DEAD END STREET
By
Andrea Hagner

It was the sort of street that people come from - not a place they dream about getting to. Short and straight, it was a street that didn't go anywhere. It ended abruptly at the railroad tracks.

The houses, never built to last a lifetime, had already seen three generations of children go from birth to graduation. Crammed together, with barely breathing room between them, each one sagged a bit more than the next.

On the corner house, an all-weather porch had been added - it's jalousie windows rusted in the half open stages of a wet Spring. The house next door had bravely painted porch rails of shiny silver, but spots of the old black paint (or maybe it was mildew) poked through the blisters. It was the third house I was looking for. The brown house with two small windows under the eaves. Windows with shades pulled most of the way down so that it looked like an old man, dozing in the sun. The door, placed dead center on three squat steps, was protected by a flimsy aluminum storm door. The Plexiglas rattled in its frame when I knocked.

It took a minute, but the door eventually opened. A man, as brown and squat as the house, stood there mutely, filling the open space. Light flooded the room behind him, shadowing him from my eyes. He could see me clearly, however. I showed him my ID. He nodded and stood aside for me to enter. Fat sofas and overstuffed beige chairs lined the edges of the square room where we were standing. In the harsh glare of dozens of lamps - floor lamps, table lamps, overhead fixtures and brightly burning reading lamps, every upholstery snag and worn spot was clearly visible. The room was clean, though; light colored wood floors were shiny enough to bounce back the light that was being thrown mercilessly at them.

"I still don't know why you came," my reluctant host waved me over to a particularly lumpy chair. He sat in the matching one nearby, taking off his glasses and rubbing his eyes as he did. "I told you on the phone, I don't know nothing about the boy."

"He's not a boy any longer, Mr. Dawson. Your son is twenty-five years old. When was the last time that you saw him?"

"Last year, maybe. He don't come by too often any more. Never did, truth be told. His Mama and me, we didn't get along. He only showed up here when he was mad at her. Or wanted money that she wouldn't give him."

"How old was he when you and his mother divorced?"

"Bout six or so. She just up and moved out one day. She always hated this neighborhood. Said it depressed her. She didn't want to waste her life on a dead-end street. Can't see that she ended up any better off, though."

I nodded and took out my notebook. I rested it on my knee, looking at Jack Dawson, while I clicked open my pen. He saw me looking at him and avoided my eyes.

"Shouldn't you be out looking for him? Checking with his friends?"

"We're doing that, sir. Trouble is that we can't locate anyone who seems to know him. His employer says Matthew is a real loner. The landlady gave us the same description. We were hoping you could give us some names. Someone who might have some idea where we can find your son."

"Nope. Fraid not. Like I said, I don't see the boy anymore. I have no idea who his friends are."

My pen stayed poised above the notebook. Dawson still avoided my eyes.

"If it was the other way around, if you were looking for me, the boy wouldn't be able to tell you the names of my friends, either, you know. We don't keep track of each other that way. Not that I have that many friends, you know. But the point I'm trying to make is that I have no idea where Matthew might be."

"You said that, sir. And I appreciate that you're trying to be helpful. But, you see, we're coming up empty handed in this investigation. Last Tuesday we got an anonymous call directing us to your ex-wife's apartment. When the officers arrived at the scene, we found her body in the bathtub. The coroner says she'd been dead for at least a day by then. The whole apartment was in disarray, but there was no sign of her son - your son - Matthew. His bedroom was torn apart, too, so it's hard to tell what's missing."

"I always knew the boy would come to no good. Always complaining that life isn't fair. Learned that from his mother. Did the neighbors see anything?"

I shook my head. "Didn't hear a thing, either. They'd only lived there a little over a year. None of the neighbors knew much about her. She kept real private, they say."

"Yep. That's how she was. Never happy anywhere. Always finding fault with every place and everyone. I can see where you got a problem, but I can't help you any. Maria and me haven't spoken to each other for more than twenty years."

"Yet you are named as the beneficiary on her life insurance policy."

"Still? Well, I'll be damned. Her lawyer made us both take out big, fat policies when the divorce was final. So the boy would always be taken care of. In case, you know. But you'd think she would have let that lapse by now. As you pointed out, the boy is all grown up."

"She paid her own premiums, then?" I asked, knowing full well that Dawson had written a check to the insurance company just weeks before.

"I dunno. I guess the bill for her policy might be included with mine. I don't read fine print too good any more. That's why all the lights, you know. Old age is creeping up on me. I remember laughing at my old Granny for needing to sit in a sunny window with a hundred-watt light bulb aimed straight at the sewing in her lap. Now I understand. Wish I had the chance to tell her I'm sorry for laughing, but she's been gone for better than forty years now,"

"I'm sure, sir. But the insurance does make me wonder."

"Have you talked to Maria's old Mama? I bet she knows where Matthew is. I don't know how she could shelter him, though, if he killed her precious Maria. But, you know what they say about blood being thicker than"

"Your wife's mother has been dead for almost ten years."

"Is that so? Well, no one ever told me. You'd think she would have had the courtesy to tell me. I might've sent flowers or something. But that's probably why she didn't. This way she could sit around and complain about how cold and heartless I was. Didn't even send flowers to her Mama's funeral. That was the kind of woman I was divorced from, you see. Cold and complaining. No wonder her own son killed her."

Dawson sat back in his chair and squeezed his eyes closed. Was he blinking back a tear? Or trying to get one to come out of his beady little eyes. I couldn't tell.

"But I still don't understand why you keep paying for those insurance policies."

He sat up a little straighter and looked me in the eye. "A man like me," he said, "can't do much for his kid except buy insurance. I was never much of a father and he's not much of a kid, but that money'll give him a chance, don't you know. A chance to end up better than this."

A buzzer sounded in the back of the house.

"Time for my medicine. If there are no more questions, I'll have to ask you to leave now. Those pills make me pretty drowsy, you know."

I didn't like what I was seeing or feeling about this man, but I couldn't come up with any reason to stay. All the evidence - fingerprints, blood-stained clothes and the ice-pick that had been used to kill Maria Dawson - pointed straight at the son and not at the ex-husband. I said my good-byes, left a business card with him and found myself out on the street. After the bright lights in Jack Dawson's living room, the street seemed darker and dingier than it had before.

I spent the next few days dealing with a hit-and-run down on Fourth Street. The whole department was still looking for Matthew Dawson, but newer, more pressing matters kept distracting us. It had been more than a week since Maria's bloodless body had been moved to the morgue. The missing son seemed the most likely suspect, and as long as he stayed missing we were spinning our wheels. I hate to admit it, but Maria Dawson's death had barely been noticed. For sixty-three years she'd been one of the one hundred and forty thousand inhabitants of our thriving metropolis, but she'd made little or no impression on one hundred thirty nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety seven of us. She'd paid her taxes, voted religiously and was current on all her bills. But, otherwise, she didn't seem to exist. Neighbors didn't know her. She had no friends. The women who worked next to her at the accounting office couldn't even remember her ever talking about her son, much less her ex-husband. There wasn't even a photo of the boy on her tidy little desk. It was easy, too easy, for the file on her murder to get shuffled to the bottom of the stack on my desk.

Six weeks later I got a call from an insurance adjuster. If I had no reason to stop them, he said, his company was going to pay out $150,000 to Jack Dawson. Embarrassed by my own lack of effort, I told them to go ahead. It seemed pretty clear that the ex-husband had not been involved in the insured's death. The son had killed his Mom and scrambled out of town. I doubted whether we'd ever find him. "By the way," I asked, just before hanging up. "Did Jack Dawson cancel his own policy?"

"No, as a matter of fact, he didn't. When Mrs. Dawson died, he sent us instructions to change his beneficiary to a Charles Dixon. A cousin, I believe, with an Oregon address."

I took down the information and added it to the file.

Less than a week later, I decided to pay another visit to Jack Dawson's house. Something was eating at the edges of my conscience and I thought I could put it to rest by having another conversation with the old man. This time, however, there was no shuffling footstep that answered my knock. And no light peeked out from behind the shaded windows.

I climbed the silver-railed porch at the house next door and showed my badge.

"I'm looking for Jack Dawson," I said.

"You missed him by a day or two. The ambulance came for him in the middle of the night. Thursday I think it was. Yeah, night before last. I called the hospital next morning to see how he was, but they said he never made it. DOA. Poor bastard."

Poor bastard. That was an understatement, to be sure. Matthew Dawson may have been elusive, but he sure wasn't patient. It took a one quick call to the hospital to confirm my suspicions. Then I called the town in Oregon where Charles Dixon supposedly lived. I was right. The local cops there met Matthew Dawson as he arrived in their fair city to take up his new life as Charles Dixon. He had thick stacks of hundred dollar bills in his luggage - nearly $150,000 worth. No doubt he had plans for the money he'd get when Jack's policy paid off, too. I had them mail me a copy of the interrogation to put in the file I sent on to the D.A. I shook my head in disbelief as I read it. Know what sort of kid kills such innocuous parents? A real spoiled brat.

"They owed me. Really owed me," Matthew repeated that phrase over and over again to what he thought was a sympathetic female detective. "They cheated me out of the kind of life other kids had. The kind of life I deserved. All I heard was complaining and moaning. The closest they ever came to loving me was taking out insurance policies on each other. Like that was a substitute for the life they cheated me out of!"

"We never did anything! Never went on trips. Never went out to eat. Never visited friends. Nothing! Every single day I had to listen to her complain about how terrible he was. How terrible I was. How terrible the whole world was. One night I couldn't take it any more, so I killed her."

"It was awful. I ran to his house and you know what he said? 'I don't want to hear about it. I've got troubles of my own!' Can you believe that crap?"

"The next day a cop came by to ask him questions. I was standing in the kitchen, listening. Listening to him say, point blank, that he wasn't surprised I'd killed her. That he never expected me to amount to anything. My own father! Lucky for me, his eyesight was terrible and he took a dozen pills a day to keep his decrepit old body alive. It was no big deal to substitute painkillers for his high blood pressure pills. And for his diabetes stuff. He lived just long enough to sign Mom's insurance check over to me. The way I figure it, I did them both a favor. They sure weren't enjoying their dead-end lives. Why should I have to live that way too?"

Matthew Dawson's life won't be a repeat of his parent's quiet, complaint filled ones. On October 12 of this year, all of his complaints will be silenced by lethal injection, when he takes one final walk down the dead-end street.