A Death in California

by Barthel, Joan;

  She got a pillow from the bedroom and lay down on the sofa, dozing lightly. She could hear Bill and Taylor talking like old friends, laughing and joking as they cleared the table. Bill was unusually talkative because he’d been drinking and because he seemed to be having such a good time. He came over to the sofa, while Taylor was in the kitchen, stacking dishes, and bent down to nuzzle her. “I love you,” he said, and Hope reached up to put her arms around his neck and give him a long, warm kiss. “It’s awfully quiet in there,” Taylor called from the kitchen in a funny, teasing voice. When he came back into the living room, he sat in the rocking chair near the fireplace where he’d sat all afternoon. Bill stirred up the fire as Hope raised her head from the pillow. “I don’t mean to rush you,” she told Taylor, “but what about your friend who’s coming into Bakersfield tonight?”

  “Oh, no problem,” Taylor said lightly. “If I’m not at the airport, she’ll just go on to the motel.”

  “You could pick her up and bring her back here,” Hope offered, but Taylor shook his head. “No, I’ll come back tomorrow.”

  Still, he showed no signs of leaving, and Hope decided that if she went into the bedroom for a nap, he might take the hint. “What time is it?” she asked Bill.

  “About ten,” he said.

  Hope got up from the sofa. “I am really beat,” she told Taylor, “and please excuse me, but I have to go to sleep now. I’ll see you tomorrow.” Taylor smiled and stood up as she left the living room and walked through the short hall into the corner bedroom, with Bill following.

  “I’m not going to bed for the night,” she told Bill. “I’m just going to take a nap. Wake me when he’s gone.”

  She unbuttoned her pink silk blouse, but she kept her clothes on as she lay down on the bed nearest the window. Bill had pulled back the bedspread, and he placed it over her. He leaned over and kissed her. “I love you,” he said. He walked around the end of the bed, turned out the light with the wall switch, and left the room, closing the door behind him. Hope fell at once into a deep, heavy, oblivious sleep.

  She came awake suddenly. The room was pitch black, but she sensed a large shape looming over her. Then something was jabbing at her mouth, trying to force her mouth open. It was cold, heavy, hard. She knew it was a gun.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Halfway across the country, a man who had never heard of Hope Masters or Bill Ashlock was working hard for them that weekend. He spent all Friday evening, when Hope and Bill were driving up to the ranch, pacing around a gym in downtown Chicago, watching a volleyball game.

  At times like that, it helped to have a sense of humor and an understanding wife, and Robert Swalwell of the Illinois State Police had both. Patricia had never complained about his work, about putting the kids to bed alone and making a pot of coffee and waiting for Bob to come home, whenever. When he was on a special case like this one, his hours were as impossible as his salary, which sometimes was stretched so thin, with a big family and a mortgage to match, that Pat had to go back to work temporarily to tide them over. Pat had been a nurse when they were first married, but she had stopped working when the babies came, five in eight years: four boys and a girl. Now that the kids were a little older, from seven to fourteen, they could manage on their own at least part of the time, with the older ones taking charge.

  Besides his sense of humor and his even-tempered wife, Bob Swalwell had two other advantages. He looked like a cop—that is, he looked the way people wanted cops to look, like Richard Boone: tall and craggy, with very light, very clear blue eyes that could turn icy cold or could crinkle quickly into a marvelous smile. Not that there was much to smile about this weekend. Bob Swalwell was involved in the very serious business of tracking a man he considered truly evil, the only truly evil person he had ever known.

  His other advantage was that he loved his work. Sometimes he was a little surprised at how much he loved being a cop, considering that it had never been his life’s ambition, not something he’d dreamed about as a boy, not a case of following in a father’s footsteps. He’d never even known his father, who’d died when Bob was six months old. Bob grew up in his grandparents’ house on the South Side of Chicago, and although his mother later married a nice man who liked the boy, Bob was restless and didn’t finish high school. He worked here and there, a little of this and a little of that, until one day, when he was working on a construction job as a pile driver, he looked around and saw men who were sixty, sixty-five years old still slugging, still sweating, still getting hurt. He decided he’d better think ahead, so he filed an application with the State Police and, a year later, got a call from them. When he reported to the Police Academy on January 1, 1959, he had a hangover, and he always was amused by the timing of a career that began the morning after New Year’s Eve.

  But it was a fine career, an honorable career, even when the work was routine. “The first year, you get a shine on that star, and you’re going to set the world right,” he recalled wryly. He worked out of a small barracks in suburban Elgin, only four men patrolling the maze of highways in and out of Chicago. Drunk drivers, speeders, a few hit-and-runs, but mostly stopping people to write a ticket or issue a warning or just give someone a hand—like the woman he saw parked in a roadside pull-off area, near a tollbooth, speaking into one of the deflector rods (a metal rod with a glistening red center) along the edge of the highway. She was bending over the rod, shouting into it: “Radar! Radar!” When Swalwell walked up to her and asked if he could help, she turned around and beamed at him. “My, you got here quickly,” she said, pleased. “I was just calling you on the radar.”

  He wanted very much to join the detective unit, but there never seemed to be an opening, so he stayed on the road, keeping regular hours, catching up with his family and with the reading he’d missed as a boy: Les Miserables, Crime and Punishment, and so forth. Sometimes when he found himself on the night shift, checking out a country gas station at two in the morning, he also found himself hoping he’d get lucky and catch someone trying to break in. “After a while, the challenge in writing a ticket is gone,” he said. But he kept his sense of humor, his sense of compassion. After a decade on the force, he was no longer starry eyed, but he wasn’t cynical, either. He still cared about people. “If a police officer doesn’t care, who the hell is going to care?” he used to say. “Life is so damned short—what do you gain by being cynical? A little compassion goes a long way, and it doesn’t cost a nickel.” He cared a lot about the men he worked with, especially one of the youngest troopers, a Swede named Sven Ljuggren, “Gus” for short. They became exceptionally close friends and sometimes rode together, although Gus was patrolling alone at 9:10 A.M. on May 26, 1969, when he stopped a car southbound on U.S. 12, because the 1968 Chevy had only one license plate.

  Ordinarily Gus would not have stopped a car for such a minor infraction, but his car had a new radio that he wanted to check out. So he waved the Chevy over to the side of the highway, pulled his car ahead of it, got out, and walked up to the driver.

  The man at the wheel was dark haired, somewhere in his thirties, very well dressed in a dark business suit, white shirt, and tie. Gus told him he was missing one license plate and that he was going to report it. The man was so pleasant and cooperative that Gus invited him to sit in the front seat of the patrol car while he called in. The man accepted Gus’s invitation.

  Gus placed the call on his radio at 9:14 A.M., giving the Chevy’s license number. Gus had no suspicion that the car was stolen; he merely wanted to see how long it would take for the call to go through and be answered. While they waited, Gus and the man chatted. The man said he was in advertising, and gave Gus his business card. Gus told the man he had just bought an interest in a marina; the man said maybe he could help advertise the new facility. When the man said he needed to get something from the Chevy, Gus thought nothing of it and remained in the police car. The man returned, opened the car door on the passenger side, and shot Gus in the head with a small, blue steel .25
caliber revolver.

  Bob Swalwell was working that day, for the first time, with the detective unit. Even on a temporary assignment, a fill-in job, he felt good in plain-clothes, a dark blue suit with a vest and a small gold lapel pin, the size of a dime, that said STATE POLICE. He was just about to go out for morning coffee at 9:18 A.M. when the radio call came. “I’ve been shot,” Gus said. He was just able to give his location on the road before his voice died away.

  When Bob Swalwell reached the scene, he was stiff with rage. Even though Gus miraculously survived—the bullet had passed through his head, entering slightly below his right ear and lodging just a half-inch under the skin by his left ear—the man had obviously shot to kill, and Swalwell took that very personally. Gus had a wife and kids, Bob had a wife and kids, so did most of the troopers—it could have been any of them. When he visited Gus in the hospital, neither of them got emotional about it; in fact, they talked very breezily. “You were lucky,” Bob told Gus. “Lucky, your ass,” Gus shot back. “If I’d been lucky he’d have missed me.” Back at the barracks, Bob Swalwell asked, urgently, to be assigned to the job of tracking down the gunman. He was so passionate in his pleading that his lieutenant agreed.

  When Gus had blacked out and lurched over sidways in the front seat, the business card the man had given him had lodged under his right leg. Swalwell started with the card:

  G. DANIEL WALKER

  AD-BIZ INK.

  From the two addresses printed on the card—740 North Rush Street, Chicago, and 803 Main Street, Geneva, Wisconsin—he worked backward, piecing together a profile of a man he’d never seen.

  G. Daniel Walker was thirty-eight years old, married, with a three-year-old son. He owned a house on Lake Geneva and he sounded like, looked like, dressed and acted like a successful advertising man, which he apparently was. He had worked for two ad agencies in Toledo, another in Chicago. Although the first agency he’d started on his own in 1965 had failed, his second venture—Ad-Biz Ink—seemed to be thriving. Yet the green Chevy he’d been driving when Gus stopped him had been stolen. Why would such a man be driving a stolen car?

  Bob Swalwell probed more, learned more, and the answer amazed him more than the question. Gerald Daniel Walker, also known as Daniel Wayne Walker and Daniel Wynne Walker, was born in Toledo, Ohio, on August 10, 1931, the only child of Virgil Walker and Irene Massie Walker. Virgil was an antiques dealer, Irene a housewife, and the boy seemed to have had a stable upbringing. He went to school and church regularly—Swalwell even came across a nun Walker had known, Sister Mavis. He served with the army in Korea. By the time he shot Gus, he had been arrested eight times, starting when he was twenty-two years old with a charge of armed robbery in Toledo. Later he was convicted of armed robbery in Miami and sentenced to ten years at the Florida State Penitentiary. He escaped, was caught, later paroled. Within two years he was convicted again of armed robbery, this time in Columbus, Ohio, and sentenced to ten to twenty-five years at the Ohio State Penitentiary.

  Everyone Swalwell questioned about Walker said the same thing: the man was a real charmer, personable and clever, a very good talker and an even better listener—a man who could charm the birds right out of the trees. The record seemed to bear this out: when he was an inmate at Ohio State, Walker had courted and married the warden’s private secretary. He was paroled in 1963 and given his final release on May 1, 1966, the year his son Drew was born, the year he started Ad-Biz Ink and began to make quite a lot of money. His income was about forty-five thousand a year when he was stealing such items as a small helicopter and a neighbor’s tent; he pitched the tent in his own back yard.

  Swalwell could only conclude that Walker robbed people and sometimes shot people for one reason: the fun of it. The thrill of it all. Some of Walker’s acquaintances said Walker had told them he’d committed the Florida robberies “for a lark” and had given the loot to charity. A camera shop owner in Arlington Heights, whom Walker had robbed, said Walker had recited poetry to him. “He just needs that little extra something to make life interesting,” Swalwell concluded. “He uses people. He could shoot you, then sit down and have lunch right beside your body and it wouldn’t faze him. He’s just a bad seed. An amoral human being.” Along with the quirky little crimes—stealing the helicopter and the tent—Swalwell found darker suggestions. A young woman living in a high-rise apartment at the Lake Point Towers in Chicago related in terror how Walker had come in unexpectedly one night, found her with another man, pulled out a gun—his favorite was the little blue steel .25—and shot the man in the head. He wrapped a towel around the man’s head to catch some of the blood, got him into his car, and drove him to O’Hare Airport, where he pushed him out of the car. “Get out of Chicago,” Walker warned the man, “and don’t ever come back.” Walker then returned to the woman’s apartment, pulled the gun again, and held it to her head. “If I ever find you with another man,” he told her, “this is what will happen.”

  Walker was married at the time, but his charm had apparently begun to fade for his wife, Edna, who worked with Swalwell and the other men on the case as they tracked Walker around Chicago. Edna was an especially good lead, because Walker wanted the child—he had a father-son passport ready, with pictures of Drew and himself. A police car followed Edna everywhere, and on at least one occasion, Walker was spotted following the police car that was following Edna. Swalwell was surer than ever that Walker was playing the game for thrills and laughter when Walker telephoned the police to tell them where he’d been and where he might be later. Cat-and-mouse. There were other bizarre moments in the three weeks Walker was loose, such as the night Swalwell and another cop drove to a house on Division Street where a friend of Walker’s lived. They searched the place, including a crawl space in the attic, where the second cop, who weighed over 250 pounds, got wedged in. All the while they struggled to get him out, they learned later, Walker was indeed hidden in that dark cranny, just an arm’s length away.

  The search for G. Daniel Walker ended on June 12, 1969, after a wild, high-speed chase through the streets of Chicago, with the Illinois State Police, the Chicago city police, the FBI, and a little old lady with a cane all taking part; she stood on the sidewalk as the sirens screamed past, gesturing with her cane—he went that-a-way! At LaBagh Woods, a forest preserve at the edge of the city, Walker ran from the car and into the woods, peeling off his clothes as he ran. The helicopter lost him then, but a swarm of policemen found him stretched out behind a log, with the gun he had shot Gus with nearby. He was arrested and charged with Attempt to Commit Murder and Aggravated Battery and, later that year, brought to trial.

  The court appointed an attorney to defend him, but Walker preferred to defend himself, which he did with such verve and skill that, for a while, the verdict seemed in serious doubt. Walker put a doctor on the stand to testify that a small round wound in Walker’s leg—a wound that Swalwell was convinced Walker had scraped and gouged himself—might have been a gunshot wound. Walker pleaded that he had shot Gus accidentally and that, in the confusion, he himself had been shot in the leg. In his summation to the jury, he stressed his heartbreak, as a father. “If you believe me, you will let me go home tonight and be with my son.” His plea was so poignant that the jury was out seven hours. But the verdict was Guilty, and on December 5, 1969, Walker was sentenced to sixteen to twenty years on the first charge, eight to ten on the second. Even though the sentences were concurrent, and even though Walker promptly filed an appeal, it was assumed that Walker would be shut up for quite a spell in the Illinois State Penitentiary at Joliet, a grim, old-time prison with high cement walls, not noted for its escape rate.

  Bob Swalwell went back to uniform, back to patrolling the roads and reading Dostoevski, but he kept hearing about Walker. Even at Joliet, the sort of place that tends to swallow men forever, Walker’s visibility was high. He was parading around the place in his customary flamboyant style, demanding that his cell be repainted, doing legal work for other inmates, filing law
suits of his own against prison officials, getting himself taken back to court time after time on one pretext or another, and, in general, as Swalwell summed it up, “driving everybody absolutely nuts.” The list of transgressions on his record grew longer and weirder, from “Lying” to “Attempting to intimidate three lieutenants” to “Having black pepper in his cell.” One of Walker’s suits charged harassment; he claimed he had been beaten, and a retinue of lawyers and reform-minded citizens began dropping in on him. One of the Legal Aid attorneys was a tall, slender young woman with long dark hair and big round glasses: Marthe Purmal, nicknamed “Marcy.”

  Swalwell considered himself a reasonably progressive cop—he approved of the Miranda law, for instance, because “it makes you do your homework”—and he agreed that prisons could surely use reforming. But he also felt that Walker was using these people, as he had used people all his life. He knew Walker’s abundance of charm and cunning, so he was not really surprised to hear on his car radio on the morning of January 31, 1973, as he was driving to work, that Walker had escaped.

  Swalwell knew that the state supreme court decision on Walker’s appeal was due that day; he knew the appeal had been denied, and he knew that Walker would have known that too. But although he wasn’t surprised, he was still furious at what Walker had done to Gus, and he was determined to put Walker back behind bars. When he got to the barracks, he asked, as he had asked more than three years before, to be assigned to the job. “It’s prison business now,” Swalwell was told. “Let the Department of Corrections handle it.”

  “It’s not just prison business,” Swalwell said. “It’s personal business. Gus is my friend.” He said it so loudly and angrily that they gave in.