The Violated

by Bill Pronzini

  “Police officers. I’m Chief Griffin Kells, this is Lieutenant Ortiz.”

  “Yeah, I know. I seen your pictures. So what brings you to my place?”

  “Royce Smith.”

  “… Who?”

  “Royce Smith. The owner of that beige Hyundai over there.”

  “Oh, him. What you want him for?”

  “Ask him to step out here.”

  “Why? He do something?”

  “We need to talk to him.”

  “Yeah? What if he don’t want to talk to you?”

  “It would be in his best interest if he complies.”

  “You gonna arrest him? You got a warrant?”

  “No. This is a routine field investigation.”

  “Whatever that is.”

  “Are you going to cooperate, Mr. Puchinsky?”

  “This is private property, man. I don’t have to do nothing you say unless you got a warrant.”

  “Then we’ll go get one,” Griff lied, bluffing. “And it won’t be just for Royce Smith.”

  Puchinsky ceased leaning against the post, stood up straight. “You got no reason to hassle me—”

  “We’re not hassling you, we’re asking you to cooperate. Is there some reason you don’t want Smith to come out and talk to us?”

  Puchinsky wiped a hand over his mouth, then swept it down across the bulge of his belly. His bluster was gone now. I could almost see the play of his thoughts behind dim eyes sunk in pouches of fat: Did we know about the meth lab? Were we after him, too?

  “No,” he said. “I don’t hardly know him. Friend of a friend.”

  “Then go ask him to come out.”

  “All right. And then you take him outta here and leave me alone.”

  Without waiting for a response Puchinsky turned and reentered the house.

  After a short silence, two male voices rose inside. One of them shouted, “No no no, no fucking way!” Then other voices rose into an alarmed babbling. Someone—Puchinsky, I thought—yelled, “Hey, what the hell you think you’re doing—!” A loud crash then, followed by a cry of pain. Another shout: “Look out, look out, he’s got a gun!” A woman began screaming.

  Griff and I were already moving by then, back across the yard, hands on our weapons in response to that last ominous shout. Before we’d gone halfway, the sounds of a door slamming open and glass breaking came from the rear of the house. In the next second a man staggered into view, one arm upraised and clutching an object that glinted silver in the pale afternoon sunlight—the aluminum frame of a large-caliber automatic. Royce Smith. His red hair was like a beacon.

  Griff yelled, “Smith! Drop the gun, freeze!”

  Smith slowed but did not halt, half-turning in our direction. It looked to me as though he pulled the trigger on the automatic, but if so, it failed to fire. All he would have hit if it had gone off, the way his arm was bent at an upward angle, was a low-flying bird. Neither Griff nor I fired at him, though we would have been justified in doing so if he had stood his ground and made another attempt to shoot at us. But he didn’t. He spun again and lurched away in the direction of the barn.

  We gave chase. Pursuit situation now, direct pursuit of an armed and dangerous suspect; that we were on private property without a warrant was no longer an issue.

  Ley de fuga. The odd, foolish thought came from nowhere as I ran and vanished just as quickly. A measure of my loathing for men like Royce Smith. But I had no wish to blow him away, would not unless he forced me to act in self-defense. I wanted him taken alive, as I had taken the machete-wielding mass murderer Jorge Martinez that day long ago.

  Smith ignored another shouted command to halt. He was almost to the barn now, some thirty yards of open ground between him and us. It was uneven ground, weed grown, and Griff stumbled as he called out, lost his balance, sprawled headlong. I did not break stride. Smith had reached the barn doors, was pawing at one of the halves, trying to drag it open.

  From the corner of my eye I saw Puchinsky come limping out through the back door. “Smith!” he bellowed. “Don’t go in there, you stupid shit!”

  Smith ignored him, too. He had the door open now, flung himself inside the barn.

  I changed direction slightly so that I would not be in line with the open doorway. When I reached the barn, I drew up tight against the closed door half. A few seconds later Griff was there next to me. Puchinsky had ceased shouting, ceased staggering forward; I saw him drop to one knee with his head down.

  I could hear Smith moving around inside, banging into unseen objects. Then, surprisingly, light blossomed in there. I moved forward, eased my head around the door edge for a quick scan of the interior.

  The light came from one of several bulbs strung along the rafters—the old-fashioned kind with dangling pull cords. Smith had yanked one of the cords and was scrabbling among an arrangement of soda pop bottles connected with rubber tubing and duct tape. He still held the automatic, the muzzle pointed down at the floor. His movements were jerky, confused, his face shiny with sweat and flushed almost as red as his hair. Kite high on meth. Stoned beyond reason.

  Griff said in a hoarse whisper, “What’s he doing?”

  “Hunting for more drugs. Meth lab’s in there.”

  “He looking this way?”

  “No.”

  “The gun?”

  “Still in his hand. Pointed at the floor.”

  Noise came from the yard behind us, vehicle doors slamming, then the roar of an engine. A quick glance showed me the blue Mustang fishtailing backward, its tires spinning up swirls of dust. Palumbo and at least one other person—not Puchinsky, he was still kneeling on the weedy ground. But even if they escaped the backup patrol unit on Dobler Road, they would not get far.

  From inside the barn came a sudden animal-like keening, then a string of furious obscenities. Glass shattered; something metallic thumped and clattered as if it had been thrown or kicked. I poked my head around the doorjamb again. Smith’s back was to the door now. He was frenziedly kicking at a pile of waste material, at the same time loosely pointing the automatic at the connected pop bottles and repeatedly jerking the trigger. The angry babbling was because the weapon refused to fire.

  I pulled back long enough to say, “The gun’s either jammed or empty.”

  “Go.”

  I went quick and quiet around the edge of the door into the barn, Griff close behind me and then fanning out to my left. Smith took no notice; in his drug frenzy, he seemed to have forgotten about us. He continued to kick at the waste pile, to curse the useless automatic. If he had kept that up long enough, we might have been able to move in fast and take him unawares. But before we could take more than a few steps, he hurled the gun at the pop bottles, shattering another one, and when he did that, his body and head turned and he saw me. Only me. He did not seem to notice Griff, or to hear another of the chief’s shouted commands.

  He swiped sweat out of his eyes, made that keening sound again, and charged me. Head down, arms extended, like an enraged bull charging a matador’s red cape.

  I sidestepped him as easily as a matador would have, tripped him as he went by, and sent him sprawling belly down into a stack of cat-litter bags. The fall jarred him long enough for me to drop down on top of him with my knee in his back. As small in stature as he was, he fought me with so much strength I had no choice but to stun him with the barrel of my Glock. Even then, it took both Griff and me half a minute to hold him down and cuff his hands behind his back. His legs kept thrashing, mostly in reflex now, making it necessary to bind them with a length of the rubber tubing.

  Griff picked up and examined the automatic, a Colt .45. “Jammed tight. Our lucky day in more ways than one.”

  “For sure.”

  “By the book, Robert,” Griff said then, nodding at Smith. “I’ll get us some help. And see about Puchinsky.”

  I read Smith his rights, even though he was too wasted to understand them and respond. We would Mirandize him again at the station lat
er when he was sober enough to be lucid.

  Before I went outside to join Griff, I took a long look around the interior.

  This was no small-scale mom-and-pop lab, but an operation large enough to supply all the addicts and would-be addicts in Santa Rita and part of the county as well. The barn was filled with the equipment and chemical products and substances, used and unused, necessary for the manufacture of methamphetamines. Hundreds of full and empty packages of medications containing ephedrine and pseudoephedrine, the primary ingredients. Volatile organic compounds such as lithium drained from batteries. Containers of ether, paint thinner, muriatic acid, alcohol. Compressed-gas cylinders. A camp stove. Coils of rubber tubing, rolls of duct tape. Bags of cat litter and Epsom salts. Holes had been drilled in the walls to ventilate the dangerous hydrogen chloride gas fumes released during the cooking. Still, it was a wonder the whole place hadn’t blown up by now.

  I did not see any of what Smith had been hunting for, powdered and crystallized meth ready to be swallowed, inhaled, injected, or smoked. Puchinsky would most likely have that hidden away inside the house. But we didn’t need it to arrest and charge him. There was more than enough evidence right here.

  GRIFFIN KELLS

  We booked Royce Smith on charges of attempted murder and resisting arrest, but in his stoned condition it was hours before we were able to interrogate him.

  Leonard Puchinsky we booked for violation of California Health and Safety Code 11379.6 HS, the illegal manufacture of drugs, narcotics, and controlled substances. We’d had no trouble taking him into custody, though he’d turned mute immediately afterward and remained that way except for demanding a lawyer. Once he consulted with one, he refused to answer any questions that might incriminate him.

  His lawyer, a young public defender, thought the DA would be unable to make the charges stick, but when I spoke to Gavin Conrad, he was confident that he could. Robert and I had been completely justified in entering the barn in pursuit of an armed and dangerous Smith, thus our discovery of the meth lab had not been the result of an illegal search; no competent trial judge was likely to rule otherwise. Judge Kiley supported our position by granting a search warrant for the farmhouse, which turned up twenty-two ounces of powdered and crystal meth stashed in a bedroom closet. The odds were good that Puchinsky would do time in one of the state lockups.

  The situation with Jason Palumbo was less cut-and-dried. He and a woman companion had been stopped just after they left the farm property and held by patrol officers Chang and Gonsolves, who found no drugs on either of them or in the vehicle. They both claimed they hadn’t known drugs were on the premises. All we could do was hold Palumbo temporarily as a material witness. Unless somebody was willing to testify against him—not Courtney Reeves, she had no direct knowledge that he’d been dealing—he would walk. But he was the type who wouldn’t learn from a close call; it was a good bet that he’d make the mistake of hooking up with another Puchinsky, and maybe then we’d nail him too.

  Smith was in bad shape when he finally sobered up—the binge he’d been on had apparently lasted for days. Shaky, sweaty, and plenty scared. Scared enough to waive his right to counsel and terrified when Robert and I listed the charges against him.

  He claimed not to remember trying to shoot us with Puchinsky’s .45 automatic (legally registered, surprisingly) or any of what went down inside the barn. This was probably true—a drug-induced mental block. But he couldn’t get away with the same claim about raping Angela Lowenstein. Tremors racked him and his face turned a splotchy, rosacea-like red when we accused him. It didn’t take much verbal hammering to break him down and get a confession.

  He couldn’t get her out of his mind, he said, she was like an obsession with him, but she wouldn’t have anything to do with him, always acting so superior and stuck-up, then she’d left her purse in an open desk drawer when she went to the toilet and he’d taken her apartment key, but he wouldn’t have done anything with it if her old man hadn’t ragged on him again in front of everybody, that made him want to get back at both of them, and he knew which nights she took college classes down in Riverton because she’d mentioned it once in the office, so he’d bought the mask and gloves and knife and then got cranked up and used the key to get into her apartment, but he didn’t intend to rape her, no, just scare her by pretending to be the serial rapist, but he went kind of crazy when she came home, couldn’t control himself, he was sorry when he sobered up afterward, felt so bad he’d stayed wasted ever since … blah, blah, blah, the usual garbled, self-serving, bullshit excuses you get from stupid felons once they’re in custody.

  He threw a literal fit when we suggested he was guilty of the other four rapes, screaming, “No! It wasn’t me, it wasn’t me, only Angela, none of those other women, I swear to God it wasn’t me!” On and on like that, his fear so intense a scud of froth dribbled from a corner of his mouth.

  It wasn’t him. A onetime copycat, nothing more. I knew it and so did Robert even before Smith told us where to find the mask, gloves, and knife—the damn fool had them in a closet in his apartment. Angela’s key, too, still attached to the miniature dream catcher.

  There could be little doubt now that the contents of the bundle found at the marina belonged to the serial. Which left us with the same still-unanswered questions.

  Who had abandoned the bundle and why?

  Was Martin Torrey the serial or was it somebody else?

  And who had murdered Martin Torrey?

  TED LOWENSTEIN

  When Chief Kells called to tell me they’d caught the man who raped Angela, and who he was, I ran the gamut of emotional reactions. Relief mixed with surprise first of all, then rage at Royce Smith, then guilt and anger at myself for not only hiring the miserable little bastard but for keeping him on staff despite his substandard journalism. It made me want to puke, thinking of him sitting at his desk ogling Angela—I’d seen him doing that, for God’s sake, hadn’t thought anything about it—and fantasizing and planning what he was going to do to her.

  “You can’t blame yourself, Daddy,” Angela said when I relayed the news to her. She was sitting propped up on pillows in the living room, Tony Ciccoti beside her holding her hand. “You had no way of knowing what kind of man Royce Smith is.”

  “Or that he’s a junkie,” Tony said. “He never showed any signs of addiction when he was in the office, did he?”

  “If he had, I would have fired him on the spot,” I said. “But there were indications that I missed. Late arrivals at the office now and then, a couple of stories handed in late and a missed assignment. I should have realized the possibility that drugs were responsible.”

  “I didn’t,” Angela said. “Nobody else did, either.”

  She looked much better now that she was home, color in her cheeks, some of the old sparkle in her eyes. But she winced whenever she moved too quickly, a grim reminder of the pain she was suffering. She hadn’t complained, however, not once. Brave. Strong. She would come through this all right in the long run. With emotional scars, yes, that was inevitable, but they wouldn’t cripple her. She wouldn’t allow that to happen.

  “Are the police sure Smith isn’t the one who raped those other women?” Tony asked.

  “Evidently. Angela was his only victim.”

  “Well, I hope they throw the book at him. Put him in a maximum-security prison where he’ll get done to him what he did to Angela.”

  “Tony, don’t,” Angela said. “Please.”

  “Sorry, honey. I can’t help hating him.”

  Neither could I. And I couldn’t help agreeing with Tony and what he had wished would happen to Smith. What was that old saw? A liberal is somebody who hasn’t been mugged. Yes, or a man whose daughter hasn’t been raped. Right now I had a hard time believing that vengeance is the Lord’s prerogative, and that hate is a hollow emotion. I had always been a vehement opponent of capital punishment. If Royce Smith had been eligible for lethal injection, it would have been difficult for me to susta
in that belief now, too.

  Tony suggested we have something to eat. Angela wasn’t hungry, and neither was I, but he insisted. He was a good kid. He’d stayed with Angela at the hospital most of yesterday, been here for her since she was released. If she loved him, and it seemed obvious that she did, I hoped she would marry him whether it meant a faraway move or not. My feelings had previously been somewhat selfish. Her happiness from now on was my only concern.

  While Tony was in the kitchen, I received a call from Tyler James, wanting to consult on how the news of Smith’s arrest was to be presented in the Clarion. We discussed that, then the discovery of the meth lab and arrest of Leonard Puchinsky. I told him I would write an editorial tonight praising Chief Kells and his men for their excellent work in both cases. I was ready, almost eager, to get back to work myself now.

  Three more calls came in while we were having dinner on TV trays in the living room—soup and grilled-cheese sandwiches, simple fare but made with Tony’s usual skill. All three calls were from well-wishers. As was a fourth, after we finished eating. All were from friends of Angela’s and mine.

  Before I sat down to write my editorial, I made a call of my own—to the one person I hadn’t heard from, who wasn’t and never would be a friend in any sense of the word.

  HUGH DELAHUNT

  I must say I had mixed feelings about the capture and confession of Royce Smith and the arrest of the methamphetamines dealer. The removal of dangerous criminals and the source of dangerous drugs from the streets of any city—and Santa Rita particularly—were cause for rejoicing. What made Smith’s capture even more satisfying was that he had been a Clarion employee. A veritable viper in Ted Lowenstein’s bosom, targeting the man’s daughter the entire time he worked for that rag, no doubt. The fallout from this would surely harm Lowenstein’s credibility in the community, and by extension the credibility of his unwarranted attacks on me.

  That Smith had vehemently denied committing the previous four assaults was not as disturbing as it might have been. I still believed Martin Torrey to have been the guilty party. The inability of Kells and Ortiz to bring Torrey’s murderer to justice was unfortunate, of course, but this too had its positive side where my feud with Lowenstein was concerned.