Billy Goat Hill

by Mark Stanleigh Morris

  His lips are dry and badly cracked, hard looking. They should be bleeding, but they aren’t. They part like the bill of a bird when he speak, his tongue dark and swollen. This is far more upsetting than I had anticipated.

  “How is Cherry?”

  “She’s not doing very well, sir.” I do not intend to be morose, but I am determined to make sure only the truth comes from my mouth. I have waited my entire life to tell this man the truth, and I must do my utmost to stay true to that purpose.

  He nods, as if the negative report about Miss Cherry was expected. “I have no family. No children. My estate, including a sizeable amount of life insurance, is to be split between you boys and Miss Cherry.” It is an abrupt start. He wants that much on the table right up front.

  I begin to say, “No, I don’t think that would be…” but he flips his hand dissuasively, the sudden movement obviously causing him pain.

  “The money is yours to do with as you wish. Give it to charity if you like. No use for money where I’m going.”

  Where are you going, sir? “Why would you want us…?”

  “It’s what I want. I know you both have been subsidizing Cherry for quite some time. It’s an expensive world we live in. The money is yours.”

  “Okay—sir.”

  He nods that it is done. “Luke, I’m dry, would you give me a little squirt?”

  A squeeze bottle marked Water sits on the bed stand. Luke puts the plastic tip to the Sergeant’s mouth and squeezes the bottle. A small amount of water trickles down the Sergeant’s chin onto his pale green hospital gown. He nods a thank-you to Luke.

  Mesmerized, I watch him.

  He looks at me, and his jaundiced eyes seem to sparkle faintly. “We had a great time at Dodger Stadium that day, didn’t we, boys?”

  I smile. “Yes sir, we sure did.” Luke echoes me. “I still have the bat, sir.”

  “I never could get you to stop calling me ‘Sir,’ could I?”

  “No, sir.” I smile again. “It’s a matter of respect, I guess. I’ve always felt that way about you.”

  His failing, desiccated body appears incapable of producing tears, but his once powerful eyes begin to spill over. He looks away from me, thankfully, for I am very close to losing it. It is killing me to see my former hero in this condition. The love I have always felt for this man rises like a geyser, charging up from the deepest holds of long-imprisoned memory. My emotional balance faltering fast, I glance at Luke, hoping to borrow some of his strength to steady myself, but I see he is already straining under the weight of his own emotion.

  The Sergeant gathers himself. “I wanted…I needed you boys to come because I want to apologize to you for the thing I did that I regret more than anything in my life.”

  I give Luke a confused look. This doesn’t feel at all like what I had been expecting. Why would he need to apologize to us? I killed the man, not him. “Apologize, sir?”

  “Yes—apologize. This will take a while, so please hear me out. I don’t think I have enough left in me to go through it more than once.”

  I nod tenuously, uncomfortable. Luke plainly would like to leave if it were at all possible. The Sergeant motions for more water. Luke gives him some.

  “First, I want you both to know I am very sorry, especially to you, Wade.”

  Sorry? I’m the one who is sorry. Out of habit from attending to Miss Cherry for so long, I take a tissue and stretch to dab the tears from his face, then catch myself and instead place the tissue in his hand. “Go ahead, sir.”

  “Please try to bear with me; this isn’t going to be easy—for any of us.” He clears his throat and looks at the ceiling for a moment.

  “Okay.”

  “In the late 1950s, the Los Angeles Police Department went through a period of heightened paranoia about the increasing presence of east coast organized crime families in Southern California.”

  What on earth is he talking about? “Organized crime—you mean like the mafia?”

  “Yes, the mafia. The O.C.I.U., a small, elite group of prima donna detectives, including Miss Cherry and me, were running too fast and too loose with our tactics. An even smaller group within the O.C.L.U. had begun to carry out covert actions, many of which were never revealed to the mayor or any other elected official, making them extralegal, if not illegal. Most of the cops were good cops doing what they believed to be the right thing.”

  He pauses to breathe and take another sip of water. I get the feeling he’s been working on this speech for a long time. I catch Luke’s eye, and he gives me an “I don’t have a clue what he’s talking about either” look.

  “One cop in particular, Lieutenant Theodore Shunkman, took it upon himself to rid the city of all perceived scourges. Ted was a real piece of work. You guys might remember him from that night on Billy Goat Hill.”

  “I remember him very well,” I say from an almost trancelike quarter.

  “He tried to punch you that night,” Luke says.

  The Sergeant might have smiled, perhaps inside, but outside it’s a wincing grimace, the cancer taking another bite of something still alive with nerves.

  I try to scrounge for levity. “You were supposed to forget about that, Luke.”

  “I forgot to forget.”

  The Sergeant stares at us for a moment. “Lieutenant Shunkman was responsible for the murder of four reputed mobsters—all sent one after the other from Miami to set up a West Coast operation. Shunkman was sick, a cunning loose cannon with a conviction that he had been put on this earth to liquidate organized crime. He was assassinating these guys and making the murders look like they were done by a particular local gang of bikers whose death signature was a single bullet between the eyes. The gang was known to fiercely protect their turf, especially from any foreign competition. It took guts for the third and fourth explorers to take up the challenge.”

  He pauses again to breathe. Speaking is difficult labor, each word like pressing three hundred pounds of dead weight.

  Something ticks in the back of my brain, the germination of a vague but very unpleasant thought. I shift in the chair, fidgeting, crossing my legs, then recrossing them. Luke seems fascinated with the story, like when he listened to the Sergeant recite the amazing saga of Jakey Blume.

  “Shunkman’s first two hits went like clockwork. He had the whole undercover unit crowing over the dumb goons killing each other off. Then he got a little overzealous and ran into some trouble on the third killing. And we caught him in the act of committing the fourth one.”

  “What trouble did he run into on the third one?” Luke asks.

  The Sergeant looks directly at me. “He made the mistake of dumping the body in the wrong place.”

  Luke stiffens on the edge of his seat, suddenly agitated. “What? Wait a second. Where did he dump the body? You don’t mean at Three Ponds?”

  “Yes—at Three Ponds.”

  I nearly choke, feverish realization beading all over my face. Then instantly I get the whole picture.

  Luke scrambles out of his chair, rage igniting his firecracker blood. “I don’t believe it! You mean you let my brother suffer his whole life thinking he killed that man?”

  I am up beside him. “Luke! It’s okay. Take it easy.” I grab him by the shoulders. “It’s okay. Calm down.”

  I haven’t seen him this angry since we were kids. I try to ease him back down in the chair, but he pushes me away. “What do you mean, it’s okay? It’s not okay. This poor excuse for a human being deserves to have cancer! You’re a child abuser, for crying out loud!” A fire rages in Luke’s eyes, his shock and anger fomenting, seething.

  “Luke, stop!”

  “The heck I’ll stop. Do you have any idea what Wade has been through all these years? Do you? You’re scum, Sergeant Cavendish! You hear me? Scum!”

  A knock sounds at the door. A nurse, the one who smiled at me in the hallway, sheepishly steps into the room. “Just checking, is everything okay in here?”

  The Sergeant waves
her away.

  “I’m sorry, ma’am. Just some understandable emotion is all. We’re fine. Aren’t we, Luke? We’re fine, ma’am. Thank you for checking on us.”

  The nurse doesn’t seem satisfied, but she quietly backs out of the room. She does not close the door all the way, though.

  Luke wants to hit something. He takes a deep breath and jams his hands in his pockets. Disgusted, he steps away from the bed and stares out the window at nothing. The Sergeant is no longer fit to look at.

  I walk over to the window and stand by Luke. My thought has exploded into a thousand urgent questions, all of which seem inconsequential when compared to the weight of the mystery that has suddenly been lifted from my shoulders. I am in shock, too, my mind racing at the speed of light, struggling to fathom a lifetime of crisscrossed meaning.

  I close my eyes and open my heart to the Lord, and God gives me the right words to speak. “Thank you for telling me, sir. My life is already on the right track. Now it’s even better.”

  “There’s more to the story, Wade.” His voice is now barely above a whisper. “I need to get it all out. I need to tell you everything.”

  I look at Luke and see his shoulders tighten, but he doesn’t turn around. I leave him standing at the window to sort through his thoughts. I return to the bedside and sit where Luke had been, in the chair closest to the Sergeant.

  I give him some more water, noting he looks paler, weaker, closer to death. “Go ahead, sir. It’s okay—you can tell me everything.”

  The Sergeant closes his eyes as he speaks, conserving energy. “Shunkman evidently dumped the body at Three Ponds sometime shortly after sunrise, because he met me for breakfast; we were together the rest of the morning and into the afternoon working on paperwork at the Highland Park station. He left the police station in the late afternoon to get ready for a dinner party he and his girlfriend were to attend that evening.”

  “About fifteen minutes after he left, I got an anonymous phone tip that the body of Johnny” “Bloody John” Giacometti could be found near the middle pond of the area unofficially known as Three Ponds.

  The face of Bloody John glares at me. I tremble as a chill whipsaws down my spine. Luke comes back to the bed and sits, his anger left to cool somewhere outside the window. I give the Sergeant more water.

  “Although I was somewhat skeptical of the phone call, I decided to go out to Three Ponds and take a look by myself.” As I made the turn from York Boulevard onto San Pasqual Avenue, I saw Luke, barefoot and hatless, running for home like he was late for dinner. A few minutes later, I found his Dodgers cap floating in the water in the lower pond. I got worried when I heard Mac yowling farther up the draw.

  “When I got up to the middle pond…” He opens his eyes and looks at me. “I saw the ball bearings…” My heart jumps. “…in the mud spelling out the word Mississippi.”

  The ball bearing that has haunted me all my life is in my pocket and now back within two feet of the man who dropped it into my sweaty, trembling, guilty hand. I have never been able to let go of it.

  “One ball bearing…was missing from the second s,” I say, the memory stark, vivid.

  Cadaverous eyes, vestiges of his burned-out soul, burrow into me. “Yes-—from the second s.”

  Luke huffs and squirms in his chair. “All these years and you…never mind.”

  The Sergeant’s gaze flares then dulls as he works to focus his eyes on Luke. “I followed the sound of Mac and came upon Wade lying unconscious next to Shunkman’s third victim. Mac wouldn’t let me near your brother at first.”

  Luke clenches his fists, his eyes watering at the mention of Mac. “Our dog was the best dog that ever lived. I always…” He chokes to a stop, his control poisoned by a flood of emotion. I put my hand on his shoulder and feel him trembling. He sighs deeply and hangs his head down. “I didn’t mean to run away. I was scared. I didn’t know what to do.” He looks up at me, his eyes pooled with long repressed regret.

  “I know, I know. It’s okay.”

  His mouth tightens in a pained smile. “That darn Mac didn’t run though, did he?”

  I pat his shoulder. “No, he didn’t, Luke.”

  The Sergeant, listless, degrading rapidly, focuses on me again. “You had a nasty bump on your forehead, but you were breathing normally. It didn’t take long to figure out what had happened—the slingshot floating in the pond, feathers strewn about, the hole in the cardboard, and victim number three leaning back against the rock with a shiny musket ball jammed between his eyes.”

  My stomach tightens. Give me strength, Father.

  The Sergeant closes his eyes again. Sorrowfully, he says, “I panicked just like you, Luke. I didn’t do the right thing. I didn’t think it out.”

  Speckles of sympathy appear in Luke’s eyes, his face drained, haggard.

  “I woke up out by San Pasqual Avenue with Mac standing over me, sir. How did I get there?”

  “I carried you.”

  “But why? Why did you leave me there like that?”

  He opens his eyes wide and looks at me. The question causes him to rally slightly, fed by a ripple of new energy. “After the murder of the first bad guy from Miami,” they sent a replacement, a lowlife by the name of Carlo Puzzi. I had some nagging doubts about Shunkman when he supposedly “discovered” Puzzi’s body over by Franklin High School and called it in himself.

  “The whole thing was too neat. He overplayed it, crowing on and on about how the stupid gangsters were killing each other off. But I had only a hunch, and no proof to back it up. And part of me felt like if it was Shunkman doing the killings, he was doing us all a big favor. Those were rotten guys he was bumping off.”

  “Murder is murder, sir.”

  “Yes it is.”

  “But why leave me lying in the dirt with a knot on my head?”

  “Like I said, I panicked. I just knew at that moment I had to get you away from the crime scene and make it look as if you guys had never been at Three Ponds.”

  “Why?”

  “I wanted to contain and cover up Shunkman’s madness, and I couldn’t have two young boys caught up in the middle of it all.” I had it in my head that I needed to protect the O.C.I.U. You see, there had been rumors that Chief Parker was thinking about shutting the unit down. I didn’t want that to happen.

  “It was politics pure and simple. We were engaged in some very important work, national security stuff, and some internal matters involving corruption within the Los Angeles Police Department. A scandal involving an O.C.I.U. officer committing vigilante-style murders would have devastated our operation for sure.”

  “I still don’t get the leaving me lying there part. And you talk as if you already knew it was Lieutenant Shunkman. How could you have been so sure it was him?”

  “It was him.” When I received the phone call at the Highland Park station tipping me to the body at Three Ponds, some things pointed to Shunkman being the caller. The call came from outside to the Highland Park station, through the switchboard, not to the O.C.I.U. at headquarters downtown, where I would normally be reached at that time. I was pretty sure only three people knew I was at the Highland Park station that afternoon—Cherry, Rodney Bernanos, and Shunkman.

  The caller asked for me by name. He also made a mistake. He referred to Johnny Giacometti as “mutt number three,” a label a few of us put on Giacometti when he first arrived from Miami. “I had spent time in Miami working under cover and knew a little about Giacometti before his bosses picked him for the assignment.”

  “I remember how tan you were. Your note with the Dodgers tickets mentioned Miami, and I thought that was strange.”

  His eyelids drift down. “I shouldn’t have written that. It was a stupid slip.”

  Luke has been listening quietly. Now he speaks up. “There’s a lot you shouldn’t have done, Sergeant.”

  “And a lot I should have done, too. But there’s more to this story, and I want you both to know all of it.” He raises his hand
to his mouth and coughs.

  I cringe when he trails his fingers on the bed sheet leaving a streak of bright red blood. “Do you need the nurse, sir?”

  “No.” You were out cold, and I couldn’t rouse you by the pond. I had to get you away from there, so I carried you out to the road and made sure you were still breathing. I ordered Mac to stay with you. Then I went to a phone booth and made an anonymous call to the police station reporting that someone was lying by the road.

  “I quickly drove back to where I left you, arriving just as you and Mac came up onto the road. You looked pretty good, from a distance anyway. I watched you start walking up San Pasqual Road and saw the patrol officer stop and talk to you.”

  A full-color memory plays in my head as he slowly recounts the most horrifying day of my life. “Yes?”

  “Then I called Cherry.”

  “Are you telling me Miss Cherry knew about the whole thing?”

  “No, Wade. Absolutely not. She didn’t know about you boys, about you discovering Giacometti’s body until much later.”

  “Luke’s Dodgers hat, two pairs of tennis shoes, a slingshot, and the ball bearings were in my car under the seat before she arrived at Three Ponds.” He coughs again, grimacing, and wipes more blood on the sheet.

  “Let me get the nurse.”

  “No!”

  “Let him talk, Wade.”

  He looks straight into my eyes. “I got rid of the cardboard, too, and I dug the ball bearing out of Giacometti’s head.”

  Shuddering, I grip the chair arm. In my pocket the ball bearing squirms. “So, Miss Cherry didn’t know about us encountering the dead man?”

  “No, not then. Cherry and I removed and disposed of the body and set out to trap Shunkman. But even at that point I had badly underestimated just how crazy and dangerous he really was.”

  “I think you all were crazy,” Luke says.

  Again, the Sergeant nods. “Cherry and I were in love.” But, both of you guys, please believe me—I swear she had nothing whatsoever to do with the early decisions. She trusted me as her senior officer in the chain of command. She was an excellent cop, doing her job, following orders.