The Ashes of an Oak (22 page)

Chapter 30

Preston Jenkins was thirty-eight at the time of his death in 1961. He was murdered, said the file, by his wife, Laura. She had killed him because she had taken one too many beatings, one too many humiliations, one too many moments of terror.

Her son had been upstairs when she had done it and had therefore not witnessed the horror. He was fifteen at the time.

              Laura Jenkins had not been jailed. She had been given six years’ probation and ordered to have therapy. The world, it seemed, had tremendous sympathy for her. All those cherry-black eyes and blueberry-bruised arms, all those berry-fat lips and plum marks on her neck, had been but a promise of things to come, a downpayment on her death, but she had survived. Now the world cared. Now someone gave a damn. All those silent screams were now heard.

Too late, the damage was done.

Preston Jenkins himself had never been destined for greatness, but his outcome had been predestined. His life mirrored the generations before, every father a prelude to every son, every son an echo of his father.

It was only going to be a matter of time before the madness, the anger, the frustration, the genetic forces, peaked in a perfect storm and was let loose upon the world in savage revenge for the simple act of birth.

Laura had held onto her son and she and Lonny had grown up together united by their survival and the secret they shared.

Of course, none of this was known. As far as that unhearing, care-blind world was concerned, Laura had killed Preston and that was an end to it. She had saved the taxpayer the price of a hanging or an expensive lifetime in jail.

The world had moved on.

Now, seventeen years later, the sins of the father had come full circle and the son, unable to resist his ghostly calls, had reached that frenzied, perfected peak of insanity and began to take bites out of the world.

Frank closed the file and lit a cigarette.

He felt flat and unfulfilled. The times he had thought about this moment and now, when he got there, there was none of the elation he had hoped for.

If Lonny Jenkins had not been born, Mary would still be alive. Whatever the connection between the two, Mary would still have been alive. So would Mrs Dybek and George Curtis. So would Mrs Curtis, God rest her soul. Those ripples spread far, down the generations like a polluted, poisoned waterfall, killing everything in its path.

He closed the file and looked at his watch. Six-thirty. He’d been here all that time.

He would go upstairs and give Emmet the good news. At least it would please him. He knew this kind of stuff ate away at him, dealing with pressure from upstairs and from the press.

He heard the door to the basement open and footsteps down the stairs. They were tired steps, steps empty of good-news-lightness, heavy with the day.

‘Frank.’

Frank turned and saw Emmet. Even in the difficult lighting of the basement, his friend looked exhausted.

‘I found him, Emmet. I found our guy.’

Emmet came over and pulled up a chair. ‘You did? Oh, Frank, you’ve made my year, you old dog. Who is it?’

‘Lonny Jenkins.’ He opened the file and showed Emmet the picture of Preston Jenkins. ‘That’s his old man. Look at the drawing, Emmet. It’s incredible. Twins.’

Emmet picked up the portrait and put it next to the photo. ‘My God.’ He shook his head in disbelief. ‘My God. Who’d’ve thought it?’

‘Not me,’ said Frank. ‘Never me.’

‘Do we know where the boy is?’

‘That won’t take long. We’ll have a picture of him and an address in no time. I’d like to bring him in, Emmet. Can I do that? Can I bring him in?’

‘You can go with Mike and Bob and bring him in. Tell them from me, you’re the one to put the cuffs on him.’

‘Thanks. I’ll go and round them up.’

Frank got up and started to put his jacket on.

Emmet grabbed the empty sleeve and stopped him. ‘Sit down a minute, Frank. I have to talk to you.’

‘Sure.’ Frank hooked the jacket over the back of the chair.

Emmet wrung his hands.

‘What’s up, Em? Come on.’ He slapped Emmet’s knee. ‘This is a good moment. Don’t bring me down.’

Emmet looked up at the ceiling as if in hope of inspiration, then lowered his eyes slowly to Frank. ‘James Cowdell is dead, Frank.’

Frank felt tears come to his eyes immediately. ‘What?’

‘James is dead. I’m sorry.’

Frank slumped back in his chair. ‘How? Why?’

Emmet wavered, his hands and arms unable to find a comfortable place to rest. ‘Steve went to question him. He told you he was going to. I okayed it. I had to. Once Steve was inside the apartment, James pulled a gun. Steve had no choice. He had to put him down.’

‘Put him down?’ cried Frank. ‘He wasn’t a fucking dog, Em. He wasn’t fucking rabid. He didn’t own a gun. He wouldn’t know one end from the other. He wouldn’t have hurt a fly…’

Emmet put a hand on Frank’s arm and squeezed. ‘We found Mary, Frank.’ Tears balanced on the rims of Emmet’s eyes. ‘We found Mary’s…’ He almost choked on the words. ‘We found her head and we found the murder weapon. He killed her with an ice-pick, Frank, right in the back of her head. We found a saw too, Frank. We found a saw. And the finger of Charlene Astle. There’s no way round it, Frank. The boy did it. The boy did it.’

Frank leaned on the desk and put his face in his hands. His shoulders quaked with grief.

Chapter 31

Lonny Jenkins lived in a pleasant but slightly run-down single storey house on a street that had seen better days. He lived with his mother, who must have been in her early to mid-fifties by now.

It was dusk. The sound of traffic hummed in the distance while the constant rattle of people in their homes, shouting and laughing, screaming at each other or watching the TV turned up way too loud, listening to music – Latino, disco, classical and crooners - carried onto the sidewalk.

A smell of food pervaded the air – fried chicken, spices, barbecued steak, a hint of garlic. It mingled with the new smell of night and stimulated the memory and the salivary glands.

They were the smells and sounds of a still-decent neighbourhood settling, the creaks and groans that came with the setting sun, the world cooling down, much as an old wooden house ticked away come the end of day.

The police turned up in force, took the front door out and subdued Lonny Jenkins immediately. He made no attempt to run. He simply put his coffee cup on the table in front of him, put up his hands and carried on watching the TV. It was a programme about sharks.

The place was a mess. There were newspapers and magazines everywhere and the floor was littered with discarded cans and empty boxes of food. There were ashtrays full to overflowing with cigarette ends and skinny joints. A layer of ash covered the table and everything upon it and made it look like the aftermath of a pyroclastic flow. As the police moved across the floor, their feet crunched beneath them as they trod upon spilled cereals and stale, hard bread.

There was a stench of sweat and urine and, behind this smell, was another, sweeter, cloying, rotten odour, which was becoming familiar to Frank Matto.

Once Lonny was secured, Frank went around the house and quickly found the source of the smell.

Laura Jenkins’ body was in her bed. She had probably been dead for three weeks. Flies had made her a source of food and a place to lay their eggs.

The curtains were closed, but they were thin and dirty yellow and the light came in and tinged the room with a sickly, mustard sheen. Frank leaned against the door jamb with a handkerchief over his mouth. Every few seconds he would lift his hand and let a bit of the smell in and, after a minute or so, he became used to it enough to put the handkerchief away. He lit a cigarette and saturated the room in as much of the smell of tobacco as he could.

Well, he thought, you don’t need a psych for this. Call it displacement or call it what you like; Mommy’s dead and the boy couldn’t hack it.

She, the waxen, decaying, stinking remnant in the bed, was the bullet for his gun, the straw for his fragile back.

He called back over his shoulder. ‘Mike. Bob. You’ll want to see this.’

The two detectives came to the door.

‘Jesus!’ said Mike.

Bob turned on his heel and went outside.

Mike walked to the other side of the room, between the bed and the window. ‘Looks like the ME’s got some homework. What do you reckon, Frank? Two or three weeks?’

Frank screwed his face up. ‘Closer to three, I reckon. Probably what set him off.’

Mike grunted. ‘Crazy bastard. How many don’t we know about? He could’ve been killing for years.’

‘Maybe,’ said Frank. ‘There’s only one way to find out. Shall we go and ask him?’

‘I suppose we ought to. I sense a long night ahead,’ said Mike. He rubbed at his protruding gut. ‘I’m shit hungry, Frank. You?’

‘No, but we’ll stop for some take out on the way back to the precinct.’

Frank took another long look at the bedroom.

There was shit on the floor, smeared up the walls, on Laura Jenkins’ fingers, beneath her long, unkempt nails.

Her fingers, the skin taut and dry, were like the fragile legs of a bird. Her arms were thin, emaciated. Her face, even without the tarnish of death, was little more than a yellowed, tissue papered skeleton.

Maybe hunger beat the cancer to it. Maybe she starved to death, no food, no water, her lips parched, her tongue adhered by a glue of thick saliva to the roof of her mouth, because her son was entombed in his own reprehensible world, excluded from the real world, excluded from her world. Two people under the same roof, a millions miles apart.

Cancer, he thought. She had cancer. After all these years, after all she’d been through, she ended up lying and dying in her own shit while her defective, cursed son was out killing innocents.

He had lived inside her for nine months, feasted upon the nutrients in her blood and grown, safe and warm, in the amniotic cocoon that protected him from the buffeting of the outside world. He had lain inches from her heart and heard the soft, regular, reassuring, pounding and known instinctively that the clock had already begun to tick.

In all that time, Laura Jenkins had no idea of the devil inside her. Even when he had slit his father’s throat she had not let go of her boy, had not considered discarding the stained remains of her womb. She had taken the lumps for him, the humiliation, the gossip and the indignity, worn the tattoo of justice that would condemn her to the day of her death.

Swap the walls of the house for the walls of a cave, thought Frank. Swap the carpet for reeds and the windows for a hole in the wall and we really hadn’t come so far at all. Take away the roof and we’re back with the beasts, he thought – we’re back with the beasts.

It was a basic room; a table, some chairs, a doorway. A single bulb burned beneath a dusty green shade and poured a weak, jaundiced light upon the occupants.

Frank Matto sat in the room with Mike Patton. A uniformed officer stood at the door.

Before them sat Lonny Jenkins. His eyes were closed and his mouth was slightly open. His head was slightly tilted, his neck seemingly collapsed into his shoulders. At first glance, the onlooker would think that he had fallen asleep.

He had fair hair that fell to his pale eyebrows at the front and fell below his ears and down below his collar. It was unkempt. It hadn’t been washed in some time. The light fell upon areas of natural grease and made it look like a windblown field of corn.

His top lip, on the right hand side, had the scar of a badly done repair. He had tied to grow a moustache, but his fair, thin, almost boyish hair, had simply fallen out of his top lip and lay like strewn hay. He had not shaved in some time. He had a beard of sorts, but it was more like piglet wisps, soft and without purpose.

He was a skinny man. He was, Frank noted with some satisfaction, thirty-two years old, but he could have passed for anything from seventeen up.

‘Lonny!’

He opened his eyes to the sound of Mike’s voice.

Now, thought Frank with revulsion, now he saw it.

Anyone who saw those eyes as they took their last breath must have thought they were already in hell.

They were dark to the point of blackness and at the edges of the irises were bands of gold that bled into the blackness like lightning strikes. To the victims, in the fullness of his fury, his face taut, his thin lips drawn over his bared yellow teeth, he must have looked like a demon come to drag them down.

‘Hi,’ he said.

His voice was soft, almost friendly, the kind that offered to carry an old lady’s shopping home.

His eyes closed again.

‘Get him a large glass of milk and half a dozen cookies,’ said Frank to the uniform. The uniform looked at him in confusion. ‘Do it,’ said Frank. ‘And quickly.’

‘What the hell?’ said Mike as the uniform almost ran out of the door.

‘He’s not tired, Mike,’ said Frank. ‘Look at him. I’ll bet he hasn’t eaten properly in two days.’ Mike looked at Frank blankly. ‘He’s a diabetic for Christ’s sake!’

‘Is that what it is?’

‘You knew he was diabetic, Mike.’

‘He might as well be a fucking alien, Frank,’ blustered Mike. ‘How am I meant to know that? I’m not a fucking doctor. I thought he was just sleepy.’

‘Well, here endeth the fucking lesson, Mike. We won’t get anything decent from him until he gets some sugar inside him.’

The uniform returned with a large glass of milk and a packet of Oreo Chocolate Sandwich Cookies. He put them down in front of Lonny and returned to his place at the door.

Frank touched Lonny’s arm. ‘Come on, kid. Wake up and drink this. It’ll do you good.’

Lonny opened his eyes. ‘I’m not hungry,’ he said tiredly. ‘Let me sleep.’

‘You sleep now,’ said Frank, ‘you won’t wake up. Drink.’

He picked up the glass and held it to Lonny’s lips. Lonny took a sip of the cool milk then took the glass from Frank and almost ate it. He drank it all down it one go. Frank looked at the rim of the glass and thought of Milt and his theory. He could see it now, the shape of the lips on the glass.

‘Eat a couple of cookies,’ he said.

Lonny picked one up and started to eat.

His eyes slid towards Frank. ‘I know you,’ he said.

‘Sure you do,’ said Frank. ‘We spent last Christmas at the lake together.’

Lonny smiled like a drunk. ‘No, really. You nearly had me. Thirty seconds earlier and you’d have been a hero, instead of some crazy punching and shooting at the empty air.’ Lonny’s skinny, weak arms punched at the air mockingly.

Frank felt his skin crawl. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘You’d love to know, wouldn’t you?’ Lonny laughed. Bits of cookie stained his teeth and coated his tongue. ‘Or maybe you wouldn’t. We don’t all want to be aware of those…moments, those moments we’d rather forget, that we’d rather leave to die the lonely death of the unwitnessed.’

Lonny’s eyes lit upon Frank. They burned. On the outside he might have looked like any skanky kid, but in those eyes, behind those storm filled eyes, lay a dangerous wasteland, where the creatures of nightmares slithered from the swamps and were let slip to crawl into the real world, to roam beyond the black, depthless stare and carry out the work of their mad creator.

Frank said nothing. He put his elbows on the table and rested his head in his hands. He could wait. He could wait forever.

‘When,’ said Lonny,’ you were doing all that cop Kung Fu stuff that night…’

‘Which night?’ snapped Mike.

Lonny’s head swivelled slowly towards Mike. ‘I did not see you there. Who are you?’

‘This is Detective Patton,’ said Frank. ‘Carry on, Lonny. Tell me what you saw.’

Lonny lifted his keens beneath his chin and screwed up his face. ‘Oh, you so want to know. You so want to know.’

‘I do,’ admitted Frank. ‘I screwed up, didn’t I. I’d like to know how I did that. Would you tell me how I screwed up, Lonny? Would you tell me where I went wrong? I need to improve myself. You could help me become a better man. A better cop.’ He lifted up another cookie and put it in Lonny’s hand. ‘Come on.. Tell me.’

Lonny held the cookie in front of his mouth. He put his tongue out and forced it between the layers. It came apart and he scraped his teeth along the cream until the other half of the cookie was bare.

‘You came running in with a gun in your hand and rain drip, drip, dripping from your hat and your coat all wet and you crept like  a cat across that dusty old floor while I hid behind an old rusty filing cabinet watching you and you didn’t even know I was there.’

Mike and Frank automatically drew breath as Lonny paused.

‘Where?’ said Frank. ‘When?’

Lonny ran stiffened fingers across his face as if he was crushing an itch.

‘The girl in the Saran Wrap. That sound like a book. Doesn’t that sound like a book?’

‘It sounds like a book,’ agreed Frank.

‘You came sneaking in on tippy-toes and then…ah…you suddenly turned and said in your best cop’s voice…’ He deepened his voice and looked with mock-seriousness. ‘‘Against the wall. Turn around’. All deep and angry you were. All deep and angry.’ Lonny held up a finger. ‘But, there was no one there. You had a fight with…fresh air. You killed…a wall.’ Lonny sniggered. ‘You killed a wall.’

‘And you saw all this?’

‘I did,’ said Lonny excitedly. ‘I did.’

‘Then what?’

Frank felt sick. Much as he’d tried, he’d never been able to forget those moments. Why was it that the things you wanted to repress stayed bobbing like a corpse on the surface, while the things you needed to remember remained hidden away, stabbing at your psyche and screwing up your life?

Lonny shoved the rest of the cookie into his mouth and chewed.

‘Well,’ he said as bits of food sprayed across the desk. ‘I thought you’d died. Really, I thought, well, there you go, he’s dead. I honestly thought at that second that I had some sort of power, that all I had to do was be in the room with someone and they would die. Can you imagine that? No more waiting in line in the shops.

Anyway, I came out from my hidey hole and heard you still breathing. You sounded like a pig. You were snorting like you were rooting for nuts in the ground. I nearly killed you but then I thought ‘Whoa! Wait a moment. I can have some fun here.’ So I did. I dipped your thumbs in her eyes and dragged those perfect nails of yours across the scratches around her eyes, then flicked a little blood onto your shirt.’ He leaned towards Frank, his chin resting on the palm of his hand as if he was chatting with an old friend. ‘What happened? Tell me what happened. I can tell you what
I
think happened, but I’d like to hear it from you.’ He narrowed his eyes and smiled.