the Onion Field (1973) (51 page)

There was no comment either official or unofficial as to extenuating circumstances. No other thefts were discovered, nor was anything said about the inconsistency of the shoplifting with the subject's unblemished past. It was much the same as an ordinary police report which a policeman would write on an ordinary shoplifter.

Of course, the staff in the chief's office and elsewhere where Karl had worked were deeply shocked. Everyone had liked the silent young officer with the sad eyes. It made them very uncomfortable to think he was a thief.

Helen Hettinger had never seen her husband cry, did not know of the episodes in the night when he cried, but she heard him just this once. He telephoned her to tell her he'd resigned.

"But I don't understand, Karl. For shoplifting? What did they say you shoplifted?"

"HI tell you later. Anyway, it's all over."

"All over? Just like that? You resigned?" Fear was in the pregnant girl's voice. He heard it and he burst into tears.

"Oh, Karl," she said, and now she was weeping with him. "Oh, please, Karl. Come home and tell me. Please."

"I . . . I . . . don't want to come home just now, Helen. I . . . I . . . just feel like going fishing. I just . . . I'll take a drive and go fishing."

A few days later he received a written notice that the police credit union was calling back its note for six thousand dollars. The credit union demanded payment within forty-eight hours. Helen's parents helped them secure the money to pay.

The Hettingers also learned that their police medical insurance would be canceled May 30, two days before the baby arrived. Fortunately, Kaiser Hospital, with whom they were insured, said they would deliver the baby for the group insurance fee just as though they were still insured.

"Care to talk about it?" asked Jim Cannell on the telephone when he first heard the shocking news.

"I just blew it, Jim," said Karl, and that was as much explanation as he offered to any of them about his disgrace.

"Okay, that's good enough for me," said the chesty voice of Cannell on the other end. "How're you fixed for bread until you find a job?"

"I'm okay, Jim."

"Stew James wants to know too," said Cannell. "About whether you need a loan."

"With all his kids? Working three jobs? Tell him thanks, Jim. Tell all my friends thanks but we'll get along."

And that was all he ever said to any of his friends on the subject of his resignation.

His parents came as soon as they heard.

"You say you don't know why you took things?" his mother asked, as the three of them sat in his living room, father, mother, son.

"No I don't, Mom. I just did it and I don't understand it."

"Well, you're out of it now," she said. "Maybe it's a blessing that you're out of it, son." And she turned and looked at Karl's father who sat awkwardly on the other side of the room, his big workman's hands dangling uncomfortably from his huge wrists. He leaned forward once or twice to catch a word here and there, but he was partially deaf.

"I'll explain it all to your father later," she said. "The main thing is don't fret about it. It's over now and everything's going to work out."

"Thank you," he said, and for the first time ever she saw tears in her son's eyes.

Karl looked across at his father, and the carpenter looked helpless and confused as though he wanted to say something to his son, but didn't know what to say or how to say it.

Helen Hettinger stepped into the room for a moment, big with her eight-month pregnancy. She looked at the three of them, the saddened family trying desperately for the first time to talk intimately to one another. Helen thought of the story Karl had once told her about his wanting a baseball glove so badly, and dreaming of being a second baseman or shortstop, and how, when the gift from his father finally came, it was a catcher's mitt. He had laughed when he told her how he played second base for years with that catcher's mitt. And how when he got older and begged for his first fishing tackle, his father had mistakenly bought him ocean fishing tackle. The boy had strapped the cumbersome gear to his back and bicycled all the way to Hanson Dam to fish for tiny bluegills. Helen never saw a blond boy fishing alone on a lake bank without thinking of young Karl Hettinger.

Now it was the carpenter she pitied, sitting there, with his big awkward hands. He would have been willing to drive a nail or a million of them, to saw a forest of lumber, anything to help his son. But there was nothing he was able to do. They couldn't even speak. It was the ancient inherited shame of fathers and sons.

When they finished the brief quiet talk, Karl, for the first time he could remember, kissed his mother. His father touched him with a bruised, knuckle-heavy hand, and nodded, and tried to say something. Then they left.

That summer, after their daughter, Christine, was born, Helen Hettinger insisted that her unemployed husband accompany Jim Cannell on a fishing trip to Crystal Lake in the High Sierras. It was a therapy trip for Karl, the first tolerable days since he left the police force. The two men fished and drank beer and shucked their clothes and swam in the cold water, never once talking about police work or of Karl's leaving the force.

Jim Cannell wanted to tell Karl how he felt, how they all felt about his leaving the department. That it didn't matter at all. That if he stole, there had to be an underlying reason, because he was the most honest man Cannell had ever known. He wanted to say that if Karl would just go out and see, he'd learn that none of his friends had deserted him. But Karl was such a private person Cannell didn't know how to tell him these things. And Karl never asked, was afraid to ask.

While crossing Donner Pass in the pickup they heard the news on the radio. Los Angeles Chief of Police William H. Parker had been fatally stricken with a heart attack. Cannell was stunned by the news. Parker had seemed invulnerable. Karl was deeply shocked and spent that night talking more than Cannell had heard him talk in years. He told one story after another of the chief, things he had learned while driving for him. Now it didn't matter if he broke the confidence. He admired the chief to the point of adulation. He was grief stricken that night.

Someone later mentioned that the object of his loyalty had every opportunity to prevent his dismissal. Could have ordered a more thorough inquiry into something as strange as an outstanding policeman like Karl Hettinger stealing cigars. Could have saved his devoted subordinate.

Someone else would say these things. Such a thing would never have occurred to Karl Hettinger. He was a thief a hundred times over. He had betrayed the department. He had betrayed the chief.

There was only so much yard work to do at his new house. They had bought the house three months before he resigned. Now he tore into his gardening with all his pent up energy and talent with growing things. There was only so much to do and then it was done. He had applied for some jobs. One was as a loader on a dock. The employer had checked with the police department and somehow found out the circumstances of his resignation. He was refused employment because of it.

"You shoulda seen the people working there," he told his wife bitterly. "They'd hire anybody there. Half of them were probably thieves. But they wouldn't hire me. Next time I won't list my former employment. They won't be able to check on me."

But he really didn't try very hard again. He was afraid. He knew they'd find out somehow. They'd learn about him, discover that he'd been a thief. So he stayed home and Helen supported a husband and three small children on a bookkeeper's salary. He stayed at home and took care of Laurie and Kurt and the baby, Christine, and wondered how they could possibly continue to make their house payments.

Now, when we're so desperate, he thought, ironically, I cant steal. The very thought of his recent thefts filled him with shame and made him physically sick to his stomach. One day when the two older children were napping, the baby began crying. He went to her and felt but she was dry so he shushed her for a moment. Still she wouldn't stop. He left her room and tried to read a newspaper and drink his beer and ignore her. She cried louder.

At least there won't be more of them, he thought angrily, and he thought of his impotency, the shame of it. Still the baby cried.

The longer he tried to ignore her the louder and more insistent were her wails until his headache was becoming brutal.

"Shut up," he said, grinding his teeth unconsciously. "Shut up. Shut up. Shut up."

Then he found himself bursting into the baby's room, slapping the baby on the bottom. The child's terrified screams startled him.

He looked down at the baby, at the red finger marks on her buttocks. "Oh, God," he said, and stumbled straight to his room, but the magnum wasn't there. He had sold it to make a house payment. Then he thought of the service revolver, and found it in the closet. He looked at the barrel, at the hideous black hole, at the gun he had surrendered to Jimmy Smith. The baby was still screaming.

He wanted to see them for the last time and he went to the room where the other children slept. Kurt was two and Laurie, her daddy's girl, was three. She used to awaken when he came home from the station at night and wouldn't sleep until he kissed her. She adored her father. He looked at them and began to cry. He wept brokenly. He wasn't even enough of a man for this. He couldn't even spare his family by ridding them of himself. The baby still screamed. He ran to her.

"Oh," he said, seeing the pathetic frightened face on the sheet wet with tears. "Oh."

He picked up the infant and walked with her and rocked her.

"Oh, I'm sorry," he said. "I'm so sorry. I'm sorry. Oh, I'm so sorry." Finally the baby stopped crying, but her father could not.

Pierce Brooks, now a lieutenant of detectives, sat in his home and held in his trembling hands a decision handed down by Justice Stanley Mosk and the California Supreme Court on July 18, 1967. He had his own copy of the decision replete with margin notes, underscoring, footnotes. It was a raging detective who sat and smoked and reread late into the night:

Defendant's principal contention is that the receipt into evidence of each of the extrajudicial statements violated the constitution rules set forth in Escobedo v. Illinois (1964) and People v. Dorado (1965). Those rules are controlling here even though the trial took place in 1963, i. E., before they were enunciated.

Brooks angrily scrawled in the margin: "Interrogation took place more than a year before the ex post facto requirement of Escobedo and two years before Dorado!"

Then Brooks read further:

... the record does not establish that defendants were adequately advised at any time of their right to remain silent and their right to counsel. Neither Chief Fote's admonition that Powell's statement "could be used in court against him" nor Officer Cooper's remark that anything Powell said "may be used as evidence against you at a later time" amounted to advice that he had an absolute right to remain silent in the face of police questioning.

Brooks wrote: "But I told Powell that he could very definitely have an attorney. That only a fool would ..."

Brooks broke his pencil scribbling this remark and threw the pencil down, continuing the reading:

. . . applying the Chapman test to this record, as we must, we are compelled to conclude there is at least a reasonable "possibility" that the evidence complained of might have contributed to the conviction.

The detective read the court's disapproval of the many statements he took from Gregory Powell and Jimmy Smith and of his arraignment of the defendants on Wednesday, March 13, 1963, instead of March 12, within forty-eight hours. By now, Brooks was making his margin notes with a fractured pencil he had sharpened with a kitchen knife: "I called the the D. A. on Tuesday afternoon and was ready but D. A. advised wait until Wednesday morning. Said Defendant's 48 hour period was not up until after court's close Tuesday afternoon. D. A. told me no problem!"

Brooks's rage knew no bounds when he got to the end of the California Supreme Court decision:

The submissive acceptance of an inquisitorial process was the desired result of a number of "techniques" used on defendants. For example, Officer Brooks maintained an air of confidence in defendants' guilt and his "conversations" with them were often characterized as merely "a few questions" about certain "details"; yet while they began with relatively minor topics, they soon proceeded to issues central to establishing that the crime was in fact committed by these defendants . . . and each was trapped in a web of shifting and inconsistent explanations.

"That's bad? That's bad? That's my job!" the usually unflappable detective shouted aloud in the quiet room and his own voice startled him. Then he held the coffeecup in both hands and continued:

Most importantly, throughout these four days of questioning, Officer Brooks successfully cultivated a relationship of trust and "friendship" with these defendants, despite the fact he must have believed they had murdered one of his brother officers. Such psychological devices for extracting confessions without crossing the line of coercion were condemned by the United States Supreme Court in Miranda v. Arizona (1966).

"That shows . . . that shows," Brooks whispered brokenly. "That proves where your head is. Where it is as far as cops are concerned!" He turned to the last pages and read: