They tore down the house on Detamble, but this has never mattered. We see that house every time we drive by. It happened more than thirty years ago. A childless couple. A childless couple who had always, the Sun-Times quoted a neighbor as saying, kept to themselves. Did they truly keep to themselves? Or is it only with hindsight that we see such people in their isolation? The husband was a retired ear, nose, and throat specialist; the wife was a horticulturist at the Chicago Botanic Gardens on Lake Cook Road. It might have taken them longer to find them if not for the dog. On the night of the third day, the hunger got to be too much, and her howling finally alarmed the neighbors. They went over and rang the bell. When they got no answer, they called the police, who used an ax to break in a side door. The husband and wife were found in the garage. (The dog, an Afghan hound, was found locked in the basement.) The only signs of struggle were bloody scratches on the wife’s arms and cheeks. The husband had no defensive wounds. This led investigators to conjecture that he had been taken by surprise, while she had seen it all coming. The other clues were that both of them had their heads stove in by some type of batlike object. It may have been the fireplace poker, the only material thing, as far as anybody could tell, missing from the house. The only other compelling piece of evidence: the wife, the horticulturist, was found wearing a money belt that still contained $20,000 cash.
“Bookies,” our neighbor to the east and town opinionator Penny Buckholtz surmised. “Everybody knows, after a certain point, it’s too late to pay them back with money. And I, for one, always knew something wasn’t right about those two. Why no kids? People who live in the suburbs without kids to raise are always hiding something. Why else would they live here?”
Penny Buckholtz may have had something there, and this is pretty much how we all took it. Must have been some kind of gambling debt. Don’t mess with the mob. You think they respect a suburban border? You think they care this is Lake County? No matter how mild-mannered you seem, they’ll take care of business the only way they know how.
There are no more memorable details and no other reasons to remember this couple aside from the way they died. We hadn’t known them. We hadn’t even known them well enough to make up stories about them, except of course Penny Buckholtz, who never had any compunction about making up stories about anybody, murdered or unmurdered.
It is tempting, after so long, the file long since closed, to zero in on the dog. Dogs are sympathetic. In a lot of stories dogs are even more sympathetic than people. For hours and hours, there’s that confused, whimpering, sleeping, pacing, foraging, and finally hopelessly yowling dog. Maybe the story is the dog and how alone she was, and how silent the house seemed. Those two had always been quiet, but no voices at all is different from silence. The silence worried the dog more than hunger. The woman had a small sad way of laughing that the dog could always hear wherever she happened to be in the house. The dog would always run toward that laugh.
It should be said that the murders, in spite of their brutality, didn’t terrorize us. We didn’t lock our doors any more than we had before. Everybody knew this wasn’t the beginning of a crime wave. No omen. It was simply an aberration. Our town has always been a safe place to raise your kids. Detamble, like so many of our leafy streets, is peaceful. Nothing ever happens on Detamble. It’s mathematical. But don’t you need some sort of break in the normal for there to be normal in the first place? The normal, the leafy, the peaceful, reaches out and bludgeons. A kind of sacrifice so the rest of us can slumber on amid the trees, on the bluffs, by the lake.