The only customers not engrossed in their morning papers were four silent men arranged around a table across the room. The two men in suits affected an elaborate disengagement from the others, who might have been truck drivers, and from each other. All four ignored the cups before them. They had the air of people who had been waiting for a long time. The sense of mutual distrust was so strong that I wondered what had brought them together. One of the men in suits saw me looking at them and snapped his head sideways, his face stiff with discomfort.
My copy of the Ledger lay folded on the table in front of me. I pulled it toward me, turned it over, and momentarily forgot the men across the room and everything I had thought and experienced that morning as I took in the big banner headline. Beneath it was a color photograph of dozens of uniformed and plainclothes policemen standing on the front lawn of a small white frame house. One of the detectives was the joker I had met at the hospital the previous night, Paul Fontaine. Another, a tall commanding-looking man with an indented hairline, deep lines in his face, and a William Powell mustache, was identified as Fontaine's immediate superior, Detective Sergeant Michael Hogan. Almost as soon as I began to read the article to the left of the photograph, I saw that, among at least a dozen other unsuspected killings, the murder of the unknown man in the passage behind the St. Alwyn and the attack on April Ransom had been solved. A twenty-six-year-old clerk in the Glax Corporation's accounts department named Walter Dragonette had confessed. In fact, he had confessed to everything under the sun. If he had thought of it, he would have confessed to strangling the little princes in the tower.
The big headline read: HORROR IN NORTH SIDE HOME.
The story all but obliterated the rest of the news. Five million dollars' worth of cocaine had been seized from a fishing boat, an unnamed woman claimed that a Kennedy nephew had raped her in New York three years before being charged with rape in Palm Beach, and a state representative had been using military planes for personal trips: the rest of the paper, like every issue of the Ledger to come out for a week, dealt almost exclusively with the young man who, when surrounded and asked, "Is your name Walter Dragonette?" by a squad of policemen, had said, "Well, I guess you know."
"What do we know?" asked a policeman pointing a gun at his chest. "That I'm the Meat Man," answered Dragonette. He smiled a charming, self-deprecating smile. "Otherwise, I must have a lot of unpaid parking tickets."
The Ledger reporters had done an astonishing amount of work. They had managed to get the beginning of the saga of Walter Dragonette, his history and deeds, out onto the street only a couple of hours after they were discovered. The reporters had been busy, but so had Walter Dragonette.
Dragonette's little white house on North Twentieth Street, only a block south of the Arkham College campus, was in the midst of a "transitional" area, meaning that it had once been entirely white and was now 60 to 70 percent black. In this lay the roots of much of the troubles that came later. Dragonette's black neighbors claimed that when they had called the police to complain of the sounds of struggle, the thudding blows and late-night screaming they had heard coming from the little white house, the officers had never done anything more than drive down the street—sometimes they ridiculed the caller, saying that these sounds were hardly rare in their neighborhood, now, were they? If the caller wanted peace, why didn't she try moving out to Riverwood—it was always nice and quiet, out in Riverwood. When one male caller had persisted, the policeman who had answered the telephone delivered a long comic monologue which ended, "And how about you, Rastus, when you hit your old lady upside the head, do you want us charging there and giving you heat? And if we did, do you actually think she'd swear out a complaint?" Rastus, in this case a forty-five-year-old English teacher named Kenneth Johnson, heard cackling laughter in the background.
After someone was missing for three or four days, the police took notes and filled out forms, but generally declined to take matters further—the missing son or brother, the missing husband (especially the missing husband) would turn up sooner or later. Or they would not. What were the police supposed to do, make a house-to-house search for a dude who had decided to get a divorce without paperwork?
Under these circumstances, the neighborhood people had not even thought of calling the police to complain about the sounds of electrical saws and drills they had sometimes heard coming from the little white house, nor about the odors of rotting meat, sometimes of excrement, that drifted through its walls and windows.
They knew little of the presentable-looking young man who had lived in the house with his mother and now lived there alone. He was friendly. He looked intelligent and he wore suits to work. He had a shy little smile, and he was friendly in a distant way with everybody in the neighborhood. The older residents had known and respected his mother, Florence Dragonette, who had worked at Shady Mount Hospital for better than forty years.
Mrs. Dragonette, a widow in her early thirties with an iron-bound reputation and a tiny baby, had moved into the little white house when North Twentieth Street had been nearly as respectable as she was herself. She had raised that child by herself. She put the boy through school. Florence and her son had been a quiet, decent pair. Walter had never needed many friends—oh, he got into a little trouble now and then, but nothing like the other boys. He was shy and sensitive; he pretty much kept to himself. When you saw them eating dinner together on their regular Saturday nights at Huff's restaurant, you saw how polite he was to his mother, how friendly but not familiar to the waiters, just a perfect little gentleman. Florence Dragonette had died in her sleep three years ago, and Walter took care of all the details by himself: doctor, casket, cemetery plot, funeral service. You'd think he'd have been all broken up, but instead he kept his grief and sorrow on the inside and made sure everything was done just the way she would have wanted it. Some of the neighbors had come to the funeral, it was a neighborly thing to do, you didn't need an invitation, and there was Walter in a nice gray suit, shaking hands and smiling his little smile, holding all that grief inside him.
After that, Walter had come out of himself a little bit more. He went out at night and he brought people home with him. Sometimes the neighbors heard loud music coming from the house late at night, loud music and laughter, shouting, screaming—things they had never heard while his mother was alive.
"Oh, I'm really sorry," Walter would say the next day, standing next to the little blue Reliant his mother had driven, anxious to get to work, polite and charming and slightly shamefaced. "I didn't know it got so noisy in there. You know. I certainly don't want to disturb anybody."
Every now and then, late at night, he played his records and his television a little too loud. The neighbors smelled rotting meat and came up to him as he was watering his lawn and said—You put out rat poison, Walter? Seems like a rat or two musta died underneath your floorboards. And Walter held the hose carefully away from his neighbor and said, Oh, gosh, I'm really sorry about that smell. Every now and then that old freezer of ours just ups and dies and then everything in it goes off. I'd buy a new one in a minute, but I can't afford a new freezer right now.
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