.”

  “No house,” she said.

  “Hmmm. What you need is a neutral, omniscient character. Something you can use as a filter, as a point of view. You know, something that can comment on each of the people subjectively. What about … what about a gardener or maid or something? Did they have one of those?”

  “I think so,” she said. “I saw something about a maid in one of the filings.”

  “Try and track down their maid,” he said. “Someone like that could tell you everything you need to know about this family. It’ll be someone the reader can relate to, too.”

  She giggled a little. She looked relieved. Other writers had quit rather than disappoint Andy by dropping an assignment. “Okay,” she said. “That’s good. Thanks, David.”

  Poor Cindy.

  * * *

  Why do demons choose to hide in plain sight? David wondered as he drove up to Brune’s house the following afternoon. Dahmer, Gacy, Ridgway. Like Brune, they’d all lived in workaday homes. Not like the movies, not in dungeons or old Victorians poised above run-down motels.

  It was a drab, low-slung ranch, a vinyl-sided bungalow with a postage-stamp front lawn and a mailbox in the shape of a fish. It sat in a run-down allotment in the no-man’s-land between Akron and Canton, near the regional airport.

  He didn’t know what he hoped to find here. He certainly didn’t entertain any notion of finding conclusive proof of his emerging theory: that Brune had been a rapist of women, his protégé the serial killer of young girls. He doubted such evidence existed; Riley Trimble was not the type to keep a diary.

  Still, he was drawn to the place. There was a thought playing at the back of his mind, a romantic, thematic thought. And it was this: the only thing that separated him from absolute truth now was a single dimension, Time. He stepped out of the car. Here he was, in the exact location—in three dimensions—where Trimble, presumably, had driven into his garage with Sarah Creston in the back of his van. The only thing keeping him from witnessing the crime was Time; a single, but very necessary, ingredient in both absolute truth and soft-batch cookies.

  David knocked lightly on the door and a shirtless man with a paunch and a stubbly goatee answered. David did his best to explain his interest in the house, and then asked a crazy question. “Could I take a look inside?”

  “I don’t think so, boss,” the man said.

  “Did you ever look in the crawl spaces? Ever find anything unusual?”

  “That’s about all I have to say.” The man closed the door.

  David returned to the car and drove around the block to a tiny cemetery situated behind Brune’s house. The cemetery was separated from the home by a thick swatch of forest a quarter mile deep. Again, he had no real hope of finding anything. Again, he was flying on instinct. Wouldn’t a serial killer bury things in the woods? Didn’t that happen on TV? It did. But in real life? He thought it was worth ten minutes of his time. He parked in the back, near a tilting tombstone from 1897, dedicated to some guy with only a first name, Tanner. Tanner. He filed it away for later use. He liked the sound of the name. Strong. Underused.

  It was the beginning of a hot summer and the air was heavy, rippling with gnats and midges and horseflies, the ground saturated from recent thunderstorms. He hadn’t prepared for the briars and burrs and berry bushes that lined the forest and they bit at his khaki pants and stung his ankles, but when he was through, the going was easier. Skunkweed and ferns grew to his knees, but bent as he passed. After a while he became acutely aware of the silence. He heard no birds, no deer crackling the bracken under hoof, no squirrels fighting in branches overhead. He heard no crickets or frogs. This patch of old-growth forest was
utterly silent except for his intrusions. And it was old-growth. The oaks were wide as cabins, their canopies blocking out the sun almost completely. It was dark, but there was also a darkness. He felt it in his bones, in a dull aching in his head, the taste of copper in his mouth, like dried blood. This place had remained untouched throughout modern human history, undeveloped by white man. Had the Indians avoided this place, too? Was it some hallowed or evil ground that people avoided subconsciously? How much was David imagining simply because he knew how close this place was to a den of true evil? Not much—even the birds felt it.

  As he was about to turn back, David happened upon the clearing.

  It was lined with giant white elm trees that had miraculously avoided the disease that felled their Ohio cousins: great, formish, idyllic elms, the likes of which David had never seen and never would again. It was a large circle, perhaps a hundred feet in diameter, carpeted with bluegrass that bended and lolled in the dank, wet hot. It was so bright in the center that David’s eyes hurt and he was forced to squint so much his vision was reduced to a thin slit. It was several minutes before he noticed the stuffed animals.

  The animals were crucified upon the elms.

  Brown bears, sock monkeys, a child’s furry tiger. Someone had nailed them to the trees that lined the clearing, every single elm, so that they faced the center. David inspected the closest tree, where the tiger was crucified. Its paws, he saw, were not just nailed to the tree, but also stapled and tied. A swatch of duct tape had been applied to its mouth. Two roach clips were secured to the fur where the tiger’s breasts would be. There was a gaping hole where its private parts were located. As he watched, a hornet crawled out of the hole and zipped away. The tiger had been there a long time, its once-orange fur mottled with fungus and brown as sewage. He couldn’t tell if the animals had hung here long enough for Trimble to have done it. It was possible some other troubled boy had lived nearby and discovered this clearing one unlucky afternoon. For a moment he caught an image of a blond-haired boy dancing in the clearing, naked and singing a nonsensical song in a foreign and lost language David thought might be Aramaic.