A Father's Law

by Richard Wright

  “I want to show you some of the horrors of Brentwood,”

  Bill said in a faraway voice.

  C H A P T E R 4

  Ever since its incorporation as an independent municipality, Brentwood Park has been in trouble. It was conceived in corruption; the aim was to avoid and evade city taxes. Had the men who had this idea in mind not been rich, the charter would not have been granted. But our state legislature could not refuse the requests of bankers, brokers, and industrialists.

  Though the rich sheltered and protected Brentwood, the fi rst house that was erected there turned out to be a hideout for Blacksnake McClusky, the famous bank robber. How he wrig-gled that, we never learned. The real estate men who sold him the plot swore that they did not know his identity, and it is useless now to probe into that. We got Blacksnake McClusky—shot

  ’im down in Dallas . . . but he was the first rotten apple in the Brentwood Park barrel.

  “You might wonder why the lawbreakers permitted a crook like that to live next to them. Well, Ruddy, it was gambling.

  And where there’s gambling, as you well know, there’s always easy money. And then there was Prohibition. Illicit liquor and gambling formed the basis of entertainment life for the rich men who worked all day in the Chicago offi ces.

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  “Add to this the ideas of rich boys and girls who spend their time in university classrooms, commuting to and fro in high-powered sports cars. Of course, there was swimming, tennis, dancing, and all-night parties. That was natural. At first all of this took place in restricted clubs, but as time went on, everybody in the whole area, regardless of age or sex, was welcomed.

  It was then that trouble started. That was in the twenties. Then you had all kinds of wild ideas in the air. Sexual experimentation. Communism. Ether parties. Booze. ‘Advanced ideas’—

  whatever that is. And all kinds of foreign notions about life’s not being worth anything unless you could wring your share of experience out of it.

  “The first semi-criminal death occurred among a group of students. You recall the Kennedy case? Three students decided to commit the perfect crime. One actually offered himself as the guinea pig and helped plan his own murder so that the police would never fi nd out.”

  “Yeah. I remember that case,” Ruddy drawled.

  “Now, the odd part of that was this: Charles Kennedy, the murderee—if you’ll permit my calling him that, for he did offer himself as a victim—thought that he would somehow be alive after they had killed him and would enjoy the baffl ement of the police in trying to solve their perfect crime. We proved that John Davis and Harris Potts, the murderers, had no such beliefs and that they knew that Kennedy was mentally off, so they took him and killed him in a manner that did actually baffl e us for a while. It was only because Davis and Potts seemed too anxious to help the police that we finally suspected that they had a hand in it. The moment we touched ’em, they confessed.

  “How did you try a case like that? Nobody could make head or tail of it. The defense contended that there had been no murder, for the murdered man aided in his own death! Had actually

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  asked that he be killed! But the state and the court ruled that he had been murdered, even if he had asked to be murdered, and the men who had carried out Kennedy’s crazy instructions were murderers. But when the defense got through describing the mental and emotional state of those boys, the jury declared them guilty of manslaughter. The judge sentenced them ten years each; they were transferred to insane asylums for treatment. Five years later they were declared sane and now they are out—in Europe.

  “The Kennedy case set the frame for the style of crime in Brentwood Park for the next two decades. As I told you before, housebreaking, forgery, stickups, etc., were never very prominent there. The crimes committed had a ‘family’ air about them. Get what I mean, Ruddy?”

  “You sound a bit like old Ed now,” Ruddy chided Bill.

  “And that was why I so heartily approved your selection of Ed to your staff,” Bill went on. “Truth to tell, maybe Ed could give you a better rundown on all this than I can. If there was ever a locale where emotional factors rather than pure greed figured in crime, it is in Brentwood Park. There are no poor folks in Brentwood, and therefore no so-called class struggle.

  The divorce rate is high, yet they have a lot of children. One wiseacre said that married couples in Brentwood were swapping husbands and wives about. Well, he forgot the children; what he should have said was that they were swapping the children about, and that makes for emotional troubles—or so the social workers tell us.

  “Though Brentwood Park’s been messy, from a policeman’s point of view, we had more or less kept track of all their crazy doings until about a year ago,” Bill went on. “Then a crime wave struck the place, and we’ve never been able to figure it out. You recall the kidnapping of Roberta Southern?”

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  “Sure.”

  “That was never solved. The child was found dead—like they always are. We still suspect that that was an inside job, for the ones who did it got cold feet and never did try to get the ransom, even when it had been left for ’em.

  “The next ‘snatching’ was plainly a professional job,” Bill recited. “We knew it the moment we entered the case. It was done in a workman-like manner and we anticipated every move.

  The ransom letter came; the money was picked up; the body of the stockbroker, Symons Jordan, was found dead—just as we expected. But he was killed to prevent identification, we suspected. And he was. We traced the ransom bills and fi nally caught up with the couple who pulled that job. They were executed.

  “You see, no doubt the Roberta Southern idea was proving contagious. But it took professionals to carry the crime to its conclusion,” Bill analyzed. “Now come three crimes, the last ones committed, for which we do not have a single clue. I don’t believe in perfect crimes. Yet so far we seem to have three on our hands, and Branden professed himself completely stumped. This time all indications point to its being a Brentwood job, or the crimes were committed by somebody who knew Brentwood well.

  “Last March a Protestant clergyman, Ernie Hindricks, was killed. Try as we might, we could not scrape up one iota of a motive for that murder. Hindricks had no enemies. Even the Catholics in the area admired and emulated his tolerance. This is one of the cases we need you to focus on.”

  “I recall the case,” Ruddy said, frowning. “It was followed shortly afterward by the murder of Father Byrnes—”

  “And not a single clue,” Bill asked. “We want you to concentrate on these cases we cannot afford to close —and another one as well.”

  “What’s the population ratio out there, in terms of Catholics and Protestants?” Ruddy asked.

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  “About equal, give and take a bit,” Bill said. “We exhausted that angle, and it led us nowhere. As in the case of Hindricks no hint of a motive, as we know and understand them. We combed the political radical groups and could get nothing. Stools were sent into that Brentwood area on all levels and could get absolutely nothing. Rewards were offered but to no avail. Father Byrnes was killed in June. Three months lapsed between the two killings. We waited. There seemed to be a kinship between the two murders, and if so, we could expect a third one. We tried to speculate upon whom would fall the next blow. Since two men of the cloth had been done in, we wondered if the killer would not next choose a man who had donated much money to both religious causes in terms of aiding their charities. But nothing happened in that direction. It was as though the murderer was watching us, following our line of reasoning. Then, in October, he struck again—at the son of one of the detectives investigating the two crimes. That baffled the hell out of us.

  “You would have thought that it would have been the detective himself who would have been the target,�
�� Bill argued.

  “And when the news came in, we actually construed that such had happened, and it was only hours later that Detective Heard called us himself and said that it was his son, and not he, who was the victim.”

  “Do you think that they could have been trying to scare Heard away, that the murderers felt that he was getting warm?”

  Ruddy asked.

  “We thought that once,” Bill said sadly. “But Heard said no.

  He had no notion as to who could have done it, and had anybody thought he was ‘warm,’ they would have gotten him, not his son. We went into Charles Heard Jr.’s death—he was shot with a .38—as we’ve never gone into the killing of anybody and we got nothing.”

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  “But you feel that the three crimes were linked, maybe committed by the same person or persons?” Ruddy asked.

  “Exactly,” Bill admitted. “But that is only a hunch, an intuitive guess.”

  “It’s mine too,” Ruddy said.

  “Now, the psychologists are arguing that this is a new kind of murder,” Bill said, with a rising inflection of voice, an infl ection that showed irritation. “I don’t know what they mean; I don’t understand ’em. They contend that the motives in these three crimes are extraordinary. Maybe they are. But a murdered man is a dead man, and that started with Abel.”

  “What kind of motives did they dope out?” Ruddy wanted to know.

  “Well, as close as I could understand ’em,” Bill related, “they felt that these crimes were semiphilosophical.”

  “Bullshit,” Ruddy spat.

  “Right. But in the absence of anything else, we had to go on that,” Bill complained.

  “What kind of so-called philosophy did they talk about?”

  Ruddy demanded, wrinkling his brow.

  “Well, they claimed that the murderer was killing because he had never killed—”

  “Jesus Christ!”

  “That was the theory,” Bill affirmed. “They further contended that he was to be found right in Brentwood—”

  “That’s possible,” Ruddy said. “But what about the killing of Heard’s son? Did they say that was because the killer had never killed? Why he had killed two men before that.”

  “Well, about that they had an even crazier idea,” Bill reported. “The psychoanalysts contended that the man who killed Heard’s son did so because he wanted to be caught for the other crimes.”

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  “Brother, deliver me from those screwballs,” Ruddy railed.

  “Ruddy,” Bill said, rising and flipping the dossier toward him, “those three killings are your first task. See what you can unearth about ’em. I don’t say that it’ll be easy, but your coming in from the outside might give you a new slant on ’em. The machine that Branden has set up out there ought to be able to take care of the run-of-the-mill stuff. So you are free to go after the big fi sh.”

  “You mean the whales,” Ruddy said.

  “Of course, when you catch this whale, you’ll find that he is a guy five feet tall, with a tendency to blushing and sweaty palms. And, above all, he will have sent beautiful cards to his mother on Mother’s Day.”

  “And he’s going to expect that we kiss him and forgive him.” Ruddy sneered.

  “I’ll forgive ’im,” Bill wailed. “I’ve give ’em twenty thousand hot volt right up his rear end.”

  “Make it forty—the extra twenty’s from me,” Ruddy said.

  He stood and looked off. “I’d like to phone home, Bill.”

  “I was expecting that.” Bill smiled. “Tell Agnes the big news.” He strode from the office, whistling under his breath.

  C H A P T E R 5

  Dawn was breaking when Ruddy emerged from police headquarters. He bought a copy of the Chicago Tribune and saw his picture on the front page; he balled the paper into his fist and frowned. He did not wish to know what the press said; he had a job to do. Though he had promised Agnes over the phone that he was coming right home and would explain everything to her, he now was bitten by another idea. He commandeered a detective squad car and ordered that he be driven through the Brentwood Park area. He wanted a glimpse of the domain that he was to rule in the name of the law.

  He was alone in the car with a police chauffeur. The car was unmarked, and he sat up front where he could get a good look at this fashionable area.

  The chauffeur grinned and weighed Ruddy out of the corners of his eyes. “Glad to have the honor of driving the new chief out to his area.”

  “Thanks, fellow.”

  “Looks like you’re taking over screwball land,” the driver said.

  “Is that what they call it?”

  “That’s it.”

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  “To tell you the truth, I can’t make head or tail from what I’ve heard about the place,” Ruddy confessed.

  “Nobody can understand that Brentwood Park area,” the driver said. “Any particular place you want to go, Chief?”

  “Just drive around, then go to the top of Andeley Hill and let me get a good look at the whole joint.”

  “Right, Chief.”

  They entered the shopping center, bustling with super-markets, drugstores, three big department stores, sports stores, hardware and clothing stores, and movie houses. At the main intersection two big banks, the First National and the Brentwood Park Trust, faced each other. Northward was the dark bulk of the pine-covered Andeley Hill and southward stretched the main boulevard, fl anking the wide sweep of gleaming lake sand. Eastward rose the section of immense private dwellings where the main body of the rich people of Brentwood Park lived. To the southwest were tall gleaming apartment buildings, sparkling in the early morning sun, rising ten, fi fteen, and some even twenty stories into the cloudless blue sky. To the northwest were sundry scattered dwellings belonging to civil servants, doctors, and skilled and domestic workers. Opposite the railroad station stood the post office in an inconvenient location that had been the subject of many bitter local editorials.

  Toward the beach were side streets filled with cafés, restaurants, bars, laundries, amusement arcades, etc.

  “An artificial town,” Ruddy commented.

  “An easy money town,” the driver said.

  “What’s the population here now?” Ruddy asked.

  “One hundred and thirty thousand when I last heard,” the driver answered.

  “Wheew,” Ruddy whistled. “That many? What a jump. I would’ve said about ninety.”

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  “Most of ’em are up in those apartment hotels and buildings,” the driver explained. “They tell me the poor people around here complain that there’s nothing for ’em to do when they quit working.”

  “There’re plenty of bars,” Ruddy pointed out.

  “Too high for ’em,” the driver said. “How can a maid shell out two dollars for a sniff of Scotch?”

  “They’ve got it all planned,” Ruddy commented, thinking of how such tactics had long been used against the people of his own race to keep them out of certain restricted business establishments.

  “Look, Chief! See that Piper Cub?” the driver said, pointing to a plane zooming low over the town.

  “Looks like it is going to land,” Ruddy observed.

  “That’s right, Chief. The landing field is atop that hill.”

  “Let’s get up there,” Ruddy ordered.

  “Right, Chief.”

  The oar turned and made down a wide side street and then followed a rising curve. At once tall pine trees fl anked both sides of the road and the air felt cool. Ruddy saw many foot-paths leading off the roadway into the dark denseness of the pines, some of which were even large enough to admit cars.

  “Lovers’ lanes, eh?”

  “Yes, sir. I expect that’s what they call ’em,” the driver said.

  “But you know, sir, most of
the crimes committed around here were never staged in the forest.”

  “They took place in the hotels and private homes, eh?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Millionaires don’t want to get their feet muddy,” Ruddy grumbled.

  The trees grew darker and denser as the car mounted the narrow asphalt road, and even flecks of fog began to form on

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  the windshield. Ruddy saw a few people wandering amid the paths in the forest, and he saw that they were well dressed.

  “This town was built to give people an excuse to spend money,” Ruddy stated. “There’s nothing here they could not get in any other small town.”

  “That’s right, sir,” the driver said. “But that’s our country.

  We’ve got to find a way to spend our money and keep busy. At the first sign of a depression, the people will start fl ocking out of here as though there was a smallpox epidemic.”

  “Right,” Ruddy sighed.

  Yes, Ruddy felt that he was on alien ground; this was no Black Belt, Irish shantytown, no Little Paris filled with jabbering Frenchmen, no make-believe Berlin choked with Germans; this was native-born America, rich, proud, free. Could he ever understand these people? At once the image of his Tommy fl ashed into his mind. Yes, Tommy would and could help him here. Not that he would ask Tommy to work on the force; no—he would ask Tommy questions about this place, for the studying of such areas was Tommy’s main interest in life. Aw, maybe my boy will be close to me, after all, he thought with pride.

  “One more turn and we’ll be at the top,” the driver said.

  Three minutes later they were rolling along a road that gave a vast sweep of Brentwood Park far below.

  “Stop here, fellow,” Ruddy ordered.

  “Yes, sir.”

  Ruddy alighted and lit a cigarette, offered one to the driver, who accepted eagerly. Puffing, Ruddy stared down at the long strip of houses, sand, apartment hotels, and streets. Far out, the bosom of Lake Michigan gleamed and sparkled.

  “Well, the main approaches are from the north and south,”

  Ruddy observed. “Anybody wanting to make a quick getaway would not come up here. The roads are too narrow. Of course,