A Death in California

by Barthel, Joan;

  Walker kept smiling as the room swarmed with men.

  Jim Brown took his wallets. “How much money do you have?”

  Walker smiled. “One hundred eighty-six dollars and thirty-three cents.”

  Jim Brown made a careful count: nine twenty-dollar bills; five singles; three quarters, four dimes, three nickels, three pennies. One hundred eighty-six dollars and thirty-three cents.

  The black wallet contained nine of Bill Ashlock’s credit cards, his driver’s license, his pilot’s license, two pictures of his daughters, three pictures of Hope Masters, Bill’s library card, a telephone credit card, and two pictures of Sandi.

  The brown wallet contained Taylor Wright’s credit cards, his Blue Cross card, his Eagle Scout Association card, and a Michigan driver’s license with Taylor Wright’s name and Walker’s photograph.

  Suddenly, in the midst of the swarming activity, Swalwell threw himself down on the bed and grinned at Walker. There was no humor in the grin; Parker thought it was kind of scary.

  “You no good son of a bitch,” Swalwell rasped. “I’m going to sleep good tonight.”

  Before anybody slept, though, there was a lot to do—searching, photographing, getting Walker behind bars. Brown and Parker sat in the back seat with Walker squeezed tightly between them. Officer Aliano sat in front, driving his own car.

  Nobody talked. Walker had a fixed, half-smile on his face. At the North Hollywood station he was booked, then stripped and photographed in the nude, front view. Swalwell got a copy of the picture to take home for Gus.

  Even when they all got back to the Mayfair, very late, they didn’t sleep right away. Everybody had bought a bottle. They talked about catching Walker.

  In many ways, of course, many people caught Walker. Hope’s team; secretaries; hotel clerks—a whole string of people had been involved. By keeping him on the telephone, Hope caught Walker. “I could tell it was coming,” she told Tom Breslin, “in the last day or two, and I think he knew it, too. His voice was different, toward the end, kind of like, come and get me, here I am. He was like a moth, coming closer and closer around the flame.”

  In one way, Walker himself caught Walker.

  Brown and Parker always insisted Swalwell caught Walker. It was hard to explain, they said, but they felt it, especially early Tuesday morning when they drove him to the airport for an 8:00 A.M. flight to Chicago. They felt very close to the man. None of them said so in the car, of course; they laughed a lot, especially about the souvenir Swalwell was taking to Gus.

  But for a long time afterward, Brown and Parker talked about how Swalwell had caught Walker. Not through any one specific thing, really. Not just because he could describe Walker so well, or because he had given them so much background; not just because Swalwell was so attuned to Walker’s habits, his way of thinking. It was harder to explain than that. It was like Swalwell wanted so desperately to catch Walker that he made them all feel that way, and made them know they would catch Walker, that there was no way in the world he would get away from them. Which is what had happened, though it was hard to explain, and finally, Parker could only say it in terms of his farm boyhood: “Without Swalwell, we’d have been suckin’ hind tit.”

  PART III

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  “Where are you now?”

  “I’m standing out in the hallway where it says AFTER YOU’RE BOOKED, ASK FOR YOUR PHONE CALL.”

  “Are you in Porterville or Visalia?”

  “Visalia.”

  “Well, Visalia’s a lot better than Porterville.”

  “We’ll see. Well, you know where I am, so I’ll expect to start getting a letter from time to time.”

  “You will. When I’m told it’s all right.”

  “I understand that.”

  “My attorneys apparently can’t handle us both. There’s a conflict of interest or something.”

  “Oh, I’m sure they can find somebody else to come in on the case. Work it out to your best interests.”

  “And to yours.”

  “I don’t have any anymore. I played the game and lost.”

  “I’ll be thinking about you.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Take care, and—and I’m sorry this whole thing has happened.”

  “That’s okay. Give the kids a kiss.”

  “I will.”

  “Did Gene put somebody in the house with you today?”

  “Well, they’ve been kind of watching me, off and on.”

  “I suggested they watch you a little more.”

  “Why? Because of the contract thing?”

  “Because of me being here.”

  “You mean because you’re there and you can’t watch me?”

  “Right.”

  “Well, I—I’m sure they’re providing protection for me here.”

  “Okay.”

  “And I appreciate the fact that you stuck this out and did not leave me in such a bad spot. God, it’s just bad for everybody.”

  “I should have cut tail, shouldn’t I?”

  “I guess you should have.”

  “But that would have left you high and dry.”

  “I know.”

  “Hey, did you brush your teeth?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Oh, and I thought I was going to get a big one.”

  “I haven’t been able to kiss good night, except for the kids, and they don’t care.”

  “Okay, I’m gonna let you go now. Give me a little one?”

  Walker made a kissing sound into the phone. Hope made a kissing sound back.

  At the North Hollywood station, Walker had refused to say anything, even to give his name. He asked to call his attorney and, at 1:10 Sunday afternoon, he called Van. When no one answered, he called Gene Tinch. Gene drove out to North Hollywood and spent the afternoon with him.

  Although Walker looked a little disheveled from the experiences of the day, Gene was impressed. “Articulate, well-educated, and one hell of a con man,” Gene reported. Walker seemed very confident, very much in control, almost nonchalant as he talked again of events at the ranch; it seemed to Gene that Walker was virtually confessing to the crime. He insisted that Tom Masters had bought the contract on Hope, that he’d met Tom at the Beverly Hilton to make arrangements. Walker said his instructions had included taking dope to the ranch and strewing it around.

  Walker identified the gun that had been taken from him when he was arrested as the gun used to kill Bill Ashlock and Richard Crane and two other people. But he never said he’d used it. He told Gene he’d been in Vail, Colorado, in Reno and San Francisco, and in general had been “moving around pretty fast,” stashing various cars in various places. He especially wanted to know from Gene whether the car with the rifle and the scope had been discovered yet.

  Almost as an aside, he said that once, when the police had come to the Sheraton-Universal and knocked at his door, he’d been in the room.

  Walker said that when Hope and her family furnished him with an attorney, he would lay the whole story out to the police and clear her.

  “If you’re going to lay it out, you have to lay it all out, and lay it out straight,” Gene told him. “If you don’t—if you put fantasy into the story—Hope would be better off if you kept quiet.”

  Walker asked Gene to ask Hope to write to him.

  “How come you let her live?” Gene asked. “The smart thing to do, if you have a contract, would be to kill her and leave, right?”

  Walker couldn’t seem to explain that.

  Because Walker was not in the Thunderbird when he was arrested, the car was impounded until a search warrant could be issued. At 7:30 Monday evening, Judge Armand Arabian of the Los Angeles Municipal Court issued a warrant based on three police affidavits. Detective Ken Pollock signed his affidavit; Gene Parker and Bob Swalwell were orally sworn. Judge Arabian witnessed the search, along with Assistant State’s Attorney John Bernardi.

  The search and the listing of the items—eleven pages wo
rth—took all evening, until 11:30 P.M. The car was overflowing. Along with pipes and tobacco, matches and towels and soap from various hotels, assorted car keys and hotel room keys, sunglasses, newspapers, magazines—Penthouse, Madison Avenue, Psychology Today—road maps, cigars, and jelly beans, there were items of special interest. A four-page typed affidavit, undated and unsigned, matched the affidavit Taylor had read on the tape.

  A brown briefcase in the front seat contained Bill Ashlock’s W-2 form for 1972, a folder with pictures of Hope Masters, and a statement to Bill Ashlock from Superior Moving and Storage Company. Eight loose pages in the front seat were titled “Extradition in International Law.”

  A suitcase in the back seat contained several turtleneck sweaters, a ski cap, a pair of red ski gloves, shirts, ties, belts, and a paperback book, The Day of the Jackal.

  Robert Pietrusiak’s gray Smith-Corona electric portable typewriter, his Yashica camera, and a Winchester rifle—thirty-ought-six—with scope, were found in the trunk, along with various Pietrusiak credit cards, Larry Burbage’s business cards, a dictionary, a Panasonic tape recorder, a traveling iron, a pair of field glasses, and two sets of Illinois license plates.

  In a brown shaving kit in a brown leather suit bag, the police found shaving gear, a screwdriver, razors, tweezers, a scissors, and, in a brown envelope, a gold ring with the initials W.T.A.

  A black-and-red cardboard box in the trunk contained assorted car rental forms and miscellaneous papers, including Mutual of Omaha business cards and a violation notice issued to the yellow Ambassador for parking by a fire hydrant on February 21, 1973.

  A garment bag, which Swalwell called “a brown clothes closet,” contained new clothes with Bullock’s Wilshire labels—a sport coat, a beige suit, and a sport shirt—along with boots, ties, more turtlenecks, another paperback, Going for Mr. Big, and one pair of surgical gloves.

  Hope weighed seventy-seven pounds when she and her children moved out of her mother’s house, at the end of the week, and went home to the Drive. Her hands shook so that she could hardly hold a coffee cup. When Tom Breslin told her that shaking hands could make her look guilty in court, she got a prescription for Stelazine.

  Martha had cleaned the house thoroughly before she left, a day or two after Hope went down the hill, Taylor following. Martha had not returned and, almost at once, the house was littered with dirty laundry and empty pizza boxes. Hope didn’t have the strength, she told her mother, to drive to the market and push a shopping cart around, then come home and cook and clean, so Honey sent up another young Mexican girl. The new maid didn’t drive, though, which meant she couldn’t do the marketing, and she didn’t speak English, which meant she couldn’t control the children. She could pick up around the house, and she could cook, in a very limited sense, so Hope called a small grocery store in Beverly Hills—very expensive, but they delivered—for a huge amount of hamburger and for days everybody ate tacos.

  Even with the maid around, and the children clamoring, Hope was scared. When she asked Van to hire a private guard, he refused, and when she asked him to withdraw some of the money that was legally hers, he refused again. “If you use that money now, you’ll just come to me for something else later,” Van explained. Hope resented his attitude, and when she thought of her mother’s three thousand dollar-a-month personal allowance, as she often did, she resented her mother, too. She felt deserted and terribly alone—a cold, empty, desolate feeling that she tried to explain to Tom Breslin.

  “Have a friend come stay with you,” Tom suggested. “Just be sure it’s a girlfriend.”

  “I don’t have any girlfriends,” Hope said.

  Hope had already talked with her team about her boyfriends. Gene and Ned had taken advantage of the long drive to Springville and back, the day they’d gone up to inspect the ranch, to discuss the matter. She had seen through their discretion. She felt that they were delicately and charmingly pumping her to find out how many men she’d been sleeping with. “You got a right to a normal sex life, Hopie,” Gene said, “but we don’t want fifty guys walking into court at the last minute.” When Hope listed the men—Tom Masters, Michael, Lionel, and Bill—they didn’t seem to believe her. “I’m sorry if I haven’t lived up to your expectations,” Hope had told them. “What can I say? That’s it.”

  Now, when Hope talked with them again, they decided she could have a man stay with her part time.

  So Lionel came back to the Drive. He did the marketing and the cooking; he sang old English ballads to the children and, when they’d fallen asleep, he sat with Hope on the sofa, held her in his arms, and told her everything was going to be all right.

  At eleven o’clock, when Lionel had to leave, Hope usually went to bed right away, but she almost never slept through the night. She had put Gene Tinch’s home phone number on her wall list of numbers, just under the number for the paramedics, and she often called him at 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning even though he could never figure out what she wanted, exactly. Gene came by now and then, sometimes just to talk, to try to keep her spirits up, sometimes with a specific purpose. He had told her to look around her house carefully, as soon as she had settled back in.

  “If there’s anything that doesn’t belong to you, get it together and we’ll get it out of there,” Gene told her. When she reported an assortment of items, Gene told Paul O’Steen of the LAPD, who came by to pick them up.

  Hope had found the calculator and the hot comb Walker had given Keith, men’s clothing in extra-large sizes from the suitcase Walker had brought in Monday night, and an unusual item, something she’d never seen before, among the china on the shelf in the living room. It was a small gold chain, a medallion with the initials T.O.W. III, so small it could nestle at the bottom of a teacup.

  Hope’s notion that Walker’s capture would clear her and free her, always a tenuous notion at best, was quickly dispelled, starting with an article in the Tulare Advance-Register and Times after Walker’s arrest. “Both are charged with the murder, but officials haven’t commented on which of the pair they believe fired a small caliber gun into Ashlock’s head.” Not even the publication of large portions of Walker’s second tape, the tape proclaiming her innocence, seemed to help. When it was mysteriously leaked to the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner and carried on the front page under a banner headline, Jim Heusdens, the prosecutor, denounced the leak, and a local paper reported that although sheriff’s investigators declined comment on the tapes, they did say “they didn’t consider them proof of either defendant’s innocence.”

  Hope had always hated Porterville—“a dumpy, miserable little town”—and since the day Jim Heusdens had argued so vehemently in the justice court that she be held without bail, he had become the epitome of all she disliked. She thought he was biased, ignorant, and provincial, a man with a perpetual sneer and an incurably closed mind. He, in turn, thought she was an arrogant little snip, a jet-set socialite given to drugs and drinking, with a lot of money and a lot of rich friends and, moreover, he thought she was guilty.

  With his flamboyant manner and his habit of saying, or shouting, whatever was on his mind (his favorite term for people he disliked was “you weasel”), Jim Heusdens would have been noticed anywhere; in tiny Porterville, he was an immense presence. Blunt and outspoken, he liked telling people off almost as much as he liked being told off. When Jim Brown, who sometimes assisted the D.A. in court, once told him, “You’re the most obnoxious man I ever met,” Heusdens laughed louder than anybody.

  Like so many of the principals in the case, he’d never planned to do what he was doing. He had dropped out of high school in his hometown—Racine, Wisconsin—where his family had already dropped the “von” from the family name, because “von” didn’t really mean anything, Heusdens said; his family was “just a bunch of renegades that got run out of Holland, anyway.” He enlisted in the navy and, afterward, moved to California to work for an uncle who had a refrigeration supply business in Porterville. For a while he worked as a TV repair
man, then he joined the local police force.

  At first he’d found it hard to adjust from citizen to cop; he recalled his reluctance, early on, to take a man into custody on Christmas Day. But over the years, as he moved from patrolman to lieutenant, his attitude had shifted. “After seventeen years, hell, I could have locked up my own mother on Christmas Day,” Heusdens declared. He opposed the Miranda and Escobedo rulings.

  At the time he prosecuted Hope Masters, he was no longer a town cop, of course. In 1969, when his friend George Carter had said, “Let’s go to law school,” Heusdens had assented, though he said he never knew quite why. He just did. After he passed a college equivalency test, he enrolled at Humphreys, a law school in Fresno. It had been a long grind, just as it had been for Carter—working all day, then making the one hundred fifty-mile roundtrip three nights a week. Heusdens passed the bar on his first try, and went to work in the District Attorney’s office, where he was earning $904 a month, less than he’d been making as a policeman.

  But he loved it. From his very first prosecution—a drunk driving case down in Pixley—he was caught up in the drama and tension of the courtroom, matching wits and words. He had no use for routine legal work—“the same crap all day long; when you write a will, only the names are different. The courtroom is where it’s at!” Heusdens exclaimed. “Unless the evidence is really overwhelming, I finally believe that whoever puts on the best show in a jury trial will win. If you’re flat, no color, they won’t look at your case. You have to have something to show them. A jury is like people buying a car: they might not buy it, but they’ll sure look it over. You have to keep their attention. If I ever think I’m losing their attention, I’ll do something to wake them up—maybe kick over my briefcase, knock over a glass of water. I may even let a few tears fall. You have to give an emotional appeal to get an emotional verdict.”