The Dark House (42 page)

“H
ey—you okay?”

It was Schecter, underwater.

No,
Rollins
was underwater.

No, there was no water. It was Schecter. Just Schecter, bending down to him. “You all right there?”

Everything felt so tight all around, and it was black behind. Then his eyes started to focus, and he remembered. He was in the SUV, squeezed between the dashboard and the seat. “Yeah.” He reached back behind his head, felt a lump. “My head. God, it aches.”

“You must've got quite a whack when you hit the house there.”

Schecter brushed away some broken glass, then helped Rollins ease himself up onto the seat.

Rollins stared out through the shattered windshield. The house rose up right in front of him. “God.”

“You clipped Jerry pretty good, too.”

“Sloane?”

“You ran him into the fucking wall.”

Schecter held the door open so Rollins could step out. He walked unsteadily around to the far side of the car. Sloane was sprawled out on the driveway. He was barely moving. Blood had drenched his trousers. His face was sweaty and bone-white in the glare of the headlights. His breathing was brisk and shallow, like a dog's in the heat. His life seemed to be draining out of him.

“You stay with him,” Schecter said. “I'm going inside to call the cops.”

Slowly, painfully, Rollins leaned down and touched Sloane's shoulder. “Take it easy,” Rollins told him. “We'll get an ambulance.”

Sloane pushed Rollins' hand away with a moan.

Schecter came back out and the two of them crouched beside Sloane. Finally, Rollins heard sirens. Flashing lights were coming up the road. In moments, three cruisers and a pair of ambulances filled the driveway, and the brightness careened about the trees.

Several policemen burst out of the cars. “What have we got here?” one yelled.

Schecter leapt up, beckoning. “Over here! There's a guy down here.” He gestured toward Sloane. “He needs help. He's all smashed up.”

Two men from the ambulance rushed over and bent down to him. “We gotta do something to stop this bleeding,” Rollins heard one of them say.

Schecter called out to the other crew: “And there's another one in the kitchen. He's dead.” He pointed toward the house. “In there to the left.”

“Jesus Christ—what happened?” one of the cops asked Rollins as he surveyed Sloane's broken body.

“He tried to kill me,” Rollins said.

“Kill you?” the officer replied, incredulous.

“He was going to shoot me.” Rollins felt the icy chill of the barrel pressing against his back. The fear had frozen his mind around a single thought—that he might never see Marj again. “But I got free and
I—I guess I hit him with that car.” He pointed toward Sloane's Land Cruiser.

“You ran him over?” the officer asked.

“Yeah, right here,” Schecter said. “Smashed him against the house.”

“Jesus.”

Rollins reached into his pocket and pulled out the tape recorder. “Here.” He handed the officer the tape from his tape player. “This has everything on it. It explains everything.”

The officer looked down at the tiny cassette in his hand.

“Yeah—everything that happened here,” Rollins said angrily. It was so hard to make the man understand. “I had the tape recorder going in my pocket when he tried to kill me. He told me how he'd killed my cousin. He chopped her up. He—” Rollins couldn't continue. “Look, everything that happened is on the tape.” He tapped the cassette with his index finger. “Just listen to the tape.”

“Okay—I'll pass it on to the detectives.” The officer turned back to Sloane, who was screaming in pain as he was being shifted onto a gurney.

Another officer charged out of the house. “Hey, guys,” he shouted. “We got a body inside.”

“That's what I was telling you,” Schecter said irritably.

“We got a name off his driver's license—Henry Rollins,” the officer shouted.

“He's my father,” Rollins said.

“Your—” the officer near him said. “Oh, Jesus.”

 

Flies were buzzing around his father's corpse, and the kitchen wall behind him was splattered with blood. The air was heavy with the smell of death. Rollins' stomach burned, every part of him hurt, and his head felt clogged, backed up with tears that would not fall. He was lost and alone. Rollins pulled out a chair from the kitchen table and dropped down into it. He was afraid he might collapse otherwise.

Police photographers were taking flash pictures of the crime scene from a variety of angles. A thin man in a short-sleeved shirt was crouched by the body, his head turned slightly away from the odor.

“We got the son here, Frank,” one of the cops told the man.

“Oh, good.” The man stood up. He was a lanky redhead. He had on latex gloves, and he stripped them off with a rubbery sound. The man reached out a bare hand toward Rollins, who shook it limply. “Detective Frank LeBeau,” the man said. He gestured across to another man by the sink. “And that's my partner, Detective Tom Jencks.”

Rollins gave the men his name.

LeBeau had the medics throw a sheet over the body. “We'll take it out in a minute,” he told them. “But we need to go through some stuff here first.” He turned back to Rollins. “I know it's a tough time for you, but there are some questions we've got to ask.” He took a seat in a chair across from Rollins. “Were you here when your father died?”

Rollins nodded.

“What happened?”

Rollins touched his hand to his forehead. It felt wet and clammy. “God—where to begin.”

LeBeau went to the sink and poured a glass of water. “Take your time,” he said, handing it to him.

Rollins sipped the water gratefully. “He had a gun,” he began.

“That one there?” LeBeau pointed to the rifle that was on the floor in the corner of the kitchen. It must have landed there after Sloane knocked it from his hand.

Rollins nodded. “I thought he was going to shoot me. I grabbed for it, we fought, and the gun—the gun went off.”

Had he shot his father? Had he?

“What made you think he'd shoot you?”

“He was pointing it right at me.”

“Why'd he do that?” the other detective, Jencks, asked.

Rollins took a breath. “Because of Neely.”

Jencks again: “What's neely?”

“Neely. She's my cousin. Or”—his voice dropped—“was.” Rollins tried to explain about Neely's disappearance and his growing suspicions about his father's involvement. But each line of explanation seemed flimsy and incomplete. As Rollins went along, he kept having to stop, to back up,
to add a detail or two to bolster his account. Still, he plodded on, for nearly an hour, parrying questions from these two men. And his father's corpse right there, bearing silent witness to his son's full understanding.

The thought came to him gradually, but it built and built until it had the power of hard fact: He hadn't killed his father, nor had his father killed himself. They had done the deed together. Their hands were together on the trigger. Both had fired the fateful bullet, and therefore neither had.

Rollins held nothing back. The story was over now; what was done was done; he had no secrets anymore. He told about his driving habits, and his tapes, and his discovery of the dark house. He told about Marj and Schecter. He told about Sloane. He told how Sloane had killed Neely, then tried to horn in on Neely's ten-million-dollar inheritance. He told about his mother, about Wayne Jeffries and the crash on the highway. For Schecter's sake, he said nothing about Tina. For his own sake, he left out Heather. These two were behind him now, but they had pushed him ahead. LeBeau mostly listened, taking careful notes in his notebook, asking only for a few points of clarification. But as the tale went on, he seemed to grow more sympathetic. He occasionally shook his head or looked over at Jencks in amazement, or muttered “God Almighty” under his breath.

Finally, Rollins reached the part about becoming convinced that his father was involved in Neely's disappearance and his realization that her body was hidden in the septic tank out in back of the house.

“Wait a second now,” LeBeau said.
“Here?”

“Yeah, in the back.” Rollins took him to the window and pointed. “It's out there, just past the edge of the lawn. When my father figured out I knew—that's when he pulled the gun on me. Later, when Sloane showed up, that was where he was going to dump me.”

LeBeau glanced at his partner. “Okay,” he said. “We'll take a look at it later.”

“Oh, and I found this.” Rollins pulled Neely's wristwatch from his pocket, and passed it to the detective. “It's Neely's watch. It was in a drawer upstairs.”

LeBeau hooked a pencil point under the clasp. “We might be able
to get some prints off it,” he said. He set it down on the table. “Ten twenty-three,” the detective told Rollins. “Think this is when she died?”

“I guess so.” Rollins went hollow at the thought of his father raping Neely, knocking her unconscious, then relying on Sloane to finish her off.

LeBeau turned the watch over. “E. P.?”

“That's Elizabeth Payzen, Neely's friend.”

“The beneficiary,” LeBeau said.

Rollins nodded.

“She still alive?”

“She died yesterday. That's what set everything in motion.”

“God, what people won't do for money,” LeBeau said.

Rollins led the detectives upstairs to the bureau where he'd found the wristwatch. There, LeBeau carefully bagged up the other pieces of jewelry as well as the box itself. When he came back, they reenacted the shooting, with LeBeau himself taking the part of Henry Rollins. Tracing the angle of the gunshot, LeBeau climbed up onto the chair and, with a penknife, extracted a bullet that had embedded itself in the ceiling. He held it up in a gloved hand. “This is what did it.” The bullet seemed almost pristine.

LeBeau finally gave the medics clearance to lift his father's body onto the gurney. Rollins trailed behind it across the driveway to the waiting ambulance. Jerry Sloane had been taken away in the other ambulance by then, but his and Schecter's cars and the whole area around them had been cordoned off with yellow police emergency tape. Schecter was outside, talking to one of the officers. “I was just helping out a friend,” Schecter was saying.

After the ambulance drove his father away, Rollins led LeBeau and several other officers outside to the septic tank. He passed the curled-up body of the dead dog, Scamp, on the way. “That was my father's dog,” Rollins said. “Sloane shot it.”

“Okay,” LeBeau said. “We'll take care of it.”

As Rollins stood by, a couple of policemen pried back the cover of the septic tank, and then jerked their heads away when the stench hit. “Oh, man. It's full of crap in there,” one cop said, his hand up against his face.

“What did you expect?” another one said.

They decided to leave that part till morning, when they could summon the local septic tank service—Red Top, just as his father had said—to drain it.

“It looks to me like you've been to hell and back,” LeBeau told Rollins as they returned to the house. He made it clear to Rollins that neither he nor Schecter were under any formal obligation to stay in Townshend that night. “No one's charging either of you with anything,” he said. “But I'd appreciate it if you'd stick around.”

 

The detective drove them back to the Mountain View Inn in Woodstock. It was nearly three in the morning, and Rollins barely spoke to Schecter on the way, just gazed numbly out the window at all the dark houses they passed. The place was run by LeBeau's brother-in-law, so Rollins and Schecter were able to secure a couple of small rooms up on the top floor even though the inn was theoretically all booked. Rollins had never been so exhausted when he dropped into bed. Still, sleep did not come. He kept seeing lights flaring, bodies tumbling. Pipes must have gone through the wall right by his bed, because he could hear water flowing and gurgling all night long.

He called the hospital the first thing in the morning.

It took a few minutes for a nurse to bring Marj to the phone. “Oh, Rolo, you're there!” she exclaimed. “God, I was so scared! When nobody answered that phone last night, I—”

“Father was pointing a rifle right at me when you called.”

Marj gasped. “He was going to shoot you?”

“It looked like it.” Rollins took a breath. “He's dead now, Marj.”

“Your father? He's—?”

“We fought over the gun. It went off and—”

“He's
dead
?”

“The bullet went in under his chin. He died right away. Oh, God, Marj, it was—I can't even say what it was. Then Sloane came and—oh, God. I found Neely's body. It was in the septic tank. My father raped her that night, then banged her around and Sloane shot her. They took her up here and stuffed her in the tank. It's all so awful, I can't tell you. Wait—you there?”

“I'm here,” she said quietly.

“It's over now, Marj. The police have Sloane, and I'm safe. I'll be done here soon. The detectives need me just a little longer, and that'll be it. I'll be back in a few hours.”

“Why didn't you call me last night? I was scared out of my mind. I thought something terrible had happened to you.”

“I couldn't, Marj. I was so busy with the detectives, and then, when I got back, it was so late.”

“I was up, Rolo. You think I could sleep? You could have called. I was up all night.” Her voice caught, and Rollins thought he heard her crying. “I was afraid you were dead.
Dead
, Rolo.”

“I'm—sorry—I—”

More soberly: “I don't think I can take any more of this.”