The Mad Chopper

by Fred Rosen

  “Where did they get the stuff that they sniffed?”

  “They bought it from this guy in the black pickup.”

  Now it was black. A couple of minutes before, the pickup was green.

  “It was fairly good-sized parking lot there on both sides. I wasn’t paying too much goddamn attention, like uh, I was playing the game room. Now all three are having a drink and they are sniffing … and so then Christ, we drive up and park.”

  “You said all three of them had a drink. You weren’t drinking?” Breshears asked.

  “Yeah, I was drinking,” Singleton admitted.

  “Which one wasn’t drinking?”

  “All three of them was drinking.”

  “There was four of you,” Breshears reminded him amiably.

  “Well, I mean …” Singleton stumbled.

  “All of you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Did you sniff any of the stuff?”

  “No I didn’t sniff it, no. I pretended to. I don’t know anything about that shit. But, okay, now everybody’s happy so we stop and I think there was a light there.”

  “Just right by the freeway?”

  Singleton shook his head.

  “No, this was still on that old highway. And so, we got to kidding around there and by that time now I know, this is going to sound bad, too, but for twenty years I had this old .22 short pistol. Lot of times I go out planking [shooting] with it.”

  “You mean in Nevada?”

  “In Nevada. This time I didn’t even know the goddamn thing was in the car. Okay, now Pedro tells the girl, ‘Well now you don’t need the knife. I have the pistol.’”

  “Where did he find the pistol at?”

  “I’ll be goddamned if I know.”

  “You don’t know where you put it in your own van?” Breshears did nothing to disguise the incredulity in his voice.

  “I don’t know. Maybe it was in the glove compartment. Normally I hide the thing under the carpet down the driver’s side. So, okay, so now everybody’s pretty goddamn drunk. These guys are talking about money. He suddenly remembered something. “What I didn’t say was the last place we stopped at, I had taken my money and put it in my sock in about three different places and stuck my wallet up over the sun visor.”

  “Where were they sitting?”

  “They were on the toolbox.”

  “Were you in the back of the van or were you in the …’

  “I was in the seat.”

  “Passenger seat?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And Larry was driving?”

  “Yeah. So, I was halfway kidding, when I told the girl, ‘How much would you charge to make love to everybody?’ And she was laughing and I think I give her eighty bucks, approximately eighty dollars, something like that. So then she said she liked to suck cocks, so okay, she gives Larry a blow job. I could’ve actually cared less, so what I done was trying to keep on one side so I could get out of the van. So, Christ I laid down, I got in the back and I laid down and she give me a blow job. So then she refused to give Pedro one. I don’t remember all the goddamn details, but at any rate, she turned around and sat on top of me.”

  “Did she take her clothes off?”

  “Yes, she took her clothes off.”

  “Did you take yours off?”

  “I, uh, took my pants down.”

  “What kind of pants were you wearing?”

  “Oh, a blue border suit.”

  “You were wearing a suit?” asked Breshears, barely hiding the surprise in his voice.

  “Yeah,” he answered, a little defensively.

  Reese eyed the tape recorder and noticed that the takeup reel was almost full.

  “Okay,” said Reese, “we’re getting pretty close to the end of this tape, so I’ll stop here and start another one. The time will be 19:54 hours.”

  Chapter Four

  The Golden Gate Bridge sparkled in the fall sunshine. Cars slipped across her span effortlessly, while below, fishing boats chugged back into the harbor with all kinds of fish that would wind up in the stalls at Fisherman’s Wharf.

  Sal Benedetto had decided to go fishing that morning. He usually got there early, but that morning, he had some extra chores to do around the house and did not arrive at the shoreline until just before noon. Still, it was a weekday and no one was around. Most fishermen preferred going to sea and the few that fished off the rocks, tended to do so a little bit farther down the coastline, where the water wasn’t as polluted. That meant that most mornings, Sal had his favorite shoreline under the bridge all to himself.

  He reached back and cast his line in and after it played out, set the reel on drag. If a fish bit, it’d get some line and then he’d pull and snag the hook in its mouth. That was the plan, until he happened to look off to his right. That’s when he saw what looked like a human hand. He gazed at it a while, focusing, trying to figure out if his eyes were playing tricks in the hot sun. When he realized that they were not, he wedged his pole into a rock and walked toward the object.

  When he was but a few feet away, he got a good look at it. He was right. It was a hand. How did it get there? Sal wondered. He didn’t speculate long. Better to call the cops and let them take care of it.

  Sal Benedetto went to get the cops, leaving one of Mary Vincent’s severed hands on the rock behind him.

  While Reese changed reels, Breshears stepped outside to think.

  For the most part, Breshears knew that Singleton was lying. There had been no evidence that Singleton had picked up any male hitchhikers. The girl had been very explicit: it was Singleton, and no one else, in his van.

  What he was telling the truth about was the drinking. One look at his red-veined nose told the story— this was a hard drinker, probably an alcoholic. The real question was when he got drunk, did he black out and keep going? If he did, he could have no memory of any assault, or at least claim he didn’t. That would allow his attorney, when he did get one, to introduce a diminished capacity defense.

  The fact was that the law said that if a person was drunk and committed a homicide, he wasn’t fully capable of understanding his actions and therefore not as culpable. That was crazy, but the law was the law, no two ways about it.

  The best thing Breshears could do here was to give Singleton enough rope to hang himself. Keep him talking, trap him in lies, and then maybe get him to make an admission, some sort of statement that could be used against him at trial.

  “You were telling me what you were wearing that night,” Breshears began after the break.

  “Like I said, I was wearing a blue border suit,” said Singleton with exasperation.

  “Blue border suit. Is that a two-piece suit?”

  “The same as this thing here,” Singleton answered, pointing to what he had on. Breshears looked him over.

  “So, like coveralls, that’s what you were wearing, like now?”

  “Yeah, like coveralls,” Singleton agreed.

  “Okay, and when did you say you took them off?”

  “No, I just pulled them down was all I did.”

  “Hold up there just one second. Didn’t you say that she sat on top of you?”

  “Yeah, she sat on top of me … down there.”

  It would almost be amusing. The alleged rapist mutilator was embarrassed to use the word “penis.”

  “Did Larry take his clothes off?”

  “He took his pants off, yeah, and his jacket.”

  “Did she say why she didn’t want anything to do with Pedro?”

  “Said something about how he was a ‘fat Mexican.’”

  “Okay.”

  “That was original. Singleton was trying to characterize the victim as a racist.

  “She said she wanted to stay stoned all the time. So then I tell these guys,” Singleton continued, “I said ‘Why worry about L.A?’ I put my paycheck down and said, ‘I got plenty of these. I get a couple of them a week.’ And I had a check there for about $800 and I don’t think
they could read too good. I said, ‘Look at this, I got two more of them.’ I tell them, ‘Let’s knock this off and we’ll go back to San Francisco and I’ll cash the checks and we’ll all have plenty of money to stay stoned for a week. These guys said, ‘Well, we could do a little business.’”

  “What kind of business?”

  “I guess dope business. So Christ, that’s when Pedro tried to drive the goddamn van.”

  “When you guys were putting the make to the girl, was the van stopped or was it moving?”

  “It was stopped and moving. Larry—”

  “What do you mean?” Breshears cut in

  “Larry was putting the make to her while Pedro almost run into the ditch.”

  “Who was driving when you put the make to her?”

  “It was stopped then.”

  “Do you recall where you were at?”

  “No. I’d never been in that part of the country down there before.”

  “Was it by the freeway, or stopped on the side of a freeway?”

  “No, it was off on a blacktop road down there somewhere.”

  “Straight road, flat road?”

  “Yeah it was straight road and flat top and, uh … oh yeah, I didn’t fuck there though. We stopped and went over to this shack. And, oh shit, by this time it was getting around ten and I’ll tell ya the goddamn truth, they said they was going to break into the shack and get something.”

  “What were they going to get?

  “I’ll be goddamn if I can remember. But there was an old shack there, but Christ by this time I was wondering what the hell was they going to do.”

  “Was there a reason why you don’t remember?”

  “I don’t really remember what they was going to do,” Singleton answered in a low, almost inaudible voice.

  “What happened then?”

  “Well, I could hear this door being forced open, and I said ‘Oh shit.’ See, I did this one time before. I picked up some hitchhikers halfway up here and they had booze with them and I went to sleep in the van and woke up in front of a bar. They were all teenagers and I took a rap there for contributing and I didn’t have a damn thing to do with it.”

  “What happened this time, Larry?”

  “Well, to tell you the goddamn truth about it, oh shit, Pedro started to drive again and Larry and her was sitting on the floor. She’s nude and Christ I just … to tell you the truth I passed out. Now, when I come to again, we were on the goddamn freeway. And, if I remember, shit, we’re almost where the highway splits.”

  “Where’s that at?”

  “Where 5 splits to San Francisco. I don’t know what the number is there.”

  “Uh-huh. Who was driving?”

  “The Mexican, and he was going about seventy-five and a little bit erratic so I calmed him down and told him, I said, ‘Look, hey, let’s let me drive because if we screw up here we’ll end up in jail.’”

  “Where was Larry?”

  “He was sitting in the other seat.”

  “Where was the girl?”

  “The girl wasn’t there at the time.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “So I get up, he stops, and I asked him, I said, ‘Where’s our pigeon at?’ He says, ‘Oh, she’s already got her hands in the till. She’s no good. We sent her to L.A.’ That’s the reason I didn’t think a goddamn thing more about it. I figure, well …”

  “What did you think about her clothes still being in the van?”

  “Her clothes?” He sounded surprised. “I don’t even … they weren’t in the van … I … don’t … even … know … know.… They weren’t in the van, no, no, because them guys only took their stuff out of the van when I dropped them off.”

  “Where did you drop them off at?”

  “At, uh, in San Francisco.”

  “You went into San Francisco?”

  “Yeah, because, see, I showed them the address where the union hall is there and I told them that’s where I work and I get plenty of money and the bank’s right around there. So I give them the rest of my money and by then, I had forty dollars. I told them, ‘You guys get a clock and I’ll meet you right back here at ten in the morning when the bank opens.’”

  “Do you remember where you dropped them off at in San Francisco?”

  “Yeah, at Sixth and Mission. Right on skid row.”

  “What did you do from there, after they were gone?”

  “I turned right around and went back down to Fifth and over the freeway and got some sleep and—”

  “Where was this at?”

  “Huh?”

  “Where did you go to get some sleep?”

  “Over at my Flannery residence.”

  “That’s your house?”

  “Yeah, and I figured, well, that’s a goddamn two-hundred-dollar lesson.”

  “Okay,” Reese cut in, “earlier in the day, we obtained some consent to searches from you. Remember that? One for your van that’s a ‘70—”

  “Seventy-one,” Singleton corrected him.

  “Blue Ford van,” Reese continued. “Also for the house at 826—”

  “Glenbrook.”

  “Glenbrook, that’s your place right?”

  “That’s right,” Singleton nodded.

  “Also, you gave me a consent to search for a blue toolbox which you had taken out of the van and put in the garage?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Also a consent to search for a ‘78 T-bird that belongs to you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay, now the consent to search for the T-bird was because of the fact that you said the coveralls you were wearing, blue in color with a zipper front …”

  “Yeah..”

  “Were in the trunk.”

  “I said they might be in the trunk, didn’t I? Did I say they were in the trunk?”

  “You said they were in the trunk,” Reese confirmed. “You put them in there after you washed them.”

  “Well, obviously I made a mistake, ’cause, see, I kind of thought they should be … should be three jumpsuits in there … a green one—”

  “Okay, mainly we were interested in the blue—”

  “And two blue ones,” Singleton continued.

  “There was a blue toolbox,” Reese added, “and we asked for a consent to search for that because you said that you had owned a hatchet.”

  “A small hatchet,” Breshears added, smiling easily.

  “Yeah, so?

  “And that you believed that hatchet was in the toolbox. Is that correct?” Reese asked.

  “Yeah.”

  Breshears noticed it then, a thin sheen of perspiration forming on Singleton’s forehead.

  “Now there’s some inconsistencies from what I recall earlier today and what you’re saying now,” Reese went on. “Earlier today you said that you gave Larry fifty dollars to purchase that dope.”

  “Yeah, I said approximately that.”

  “Did you give him the money or did he have the money?”

  “I give him the money.”

  “Also, you said when you woke up, Larry was driving the van in San Francisco. Was it Larry driving or the other guy driving?”

  “The other guy.”

  “Okay, earlier today, I asked if you ever remembered the girl being tied up. Do you remember what you said to that?”

  “I said no, I never remember seeing her tied up.”

  “Also, earlier today, I asked if there would be any reason for there being blood on your coveralls. Do you remember that?”

  “Yes, you did.”

  “First you told me no. Then later you told me something about a bloody nose.”

  “Yeah, I said that they were horsing around and then actually I can get bloody any time off here in small amounts. The lady that rents the house from me, she washed that stuff for me and no, I mean I don’t think it was. Also you can ask Hank over there, because Hank helped me clean out the van.”

  His rambling was almost incoherent. It was time to steer him ba
ck on track.

  “You mentioned something about her having a bloody nose,” Breshears reminded him.

  “I can vaguely recall something like that, driving along and she fell over and hit Pedro’s elbow or something like that. I just don’t know.”

  “Did it cause her nose to bleed?”

  “I don’t really remember if it did or not.”

  “When did you leave your home in San Pablo? After you went back to bed and got up? What time did you leave to go to Sparks?”

  “Around ten A.M I guess.”

  “Did you do anything around the house in San Pablo before you left? Clean up or anything?”

  “No, never did.”

  “Did you start a fire in the fireplace?”

  “Oh yeah, I burned up the paper.”

  “Did you burn anything besides paper?”

  “Uh. Yeah, I burned several old rags I had there.”

  “Several old rags?

  “Yeah, see, in my work there I come home with bags full of rags and before I left there I did burn ’em.”

  “Why did you burn the rags? Why didn’t you just keep those and wash those, too?”

  “Because it’s a needless expense to me.”

  “What color are those rags?”

  “All different colors I guess.”

  “What colors are there? Do you get them at work?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay, what colors are they?”

  “Uh, there’s every color.”

  “What colors do you remember?”

  “There’s blue, white …”

  “All the same material?”

  “No.”

  “They’re not all the same material?”

  “No.”

  “Are they supplied by a linen shop?”

  “Uh, uh, what you do is order a hundred-pound bundle of rags.”

  “Who do you order them from?”

  “From Chip’s Ship Handlers.”

  “They’re all pretty much the same brand then?”

  “Well, I’ll tell you the damn truth, I don’t know where they buy them. I guess there’s a half dozen different suppliers.”

  “Do you remember picking up the clothes from your house?”

  “Yeah.”

  Reese cut in. “Do you recall what was in them, the clothes you brought to Sparks?”