by Mark Johnson
I became a cop partly to escape management. Personnel problems were constant, aggravating, and among the least satisfying parts of any job I’d ever had, so why do it as a cop for a dollar more an hour and stripes on my sleeve?
Then, six years into the job, six years riding beat 12, six years as a no-rank slick sleeve, the captain calls me into his office one day and tells me that they’re restructuring the Investigations Division, beefing up property crime investigations at the precinct level, putting more manpower where it can be more focused and effective on burglaries and thefts, and he wants me to be on a detective squad he’s putting together. There’s no test to take. There’s virtually no training, either, other than OJT*. Nor is there any pay, rank, or even status change. Oh, I would get a $200-a-year clothing allowance, since I’ll be going “plainclothes,” wearing my own civilian duds on the job now. And when I’m on a scene, I control it, even if there are sergeants and lieutenants around. “But I doubt that’ll go to your head,” the captain says.
I ask the usual why me, and he answers with the usual: “You can write a good report. And you should make a good impression in court.”
Then he presses for the close.
“You’ve had an unusually long run at one spot for this department, Mark. Six years in the same beat. You’ve seen how people get moved around. If you don’t take this, pretty soon you’ll just see your name on the transfer list anyway, and they won’t be inviting you, they’ll be ordering you, and who knows where you’ll land? How’d you like to end up in some shit hole like Property, or the Impound Lot, or the Pawn detail?”
I don’t respond immediately. I’m remembering the time at United Way that there had been some campaign donations missing from the fund drive among faculty and staff of the Mobile County Public School administration building. It was only a few thousand dollars, and I knew none of my staff had stolen it, but I needed to prove it to my board and to the school board. So I had asked for an investigation from MPD.
A guy in a cheap, ill-fitting rumpled suit, with a bad haircut—not unlike Peter Falk’s Columbo—had appeared at the office one day. Except he had none of Columbo’s wit, or charm, or even street smarts, so far as I could tell. I explained to him that my staff were exemplars of probity, but I simply needed the MPD’s confirmation of that fact to remove all suspicion from our end of the money handling. While I certainly wanted him to be diligent and thorough in his investigation of my staff, it really amounted to a pro forma demonstration of our system’s checks and balances and integrity. He proceeded to spend the better part of a week grilling and browbeating my staff, bringing several of them to tears (including the men) and enraging the rest, only to conclude that his investigation was inconclusive and to suggest I subject everyone to polygraph examinations. I thanked the idiot for his help and dismissed him.
If that’s what it means to be a detective, I’m thinking I’d just as soon stay on the streets. But I don’t share any of these misgivings with my captain.
I’ve known the captain since he was the sergeant running the academy and I was his oldest recruit. We’d had some candid talks about career trajectories and life lessons, and I respected and trusted him. He had given me good insight into police culture.
“Cops are often petty and real jealous of each other’s success. Avoid calling attention to yourself if you can,” he had counseled when the press had wanted to do a story on “old United Way guy becomes cop.” (I had done it anyway and regretted it. I was immediately suspected to be a dabbler, a dilettante, a rich “hobby cop.”) And the captain had provided pithy but profound counsel on other matters as well, such as the cop tendency to become suspicious of everybody (“When you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail”) and how to deal with cop groupies (who exist, even for one of my advanced years). “Just remember: the badge’ll get ya pussy, but that pussy’ll get your badge.”
The captain is a smart man, and an honest one. I know I can trust him not to give me a bum steer.
After a moment, I hear myself say, “Hell, Cap, I guess you’ve made me an offer I can’t refuse.”
So I became a detective, somewhat reluctantly. I knew that at least Nancy would be happy. (Or, more precisely, a little less worried.)
And, in the back of my mind, there was always this: I already had a little experience with investigation. Nearly three decades earlier, I had cracked a cold case that had spanned the globe and the better parts of three lifetimes, a case involving missing persons (one of whom had long been presumed dead).
It had been, in a manner of speaking, a case of identity theft: my own.
For ten years, from my eighteenth to my twenty-eighth year, my investigative efforts had consisted mostly of looking in phone books for Culkin listings whenever I went to a new town. Never found a one.
In the meantime, I (somehow) graduated from CU with a degree in English (a hard-driven bargain with my beleaguered dad, who allowed me to drop out of architecture and major in whatever I chose, on the condition that I at least stay in school until I graduated with a degree in something, so when I went to Viet Nam with the Marine Corps—as I had threatened to do—I’d at least have a shot at going in as an officer rather than as cannon fodder). I had also married my college sweetheart and, since ’Nam had ended by the time I graduated, had taken a series of soul-deadening sales jobs, despite having little if any interest or knack for selling, especially since my product lines ranged from soft drinks to condiments to cookbooks. The chief benefits of the work, as I saw it, were a company car and an expense account, little accountability due to management’s distant location, and a five-state territory covering the Rockies. Roaming such a vast expanse of geography afforded ample opportunity to look in numerous phone books, as well as to introduce myself as Rusty Culkin to every bartender, barfly, and beat-down booze whore in every roadhouse, motel lounge, and honky-tonk in Colorado, Wyoming, New Mexico, Arizona, and Utah. Always looking for that flicker of recognition, never finding one, then luxuriating in the bizarre and twisted freedom of being, at least for that night, whoever Rusty Culkin might feel like being: an advance man for 60 Minutes, in town to do preliminary research for a feature on western saloons that might well include this very bar! Or a columnist for the ProRodeo Sports News, in town to do a story on local cowboys and the rodeo groupies who worship them, or a skip tracer, hunting a guy who’s wanted in three states for bail jumping on charges of embezzlement, or bigamy (that last one always played well in Utah).
Though my random, hit-or-miss investigative techniques were utterly futile, they were cheaper and a lot more fun than hiring some shady Sam Spade character (why hire one when, as Rusty Culkin, I could just be one?) or engaging a pricey New Orleans litigator to wage a court battle to unearth the Dead C Scrolls. (The C being for the whore-bitch Cunt who’d squeezed me out, abandoned me, then probably crawled off to die of syphilis in some skid row free clinic.)
And then, as fate would have it, my long-suffering wife, a working journalist, was assigned to do a feature story on a group called Adoptees In Search, which was holding some kind of confab in Colorado Springs. Nancy came home from work and mentioned some of the people she had interviewed for the article and the successful, heart-melting “reunions” they had helped arrange between “relinquishing mothers” and their long-lost illegitimate offspring. She urged me to contact them.
Eventually, I did but with little hope for any useful suggestions or resources. After all, what could a group of amateurs in Colorado do to unlock sealed adoption documents nearly three decades old from a home for unwed mothers a half a continent away in New Orleans that had been out of business since 1957? I had nailed down the date of The Willows’ demise through some desultory research at the library (this was well before the Internet), where I had found a fairly recently microfilmed New Orleans Times-Picayune story that included a reference to The Willows’ closing. The main story was on the general decline in adoption, owing to the legalized access and widespread availability of birth con
trol and abortion and the fading stigma of unwed motherhood, which made it much easier for pregnant girls who chose not to abort to keep their children to raise themselves. The piece on The Willows was just a sidebar story to illustrate how, in contrast to today’s open acceptance (if not fashionability) of unwed motherhood, the topic used to be spoken of in hushed tones with euphemistic language. From an old The Willows promotional brochure: “Long recognized as offering some of Nature’s choicest products to America’s finest families.” The florid, fulsome snob appeal nauseated me. Why not just something on the order of Get your USDA Prime bastards here at the The Willows, folks! But the dated literature, as well as the Picayune’s story, did bear out Mom’s recollection of The Willows’ national reputation.
Still, no matter how well known or well regarded it had been, I had my doubts about the ability of Adoptees In Search to get me any closer to my phantom forebears.
O me of little faith! Within a week, the organization had hooked me up with a similar group called Louisiana Triad, which put me in contact with Betty (who preferred not to reveal her last name). Betty was a retired delivery-room nurse who had worked at Tulane University Medical School Hospital. She had dealt with searches for Willows clients many times before. She had “access” to sealed records, and if I agreed not to ask questions about the nature and legality of her access to such records, she would provide all the information she could gather if I would simply read her the specifics (dates, times, names of adopting parents, etc.) from my birth certificate and adoption papers.
Betty was shocked that I had an actual pre-adoption name, saying that this was very rare, a major clerical faux pas, and a major break for me, which would expedite her research.
A week later, Betty called me back with the name of my biological mother (Judith Anise Culkin), her age when I was born (nineteen), and her hometown in 1952 (Hampton, Virginia). She added that I was really lucky to have the somewhat uncommon surname Culkin, because if my mother had been a Smith or Jones (or Johnson), I might still never find her, even with this many solid leads.
“Holy shit, I can’t believe it!” I blurted. “A name and hometown! Let me pay you something, Betty, please! You’re way better than any gumshoe! Wow! I’m catching the next flight to Hampton, Virginia! You have no idea what this means to me, what this feels like right now!”
“Oh, but I do,” she replied. “I’ve been there, Mark. But you need to slow down. Take a breath.”
Betty urged me to talk some more to the Adoptees In Search people who have completed their own searches and reunions before launching off on my hunt for Judy Culkin, because “even if the search is successful, the reunion may not be.”
“Huh?”
“She could be dead. She could be sick. She could be in an asylum, or a prison, or somebody you just would rather not be related to. She could be in denial, and not want to be reminded of you, much less talk to you or meet you. She could be happily married and never have told her husband or kids about you and living in fear all these years that you’ll show up and wreck her marriage. I’ve seen it play out in all these ways, and more. You need to give some sober, informed, prayerful consideration to how you will make your approach, and how you might handle the various outcomes, Mark. Promise me you’ll do that.”
My mind was reeling; I was speechless.
“Not all reunions are heartwarming and liberating,” Betty continued. “It can just as likely be unsettling, frustrating, burdensome, and heartbreaking. Even tragic. Take it slow, Mark. Easy does it. Promise me.”
I hadn’t given any thought to most of the possibilities she had rattled off (except, naturally, my own lurid whore fantasy). And the shock of the breakthrough was making it almost impossible for me to process all the new possibilities and variables.
Finally, I found my voice.
“Yeah, sure, of course I will, Betty, I promise.” It was a lie, naturally. Lying was second (maybe first) nature to me, anyway, as a son, as a student, as an alcoholic, as a salesman, as a husband, as a lifelong imposter.
And I had gotten my first taste of the hunt, that jolt of the adrenalin that fuels the chase, the momentum that years later would sustain me daily, as a bona-fide police detective. Forty-eight hours after I hung up with Betty I was en route cross-country to Judy Culkin’s house.
*Public Information Officer.
*On-the-job training.
14
Missing Persons
The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom; prisons are built with stones of law, brothels with bricks of religion.
—William Blake, “Proverbs of Hell,” from the poem “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell”
I left at night. Nothing’s finer than a good long overnight cross-country ramble to clear the mind. An evening departure means less traffic, slack trooper enforcement, higher speeds, better time. Plus you can get good reception of the all-night nationwide truckers’ radio show on KVOO out of Tulsa, and for variety you can pick up the Mexican stations out of Juarez.
A thermos of strong black coffee, a pocketful of speed and weed, and eight hours of white lines and starry night were just what I needed to contemplate what lay in store for me.
I reviewed what I knew so far. After hanging up with Betty, I had dialed directory assistance in Hampton, Virginia, requesting residential numbers for any and all Culkins.
“I have no listings, sir,” the operator said. Undeterred, I asked her to check for Culkin in the business listings.
“I do have two: Culkin Memorial Hospital and the Culkin Branch of the Hampton Public Library, sir. Would you like those numbers?”
Hey, now! Whoa! A hospital and a library? These Culkins must be robber barons. Or sweepstakes winners.
“No thanks. But could you check for Culkin in Newport News, Norfolk, and Portsmouth?”
“One moment, sir. I find no residential or commercial listings for Culkin in any of those metro areas, sir.”
I thought about just driving to Hampton and going to the hospital and the library and asking around about the family whose name graced their fine institutions. Surely some blue-haired librarian, filled with civic pride at the opportunity to share her knowledge of local history, would be delighted to tell me about the pillars of her community and what became of the Culkin clan. But I recalled Dr. Cohen’s words from freshman year in Boulder a decade ago and decided a more focused, less impulsive investigation might be better.
I called directory assistance in Richmond. No Culkins. Then I tried Washington, D.C., and Baltimore. Pay dirt! In Baltimore, there was a listing for a Willard Culkin. When he answered the phone, it was clear from the timbre of his voice that he was up in age. I explained that my name, too, is Culkin, and as an amateur genealogist, I was working on my family tree, and my research had led me to a connection to the Hampton, Virginia, branch. Might you be familiar with them, Mr. Willard?
“Oh, yeah! You’re not a Culkin if you haven’t tried to find a link to the Hampton clan! That’s the rich side of the family! But unfortunately, I’m not a part of it.”
“Well, I kinda figured there had to be some wealth there, because of the hospital and the library. But I’m not after money, just information. I just want to fill out all the branches on my tree. It surprised me that the operator said there were no listings for any Culkins in the Hampton area. Do you know what became of them?”
“Well, as I say, that branch is pretty distant from my own, and it’s been a number of years since I did my own research, but I do recall that the Culkin who donated the hospital and the library, the old man who made the original fortune—of course he’s long since passed now—I think he made it in oil and commodities, back in the twenties and thirties. And in his later life he was a U.S. congressman, I believe, or maybe it was just the Virginia statehouse. I’m not sure, it’s been so long. I’m an old man, you know. But I seem to recall his oldest son took over the family concerns and runs an oil outfit in Texas somewheres. The only first name I can remember is William, becau
se it’s similar to my own, and that was the politician’s. Beyond that, I’m afraid I’m of little use to you, young man. Don’t recall any others, or any locations, either. You might try Dallas, though, for William’s son. If it’s oil, in Texas, I believe I’d start with Dallas.”
I had thanked ol’ Willard Culkin for his help and expressed a sincere hope that we’d meet some day, then found a listing for Culkin Oil in Dallas; the adrenaline boosters fired anew.
A receptionist put me through to Ben Culkin, president of Culkin Oil, but only after I identified myself as Russell Culkin, from Colorado Springs, calling on a personal family matter.
Ben seemed like an affable if inquisitive fellow. When I went through the family tree spiel that had worked so well with ol’ Willard in Baltimore, I could hear him warming to me and was encouraged.
“I’m a bit of a genealogy buff myself, Russell, and I gotta say I’ve never heard of any Colorado Culkins. This is intriguing! Hold on a second, do you mind?”
I could hear a rustling of papers in the background, and my encouragement morphed into panic.
“You there? Good. I’ve pulled out some of my charts here, and I’m trying to see how we might be related. What were your father’s and grandfather’s names on the Culkin side?”
Shit! I hadn’t thought this through. I couldn’t hem and haw; any delay at all, and he’d figure I was just bluffing, a fortune-hunting con artist.
“Stanley Byron Culkin, Junior and Senior,” I replied, without hesitation. I just used what I knew: my Johnson family names.
“Stanley Junior and Senior, you say? Hmmm. Where were they born?”
“Well, my father was born in Oklahoma City, and his father was born in Mountain View, Arkansas.” It was so much easier just to use the truth than to try to think up something on the fly.