Authors: Jackie Barrett
“I got him right in the back, and he went down. But
he wasn’t finished. Now my mother’s up and screaming, ‘Oh my God, Ronnie!’ They’re looking at each other, she’s coming over to his side. ‘Oh my God, Ronnie!’ I’m telling you he was getting up, he wasn’t accepting this. Then my mother pulls out a pistol. It was one of them you clip on your ankles, real light, a .38.”
In Ronnie’s voice was again that peculiar dichotomy, the man who had been perfectly prepared to shoot his father but was still deeply pained at the thought that his mother might be willing to shoot him in return. Ronnie still spoke both like a man resigned to continue being punished for his sins and one who scoffed at those who’d allowed him to commit them.
“He’s getting up; she’s got the pistol out. I let the second round go. At the same time I hear shots from one of the other guns. I assume I’m hit; I said, ‘Oh my God.’
I swing the gun around, hit the lever, put a second round in my mother. I didn’t know she was shot till I seen the barrel flash. Then I look at Dawn, I said, ‘Oh shit.’ Dawn had two hands on that gun. I seen the front of the barrel come up, I seen a flash about two, three inches wide. I saw it all in the mirror, that’s why I had to turn around. I thought I’d been shot. Now I’m looking back in the mirror. ‘Oh shit,’ I said. It was Dawn. I said, ‘What the hell did you do?’ ‘I did you a favor,’ she says. I picked up the pistol my mother had pulled out. The hammer was back.”
“She was about to shoot you.”
“Yeah, my mother was gonna shoot me right then and there. I quickly turned the ceiling light on, the chandelier. I said, ‘Oh man, I thought I was shot.’ Dawn said, ‘I saved your ass. She was gonna shoot you.’ ‘Well, ain’t nobody living through this,’ I said. ‘They’re both dead. Did you see him? He was getting up.’ ‘Yeah, I seen him,’ she said. ‘He was gonna wrap that gun around your neck.’ We’re standing there looking at each other, and they’re dead.”
“Did you panic?”
“There was no time to panic. There were things I had to do now. I said to Dawn, ‘There’s things in this house that gotta go.’”
“You mean evidence?”
“I mean money. There was a file my father kept stashed away, with money in it. I told Dawn, ‘We gotta clean the place out.’ I found the file. I said, ‘There’s forty grand in here, you know about it, right?’ She said, ‘I know there’s money.’ I said, ‘There’s forty grand, four stacks of hundreds,
ten thousand in each one.’ Plus I had thirty-seven thousand and change of my own in the crawl space.”
“Thirty-seven thousand dollars?”
“Yeah. I was pretty good with money.”
Saying he was “good with money” was an interesting statement. From the stories I’d read, it seemed more that Ronald Sr. and Louise simply gave their son money whenever he needed it because they weren’t sure what else to do.
“I said, ‘There’s an envelope, but let’s leave that. The box on the floor, I don’t think there’s anything in there; the jewelry and everything’s in a safety-deposit box.’ We looked anyway. The envelope and the box are both lying there. We left the envelope, we looked in the box on the floor. We found the file with the forty thousand in a shoebox in the top of my mother’s closet, hatbox, shoebox, whatever it was. Hatbox. We took the file.”
“With the money in it.”
“Yeah, with the money in it, of course with the money in it. Then I told her, ‘Look, there’s a million dollars in a duffel bag down in the basement.’ ”
“A million dollars?”
“Yeah. It was backup money that my father kept there. Dawn said, ‘What are you, high?’ I said, ‘Yeah, I’m high, but that’s irrelevant.’ That money was hidden, it was just-in-case money. I know because I’m the one who put it there.”
“You mean in case the business tanked?”
“Right. That money was my father’s escape hatch. He had asked me to bury it, so I knew exactly where it was. No one else knew. Just me.”
There were times Ronnie sounded nearly proud to have been his father’s son. And it was just as pitiful to me as when he was describing his father using him as his personal whipping boy.
“I told her, ‘You stay right here. Let’s make sure the police ain’t on their way.’ We wiped everything down. I said, ‘You had gloves on. I didn’t have no gloves on, there’s paraffin all over my hands. I hope the police don’t come in here.’ Anyway, I decided I’ll deal with that later.”
“Where were the guns?”
“They were still in the bedroom. But I wasn’t thinking about that. I was thinking about what I had to get out of that house to somewhere else. I told Dawn to stay upstairs, then I went down to the cellar, to get the duffel bag. Dawn is goddamn stubborn, of course.”
Dawn is stubborn.
He was talking about her in the present tense. In his mind it was still happening. How many times had he replayed this tape? How often had he tried to convince himself it never happened?
“She didn’t stay upstairs. She came down.”
The fact that
my bichon, Max, was an old dog didn’t make saying good-bye any easier. He’d been my best friend. To those who have never owned dogs or cats, the statements made by pet owners read like so much fluff. He was more than a pet. He was a member of the family. He knew my moods and made me feel okay when nothing and nobody else could. All of these things are true, and were true of Max. I would say things that are stronger
yet. Max had soulful eyes. He felt love deeply and gave love deeply, too. We all cried together as he was put down. Out of this life, into the next.
The next morning, the phone rang. The caller ID said “Unknown Number.” When I picked up, it was Ronnie, in his other voice, laughing. Every other time he’d called, the number for Green Haven had come up on the display.
“Hey,” he said, “if I showed up at your door late at night with a puppy, would you take care of it?”
Ronnie relished speaking in code.
“I know what you’re doing,” I said.
“Come on,” Ronnie said. “He was old.”
I hadn’t told him about Max’s passing. I hadn’t told him a thing.
“I had gasoline
down there. A big cherry jug, for the boat—more than five gallons. I said, ‘We’ll use it to burn the house down.’ But there wasn’t enough gas. So I said, ‘Let’s just burn their room up.’ ‘No,’ Dawn said, ‘don’t be starting no fire.’ I said, ‘All right, fine, you’re right,’ and I told her again to go back upstairs. She said no.”
“She didn’t have any idea about the million?”
“No one knew about that but me. I’m the one my father had asked to hide the goddamn thing. When I finally got it out, Dawn said, ‘Let me see, let me see,’ like she’d never seen money before. All the money was wrapped—clear bags, then black garbage bags, then the duffel bag. I said, ‘Look, you see, all hundred-dollar bills, a million dollars. There, okay? A million, right there, right
in front of your face.’ She said, ‘We have to keep this money.’ I said, ‘No way are we keeping this money.’ ”
“Did you ever think of keeping it?”
“I didn’t want no cops finding a million bucks there after what happened in that house. I told her, ‘I’m taking it to Brooklyn right now, ’cause we can’t call the police with the money in the house. God knows what’ll happen. We can’t call the lawyer, ’cause we’ll look guilty.’ ”
“What was in Brooklyn?”
“My grandparents.”
“You mean your dad’s parents?”
“Yeah. I told Dawn, ‘Don’t do nothing. I’m taking this money where it belongs.’ I said, ‘I’ll be back in an hour and a half, maybe two, tops. Don’t do nothing. We got time.’ ”
The laundry had
piled up. I could barely see over my own clothes as I carried the basket to the basement. I was focusing on each individual step so that my fatigue wouldn’t produce a catastrophic stumble.
“Okay, you’re right. They want me out.”
It was Uncle Ray, gazing ahead at something I couldn’t see. Talking to someone invisible.
“I’ll do it.”
“Ray?” I spun toward him. A trail of mist, like a thick cloud, swept past my face, obscuring my sight and making me feel faint. I swayed back and forth. “Ray,” I said, trying to stay conscious. “Ray, who are you talking to?”
“No one,” he said, still looking straight ahead.
“Ray.”
He kept staring ahead. I was about to black out. I didn’t know what to do other than speak directly to whatever was speaking through him.
“Look, you get any fucking ideas, I will have him in jail in a heartbeat.”
Uncle Ray only stared.
“The problem was
our neighbors,” Ronnie claimed. “The Colemans, Olivia and Jimmy. The wife and husband. Dawn and I went back upstairs to the bedroom and could see them standing on their back porch. They were just standing there. I couldn’t see that good, ’cause the window had an air conditioner in it, so I could only see through the top. But I saw something. I didn’t know at first if it was the police or what, then I saw it was them. I went into Allison’s room and told Dawn to be quiet. We both went to the window, the second window, and I know the Colemans had to see me, because I had to lift up the window from the inside. And we had glass storm windows, I didn’t bother lifting that one up, ’cause then they woulda seen me for sure. But I lifted that first one, I had the rifle in my hand. I wasn’t gonna shoot them. I don’t know what they thought I was gonna do. They just stood there.”
“What were you thinking?”
“I was thinking about what to think. I thought about maybe going in that house and wiping them out, but I didn’t know how many people were in there, and I didn’t know how many bullets I had left. So that idea was out.”
“But you just said you weren’t going to shoot them.”
“I’m saying I wasn’t thinking of shooting them at first. Then I was, then I wasn’t again. I’m trying to tell you everything happened fast. You can’t sit there and think about it forever, you just have to move. One way or another I had to go. I took off for Brooklyn.”
“What were you thinking you’d do if the Colemans did see you?”
“I wasn’t considering that. I figured I’d deal with all this other shit later. I just knew I had to get going. When I left the house, Jimmy’s pickup truck was there, and he was sitting in the goddamn thing, in the back of their driveway. He watched me come out of that house. Them two were right there watching me come out the door. And I know they seen Dawn, because Dawn came down with me, she was standing there at the storm door, the front of the house lit up like a Christmas tree. They were standing on that back stoop, that back hump there. But they never said anything. They dummied up good.”
According to Joanne’s research, if the Colemans had indeed seen Ronnie or Dawn DeFeo that night, they’d never said a word about it, at least not as far as the public record was concerned. Maybe it had all been a figment of Ronnie’s drugged mind. Or maybe, like he’d said, Olivia and Jimmy Coleman had just “dummied up.” Either way, there was nothing to corroborate his story.
“I’ve seen pictures of the house. The front door was actually at the side, right?”
“Right.”
“So your neighbors would have had a full view anytime someone came out of the house.”
“Yeah. I remember Dawn said, ‘Why don’t you take a picture—it lasts longer.’ Real loud. I just shook my head and got in the car and left. I went to Brooklyn with the money, I took the .357, I had that on me, five rounds in it, one round was fired. I took the rest of my guns, too. I got in that car. The gun’s right there, with the hammer back. I’m gonna tell you exactly when I got there. Couple of minutes before three
A.M.
I had the radio on. I wasn’t feeling good, my mind was messed up. I was high, I never did nothing like that before. I said, ‘What the fuck am I gonna tell this man?’ ”
“You mean Rocky?” His paternal grandfather.
“Yeah. I got to their house and rang the doorbell. Then I start banging on the bottom of the door, they had a stainless-steel front door. Fourteen Twenty-Three East Twenty-Ninth Street. I start banging on the door with the butt of my gun. The lights across the street come on. I knew all them people, I used to sleep over at the house all the time. They woke up. Somebody was sitting in an unmarked car. I know police cars. It was an old fire chief’s car—faded red four-door Plymouth. Somebody was in there, I could see his head. Looking at me. Down the street, on the opposite side. It’s a one-way, very narrow. I said, ‘What the hell?’ I was all paranoid and wired. I’m saying, ‘It’s me, Butch.’ The whole neighborhood’s waking up now.”
I was down
in the garage cleaning up when I came across the axe. Red, long-handled. It was the one Will had been
swinging in the store. Puzzled, I touched it. He would have to have gone back to the store. He’d have to have done it without me, behind my back.
When he got home that night from his shift at the bar, I didn’t say anything. I just held out the axe. Will isn’t a great actor. He doesn’t have to be, because everything he does is done with sincerity. So when an expression of shock came over his face, I knew the look was genuine. I asked him to explain himself anyway.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I didn’t buy the damn thing. I never went back to the store. I didn’t.” I must have looked skeptical, because Will walked out of the house.
I drove over to Adam’s and handed him the axe. “Hold this for me,” I said. “Better yet, keep it.”
Adam studied my face. “What the hell is going on, Jackie?” he said. “You don’t look right. You need to see a doctor. Is something threatening you?” Adam and I have worked on more high-profile murder cases than I can remember, he in the forefront, me in the background. He thought maybe someone got to me, or wanted to.
I shut the door, then turned to Adam. “It’s coming,” I said.
He said nothing for a minute, then took the axe from me. “Yeah. I figured someday it might.”
“The two of
them come down, my grandfather and grandmother. I said, ‘Something bad happened in the house. Something real bad. You gotta take this money.’ I said, ‘The police are gonna come, and when they come,
what am I gonna do with this?’ He says, ‘What are you, drunk, high?’ I say, ‘Look, don’t worry about that. This is your money. You don’t understand—something happened to my father and mother.’ He asks me what happened. I said, ‘Use your imagination.’ He said, ‘What are you, a smart-ass now?’ He pushed me out the door. He didn’t want that bag.”