Yes, I tell him, this is what I’m here for—I’ve dutifully collected any and all details that haven’t vanished into the tides of time. I know about the seven chambers, and the story they succeeded in telling, and how the local media ran with it for a cycle or two, tying the case to rumors of satanic cabals around the state and the Southwest; and that there were other theories headed in the other direction, up into Oregon, where Anthony Hawley had gotten his start.
“Hawley!” says Seth. “Do you know I never actually met that guy, I figure he’s still around here, people tend to kind of settle once they land here, I’ve noticed, though that won’t be true much longer if the rent keeps rising. Whole different subject. But I felt so bad for him, you know, they kept sending news crews to his house, to his office, if a news crew showed up here to talk, well, I mean, I guess there’s you, but that’s different. Did you talk to Derrick?”
I haven’t, yet. “You might want to put on your kid gloves,” he advises me. “It was different for Derrick, because Hawley told them he’d had Derrick working in the store, and so some of the cops started to get a lot of very sick ideas about the whole thing, which then of course became rumors, small towns are like that, and then people started to look at Derrick like his whole life was just a front for something seedy. And he didn’t really need something like that in his senior year with all the big things to be thinking about, you know? I mean college. Life after college. All that stuff. And he’s thinking, This is going to ruin my chance with the colleges, they’ll find out, what do I do if I don’t go to college.
Seth Healey grows quiet; as I’ll learn over the course of our day together, this is something that doesn’t happen very often. There’s a window in his office overlooking the gym; he’s gazing through it, maybe taking stock of the scene, so far from the place we’re talking about—even if, physically, it’s really just a short drive away.
“Not everybody has to worry about the same kind of things Derrick had to worry about back then,” he concludes when he picks up the thread. “It took a toll.”
* * *
WE’RE AT A CHAR-BROILED BURGER STAND half a mile from the gym, seated at an outside table; there are fewer and fewer places like this left in California, but once they were everywhere—fast-food stands before the big players gobbled up all the little ones, relics of an earlier time. Seth has ordered a double patty, no bun, covered in the works and with special sauce; slopped onto translucent wax paper in a plastic basket, it’s a giant, lurid heap of color with steam rising from it. Seth attacks it studiously, without looking up, his lean, wiry frame wholly attending to his task.
People are sometimes offended if you make observations about how they eat—most people don’t think about it much, and some would rather not—but I take the chance, and ask him if he’s always this quiet over lunch. “Always,” he says, wiping his mouth with a paper napkin. “If I don’t devote a hundred percent of my attention to something I’m likely to abandon it halfway through. It’s my brain, right? My brain is like that. I can’t focus and I can’t focus and I can’t focus and then suddenly, bam, there’s something I care enough about to really give it my time and energy, and for that period of time, it’s the only thing I care about. Almost the only thing in the world. Meals, conversations, work. It means I have to warn people, don’t try to tell me two things at once, even though, when I’m the one doing the talking, I can keep almost an infinite number of plates spinning. But it looks different from this side, I guess.”
I wonder aloud whether the intensity of his focus feels like a blessing or a burden.
“Well, it’s both,” he says. “When people don’t understand you, they don’t even try, they just write you off. So you have to really sell yourself. That’s something I had to learn. But the internal benefits of being your own man, it’s something I teach at the gym. For example, I have one of the best memories of anybody. Because I’m all over the place when I talk, people assume my memory’s like that, too, but it’s not. Once I take note of a detail”—he taps his temple with his forefinger, twice—“it’s in here forever.”
The police thought you had an active imagination back in 1986, I say.
“I do have an active imagination,” he says proudly. “But also, I know what I know, and if I say I saw something, it’s because I saw it.”