Richie

by Thomas Thompson

  George seized the gun, checked to see that it was loaded, stuck it in his belt. The loose-fitting wool plaid shirt he wore covered the bulge at his middle. Wordlessly he opened the door and passed his son and descended the steps to the basement. In his mind was the notion that he could terminate the quarrel by simply getting away from Richie. And if the boy persisted, then the gun would frighten him away, even as the golden mending scissors had sent George racing from the house the week before.

  No sooner did George reach the eleventh and bottom step of the stairs than Richie burst onto the top landing. George spun around to face his son. The boy swayed in the half-light from the kitchen. George was illumined by a work light. Darkness fell between them.

  “Did you tell those cops I use dope?” shrieked Richie. Is this the most important unanswered question in his life, wondered George, or is it just his reason to explode?

  Unsteadily, Richie made his way down the steps. He never took his eyes from George, father and son locked in a painful visual embrace. When he reached the bottom, Richie looked for the first time about him. He saw an ice pick on a workbench and snatched it. He raised it in his hand and cried, “Answer me! I want an answer! Answer me!”

  George’s answer was to reach slowly inside his wool shirt and take the .38 from its hiding place and point it at his firstborn son. This would frighten him. This would send him away. In the movies of his Brooklyn youth, the antagonist always dropped his weapon and backed away at the sight of the gun.

  But Richie would not cooperate. He flung out his arms like a crucifix. “You’ve got your fucking gun,” he shouted. “Go ahead and use it!” As in a nightmare, one that an awakening would never shatter, Richie began to walk toward his father, arms outstretched, the ice pick glinting in the naked work light.

  When he was five feet away, George cocked the .38. The noise was unmistakable. Carol, who had followed Richie silently down the steps and who was now pressed in terror against a wall near her washing machine, cried out, “You two stop it! Please!”

  Richie stopped. He thrust his chest forward as if to make the target larger. And he shouted, once more, “Go ahead.… Shoot!”

  But when George did not fire, Richie dropped his arms and the ice pick fell loudly to the floor. With that, George lunged forward, grabbing his son by both shoulders and shoving him out of the way. At the same time he kicked the ice pick into a corner. Richie wrenched free from his father and rushed upstairs, falling clumsily, crying as he went, “I’m going to get the scissors!”

  Carol threw her arms around George. “Oh, my God,” she moaned. “What are we going to do?”

  “I don’t know,” said George. “Maybe he won’t come back.” He stroked her hair, but he kept his eyes locked on the top stair.

  While they waited fearfully in the cellar, George and Carol could hear Richie rummaging wildly in the kitchen directly above their heads. He pulled a drawer out too far. It crashed to the floor, utensils rattling about like hailstones on a roof.

  Within seconds, Richie reappeared at the top of the stairs, this time with a steak knife in his raised right hand. Once more he began the ceremony of descent, crying, with each step, “Shoot! Use your fucking gun!” In insane counterpoint, the family poodle, Bridget, yelped and barked behind him.

  George pushed Carol behind him and out of the way. She began to plead, desperately, hysterically, “Oh, my God, you two, please. Oh, please!”

  George’s finger trembled on the trigger he knew so well. He had fired this gun a thousand times at black and white circles on cardboard squares. He raised the gun in one last show of warning. But Richie refused to heed. He took another step.

  Images and questions swam through George’s mind. Before him were the frustrations of his life, telescoped, refusing to go away and let him be. Why had his world come to this? Why was this enemy loose in his house, an enemy he could not understand? His seed had produced a son, but where was the son? What stood before him was not the mirror image, not a son, not with his mouth a generator of hate, not with his hair tossed about by the new winds, not with his arm promising death. It did not occur to George that in this terrible moment was contained Richie’s plea for help. Reason is not always present when the finger is on a trigger.

  What God spared Abraham from committing on his son Isaac, what the makers of myth and literature could scarcely imagine, George Diener in the forty-fourth year of an unhappy life at last did.

  He fired.

  The bullet went directly into Richie’s heart, a neat, precise bull’s-eye. He slumped backward onto the stair in a sitting position. He brought his young hands to his chest and he saw his blood. He was puzzled. He stood straight up and raised the knife again. Now its handle was soaked with the life draining from him. As Carol screamed, she thought—how young he is.

  George Diener was not yet done. He fired again. All of his furies had to be slain. This time the bullet went wide, tearing past his falling son and ripping a hole in the rear wall of the lemon-colored house that had been his dream.

  Richie did not speak again. He sat down and toppled forward, down the stairs, down and down until the cold cement floor caught him.

  Grabbing Carol, George pushed her up the stairs and into the living room. He went to the telephone. He dialed the police.

  “Hello,” he said, surprised that his voice was firm. “This is George Diener, at 1903 Longfellow Avenue in East Meadow. I want to report a shooting. I … I just shot my son.”

  “Was it accidental?”

  George did not hesitate. “No. Deliberate.”

  He replaced the telephone and walked to the stair landing. In the dim light he could see his son crumpled at the foot of the stairs. Now it was his turn for the slow descent. At the bottom, he knelt beside Richie. He was not moving. George touched his throat. There was no pulse. He picked up his hand. It fell limply away.

  Slowly he pulled himself up the stairs. Once he had wanted a mountain to climb and a life at its summit. But there would never be a mountain.

  George went to Carol and dropped down beside her chair. “He’s dead,” he said. “I’ve killed our son. Can you ever forgive me?”

  Then they sat and cried and waited until the police siren shattered the winter stillness of Longfellow Avenue.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  The first policeman to enter the house crept in like a hunter with his hand on his gun. George rose to meet him, putting on an expression to show there was no longer danger within.

  “Where’s the gun?” said the officer. It seemed to Carol that a more proper concern would have been, where is the victim?

  “I put it away,” answered George. “Would you go down and look at our son?”

  Immediately the officer took out handcuffs, pulled George’s arms behind him, and snapped them shut. George cooperated fully, even though the cuffs were tight and bit painfully into his wrists. I don’t mind this, he kept reassuring himself. Criminals deserve it. But the police don’t understand what happened here. They’ll take off the cuffs as soon as they hear the truth.

  Now another policeman rushed in. Then there were ten. Soon there seemed, to Carol, that hundreds of men filled her living room. She heard the constant sound of doors slamming, of police radios crackling in her driveway. She saw the stark white light of spots bathing her house.

  One officer decided that George was not manacled securely enough. He snapped a second pair of cuffs on the man who had shot his son.

  Carol heard the sound of feet hurrying up and down the basement stairs. To one of the men who came up, she asked, “How is he?” For a few moments she had had the idea that perhaps Richie was not dead.

  The young detective shrugged. “What can I tell you?” he said, but that was enough.

  A deputy medical examiner named Dr. Benjamin Beck arrived and formally pronounced George Richard Diener, age seventeen years and eight months, dead at 6:30 P.M. on the evening of February 27, 1972. He wrote on his notepad:

  Young white male w
as discovered lying in supine position at the foot of basement steps, clad in dark blue dungarees and dark blue turtleneck cotton shirt. Shirt was stained with blood over left chest. Blood smears over left upper arm. Upon lifting shirt, there was an oval penetrating wound in left chest representing entrance wound. An apparent exit wound on posterior chest below left scapula.

  When the examiner was done, Richie’s body was put into a canvas sack, a drawstring tightened at the neck, and carried out the kitchen door. Carol was spared the sight of her son leaving her home for the last time.

  Outside, the crowd, gathering rapidly, could not tell who was in the sack. Rumors had it that Richie shot his father. As word spread across East Meadow that night, no one seemed sure exactly who shot whom. The first local radio report confused the matter further, since the victim was identified as “George Richard Diener,” and no one knew Richie’s first name was the same as his father’s.

  Brick Pavall had been waiting on the corner for his friend, but when Richie did not appear, and the commotion began, he went to the house. Upon seeing so many of his nemeses—cops—about, he did not stay long enough for information.

  Sean O’Hara also went to pick up Richie at six, as they had arranged, but all he found were police and searchlights. He went to the front door and asked an officer, “Can I see Richard Diener?”

  “No.”

  “What happened?”

  “Everything’s under control.” The cop turned away.

  Sean slipped back into the crowd across the street to elicit information, but all he could learn was that a body had been brought out in a sack. He spent the rest of the night searching East Meadow, fearful that Richie had shot his father, that Richie had run away, that Richie was hiding somewhere in bitterly cold flight. When Mrs. O’Hara heard the news, she rushed into her garage, thinking that Richie might be hiding in one of their three cars.

  At the police station, George was mugged, printed, and searched. The procedure was brusque and humiliating. Told to strip, he stood naked before the police whose defense of law and order he so ardently supported. He had to bend over and spread the cheeks of his anus while someone saw to satisfaction that no weapon was concealed therein.

  All of his property was taken from him, even a piece of paper towel he had been using to wipe his tears away. It would be returned, they said: his money, keys, the piece of paper towel.

  Permitted at last to put on his trousers, minus the belt, George was taken in handcuffs to a homicide officer where he was advised of his constitutional rights and told that he did not have to make a statement.

  “But I want to give a statement,” George said. “I always told Richie and those friends of his that if a person is innocent, he has nothing to hide. The law and the police will protect you.”

  In detail, George took the detectives over the story of his life, and of his years with Richie. He told everything he could remember leading up to the moment when Richie stood at the top of the stairs. He said he was certain that drugs had altered his son’s personality and turned him mad.

  Q.

  Was your son high today when he came down the stairs?

  A.

  Today he was definitely high. He told his mother—when I came up the first time and heard the crash, he was high. He said he had been down into his room, where he took a few Seconals.

  Q.

  Did he appear wobbly as he came down the stairs?

  A.

  I guess, I would say slightly wobbly, swaying.

  Q.

  Do you feel that you could have disarmed him?

  A.

  I was scared to death of him.

  Q.

  Well, wasn’t he in such a condition when he had the ice pick that the ice pick flew out of his hand?

  A.

  Yes.

  Q.

  Then what about the knife? What did you feel?

  A.

  I don’t know. If I thought I could have disarmed him … I definitely didn’t think I could disarm him, because if I thought I could have disarmed him, I would have tried without shooting him. But the thought of my dying and leaving him to be the head of my household and telling my wife and other son what to do was something I really couldn’t—

  Q.

  But when you fired, you fired right at his chest?

  A.

  Yes. I didn’t shoot to wound him. All these things went through my mind, such as, if you shoot to wound him, what happens if you cripple him? Then you’ve got a mad animal on your hands. I felt I had to do what I did.

  Q.

  Is there anything else you want to put on the record?

  A.

  If there was any way in the world around what I did, I would have taken it.

  Q.

  Okay. Thanks very much, Mr. Deiner.

  Carol was not permitted to see her husband until almost midnight, after the detective had finished questioning him. She had spent the hours at her home after George was taken away, making coffee for the investigating officers. Then she went to the police station and sat on a hard bench outside the homicide office. June Marck took a detective aside and warned that Carol had had a heart condition since childhood, that she must be treated gently or face the possibility of an attack.

  When George was led out, Carol went to him. They embraced. George held her tightly. “I’m sorry,” he said. “There was no other way.”

  Carol bit her lip. She wanted to be strong at this moment in support of her husband. “I know.… If I hadn’t been home when it happened, I might have blamed you,” she said. “I would have hated you. I would have taken Richard’s side, like I usually did.”

  She had one piece of news for George. Her brother-in-law, Joe, was getting in touch with an attorney, the same one who had been engaged to handle Richie’s assault charge from the Walgreens incident.

  As they talked, policemen hovered near watching them, eyeing his reaction to her, and her reaction to him. George then realized he was still a prisoner, despite the story he had told, despite the apparently sympathetic attitude of the homicide officers. “I can’t get out of here tonight?” he said.

  Carol shook her head. The lawyer was trying to arrange bail the next morning.

  The holding cell was at least private, one used for murder suspects. It consisted of a toilet bowl with no seat, a sink, and a slab of wood on which to sleep. There was no mattress or bedcovers. George lay on the board without closing his eyes through the hours that seemed like years. Sometime during the night black coffee and a hard doughnut were given to him, but his mouth was dry and he could not swallow. He wept, but his agony was not heard. In the next cell, a prisoner let out war whoops that did not stop. Down the row another prisoner chanted curses almost melodiously, and still another cleared his throat constantly, in a manner that sounded eerily like Richie’s.

  The next morning at five, perhaps earlier, perhaps later, for George’s watch had been taken from him, another cup of coffee and a piece of store cake wrapped in cellophane were brought to his cell. At nine, guards came for him, snapped on the handcuffs, and moved him efficiently into a police wagon.

  Unshaven and red-eyed, his heart pounding, George looked at his companions on the ride to the courthouse. They were mostly black, loud men who had taken this ride before and who insisted they were not afraid of what lay ahead. “I ain’t scared,” said one. “They can’t do a thing to me.” Some found merriment in the trip, one crying out, every time the driver made a turn or hit the brake, “Shit, man, can’t you drive this mother?” One nudged George and started to speak, but he abruptly stopped when the white man’s face showed that he felt no kinship. “I guess I looked too straight,” said George to Carol when he told her of the ride.

  Placed in another holding cell, George waited with fifteen prisoners. Their talk was of grand auto theft and burglary and felonious assault. Curiously, thought George, none mentioned murder.

  A deputy at the barred door spoke to George routinely. “Who did you kn
ock off?” he said, glancing at the clipboard and noticing “murder” beside the name.

  “My son,” said George.

  The deputy turned his head away.

  “I shouldn’t have answered him,” said George later. “But look what happens when I ignore somebody. I ignored Richie and he’s dead.”

  The first judge refused to set bail, accepting only George’s plea of not guilty of first-degree murder by reason of self-defense. He pronounced the crime of serious enough nature for George to remain incarcerated until the grand jury took action. Hearing this, George wanted to cry out that he could not endure another night in the tiny cell, but his lawyer raised his hand to silence him.

  Later that afternoon, the lawyer, Martin Massell, took his plea for George’s release to another court. More eloquent this time, he called the killing “a new American tragedy.” He said the death was the final act of a tragedy that had been played for years. The judge set bail for $50,000.

  One of George’s fellow employees from the food company stepped forward immediately with the money. “This was not a sudden act,” said George’s friend. “George Diener is a decent and honorable man. His company thinks highly enough of him to write him a blank check, whatever it takes to bail him out.”

  Carol’s brother-in-law, Joe Marck, the mortician, went to the Nassau County medical examiner’s office to identify his nephew. He waited in the “Family Room” while a freight elevator groaned up from the basement autopsy area. Red drapes were parted and Joe glanced through the mesh glass window. He nodded.

  The autopsy report would show that large amounts of pentobarbital and secobarbital were present in Richie’s blood, brain, kidney, and liver, with a trace of secobarbital in the stomach. It was estimated that he had taken a walloping dose of the drugs a few hours before his death, a dose at least six times as large as that given for therapeutic purposes, perhaps as many as six to ten pills, enough, surely, to rip away the human brain’s violence barrier.