the Onion Field (1973) Read online

  It may have been his affinity to growing things, or it may have been living in the dorm, truly self-sufficient for the first time, or it may have simply been his ripening past adolescence, but whatever it was, Karl began to burgeon as surely as the crops he tended. He was a varsity baseball player, a member of the student council, and finally the student body president. Karl, though only of medium size, had strength, agility, and most of all the determination to pursue any task to the end. Often he would be found irrigating in the fields in his rubber boots long after classes, earning extra money. The dorms were thirty dollars a month and his father worked night and day for the properties and goods he possessed, and believed his children should do the same.

  With his diligence and love of basic field toil he was a natural to be chosen as a college leader at this agricultural school which still clung to the Protestant ethic of hard honest work.

  Life in dorm three was a pleasant interlude he would look back on at a later incredible time of life. He would remember the marvelous poker games. Karl would sit there in a nickel-dime game, the light shining off his crew cut, now darkened to red blond with the passing of years, puffing nickel cigars though otherwise he didn't smoke, his blue eyes also darkened to a deeper color, expressionless as long as the game was in progress. And Iranian students, sons of sheiks, would play as fiercely as he, as though every dollar they owned was in the game. In Karl's case it often was.

  But there were disadvantages to a school like Pierce in these years: for one, a dearth of women students. The few there were were attracted to Karl, not only by virtue of his student body leadership but by reason of his diffidence around them.

  The year and a half he spent at Fresno State College was less pleasant. Though most of the old Pierce boys stayed together, they played too much, and the grades began falling. Like Ian Campbell, Karl Hettinger dropped out of college in his senior year.

  Karl joined the marines and was stationed at Twenty-nine Palms, California for most of his enlistment.

  His childhood friend Terry McManus talked of Karl: "We went to a beer bar one night right after he got out of boot camp. The broad behind the bar was a tough old bat and some guy was coming on pretty rank with her. And she put up with it as long as he was spending his money, but finally he was getting awful aggressive. She was the owner's wife and had probably handled a thousand guys like him, but all of a sudden Karl gets up and goes over and tells the guy to leave the lady alone. Imagine, in this day and age, and in a joint like that, defending a lady's honor! Well, Karl was always a wiry guy, and hard muscled, but this other guy knew all about handling his fists, and after Karl took his lumps and I helped him out of there, he just grinned and said, 'Guess I thought I was a marine tiger.' But it wasn't the marine thing at all. He would've always done something dumb like that. He was like so many of those farmboys I met at Pierce: stubborn, quiet, and determined about right and principle, and just about thirty years out of touch with the city life of Los Angeles all around them. In Los Angeles, only a farmer would shrug shoulders at adversity and bear up without complaint and hope for fair weather. And for sure only a hick would defend a barmaid's honor."

  After the marine corps, Karl Hettinger was suffering the same adjustment pangs that all vets undergo-restlessness, uncertainty- when one day a friend talked him into accompanying him to City Hall where the friend was going to take the test for policeman. On impulse Karl took the test himself. Ultimately it was Karl and not the friend who entered the police academy. It was a surprise to his family, to everyone who knew him, most of all to himself. He wasn't at all certain this was to be his life's career or even how he got there. But, typically, he put forth maximum effort and did well and was named class valedictorian.

  The first two years on the police department were for Karl like they are to most young policemen: incredibly boring, intensely exciting, mostly bewildering. Having a quiet but sharp sense of humor, Karl tried to salvage the funny moments for old friends who wanted to hear cops-and-robbers stories. Karl shared an apartment with Bob Burke, a policeman three years his senior, who had helped break him in at Central Division. They were compatible roommates, both meticulous housekeepers, who stayed out of each other's way and worked different shifts. Bob was more of a ladies' man than Kad, who was still an avid outdoorsman. Anything to get out in the mountains or deserts, or especially the lakes.

  Then came the transfer to Hollywood Division, and with only two years' experience, an assignment to the vice detail. There was seldom time to think of the old dreams of tomatoes glistening in the sun.

  Vice work was both enthralling and appalling. He found the bookmaking detail best, and was surprisingly good at working bookies. The prostitutes were impossible for him, at least as an operator. He could never master the lecherous role a vice operator must play. He was not an actor, could never pretend to be someone else.

  The omnipresent Hollywood homosexuals were perhaps most shocking, and the sordidness of the assignment was best mitigated by dark humor.

  "Look at the whanger on that one," whispered his partner, John Calderwood, at midday, as they sat on a hillside in Griffith Park and watched a well dressed, middle aged businessman leave his company car two hundred feet down from the restroom and disappear into the bushes just below their place of concealment. There he conducted a bizarre ritual with a shoe, a jar, and a nylon stocking, ending in five minutes of violent masturbation.

  "He reminds me of a tripod I used to own," said Karl dryly.

  "What a maniac," said Calderwood, scratching his mane of blond hair. "What the hell can you do about people like that?"

  "Circumcise them," said Karl.

  "What the hell's that gonna accomplish?"

  "With a chain saw," said Karl.

  On and on went the defensive vice squad comedy until partners began learning their lines so well they began playing straight man to each other in front of other members of the squad.

  One vice arrest of a homosexual was to have significance at a later time in his life.

  "We was up off the path in Ferndale Number Nine one afternoon," said John Calderwood. "I always liked to work with Karl because he had more jokes than any man I ever met in my life. Clean jokes and dirty jokes, he had a million even though he was a little quiet. Anyways, Ferndale Nine is the famous restroom up in Fern- dale Park. All the fruits congregate there and do everything you can think of in the restroom."

  Karl and Calderwood were up on the hill that day directly east of Ferndale Nine. There was a trap where vice officers watched for homosexual acts and made arrests for lewd conduct in a public place. Though most of the homosexuals who frequented Ferndale Nine knew that vice cops lurked there, they still came because the possibility of being caught excited them as much as the sexual contact. In fact pne effeminate young man with a puckered nervous face was seen writing "Peak here" on the wall of the restroom just under the observation window of the trap. So the homosexuals and the vice officers engaged in an endless dreary war there in Ferndale just below the Griffith Park Observatory.

  The homosexual who was to emerge later in Karl's life was cruising that day and spotted Karl standing on the hillside by Ferndale Nine. He stared at Karl with a feverish panicked gaze. This kind of look often signals danger to vice officers. In terms of physical injury, vice work was more hazardous than any other police function with the exception of the motor squad. Panic made it so, and in terms of injury to the spirit, the vice squad produced more casualties than all other police details combined.

  Karl was anticipating danger and watching slant eyed and poker faced when the young man shook back a lock of brown hair, smiled, and without hesitation reached for Karl's crotch.

  "Police officer! You're under arrest!" said Karl, grabbing the man's wrist. The burly young man drew back in disbelief. His bright round eyes blinked and filled with tears. Karl heard the crackling of branches as Calderwood ran from the bushes. Then the young man erupted in a blur of fists and feet, punching, kicking, screaming in o
utrage and betrayal, and the three of them were on the ground fighting. Not a movie fight where one stands back and resoundingly cracks homeruns cleanly off the other's chin. A real fight-a choking, gouging, biting, kicking fight. Hate-filled, blood-smeared faces. Desperate vice officers. A burly neurotic filled with panic. Muffled curses. Blows thrown by the policemen which often as not hit a partner. Each of them with one thought in mind: a headlock, a choke hold, the crook of the forearm closing on the carotid artery.

  A hold which has saved more policemen than all the sophisticated self-defense holds combined, because anyone with average strength can get a choke and squeeze until the antagonist falls limp. But they couldn't get a choke. He was thick and strong and hysterical. He was making animal sounds and Calderwood was around his neck bending him backward away from Karl whom he was stomping down on his back.

  Then the hold was firmly achieved and he was choked. They handcuffed him when he was flopping on the ground, face |jke a spotted plum, mouth gaping idiotically, gasping, swallowing his breath. Then, incredibly, he was on his feet, hands cuffed behind his back, running blindly across the hill. The two policemen did not have enough strength left to catch him, but tried, until he ran straight off a fifteen-foot embankment. They heard him shriek and fall. They ran to the brink and saw him at the bottom on his stomach, head twisted, eyes closed. They thought he was dead, but he was not. He only suffered a* broken collarbone.

  Their hands were still unsteady twenty minutes after the booking when they sat in a Hollywood drive-in restaurant drinking coffee.

  "I don't care if I never bust another fag," Calderwood groaned, holding the coffee mug in both hands, gingerly shifting his weight in the chair. "I'd be tempted next time to use a magnum on an asshole like that."

  "Ordinary magnums wouldn't help much with that one," said Karl, massaging his ribs.

  "Why not?"

  "You'd need silver bullets."

  "Hope to hell he pleads guilty," Calderwood moaned. "I don't even wanna see that beast again."

  But he did not plead guilty. They did see him again. In court. And they heard from him again. The man wrote letters complaining of brutality to the police department, and to the municipal court before and during his trial. Finally after his conviction he threatened in writing to kill Karl, Calderwood, the city attorney, and the judge. Then he was all but forgotten.

  By the time his vice tour was ending, Karl was ready for a less sordid assignment. He was sick of the intimate contact with wretched people, had had enough of the sweet sick smell of wine and stale sweat and vomit that permeated patrol cars until after a while you thought you smelled it everywhere. He hoped to work juvenile, was sure he would be good at it. He was patient and enjoyed children and was troubled by the tragic wandering teenagers he saw in Hollywood at night. When he mentioned to a partner that the young wanderers bothered him the partner grunted and said, "Wanna save the world, huh?" And Karl smiled self-consciously.

  By then he had met Helen Davis at one of the many parties Bob Burke arranged in their apartment. And though she was only twenty years old, Helen was a girl who knew what she wanted. She jokingly said that it was time a man almost twenty-eight years old got married. Karl laughed and treated the remark lightly but saw in her hazel eyes, or thought he did, a certain strength to match his own.

  In December of that year, Karl's police friend Jim Cannell routinely reminded Karl of the fishing trip they had planned to Lake Isabella and asked him if he would be bringing Helen.

  "Can't make it this week, Jim," said Karl.

  "Why not?"

  "We're going to Las Vegas to get married," he said casually, and they did. Characteristically, he had told none of his friends.

  At the Hollywood Division Christmas party in 1962 they were more happy than they had ever dared dream. They glided across the dance floor, Helen's light brown hair tumbling across his face when they whirled, and both had enough to drink to be sure they were the best dancers on the floor. They vowed to go dancing often, at least once a month, and to attend many of the police department's dancing parties. But the ninth of March was less than three months away. This would be their last police department dancing party. Now the gardener looked up at the sun and without his watch knew he was an hour and a half from lunch. That was certain. The certain things of life pleased him. He was sure for instance that if he cared properly for the old woman's Aleppo pine it would grow to he a soothing pale green with lacy needles.

  After lunch when he would leave here maybe the headache would stop. He would get to do a beautiful yard this afternoon, the best on his route. The yard had some fine specimens of Monterey pine lining the driveway. They were so stately and deep green and symmetrical they hardly ever needed trimming.

  The gardener looked at the old woman 7s petunias. They had good color: reds and whites and off-shade blues, but the old woman didn understand petunias. They bloomed profusely but they were delicate. You must never forget how delicate they arey he thought. You must be kind to them. Life was a tenuous thing to the gardener.

  And then, there in the petunias he caught a picture of himself in a store by an untended counter. Saw himself glancing to his right at a clerk whose back was turned to him. He hadn yt stolen anything big as yet, only pocket loot. Now, though, the bulkily packaged electric knife looked irresistible. Where could he secrete it? Under his coat? Inside his belt? Perhaps in his hand? Yes, brazenly in his hand. Store security men looked for telltale bulges, furtive behavior, but what if you just held the large thing in your hand and simply walked out with it? People don't see the obvious. That was the way, yes.

  Now, suddenly, the crimes were almost too painful to recall. He'd continue to think of them later. He had all afternoon. When he started thinking about his crimes, he had to start at the very beginning and think of all of them, the same as when he used to think about the night in the onion field.

  He always thought of that night from the very beginning to the end. If it weren't for the trials he wouldn yt think of that night at all. Why should he? It was seven years ago. Besides, he had all his crimes to think about That was the real horror.

  Chapter 3

  It was Ian Campbell's turn to drive on the ninth day of the partnership: Saturday, March 9, 1963. He and Karl were dressed, as always, in old comfortable sport coats and slacks. Ian's coat was wearing through where it rubbed against the butt of his revolver. They talked about clothes during the early part of the night, both of them ever thrifty, wishing that the department gave a clothing allowance to plainclothes officers.

  There were two other young men driving toward Hollywood that night in a maroon Ford coupe, who had begun a partnership on exactly the same day as Ian Campbell and Karl Hettinger.

  The two young men in the coupe also talked about clothes. The blond driver, Gregory Powell, admired the black leather jacket and cap he wore. The darker man, Jimmy Smith, hated his, but wore it because Greg insisted.

  "Fuckin Saturday night traffic," Jimmy Smith muttered.

  "Stop griping, Jim," said Gregory Powell, his gaunt face turning toward his partner on the swivel of an incredibly long neck. "Wait'll we take off that Hollywood market. Wait'll you get your hands on some money."

  Jimmy Smith grunted and adjusted the Spanish automatic he carried in his belt.

  "I just wanna git it over with, is all," said Jimmy Smith in his soft voice, and Gregory Powell smiled, his front teeth protruding slightly over his lower lip, and dreamed past this robbery to much bigger ones. And dreamed of having enough money to go into legitimate business.

  Imagine what they would say then, thought Greg. All the bitterness would be forgotten. They would come to him for money or favors. Gregory Powell chuckled silently as he thought of them-his family.

  "I didn't really mature until I was thirty-three years old," Rusty Powell often admitted, but by then his eldest son, Gregory, was already twelve years old, and had attended a dozen different schools before moving to Cadillac, Michigan. Rusty Powell had been p
retty much of a drifter during the Depression and early war years, playing in small dance bands whenever possible, while his young wife had a baby every three years until after Douglas was born in 1942.

  At age thirty-three, Rusty Powell enrolled in the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music. But now, with new time-consuming zeal, and guilt-relieving work, he knew his children less than he did in the drifting dance band days.

  For his son Greg though, there had always been the Governor, his maternal grandfather, whose picture he would carry even as an adult, a sturdy old man with deep creases in his cheeks, with white hair and a white moustache, a pipe smoker, fond of comfortable baggy pants and suspenders, and a shirt open at the collar. A grandfather who looked as grandfathers should: strong, wise, patriarchal. Greg would spend hours talking with the old man and many of the talks would be about Rusty Powell. The Governor would try to make the boy understand his father.

  "He doesn't have an easy time, your dad. Why, your mom's had every disease and operation known to medicine almost, and what with four kids and all, your dad just hasn't had an easy life. And sure, he's an easygoing sort of man and maybe you think he lets your mom run over him too much, but a mountain is quiet too and I suspect there's great strength in your dad. Maybe just going along with her and not riling her is a way to have peace in this world."

  And the boy would nod and say, "Tell me about my dad when he was courting my mom, when he had the fight with the boy that insulted her."

  And the old man would tell him once again of how Rusty Powell crushed the other boy in his arms, breaking a rib or two, and Greg would say to the Governor, "Do you think I'll ever get as big as my dad?"

  When Greg's mother, Ethel Powell, would unreasonably revoke an agreement that he could go ice skating, or to the movies, he would tearfully drag his father into her bedroom and confront the invalid woman with her broken promise. But she would deny that she had ever made it, and would rail at both of them and remind them of her thyroid and of the Bright's disease and of her nervous condition. Invariably, Rusty Powell would shrug his large sloping shoulders, shortening his long muscular neck with the gesture, and he would yield-to her. And for an instant the boy would hate him even more than he hated her during those years of illness and "nerves" and he would try to think of his father as a boy whipping the tar out of Greg's uncles, showing that he was a man. Greg would make allowances and resume his duties: the shopping, the minding of the three younger children, the ordering of the home.