One Thursday in August he brought Stella back early, said he had someplace to be. She looked at him funny, like maybe her feelings were hurt. Didn’t say anything. Harvey didn’t worry about it. He’d make it up to her in spades.
He needed to know what time Postelwaithe arrived, and if he came alone. Harvey’s reconnaissance had found a good place to see the door without being seen himself, next to a trash bin near the service entrance.
Postelwaithe pulled up in a Caddy at ten twenty, sat in the car and smoked until exactly ten thirty. Alone. Harvey kicked himself. He could have taken Postelwaithe right there and been done with it, but he hadn’t brought the extra Luger and didn’t have his escape route planned yet. Harvey made himself calm down; he’d be back. Three more times Harvey checked Postelwaithe’s habits. Sometimes he came five minutes earlier, sometime five minutes later. Always alone.
By mid-September Harvey was ready. Canceled his date with Stella. Said he had to work. Met a couple of friends, right gees who’d know on their own to say he left them later than he did, if it came to that. Picked up a car from a curb in Lawrenceville where the owner really should have known better. Mapped a route back to his car that gave him a chance to dump the Luger in the river. Even if the cops came around to him, his hadn’t been fired, and the slugs wouldn’t match. Worst could happen was it would look like a frame.
He crouched by his trash bin at ten o’clock, listening to the occasional rustlings of rats on the inside. Overcast night, no light except what the streetlights showed, which wasn’t much after Harvey broke two of them.
Postelwaithe parked at ten seventeen and sat in the car smoking. Snatches of Frankie Carle’s “Rumors Are Flying” floated through the alley. Harvey saw the glow of Postelwaithe’s cigarette when he turned his head, smoke wafting out the driver’s window.
At ten twenty-eight by Harvey’s watch the car’s dome light came on as the door opened. Postelwaithe walked around the front of the car, his right shoe making a rasping sound on the gritty pavement as his bad leg turned in the toe. Harvey walked quickly, didn’t run. He made it as far as the car’s trunk when Postelwaithe reached for the door to enter the Green Gables.
Harvey called out, “Postelwaithe! Mr. David Postelwaithe!”
Postelwaithe stopped and turned. Harvey walked towards him from behind the car. Postelwaithe built half a smile, like he might know Harvey. He’ll know me in a minute, Harvey thought, holding the Luger out of sight down against his right leg.
Close now, no more than five feet apart. Postelwaithe looked younger from here, no more than thirty. Unblemished face, clear blue eyes. Hatless, a thick head of blond hair combed straight back off his forehead. He said, “Yes? I’m sorry, I don’t recognize you.”
Funny thing, Harvey thought he might have recognized Postelwaithe just as he pulled the gun level and shot him in the belly. The Luger made more noise than Harvey expected in the alley, reverberating between the close brick walls like thunder in a canyon. The noise fazed him for a second, long enough for Postelwaithe to recover from the initial impact of the shot and move towards him.
Postelwaithe came after Harvey with the assurance of someone who knew how to handle himself in a tough spot. The leg made his move jerky, slowed him down. Harvey pushed the gun into Postelwaithe’s fleshy midsection and shot him again. This time he went down.
Harvey risked a quick look up the alley. Trouble could only come from one side. Escape lay the other direction, over a fence to the hot car parked a block away. No footfalls sounded. Only Postelwaithe’s moans as he struggled to catch his breath.
Harvey placed the muzzle of the Luger to Postelwaithe’s head an inch above the right ear. Their eyes met, Postelwaithe’s searching for some explanation. Harvey said, “You should treat women better.” His shot made a Rorschach pattern of brains against the Green Gables’s wall.
Harvey ran back past the trash bin thirty yards to the fence, scaled it in one jump. No one on the street, the car right where he left it. He threw the gun into the Mon from the Rankin Bridge. Harvey was home, in bed, by midnight. He never even heard a siren.
He dozed off and on all night, waiting for the morning news. Never occurred to him to turn on the radio, like it wouldn’t be real until he saw it in writing. None of the three major papers had anything until the Post-Gazette came out with a special around ten o’clock. Harvey bought a copy from a newsie outside a drug store on Braddock Avenue. He snapped the paper under his arm like his interest was no more pressing than what the Pirates did last night and made himself take his time walking home.
He made the headlines.
ATTORNEY GENERAL’S NEPHEW SHOT TO DEATH IN WEST MIFFLIN
Harvey’s guts coiled as he read down the page.
David Postelwaithe, 28, nephew of Pennsylvania Attorney General Byron W. Dworkin, was shot to death outside the Green Gables Ballroom in West Mifflin last night.
Harvey’s mind ran on two tracks, part reading, part thinking of what he’d got himself into. He kept reminding himself he was clean. No one had seen him, the gun was in the river. He had an alibi as long as Lou and Brownie didn’t play the wrong riff. The attorney general’s nephew. Harvey wondered how much heat Lou and Brownie could handle if it came to that.
The Post-Gazette article had more.
Postelwaithe, a marine who earned a Navy Cross on Guadalcanal, had returned to the area to rehabilitate his right leg, almost severed by a mortar round on Okinawa.
Things Stella told him crowded the newsprint from Harvey’s mind. About how Postelwaithe knew someone on the draft board. Hoarding ration coupons. He pushed the thoughts aside. All politicos had pull with the papers. A good flack could make Bruno Hauptmann sound like Pope Pius XII.
Police are looking for a man seen in the company of Mrs. Stella Griffin Postelwaithe several times over the past few months. Details are unavailable, but Mrs. Postelwaithe is rumored to have described a man who had accosted her on multiple occasions at the Green Gables.
Harvey turned to the continuation on an inner page thinking she might have described anyone. Everyone there danced with her.
Page thirteen had more facts of the crime, comments from the police and not-quite witnesses from the Green Gables. Nothing more about the investigation or whether they had any good leads.
A sidebar story covered four inches of three columns near the inner fold. People who knew Postelwaithe, led by a comment from Stella.
“Dave and I met dancing, he knew how much I loved it,” Mrs. Postelwaithe said. “He couldn’t even walk when he got back from the war. He told me he would rather have died over there than see me shut up in the house all the time, so he encouraged me to go dancing at least once a week while he got his therapy. He gained a lot of weight when he couldn’t get around and was finally starting to get back into shape. He said he was looking forward to going with me in another month or so.”
What else would she say? Name one woman who says her dead husband was a malicious SOB who manipulated her. Harvey still knew—knew—he only had to let some time pass and Stella and the whole setup would be his.
Another quote caught his eye, three inches down the sidebar.
“A wonderful man,” said Homer Griffin, Mr. Postelwaithe’s father-in-law. “I would have lost the farm when I got sick. Davey took care of everything, even gave me the mortgage to burn at their wedding rehearsal dinner.”
Harvey was still trying to reconcile that with what Stella told him when the police kicked in the door to his apartment.
Stella made a great witness. Sobs were heard on several occasions in the gallery when she bravely and without tears told how much she loved her husband. How Harvey accosted her and didn’t want to take no for an answer. Under cross-examination she admitted to leaving the Green Gables a time or two for a drink, to avoid causing a scene. No one could identify her at the flop they’d used for their trysts; Harvey had been too careful getting her in and out.
The jury took less than three hours. The judge’s gri
m smile as he read the verdict form and passed sentence showed his satisfaction at a rare opportunity for real justice.
Harvey barely had time to get the routine of Death Row down before he read a three-day-old article in the Press about Stella. Story below the fold in the regional section, how her beloved father fell down the cellar stairs in Brookville reaching for a mason jar. Broke his neck, dead when the ambulance got there, despite Stella’s frantic attempts to revive him.
A sidebar had an interview with Stella, recapping her tragic year. “I can’t stay in Brookville anymore,” she said to the reporter. “Losing David and my father within a year. There’s nothing here I can bear to look at.” The article went on to say she was selling the farm and moving to New York. Already looking for an apartment in Manhattan to take advantage of the year’s single saving grace: rising property values.
Harvey kept looking for an angle. Saw guys get weaker as their day approached, like they were disappearing before his eyes. The electric chair just gave someone an excuse to pronounce them. Not Harvey. He asked for the paper every day, stayed current on world events. Acted as though it mattered, like it would be important to him when he got out. The guards gave him a grudging respect. Always on the grift, never giving up. He told them war stories they didn’t believe, even though the most outrageous ones were true.
The warden at Western Pen thought of himself as enlightened, wanted the inmates to feel connected to life around them as much as possible, even the walking dead. Let them join the general population for movies twice a month, if they wanted to. Most didn’t. Harvey went every time. Wrists and ankles shackled, he sat in the back of the mess hall, no other prisoner within twenty feet, his chair chained to a table so he could see. Caught a lot of good movies that way. Casablanca, All the King’s Men, Going My Way.
The last one he saw—a week before they ran the current through him—starred Barbara Stanwyck. Not Stella Dallas, the one his Stella recommended to him. This one he’d missed, it came out while he was in Europe. Harvey’s minute sense of irony was pretty well shot by then—four days and counting—so he didn’t recognize his kinship with the Fred MacMurray character in Double Indemnity. Walter Neff. A man who killed a husband for money, and for a woman. He didn’t get the money, and he didn’t get the woman.
Pretty, isn’t it?
Death of a Rat
Eddie Bunker
A witness to the murder of the Soledad guard had been sent to San Quentin awaiting the trial. He was kept on the hospital’s third floor. To reach him, you had to get through the hospital entrance by showing an identification card, with mug photo, name, and number. That got you into the hospital infirmary room, normally used for treating cuts and dispensing cold pills. At the other side of this first room was a gate of steel bars painted white. A guard stood behind it, checking passes and identification. He had a board affixed to the wall with a hundred and fifty-two name tags, inmates who worked somewhere in the hospital, from laundry room to surgical nurse, clerk to the prison psychiatrist and the chief medical officer’s clerk. Inmates who worked in the hospital wore green jumpers, which differentiated them from non-workers in blue chambray shirts.
A couple weeks later the chief prison psychologist gave his clerk a list of men he wanted to see. The clerk dutifully typed up the list as a “request for interview.” He put it on the psychologist’s desk. It was signed and given back to the inmate clerk to be forwarded to the custody office where the actual passes were made up and distributed throughout the cell houses by the graveyard shift. This time, however, when the clerk got the signed list from his boss, he put it back in the Underwood and added two names and numbers, “Clemens, B13566,” and “Buford, B14003.” Both were young “fish,” age nineteen and twenty-two, and neither had been a year in the House of Dracula, the nickname for San Quentin. Folsom was the Pit, and Soledad, the Gladiator School. Neither would admit it, but both wanted to be the stuff of legend in the prison underworld. During the night a guard walked the cell house tiers, putting passes (called ducats) on the cell bars of convicts who were wanted somewhere by someone. Clemens was wide awake and waiting when the guard passed his cell. Buford got his when he woke up.
They met on the Big Yard after breakfast. Neither had any appetite. Instead of hunger, both felt the hollowness of fear deep in their stomachs. Normally they would have joined some partners hanging out in the morning sunlight near the north cell house until the mess halls cleared and the whistle blew for work. This morning they wanted to hang out quietly until it was time to take care of business.
“Is that fuckin’ whistle late this morning?” asked Buford.
Clemens shrugged. “I ain’ got no fuckin’ idea. I don’ even know what fuckin’ year it is.”
The work whistle blasted through the morning, causing an explosion of pigeons and seagulls. The latter flew over the yard and shit on the cons, as if getting vengeance for the whistle’s blast. They were cursed in return. “Flying fuckin’ rats.” (In an attempt at retaliation, a few convicts would put Alka-Seltzer tablets inside pieces of crushed up bread. The birds swooped, ate, and soon went crazy as the Alka-Seltzer fizzed inside of them.)
The Big Yard gate was rolled open and convicts streamed out to their jobs in the lower yard industries. In minutes the yard was empty save for the cleanup crew and those who had night jobs. Lined up near the south cell house rotunda were those going to sick call. A guard was picking up ID cards. When he reached Clemens and Buford, they showed the ducats and ID cards. He beckoned them. “Follow me.” The guard led them along the line to the infirmary door. Because they had passes, they had priority over those who were in the sick call line on their own. He took their ID cards and put them with the others, to be returned when they left the hospital.
At the grille gate across the infirmary, they handed their passes through the bars. The guard keyed the gate. “You know where you’re goin’?”
They nodded and he waved them through. The corridor ahead was long. A few inmates and free personnel were coming and going. The psychiatric department was halfway down the hallway. Instead of turning through the door, they kept going to the rear. On the left was an elevator. Inmates used it if they were patients or assigned to. Others went up the stairwell, which was the route taken by Buford and Clemens, two and three stairs at a time. On the second floor they turned in and went to the X-ray department. They swiftly removed their shirts and tossed them under a bench. Now they wore the green jumpers. Anyone who didn’t know better would assume that they were assigned to the hospital work crew. Clemens slapped Buford on the back. “Let’s do it, homes.” He opened the hallway door and out they went.
As they reached the third-floor landing and started to turn in, an elderly correctional officer came out and nearly collided with them. “Slow down. Where’s the fire?”
“Sorry, boss,” said Buford. “We’re late.” If the guard had asked for what, there would have been no reply, although Clemens’s sweaty hand held the taped handle of the shiv in his pocket. It was fifteen inches long overall, and the tip of the blade had been stabbed through the bottom of his pocket and the steel pressed against his thigh.
“Okay, go on ... just take it easy.” The guard went down the stairs and they went through the door. To the left were the rooms. It was cleanup time and the doors were ajar. A chicano janitor was squeezing a wet mop in a wheeled bucket and wringer. The first door went into the nurse’s station. It was open; the nurse was inside.
“Where’s the rat?” Clemens asked Buford.
“At the back ... around the corner.”
“How we gonna get by the nurse?”
“That’s what these green shirts are for.”
“Let’s go do him up.”
They walked past the nurse’s office without a challenge, and nodded at the chicano mopping the floors. Men in the rooms, mostly wearing nightgowns and jeans, glanced up as they went by, but suspected nothing and said nothing. With every step Clemens’s tension increased. When they turn
ed the corner and saw the correctional officer reading a newspaper, Clemens got momentarily dizzy. He expelled a lungful of air.
The officer sensed, or heard them, as soon as they turned the corner. The way they moved made him stand up and put the paper down. He saw the green blouses, but the hallway was a dead end ten feet away.
“Hold it. Where’re you going?”
Clemens literally lost his mind. The tension was too heavy and he snapped. “Gimme them motherfuckin’ keys, pig!” He didn’t wait for the response, but pulled his shiv and stuck it straight into the officer’s stomach, an inch below the ribcage.
“Ahhhhhahhhhh! God!”
Buford stepped forwards and put a hand over Clemens’s chest. “Cool it.” And to the officer: “Better be givin’ up them keys.”
“I don’t have them,” he said, blood spraying out of his mouth.
In the cell, the witness, a black queen, heard the officer bang his back on the door when Clemens stabbed him. The queen got up to look through the observation window. She saw what was going on and ran to the window overlooking the air well at the center of the building—and began screaming: “Help! Help! Help! Murder! Oh, God, help!”
From nearby windows came responding voices, but not of help. “Shaddup you dingbat motherfucker!” “Shut the fuck up, dick sucker, snitchin’ nigger.”
In the hallway, Clemens and Buford had the guard seated in the chair, unable to resist, blood coming from his mouth and down his shirt. He held his belly and hunkered forwards. “Don’t have keys,” he said.
“Yeah ... yeah.” Buford was turning the guard’s pockets inside out. Nothing.
Blood, Guts, & Whiskey Page 15