“That’s just why I’m insisting that you go there,” Bill said emphatically. “Look, Branden was married into that crowd. He was a good officer. Don’t overlook that. But he was too close to them. I don’t think Branden ever did anything wrong, except maybe now and then he closed his eyes to something he ought to have looked straight at. It’s hard to move against your friends or to see them
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objectively. That was Branden’s trouble. It was not all of his making, but now that I’ve a chance to change all that, I’m doing it—in the interests of society—in the interests of those people out there.
“Ruddy, when a rich man’s in trouble, he comes running to the law, demanding help, action,” Bill outlined. “But when he breaks the law, he will stare you right in the eye and dare you to touch ’im, reminding you that he can hurt you. Most times, that trick works. The law is made for everybody, and the whites and the blacks, the poor and the rich, native-born and foreign-born ought to observe it. That’s my view, Ruddy.”
“That’s mine, too, Bill,” Ruddy concurred.
“And that’s why you’re going to Brentwood.” Bill under-scored his determination.
“What are they bothered with out there—housebreaking?”
Ruddy asked.
“That’s the question of a good officer,” Bill approved. “And housebreaking is what you’ll see written in the offi cial reports.
But housebreaking is not what is wrong in Brentwood. Look, most of the housebreaking out there comes from aggrieved servants who are no longer in their employ. We’ve established that. They know where the valuables are, and they sneak back at night and get them. But we trace almost all of that stuff.
That’s kid’s play. They can’t sell the stuff without our putting our fingers on it, and once the stuff is spotted, the nabbing of the thief is not far off.
“Strangely, the turnover in servants out there is heavy,” Bill went on. “Why that is, I really don’t know. But our questioning of their maids and cooks and butlers makes me feel that the servants feel out of place out there. In the last six months, there were eighteen cases of housemaid pregnancy—eighteen were reported. How many really took place and did not come to us, we’ll never know.”
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Ruddy whistled. “Rape?” he asked.
“Ruddy, when a rich man does something, it’s done in a manner different from what a poor man would do,” Bill recited.
“There’s liquor, presents, parties—too much of everything.
Wives sleeping around with everybody. Is it any wonder that the husband or son gets the notion of tumbling the maids?
A dress, a ring, a twenty-dollar bill, plus a bit of alcohol, and a maid is in bed with her clothes on, not quite knowing what is really happening to her. We can’t call it rape. It’s just delin-quency. Ruddy, I call it crime.
“But that’s not what is really wrong out there,” Bill said, twisting down his lips. “If it were, I wouldn’t be wasting time talking about it. The big crime in Brentwood is the sexual violation of children—”
“What? ”
“You heard me,” Bill snapped.
“But I thought that that took place mainly among poor folks, sleeping six in a room,” Ruddy breathed.
“No—it takes place in families where there are fi ve people sleeping in sixteen rooms too.” Bill’s voice was rasping and cynical.
“Jesus Christ,” Ruddy sighed.
“You can say that again,” Bill agreed.
“No leads on the perverts?”
“Plenty.”
“Aw . . . Influence. Protection. Higher-ups.”
“Right.”
“Did this have anything to do with Branden’s being slain?”
“No. It didn’t. Branden’s death was a revenge slaying,” Bill explained. “Ruddy, the police chief who wouldn’t haul in the guilty rich was killed by a guilty poor man. I don’t say that that’s justice, but it happened.”
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“Bill?” Ruddy’s voice called out insistently, though he was staring at the ceiling.
“Yeah?”
“I ain’t no fancy cop,” Ruddy rumbled angrily. “If a man’s guilty, I grab ’im, no matter what. Will the department stand by me?”
“Not only the department but the DA’s office will back you up,” Bill assured him. “Ruddy, I wouldn’t be talking to you here tonight if I didn’t know you were square straight. Now, don’t go and get poor Branden wrong. He was straight, but he went blind, so to speak. You can’t be with the law and have friends whom you admire who break the law. Those things can’t mix.
Branden loved the big, rich boys and felt sorry for ’em when they went wrong. And when they spent big money to hide their crimes, Branden wouldn’t insult ’em by insisting upon looking too hard at ’em. He was going to run for country sheriff, and then he was going to try for the mayoralty.”
“Wheew,” Ruddy whistled. Then he rolled his hard, brown eyes at Bill. “There’s a ceiling on my ambitions.”
“There’s a ceiling on every honest man’s ambitions,” Bill amended Ruddy’s statement. “Ruddy, I came from as far down as you. I’m Micky Irish. My people were more than dirt-poor.
They had lice on ’em. I had ’em once too. But I’m clean now, and I’m clean in more ways than one.”
“Spill a little more on this child-violation stuff,” Ruddy asked softly.
“Most of the records on that are in my head,” Bill said.
“When a rich man’s daughter is molested sexually, he wants it kept under cover. He doesn’t want his property soiled in the public eye, get it? Now let me start backward. Last month two girls, ages six and eight, were raped in Brentwood. We know that from hospital reports.”
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“Any leads?”
“Two general leads,” Bill stated. “We know the boy who violated one child. And we know the girl who violated the—”
“A girl?”
“Lesbian.”
“That place is rotten,” Ruddy growled.
“Straight through to the core,” Bill affi rmed. “We’ve got a good notion as to who the boy is and also the gal. But—”
“But what?”
“Ruddy, it’ll take a million dollars a piece to convict ’em,”
Bill said sadly. “They paint pictures of all kinds of neuroses and complexes, and they’ll end up by making the world feel sorry for the poor rich boys and girls.”
“If the courts are powerless, what can I do?” Ruddy wanted to know.
“You can harass ’em,” Bill jerked out. “You can let ’em know that they are corrupting youth. You can make ’em feel wrong.
By God, you can educate the public with ’em. The press’ll be behind you—that is, in the main. The common people are with you. You want to try it?”
“Bill, I’ve nothing to lose,” Ruddy said, smiling bitterly. “I thought I was going to retire in a few months and pal around with that boy genius of mine. But I can’t shrink from this. Bill, I’m a bulldog cop. If you say, ‘Sic ’em,’ then I’m going after ’em.”
Bill stood and clapped Ruddy on the right shoulder.
“Good.”
Bill went to his desk and flicked a button and spoke into the office intercommunication system. “Mary Jane, tell Watkins, that corporation lawyer Jacobs, and those two witnesses to come in here. I’m swearing Ruddy in right now.”
Ruddy heard Mary Jane’s voice coming with metallic musi-cality: “The press is here, Mr. King.”
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“Tell ’em to go to hell,” Bill snapped. “I’ll talk to ’em tomorrow afternoon. I’m confronting the entire city with a fait accompli. ”
Ruddy stood facing Bill and they were both silent for a moment.
“Nobody has ever trusted me this much before, Bill.�
��
“I’m trusting you as though you were my own son,” Bill said with a sigh.
Ruddy’s old tension was now reborn in him, that tension that had dogged his footsteps when he had been a rookie. But there was a difference now; that tension was modified. He was no longer a lone colored man with a gun but a well-known and respected one who was being given a mandate to enforce the law among the lawless. Yet he had never regarded the men of wealth and power as being lawless. What Bill had told him had stunned him, not so much for its revelation of moral turpitude but for the seeming guiltlessness of the people whom he would rule, or, to put it another way, for their apparent guiltiness. It all depended on how he looked at them and felt about them.
Did he feel identified with the lawless people of Brentwood Park? No. But there slumbered deep in him a sneaking kind of admiration for their strength; he had the feeling that they were somehow right in doing what they did, even if their deeds were against the law. Yes, Branden had no doubt felt that way, and he had agreed with Bill in condemning Branden’s blind wayward-ness. Yet those people—were they not merely feeling and having their way in an objective manner while he, Ruddy, had had his guilty way years before in a subjective manner? If that was true, why was he being called upon to condemn them? Ruddy had never thought of this before, and had it not been for his pending induction into a new job, he would never have dreamed of it. There was no doubt that there was an attractive and alluring
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image in the actions of rich people who did as they liked. Did not everybody want to do that? Was freedom to be denied only to the poor or only to the frightened poor? For Ruddy, a policeman, knew quite well that there were many poor people who had and were taking their way with blazing guns. It seemed that only at the two extremes of society, the very top and the very bottom, could there be seen or felt any real freedom. What was freedom then? And what was law?
Ruddy was a policeman because he was a man who had once loved freedom so hotly that he had become guilty in the pores of his being by dreaming illicitly of freedom, and his becoming a policeman had been a manner in which he had escaped being cast into an ocean of guilty emotion. He had eased the burden of guilt he carried by seeing and trapping it in others; he had earned the right to live with himself by being able to handle the guilt that seethed in him in an objective manner in the lives of others. Now he was being called upon to check and put down that freedom in others that he had once yearned to have. Did he at heart merely regard the poor and weak as being guilty—as being guilty because they were poor and weak? And did he really feel an admiration for the strong because they could be free with impunity? The clock on the wall ticked loudly in the quiet room and beads of sweat, tiny and glistening, oozed out upon Ruddy’s bronzed brow.
“Don’t worry, Ruddy,” Bill said, moving nervously about.
“It’s not my aim to give you time to refl ect.”
They grinned at each other. What would Tommy think?
And Agnes? Their lives would be different now. And the pledge that he had given them that he would have plenty of time for them after his retirement would have to be withdrawn. Never would he be so busy as he would be now. He would be facing the supreme test of his life, and he would give a strict account
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of himself, of his office, of his duties, of his zeal. But those rich whites? How would he face them? Would they, too, try to get next to him? And he a black man? He smiled wryly. If they wanted to continue to carry on their mischief, they would certainly try to do that. Yes, that was why Bill was pushing him into this job. His smile grew.
“You see what I’m doing?” Bill asked.
“I see it all,” Ruddy murmured.
“A good idea, hunh?”
“I must say it is, Bill. It’s just like you.”
“Depend on me to fuck ’em good, Ruddy,” Bill snarled.
Ruddy felt a flash of power surge through him as he recalled that he had been thinking all along in terms of his facing them as one individual. No—he would have a staff.
“Bill?”
“Yeah. Speak what’s on your mind. In a few moments it’ll be too late.”
“I have some police administration experience,” Ruddy spoke slowly.
“I know it.”
“The responsible work of a staff of policemen is done by a small hard-driving nucleus,” Ruddy spelled it out.
“Right.”
“I want the right to name the men directly under me.”
“You’re cooking with gas. Name ’em and they’re yours. I’ll list them right now,” Bill said, lifting an ornate ink pen and poising it over a clean sheet of paper.
“Jock Weidman.”
“One of the soundest officers on the force. He knows the work from A to Z, despite the fact that his personal life is a mess,” Bill murmured, writing. “Who else?”
“Ed Seigel.”
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“A good man,” Bill murmured. “An all-round man. A little cracked on ideas, maybe. But you might find him useful out there among all those rich eggheads. Okay. Who else?”
“Captain Drake, for protocol and general work,” Ruddy said.
“Damn good. Go on.”
“Wade Williams, as my bulldog,” Ruddy said.
“He’s as stubborn as black paint,” Bill sang as he wrote.
“Go on.”
“You’re going to object,” Ruddy warned.
“No.”
“Mary Jane Woodford, as the boss of the offi ce,” Ruddy boomed fearlessly.
Bill lifted his head and stared at Ruddy. He bit his lips then.
“That’s all I need as a core of a team,” Ruddy stated.
“Okay, boy. You can have ’em. Sorry to part with Mary Jane.
She knows more about police work than I do,” Bill said with a sigh. “You’ve just picked the cream of our police force.”
“That’s what I’ll need.” Ruddy was defi nite.
“When the mayor sees who’s helping you, it will help him to defend what I’m doing,” Bill said with a grin.
“I know what you mean,” Ruddy sympathized warmly.
“I’m not scared,” Bill let out.
“Nobody ever said that Bill Joseph King was a scared man,”
Ruddy stated with calm judgment.
The buzzer sounded. Bill picked up the receiver of the intercom: “Yes?”
“They’re here,” Mary Jane said.
“Send ’em in. What’re you waiting on? And you come in too, Mary Jane,” Bill instructed.
“Me?”
“Yes. I’m changing your life, too, tonight,” Bill said, then slammed the receiver on the hook. He rose, opened a drawer
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and took out a big black Bible, and laid it upon his desk just as the door opened.
Watkins entered first, grinning, his arms stretched wide.
“I’m presuming that everything’s working,” he said, paus-ing, glancing at the commissioner, who nodded, and then embracing Ruddy.
“Something big’s happening to you tonight,” Watkins sang.
“Thanks, Mr. Watkins,” Ruddy said with a choked voice and eyes clouded with emotion.
“I’m Hymie Jacobs.” A short, plump man with white hair introduced himself to Ruddy, extending his hand. “I’ll congrat-ulate you after I’ve sworn you in.”
Two other men, both of whom Ruddy knew by sight and name, followed into the room. Mary Jane, her eyes baffl ed, came in last.
“Ruddy, you know Johnny Welch.” Bill made the presentations perfunctorily. “And Dick Donovan. Johnny’s been my assistant for well-nigh ten years. And Dick’s the head of the plainclothes squad and is our liaison with the DA’s offi ce.” Bill took Ruddy’s left hand and placed it on the Bible and then turned to Hymie Jacobs, lifting his eyebrows.
“Will you raise
your right hand?” Hymie Jacobs asked Ruddy.
Ruddy complied silently, his temples throbbing.
“Rudolph Turner, do you solemnly swear that you will dis-charge the duties of the office of Chief of Police of Brentwood, Illinois, and that you will defend and protect the Constitution of the State of Illinois, and that you will, without mental evasions or reservations, defend and protect the Constitution of the United States of America, against all enemies, both foreign and domestic, to the best of your ability, so help you God?”
Ruddy took a deep breath and said, “I do.”
A sigh went around the room. Bill came forward with his
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right fi st clenched, then extended it and clapped into Ruddy’s right hand a golden star.
“Good luck, Chief,” Bill said.
“I owe you a debt that I feel I can never pay,” Ruddy sighed.
“Forget it,” Bill said.
“Congratulations,” Jacobs said, shaking Ruddy’s hand again.
There were congratulations all around, including those of Mary Jane, whose eyes were round and moist.
“Mary Jane,” Bill began, “from tonight on, you are the chief clerk in the office of the Chief of Police of Brentwood.”
Mary Jane’s blue eyes widened. “Oh,” she exclaimed, staring at Ruddy.
“And here’s the list of Ruddy’s private staff, who will fl ank him all the way,” Bill said.
“Jesus, everything happens,” Mary Jane murmured. “I don’t deserve this promotion.”
“It’s no promotion,” Ruddy said. “You’re just hired. And you’ll work until your tail drags.”
“I’ll work for you,” Mary Jane declared fervently. She stared around the room with open lips.
“I don’t want to be rude,” Bill said. “But now that the for-malities are over, Ruddy and I have a lot to talk about in a short space of time.”
There was an aimless milling around, more congratulations, and then the swearing-in personnel, including Mary Jane, retreated, leaving Bill and Ruddy alone once more.
“Sit down,” Bill said. “I want to show you something.”
“Sure,” Ruddy said.
Bill extracted from a drawer a large dossier, then sat beside Ruddy again.
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