Killings

by Calvin Trillin

  It wasn’t long, of course, before it became known that Bopp had interests beyond health food. The Star reported in January that he had disagreements with several people about land near Arivaca. It also reported that he had been involved in “supernatural” activities. Then two young reporters for the Tucson Citizen, Dan Huff and Shawn Hubler, poked around in Walter Bopp’s life and found people who referred to him not as Dr. Bopp but as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Bopp, the Citizen reporters discovered, had indeed been capable of great kindness. He had also been, they wrote, a “tight-lipped, sometimes hateful man who believed in witches and who once said that Lyndon Johnson, Lady Bird and Robert McNamara turned into animals and slithered over White House fences at night.” It was known in Tucson that Bopp had divorced his wife a few years earlier, after forty-seven years of marriage, but the Citizen piece revealed that he was thought to have done so under advice from a psychic. (Most of Bopp’s acquaintances—he didn’t seem to have any close friends—were unaware that he had remarried until the newspapers carried the name of a second wife as his survivor.) It also revealed that Bopp had strong racist views about Mexicans and blacks. The kindly Dr. Bopp, Huff and Hubler were told, had been a contentious man who never admitted he was wrong and never let loose of a grudge.

  Newspaper reports indicating that there were areas in Bopp’s life which could indeed have produced an enemy or two did not clear up the mystery, of course; they simply made it more complicated. Had Walter Bopp been terrorized because of a dispute over a silver claim? Could he have discovered something in Arivaca that someone else wanted to know? Was it possible that he had found himself among the sort of cultists who beat up elderly vegetarians? What were Bopp’s tormentors after? Gold? Silver? Information? His store? What could have been secret or private enough to restrain Walter Bopp from helping police find the people who had left him bound and beaten on the floor of his storeroom?

  From the start, of course, there were ways of explaining what happened to Walter Bopp that did not require knowledge of his ventures into mining or racial theory or the supernatural. Who leans on respectable businessmen? “They were obviously hit men,” a clerk at Bopp’s store said after the December beating. Tucson happens to have a substantial and well-publicized colony of the sort of citizens who are photographed by the FBI at funerals, and a lot of speculation naturally centered on the possibility that Bopp had run afoul of the mob. Did Walter Bopp have something the mob wanted? Were mobsters trying to persuade him to do something they wanted? It was also possible, of course, that Walter Bopp had simply wandered into some private dispute over pride or sex or vengeance. People in Tucson developed a stunning variety of theories to account for what happened to him: he was a loan shark, he was a bagman, he was a drug dealer, he was an arms dealer, he was a rich miser. “I know he was sitting on a lot of gold,” a bartender at the Poco Loco, a tavern next door to Bopp’s Speedway store, said not long ago. “He had been buying gold that’d be worth a million dollars in today’s market. I think that’s why he was dusted.”

  —

  Walter Bopp arrived in America in the twenties and, doing farmwork, made his way across the country to California. Just before the crash of 1929, he sent for his childhood sweetheart—a young Englishwoman who had been at a Swiss school in Bopp’s village. Apparently, whatever money he had saved was lost in a get-rich-quick real-estate scheme; at the beginning of the Depression he was working as a dishwasher. What brought him to Tucson in the early thirties was a job as a salad chef at the Pioneer Hotel. When Bopp Health Food opened in 1934, in a tiny downtown storefront, Bopp’s wife, Mae, used to say that the cash register was worth more than the stock. Bopp let his wife mind the store for a couple of years while he held on to his salad-chef job. Then they both began working—working without taking vacations or weekends, as far as anyone in Tucson remembers—to build what was for a dozen years the only health-food business in Tucson.

  Health food was hardly a national fad in the thirties. “It was not just unfashionable,” someone who got into the business a decade or so later said recently. “It was practically clandestine.” Tucson, though, did have more than its share of potential customers. In those days, doctors used to send patients to the Arizona desert on the theory that the dry air would alleviate suffering from allergies or asthma or arthritis or emphysema—or simply on the theory that it might be a soothing climate for someone whose disease seemed beyond the reach of conventional medicine. Some of the desperately ill looked for remedies in nutrition, and Walter Bopp was their adviser. He also developed a trade supplying grain and cereal in bulk to ranchers. As a businessman, Walter Bopp was old-world—thrifty, hardworking, cautious, impervious to suggestions about merchandising techniques. He didn’t hold much with spring sales or regular salary increases. The original store remained the same size, in a part of downtown that gradually became characterized by cheap furniture stores and pawnshops. Bopp didn’t open a second store until the sixties—on East Speedway Boulevard, a wide street that for miles seems to be one run-on strip-shopping development. The Speedway store was modern when Bopp built it, but hardly modern compared with the flashy health-food chains that blossomed when the business began to attract people who saw health food as a market rather than a cause. Walter Bopp plugged away—grumbling about the insincere people who had come into the business, moving stock from one store to the other in his pickup truck, working late into the night on his order forms. The block he had chosen on Speedway turned out to be even less uplifting than the old block downtown. After a while, Bopp found himself with the Poco Loco on one side and on the other a place called the Empress Theatre, which offered hardcore films, “adult books and novelties,” and a “hot-tub spa.” Bopp complained belligerently about tavern and porn-store customers jamming the parking spaces in front of his shop and using the small parking lot he had for his own customers. “An American businessman might have just moved,” someone who knew him at that time said recently. “But he was very set in his ways.”

  Bopp’s ways were strange from the start. Mae Bopp—a diminutive, well-spoken woman who seemed almost timid, particularly in his presence—worked constantly in the store, but the Bopps were otherwise not seen together. He seemed to live mainly in the back of the downtown store. He was kind to some employees and cold to others. He fired at least two clerks in the belief that they were witches who were trying to hex him. (“He was good to me until then,” one of them has said. “He was a sweet old man.”) To a lot of people, he seemed secretive and aloof. His feelings against Jews were even more vitriolic than his feelings against blacks and Mexicans. Some people who knew Bopp for years were unaware of his racial views; some were treated to them in intense, sotto voce lectures in a back corner of the store. “He was very intelligent,” one of his former employees said recently. “He knew herbs very well. He was the first one to help you if you went to him with a problem. He had so many good ways—it’s too bad he got mixed up in all that weird stuff. He said some weird things about Jewish people. Once, he told me that a customer was a witch and I shouldn’t look her in the eye. He’d start talking real mysterious, real low. He told me she would come to my bedroom in the form of a vampire, and I should get a silver cross to ward her off. I don’t believe in witches, but, I’ll tell you, when he got through with me I wished I had a silver cross.”

  Among his other views, Bopp had a strong belief that the economic system—or perhaps all of society—would come crashing down one day, in an even more disastrous way than it had come crashing down in 1929. At that point, of course, stocks and real estate and even paper money would not be worth having. The only wealth would be in gold and silver. There is reason to believe that Walter Bopp did indeed have some gold or silver stashed somewhere. Gold and silver would allow him to survive the economic disaster. According to someone who used to work for Bopp, the silver would have an even more important use: “He figured he could use the silver against Satan. Evil spirits are afraid of silver.”

  As a young
man in Southern California, Bopp had shopped around in what must have been the Western world’s most extensive display of yogis and mystics and cults, eventually settling on a Hindu offshoot called the Benares League. His belief in the occult may have intensified as he grew older. He seemed more certain of the forces allied against him. He told an acquaintance that he had paid to have a counter-hex placed on someone who was trying to hex him. The woman he married a few months before his death is said to be a soothsayer or a psychic—the same one who advised him during the dissolution of his previous marriage. A former employee of Bopp’s was told by the police that the closest Bopp would come to identifying his assailants was to say that he had been done in by the Evil Force. A lot of people who knew Bopp remain convinced that his death had something to do with his otherworldly beliefs. (“It must have been that damn cult thing.”) But what? A hex does not, in fact, cause a vicious beating. The secrets of the afterlife are not ordinarily sought by torturing a man of spiritual powers until he tells. How can Bopp’s silence be explained? Could Walter Bopp—confused, increasingly obsessed with the otherworldly, slipping toward paranoia—have mistaken a couple of thugs after gold for the Evil Force?

  —

  The most romantic notions of what might have happened to Walter Bopp have to do with mining, which has been part of the folklore of southern Arizona for much longer than the mob has. A lot of people in Tucson who may do something else for a living prospect as a sort of sideline—somewhere between a hobby and a disease—and for at least thirty years Walter Bopp was one of them. Some of them still dream of the big strike—a lode of silver that has somehow been missed by all the holes poked into the desert all of these years, the fabulous lost mines that the Jesuits are said to have left when they were expelled from Arizona in the eighteenth century. Some people in Tucson theorized that Walter Bopp might have hit such a strike, but the mining people around Arivaca find that notion amusing. From what they say, Bopp must have been one of the most consistently unsuccessful miners in the state.

  “I don’t think he ever shipped a pound of ore out of here,” someone familiar with mining in Arivaca said recently. Occasionally, Bopp would show up at the assay office with a test bore that looked mildly promising, but, as far as anyone knows, he never followed it up. Bopp was not simply a weekend prospector with a pan or a pickax. He filed dozens of claims and did dozens of test bores. (“He sank holes all over this country.”) Just outside of Arivaca, he kept a couple of miners working for a dozen years to sink two shafts deep into the ground. There are people in Arivaca who believe that Bopp was almost willfully unsuccessful—ignoring promising samples, choosing the least likely place to drill. His method of finding gold or silver was what prospectors call “witchin’ it”—trying to divine it, the way a dowser divines water. It is not uncommon for prospectors—even prospectors who don’t believe in witches—to try to witch gold or silver, and apparently just about all of them do better at it than Walter Bopp did.

  People around Arivaca remember Bopp as a contentious man—quick to assert his rights, quick to take an argument to court. It is possible, of course, that he got into a dispute with someone over a claim or had some mine information someone else wanted or let one of the arguments miners are always having with ranchers in southern Arizona get out of hand. Nobody who knows much about mining thinks that explains what happened to him. They don’t think that Bopp got into a dispute of great seriousness, and they don’t think what happened to him is characteristic of the way such a dispute would be settled. That doesn’t mean that they think there was nothing mysterious about Walter Bopp’s mining operations. They wonder where he got all of the money he spent for what miners call “holes in the ground.” A lot of them figure he was using someone else’s money. Whose? What does that have to do with what happened to Walter Bopp?

  —

  The police have been to Arivaca and they have visited one of the people Bopp suspected of witchcraft, but they are apparently not taken with some of the more ornate theories about the fate of Walter Bopp. Detectives, in the accepted manner, appear to have concentrated their attention on those closest to Walter Bopp and on those who might profit from his death and on anyone who both knew him and seems capable of having terrorized him. (One of Bopp’s Speedway neighbors, for example, was once charged with extortion and, in plea bargaining, pleaded guilty to aggravated assault.) It has been five months now since Walter Bopp was attacked, and there is some feeling in Tucson that the police have shifted their energies to other matters. The mystery may always be a mystery.

  Among people familiar with the case, of course, the speculation continues. Someone has called Dan Huff at the Citizen with an involved story based on Bopp’s being connected with Swiss banking houses. Someone else reported having seen Bopp at a Klan recruiting meeting. The various aspects of Bopp’s life can be put together in any number of combinations: Bopp owed the mob money he had borrowed to pour into holes in the ground around Arivaca; Bopp met some hippie cultists in the desert—where hippies still seem to exist, as if preserved by the dry climate—and made the mistake of telling them that he had a fortune in gold; Bopp’s views on race led him into contact with some people whose viciousness went beyond sotto voce lectures; Bopp was using mob money for mining; Bopp was using Swiss banking money for mining; Bopp was using Fascist money for mining.

  It is said around Tucson that Bopp’s widow intends to reopen the health-food stores, but it is also said that the East Speedway store has been sold to the porno operation next door. Both stores are locked, with ornamental grilles protecting their windows. At the Speedway store, the grille is festooned with signs saying that parking is for customers of Bopp Health Food only. In the window, among the displays of sweet orange-spice tea and the Naturade jojoba hair-treatment formula, is a handwritten note that says, CLOSED DUE TO DEATH IN FAMILY.

  A Father-Son Operation

  * * *

  Grundy County, Iowa

  SEPTEMBER 1982

  The soil in Grundy County is often spoken of as the richest soil in Iowa—which means, Grundy County residents sometimes add, that it must be about the richest soil in the world. “The land is mostly a gentle, undulating prairie with just sufficient slope to thoroughly drain it,” somebody wrote of Grundy County farmland in 1860. “There is not the same area in the state with less wasteland….The soil is black mould of the prairie, deep and strong for all kinds of crops.” Although the farmers who come in to Grundy Center, the county seat, to do their banking and buy their supplies manage to find plenty about the weather that is worthy of complaint, crop failures in Grundy County are even rarer than armed robberies. “Oh, we get six or seven crop failures a year,” a local resident said recently over morning coffee at Manly’s drugstore, on the main street of Grundy Center. “But they’re all in the bar or the drugstore.” Agribusiness spokesmen who routinely talk about the American family farm in the past tense are apparently not familiar with Grundy County. All its farms are family farms. Many of them are owned by the same families that carved them out of the prairie in the last decades of the nineteenth century. In those days, the northern part of the county was virtually all German—it was settled by serious, hardworking farm people from East Friesland, near the Dutch border—and it is virtually all German today. The family names are the same. People in Grundy Center still like to say that you can walk from a point just a couple of miles north of the county courthouse to Parkersburg, fifteen miles away, and almost never be off land that is owned by one member of the Meester clan or another.

  In some ways, the lives of the Grundy County Germans have not changed a lot since the days when walking was about the only way to make the trip. It is true, of course, that they now own sixty-thousand-dollar tractors and that they routinely drive twenty-five miles to a shopping mall in Cedar Falls for their groceries and that many of them can easily afford to fly to Germany to visit the villages of their forebears. It is also true, though, that they remain serious, hardworking farm people. Most of t
hem still lead lives that revolve tightly around their families and their land. On Sundays, they go to church—to small country Reformed churches on county blacktops or to conservative versions of Presbyterian or Baptist churches in nearby trading towns like Parkersburg and Aplington. The Sabbath is still taken seriously as a day of rest in northern Grundy County; not many people would mow their lawn or wash their car or repair the roof of their barn on a Sunday afternoon—not within sight of the road, at least. Many people still live in the rambling white farmhouses that their forebears built on the family’s original plot of land—what farm people in Iowa still call the home place. The houses stand surrounded by huge groves of shade trees that are visible for miles across an otherwise almost treeless prairie. In all directions, the black Iowa soil is planted in corn and soybeans. In Grundy County, a good farmer can expect a yield of a hundred and fifty bushels of corn an acre, and it is taken for granted that just about all farmers in Grundy County are good farmers. One of the best—one of the best, that is, until his life began to change in ways that his neighbors still can’t quite explain—was a man named Lawrence Hartman.