A Father's Law

by Richard Wright

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  “Did he mention Marie?”

  “No. Not directly.”

  “What did he say?”

  “They had a spat.”

  “Oh, a lover’s quarrel,” Agnes said knowingly. “They’ll get together yet. You’ll see.”

  “Maybe,” he said and sighed.

  “How is his mood?”

  “Okay. He’s studying real hard, that boy.” Ruddy sought to cover up for his son.

  “Now, darling, promise me you’ll not fret over Tommy,” Agnes asked.

  “I promise,” he said. “And I was glad that I talked to him.

  I’m going to lean heavily on him for information about Brentwood Park.”

  “Good! A father-and-son team!”

  “No. Not quite that,” Ruddy corrected her.

  “But anyhow, you’ll get closer, won’t you?”

  “That we will, darling,” Ruddy pledged.

  “I’m so happy,” Agnes sang, heaping her plate with food.

  “What a day! You’re a police chief. And my husband and my son are friends!”

  “I want to be the best friend that boy ever had,” Ruddy declared with passion.

  C H A P T E R 9

  Smiling urbanely, his eyes holding a light of respect and ready obedience and yet a kind of manliness, Captain Snell was punctual. His left arm bulged with a stack of brown-covered police dossiers. After they had shaken hands, Ruddy asked him, “How are things over there?”

  “All right,” Captain Snell replied. “We’re all very happy that you’re going to be with us, going to be our chief. I came up through the ranks myself, and I want you to know that I’ll be personally proud to serve under you, sir.”

  “Thank you,” Ruddy said. “I’ll be in in the morning.” He paused, sizing up the captain. He liked him, liked the manner in which the captain readily surmounted all jealousies and racial feelings and put police work utmost. I’ll keep ’im. . . . “Is there anything requiring my urgent attention?”

  “No, sir. Just routine stuff, Chief. I’m sure you’ve heard tall tales about Brentwood Park. We do have a backlog of unsolved murders.”

  “Yes, Captain,” Ruddy informed him. “The commissioner dumped all that into my lap during the first hour I was in offi ce.”

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  “If there are any orders about those cases—”

  “No. Nothing for the present. And there’ll be no special orders into things until I’ve had a look-see,” Ruddy said with a smile.

  “Poor Chief Branden was a fine man,” Captain Snell sighed.

  “An A-1 officer,” Ruddy agreed, knowing that all this was more or less protocol, that they were feeling each other out.

  “Chief Branden was regular,” Captain Snell began.

  “I’m regular too,” Ruddy hastened to assure the captain.

  “There’s only one thing I’m asking for. I want my own personal staff.”

  “That’s reasonable,” Captain Snell said, relieved.

  “I’m bringing in Ed Seigel, Jock Weidman, Mary Jane Woodford for the office, and a few others.”

  “They’re all first-class

  people,” Captain Snell said,

  nodding.

  “But I’m pushing nobody out,” Ruddy told him.

  “That’ll be deeply appreciated,” the captain said, nodding still more emphatically. “And we’ll be with you until the cur-tain comes down, sir. Now, I tried to anticipate. . . . These”— he pushed the bundle of dossiers forward— “are the three ‘lulus.’

  The DA’s on our neck about ’em. I thought you’d like to see ’em first, give ’em a glance.”

  “Thank you, Captain. I do. But tell me, were you in on those three ‘lulu’ murders?”

  “All the way, sir.”

  “Good—now maybe you’d be so kind as to summarize ’em for me,” Ruddy requested. “Not too many details, but the general sense.”

  “Glad, sir,” Captain Snell said. “Well, like reporting on all unsolved stuff, maybe I’ll not be giving you the cases in the

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  most concise order or manner. One does not know what is relevant or irrelevant, you see? It may well be that we’ve overlooked the heart of it, the most essential things.”

  “That’s always the case with an unsolved crime,” Ruddy agreed, nodding. “You have to grope.”

  “Right. Now, all three of these crimes were what we call

  ‘bushwhackers.’ They took place at night in the woods that rise to the west of Brentwood Park. Late one night, between ten and midnight, Rev. Ernie Hindricks and Eva Landsdale were killed with point-blank shots from a .38. They were both seated in the front seat of Rev. Hindricks’s Oldsmobile. A light rain was falling. No one heard the shots. The car was found next morning with the door next to the driver’s seat open. Rigor mortis had set in. There was not a single clue or motive to that shooting. There is no evidence that Eva Landsdale knew the reverend or that he knew her. Even how they met is a mystery. There is no evidence that they had known each other. It was as though somebody had dropped them down there in that car for them to be murdered. Absolutely nothing that we could determine had been stolen from either body. It was the consensus of opinion of all who examined those bodies that they had not been touched. It was the opinion of the medical experts attached to the district attorney’s office that no sexual intercourse had taken place between Rev. Hindricks and Eva Landsdale or between the murderer and Eva Landsdale. There was not a footprint, a cigarette—nothing was left as a clue on the scene of the crime.

  “We traced the movements of both deceased for forty-eight hours before the crime. Nothing suspicious. The reverend was at home preparing sermons the day before the crime, and on the day of the crime, he played handball with two of his young sons. He seemed to have had a happy married life. Eva Landsdale

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  was unmarried and worked as a social worker. Her work never brought her into Brentwood Park, and we have no evidence that she had ever been seen there. On the night she was murdered, she is supposed to have gone alone to a movie near her apartment.

  But she was not seen there by anybody who attended that movie that night. Maybe Eva Landsdale met Reverend Hindricks somewhere. Undoubtedly they did. But where? There’s absolutely no information about that.

  “Though there’s no evidence to support any lover’s ren-dezvous, the newspapers made a big noise about that angle of it. There is a lot of foliage around there, and it is possible that neither of the victims knew that a murderer was lurk-ing nearby. We don’t know if the killer stopped them, that is, flagged down their car and ordered them into the woods or not. At the best of times, these hit-and-run killers are hard to track down, but when it is seemingly done by somebody who really plans it, then it is almost impossible to size up what kind of killer it was.

  “We dug back ten years into the lives of each of the victims and found nothing that linked them to each other or to anybody who would have wanted to kill them. Robbery could not have been the motive, for Reverend Hindricks carried some four hundred dollars in cash in his wallet. There were twenty dollars and some odd cents in the woman’s purse, which, incidentally, seems not to have been touched. It was known that the reverend was to visit a travel agency the morning after the murder and pay for a railroad ticket that covered a lecture tour he had agreed to undertake. That accounted for his having the money.

  He took the money out of a Loop bank at ten that morning.

  Nobody but the bank teller knew of it; the teller’s movements were checked and his character studied. Nothing came of it.

  That teller knew no crooks. (And if he did, it is doubtful if he’d

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  be involved in a $400 robbery-killing.) Now, it was surmised that maybe the killer panicked and was too fr
ightened to search his victims; in fact, that theory was widely believed at the time, but when the killing of Father Byrnes came about and under vaguely similar circumstances, that theory was abandoned.

  “The character of the reverend’s wife was carefully checked on the grounds that maybe she had a secret lover, but she was without blame. And Eva Landsdale had no boyfriend to seek vengeance. Chief, there it is. Just that. And nothing more.

  “Six separate investigations have been launched into the Hindricks-Landsdale slaying, and nothing has come out of them. The case has never been closed, and the $5,000 reward offered by the National Baptist Church Council has not been withdrawn.

  “Now and again vague rumors crop up and we check them, but they turn out to be duds. Every crackpot in Chicago tried to butt their way into the Hindricks-Landsdale slayings. Sixteen psychopaths came forward to confess that they did it, and when their ‘confessions’ were checked, they could be placed nowhere near the scene of the crimes.”

  “Hmmnnn . . .” Ruddy sighed, frowning. “Did you ever notice, Captain, that there is a kind of crime that brings these confessing psychopaths out like fl ies?”

  “Yes, Chief,” Captain Snell agreed, nodding his head. “Especially those crimes with violent death, a hint of sex, and mystery in them. Many people get terribly wrought up.”

  “Why do you think some crimes have that power?” Ruddy asked.

  “Well,” Snell said cautiously, “one of our psychologists said that such crimes make people think that they could have done it, and from that possibility, if they are inclined to feel generally guilty, they leap to the delusion that they did it.”

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  “Maybe,” Ruddy said, scratching his head. “But why would they feel generally guilty?”

  “That beats me, Chief,” Captain Snell said, smiling wryly. “I think I’d be a miserable man if I felt like that.”

  “I would too,” Ruddy declared. “Well, it takes all kinds to make a world.”

  “Right. Now, Father Byrnes’s and Sister Karn’s slaying stood out clearly in many respects: it was like the Hindricks-Landsdale murders but with a kind of cleanness, if I can use that word. What I mean, there was no hint of sex, we knew what Sister Karn was doing with Father Byrnes that night, we knew where they were going, and we knew why they were in those woods.”

  “I see. That’s interesting.”

  “Sister Karn was visiting her family that Thursday evening.

  It had rained hard, and the sky was black. A strong wind was blowing. Sister Karn’s aged brother came down with a heart attack. He was a devout Catholic. Naturally, Sister Karn wanted a priest to administer extreme unction. Now, the rainstorm had blown down telephone lines. They could not summon a priest by phone. They consulted the telephone directory and found that Father Byrnes was the nearest priest. Sister Karn went into the wet streets, found a taxi cab, and went directly to Father Byrnes’s house. The priest was in. He agreed to come with her but told her that it was not necessary to take the cab back, that they could take a shortcut across the woods and be at the house of the Karns in five minutes. Now, Sister Karn knew nothing of the paths in those woods. But she agreed; she was not fearful.

  She felt perfectly safe, being with a father of the Church.

  “They set out. That was the last ever seen of them. When Sister Karn did not come home, and when Father Byrnes did not return to his apartment, a search was made. Toward fi ve

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  o’clock that morning, a party of searchers found their cold and wet bodies in the woods. Both had been shot to death with a .38. Now, it so happened that in falling, Father Byrnes fell across the body of Sister Karn, and that odd incident was what made the press pour out tales of a tryst of love between a Catholic priest and the nun. But there was not a single detail at that scene that suggested such.

  “They seemed to have been ambushed suddenly by somebody standing in their path with a gun. What really happened, nobody knows. They seemed to have been shot at point-blank range, twice, through the head and then through the heart.

  Both of ’em. And no clues. Not a match, a footprint, a cigarette, a strand of hair . . . nothing, nothing, nothing. The killer vanished. His race, his sex, his social standing, his profession—

  nothing is known about him. The slaying of Father Byrnes and Sister Karn proved that the other killing really had nothing to do with blackmail, jealousy. I say that by assuming that the same killer killed both times and—”

  “Why do you assume that?” Ruddy asked.

  “I told you that in relating crimes in which there are no clues, one might relate things that are not germane to the crime,” Captain Snell said apologetically.

  “I understand, Captain.”

  “It’s perfectly possible that a different killer killed both parties,” Captain Snell went on. “That both parties were killed at night, that the parties were a man and a woman, that no robbery took place, that the bodies seemed not to have been touched. All of this might well be merely a coincidence. But, Chief, there is something in the popular imagination that did not let the public or the police believe that. Queer, isn’t it?”

  “I agree,” Ruddy said. “I said with what you have said.”

  “Crimes seem to speak.” Captain Snell smiled wryly. “One

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  of the men from the DA’s office said that. Those crimes had a smell about them. They seemed to have been linked, not so much objectively but subjectively, in some killer’s mind. Odd, hunh? But you couldn’t escape feeling like that.

  “Now, the same investigatory procedure that was employed in the Hindricks-Landsdale murders was employed in the Byrnes-Karn murders. We traced everything—and I mean everything—and we drew a blank. We are inclined to believe that those people were thrown together that night accidentally and were killed by a crazy ‘bushwhacker.’”

  “You are assuming that he is always in those woods, that

  ‘bushwhacker,’” Ruddy said.

  “I know, I know,” Captain Snell admitted an irrational element in his report.

  “Maybe the ‘bushwhacker’ was there more times than one,”

  Ruddy speculated. “Maybe he was waiting not for the particular victims he did kill but for somebody or someone who fi tted his notions of being a good victim.”

  “That’s possible too,” Captain Snell admitted.

  “In that case, then, he frequents those woods,” Ruddy said.

  “We came to that conclusion,” Captain Snell said. “And that theory leads me to the third crime, for it came out of our trying to test that theory. Detective Heard and Policewoman Jenny Saunders were assigned to the case—in a sort of long-term proposition, see? We gave them plenty of latitude. They were in plainclothes. They came to live in Brentwood Park. Heard was married, a son in the university, and—”

  “My son knew Heard Jr.,” Ruddy told Captain Snell.

  “No!”

  “Yes.”

  “He’s given you any ideas about it?” Captain Snell asked.

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  “Nothing of any value,” Ruddy said. “You know how it is.

  Laymen don’t know how to observe. They get all wound up in wild abstractions when they try to think about crime. But go on.”

  “Well, as I said, Heard and Saunders frequented that wood,”

  Captain Snell went on. “And they contrived to let it be known that they were investigating. We circulated rumors that we were near a solution to the crime, that we almost knew who did it.”

  “A come-on,” Ruddy said. “A provocation, so to speak.”

  “Right. Well, nothing happened all summer. Heard and Saunders were in those woods night and day, in their car, afoot, and once they even slept in a tent there. They met many people who eyed them and passed on. But nobody—and I mean nobody—molested them. At this time crime wa
ned in Brentwood Park and we wondered if it was because of Heard’s and Saunders’s presence. But we could not tell.

  “Then one day Charles Heard Jr. went to find his father for some urgent reason,” Captain Snell reported. “He went into the woods. He never came out. A party of picknickers found him shot to death. Heard was in a state of collapse. And this death forced us to believe that there was one killer in the series of murders.”

  “You would have thought that the killer would have slain Heard and Saunders,” Ruddy said refl ectively.

  “Exactly,” the captain said.

  “But they got his son,” Ruddy said wonderingly.

  “That’s the only fact that knocks the theory of the single killer,” Captain Snell pointed out.

  “It does. Now, could the killer have made a mistake?”

  “How?”

  “By killing a victim he thought was somehow allied with what had made him kill the other two?”

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  “We’ll ask ’im if we ever catch up with ’im.” Captain Snell permitted himself a cynical joke.

  “Maybe the killer was taunting the detective,” Ruddy suggested.

  “Why?”

  “Well, he—”

  “If it was a ‘he.’” Captain Snell emphasized the mystery.

  “Yeah. We really don’t know if it was a ‘he’ or a ‘she,’” Ruddy agreed. “There were many women in the last war and they were taught to shoot.”

  “That last killing was what really threw us off,” Captain Snell confessed, running his fingers through a shock of curly blond hair. “If we accept the theory of a single killer for all three crimes, then this last killing seems to indicate a change of outlook on the killer’s part, another perspective, even a kind of exasperation.”

  “What could ‘he’ or ‘she’ have been exasperated about?”

  Ruddy asked.

  “Don’t know. It was just a kind of hunch that made me say that,” the captain admitted.

  “Now, the commissioner told me that there was a sharp decline in crime in Brentwood after that,” Ruddy stated. “How do you account for that?”

  “I don’t account for it.” The captain was honest. “Again we can only guess, Chief. Out of all the wild talk, the many speculations advanced, somebody said that maybe those three crimes were so horrible, so brutal and cold-blooded, that the amateurs were chilled into inaction.”