the Onion Field (1973) (49 page)

"I haven't seen him laugh in a long long time," said Dick Howard, the third man at the campfire, the youngest.

"He used to keep me going all day with one-liners," said Cannell to the women. "He had that wit that sparkled at least one time during every rollcall and kept the rest of us awake. . . . Maybe I'll invite him duck hunting. Maybe he needs to get out more."

"He isn't much for shooting," said James.

"That's another thing that's different about him," said Jo Can- nell. Helen said he can't shoot anymore. He used to be a dead shot and now he can't hit . . ."

"A moose in the ass," said Cannell, draining his beer, and the others grinned because Jo Cannell was a Jehovah's Witness and disapproved of her husband's profanity and beer drinking.

"Helen said she and Karl were shooting at tin cans out by the lake and he couldn't shoot a lick," Stew James agreed.

"He's having trouble qualifying at the pistol range every month," said Cannell.

"And have you noticed the way he's always rotating his head like his neck hurts?" said Donna James, a perky brunette who sat with a blanket wrapped around her this crisp night when a damp wind blew in from the lake.

"So maybe his neck hurts," said Dick Howard, who worried and noticed less than the others.

"You didn't know him well enough to see the difference," said Cannell. "You didn't know him B. C." "B. C.?"

"Before Campbell. You just wouldn't believe it. It's unreal, "said Cannell.

"He's growing into a little old man before my eyes," said James, the worried eyes turning down.

"He looks like doomsday itself," said Cannell. "There isn't enough left of him to know it's Karl Hettinger."

"Well what's the sense mulling over all this?" said one of the women. "Nobody ever asks what's troubling him."

"He's not that kind of guy," said Cannell. "He keeps things in and doesn't like prying."

"That's what I've always thought," said Stew James. "My role is to be his friend and not bug him. If he wants to talk he will."

"Some people can't talk," said Jo Cannell.

"Well anyway, I think I'll see if he wants to go duck hunting," said her husband. "It doesn't matter a goddamn bit if he can shoot or not. We don't hunt anyway, we just drink."

"Well I think it still bothers him!' said Donna James.

They all knew what it was and several heads turned involuntarily toward the lake, but his silhouette had vanished in the darkness. It was the unstated law that none of them ever talked about it in front of Karl Hettinger. He had never described his night of terror to any of them, had never told any of them how it had affected him, not so much as a word. They mistakenly assumed that he must at least discuss it with Helen. With somebody.

Now the voices had dropped to a whisper and the words were muffled by coffeecups or beer cans.

"If it's bothering him, he'll just have to talk about it."

"It must just be the shock of seeing Ian killed," said James. "It must be that. Ian was such a . . . gentle guy. Do you know he loved classical music?"

"So do I," said Jim Cannell, "but I ain't so gentle."

"I'd drink to that, if I drank," said Jo Cannell dryly.

"Maybe Ian and Karl should never have been working together," Dick Howard agreed. Then he grinned at Cannell. "They were too nice. Should've been somebody like you with them, Jim."

"I wonder if maybe Karl could feel . . . oh, responsible in some way," James mused.

"Why should he?" asked Cannell. "It was Campbell's fault, not Karl's."

And there it was. The blame being laid. All policemen, even the closest friends of Karl Hettinger, had to lay blame for the catastrophe. They were policemen. The most dynamic of men. No man- caused calamity happens by chance. Only acts of God are unprevent- able. It was as certain as sunset.

The next day, fishing, Cannell had his friend very much in mind and he began consciously to test him.

"Why don't you tune up that wreck of yours, Karl? It sounds awful."

"Are you kidding?" said Karl. "If I tried fixing it, it'd never run again."

"Come on. You used to say you were a pretty good shade-tree mechanic."

"I can't fix anything," said Karl.

"Where're we gonna fish today, Karl?" asked Cannell carefully.

"I don't care. Wherever you wanna fish."

"Well, you pick the spot, Karl," said Cannell staring at the smaller man. "You pick it, Karl. We'll go wherever you decide."

"Well. . . I . . . how . . . how about you deciding, Jim. You make the decisions."

They fished mostly in silence. Jim Cannell looked often at his friend, watched him rotate his head, and massage his aching neck. Watched the fingernails periodically digging into his palms.

That night, Karl sat alone on a picnic table away from the fire. He sat as he always did, hunched forward, hands pressed between his knees, eyes down, nails digging.

After awhile Helen Hettinger said, "Where's Karl?" and turned, seeing him sitting in the darkness. "He must be cold," she said, and went to the truck to get a blanket.

"That's a bitchin broad, brother," said Cannell. "And how's that for alliteration, my dear?" he added, gulping his beer and winking at the tiny Jehovah's Witness, who was looking in resignation at the pile of empty beer cans.

Helen Hettinger by now also knew her role with her taciturn husband. She knew he would never confide in her or in anyone on earth. She also believed she was not bright enough nor sophisticated enough to know what to tell him even if he would confide. She only sensed what she must do.

Helen left the light and warmth of the fire to sit next to Karl on the picnic table. She said nothing. She wrapped the blanket around his shoulders. Then she got inside the blanket with him and pulled his head down to her shoulder.

"She was just a kid herself," Jim Cannell said later. "But she held Karl like you would a baby. Without saying a word. The rest of us after awhile got up and hit the sack for the night. They just sat there like that in the dark. She rocked him a little. I'll never forget that gesture."

Karl did enjoy the pickpocket detail for the short time he worked it. His partner was all that was advertised, a graying, portly police veteran who melted into crowds. Oscar O'Lear was invisible on crowded sidewalks or in bus stations or department stores, even on buses, anywhere pickpockets lurked. He was the scourge of the feather-fingered brigades which descend on the downtown streets of Los Angeles both in and out of season.

The pickpockets tended to be a clannish lot, much like hotel burglars. They avoided the company of less artistic thieves who need guns and saps and knives to make their living. Karl loved watching the way his partner could spot a pursepick clear across a department store, usually by first identifying the thief and then sensing who the victim would be even before the thief himself had made his choice.

Most of all, Karl was glad to be out of the police building onto the streets once more. He was almost sure the inside work was causing many of his problems. He had assured his wife the insomnia and dreams would stop and the appetite would return when he once got back to an outside job.

But in fact it was all getting worse. So much did he fear the dreams that he sat every night before his television until the early morning hours drinking one beer after another, taking nonprescription sleeping pills because he still refused to see a doctor, hoping each night that sleep would come easily and that he would not dream.

There were other things now to contend with, some of which Helen could observe, some she guessed. He was hit by a maelstrom of symptoms which almost drove him to seek medical assistance except that each particular malady would vanish as mysteriously as it appeared, and another would take its place. He had bouts of diarrhea, chest pains, and vicious headaches at the base of his skull which truly frightened him.

There were other things which frightened him more. One was just being afraid. This was fear without a name, which could not be battled because he had no idea where it came from. He would be sitting there alone sometime after midnight when Helen, pregnant for the third time, was asleep. He might even be vaguely interested in something on television. It would creep up on him. It would attack without warning. A bodiless, merciless, strangling thing. He would find himself cowering in his chair, and his hands would be so wet he couldn't hold the beer can and would spill most of it on himself like a baby. Then he would sit with his hands between his knees and wait for the ocean of scalding blood to crest and break and slosh through his skull, for this is how he felt it. Then it would slowly pass.

If only he knew what made him afraid. If only he knew, he was sure he could defeat it. He did consider seeing a physician, but what could they tell him? It was his nerves, of course. He was too weak to live down the shock of the killing. That's what he suspected must be troubling him. A real man could have come out of it in a short time and resumed a normal life.

After all, he had done all he could that night. He had nothing to feel bad about. Nothing at all. It was easy for some of them to criticize him. To have their training classes and criticize him and Ian and say what should have been done. Yes, it was easy enough to say. Anyway, it didn't bother him at all. There was nothing else he could have done. There was nothing to feel bad about. He didn't feel bad about it. There was no reason to feel bad.

Then he was crying. It was the first time he had cried like this. Karl Hettinger sat hunched in his chair and his wet cheeks glistened silver from the light of the television, and his shoulders began heaving and great shuddering sobs ripped out. He lost control. He wept and the shame of it made the tears gush hot. There was nothing left, not a shred of self-respect. What kind of a man would cower and cry in the swirling darkness?

He no longer sat in front of the television. He had fallen to his knees. He couldn't breathe, so overwhelming was his grief. The sobs were soundless now and absolutely dry. He cried until he hardly had the strength to stagger to his bed. Though he was not a religious man he thanked God for not having let him awaken his wife. The most unbearable part was to think of another human being seeing him like this. He whimpered very quietly in his bed until his control returned.

For a year after this, Karl would be completely impotent, then sporadically impotent. One day while walking through a department store with O'Lear looking for thieves, he saw a masonry drill he needed. He started to buy it but instead just put it in his pocket. It was as baffling and inexplicable as the weeping.

Chapter
14

On June 22, 1964, the United States Supreme Court had handed down an opinion in the case of a young man named Danny Escobedo who had murdered his brother-in-law but who had confessed only after first telling police: "I'm sorry, but I would like to have advice from my lawyer."

On January 29, 1965, a murder conviction had been reversed for a convict named Robert R. Dorado, who stabbed another inmate to death and confessed to that murder. The California court took Escobedo a step further and decided that the police have a duty to warn of both the right to remain silent and the right to counsel.

Finally, on June 13, 1966, the United States Supreme Court reversed the gase of Ernesto Miranda, a confessed kidnapper and rapist. Miranda laid down for all of America the same guidelines as Dorado had in California. Chief Justice Earl Warren condemned the police for tricking the confession of guilt from the defendant.

Ernesto Miranda had been arrested the day Ian Campbell was buried.

By January 30, 1967, there were sixty-two men in San Quentin Death Row. They were cop killers, stranglers, slashers, rapists. Some had murdered once, some several times. Some could not be stopped from murdering, not even by prison walls. There were thirty-four white Anglos, twenty-one blacks, five Latins, two Indians.

In the past three years, fifty-seven men had gotten new trials with twenty-six of those receiving death verdicts a second time. One, in fact, was freed after a third trial.

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It was a time of great hope on the row for those sixty-two residents, even for Gregory Powell, who felt that a retrial was inevitable, though it would probably end the same as the last.

Four residents of the row, all white men, had one last agitated conversation that afternoon.

"Man, fuck it, I say, we gotta go while we got the chance!"

"Yeah, but the new trials . . ."

"Fuck the new trials!"

"Yeah, but you got a hot beef, you and Powell."

"So stick around and bum dimes and watch TV and eat your fucking zuzus. Me, I'm trying it tonight."

"I didn't say I wouldn't go."

"Well, I'm going and Powell's going, right?"

"Right," said Greg.

"Well, you guys got hot beefs."

"Man, Reagan is the governor. Don't you understand that? He's laying to smoke people!"

"I didn't say I wouldn't go. What the fuck I got to lose?"

At 1:00 a. M. a sergeant was completing a visual check of each of the sixty-eight cells which comprised the row. The sergeant heard nothing but the heavy breathing of the sleepers. He walked quietly in the tennis shoes he had been wearing ever since the inmates complained that his leather shoes were too noisy. When he left the aisle he had an uneasy feeling. He returned, peeked around a corner, and saw an inmate running quietly in the other direction.