Martha Clarkson

True Crime

From the time he was a teenager, my father was obsessed with mysteries. Murder, mostly. Not so much an appreciation for the traditional writers like Poe, with live organs beating below floorboards, but about those movies with cryptic notes delivered by expressionless men in tight collars, about elongated shadows on walls lit by streetlamps, about people trying to outwit a clodgy gumshoe. My father didn’t own a gun and his job had no relation to the law, like cop or private eye; he spent his days in the smooth comfort of writing ad copy. It was the detection of clues that fascinated him; the movies where Clifton Webb attempts to murder his beloved Laura and ends up shooting the wrong girl; where a key left under a stair carpet sends Ray Milland to jail.

* * *

At birthdays and Christmas, my parents strove to find the unusual toy. For my sixth birthday they bought me a dollhouse, but nothing about it was traditional, more an architect’s model than a true home for dolls. The roofless, one-story house was made of plastic walls and situated on a large masonite square painted with patches of green for bushes and a blue walkway from the front porch to the mailbox, where there was even a small white plastic letter you could put out for an imaginary mailman. Stenciled on the mailbox was the name Davis and inside the house a man and woman named Mary and Roger, each about an inch high. The square yard sat on four plastic legs, so it was up off the floor a few inches, giving you the feeling that Mary and Roger had a skyline view. The special part of this toy was its two wands, each of which had an upturned magnet on the end, allowing manipulation of Mary, Roger, and all of their furniture, magnetically from underneath, through their ultra modern quarters.

Sometimes my father would sit down on the rug with me at the Davis’. I’d give him a wand and take one myself and we’d start to move Mary and Roger around. Inevitably, he’d say, “Now, let’s pretend that Roger wants to murder Mary. Put Mary in the kitchen, honey, so he can come up behind her. Imagine a baseball bat in his hand.”

* * *

It was the mid-sixties, the days of black-and-white network TV, and when one of my father’s favorite mysteries was broadcast, anything else going on was rescheduled. We watched the movie, even my mother most times, crowded on the chenille sofa in the den. Double Indemnity was one of his favorites, with the kindly father from My Three Sons playing a man who agrees to murder his lover’s husband after they take out a large insurance policy. The movie had lots of gunshots and multiple betrayals that were hard to keep straight. In the end, Fred McMurray was bleeding all over his office, talking into a machine that looked like a gramophone.

With all this cinematic murdering going on, and fatherly dissection of clues and story lines at the dinner and breakfast tables, I wasn’t afraid of murder plots or monsters. Neither the barrel of a shotgun or the dainty .22 pulled from a babe’s purse gave me nightmares. In our neighborhood, we ran back and forth between houses all day and even at night. No one locked their doors.

The month after my sixth birthday, I’d had my friend Lindy over to watch the Wizard of Oz. It was supposed to be our first sleepover. When the wicked witch appeared flying through the sky on her broom, Lindy started wailing—not just crying—and was insistent that my father walk her home, even though her house was just kitty-corner from ours. I was disgusted with her babyish-ness and sat alone watching the movie until my father got back. Even those flying monkeys in their brocade jackets couldn’t make me look away.

* * *

It was on one of the evenings of movie-watching that the doorbell rang, rather late. My father was letting me stay up to watch Rear Window. You couldn’t push “pause” in those days, so he had to get up to answer the door just as Raymond Burr’s motives were beginning to dawn on Jimmy Stewart. My mother was down the street at her friend Dena’s, drinking screw-cap Rosé and gossiping about the neighbors. The front door wasn’t visible from my spot on the couch, but I heard low voices going back and forth, a serious pitch to my dad’s voice, then heard the door shut. He came back to the den. “That was Mr. Finch,” he said. Mr. Finch was the old man across the street. “He said their house was broken into tonight. A rock through the back door window. Took the silver.”

“Did they catch the robbers?” I said.

“No, not yet. Thank goodness the Finches were out for dinner when it happened,” he said.

Hard to imagine the Finches going out to dinner, an activity that was always tied to some kind of celebration. I couldn’t picture the pucker-faced old Finches, who wouldn’t let us ride our bikes up their driveway, toasting each other with glasses of bubbly wine.

“Are they okay?” I asked, to be polite, but I really wanted to get back to Raymond Burr, the nice lawyer from television, who was not acting very nice so far in the movie.

“Yeah, honey, they’re okay. The police were just there talking to them. They’re going to a motel tonight, just, you know, until morning. I’m sure the burglars will be caught in no time.”

* * *

That Saturday, Lindy and I rode our bikes up and down the street and then came inside to play with the Davises. We changed their dining room into a living room and the kitchen into a bedroom by magnetic furniture rearrangement. My dad came home and asked if Roger had been able to find a weapon to use on Mary yet and where would he hide the body. Lindy looked tearful.

My grandma called that afternoon to say she had a new grandson, my dad’s new nephew, a boy named Kenny, six pounds, four ounces. My father went to the silverware drawer and pulled out the wrapped cigar he’d been saving, and we all put on our coats for a trip to the hospital. These were the days when children were considered germ-carrying menaces if they were within a two-mile radius of a maternity ward. My parents dropped me at my other grandma’s and went on to see their new nephew. Grandma tried to teach me to embroider and I pretended to like it, but I really wanted to watch the episode of Perry Mason that my grandfather had going in the other room. My parents picked me up after their visit to the hospital and I fell asleep in the big backseat of the finned Chevy.

We always entered the house through the garage, and that night my mother led the way. She opened the door and stepped onto the threshold, the rest of us right behind her. She was facing the kitchen nook when she stopped short. All the lights were on, more than we’d leave on to pretend we were home. More than we’d have on if we were at home. All of us looked ahead at the kitchen, where every single cupboard door was open and pots and pans were pulled out all over the fake-brick linoleum. No one moved.

Then my father put his long arm around my mother and me. “Shit,” he said. I’d only heard him say “shit” on Saturdays, when trying to get the gas mower to start. “Someone’s been in the house. C’mon, let’s go.” He turned us around and we walked back out through the garage. In the driveway, he whispered to my mother, “They may still be in there.”

We stopped at the end of our driveway, and looked over at the Browns, then the Schraders, where Lindy lived. The Browns’ house was dark, and Lindy’s had the token pretend-we’re-home light on, barely a glow behind the drapes. My father marched us across the street to the Finches, where the living room lights were on and the TV visible through the window. They were the only house on the block with a color TV.

Both Finches came to the door and my father explained what had happened. Mrs. Finch twittered around, fussing, practically pushing my mother and me onto the mohair sofa and throwing a scratchy afghan over us. My father went to the black phone on the hall table and called the police, then paced back and forth. Mr. Finch told him to calm down, that there was nothing to be done until the police arrived. Mrs. Finch brought in a tray of macaroons.

The police searched our house and came over to the Finches to tell us no one was inside. My father decided it was late and insensible to go back right now, especially with a young child. The Finches offered for us to stay overnight and we did, my parents in the guestroom and me on a cot they set up in the pantry.

In the morning they fed us pancakes and Jimmy Dean sausage. It was hard to imagine these were the people who didn’t let the neighborhood kids ride bikes in their driveway. My father led us across the street and we held hands. “The robbers threw a rock through the glass door in the basement,” he said, “but the door at the top of the basement stairs was locked, you know, like we do when we’re away at night.”

“How do you know they threw a rock in the basement door?” my mother said.

“Finch and I came over this morning, before breakfast. I just wanted to make sure everything was all right,” he said. “So anyway, they went back outside and found my hatchet in the back of the woodpile. You’ll see a big hole in the door to the basement where they chopped through, but … but don’t let it scare you.”

We couldn’t all fit through the nook doorway abreast, so my father led the way. I wedged between them because I didn’t want to be first or last. From the disarray on the first floor, it seemed the robbers had looked through every last cupboard. Books were on the floor, lampshades were crooked, chairs were tipped over. In the den the inflatable penguin my uncle had sent from China was now shrunken in the corner. They’d taken the time to pop it.

The robbers took out every tie off my dad’s rack, in case he’d hidden money in the back of one. “Like in The Greene Murder Case,” my dad said, referring to one of his more obscure movie titles. “Remember? Vance hid his extra cash in his ties.” Worst of all, the robbers dropped a brass dog bookend straight through Mary and Roger Davis’ plastic designer house. Clean split through the kitchen and bathroom, like an earthquake ravine with a shiny dog lying in it. Mary and Roger lay dead on the carpet. I was too stunned to even cry, but I had a stomachache. Remnants of Jimmy Dean crept up the back of my throat.

My father didn’t keep his money hidden in the backs of his ties, so for all the mess, the burglars ended up with only $22 from a jelly jar in the kitchen and the $2 I had in my new turquoise wallet, which they’d taken the time to find under a Pee-Chee in my bottom dresser drawer. I pictured them as two aging thugs—standard issue in almost all our crime movies—walking through our house, rashly flipping on lights, guns forward in expectation, their large shadows following them from room to room.

The new basement door my mother ordered would not arrive for a week. She unfolded a map of the Caribbean that had come in the mail from someone selling cruises and taped it over the hole in the basement door. On the bottom of the map were color photos of people frolicking in a warm ocean. It was only big enough to cover the width of the black hole. On the top and bottom, there were still the jagged hatchet-teeth of the hole, to remind us of what happened. Even my father looked away when he passed by.

While the police were walking through our house that night, making sure it was empty, the robbers were chopping their way through other houses in the neighborhood, helping themselves. We heard, weeks later, that they’d been caught in a similar caper in Forest Grove, but by that time we’d lost interest. We weren’t going to get our twenty-two dollars back, or be able to re-instate my inflatable penguin from China. My dad did his best for the Davis’ house with duct tape, but they never could do their magnetic gliding the same way after that. We hooked the chain across the back and front door each night. The new signal for bedtime became the unfamiliar clunk of the deadbolt, locking us in.

Return to Volume 7.2

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