the Onion Field (1973) (33 page)

And in college, his endless, unanswerable questions: "Well, do you think Kant was wrong then when he said . . ." And listening, always listening, damn, it was enough to get on your nerves. Why wasn't he opinionated like I am? Why did I always feel he was in control and I was out of control? Why did I like him so much? Him and his bloody music, his Bach, his Stravinsky. Did he really love his music? Was it just her who made him think he loved his music? And her: Why is she so correct, so courteous, so cordial that she scares me? Why is she sitting there now so sphinx like? She's not some fanatical religionist. She's not tranquilized. So how is she doing it? Look at Adah, demolished, one step from hysteria, and Adah sedated by that Armenian doctor. It was easy at this moment to rage at all of them.

Grog knew that years before, Chrissie had brought her husband's body here and that she had given this plot of earth to Adah for Ian's burial beside his father. There were two flat stone markers: William Campbell, M. D. (1898-1944), and Ian James Campbell (1931- 1963). And next to Ian an unused plot, conspicuous in the crowded graveyard. And Grog imagined how it must have been when Chrissie offered Ian's plot to Adah and how Chrissie must have looked: unruffled, controlled. And how she must have been inside: not breathing, heart hammering, until Adah said, "Yes. All right. I guess so. I don't care." And how Chrissie must have closed her eyes, and secretly: "Thank you. Thank you. Thank you."

The only still-unused plot of ground was not beside Dr. Campbell. It was beside Ian. Grog never had to ask. He knew who owned that unused plot of ground. And who would one day lie next to him.

So you're not fooling me with that relentless impassive expression, thought Grog, his shirt soaking against his chest. I know who he was to you, your young lord. Your sun, yes, s-u-n. And what's left now? Adah has the kids and she's young. She'll marry again. But you, what've you got? What is this Gaelic, Calvinistic, monstrous ethic that's holding you up? I don't understand it. I don't. And what. . .

The wail. Clear and piercing. Eerily distant at first. But then, like cold wind slashing through the crowd, cascading down on those who really knew him.

Art Petoyan said: "It was like a deja vu experience. I thought of Piper Major Aitken's funeral with Ian standing beside me. I knew it was coming but still I started trembling when I heard it. Back, back, up on the hillside he was. That solo piper. That solitary piper. Playing that ancient plaintive dirge for clansmen killed in battle, Tleurs of the Forest.' And I was shivering all over, and I noticed the hairs on the back of my hands were moving, swaying. I looked at her. She sat there erect, looking straight ahead. Adah of course was totally destroyed even before the piper started. She was almost collapsed across her brother's arm. But though I was worrying about Adah's condition I took my eyes away. I had to look over at the other chair, at her, sitting there, straight, impassive, motionless."

Wayne Ferber was standing at the grave looking at Ian's wrist- watch which Adah had given him. He was thinking of Ian's killers. "I thought how the Ian I'd always remember couldn't even have believed there were people like that. Then I saw the wreath shaped like an anchor. It was sent by an old limping sailor, who looked like Popeye. I thought of us as children, playing in Hancock Park. Of how he was. Never frivolous. How even his kid games had to have an end, a conclusion, a point. He'd insist on it. And now I thought: Is there a point to it, Ian? Maybe you know at last. Then I heard those pipes. . . ."

Grog Tollefson's eyes were raw and burning, and he looked around and saw the effect of the pipes on those who really knew.

Well, Ian, he thought finally. Well, my friend, we got to them with that one. We got a little of you into this mad carnival.

Now his cheeks were wet and he found himself swallowing hard. He stole a look, one last secret look, at Chrissie Campbell. Still she was motionless. Without expression. Staring. Straight ahead.

Chapter
10

"Outrage and horror" was the phrase most often used by police spokesmen. And it hardly described the police climate. For this was 1963, before the revolutionary assassinations of policemen. Despite their cynicism, American policemen are Americans. Perhaps a gendarme or polizidtto would only have been deeply angered by the gratuitous act in the onion field. But an American policeman was horrified There had always been rules in the game. One had to have a good reason to kill a cop, such as eluding capture. Smith and Powell had already won that night. In killing Ian Campbell they had scoffed at fair play, scorned the rules of the game. This was the thing an American policeman could not bear.

The young red-faced vice officer at Wilshire Station had been a policeman less than three years, but he had learned certain fundamental truths about policemen. Policemen'thoroughly believed that no man-caused calamity happens by chance, that there is always a step that should have been taken, would have been taken, if the sufferer had been alert, cautious, brave, aggressive-in short, if he'd been like a prototype policeman. They saw themselves as the most dynamic of men, the ones who could take positive action in any of life's bizarre and paralyzing moments.

To suppose that a policeman's vicious murder was inescapable from the moment that little Ford made the wrong turn on Carlos Avenue was inimical to the very essence of the concept of dynamic man.

The ranking Los Angeles Police Department officer who went to Bakersfield the night of the killing was Inspector John W. Powers.

John Powers was greatly admired by Pierce Brooks and indeed by most policemen. Some twenty years before, when he was a young detective, he had been involved in a sensational shootout wherein he was wounded and had earned the nickname "Two Gun Johnny." He'd lived up to that name. Even now, when he was a police administrator whose most hazardous task was driving to his office on Los Angeles freeways, John Powers wore two guns on his lean hips. It did not matter that many of his administrative colleagues left their guns in lockers or desk drawers. John Powers never was without both of his guns under the coat of his business suit. He was said to be the Patton of the Los Angeles force. He was tall like the general, with white wavy hair and eyebrows like crow's wings. And Inspector Powers had the Patton charisma with the line policemen, would talk their language at rollcalls, would brief stakeout squads and robbery teams in regard to shooting. A good clean bandit-killing pleased him as it does most policemen. He was known as a cop's cop.

What John Powers said carried much weight with the street cop. He had been one of them somewhere back in the old days, they were sure of it. And they were sure he wouldn't kiss anybody's behind. He talked like a real man.

Just five days after the murder of Ian Campbell, John Powers drafted what would be called by many policemen the Hettinger Memorandum. Actually it was Patrol Bureau Memorandum Number 11. The subject was: "Rollcall Training-Officer's Survival." It was considered so urgent that no officer in uniform or plainclothes was excused from rollcalls, and the division commanders were instructed to assure that every man was apprised of it:

The brutal gangland style execution of Officer Ian James Campbell underlines a basic premise of law enforcement. You cannot make deals with vicious criminals, such as kidnappers, suspects who have seized hostages, or those who assault police officers with deadly weapons.

Officer Campbell will not have died in vain if his death causes each member of the department objectively to evaluate his personal role as a policeman and the objectives of the department as a whole. . . . Just as the armed forces protect the nation from external enemies, local police departments protect their communities from internal criminals every bit as vicious as our enemies from without. The police are engaged in a hot war. There are no truces, and there is no hope of an armistice. The enemy abides by no rules of civilized warfare.

The individual officer, when taking his oath of office, enters a sacred trust to protect his community to the best of his ability, laying down his life if necessary.

All men return to dust. The manner of a man's living and dying is of paramount importance. Although some moderns have attempted to sap the strength and ideals of this nation by slogans such as, "I'd rather be red than dead," there are situations more intolerable than death.

John Powers' lesson number one of the rollcall lesson plan was read once by the red-faced vice officer, three times by Karl Hettinger:

Surrender is no guarantee of an officer's safety or the safety of others, including that of his partner and other brother officers. The decision to place these lives and his own in the hands of a depraved criminal is not one to be made lightly.

In lesson two, Powers became specific in his recommendations to officers who find themselves suddenly covered by a gunman. Some of the suggestions are to tell a nonexistent policeman behind the suspect not to shoot, hoping the suspect might turn around to look, or to pretend to faint to get near the suspect's feet and trip him, or to jab a pencil through the suspect's jugular vein.

Perhaps the entire memorandum is summed up in lesson four, where officers are advised that, "If shot, all wounds are not fatal." And that, "A strong religious faith gives you calmness and strength in the face of deadly peril." And, once again, that, "Surrender is no guarantee of safety for anyone."

Pierce Brooks had mixed emotions when Inspector Powers consulted him about the memorandum he was about to write. On the one hand Brooks subscribed to the unwritten police commandment about not second-guessing a field situation where you were not present. On the other hand, he was too much policeman not to believe in the dynamic man concept. Campbell's death had to have been preventable. Powers was right. But in his final reports some weeks later he softened his appraisal of the officers' conduct. He couldn't go so far as the Powers memorandum and imply that Campbell and Hettinger were almost-he hated even to think the word-cowards. So he finally concluded that Karl had merely used poor judgment in surrendering his weapon, and that once surrendered, it was too late on the ride up to use any of the fancy tricks recommended in the memorandum. He wished Powers would have waited before releasing the order. Brooks by now had come to know Hettinger, knew that the murder had disturbed him, but not how much. Still, he thought that the Powers memorandum could cause the young policeman to feel some guilt. Then he dismissed the thought. He was too much policeman to believe very strongly in other than physical trauma. He had been too often frustrated by defense psychiatrists.

"I've read the order," said the young red-faced vice officer to his sergeant. "And personally, I don't like it. We've been telling robbery victims for years not to try something as stupid as drawing, or shooting it out with a guy who had the drop on you. Now we're throwing it out the window as far as policemen are concerned."

"They call that typical police overreaction," said a second vice cop, an older policeman who was reading a racing scratch sheet trying to pick a daily double.

"The department's writing general policy because of one specific isolated case," the young vice cop argued. "It just doesn't make sense."

"I'm not saying I disagree with you," said the big sergeant to the younger officer. "In fact, I more or less agree. But you have to understand what's happening in the department. Policemen are . . . are . . ."

"Outraged."

"Yes, outraged. We've never had an officer taken to an onion field and tormented and needled at the very end and ..."

"Look," said the red-faced vice cop, "I understand that. Christ, I feel the same, but I think the department's making a bad mistake with this Hettinger Memorandum. I'm gonna say so when we go the patrol rollcall tonight."

"Now just a minute," said the sergeant, "the captain said the whole damn station has to go and hear this memorandum, that's all. Just listen to it. You're still free to do as you like in a combat situation. It's not handed down from a mountain." "Have you read it?" "No."

"It's on the watch commander's desk upstairs. Read it. It was handed down from a mountain."

"Well, I don't see any sense of you or me popping off about it." "Listen to this," said the young vice officer, his face not just ruddy now, but flaming, his voice cracking with emotion as he thought of standing at the crowded rollcall and daring to dispute the order of Inspector Powers. "These are articles I clipped. It says that this is the fourth kidnap of policemen in Los Angeles County in the past four weeks." Then the vice cop began heatedly reading:

On February 24, officers Albert Gastaldo and Loren Harvey spotted a woman parked alone in a car. She told them she was waiting for her husband. The officers remained nearby. Soon a man appeared, his arms buried in packages. The police ordered him to drop the packages. The man complied, but when packages fell, a sawed-off shotgun remained. He disarmed both officers. The officers were released unharmed.

On March 1, Whittier police officers Arthur Schroll and Richard Brunmier made a routine field check on an auto containing two men. The men drew guns, took the officers to an isolated section where road work was in progress and handcuffed them to a piece of heavy equipment. The men, both robbery suspects, escaped with the officers' revolvers.

On March 9, Inglewood police officers Arthur Franzman and Douglas Webb signaled a lone male driver to pull over to the curb in a routine traffic violation. The man got the drop on the officers, took their revolvers and made them drive to Inglewood Park Cemetery where he ordered them to lie down. The man later was identified as a bandit who held up a cafe and escaped with twenty-seven hundred dollars.