The Throat (23 page)

A few houses away, a car started up, and both boys screamed,
thinking that Walter had come back and caught them. Akeem was the first
to be able to move, and he stepped back and put his right arm around
his brother's waist and pulled him away from Walter's house.

"Akeem, it wasn't no
movie,
"
Kwanza said.

Too shocked and frightened to speak, Akeem grimaced at him,
frantically gesturing that Kwanza should start running for home right
now
. "Damn," Kwanza said, and
sprinted away like a jackrabbit. In
seconds they were pounding up their own lawn toward the front door.

Akeem yanked the door open, and the boys tumbled inside.

"It wasn't no
movie
,"
Kwanza said. "It wasn't—"

Akeem ran up the stairs toward his parents' bedroom.

He woke up his father, shaking his shoulder and babbling about a
dead man with his head cut off across the street, this guy was all
dead, his head was all cut off, blood was all around…

Kenneth Johnson told his wife to stop screaming at the kid. "You saw
a dead man in the house across the street? Mr. Dragonette's house?"

Akeem nodded. He had begun to cry, and his brother sidled into the
bedroom to witness this astonishing spectacle.

"And you saw it, too?"

Kwanza nodded. "It wasn't no movie."

His wife sat up straight and grabbed Akeem and pulled him into her
chest. She gave her husband a warning look.

"Don't worry, I'm not going over there," he said. "I'm calling the
police. We'll see what happens this time."

Two policemen pulled up in a black-and-white about ten minutes
later. One of them marched up to the Johnson house and rang the bell,
and the other sauntered across the lawn and peered through the gap in
the curtains. Just as Kenneth Johnson opened the door, the second
policeman stepped away from the window with a stunned expression on his
face. "I think your friend would like you to join him," Johnson said to
the man on his doorstep.

Before another twenty minutes had passed, six unmarked police cars
had been installed up and down the street. The original black-and-white
and one other stood parked around the corners at both ends of the
block. While they all waited, a young policewoman with a soothing voice
talked to Kwanza and Akeem in the living room. Kenneth Johnson sat on
one side of the boys, his wife on the other.

"You've heard loud noises from the Dragonette house on other
occasions in the past?"

Kwanza and Akeem nodded, and their father said, "We all heard those
noises, and a couple of times, I called to complain. Don't you keep a
record of complaints down at the station?"

She smiled at him and said in her soothing voice, "In all justice,
Mr. Johnson, the situation we have now is a good deal more serious than
a loud argument."

Johnson frowned until the smile wilted. "I don't know for sure, but
I'm willing to bet that Walter over there seldom stopped at the
argument stage."

It took the policewoman a moment to understand this remark. When she
did understand it, she shook her head. "This is
Millhaven
, Mr. Johnson."

"Apparently it is." He paused to consider something. "You know, I
wonder if that fellow over there even owns a freezer."

This irrelevance was too much for the young woman. She stood up from
where she had been kneeling in front of the two boys and patted
Kwanza's head before closing her notebook and tucking her pen into her
pocket.

Johnson said, "I can't help it, I'm sorry for you people."

"This is
Millhaven
," the
policewoman repeated. "If you'll permit me,
I want to suggest that your boys have already been through enough for
one day. In situations of this kind, counseling is always recommended,
and I can provide you with the names of—"

"My God," Johnson said. "You still don't get it."

The policewoman said, "Thank you for your cooperation," and walked
away to stand in front of the Johnsons' living room window and wait for
Walter Dragonette to come back home.

An hour and a half before Walter Dragonette was due at his desk in
the accounts department, the old blue Reliant appeared at the end of
the block. Other cars up and down the street began backing out of
driveways and easing away from the curb. The lurking patrol cars swung
into the street at either end and slowly moved toward the white house
in the middle of the block. Walter Dragonette drove blithely down his
street and pulled up in front of his house. He opened his door and put
a foot on the concrete.

The two squad cars sped forward and spun sideways, their tires
squealing, to block the ends of the street. The unmarked cars raced up
to the Reliant, and in an instant the street was filled with policemen
pointing guns at the young man getting out of his car.

Kenneth Johnson, who described all of this to me, including what his
children had done to bring such enveloping turmoil upon the Millhaven
police department, told me later that when Walter Dragonette got out of
his car and faced all those cops and guns, he gave them his secret
smile.

The police ordered him away from his car, and he cheerfully moved.
They spoke, and Walter told them that he was the Meat Man. Yes, of
course he would come down to the station with them. Well, certainly he
would put down the paper bag in his hand. What was in the bag? Well,
the only thing in the bag was the hacksaw blade he had just purchased.
That was why he had left the house—to get a new hacksaw blade. Paul
Fontaine, who still knew nothing about what had happened to April
Ransom since he and John Ransom had left her bedside that morning, took
a card from his jacket pocket and read Dragonette his rights under the
Miranda decision. Walter Dragonette eagerly nodded that yes, he
understood all of that. He'd want a lawyer, that was for sure, but he
didn't mind talking now. It was time to talk, wouldn't the detective
agree?

Detective Fontaine certainly did think that it was time to talk. And
would Mr. Dragonette permit the police to search his house?

The Meat Man took his eyes from Detective Fontaine's interesting
face to smile and nod at Akeem and Kwanza, who were looking at him
through their living room window. "Oh, by all means—I mean, they really
should
look through the place,
really they
should
." Then he
looked back
at Detective Fontaine. "Are they prepared for what they're going to
find?"

"What are they going to find, Mr. Dragonette?" asked Sergeant Hogan.

"My people," the Meat Man said. "Why else would you be here?"

Hogan asked, "Which people are we talking about, Walter?"

"If you don't know about my people—" He licked his lips, and twisted
his head to look over his shoulder to see his little white house. "If
you don't know about them, what made you come here?" His eyes moved
from Fontaine to Hogan and back again. They did not answer him. He put
his hand over his mouth and giggled. "Well, whoever goes into my house
is in for a little surprise."

I never heard the waitress put the plate on the table. Eventually I
realized that I could smell toast, looked up, and saw breakfast
steaming beside my right elbow. I moved the plate in front of me and
ate while I read about what the first policemen inside Walter
Dragonette's house had found there.

First, of course, had been Alfonzo Dakins, whose shoulder joint had
broken Dragonette's hacksaw blade and forced him into an early morning
trip to the hardware store. Alfonzo Dakins had met Walter Dragonette in
a gay bar called The Roost, accompanied him home, accepted a beer
treated with a substantial quantity of Halcion, posed for a nude
Polaroid photograph, and passed out. He had partially reawakened to
find Walter's hands around his neck. The struggle that followed this
discovery had awakened Akeem Johnson. If Dakins had not been woozy with
Halcion and alcohol, he would easily have killed Dragonette, but the
smaller man managed to hit him with a beer bottle and to snap handcuffs
on him while he recovered.

Roaring, Dakins had gotten back on his feet with his hands cuffed in
front of him, and Dragonette stabbed him in the back a couple of times
to slow him down. Then he stabbed him in the neck. Dakins had chased
him into the kitchen, and Walter banged him on the head with a
cast-iron frying pan. Dakins dropped to his knees, and Walter slammed
the heavy pan against the side of his head and knocked him out more
successfully than the first time.

He covered the living room floor with old newspapers and dragged
Dakins out of the kitchen. Three more layers of papers went around and
beneath his body. Then Walter had removed the trousers, underwear, and
socks he had been wearing, mounted Dakins's huge chest, and finished
the job of strangling him.

He had photographed Dakins once more.

Then he had "punished" Dakins for giving him so much unnecessary
trouble and stabbed him half a dozen times in the back. When he felt
that Dakins had been punished enough, he had anal intercourse with his
dead body. Afterward, he went into the kitchen for his hacksaw and cut
off Dakins's big bowling-ball head. Then the blade had broken.

On the top shelf of Dragonette's refrigerator, the police discovered
four other severed heads, two of black males, one of a white male, and
one of a white female who appeared to be in her early teens. The second
shelf contained an unopened loaf of Branola bread, half a pound of
ground chuck in a supermarket wrapper, a squeezable plastic container
of French's mustard, and a six-pack of Pforzheimer beer. On the third
shelf down stood two large sealed jugs each containing two severed
penises, a human heart on a white china plate, and a human liver
wrapped in Clingfilm. In the vegetable crisper on the right side of the
refrigerator were a moldering head of iceberg lettuce, an opened bag of
carrots, and three withered tomatoes. In the left crisper, police found
two human hands, one partially stripped of its flesh.

Human Hand, on the list of
Les
Viandes
.

On a shelf in the hall closet, in a row with two felt hats, one
gray, one brown, were three skulls that had been completely cleaned of
flesh. Two topcoats, brown and gray, a red-and-blue down jacket, and a
brown leather jacket, hung from hangers; beneath the two jackets was a
sixty-seven-gallon metal drum with three headless torsos floating in a
dark liquid at first thought to be acid but later identified as tap
water. Beside the drum was a spray can of Lysol
disinfectant and two bottles of liquid bleach. When the big drum had
been removed from the closet, a smaller drum was discovered behind it.
Inside the second drum, two penises, five hands, and one foot had been
kept in a liquid later determined to be tap water, vodka, rubbing
alcohol, and pickle juice.

A row of skulls stood as
bookends and decorations on a long shelf in the living room—they had
been meticulously cleaned and painted with a gray lacquer that made
them look artificial, like Halloween jokes. (The books that separated
the skulls, chiefly cookbooks and manuals of etiquette, had belonged to
Florence Dragonette.)

A long freezer in excellent
working condition stood against one wall of the living room. When the
policemen opened the freezer, they discovered six more heads, three
male and three female, each of these encased in a large food-storage
bag, two pairs of male human legs without feet, a freezer bag of
entrails labeled
STUDY
, a large quantity of pickles
that had been
drained and dumped into a brown paper bag, two pounds of ground round,
and the hand of a preteen female, minus three fingers. To the left of
the freezer were an electric drill, an electrical saw, a box of baking
soda, and a stainless-steel carving knife.

A manila envelope on top of
a dresser in the bedroom contained hundreds of Polaroid photographs of
bodies before death, after death, and after dismemberment. Behind the
house, police found a number of black plastic garbage sacks filled with
bones and rotting flesh. One policeman described Dragonette's backyard
as a "trash dump." Bones and bone fragments littered the uncut grass,
along with ripped clothes, old magazines, some discarded eyeglasses and
one partial upper plate, and broken pieces of electrical equipment.

The initial assessment of
the investigating officers was that the remains of at least nineteen
people, and possibly as many as another five, had been located in
Dragonette's house. An Associated Press reporter made the obvious point
that this made the Dragonette case—the "Meat Man" case—among the worst
instances of multiple murder in American history, and, to prove the
point, listed some of the competition:

1980s: about fifty murdered
women, most of them prostitutes, found near the Green River in the
Seattle-Tacoma area

1978: the bodies of thirty-three
young men and boys found at John Wayne Gacy's house in suburban Chicago

1970s: twenty-six tortured and
murdered youths discovered in the Houston area, and Elmer Wayne Henley
convicted in six of the deaths

The reporter went on to list
James Huberty, who killed twenty-one people in a McDonald's; Charles
Whitman, who killed sixteen people by sniping from a tower in Texas;
George Banks, the murderer of twelve people in Pennsylvania; and
several others, including Howard Unruh of Camden, New Jersey, who in
1948 shot and killed thirteen people in the space of twelve minutes and
said, "I'd have killed a thousand if I'd had enough bullets." In the
heat of his research, the AP reporter forgot to mention Ted Bundy and
Henry Lee Lucas, both of whom were responsible for more deaths than any
of these; and it is possible that he had never heard of Ed Gein, with
whom Walter Dragonette had several things in common, although Walter
Dragonette had certainly never heard of him.