The Badge
Page 8
Yet the very first day he heard of Stephen Nash he knew instinctively that he was touching something evil. Something especially evil that would have to be stopped fast. At the time, Nash wasn’t even wanted for murder, but Scarborough suspected a little of the monstrous truth.
All that dull November day, from morning till late afternoon, two men, one a boyish twenty-four-year-old, the other an older sullen man, stood together on the Skid Row corner in the “slave labor” belt, hoping for a job.
It was Friday, a bad day for the kind of jobs that are doled out on Skid Row, and they had no luck.
The younger man, Dennis Butler, had a few dollars. He offered to buy his new friend a beer or two, and they went to a nearby saloon. For an hour, the sullen, older, bitter man did the talking, and Butler did the buying.
The older man, it seemed, had a grievance against society that had begun in infancy and never had been assuaged. As a baby, he had been abandoned, and from that first, unfair stigma, life had continued to abuse him.
He was still talking when they left the bar and walked up Third Street toward a cafeteria where the food was cheap but good. He was talking louder and more bitterly, and waving his arms in rage, as they entered the Third Street tunnel. Butler began to feel uneasy about this new friend who hated anything, everything, with such a black, consuming hate.
Midway through the tunnel, the tall, gaunt man stopped and glared at Butler. Not a word was said, but the younger, smaller man tried desperately to back away.
It was too late. A hunting knife with a four-inch blade drove into his stomach.
Butler screamed, and his terror gave him the strength to run despite the burning wound. He fled out of the tunnel and into the lobby of a nearby hotel.
Knife upraised for the kill, his assailant followed him, trapping him in the lobby.
For some reason, perhaps because it would have been more merciful, he withheld the fatal thrust. Instead, deliberately, viciously, he stomped on his prostrate victim till he had broken Butler’s collarbone. Then he fled.
Somehow, Butler survived the attack, and in the hospital he whispered to a radio car patrolman the name his assailant had given. It was Stephen Nash, all right, and the records down in R. and I. flashed out the story.
At the age of thirty-three, Nash had already done half a dozen years in San Quentin for strong arm robberies. He had brawled at a cannery where he was working, and done six months on a sheriff’s honor farm at Santa Rita.
In the stupid, senseless way of some Skid Row characters, he was bad, but there was nothing to suggest that he was monstrous. Yet something clicked right then for Sergeant Scarborough. Wasn’t it four or five weeks earlier in Sacramento that it had happened?
Scarborough checked the file of All Points Bulletins. Yes, here it was:
Floyd Leroy Barnett, 27, cannery worker, body found in Sacramento River, bludgeon and knife wounds.
Scarborough wired the Sacramento police for full details. Standup mugs of Nash were printed up and distributed. All commands were briefed on his physical description, habits, and known haunts. To police in other cities, LAPD put out a “want” on Nash for assault with a deadly weapon.
Privately, Scarborough knew the charge was an understatement.
Ten days later, the gaunt, toothless man is in Long Beach, twenty miles south of his Skid Row hangouts. He meets John William Berg, twenty-seven, and the young hairdresser invites him up to his apartment.
There is an argument, or is it one of Nash’s tirades against society that can be satisfied only by blood and death? He fatally stabs the hairdresser. The next day, he has Berg’s new clothes altered to fit him, sells his own shabby garments and disappears.
Back in LAPD Homicide, Sergeant Scarborough notes the modus operandi and adds a second murder to the case he is already building against Nash.
Now it is three days after the Berg killing, and ten-year-old Larry Rice is listlessly playing near the pier in the beach area at Venice. Now and then he glumly kicks a stone, but mostly he just stares out at the water, blinking occasionally.
Larry doesn’t want to play with the other kids or go home to his empty house. He is just killing time in a lonely, inarticulate, small boy way till his father comes home from his job as an aircraft assembler. Larry is an only child; and, eight days ago, his mother died of cancer.
A gaunt man with a funny, toothless smile gets Larry to talking a little. They drift over to a foodstand, and he treats the boy to a hamburger and pop. Then they go under the pier and talk some more.
There’s one nice thing ahead, Larry suddenly confides to his new friend. His face brightens in anticipation.
After it, well, happened—he blinks quickly and goes on —his daddy talked to him. Look, kid, these things happen, and it’s better for her this way. Now, you be brave, and I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. I’m saving the money, and we’re going on all the rides in the amusement park. How’s that! All the rides.
Larry likes that, he tells his friend under the pier. He likes his daddy. His daddy says there are going to be lots of more nice things, too.
He looks up smilingly at the gaunt man and wonders, in sudden panic, what did he say wrong? Larry tries to yell, but it comes out a small boy’s squeak. He tries to run, but the gaunt man grabs him and slashes viciously with a knife.
When they find Larry a little later, there are twenty-eight knife wounds all over his body. He dies the same day.
It’s got to be Nash, Sergeant Scarborough told himself. He added a third murder to his private “want” on the killer.
Next day, when Nash was bagged by the Santa Monica cops in a roundup of vagrants, Scarborough was on his way there.
In a showup of the suspects, several small boys recognized the gaunt, toothless man with his funny smile as the one they had seen with Larry Rice. An hour later, as Scarborough listened to his confession—a boastful, triumphant story the way Nash told it—the sergeant knew beyond all doubt that he had been right about this monster.
“He was a kid,” Nash said without a flicker of remorse. “It was all there in front of him. His whole life… sex, fun, all of it! Why should he have it when I never did? I took it all away from him.”
Then toothlessly he smiled at the cops. “Besides, I never killed a kid before. I wanted to see how it felt.”
Quietly Larry Scarborough snapped the handcuffs on Nash’s thick, muscled wrists, noticing the cuffs clicked in the first notch and no more. He took him back to LAPD Headquarters for one of the most detailed, brilliant interrogations in LAPD history, one that was to win for him a special honor plaque from the California Association of Private Investigators.
Because he knew so much about his man even before laying eyes on him, Sergeant Scarborough had little trouble getting Nash to talk.
For two weeks, a tape recorder at his side, Scarborough listened and prompted as the killer bragged, whined, screamed, joked, wept, and ranted. Endlessly Nash reviled society and occasionally he laughed—when he described a murder or his hope to invent a new kind of murder by spiking whisky with iodine. Like the train wreck, he just hadn’t had the opportunity to test it out, he added resentfully.
The story was even worse than Scarborough had suspected. He already knew about the killings of the cannery worker, the hairdresser, and the little boy, all in a six-weeks period stretching from mid-October to late November. Now Nash filled him in on two more.
Almost a year ago, the previous December, he had beaten William Clarence Burns to death with a lead pipe. Burns, an Oakland merchant seaman, had a good job, Nash thought, and that was reason enough to murder. The pipe and body had been thrown into San Francisco Bay near Richmond, just north of Oakland.
Then in August, two months before killing his fellow cannery worker, Barnett, he had murdered Robert Eche, a twenty-three-year-old draftsman for the Pacific Gas & Electric Company. This was the first time he used a knife, but the motive was the same as in all his wanton killings— an envious hate.
Scarborough listened to a playback of the tape recording, and made some notes. The murders had occurred in December, August, October, and then two in November. Had this monster abstained during the long eight-months’ period between December and August? Scarborough put it up to him, and Nash laughed teasingly.
Why, there were another half dozen killings he could talk about if he wanted to. But he wasn’t going to. He was going to sell that information at $200 per body. Scarborough could believe it. The killer was miserly as well as bloody.
He didn’t even drink wine like most of his Skid Row associates because it cost too much, and he had saved up the prodigious sum of $450 from his cannery wages. But, as it turned out, though he repeated his $200 offer in court, he made no blood money. Neither the newspapers nor the authorities would give him the satisfaction.
When Scarborough took Nash into Los Angeles County Superior Court, the case was tight and tidy. Incredible as the quintuple-murder confession sounded, Scarborough had painstakingly corroborated it. On a weeklong tour through the state with Nash, he had revisited the scenes of the five slayings, and everything had checked out as the killer told it.
After listening to the tapes, there wasn’t much for the jury to do except rule that Nash had been sane when he committed the killings. Since the death sentence was mandatory, there was even less for Judge Burton Noble to do. Sadly he called the New York foundling “the most evil person who ever appeared in my court” and consigned him to death row at San Quentin.
As Nash stepped into a station wagon for his last ride to San Quentin, he bragged to newspapermen:
“I’m the king of killers! I’ll go to my death like any king should. I have nothing to die for because I had nothing to live for.”
A reporter asked if he wanted a Christian burial, and Nash laughed harshly. “Who, me!” he exclaimed in derision.
Sergeant Scarborough had no statement. He was drained and sick at heart from his long, close association with evil.
Neither did Larry Rice’s father, who in ten days had lost his wife and only child to two equally monstrous forms of cancer.
Backbone of the Force, my boy.
IV
You think the cop on a beat knows tragedy. Then you talk to Sergeant Daisy Storms. The tragedy the beat man knows is mostly a crystallization of inheritance, environment, circumstance. But whatever the cause, there is only one thing to do now, from the officer’s point of view. Get the bum off the streets before he can hurt somebody else.
But what Daisy Storms sees is tragedy just beginning. The little punk trying desperately to become a big punk. The teen-age bully practicing strong-arm tactics. The girl who has scarcely achieved puberty and knows what it’s all about.
They are so young and malleable that somehow, you think, the right word, the right decision now will avert a misspent life. And sometimes, being a mother herself, Daisy Storms knows the kindly word that makes the suspicion of a tough, unloved kid dissolve into trust and friendship.
But there are always some whose blind hurt is so deep, their rage against the adult world so great, that nothing can be done. Those are the times that Daisy Storms says brightly, “I could stand some lipstick.”
To the young, it never matters how they get to Hollywood, by boxcar, by thumb, or stowed away in planes, slow boats, and trailer trucks. They hit Los Angeles first and, being ravenous, make for the nearest hamburger joint. There is the delightful discovery of chili, tamale, taco, and burrito, and only after they are gorged do they realize that there isn’t a movie queen in sight and Hollywood is still eight miles off toward the hills.
So they wander uncertainly past the store fronts, past the girlie joints that feature “Russian Tease” and “Naked Sin.” As they wander, they are innocently vulnerable to those who prey on the unsupervised juvenile. But if they are among the lucky ones, a team of plainclothes detectives on routine juvenile patrol will spot them first. Often the detectives are sergeants and sometimes, like Daisy Storms, the sergeant is a lady.
These runaways are the easy ones to handle. They are already scared and homesick and probably broke. A motherly hug, a notification wire home, then a seat on a departing bus, and case closed out.
But most of the time it isn’t that easy, and there are so many of the young in trouble every day!
In Los Angeles there are 600,000 school-age kids, more than the total population of Cincinnati, Ohio. During a year, some 13,500 of them will get into brushes with the law; a few as many as twenty times during the twelve months. They come in for everything: murder, sex, larceny, robbery, burglary, auto theft. Eight hundred of them are picked up for using and selling dope.
Worst of all, where once a kid didn’t normally foul up till he was seventeen, now it is the precocious children aged thirteen to fifteen who are the biggest group of offenders.
In line with California’s juvenile court law, which is essentially rehabilitative, LAPD’s Juvenile policemen wage a four-point program of counter-attack. They call it discovery, investigation, treatment and referral, and protection.
What it comes down to is this:
With the help of churches, schools, welfare agencies and parents, Juvenile patrol units smell out and try to anticipate child crime. Where delinquency is reported, they dig back into the home conditions, social attitudes, companions, habits, and aptitudes. On a broader scale, they work with civic betterment groups for removal of environmental hazards. When they must arrest a juvenile, they give him every possible break through the Probation Department, a social service agency or some other organization specializing in youth work.
But even for a lady cop, police work can’t be just social service work.
In the living room of a shabby frame house in Central Division, Daisy Storms and a male Juvenile officer are surrounded by seven scowling teen-age thugs. They are looking for a fifteen-year-old girl who has been reported missing and the boy who seduced her.
There is a moment of tense silence. Then Daisy looks straight at the ringleader. “We’d like to talk to Johnny,” she says.
“What do you want him for?”
“Just to talk. We’re looking for a girl. Betty.”
Suspiciously Johnny steps forward, and Daisy asks him to please come out to the car. There is something she wants to check with him. Johnny hesitates, his friends sidle closer behind him. Daisy pretends she doesn’t notice.
Then Johnny steps forward, and the tension is broken.
In the car outside, Daisy and her partner arrest Johnny for statutory rape and take him to the Georgia Street juvenile detention unit. She also makes a call to the Robbery Division.
A roving gang of young Mexican-Americans had been pulling a series of stickups through the city, and Daisy thought the boys in the old house answered the description.
At the point of machine guns, the youths were arrested, and a small arsenal of weapons and ammunition confiscated.
The youths were charged with the holdups while Daisy Storms, checking through on her particular problem, located the missing Betty. A delinquency complaint was filed, and Betty was released under the supervision of a probation officer.
Who is responsible for the Johnnys and Bettys who go through the Juvenile mill by the thousands each year?
Daisy Storms’ years of experience make her distrust glib answers, and she comes back to the simple and obvious answer. It is the parent. The father who has fled his responsibilities, leaving a broken home behind. The mother who must work and cannot exercise a mother’s supervision. The parent who wields too much or not enough authority, who just doesn’t care.
Occasionally, too, you can blame a hurry-up civilization which demands too much too soon from its children and drives them into confusion. This is lofty-sounding talk, but th
ere are the children to substantiate it.
Shortly before 8 a.m. on an April Wednesday, police of the Venice Division find four boys sleeping in a nine-year-old sedan. Two of them are thirteen, the third is fourteen, and the ringleader, who has taken his uncle’s car, is all of fifteen. The police itemize the following fifteen pieces of property which they find in the car:
One machine gun.
Two shotguns and two rifles.
One .45-calibre automatic.
Two sticks of dynamite.
One bayonet.
Three hunting knives.
One black suitcase lined with ammunition.
Two copies of a curious document entitled The Constitution of the House of San Miguel.
At the office, Juvenile detectives interrogate the ringleader.
For a long time, he explains, the things going on in the world have been bothering him. He has had it on his mind that he would like to escape to the island of San Miguel, sixty miles due west of Los Angeles, and there create a new nation where boys could be happy.
The year before, he had begun stealing some things to prepare for his expedition. But, while driving a stolen truck containing his stolen supplies, he had collided with a tank truck. He was arrested and sent to a forestry camp.
After he got out, he sent a recruiting letter to certain reliable friends and enlisted five followers, including the three picked up with him. Their plan had been to cache their arsenal on the discipline grounds at Camp Cook until they could steal a boat for the expedition to San Miguel.
There, as the Constitution made very plain, the boys would farm, fish, hunt, and relax, and there would be no stealing, arguing, or other trouble like in the outside world. If there were, a fair trial and punishment were provided for by the Constitution.
A little sadly the Juvenile detectives ask him: Doesn’t he know? The outside world and its troubles have already come to San Miguel. The island, owned by the United States Government, is used by the Marine Corps as a target for gunnery practice.