Kenny smiled. The kid had this tough old bull right around her finger. “Give her a week. That age, it's hard to hold a grudge."
"Who're you, Dr. Phil?"
"My opinion."
They didn't say much to each other rest of the shift.
Now here they were, turning another slow night into missionary work on someone else's beat. The kid who'd been standing in the shadows bolted, rabbiting it into the house. Rollo, snub nose and gloves somehow already out of the off-duty bag, swung the cruiser's door open and went after him, yelling for Kenny to cover the back. Kenny pulsed the scanner, saying, “Unit twelve, foot pursuit, Avon and Beech,” not waiting for the dispatcher to acknowledge, cutting the squelch to mute the scanner.
He was no more than halfway around the house when a shot cut the night air, dead space, then two more tumbled after it. To his ear, all came from the same piece, but he didn't trust his ear and wondered whether the perp had opened on Rollo.
Whatever, he had to get in there fast. That point on, things seemed to blur, to go slow motion. Every sense seemed electric, as if the smallest movement were being recorded and stored in his own personal video cam. Stumbling, service piece now drawn, he reached the back stairs that led to a little porch. Time slipped back to normal and the cam switched off. Kenny, disoriented by the warp, stood there for a few seconds, unsure of whether to wait in ambush or bust the door. Bust the door won. He keyed his scanner, pulsed the mute off, then remembered that Rollo had once ragged on him about keeping the damn thing off for close-in work. “Thing'll get you killed,” he'd said. “Noise it makes, might as well shine a spot.” He slipped the scanner back to his belt. No light from the grated windows. The door looked as if it were metal with just a peephole at eye height. Standing to one side, he tried the doorknob and it turned easily. A small push and it arced slowly open. Crouching, he swung into the opening, fanning his police issue from side to side, looking for movement, finding none. He stepped to the right, taking himself away from the light frame of the door.
The layout of the house was typical of those built in the thirties and forties. Living room on one side facing the street, kitchen behind it on the alley side, two bedrooms separated by a single bath on the other side, all connected by a small hall. There was a glow coming from the hall indicating a light in one of the bedrooms.
Kenny, still in his crouch, called, “Rollo?"
"In here."
Straightening, still wary, holding his piece double handed in front of him, he moved toward the hall. The light came from the front bedroom. Rollo, his back toward the door, kneeled over a body, the only part of which Kenny could see were two akimbo, poor-boy-pants-covered legs. Rollo seemed to be working the body, first aid, Kenny thought. Whatever had been going on, it was over; Rollo's service issue was back in its holster, and the air in the room was as calm as a Moonie retreat.
"Son of a bitch pulled on me,” Rollo said. “Call the meat wagon."
Rollo's left arm came up, followed by a thump. The perp's arm hit the floor, and a snub-nosed revolver skittered across the wood. Kenny watched it slide under a chest of drawers. Rollo, who's head had also turned to watch the piece do its pirouette, saw him and said, “You still here?"
Kenny started toward the chest of drawers. “Leave it,” Rollo commanded.
"Yeah,” Kenny said, “What happened?"
"What's it look like? He pulled on me. End of story, his story.” Rollo gave him a sharp look. “Call that wagon."
Kenny clicked the talk button on his scanner. “Shots fired, shots fired; Avon and Beech; man down; need medical examiner. Lock me down. Need crime scene ASAP and tape up around the house.” He knew that by using medical examiner instead of medical assistance the sharp ones would assume the perp was dead.
Central dispatch came back, “Ten-four unit twelve; shots fired, man down, Avon and Beech, medical examiner dispatched.” There was immediate chatter on the line with other units breaking in, signaling readiness to assist.
Washington broke in, “Unit forty-seven en route to assist. Tape off the area. Dispatch, notify CID."
Central responded, “Ten-four. Unit forty-seven en route to scene received. CID notified."
Kenny read the hesitation on the other end, knowing Washington wanted to know how in the hell they'd wound up out of their territory with shots fired and a dead man, but since everything was recorded, Sarge was smart enough not to ask.
Kenny had turned away during the call and now, as he turned back, saw Rollo's hand coming out of the dead man's jacket pocket. “You get an ID yet,” he asked.
Rollo held up a gloved hand holding a wallet. “Like I figured, a punk.” He stood, giving Kenny a hard look. “You saw it all. His running was probable cause. He reached. I got him first. Piece with his prints on it and all.” His eyes flicked to the chest of drawers. “Once he was down, we did a quick search.” He held out his hand, which had a couple of small plastic bags of white powder. “Looks like H to me. Guy's a peddler."
Kenny knew what was happening. Rollo was feeding him the party line, making sure when statements were made, the same message would get taken down no matter who was doing the talking. He nodded. “Way it was."
Rollo smiled. “Way it was."
He took the wallet from Rollo's hand and pulled out the driver's license. Juarez Jones, age twenty, same widow's peak and thin black mustache as the stiff on the floor. No earring in the driver's license picture, but the tattoo on his neck was there. He thought about the three shots: bam, pause, bam, bam. Jones here has one in him, he'd be on the floor, no reason for the other two. Unless the first one wasn't a stopper, and Jones was bringing the piece up on Rollo. Could be. Cannon Rollo used, though, stop an elephant. He said, “Funny, he should make a turn, bolt into this here bedroom, instead of going straight through, hoofing it out the back."
Rollo's eyes narrowed and he cocked his head to one side, “Yeah. Must've heard you out there, covering. Smart of you to point that out. Probably figured he'd dive through the window. You and me, we'd be holding vapor. That's the thing, these guys, they're not smart, but trap ‘em, they're like rats, figure some way to get out."
Again, feeding him his lines, covering bases, knowing Kenny could not have been more than halfway to the back when the shots were fired. Now thinking, guy's running, why'd he turn to take the lead? Why not just keep going for the window? “This guy, you know him?"
Rollo gave him one of those hard looks with his eyes narrowed, but Kenny could see the hint of a smile force its way onto his face. “What you talking?"
"Out of our territory, Mex guy, initials, J.J., earrings, tattoos, seems like I heard about this guy somewhere."
"You're thinking too hard."
The backup units wailed their way to the curb, and Rollo moved to the front of the house. Kenny flipped through Jones's wallet. A little plastic sleeve held a picture of a wide-eyed sixteen-year-old beauty-to-be, looking as good in this one as she had in the other. Sloppy of Rollo to leave it there. Not like him. He fished the photo out of the sleeve, put it in his pocket, and tossed the wallet back on J. J.'s body. He could hear Rollo out front telling it like it was. Almost. Street justice, he thought, and reached under the chest of drawers, fished out the H&R snub-nosed thirty-two, and slipped it into the place between his belt and the small of his back, covered the piece with his jacket, thinking, Sorry, Rollo, got to be consequences.
Copyright (c) 2007 Frank T. Wydra
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REEL CRIME by Steve Hockensmith
In the new thriller Death Sentence (opening August 31), an average Joe (Kevin Bacon) becomes a gun-toting vigilante after criminals brutally murder one of his loved ones.
If that sounds a lot like the seminal seventies revenge flick Death Wish, there's a good reason. Like Death Wish, Death Sentence is based on a novel by Brian Garfield. And not only was the novel Death Sentence written as a sequel to Death Wish, it represented something much more, as far as Garfield was conce
rned: atonement.
* * * *
Brian Garfield
* * * *
"It was penance for the movie,” Garfield says. “The point of Death Wish was supposed to be that vigilantism doesn't work. It's not a solution, it's just another problem. But then the film came out, and it was amazing the way people reacted to it. There were people standing up on their seats in the theaters, yelling, ‘Yeah! Kill that mother!’”
While the film Death Wish stuck close to the plotline of Garfield's novel, Garfield's point was obviously lost in translation. But now with Death Sentence, the opposite is true: The story's been changed considerably, but Garfield thinks the message is right on target.
That hews a lot closer to the Death Wish adaptation that almost got the green light three-plus decades ago. The film was originally intended to be a black-and-white psychodrama helmed by directing heavyweight Sidney Lumet (Network, Dog Day Afternoon) and starring an actor who would never have been mistaken for an action hero: Jack Lemmon. But when Charles Bronson took over the lead role, everything changed—and a franchise was born.
"I think I saw all of number two, and after that I was too disgusted [to watch any more], so I've just seen bits and pieces of the others,” Garfield says of the four Death Wish sequels that were made between 1982 and 1994. “I had only one thing to do with them, and that was that I had to threaten to sue the producers to get paid."
* * * *
Kevin Bacon in Death Sentence. (c) HPE Rights, Inc.; photo by Jim Bridges
* * * *
Fortunately, Garfield's had a decidedly cozier relationship with the producers behind Death Sentence. In fact, he penned the first few drafts of the screenplay himself. And though writer Ian Mackenzie Jeffers ended up with solo script credit, Garfield's not complaining.
"They didn't use anything of mine except the original idea,” says the novelist (who, as of press time, had yet to see a cut of the film). “But the shooting script reads really well. I'd be happy to put my name on it, but it wasn't mine."
Garfield also gives his stamp of approval to the film's director ... even though friends warned him that his already dark, bloody tale was about to become a lot darker and a lot bloodier.
* * * *
Charles Bronson
* * * *
Death Sentence director James Wan is best known as the wunderkind behind the brutal Saw films, in which a sadistic kidnapper uses fiendish contraptions to test, torture, and kill his captives. Wan directed and cowrote the first Saw movie when he was just twenty-six, and he's served as executive producer on two (soon to be three) sequels.
"Everybody kept telling me Saw is this gory, violent, awful film, but I didn't find it that way,” Garfield says. “I find it surprisingly restrained compared to a lot of the chainsaw things that tend to dominate [the suspense/horror] genre. I thought it was quite an intelligent movie, actually. It was not plausible, but it kept you on the edge of your seat."
* * * *
James Wan and Cary Elwes on the set of Saw. (c) Lions Gate Films
* * * *
Garfield certainly has more faith in Wan than he did in Death Wish director Michael Winner. He calls Winner's approach “sloppy” and says he regrets that the 1974 film wasn't “more responsible."
Which probably explains why Garfield later took matters into his own hands when one of his favorite books was turned into a movie: He coscripted and produced the 1980 spy caper Hopscotch (based on his Edgar-winning novel of the same name). The resulting film—memorably starring a Golden Globe-nominated Walter Matthau as a curmudgeonly CIA agent out to embarrass his paper-pushing superiors—was a hit with critics and moviegoers alike. But not every adaptation turned out so well.
"Death Wish made me bankable, so I started selling movies left and right,” recalls Garfield (who wrote Westerns under a number of different names before hitting it big in the crime genre). “And some of them weren't very good."
Garfield's Western The Last Hard Men became a Sam Peckinpah-style exercise in ultra violence, for instance, while his suspense novel Necessity was the basis for a CBS movie of the week, starring master thespian Loni Anderson. (It wasn't just Garfield's books that made the jump to the screen, by the way: His short story “Scrimshaw” was turned into a 1985 episode of the syndicated series Tales of the Unexpected ... after first appearing in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine.)
Death Wish made me bankable, so I started selling movies left and right."
In 1987, Garfield had one more modest success as a mini movie mogul: He produced the microbudgeted thriller The Stepfather, which won a cult following (and spawned two sequels), thanks largely to a mesmerizing performance by Terry O'Quinn (Lost) as a very bad dad. (The twisty script by Garfield pal—and living legend—Donald E. Westlake certainly didn't hurt.)
But as the eighties wound down, Garfield found himself losing interest in Tinseltown.
"It was fun [producing movies], but I've got to say that writing books is much more satisfying in the long run,” he says. “A film belongs to the two or three hundred people who made it. They all own a little piece of it. But a book—that's all yours."
* * * *
Not that Garfield was anxious to get back to churning out page-turning novels. From the late eighties on, he devoted himself largely to environmental causes and research-heavy nonfiction projects. His 1989 book Manifest Destiny explored Theodore Roosevelt's years as a young cattle rancher (and might soon become a TV miniseries starring Steve “Sahara” Zahn as Teddy, if all goes according to plan.) And this spring saw the publication of The Meinertzhagen Mystery, Garfield's biography of the flamboyant English scientist, soldier, spy, and compulsive liar who helped inspire Ian Fleming's 007.
That last project required ten years of research in locations around the world. So Garfield can be forgiven for taking it easy these days. He's currently working on two new books, but neither one is likely to be as exhaustive—or exhausting—as the Meinertzhagen bio. One's a thriller he says he can write “off the top of my head.” The other ... well, that one's a little harder to pin down.
"It's ... I don't know what to call it,” admits the sixty-eight-year-old author, who splits his time between homes in Los Angeles and Santa Fe. “'Family memoir’ is the phrase that comes to mind. It's not about me. It's about my mother, father, uncles. They lived in a fascinating time among fascinating people. My mother was an artist, for example—a protégé of Georgia O'Keefe's. And I'm the only member of that group still alive, so I should probably put this down on paper while I can."
Copyright (c) 2007 Steve Hockensmith
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TOO COLD A TRAIL by Birney Dibble
* * * *
Tim Foley
* * * *
At first the young lady's suggestion didn't make much sense. She wanted Detective Michael Cellini to convince his chief to reopen a murder case that had been closed—unsolved—fifty years ago. He said as much to her.
"But, Detective Cellini, she died a Jane Doe back in the mid fifties! Think of the advances in detection since then. Like facial reconstruction. Like DNA testing. Like, oh, I know I'm preaching to the choir when I say that..."
They'd been talking for half an hour. Her name was Nancy Lentz. She was a newspaper reporter with a strong interest in local history. She was also a member of a group that went to cemeteries to reenact the highlights of the life of the deceased. They called the short skit “Meet the Spirits.” Recently she had gone up to Forest Hill, the big cemetery that overlooks Half Moon Lake in the middle of the city of Eau Claire, to celebrate and participate in the reenactment of the life of a young woman doctor. Near the new grave she spotted a small headstone with this inscription:
JANE DOE
APRIL 1955
AGE ABOUT 20 YEARS
She was intrigued. Back in her newspaper's morgue (dead newspapers, not people), in just a matter of minutes she found the story in a stack of yellowed newspapers.
Two high
school boys had found her body. It was a warm Saturday in late May. They had ridden their bikes down an old dirt tote road that had been bulldozed to log the mixed pine and popple trees. They parked their bikes where the road ended near the Chippewa River and fished for a couple of hours. About noon they returned to their bikes, got their brown bag lunches from their backpacks, found a couple of stumps to sit on, and ate their lunches. After lunch one of them walked into the woods a short distance to relieve himself and almost stumbled over the body.
Dr. Ralph Regent, the Sacred Heart Hospital pathologist who did the autopsy, informed the police that she had been dead about a week and was almost certainly still alive when she was dumped. Her skull, left arm, and several ribs were fractured. Her body was blackened from multiple bruises. She was 5-foot-3 and weighed 104 pounds. She was about twenty years old. Her hair was strawberry blond. She was naked and wore no jewelry.
Animals had eaten so much of her face that her own mother wouldn't have been able to identify her. And her fingers had been so chewed on that no fingerprints could be taken. Dental records, even if they could be found, would be of no help because she had never had any cavities filled. In her hair she had three bobby pins that she could have bought in any one of thousands of stores in the country. And that was it, as far as identification was concerned.
There was all kinds of stuff found near the body. People had just taken their junk on a dark night and dumped it at the end of the tote road, rather than pay to have it carted away or to take it to a landfill. There were bottles, a smashed bicycle, an old sofa, a rusted toolbox filled with rusted tools, a headlamp, an old-fashioned icebox, a more modern but obviously nonworking refrigerator, several mattresses with holes where mice lived or borrowed stuffing for their burrows. And on and on and on. But nothing that came close to being a clue to the girl's murderer.
Murders in the area in the mid fifties weren't all that common; the story was front page news there and across the state. Some kind soul sent a bouquet of red gladioli with a note, “For Someone's Daughter.” No missing girls of Jane Doe's description had been reported locally, so it was assumed by the police that she'd been brought to Eau Claire from elsewhere, but there were no clues as to where that might be. The police reviewed the reports of missing girls from around the country, but none described their Jane Doe.
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