“Like you remembered, Fenn, that’s the place that makes a specialty of hopping up the stock cars and the carts. It cost him eighty-eight cash for the motor job they did for him. Racing plugs and points. Changed the jets. Gave him a manual control on the dash for air intake. The guy that worked on it, he told me it will do a legitimate one-thirty, and take off like a bomb.”
“Did you cover, in case he comes back for more work?”
“I couldn’t cover your phone call, but from what you said, there’s no reason they’d mention it. I just asked what they could do to give my car more steam, and when they got to telling me about the Pontiac that was just in, I kept them talking about it, what was done, what it would cost me and so on. Do you want me to write this one up?”
I didn’t like the question. It made a personal inference. I have learned that in the management and manipulation of
human beings, control can best be exercised by responding to a question with a question.
“Can you think of any reason why you shouldn’t?”
Ben Rossman looked uneasy. “There’s no file, is there?”
“If you turn in a report, there’ll have to be one.”
“What’s the classification?”
“How would you classify it, Ben?”
“Well—we’ve got him classified as a Known Criminal, and there’d be a registration number. So I guess we’d just set up a sort of open file, an activities file, and cross reference it to that registration number?”
“Exactly as we’ve done other times, Ben. With a verifax copy of the ID sheet, and, when Harpersburg ever gets around to it, the abstract of the prison record and the release photos.”
“I guess I just thought that—”
“There’s more reason to have a complete file on him, wouldn’t you say?”
“I guess so. I’m sorry, Lieutenant. I hadn’t thought it all the way through.”
“The file is already established, Ben. I set it up the day after I brought him back here. Do you think it’s going to be useful?”
He looked slightly startled. “When he uses that car, for whatever he wants it for, yes. We better have a file.”
“Maybe he just likes to drive a bomb.”
“Maybe we could all get lucky, Fenn. He could drive it into a tree.”
vii
Sergeant Johnny Hooper got back from Harpersburg at eight-thirty that evening, and phoned me at my home. He said he had something which sounded interesting. McAran was sprawled in my living room, and Johnny was about to sit down to the meal his new little wife had saved for him, so I arranged to go over to his place.
When I told Meg she gave me a rueful smile and told me she hoped it would be a boy. It is a family joke. Early in our marriage she read a magazine article about how occupations can interfere with togetherness. It told how the wives of obstetricians are the ones least likely to be able to plan anything in advance, and dedicated business executives run second. They made no mention of the wives of cops, so she accused me of operating an obstetric business on the side.
I remembered the joke when Mimi Hooper answered the door. I hadn’t seen her in several months, and I estimated she was now about eight months along with their first child. She is a small vivacious girl, as dark as Johnny is blonde. They lived in a pleasant, spacious apartment in one of the old houses west of Torrance Memoral Park. Mimi was a Littlefield, and the house was built originally by her great grandfather who made his money in hardwood timber. She is distantly related to the Hanamans. There isn’t much left of what was once a substantial fortune for this area. The Merchants Bank and Trust administers the estate, and divides the income between Mimi and her two brothers. The estate owns the old house and, in return for letting Mimi and her husband have the apartment, subtracts a very nominal amount from her share of the income. She gets a little over a hundred dollars a month. It makes a fine arrangement for a career cop. I think it would be a lot easier to put up with all the rest of the harassment if you didn’t have to wage that constant losing battle with the household budget.
They were almost through dinner. I sat and had coffee with them. Johnny appeared tired and depressed. Mimi
seemed to be using the most innocent remarks to take small stabs at him.
Finally he sighed and said, “Mimi stands on the side of the poor oppressed criminal being persecuted by the gestapo.”
She frowned at him and turned to me. “When a man has served his sentence, why can’t you leave him alone? Isn’t society supposed to be able to—reabsorb people like Dwight McAran? He was just a—professional athlete who got mixed up with the wrong kind of people, and with a perfectly horrible girl.”
“There’s been a lot of pressure on us to push him around, Mimi.”
“And you feel you have to?”
Johnny said, “I keep telling her we haven’t done any such thing.”
“Sometimes, Mimi, for reasons which seem good, we move people along, strangers in town, usually, who want to set up something we don’t want. We have a special list of city ordinances, the ones we can’t enforce under normal conditions. Littering, loitering, spitting, jaywalking. We assign men. The municipal judges co-operate with maximum fines, and if the man or men involved don’t get our message, we start adding jail sentences on top of the fines. Running any city is the art of the possible, and in a controlled town like this one, it’s a little bit easier to discourage people who want to upset—the local balance. Personal factors have to be considered. If I wasn’t in the job I’m in, or if he wasn’t my brother-in-law, maybe Larry would have put the machine to work, and McAran would be out of town by now. He hasn’t any influence here. But we’re not leaning on him.”
“Then what was Johnny doing at Harpersburg?”
“Chief Brint, Johnny and I—and some others—think McAran is dangerous. We think we know the type. Meg can’t believe he is.”
“I know he
looks
sort of tough, but you can’t judge a—”
“We don’t like the way he acts or the things he’s doing. We have to protect ourselves. If he does some violent thing, it’s going to look like contributory negligence on our part. And the powers that be will break up our team. We think it’s a good team. And it’s a help to us if our wives—believe we know what we’re doing.”
She smiled. “I guess I consider myself spanked, huh?”
“I didn’t mean it that way,” I told her.
She tilted her pretty head and looked at me questioningly. “I guess I’m still adjusting, Fenn. I never expected to marry a law man. I think I’ve adjusted to the idea that some horrid little spook could—hurt him. But he’s happy doing what he wants to do. God knows he isn’t doing it for the sake of the money, and neither are you. But what bothers me is—how you can keep up this sort of dedication you both have, when the whole situation is so sort of grubby. I mean the working arrangement with Jeff Kermer, and the way you make the law work one way for some people, and another way for others, and the way you have to do things in a sort of—political way.”
“Social institutions are imperfect. Meg can tell you about politics in the school system. Everybody gets the same choice. You can try to operate in spite of the crud, or you can live with it until you enjoy it, or you can get out. I don’t know about Johnny, but I take a kind of upside down pride in it. Cynical pride. I do the cop job, and feel like an idiot for trying. Cop movies and cop television make me feel like laughing or crying, and I’m never sure which. With a citation and a dime you can ride a city bus, and if you get killed, the city chips in on the burial expenses. If I arrest the wrong lawbreaker, I get chewed, and if I can’t find the one I should arrest, I get chewed. When I testify in court, I’m fair game for the defense lawyer. The public thinks I’m a cop because I’m making it on the side, or I’m somebody’s relative, or I’m a sadist, or I’m too stupid to make out doing anything else. The best respect we get is from professional criminals, who know a good cop when they see one in action.”
“I’d like to know why I don’t quit,” Johnny said. “The only thing I can figure out is that it’s like the boy who ran away from a wealthy home and when they located him forty years later he was with the circus, working every day with a big shovel, cleaning up after the elephants. They told him all was forgiven and he could come back to the bosom of his family, and he said, ‘What! And leave show biz!’ ”
She gave him a fond little punch and said, “Okay. I’m learning. Go on in the other room and practice your trade while I clean up.”
We went into the front room of the apartment. He sat
and scowled at the empty fireplace and said, “Right now this business makes less sense than usual.”
“Harpersburg?”
“I never spent a day there before.”
“Of the fifty states, Johnny, our prison system is rated forty-fifth. Keep that in mind. Prison systems need money. So, having very little money, and a legislature which can’t come up with any good ways of getting more, we have a bad prison system, a bad school system, bad programs for the aged and indigent, bad state and county highways. We’re a poor relation, Johnny, like West Virginia and Mississippi.”
“Jesus, the way they’re jammed in there, Fenn! All it does is keep them out of the way for a while, then turn them loose like sick animals. I’ve put some people in there. What good does it do?”
“According to Boo Hudson, it makes them damn anxious not to come back.”
“Anyhow, maybe I found out what I went after. It took a long time. They had a rat they were keeping in solitary because the kangaroo court gave him a death sentence. He was knifed but he lived through it, and they’re trying to get him transferred, but Hudson says that even if they do, it’ll probably catch up with him in the next place. He was on the fringe of the group McAran was a part of; before they found out, one of the guards had turned him into an informant. McAran was a loner for two years before he was accepted into that little group. It made a hard-nose quintet, with McAran serving the shortest time of any of them. The leader was Morgan Miller. Here’s a photostat of the prison ID card on him.”
I studied the sheet. The corner photo hadn’t reproduced well in the positive photostat. A balding head, a lean, closed face. Two previous convictions in Ohio. A pattern of professional theft. Several arrests without convictions. One rap for breaking and entering. One for armed robbery. And he had been given fifteen years in our state for a bank robbery in Kinderville, up in the northern part of the state.
“That bank job was a very smooth operation,” Johnny said. “There were three of them, and nobody could get a line on it for seven months. Then a woman talked, and from that tip, the Bureau put a tail on one of them. The take was a little over ninety thousand. The one they were tailing led them to Miller, eventually, and when they moved
in, the one they had been tailing got killed. They made recovery on over fifty-five thousand. Miller wouldn’t talk, but by backtracking his movements, they decided the third man had been somebody they already wanted. Miller said they had cut the take and split up the same night they’d taken the bank. The man eluded them for three years. They found him in California. He died of some kind of sickness while they were getting set to extradite him.”
“Miller led the bank job?”
“The witnesses testified he was the one giving the orders.”
“And it was professional?”
“Fast, rough, nasty and well-planned. They went in a few minutes before closing, slugged the guard, herded everybody into a rear office, pulled the main switch, cutting off power to the alarm system, locked the doors, cleaned out the cages. A three-minute job.”
“His group of five, where did they fit into the prison setup?”
“No known affiliations. Off by themselves. Nobody wanted to mess with them, prisoners or officials. All older than McAran. None of them getting any kind of special deal, except the kind McAran was getting. Two of them, Deitwaller and Kostinak, are lifers. Kelly has thirty to go.”
I looked at the ID record again. “Morgan Miller got out two months ago.”
“After the full fifteen. Down there in the corner is the psychologist’s estimate of likelihood of continuance of criminal activity. Ninety per cent. It would be a hundred, except they never mark anybody a hundred. Ninety is tops.”
“Was he turned down for parole?”
“He never applied.”
“And he went back to his home town?”
“Youngstown, Ohio.”
“Which is how far from Pittsburgh? Sixty miles?”
“Not much more than that, maybe less.”
“We’ll check it out with them tomorrow.”
“Fenn, if it was Miller who sent McAran the money, where would he have gotten it?”
“Hell, look at the arrests and convictions. This is an old pro, Johnny. How old is he now? Forty-seven. And he’s spent twenty-one years of his life in prison. Two years, four years, fifteen years. He’s sort of a loner, and he likes to run things. He’ll swear his luck has been bad. He considers robbery
his line of work. He knows it takes financing to set up a job. It probably took a month to set up that bank in Kinderville. So he would never let himself go broke, because if he did, he’d have to take a chance on some small stuff in order to bankroll himself. So as standard procedure, he’d stash funds to finance the next job. A few thousand sealed up in a jar and buried. Some of them get compulsive about it. I’ve read of cases where men have been burying half their take for years. They’re frugal men, temperate, quiet. They don’t seem to want the money for what it will buy. They seem to want the charge they get out of planning to take it and taking it. But they have to get into bigger and bigger operations, to keep the kick from diminishing, and they need more people helping them, and the more people you have in on something, the sooner somebody is going to talk. They tell themselves they’ll make that final big one and live in Mexico forever, but it’s a dream that never happens because it isn’t what they’re really after.”
“Would a man like Miller hook up with an amateur like McAran?”
“They couldn’t break Dwight at Harpersburg. That would count heavily with a man like Miller. He’s big, quick and tough. That makes him useful. He’s bright enough, and educated, and he’s full of hate. I’d say Miller might wish he had three Dwight McArans.”