the Onion Field (1973) (29 page)

"Greg," Brooks began, "would you tell us to the best of your recollection what happened last night, from the moment that the officers stopped you out in Hollywood? And start out first by telling us who you were with."

"I was with Jimmy Youngblood in the 1946 Ford coupe . . ."

And after an hour of lies and truths and half truths Greg was excitedly relating the moment of death in the onion field very much as Pierce Brooks expected he would.

". . . and Jimmy was standing out there, and I could hear him speaking to them, and I laid the gun down on the seat, and I walked around back to the car and I walked up to Jimmy and I was about maybe a foot and a half from him. I was going to ask him if he wanted me to drive, or if he was going to drive or what . . . and he fired, and the one policeman went down and the other started running and I hollered, 'What in the hell are you doing?' And he kept firing at this one that was running. I turned around and started running, and he started shooting at the officer on the ground again. I don't know why. I ran about maybe forty to fifty feet, and I almost overtook the officer that was running. I dove off into the side because Jimmy was still shooting . . . and hell, I could hear the slugs hitting the ground. I was damned scared. I didn't know whether he was shooting at me for running or at the officer, you know, and then he took off."

Pierce Brooks sat and nodded occasionally and Greg looked at the chestnut brown around the hazel irises of the tired patient eyes of the detective.

"You mean when you got out of the car in the onion field you weren't armed at all?"

"I was not armed at all," Greg said evenly. "I was so damned scared."

"Was the .32 ever fired that night?"

"Not that I know of, no," Greg said, telling for that instant the whole truth as he knew it. "No, it was not. Definitely."

But Brooks knew that it was.

Jimmy Smith's feet were bloody and he was sitting in a bed of sagebrush by an irrigation ditch with his feet in the water, drinking the irrigation water from the whiskey bottle he'd saved. Jimmy slept all day, waking with a pounding heart when an occasional Sunday car passed down the lonely road.

Then Jimmy awoke, cold and shivering in the warm sunshine. He put on the socks, dry now, and began walking toward Highway 99 until he found a service station where he could wash and drink water. It was late afternoon and he was famished. He walked until the sun was down and then found a small well-lighted grocery market operated by two old women. He saw a newspaper stand but the Sunday morning paper was too late for the story. There was no murder headline and he was heartened. There was still time. It was just a matter of running. Running flat out. Where, he didn't know yet. Just running.

Jimmy bought a quart of milk, some candy bars, cookies and cigarettes. He looked at the cars parked in front and discarded the idea to rob the women, realizing if he was to do that and steal a car, they would know he was still here in the Bakersfield area. As it was they might think he was in Fresno or San Francisco. He needed another day, a room to sleep in, a bath, one more night to think about it. He couldn't afford to have them know where he was now, and he didn't think they'd find the car just yet. He should have one more night before they found it and maybe he could steal another car by then.

With a belly full of candy, milk, and cookies, much the same diet he'd had as a child shoplifting the Fort Worth markets, Jimmy Smith hiked all the way in to Bakersfield, to Lakeview Avenue, to a place he knew called Mom's Rooming House. Mom's was near Virginia Avenue and Lakeview. It had a lighted multicolored star atop which said "Mom's Rooming House and Dormitory." It looked like a private, one-story stucco residence with a chain link fence around it. The neighborhood was black ghetto: shine stands, a pool hall, liquor stores, a bail bondsman, bars on both sides, lots of trash on the street, lots of street corner loiterers. To Jimmy Smith, it looked like sanctuary and peace.

On Sunday evening, an autopsy surgeon employed by the Los Angeles County Coroner's Office was looking at the naked body on the stainless steel table in the glare of fluorescent light in a tiled room with rusty floor drains. On the forward end of the table was a hose. At the other end was a drainage tray. It was unusual to be doing an autopsy on Sunday evening but of course this was a very special case and would need to be done with great care, with no unnecessary mutilation of the head and face.

"File number 88883. The unembalmed body is that of a Caucasian male reported as 31 years of age, measuring 6'2" in length, weighing 195 pounds, with brown hair, hazel eyes, and medium complexion. No scars, tattoos, or identifying marks are observed."

The police officer from Detective Headquarters witnessing the autopsy digested the technical findings of the autopsy surgeon for police department superiors.

Number 1 slug enters upper lip, shatters upper center incisor teeth, continues through hard palate and through tongue, and lodges in third cervical vertebra. Is a Colt .38 cal. special.

Number 2 slug enters chest at a downward angle, goes through left lung and exits left lower back. Through and through wound. No slug recovered.

Number 3 enters chest at downward angle, parallel to number 2, goes through left lung, breaks rib, and stops just beneath skin of lower back. Is a .38 cal. Smith and Wesson 200 grain.

Number 4 slug enters left upper chest, goes through heart, diaphragm, liver, spleen, kidney, and nicks the aorta. Exits lower left back. Through and through.

Number 5 slug enters right center chest, through right lung, through left lobe of liver, right adrenal gland, and vena cava. Exits lower back. Through and through.

An examination of the vital organs of the deceased indicates he was in excellent physical condition prior to being shot.

A probe was placed in each wound and photos taken to show the trajectory of the slugs.

The trajectory indicates that the weapon used to inflict wounds number 2, 3, 4, and 5 was held 34 inches from the top of the victim's head and 24 inches above his chest.

Autopsy surgeon states that wound number 1 would not be immediately fatal. However, either of wounds 2, 3, 4, or 5 would be instantly fatal.

It was a long and tedious autopsy, much work for the doctor because the remains could not be routinely mangled, but had to be presentable for the ostentatious police funeral sure to follow. It was after 10:00 p. M. before the doctor could remove his smock and finish his notes and leave the morgue.

It was some minutes later when the morgue attendant said, "Well, that boy's done his all for the goddamn city. Let's call the mortuary and get him outta here. What's left of him." And he called. His remains were released to the mortuary at 10:40 p. M.

It was 10:40 p. M. when the detective at Bakersfield police headquarters sat stock still at his desk, the cigarette burning his finger unnoticed, his whisper almost as breathless as the one on the other end of the line. "You sure?" he breathed. "You sure? Goddamn!

Okay. Okay. Sure. We'll take care of you. Sure. Don't worry. Be there in ten minutes! Goddamn!"

Mom's Rooming House seemed to Jimmy like it should have been a good place for a black man to hole up for a day or two. But thanks to police mug shots, Jimmy Smith was quickly becoming the most famous black man in Bakersfield. He checked in only ten minutes before the Bakersfield police received the hushed phone call.

Jimmy was relieved that Mom didn't give him a second glance when he registered, and Jimmy was happily surprised to find the room was clean. As soon as he closed the door he began stripping down, but despite the mud and stale sweat he was too exhausted to bathe that night. But he had to wash the pants and shoes and socks or they'd never be dry tomorrow.

Jimmy pulled himself up from the bed in the tiny room, cursed as he discovered there was not even a wash bowl, and trudged wearily down the hall with the soiled things, heading for the community bathroom.

As Jimmy walked down the poorly lit hall, he passed a tall, light skinned man who looked at him strangely and kept walking toward the front. It was a small bathroom, barely large enough for the tub and stool. He scrubbed the clothes for perhaps five minutes and as he sat there on the toilet washing the socks he heard voices out front. Jimmy, wearing only his shorts, peeked out and the door came crashing in at the same moment. The back door was also shattered. Then Jimmy was hurled out into the hall and was against the wall, and strangely, he couldn't keep his eyes off the back door as one policeman was methodically hacking through, shouting, "I cut my goddamn hand!"

Now Jimmy was ringed by uniformed police and detectives and his hands were jerked up behind his back. He was handcuffed and dropped to the floor on his stomach. One officer said, "Move, you cop killing bastard, and I'll blow your head off."

Then Mom came in and said, "Look at my tenant! Look at that nice young man layin there on the floor with only his underwear on!"

And a detective said, "Listen, Mom, you get on back in your room and we'll handle this."

Jimmy felt sure the tall light-skinned man had recognized him and called the police. He was never to even wonder how so many uniformed policemen and detectives could have gotten there less than five minutes after the tall man saw him. Jimmy was grateful to hear the solicitous voice of Mom. She was a nice old lady like his Nana, he thought vaguely. If she wasn't here they'd kill me.

"Just move, you cop killing son of a bitch," another policeman whispered to him, "and I'll take your head off." Jimmy did not move and did not speak and thought how strange it was to hear the label "cop killer" applied to him. He was only a thief, he thought, incoherently. Just a thief. Just a liar and a thief. Been one all my life. Just a sniveler and a crybaby and a thief. How can they say I'm that. That They gas people for that.

Then Jimmy was jerked to his feet and pushed inside the room where a big detective was examining Karl Hettinger's gun and he said, "Is this the gun you took from the policeman?"

"You got it wrong," Jimmy whimpered. "I didn't kill nobody." Then he was being hustled out the door barefoot, with a blanket over his shoulders, walking through the broken glass, feeling nothing. He was turned over to two Los Angeles detectives who had been in Bakersfield and were summoned to Mom's.

"Powell forced me to come to Bakersfield with him and the officers," said Jimmy to the Japanese detective. When the detective did not respond, Jimmy turned to the Caucasian and said, "Powell shot that man in cold blood. It shocked me. I was scared. I didn't kill nobody."

But neither detective looked as though* he believed Jimmy Smith. On the way to the Bakersfield jail, Jimmy said, "You just check those guns. You ain't gonna find my fingerprints on none of them. I didn't fire no gun. Not at all. You check, then you're gonna know I'm tellin the truth!"

Chapter
8

At 8:40 that evening, while the body of Ian Campbell was being cut and sawed and disemboweled, Gregory Powell was taken from his cell and was again talked to by an exhausted Pierce Brooks, who knew the coupe had been found in the small town of Lamont with two revolvers, wiped and wrapped in a trenchcoat, stuffed under the front seat. Brooks doubted that there'd be any good prints on the guns, and even if there were they wouldn't prove much, with each man shuffling four guns around in the car after the shooting.

"Here're some cigarettes, Greg," said Brooks when the young killer sat. "Now, just before we shut down for the night, there's something that's confusing me. I need to know exactly what Jimmy did, and what position he was standing in at the time the shooting happened."

"First, can I ask you, have you found out anything about Max?"

"Max is fine."

"She got arrested, didn't she?"

"That's right."

"What for?"

"For robbery."

"Robbing who?"

"Max is under investigation to determine if she's been involved in any of your robberies, and if she hasn't she'll be released. You know darned well Max isn't in trouble, that she's all right."

"I haven't seen her. I don't know this. I haven't seen her. You
didn't tell me that she'd been arrested. You said you were going to level with me, Mr. Brooks."

"I am leveling with you."

"Well you damn sure didn't."

"Don't talk to me that way," said Pierce Brooks. "Just simmer down. How often does your temper flare off like that, young fellow?"

"Pretty frequently."

"Pretty frequently. It flared off pretty frequently less than twenty-four hours ago too, didn't it? When you shot that policeman in the face."

"I didn't shoot any policeman."

"Yes you did. You know the other officer is alive, don't you?"

"Yes sir."

"And he was there and he told us what happened."

"I don't care what he said. I told you just exactly the way it happened."

"Who made the statement, 'Have you ever heard of the Little Lindbergh Law?' just prior to the shooting?"

"I don't know."

"You remember the statement being made?"

"I don't recall. We'd spoken about-kidnapping when we were riding up there, but now I don't think there was anything mentioned about a Lindbergh Law."