The Damned (20 page)

This, too, is how it is between twins.

When I lifted my head the lot was full of parents getting out of cars, all of them staring at me, the folded-up stranger fighting to get to his feet.

The bell rang. Kids hollered out the doors and found their moms and nannies and dads.

And me among them. The fever heat of suspicion on my back.

A
T THE SCHOOL'S RECEPTION DESK
, a secretary wearing a rubber ducky nightshirt and sleeping cap asked if she could help me. When I didn't immediately come out with anything, she looked down at her outfit and grimaced.

“Pajama Day,” she said.

I asked if the school kept records on teachers who worked here in the old Dondero days. In particular, a substitute Drama department head named Dean Malvo. The name gave her pause.

“We don't have staff files of that kind. Not here, anyway,” she said. “Maybe you could try the union?”

“I'll give them a call, I guess.”

It seemed that was it. I was mustering up a thank-you when she leaned against the counter so she could lower her voice.

“Why are you looking for him?”

“I think he might have hurt my sister.”

“Break!” she called out to someone unseen and unreplying in a room around the corner. Then she stepped out from behind the counter and walked out, leaving me to follow her down the hall to a door at the opposite end.

Outside, she leaned against the wall and looked anywhere but at me.

“He goes by Bob now,” she said.

“Can you tell me where he is?”

“I can tell you where he
was
. Did six years at Baraga. Got out maybe a couple years ago.”

“What for?”

“What do you think? You're here asking about your sister. There were other sisters after yours. Other daughters.”

She pulled a pack of cigarettes from a pocket but didn't take one out.

“Did you know him?”

“He was a sub teacher, he moved around,” she said. “I guess that had its advantages for him. But yes, he was at a couple of schools I worked at a long time ago. A good talker, that's for sure. People took notice of it at the time. So when the news came out, they took notice of him for something else.”

She knew more than this. It's why we were there, out in the sunshine that appeared with the pullback of clouds, a shattered man and a woman in a nightshirt, neither knowing the other's name and both preferring not to say.

She cared in some way. Whether it was for Malvo, or for one of the girls he decided on, or for herself. Maybe she fell for him, only to later discover he was a monster. There was no wedding ring on her finger.

But if she was going to tell me about any of that, she would be doing it now. It was obvious, by the way she pocketed the cigarettes and gripped the door handle to go back inside, that she'd already gone further than she meant to.

Yet she didn't go in just yet. Looked at me directly for the first time since we came outside.

“You okay?” she said.

She saw it before I felt it. The sense of everything coming down at once.

Malvo a predator.

Winona dead, along with the other girls who made the trip down Woodward.

Eddie in a hospital bed.

“Sweet dreams,” I said before stumbling off, eyes closed against the sunshine.

I
t made sense that Malvo changed his name to Dean. The kind of name to put at the bottom of 8 x 10s, Bob not carrying quite the same hint of mystery. It also made sense to change your name back to what it was once you started to come under suspicion for sexual interference with underaged girls. Not that it helped him.

Bob Malvo was charged with two counts of third-degree criminal sexual conduct relating to girls between thirteen and fifteen years old and was convicted of both in 1993. He was subsequently sentenced to eight years in prison (though as the Pajama Day secretary correctly noted, he was out in six). His crimes took place while he was a substitute teacher at two different high schools, both located in southeast Michigan, the victims both ninth-graders and students in his drama classes.

I tried searching for something that might tell me what he'd been up to for the time since his release, but nothing matched his name and profile. He could be anywhere. The chances of a convicted statutory rapist hanging around near the same towns where he committed his crimes had to be slim. Employment in teaching would be out of
the question, and the professional acting opportunities for a man who would now be in his late fifties and with a nasty record would be nonexistent. Bob Malvo may well hold the secret to how Ash died in the fire. But he'd be long gone now.

The news stories about his trial named his defense lawyer as William LaMaye, of Farmington Hills, another suburb west of Royal Oak. An online search showed he was still practicing, still there. A partner at LaMaye & Durridge, a firm whose slogan, “IT'S NEVER TOO EARLY TO HIRE THE RIGHT ATTORNEY,” suggested that everyone in Detroit would need a defense lawyer at one point or another, so you might as well retain one now.

I hit an ATM and withdrew the maximum amount allowed, slipped it into an envelope, and pocketed it in my jeans.

If I was heavy on the gas and the traffic was light, I might make it before the office closed.

W
ILLIAM
L
A
M
AYE, OF
L
A
M
AYE
& D
URRIDGE,
was a chronically underslept black man of unguessable age in a suit that was once tailored to fit him but no longer did, the shoulders sagging and front button-stretched in the places he had shrunk and expanded. After the receptionist put in a call to him he was out to see me before I had a chance to take a seat in the waiting area. His movements deliberate but forceful, a body used to being taken seriously.

“Thank you for seeing me, Mr. LaMaye.”

He shook my hand, a brief clench that let me know he was prepared to hear whatever I had to say but that it didn't mean he was interested in taking any bullshit.

“Hey, I'm
here,
” he said. “Office?”

I followed him back through a narrow hallway in need of a new carpet and smelling of French fries. In his office, there were sun-faded degrees on the walls from Western Michigan and Wayne State Law, two chairs, and a desk stacked so high with binders and files shaggy with Post-it Notes he had to place a hand on the top of it to prevent it from crashing onto my lap.

“So,” he said once he'd found his way into his chair. “What kind of trouble you in?”

“You don't want to know. But I'm not here about me, actually.”

He didn't like the sound of this and let me know by placing both hands behind his head. “No?”

“Bob Malvo was a client of yours some years ago.”

“Malvo.”

“He was a teacher? Convicted for—”

“I know who
he
is. I'm waiting to hear what you want from
me.
”

“I was wondering if you could tell me where he is now.”

He let his hands slip away and returned them to the desk, but finding nowhere to put them, dropped them on his thighs.

“I'm not permitted to give out client information of that kind,” he said.

“Trust me, I'm not a journalist or revenge seeker or anything like that. I'm just family.”

“Family?”

“Bob's brother.”

“He didn't mention he had a brother.”

“He wouldn't. I'm of the Long Lost variety. That's why I want to find him. Say I'm sorry for what I've done, that I forgive him for what he's done. Clean slates. Know what I mean?”

“What's your name?”

“Name?”

“Yeah, you know. Those words at the top of your driver's license?”

“Danny. Danny Malvo.”

“Danny and Bob.”

Did he believe me? William LaMaye was a man who dealt with liars for a living, so I'm guessing not.

“Smart guy, your brother,” he said after what either was a long while or what he made feel like one. “Gift of the gab.”

“He was an actor.”

“He
acted
like an actor. Know what I'm saying?”

“Afraid so.”

If there was any polite humor in his tone before, what he said next was drained dry of it.

“Still owes part of my fee, you know.”

I handed over the envelope I'd stuffed at the ATM. Six hundred dollars. An amount William LaMaye didn't blink at, just counted, once, before opening a desk drawer and shoving it inside.

It appeared that was it. I'd made a contribution toward Bob's overdue legal bill, and there was nothing coming back the other way. The two of us sitting across from each other thinking about what might be said next. It had been a long day for both of us.

All at once he opened a leather agenda on his desk. Flipped the pages and, finding what he was looking for, reached for a memo pad. Wrote something on it and ripped the sheet off. Flipped it over to me.

“That didn't just happen,” he said.

I didn't read the note until I was back in my car.

An address. A street in an area I could locate in my mind, but one I'd never visited in my life even though I grew up no more than a mile away from it.

Bob Malvo lived in Detroit.

T
he east side of Detroit is even more lawless and unoccupied than the lawless and unoccupied west side, and McDougall-Hunt is a neighborhood situated at the very heart of the east side.

This is where William LaMaye directed me, whether to see me find his client or see me lose my wallet or worse, I wasn't sure. There was no reason why he should be trusted. Knowing this didn't stop me from driving right past after I turned onto the street and, after driving through a field where other houses used to be, finding the house I was looking for, standing alone in the tall grass like a farmhouse on the Dakotan prairie. Of the half dozen places still standing on this cracked stretch of pavement, it was the only one with a porch light on. A bare 40-watt bulb under siege by a dive-bombing moth the size of a bag of chips.

What did I think was going to happen here? Knock on the door, ask the man if he'd like to discuss his possibly being a murderer along with a sexual predator? It was only there, only then, that the foolishness of my journey was wiltingly brought into focus, the
ridiculous sight I made in the rearview mirror, baffled and greened by the dashboard light. It was a fight to talk myself into parking a hundred feet short of the address, the only car to be seen, behind or ahead. It was another ten minutes to convince myself that this unlit street-that-is-no-longer-a-street was where I would find the thing that would save my family.

I got out and made my way to the front door. The night was windless and hot. Despite the wide space between the lopsided outlines of distant homes, I had a sense I wasn't alone, that my clean car with the Budget sticker in the back window—that I, polo-shirted and deck-shoed, stepping out of it—was a spectacle that had already been taken note of. A quiet that came not from people sleeping, but people waiting.

The doorbell didn't work. Knocking wasn't much better. My knuckles on the wood next to the square of gated window in the door swallowed the sound up inside.

Anywhere else, you'd say there was nobody home. Here a dark house didn't mean a thing.

I tried the handle. Locked by way of multiple bolts secured on the inside frame.

A walk around the outside of the property revealed ground-floor windows curtained with newspaper. A yard so dry that nothing, not even crabgrass, grew. In the distance, a broad rectangle with a smokestack rising out of it like a middle finger salute.

I looked up. A rear balcony over the back door that led into what I guessed was a second-floor bedroom.

The way in.

If the sliding glass door could be wrenched open. If I could climb up there without breaking my neck. If hands or dog's teeth or buckshot didn't pull me down.

I was hugging one of the two wooden supports that held the balcony up when I saw the hammer.

A ball-peen lying next to a rusted can of paint next to the back door. The can dented like someone realized they picked a tool without a hook to lift up its lid and figured they'd beat it open anyway. When that didn't work they quit, leaving both behind.

Now I was picking the hammer up. Throwing it into the air and getting lucky when it landed on the balcony with a metallic ring like it found a gong up there.

Then I was wriggling up the post again, splinters stabbing through my shirt. At one point I swung out with only a hand and the toes of one foot holding on, and there was time to see I was going to fall, my head leading the way.

But I didn't let go. The swing brought me around to the railing and I used the momentum to pull myself up and over. Made the same gong sound with my face as it hit a steel mixing bowl, left out there as if to catch the rain.

I was ready to use the hammer on the sliding door handle but didn't have to. It had been left open an inch.

Even though the gonging and hammer tossing and body crashing had already alerted any conscious people inside to an intruder, I pulled the sliding door open as quietly as I could.

Nothing came at me from out of the dark. Until something did. A dead-aired wall of body odor, sweetly foul as a sack of rotten oranges.

It was even hotter inside than outside. A stillness that slowed the capacity for movement as well as thought, so that I put observations of the room together in a linking of sluggish logic.

No bed or furniture

means nobody sleeps here

means there's nothing here to see

means keep going, Danny

On the second-floor landing, three other doors. One to an empty bathroom. One to another bedroom similarly bedless and unfurnished, the closet vacant except for what appeared to be a nest made of dried grass and ripped-up magazine pages and pieces of
IT'S YOUR BIRTHDAY
! ribbon on the floor. The last opened to the third bedroom where, by the look of it, by the smell of it, somebody came to sleep.