The Damned Read online

  “The drama teacher?” Rudy said. “The director of the play that year?”

  “South Pacific.”

  “That’s it. South Pacific. Ash was, like, the lead or something.”

  “She was the lead. Have to say, she was actually pretty awesome. Great pipes.”

  “Great everything. Nice teeth, too.”

  “Malvo and Ash in his car in the parking lot out back of the Caribou Coffee.”

  “Kissing.”

  “Kissing.”

  I remember Mr. Malvo. At Dondero for just a single year, replacing Mrs. Regehr who was away on maternity leave. An actor himself. This is what everyone knew about him, because it was what he constantly reminded everyone of. He’d grown up in Sterling Heights, in suburban Detroit “just like you,” as he said in his little introductory speech at school assembly, the like you dripping with the condescension of the motivational speaker, as if he was addressing a gymful of kids confined to wheelchairs and he alone had learned how to walk. After a move to the coast (never “Hollywood,” never “L.A.”) he’d made it onto a couple TV shows, bit parts on a soap and a cop show, both canceled. This lent him a glamorous authority we’d had no experience of. A guy in his midthirties who didn’t wear a wedding ring and looked a little like a young John Malkovich if he had more hair and hit the weight room four times a week.

  The next year, he was gone. Mrs. Regehr never returned after having her baby so there was an opening in the drama department he could have filled. But Malvo left Royal Oak sometime during the summer that followed his triumphant staging of South Pacific with its “electrifying” (Detroit News) sixteen-year-old star—the summer that same star burned to death in an abandoned mansion downtown—and was never heard from again.

  “Ash was making out with her drama teacher,” I said. “Creepy. But not exactly evidence of foul play.”

  “Meg Clemens was in the play, too,” Rudy said. “Think about that.”

  “Four-eyed Meg who ended up in the same place Ash ended up,” John said.

  “There were people at the time who said they saw Malvo and Meg together, just like we saw him with Ash,” Rudy said.

  “So why wasn’t he a suspect at the time?”

  “He was on the list, or so I heard,” John said. “But there was no physical evidence, nothing more than circumstantial stuff.”

  “And let’s face it. It was probably a long list,” Rudy said.

  “But I’m telling you, there was something wrong with that guy,” John said.

  “Lucky sonofabitch,” Rudy said.

  I asked them if they knew where Malvo might be these days, or if anyone might have more information about the director’s relationship to his cast, but they admitted to having no way of knowing, not exactly being the coolest kids in school at the time.

  “We were nerds,” John said.

  “Gifted.”

  “Same difference.”

  Without noticing, over the course of our conversation, I’d finished my scotch. This middle-of-the-day-drinking thing was easy so long as you were motivated.

  I declined the Wiggs’ invitation to join them for lunch, thanked them for their help. Rudy wished me luck. John told me to come back anytime I was looking for a good quote on corrective dental work.

  On the way out, I picked up their tab. It was the least I could do. Us freaks got to stick together.

  28

  * * *

  How to find Mr. Malvo? I figured my one advantage was that he was an actor. And actors leave credits behind like a mouse leaves turds.

  It appeared, however, his life on the silver screen was cut short just prior to his coming to Dondero High. All the TV and movie websites tell the story of his sputtered career: there’s the soap, and there’s his name—Dean Malvo, the “Dean” striking me as fake—deep down the cast list of a couple second-tier action flicks I could sort of remember.

  Henchman #3.

  Waiter in Café (Paris).

  Guy With Bomb.

  It seemed that he was on his way up, the henchmen graduating to indie dramas where he earned an actual character name or two.

  Then it all stopped in 1988. The year before he subbed for Mrs. Regehr and was witnessed making out with my teenaged sister and Meg Clemens. From then to the present, there was no trace that Dean Malvo of Guy With Bomb fame existed.

  He had another career, though. Drama teacher. As well as a possible side interest in seducing girls of an illegal age. The sort of activities that might also leave a trail behind.

  DONDERO HIGH LOOKED MORE OR less the same, but it wasn’t Dondero High anymore. A plaque outside the main entrance doors explained that Royal Oak’s two high schools were consolidated into one a few years ago, and that this building now housed a middle school. Before I went in, I walked around the property and the buried memories stuck their hands up out of their graves: there were the bleachers Todd Aimes pulled me under and smeared dog poo under my shirt because Ash told him to, there were the train tracks at the far end of the playing field where Ash made kids play chicken with oncoming diesels, there was the parking lot where she would stroll from car to car, visiting the older guys with their radios blaring, sticking her head into their Camaros and Mustangs to let them get a good look, a peek down her shirt, leave a whiff of herself behind.

  Only then, standing in the place where it happened, did it occur to me to wonder if Ash liked having her teacher’s hands on her. Or was he something she couldn’t control, something that took from her and made her keep a secret? Did he hurt her?

  The weight of sympathy I felt for her was so sudden I needed to sit on the lot’s curb and rest my chin on my knees. She was the reason my life had been the malnourished thing it had been until Willa and Eddie came along. But she was also my sister. She may well have needed me back then without saying so just as I wished she were someone I could actually talk to, actually understand. It’s why the idea of an outsider making her do something she didn’t want to do made me feel like the failure was mine. I should have seen what was going on, read her brooding, lengthening stretches in her room as a sign. I should have saved her.

  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.

  AT 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 cigar
ettes 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.

  29

  * * *

  It 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.

  WILLIAM LAMAYE, OF LAMAYE & DURRIDGE, 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.

  30

  * * *

  The 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.