the Onion Field (1973)

by Wambaugh, Joseph

  There were other things which frightened him more. One was just being afraid. This was fear without a name, which could not be battled because he had no idea where it came from. He would be sitting there alone sometime after midnight when Helen, pregnant for the third time, was asleep. He might even be vaguely interested in something on television. It would creep up on him. It would attack without warning. A bodiless, merciless, strangling thing. He would find himself cowering in his chair, and his hands would be so wet he couldn't hold the beer can and would spill most of it on himself like a baby. Then he would sit with his hands between his knees and wait for the ocean of scalding blood to crest and break and slosh through his skull, for this is how he felt it. Then it would slowly pass.

  If only he knew what made him afraid. If only he knew, he was sure he could defeat it. He did consider seeing a physician, but what could they tell him? It was his nerves, of course. He was too weak to live down the shock of the killing. That's what he suspected must be troubling him. A real man could have come out of it in a short time and resumed a normal life.

  After all, he had done all he could that night. He had nothing to feel bad about. Nothing at all. It was easy for some of them to criticize him. To have their training classes and criticize him and Ian and say what should have been done. Yes, it was easy enough to say. Anyway, it didn't bother him at all. There was nothing else he could have done. There was nothing to feel bad about. He didn't feel bad about it. There was no reason to feel bad.

  Then he was crying. It was the first time he had cried like this. Karl Hettinger sat hunched in his chair and his wet cheeks glistened silver from the light of the television, and his shoulders began heaving and great shuddering sobs ripped out. He lost control. He wept and the shame of it made the tears gush hot. There was nothing left, not a shred of self-respect. What kind of a man would cower and cry in the swirling darkness?

  He no longer sat in front of the television. He had fallen to his knees. He couldn't breathe, so overwhelming was his grief. The sobs were soundless now and absolutely dry. He cried until he hardly had the strength to stagger to his bed. Though he was not a religious man he thanked God for not having let him awaken his wife. The most unbearable part was to think of another human being seeing him like this. He whimpered very quietly in his bed until his control returned.

  For a year after this, Karl would be completely impotent, then sporadically impotent. One day while walking through a department store with O'Lear looking for thieves, he saw a masonry drill he needed. He started to buy it but instead just put it in his pocket. It was as baffling and inexplicable as the weeping.

  Chapter 14

  On June 22, 1964, the United States Supreme Court had handed down an opinion in the case of a young man named Danny Escobedo who had murdered his brother-in-law but who had confessed only after first telling police: "I'm sorry, but I would like to have advice from my lawyer."

  On January 29, 1965, a murder conviction had been reversed for a convict named Robert R. Dorado, who stabbed another inmate to death and confessed to that murder. The California court took Escobedo a step further and decided that the police have a duty to warn of both the right to remain silent and the right to counsel.

  Finally, on June 13, 1966, the United States Supreme Court reversed the gase of Ernesto Miranda, a confessed kidnapper and rapist. Miranda laid down for all of America the same guidelines as Dorado had in California. Chief Justice Earl Warren condemned the police for tricking the confession of guilt from the defendant.

  Ernesto Miranda had been arrested the day Ian Campbell was buried.

  By January 30, 1967, there were sixty-two men in San Quentin Death Row. They were cop killers, stranglers, slashers, rapists. Some had murdered once, some several times. Some could not be stopped from murdering, not even by prison walls. There were thirty-four white Anglos, twenty-one blacks, five Latins, two Indians.

  In the past three years, fifty-seven men had gotten new trials with twenty-six of those receiving death verdicts a second time. One, in fact, was freed after a third trial.

  335 It was a time of great hope on the row for those sixty-two residents, even for Gregory Powell, who felt that a retrial was inevitable, though it would probably end the same as the last.

  Four residents of the row, all white men, had one last agitated conversation that afternoon.

  "Man, fuck it, I say, we gotta go while we got the chance!"

  "Yeah, but the new trials . . ."

  "Fuck the new trials!"

  "Yeah, but you got a hot beef, you and Powell."

  "So stick around and bum dimes and watch TV and eat your fucking zuzus. Me, I'm trying it tonight."

  "I didn't say I wouldn't go."

  "Well, I'm going and Powell's going, right?"

  "Right," said Greg.

  "Well, you guys got hot beefs."

  "Man, Reagan is the governor. Don't you understand that? He's laying to smoke people!"

  "I didn't say I wouldn't go. What the fuck I got to lose?"

  At 1:00 a. M. a sergeant was completing a visual check of each of the sixty-eight cells which comprised the row. The sergeant heard nothing but the heavy breathing of the sleepers. He walked quietly in the tennis shoes he had been wearing ever since the inmates complained that his leather shoes were too noisy. When he left the aisle he had an uneasy feeling. He returned, peeked around a corner, and saw an inmate running quietly in the other direction.

  The sergeant made a call and armed officers immediately poured into the row. Additional guards were assigned to the prison towers, and building number eight was completely surrounded. The guards found the two lower bars of Gregory Powell's cell sawed through and removed. The prisoner was missing. The bars on the cells of Edmund Reeves, Charlie Pike, and Joshua Hill were partially sawed and the grooves filled with paint-tinted soap. Pajama-clad dummies stuffed with newspapers were found in the cells of Pike and Hill.

  In Gregory Powell's cell the guards found a can of excrement, estimated to be three days' usage after the toilet had been torn from the wall. With the toilet removed the prisoner could reach into the utility corridor. The hole also revealed a drainpipe which on past occasions had been used to transport contraband from one floor to another.

  Gregory Powell was captured above Reeves's cell at a barred transom. He had been sawing through the bars with a hacksaw blade. Several blades were found in Reeves's cell as well as two rolls of rope, each over one hundred feet long, woven patiently from bed sheets which had been cut into three strips. A test revealed that it took only three and one half minutes to saw through a cell bar with a hacksaw.

  Prison authorities were unable to trace the source of the hacksaw blades. One theory was that they were leftovers from an earlier attempt by two fire bombers who killed six people at the Mecca Bar in Los Angeles. The arsonists had been commuted to life, no longer residing on the row, but would eventually testify as character witnesses for Gregory Powell. Another theory was that the hacksaw blades were smuggled inside within Gregory Powell's typewriter by a family member.

  There were no escape charges filed against the four inmates. When Homicide Division, Los Angeles Police Department, asked why, they were given these reasons: (1) There was delay and confusion in obtaining the evidence used by the principals in the attempted escape. (2) When a criminal prosecution is sought against inmates, the inmates have a tendency to subpoena all their inmate friends to court which creates a security problem. (3) Filing additional criminal charges would delay the pending appeals.

  All four inmates were confined to isolation cells for the maximum term allowed, twenty-nine days, with loss of television and commissary privileges for the entire time. In addition, inmate Powell was charged thirty-two dollars for the broken porcelain toilet. This was the second isolation punishment for Joshua Hill. He got twenty- nine days the first time for slashing a fellow inmate's throat.

  Gregory Powell had been five minutes from the roof of building number eight. With two hundred feet
of rope and a San Francisco fog going for him, he came perhaps closer than any man to escaping the row.

  Jimmy Smith now lived next door to the Gamblin Man, Aaron Mitchell, who would become the most famous member of the row.

  They shared the same television set and seldom bickered over control of the channels, each usually checking with the other before using his remote control switch.

  Jimmy and Mitchell played bridge avidly and Mitchell talked of his early life in black ghettos, of petty stealing, and of finding a white woman whom he felt obliged to steal for. He told of finally killing a policeman in a robbery and of nearly being killed himself in the shootout.

  Jimmy played cards with the Gamblin Man until one day Jimmy went to the dentist. When Jimmy returned with the escort guards he was surprised to see Mitchell standing naked in his cell.

  "Jimmy, get the bull to pull the bar," said Mitchell in a strange voice, and Jimmy walked to the rear of the block.

  "Just got a tooth pulled," said Jimmy to the guard pointing to the cotton in his jaw. "Want back in."

  When Jimmy got to the other end of the block Aaron Mitchell walked out of his cell still naked. He looked around with a confused expression and began pacing up and down the deck for a space of forty feet.

  The guard on the gunrail rose from his stool and gaped. All talk and card playing stopped. Those men who were close watched Aaron Mitchell slash his wrist and raise his left arm letting the blood splash to the floor. Then he continued to walk, saying: "Do you know I am gonna die just like Jesus Christ did? I will die to save you guys."

  Four guards rushed into the cellblock and carefully coaxed Aaron Mitchell into giving up the razor blade and surrendering. The doctor went into his cell and no one ever heard another word from the Gamblin Man. Not that night, not ever. The next morning they executed him.

  Jimmy could smell the fumes being filtered through the water out into the air that day, April 12, 1967. Jimmy smelled the gas for days even when logic told him it was gone. Two weeks later a judge issued a blanket stay of execution to cover every man on Death Row. Jimmy's stomach at last began to unknot. The Gamblin Man was the last of them to die.

  The gardener was reading the paper in his truck. After this break, he would finish up the yard and be through for the day.

  He thought how strange it was to see so many Christmas advertisements already in the paper since it wasn't even December yet. They just started earlier and earlier each year, thought the gardener. It was going to be the biggest Christmas season ever> they said. They were selling everything at exceptionally low prices to celebrate the coming year and it would be a most jubilant New Year, they said. The 1960's were finished and they were starting a more hopeful decade. They would help you to celebrate the coming of 1970 by giving you rock bottomy end of the yeary closeout pricesy they said.

  He couldn 't help remembering all the things he had stolen during that one Christmas season. Then he saw the ink smeared on his fingers from the newspaper. He couldn't believe how badly his hands were sweating. They were dripping sweat and black with ink. His hands were usually wet, but not like this.

  He knew there was no avoiding it. He had to think of his last crime. When they stopped him. When he was caught. When they exposed him for the thief he was.

  He hadn't committed his last crime during a Christmas season. No, it was even a more insidious time of year, when California gardens are bursting with life, vigor, potency. It was in May, the gardener's favorite month.

  He was caught at a supermarket It wasn 9t the first time he had stolen in this place. In facty less than a month before, he was almost caught here. He was seen on the first occasion when he stole two packages of cigars. He had come back to steal again.

  It troubled him the second time he stole cigars. He thought it was doubly wrong to steal what you couldn ft use. Why would someone steal what he couldn 't use? He had just grabbed the cigars on an impulse. He smoked them so they wouldn11 go to waste. Well, he reasonedy hadn't he often smoked a cheap cigar in those ancient college days when he played poker? It had been his dormitory trademark.

  He always remembered trivia like that What was so difficult to remember were things that happened from March 1963 when Ian was killed until May 1966 when he was finally caught for his crimes and stopped stealing, and became a gardener. Certain things would stand out when he really tried to remember, but other things just weren't there and his wife would have to remind him. Why didn't the crimes fade like that? Why did he have to remember his crimes so well?

  He was almost positive the store employee was watching him shove the packages of cigars in his pocket. Then he had the cigars. Now came the critical period. The thing he always thought about and dreaded. The critical period of making his escape. There could be no doubt. He knew he was seen. He could hardly control his legs. He walked slowly, deliberately, just as always. The store employee followed him.

  It was the same store employee who had seen him do it the other time when the employee wasn yt sure enough to challenge him. This time he was sure and the employee followed him to the parking lot and copied down the license number.

  He was frightened. He would be stopped now. They were going to arrest him. Would he run, fight, surrender? He didn 't know. He knew nothing except that there were waves of blood cresting, surging, breaking in his head. He got in his car. Still he was not arrested. He paused before starting the engine. Still nothing. He knew the store employee had taken his license number. He must have taken his license number. He didn't sleep at all that night He couldn't eat at all the next day. Finally it came. The telephone call. Report to the fifth floor of the police building. To Internal Affairs Division.

  Chapter 15

  They made him wait in an outer office of Internal Affairs Division for a long time before calling him inside for the questioning. It was a technique they used on all their subjects, even though all their subjects were police officers and presumably knew about such obvious interrogation devices. They usually dragged out the Mutt and Jeff routine where one investigator sides with the subject against another ostensibly more hostile one. They used every old trick on their subjects, and the strange thing was that it worked. It worked on policemen who understood, even better than it worked on ordinary criminals who did not. The thing which made it work on policemen was the thing which made the lie detector work better-the conscience of the subject. So many ordinary criminals are sociopaths that the lie detector is utterly useless and interrogation techniques are frustrated because there isn't a sense of guilt, the most valuable tool of the interrogator.

  Karl waited and knew what it was for. He tried to think of a plausible story, but the more he thought, the less likely became any excuse he could conjure up. Instead of thinking about what he would tell them, he thought about an incident which had dominated his thoughts lately. It had happened since his recent transfer to Highland Park Detectives.

  They had surrounded a house in a narcotics stakeout. A suspect had suddenly come running into an apartment from the direction of the house and up a flight of stairs with Karl running behind and commanding him to stop. Karl drew his magnum as he ran into the building and shouted at the runner. Then Karl stumbled and fell on the stairway, and his hand instinctively gripped the gun but the hammer only popped back part way and the gun didn't fire. The runner was apprehended and turned out to be a frightened teenager who had seen men with guns and had nothing to do with the narcotics stakeout. Karl had to clench his fists to keep his hands steady every time he thought about what he had almost done accidentally that day.

  He had bought that four-inch magnum partly because he felt it would let him fire more accurately now that he was having so much trouble with his monthly shooting qualification. He had come to a conclusion about the inexplicable bouts of fear which were attacking him with such great frequency. He reasoned that he was probably afraid of Gregory Powell's friends. Perhaps while the case was on appeal Powell would send someone to harm the vital witness or his family. He
never feared Smith, only Powell. That must be what the fear is all about, he told himself. He bought a better gun to make the bad feelings go away.

  At last they called him into the Internal Affairs interrogation room, and Karl Hettinger discovered he was not a man to escape irony. One of the two investigators was Sergeant Riddle, whom he had worked with in the past, and who had been the chaplain presiding at the funeral of Ian Campbell.

  "I put a dollar down on the counter before I walked out," the subject told the two investigators after only a few prefatory questions.

  "That wasn't enough to pay for the cigars," said Riddle. "We're old partners, Karl. Do you want to tell me about it?"

  "Well I just made a mistake then."

  "You didn't make a mistake, Karl. The man at the market saw you stealing cigars there last month."

  "Well if I did it, I didn't know I did it."

  And the investigators settled for that: a passive, tacit admission of guilt. He was ordered back in the afternoon.

  His lunch was two cups of coffee. He thought about the interrogation during the lunch hour. Just a table and three chairs. A tape recorder on the table. Four walls which closed in on him. He thought of all the criminals he had interrogated in similar rooms, so stark and bleak and inhospitable. Strange he never thought about it before. He never thought about how frightened some of them must be.

  That afternoon he sat across from Captain Colwell, the commander of Internal Affairs Division. The captain was not a man noted for a sense of humor. Now as he sat so still and somber, and stared at the subject, Karl felt himself hunching forward even more than usual. He was going to try to explain to the captain that it was a mistake. He intended to lie and say that it had never happened before. He was going to tell the biggest lie of all and say that he was not a thief. Instead he withered under that gaze. The captain looked so stern, so disapproving, so right to the subject.