The Murder House

  It’s not supposed to be like this. Dede and Annie, they were real. He thought the one thing missing was that he didn’t know them first, didn’t get intimate with them, killed them almost at first sight. But that was better. That was better than this—

  “Got anything to drink, mister?”

  He shakes his head, unable to speak. He should’ve thought of that. He should’ve had a bottle of whiskey or something.

  “Got any music?”

  Shit. He shakes his head again. He feels everything slipping away, every turn a wrong one…

  “I…can’t,” he whispers.

  “Can’t what?”

  Sweat has broken out on his forehead. His pulse is racing. He doesn’t feel right.

  “I can’t…kill you,” he says. His eyes slowly rise to meet hers.

  She studies him a moment, lips parted, fear beginning to spread across her face. He feels himself getting hard. He feels the energy suddenly fueling him.

  And then her eyes grow big again, when she sees the look on his face.

  There. There it is!

  She bounces off the bed, rushing for the door.

  Yes.

  “No!” she cries as he grabs her arm. “No, please!”

  He pins her up against the wall, bringing a hand over her mouth. She bites down on his hand, causing a glorious pain, but he pushes back hard, slamming her head against the wall with all the force he can summon. Her eyes roll back and she begins to slide down the wall, unconscious.

  He lowers himself, sliding down with her. He drags her over near the bed and lays her out properly.

  “Thank you, Barbie,” he whispers.

  He handled this wrong, but she salvaged it for him, a last-minute save.

  He learned something. He won’t make this mistake again.

  He walks to the corner to get his Fun Bag.

  Book III

  Bridgehampton and

  Sing Sing, 2012

  37

  SING SING Correctional Facility, thirty miles north of New York City on the east bank of the Hudson River, houses nearly two thousand inmates over fifty-five acres of property. Up the hill from the lower-level secured facilities is Cell Block A—“Maximum A”—one of the largest max-security cell blocks in the world, with over six hundred inmates packed into six-by-nine-foot cells. They are murderers and rapists and sex traffickers and mob bosses and major drug dealers, divided into fierce factions predominantly by race—the Bloods and the Crips, the Latin Kings and Trinitarios, the Aryan Brotherhood. If you belong to one of the gangs, they have your back—you’re protected—but even then you’re not really protected, because the sins of the individual are the sins of the gang, and retaliation in Cell Block A is as common as census counts four times a day. In the last eight days, Cell Block A has been on lockdown four times, as the Latin Kings and the Bloods have worked out their differences the only way they know how. Guns are uncommon; it’s by shanks and razors, anything that can be pried loose and sharpened into a weapon, that most of the injuries are inflicted.

  The first time Noah Walker walked into Cell Block A, he was overwhelmed. Overwhelmed by the sheer enormity, the cell block extending four stories high and so far from right to left that there seems to be no beginning or end, just an endless wall of steel and chain-link barriers. Overwhelmed by the noise, a deafening clamor of hundreds of caged men shouting, radios playing, gates slamming.

  This is his home now, on the top tier of A-Block, Gallery L, seventh cell. He will live in L-7 for the rest of his life. He will live amid a massive series of cages, covered by a concrete-and-brick dome with windows that miraculously let in very little light, sunshine filtered through filth. The polluted air, the noise, the solitude of hour upon hour spent in a cell no bigger than a normal person’s closet—in the seventy-three days that Noah has spent here, they have had the effect of deadening him, killing his hope, erasing his dreams, leaving him numb.

  Outside the cell—the mess hall, the showers, the machine shop, and the prison yard—it’s a different story. Noah is alert at all times, his eyes constantly moving about. Noah is not affiliated. The only real option for a white guy is the Aryan Brotherhood, and he’s not going anywhere near those racist morons. That makes him fair game to everyone. Stick a shank into Noah’s back, or accost him in the shower, or jump him in the yard, and nobody will retaliate. Noah is alone in every sense of the word.

  And with every day that passes, he finds that he cares less and less. There is nothing for him here but the passage of time. He is simply waiting for time to move along until he dies.

  His tiny cell is barren of personal effects. He hasn’t built up enough in the commissary for a radio, and no television is allowed. He has only two personal items, a photograph of Paige and a copy of his favorite novel, The Catcher in the Rye.

  In the photograph, Paige is in Noah’s attic bedroom, her hand up to shield her face from his camera, a look of embarrassed amusement on her face. Strands of her hair curl around her cheek. He likes this photograph because it touches all of his senses. He hears Paige’s voice—Don’t take my picture! He smells her the way he liked her best, sweaty after sex. He feels her hand on his arm while she tries to keep him from snapping the photo with his phone.

  Paige. He will never see her again. He told her not to come here, and to drive the point home, he told her he wouldn’t see her if she came. They have no future now, and it’s better she remembers him when life was good, to hold that sweet memory close to herself, rather than having her image of him deteriorate slowly over the years as he grows harder, more bitter.

  He met yesterday with his lawyer, who told him there would be a one-month delay in getting his appeal on file. Noah told him that was okay. He doesn’t have a chance. He knows that. He’s in no hurry to find out that his appeal has been rejected.

  That’s the worst part, worse than the fear in the prison yard, or the loneliness, or the shame of being convicted of a double homicide. The lack of any hope, of any future, of any meaning to his life, will kill him—if a shank in the neck doesn’t.

  Which of those will come first, he has no idea.

  38

  THE MACHINE shop in Sing Sing is in the former “death room,” where the electric chair, “Old Sparky,” killed more than six hundred people, including the spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, over the course of seventy years. “Old Sparky” has been moved to a museum, and the death penalty has been abolished in New York—Noah now often wishes it hadn’t—so instead, Noah works in that space assembling chairs for toddlers, to be used, he assumes, in either an elementary school or a hospital.

  If there have been any moments of enjoyment in his two and a half months in Sing Sing, they have come while he’s been doing this work, taking care and pride in putting together these chairs. He’s always enjoyed working with his hands, knowing that there is something tangible to show for his effort. Someone will sit in this chair. Someone will learn something in this chair. Someone will laugh in this chair.

  “On the count!” One of the COs walks in for the census, taken four times a day to make sure all prisoners are accounted for. The correctional officers cannot, as a practical matter, follow around every inmate all the time, so they move them in groups through the narrow hallways, always staying to the right of the yellow stripe down the center, and even let them walk on their own when going to the yard or the gym.

  At the CO’s call, Noah stands and keeps his hands at his sides. The CO counts off the inmates aloud. There are eleven in the machine shop, divided among the various rooms for printing, woodwork, and welding. There are only three, Noah included, here in woodworking.

  Noah gets back to work, squatting down on one knee. Behind him, he hears the other two inmates—both of them African American, Al and Rafer—abruptly put down their tools and walk out of woodworking. Noah senses something.

  He gets to his feet just as three men enter the room. Unlike Al and Rafer, these men aren’t black. They are white. He recognizes one of
them as Eric Wheaton, the leader of the Aryan Brotherhood here at Sing Sing. His two friends are massive, with shaved heads and skin ink up and down their tree-trunk arms.

  Wheaton, himself above average in size but dwarfed by his companions, is the elder statesman of his clan, probably fifty. He shows Noah his teeth. “Well, Noah. Seems like you been avoiding us. My friends have offered to be your friends.”

  “I don’t need friends like you,” says Noah. He wishes he had something in hand, like the hammer on the floor.

  “You don’t need friends? You’re the only guy in A don’t need friends? How’s a guy like you gonna get along in here with all the mongrels?”

  The men on each side of Wheaton fan out, forming a semicircle around Noah. Two more men, nearly as big as the first set of goons, also proud members of the Brotherhood, enter the room. Now it’s five on one.

  “So I’m askin’ nice,” says Wheaton. “For the last time.”

  Noah takes a breath, steels himself. “I don’t need you or your white-trash racist asshole buddies.”

  Wheaton’s smile widens, showing stained, crooked teeth. “He’s too good for us, friends. He’s Jesus. Didn’t you hear? Surfer Boy Jesus. Someone help me remember, now—what happened to Jesus?”

  With that, they close in from both sides. Noah keeps his fist in tight and pops one of the goons in the mouth, snapping his head back, and then spins to his right and connects with a roundhouse left to the jaw of the thug from the other side. It’s enough to throw the man off balance but not enough to knock him over. Noah will still have to deal with him and with the other two. He turns back to his left for the oncoming rush, but he’s not fast enough; the biggest of the goons barrels into him, three hundred pounds of force, knocking him to the floor. He kicks out his legs and tries to bench-press the man off him before a boot connects with his temple, sending a shock of lightning across his eyes. Then the man on top of him rises up and slams down a fist. Just in time, Noah ducks his head, and the man’s fist hits the floor instead of Noah’s face. He cries out in pain. Noah lunges up at the midsection like a bucking bronco to topple the man off him.

  But they are too many, and too big. After the initial burst of action, it simply comes down to numbers. Five on one. Five men kicking and punching Noah, who is pinned down. Blood flies from his mouth and nose with each kick, each punch, until he can no longer hold his head up. Now he is nothing more than a punching bag. He feels his ribs crack with successive kicks, but he can’t offer any response. He is getting the life beaten out of him, and if they want to kill him, he can no longer stop them.

  After a while, the pressure comes off his chest, and he is being tugged by all four limbs. Then he is lifted off the ground and thrown down onto one of the large woodworking tables.

  “Keep his arms out, boys,” one of them says. Noah is hardly conscious as his arms are spread out, palms up. Men climb onto the table and sit on each of his forearms, while two others sit on his shins. He is completely pinned down.

  By the time he feels the prick of the nail on the palm of his hand, he is unable to even cry out. He looks through the fog, through the tiny slits of his eyes, and sees Eric Wheaton poising the nail over his right hand, a hammer raised above his head.

  When the hammer comes down on the nail, it’s like a drilling rig finding oil, blood spurting into the air. Noah lets out an animal cry and his eyes go to the ceiling. They do quick work of it, nailing both hands to the wooden tabletop, while Noah focuses on a single thought.

  Let me die, he prays.

  39

  “ALMOST READY, BABE?”

  I flip the page, then flip back, reading through police reports and investigation summaries and cross-referencing trial transcripts.

  “Babe?”

  “Um. Yeah. Almost ready.”

  Well, not so much. I’m sitting on the bed, feet up, doing work. But I can get ready fast.

  Matty pokes his head into the room. He’s wearing a new Hugo Boss sport coat and cologne of the same label. His hair is freshly slicked back from his shower.

  “What are you doing? You haven’t even showered?”

  “No, I—sorry,” I say. “Just reading.”

  “Reading what? Christ, Murphy, do you ever stop working? And that comes from someone who works on Wall Street.” He walks over to the bed, where I’m sitting with the transcript on my lap. Matty reaches for the stack of paper I’m reading, revealing the solid-gold cuff links on his sleeves.

  “This is the guy who killed your uncle? The ‘Surfer Jesus’ guy?”

  “Yeah.” I look up at him. “Just checking something.”

  “Checking what? That guy went down, what, four months ago? What is there to check?”

  I shrug. “There was a shooting at Bridgehampton School a long time ago. Halloween of ninety-five.”

  “And that has what to do with what?”

  “Noah was arrested for it.”

  “Noah,” he says. “Now you’re on a first-name basis with the guy.”

  “I pulled the file yesterday,” I say. “Let me run this by you, okay?”

  “Hurry.” Now he’s at the bedroom mirror above the dresser, checking himself over, fixing the collar of his new shirt.

  “Fifteen people were shot that day in the southern playground,” I say. “Noah was on the east end of the yard, by the trees. Of the fifteen shot, about eight of them were hit within thirty feet of where he was standing with his BB gun.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Another seven were walking up to the school but farther away, farther west.”

  “Oh. Okay.” He smoothes his hair, looks himself over once more, and reaches a favorable conclusion.

  “They were more like sixty, seventy feet away. One of the kids on the farther west end, a kid named Darryl Friese, took a BB in his eye.”

  “Yeah? Wow.”

  “His left eye.”

  Matty doesn’t answer. He walks into the bathroom and runs the water. When he walks back out, wiping his face with a hand towel, he nods at me.

  “You still aren’t in the shower,” he says.

  “You’re not listening to me.”

  “Sure I am.”

  I’m tempted to ask him what I said. But that would embarrass both of us.

  “If Darryl Friese was walking north up to the school, and Noah was shooting from the east, how did he hit Darryl on the left side of the face?”

  Matty tosses his shoulders. He doesn’t know. He doesn’t care, either. He finishes with the towel and gives me a sideways glance. “I’ve seen this guy Noah on TV,” he says. “Handsome dude. Should I be jealous?”

  “Matty—”

  “Who’s better-looking, him or me?” he asks.

  “Are you kidding me?”

  He points at me. “That’s a nonanswer. You think that guy’s got something on me? He doesn’t make seven figures, does he? C’mon, Murphy, give it up,” he says, grabbing my ankle. “You like that guy more than me?”

  I move my leg, forcing his hand off my ankle. I get off the bed and walk out of the room. He follows me down the hallway.

  “What? I was listening. But Murphy, what’s your deal? That thing was a lifetime ago. I mean, I know you miss your uncle, and I’m sorry and all that—”

  “That’s very sweet of you,” I deadpan.

  “—but seriously, you gotta snap out of this. You’re turning into a real drag.”

  I stop and spin on him. “Am I?”

  “Yeah, you wanna know the truth. You are.”

  I take a step toward him. “This is the guy who killed my uncle. I’m trying to understand him.”

  “Why? You trying to get closure or something?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  “Well, can you get ‘closure’ when we don’t have reservations at Quist in…now it’s twenty-four minutes,” he says, checking his watch.

  “I can still get ready,” I say.

  “Yeah, you’ll wash your hair and tie it into a ponytail and thr
ow on something too casual for where we’re going. God forbid you try to look hot when I’m in town. God forbid you put on some makeup and spend more than two minutes on your hair. You’re this…you’re the hottest woman I know, but it’s like you don’t give a shit about that.”

  I narrow my eyes to get a better look at this man named Matt Queenan. “I don’t give a shit about that,” I say. “Did you just figure that out?”

  “Y’know, I’m gonna let you in on a little secret, princess.” He wags a finger at me. “A lot of women would want to look hot for me. You think I don’t get overtures all the time? Every day? You think there aren’t a dozen women who’d jump at the chance to date me?”

  “Oh, I’m sure there are hundreds,” I say, not hiding my sarcasm. “You’re the great Matty Queenan! You make seven figures a year! Why don’t you go find one of those women tonight?”

  I return to the bedroom. As I pass him, he grabs my arm. “You know what, I think I will,” he says through his teeth.

  I yank my arm free and give him a forearm shiver to the chest. “Don’t grab my arm.”

  “Don’t fucking push me,” he says, knocking me back into the wall.

  My Irish up now, I lean in and punch him right in the kisser, connecting with his teeth and feeling his jaw crunch. “Is that better?”

  He stumbles backward, unprepared, touching his mouth and then checking his fingers, finding blood. “You fucking bitch. Nobody hits me.”

  I shrug. “Hit the road, Matty,” I say. “Or I’ll hit you again, a lot harder.”

  “Yeah?”

  He moves at me, but I feint toward him and he backs off. He’s a lightweight. He knows I could take him. He couldn’t handle the embarrassment.

  “Have a nice life in this shithole town with your shithole job,” he says, turning to leave. “I’ll have another date by the time I get back to Manhattan.”

  40