A Father's Law

by Richard Wright

  “What new idea is this?” Ruddy asked in a doubting but playful tone.

  “Well, it’s rather deep stuff,” Ed ventured. “The idea now is that criminals ought not to be punished—”

  “Oh, that bullshit.” Wade sneered.

  “We just let ’em go?” Jock asked softly, staring.

  “Oh, no. That’s not it at all,” Ed corrected Jock.

  “Punishment is the only thing that a criminal understands,” Wade said.

  “No one says that we ought to open the prisons and let murderers out,” Ed told them. “The real aim of penal law is to protect society.”

  “Okay, wise guy,” Wade said. “Ain’t we doing that when we lock up a killer for twenty years?”

  “No,” Ed said coolly. “Look, just last month, Baby-faced Bruno came out. He served fifteen years for murder. He was out four months and he killed again. Was society protected?”

  “Well, hell, we’re going to lock ’im up again,” Wade declared in-dignantly. “This time for good, maybe. Perhaps he’ll get the chair.”

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  R i c h a rd W r i g h t

  “But his getting the chair doesn’t bring back the life of that old man he killed to get fifty dollars,” Ed scored.

  “That’s right,” Ruddy agreed. “That cold-blooded bastard should not have been let out the fi rst time.”

  “But Baby-faced Bruno is just one among hundreds of thousands who go free to kill and steal again.” Ed stated the full scope of the dilemma.

  “What are you driving at, Ed?” Jock asked.

  “Putting a criminal in jail is not a way of protecting soci -

  ety,” Ed said.

  “Well then, you tell us how we are to do it,” Ruddy said.

  “They are sick people,” Ed said. “They have to be treated.”

  “What kind of disease have they got, Doc?” Ruddy was sar-castic. “Show me those germs under a microscope.”

  “It’s not that kind of sickness, Ruddy,” Ed contended. “It’s emotional.”

  “Tell me how are we going to know when a punk is emotionally sick,” Jock demanded.

  “You can tell,” Ed said. “Those psychologists can tell.”

  “And you say that Tommy goes for that stuff?” Ruddy asked.

  “Yes, he’s deep in it.”

  “Maybe I’m emotionally sick,” Jock said slyly. “I’ve got woman trouble all the time. But I never killed or stole anything.”

  “It’s not that simple,” Ed said. “There are questionnaires you can give a kid and find out when he is on the wrong track.

  You can do that long before he ever kills.”

  “What are some of the things that make you know he’s going wrong?” Ruddy asked. He felt a sense of uneasiness.

  “Attitudes,” Ed said. “Things like that.”

  “Give me one attitude,” Ruddy insisted. “Just one idea about how to spot a bad egg without breaking it open.”

  “Well, there’s one thing the psychological guys are always

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  talking about,” Ed began cautiously. “When kids rebel against authority, that’s the start of trouble. You can find it in the home, at the dinner table.”

  “Oh, that kind just needs a damned good spanking,” Wade said angrily.

  “What kind of rebellion against authority?” Ruddy asked.

  “All kinds,” Ed said. “Long before a boy shoots one of us, that boy has killed his father in his mind by rejecting him.”

  “That’s pretty slippery logic,” Ruddy commented. “You just praised Tommy. Now, Tommy doesn’t agree with me. Does that make him a future killer?”

  “I’m speaking of emotional rejection and rebellion,” Ed insisted. “Not just a boy’s right to discuss with his dad.”

  “Oh,” Ruddy said, and he was surprised at the amount of relief he felt. “I don’t get all that. It’s something for the professors.”

  “Ditto,” Wade said.

  “I say get the bastards who hurt and kill others,” Jock said.

  Was Tommy really against him? Ruddy tensed as he sat and stared unseeingly at the gold of the streetlamps on the black wet asphalt. That boy is locked away from me; he lives in another world. He longed to ask Ed more questions about how to spot a potential criminal, but he dared not, for he did not wish to betray his own worry. His own worry? Was he worried about Tommy or about himself? That was the question. Yeah, I got to think about this. He too, Ruddy Turner, had his problems, but he had solved them. Or had he? Yeah, I’m all right. And the mental tone in which he said that reminded him of Tommy’s constant and almost make-believe lightheartedness. A stitch of fear snatched at Ruddy’s heart. Yeah, that boy’s like me. If that were true, then everything would turn out all right? But what if Tommy’s kind of problem could not be resolved as he had resolved his own?

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  R i c h a rd W r i g h t

  Ruddy too was lighthearted, and yet he well knew that that was his mask for others, for his wife, his pals on the force, his superiors, and, above all, for the criminals he caught. The car tires whirred like his wheeling thoughts. Sometimes he would like to have a good heart-to-heart chat with old Ed.

  Ed Seigel was Jewish, and Ruddy was a black Catholic, and he had always kept a kind of distance with the Jew boy. He liked him, yet he feared that if he had too much to do with him, people would think that he was too intimate with an unpopular minor-ity. And Ruddy loved being with the majority; he respected the wishes of the community; indeed, he loved the laws and rules of the community with an abiding and intense passion. He lived, after all, by enforcing the laws and wishes of that community. But if he talked a bit to Ed, nothing would seem amiss. And Ed knew so damned much. Why was it that the guys who were outside of the majority group seemed to be so smart, knew so much? Yeah, there was something devilish about that. But why not seek advice in some other quarter? Father Joyce? No. He knew without trying that the good Father would shunt him off with meaningless assurances, would imply that he was losing the faith.

  Well, in a few months, he would be retired and then he would get next to that boy of his. What better plan could he devise than that? What better proof could there be of his sin-cerity than his resolve to devote his life to his son? I’ll just be a stepping-stone to that boy and help him on the way up. And Ed had said that the boy’s professor at the university had said that Tommy was a genius. But what was a genius? The very word disturbed him. All too often he had heard of criminals about to be executed and the doctors had said that they acted and talked like geniuses. No! Let Tommy be just like any other boy. Let him play baseball, basketball, shoot pool, get a gal. . . . And keep away from too much gnawing into those goddamn books.

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  Yet Ed’s claim had something in it. Ed knew more than he knew and that bothered him. He could not refute Ed; he could only listen and offer feeble objections. That was as it had always been. And the other officers, he knew, felt more or less the same way about old Ed.

  “We’re on the homestretch,” Wade said, letting the car shoot forward with speed.

  “What the hell are they dragging me down here for at two in the morning?” Ruddy asked in a tone that sought to convey that he was peeved about his loss of sleep.

  “Something rather important if the commissioner demanded it,” Ed commented.

  “Something that he did not wish to let wait,” Ruddy said.

  “Old King gets a bee in his bonnet sometimes,” Jock said.

  “But bees don’t act up at midnight unless somebody bothers them,” Wade pointed out.

  “Right,” Ruddy seconded.

  Wade turned and slowed at a wide gate at which a uniformed guard saluted; the gate swung open and the car rolled forward into a vast court-like interior in which hundreds of other cars were parked. Two minutes later Wade stopped before a door under a glass shed and an officer armed with a submachine gun came forward.


  “We got something hot here; be careful!” Jock called warningly.

  The submachine gun lifted its muzzle.

  “Are you trying to get me shot?” Ruddy asked Jock and pushed his shoulder as he opened the door and began edging himself out. He found old Greenwood advancing with the machine. Then Greenwood stopped, stared, his lips parting.

  “Who’s that?” Greenwood asked. Then, without waiting for an answer, he intoned: “It’s the captain . . . Captain Turner!”

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  R i c h a rd W r i g h t

  “Put that thing away, Greenwood,” Ruddy cautioned. “You never know; it might go off.”

  “Aw, hell,” Greenwood grumbled. “I thought they were bringing in a killer.”

  “He is a killer . . . of crooks,” Ed said.

  “Hi, Ruddy!” the voice of a passing officer that Ruddy did not see greeted him.

  “Hi,” Ruddy responded with a hand wave.

  “If you need an alibi, we’re it,” Wade said, pulling away from the door.

  “I’ll remember that,” Ruddy said.

  Ruddy pushed his way past a milling throng of policemen.

  “Hi, Captain.”

  “Hi, boys.”

  “What’re you doing here tonight, Captain?”

  “Don’t know, really.”

  It was twenty minutes to two; Ruddy was undecided whether to get a cup of coffee in the main swing-room or to go right up to Commissioner King’s office and wait on the bench in the hallway. Not feeling like chatting idly, he took the self-service elevator to the tenth floor and found himself surrounded by other officers of varying grades.

  “What’s up?” Ruddy asked a young rookie.

  “Haven’t you heard?”

  “No.”

  “Chief Mo Branden was killed last night—about half-past eleven,” the rookie explained.

  “Jesus, no!”

  “Yep.”

  “Poor Mo Branden.”

  “He was a fi ne officer,” the rookie said.

  “A wonderful officer,” Ruddy murmured. “What happened?”

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  “A shotgun blast . . . don’t know the circumstances yet,” the rookie said. “You’ll know before I do. It was on the police radio shortly after it happened.”

  “I was asleep,” Ruddy said. “Can’t listen always.”

  “I know.”

  “My Lord,” Ruddy breathed.

  Mo Branden had been the chief of police in the suburban area south of where Ruddy lived; he had not known the man, but his reputation was high. Mo Branden had been intimate with all the higher-ups, his daughter having recently married a stockbroker. And he had been police chief in an area in which a few wealthy Negroes had recently installed themselves. But had he, Ruddy, been called in about this? Could there be racial trouble out there? And why had the rookie not disclosed a single incident about the slaying? Ruddy looked about. There was not a single officer he knew, but he saw a few eyes weighing him, watching him. “Something really big’s cooking,” he muttered under his breath and sat on a bench whose back rested against a granite wall. Jesus, anything could happen in police work. Beside him lay a discarded copy of the Chicago Tribune, but, when he examined it, there was no news of the Mo Branden slaying.

  “No, it’s too early for that,” he said. He glanced idly around. A plainclothesman passed him, nodded slightly, and hurried on.

  Was he imagining things? People were paying more attention to him tonight than usual. In fact, that policewoman was smiling at him as she passed. “Something’s up,” he muttered yet again to himself, leafing aimlessly through the newspaper.

  “Ruddy Turner!”

  He whirled his head. Jack Watkins, a South Side Negro politician, was bearing down on him. Ruddy leaped to his feet and took off his hat.

  “Hi, Mr. Watkins,” he said.

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  R i c h a rd W r i g h t

  Watkins was running for the city council, and it was always safe to be friendly with men like that.

  “That Branden killing shocked ’em all,” Watkins said.

  He was a short, hard, brown man with curly hair. He had long ago given up a high military position in the Illinois National Guard to enter politics and he was still rising fast.

  “What happened?” Ruddy asked with a tone of voice that implied that all confidences would be respected.

  Watkins did not reply at once; his eyes roved over Ruddy, judging, weighing. “What are these guys looking me over for?”

  he asked himself desperately.

  “Looks like it was a revenge killing,” Watkins said slowly.

  “None of our people involved?”

  “No. A bank robber . . . Somebody Branden sent up years ago,” Watkins explained. “He got out last week. Hunted Branden up and let ’im have it.”

  “Cappy Nelson?” Ruddy asked.

  “That was the boy,” Watkins said. “They riddled ’im. But it was too late.”

  “Good Lord. Looks like putting ’em in jail doesn’t help much, does it?” Ruddy found himself remembering Ed’s question and Ed’s interest in Tommy’s ideas.

  “It helps only as long as they are in jail,” Watkins said.

  “When they get out, they always kill again.”

  “You know, I helped to capture that bloke,” Ruddy explained.

  “Yeah. The commissioner knows that,” Watkins told him.

  “I know he sent for you. There’s a crowd in there now. He’ll be seeing you soon. Fine man, that Commissioner King.”

  “Wonderful man,” Ruddy chimed in.

  “Got to rush on home now, Captain.” Watkins excused himself. “I’ll be seeing you around. I know.”

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  “Good night, Mr. Watkins,” Ruddy called to the retreating man.

  Well, one thing was true. Everybody seemed to know that the commissioner had sent for him. And it was dollars to doughnuts that it had to do with the Branden killing and the retaliatory killing of Cappy Nelson. “Maybe identifi cation matters,” he mumbled. He tensed. Cappy Nelson had been a university man who had gone wrong; he recalled that Cappy Nelson had spread a trail of terror in bank crashing across the nation until he had come to a bad end in Chicago. And, at the time, the newspapers had been full of long articles asking why would a man upon whom so much money had been spent to educate him resort to crime. Cappy Nelson had been called

  “The Mad Bulldog.” After a long and expensive court trial, in which alienists had testified to Cappy Nelson’s emotional state, a sentence of fifteen years had been passed upon him. “Nobody ever really found out what was wrong with that guy,” Ruddy told himself. “I remember that he looked like a matinee idol.

  Quiet, too quiet. Almost sweet. Spoke beautiful English. Ha, ha. . . . In fact, he once corrected the grammar of the district attorney! And they say he was the best teacher of English at the prison university. Jesus, Ed may be right, after all. It would take God Himself to figure out guys like that. Cappy Nelson grew up with everything. Was a football hero at the University of Chicago. Was engaged to marry the daughter of a well-known something-or-other when he was caught robbing his fi rst bank.

  Was let off through high influence, let off on parole. Then he started his terror. Well, that’s about all I remember of the guy.”

  He frowned. The image of his own quiet Tommy came com-pulsively into his mind. “Oh, hell. Tommy’s not that kind.” He folded the paper and flung it aside. “And why in hell do I keep on thinking of Tommy in relation to things like that?”

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  R i c h a rd W r i g h t

  He felt guilty. Maybe some kind of warning was sounding deep in him? Was he superstitious? No. But why was his worry about Tommy sucking, like a down-circling whirlpool, all the worries of police work into its funnel? I’m nervous. . . . Been working too hard.

  Slowly, Ruddy began tapping his left foot against the marble floor, a sign that he was rea
lly nervous. He felt one of the old nervous crises coming over him, the kind he had when he fi rst joined the force. God, how scared he had been in those days! When Ruddy, twenty-five years ago, had joined the police force, Chicago’s South Side had been relatively a small community, deeply race-conscious.

  Indeed, it could not be strictly said that he had, on his own voli-tion, joined the force. He had been “taken in.” Being an assistant Republican precinct captain at a time when a Negro ward committeeman had been given the honor of submitting the name of a Negro to become a member of the police force, turned out to be the opportunity. Just from Memphis, young, big, raw, hard, silent, and willing, Ruddy Turner had been called in to see “Scooty”

  Peterson, the ward committeeman, who had asked him: “How’d you like to be a cop?”

  “What’s in it?” Ruddy had asked, completely bewildered.

  “I don’t want you to be a grafter,” Scooty had warned. “In fact, you’ll be on trial. You’ll have to walk a chalkline. You’ll make enough money to live on. You can retire on a pension after twenty-five years. There are chances for promotion. And you’ll be a credit to your race. What do you say?”

  “What do I do to get it?”

  “You take an exam. You’ll have my endorsement,” Scooty said.

  Ruddy was out of work. Gee, here was a chance. But he did not like the idea of being shot at.

  “Just what kind of work is it?” Ruddy had asked.

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  That question had almost lost him his chance. “Scooty”

  had risen and glared at him as though he were crazy.

  “Shit, what do policemen do, man? You catch crooks. You kill ’em, if necessary. And you remember your friends, see? You direct traffic. You keep crowds from collecting. You protect property. You reckon you could do that?”

  “Maybe I could. Just never thought of being a policeman,”

  Ruddy had mumbled.

  “Well, what is it—yes or no?”

  “I’ll try, if you want me to.”

  “Do you want to be a policeman?”

  “Sure, sure. I’ll take the exam.”

  “Then you’re in.”