JO03 - Detour to Murder

by Jeff Sherratt

  “C’mon, man. You pleaded guilty to the woman’s murder back in ’45 when you were arrested,” I said. “Show some remorse, for chrissakes.”

  “That’d be hard to do,” he whispered.

  “What?”

  “I said I can’t do that.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “I didn’t kill her.”

  “For chrissake, Roberts. It’s all here in black and white.” I thumbed the report, quickly reviewing a few details. Roberts’s first victim, the guy who gave him a lift, was named Charles Haskell, Jr. The woman Roberts had picked up on the road after killing Haskell and stealing his car had not been identified by the authorities. No one came forward to claim her body and after the time prescribed by law she had been buried at the expense of the City. I slammed the report on the table. “Says here you killed them both. You’re lying to me, Roberts.”

  “No!”

  “Then why did you say you murdered the woman in the first place?” I paused and he remained silent. We both knew the answer: the plea bargain. “It’s not smart to lie to your lawyer, Roberts. Are you that goddamn stupid?”

  His face turned red, his breathing irregular, beads of sweat dotted his forehead. I felt at any moment he’d bust loose. Then after he got the anger out of his system, I’d do what I came here to do: show Roberts how he’d have to present himself at tomorrow’s hearing. The board wouldn’t tolerate his claims of innocence. That would blow the whole thing right out of the gate. He’d have to admit his guilt and he’d have to appear to be a man of humility with sorrow and remorse in his soul for what he had done all those years ago. He’d have to show them how, after twenty-nine years languishing in this “correctional” facility, he’d changed and had achieved a state bordering on veneration.

  I pounded the table with my fist. “Why’d you confess if you’re so goddamn innocent?” I didn’t wait for an answer. “I’ll tell you why. You took the easy way out, Roberts. Couldn’t take the pressure. You copped a plea to the woman’s murder. They didn’t charge you with Haskell’s death, no sir. But they used his murder as a wedge, pressuring you to admit that you strangled the blonde.” I got up and paced the room. “Isn’t that right, Roberts?”

  He kept quiet, but the veins on his neck pulsed and his jaw muscles tensed. His insides had to be burning as he continued to struggle to maintain control. Damn, I said to myself, let loose, Al. C’mon, man, let it out. Show some emotion.

  I turned back to him. “The prosecutor played the old shell game, didn’t he, Roberts? ‘Take your pick. The little pea under the walnut hull is a six by eight cell in San Quentin. Or, hey, maybe it’s a trip to Yuma. They have a nice little room down there filled with cyanide perfume just waiting for you.’ Is that what he said?”

  He slowly shook his head.

  I walked around behind him. “And you fell for it,” I said to his back. “You were a fool.”

  He still didn’t respond, but I saw his fists tighten, the knuckles turning white. I was getting close. Any moment, he’d blow. And in anger, he’d admit to what he had done.

  I darted to the table, leaned forward, and stabbed the report repeatedly with my finger. “It says here you strangled the girl with a telephone cord until she couldn’t breathe. Then you snapped her neck with your bare hands.”

  “I wasn’t even there when she was killed,” he muttered.

  “What about the guy, Haskell, you killed a couple days earlier?”

  “I didn’t kill him either, understand?”

  “Okay, you didn’t go to trial on that one. We’ll forget about it for a while. But tell me more about the dead girl. The girl you didn’t kill. The one you had sex with. The one who grated on your nerves, the girl you were cooped up with all alone at that motel.”

  “It wasn’t like that. Somewhere in the middle of the goddamn desert, Haskell gave me a lift. After a while, he got tired and I drove. Then he died. He fell out of the passenger seat, hit his head on a rock. But I had to get to L.A. So, naturally, I took the car. I—”

  “Then you, naturally, stole his clothes and money. Then you, naturally, picked up the girl on the road while driving the dead guy’s car the rest of the way to Los Angeles. Then you, naturally, killed her too.”

  “No, goddamn it—I mean, yes, I picked her up, but… She wanted money. I gave her everything, all the money I took from Haskell’s body, but she wanted more.”

  “Strong motive.”

  “After we had been in L.A. a few days, I left the motel room, went to sell Haskell’s car, but without papers nobody would touch it. I went back, was gonna tell her. When I got there, she was dead. But I couldn’t prove that I didn’t do it. My prints were all over the place. I’d been there with her for three days.”

  “I’m not buying it, Roberts. You confessed? I’ll say it again. You’re a goddamn liar.”

  He turned his head slowly. The look in his eyes told me I’d be a dead man if he wasn’t cuffed and Marsh wasn’t in the room.

  “Don’t call me a liar! I’m not a goddamn liar.” He paused for a beat. “You hear me?” His words bounced off the walls, echoing in the small room.

  Marsh walked over to him. “Keep your voice under control or this meeting is over,” he told Roberts, jabbing a finger in the prisoner’s chest. “Do you understand me?”

  Roberts stared at Marsh, wide-eyed. Then he looked at me again, despair on his face. I felt some sorrow, surely not for him. After all, he did kill two people. Still, nobody was on his side, then or now. I’d worked him over as hard as I could and he didn’t crack. Could there be a possibility that he’s telling the truth? No, and that issue had been decided long ago.

  But the State said he had a right to parole. After all this time maybe he changed, became a different person. Maybe he wasn’t the same monster who’d walked in through those barbwire prison gates back in ’45.

  “Why, Al? How’d you get in this mess if you’re innocent?”

  “They were gonna kill me,” he said softly.

  I pulled out a chair and sat next to him. “You wanna tell me about it?”

  “The DA gave me a chance to stay alive and I took their deal. Nothing I could do.”

  “Your lawyer went along with it? Advised you to take the deal, is that it?” I asked.

  “A trial costs big dough.”

  “And of course, you had no money.”

  “After I was arrested, my lawyer sold my story to some guy, got five hundred bucks. They made a movie, wasn’t much, and they mostly got it wrong. But anyway, once the five hundred was used up, my lawyer wanted to cut and run.”

  “What was the name of the movie?”

  “Detour.”

  “Never heard of it,” I said. “Who’s in it?”

  “Nobody.”

  I got up and walked around the room again.

  “Do you want out of here, or not?” I asked, staring at the back of Roberts’s lowered head.

  “It’s not fair.”

  “You know how it is with the law, Roberts. What do you expect, put a quarter in the slot and out pops justice?”

  “The parole board’s gonna give me a down letter. Hell, even if they gave me parole, they’d send me to Arizona. I’m in for the long ride. You’re wasting your time.”

  “Forget about Arizona,” I said. “You’re here because you murdered the woman. This isn’t about the dead guy on the road. Now tell me the truth. Why did you kill her? You must’ve had a reason.”

  “I already told you I didn’t kill either one of them, Haskell or Vera in the motel. That was her name, you know, Vera. Didn’t catch her last name.”

  “Smith, Jones, MacGillicuddy, take your pick. The police never got a positive I.D. All they knew was that she had track marks on her arm. If it’s true what you said when you were arrested, she came from somewhere in the South.”

  “She had an accent.”

  “That’s not all she had. She had narcotics, barbiturates in her purse.”

  “Yeah, I know…” H
is voice trailed off.

  We didn’t say anything for a couple of moments. Roberts remained slumped in his chair while I gazed at the ceiling. I could smell the anguish permeating the walls of this warehouse of human atrophy. “Look, Roberts, we have a few minutes left. Why don’t you tell me your side?”

  He looked up. “You want to hear my story? You won’t believe me.”

  “Suppose you try me.”

  “I guess you can say I couldn’t believe she was in love with me.”

  “They always start that way, don’t they, stories like this?” I said.

  “Yeah, guess so.”

  “You talking about Vera, the dead girl?”

  “No, not that bitch, gimme a break. It started long before that. In New York. Her name was Sue, Sue Harvey.” He rested his head in his hands, with his elbows on the table, and after gathering his thoughts, continued. “She was the songbird in a club where I played piano with a jazz trio. Sue had those dark green eyes and a waist so slender, every time she bent over you’d expect something to break. We were engaged, but she wanted to be a movie star, took off for the Coast.”

  “Is that why you were heading to L.A. when all this started? You were chasing some skirt named Sue?”

  Roberts raised his head and looked up at me. “I keep trying to forget what happened and wonder what my life might have been like if that car of Haskell's hadn't stopped.”

  I listened for almost twenty minutes. He told the forbidding tale of a common man whose life had spiraled and tanked as he made one tragic decision after another while hitching rides across the country, heading to the land of broken dreams, chasing a dream of his own: a singer named Sue. At the end of his story, Roberts froze for a moment, then turned to me and continued in a chilling, calm voice: “I didn’t kill him. But Haskell was dead. It was an accident.”

  “Then you stole his car,” I said.

  “Yeah.”

  “And then you picked up the woman named Vera, bumming a ride, and continued on toward L.A.”

  “Yeah.”

  “What about your girlfriend, Sue?”

  “Never saw her again, never spoke to her. Leave her outta this.”

  I looked down at that pitiful creature, balled into a heap, and said under my breath, “What about Vera, dead in the motel room? When you twisted the cord around her neck and strangled her with your bare hands, was that an accident too?”

  Highway 54, Arizona, July 1945

  The asphalt road ran straight and went on for miles. It came out of the mountains in the far distance, bottomed out, then gradually climbed across the desert floor, heading up into the small rocky hills ahead. At the base of the slope, looking back from where he had just come, Al Roberts kept an eye on the car as it shimmered, almost floated in the vaporous heat currents, growing larger, moving closer in the afternoon glare.

  He continued to walk along the sandy edge of the road, heading west. But he stuck out his arm, his hand slightly closed with his thumb pointed in the direction he was moving.

  Roberts hadn’t seen another car in hours and the last one had zoomed by without slowing down, kicking up small dirt devils at his feet. The sun hung high in the colorless sky, and his lips were parched and raw from lack of moisture. He was bone-weary and he hadn’t had a meal in two days. Not a bite of food since that trucker staked him to a hamburger at a diner on the outskirts of Tucumcari, New Mexico. But then, after riding with him for a couple hundred miles, the trucker had to head back to Detroit and after stopping to pick up a load of cantaloupes, he dropped Roberts off just inside the Arizona border. He’d been hoofing ever since.

  Roberts had been on the road for almost three months, traveling from New York, riding buses for part of the trip but mostly hitching rides. Down to his last ten dollars, he knew there’d be few meals and no more bus tickets, but he was determined to get to Los Angeles even if he had to walk the rest of the way.

  He glanced back; the approaching automobile started to slow. Maybe this one would stop and the guy driving it would give him a lift.

  Roberts lowered his battered suitcase to the asphalt, and with the back of his hand wiped the sweat from his brow and swore an oath to himself. When he arrived at his destination, he’d marry her. He wouldn’t let her slip away, by God, not this time. Roberts wouldn’t let her walk out on him again. He’d die first.

  The car, a fancy convertible, pulled up next to him. The man, alone behind the wheel, nodded. Roberts heaved his suitcase into the backseat and climbed in.

  Roberts, now driving, pulled to the side of the road and quickly glanced around. It was dark, raining hard, and he spotted no other cars traveling on this deserted stretch of highway. They had left Yuma just fifteen minutes ago. The man had flashed a roll while paying for their dinner at some roadhouse café, then asked him to drive when they climbed back into the convertible. They’d cruised silently through the early evening. Storm clouds gathered in the distance while the man slept.

  And now the man was dead, tumbled out of the car and banged his head on a rock when Roberts opened the passenger door to put up the convertible top.

  Roberts peered at the harsh, barren wasteland out beyond the highway, then back at the girl standing there. Her legs were nice, long sculptured calves that went on forever. The rest of the package wasn’t bad either. He shook his head; her figure would improve any landscape.

  He knew how it was, alone on the road, bumming rides from strangers. It had to be worse for a woman, especially a dish like her. He screwed the radiator cap down tight, slammed the hood and took another look at the woman, not twenty feet away. “Hey you,” Roberts shouted. “C’mon, if you want a ride.”

  She gave him the quick once-over, then walked with a brassy saunter to the convertible, opened the door and climbed in. She stowed her small suitcase in the backseat.

  He cranked the motor to life and pulled away from the pump island. He drove slowly forward to where the gas station’s pavement met the road, accelerated, and headed west.

  After a few minutes, cruising along the highway with neither of them saying anything, Roberts tried to get a little conversation going, nothing deep or personal, just something to break the ice. But she didn’t respond. Oh, she nodded or shook her head once or twice to his direct yes-or-no questions, but that was it. He told her his new name, Charles Haskell—the name on the dead guy’s driver’s license, the name he’d use until he arrived in L.A., where he could dump the car and walk away. When he asked the girl what her name was, she answered him in a curt manner: “Vera.” She didn’t embellish.

  Roberts couldn’t put his finger on it, but there was something creepy about her. The way she sat, stiff as a board, just staring at the road ahead. And that look on her face, like she could eat a rat and spit out the bones without thinking twice.

  And her eyes: hard, angry, like her guts were on fire. She couldn’t have been more than twenty-four, twenty-five, and yet she had the look of someone who had seen life through a broken mirror, all distorted with hard angles and sharp edges. But she had pretty features and if she were cleaned up, she’d turn every head in a joint.

  Sneaking another glimpse at his passenger, he wondered what a girl like her was doing out here alone in the desert, a million miles from nowhere. And he began to wonder if it was such a good idea picking her up. He looked at her again, but now she sat with her head tilted back, resting it in the V where the seat met the door. She slept, peaceful and calm. He thought she must be in terrible trouble, maybe only finding a reprieve or comfort in sleep.

  Telephone poles and yucca trees flashed by as Roberts made good time, hauling west on Highway 78. He wasn’t far from Brawley. He needed gas again and figured that the town would be a good place to stop and fill the tank while grabbing a bite. He’d buy the girl—what was her name, oh yeah, Vera—a meal just as Haskell had done for him. Money would not be a problem now, not with the seven hundred sixty-eight bucks he found in the guy’s wallet. He felt a little guilty taking Haskell’s money,
but he knew he’d have to buy gas, and besides, dead men didn’t need money.

  He decided to let Vera sleep until they pulled into the gas station, where she could use the restroom to fix herself up. He wanted her to look clean and fresh when they entered the cafe, just another normal couple on the road. He didn’t want to draw any attention. Not with a dead body about a hundred miles back. Yeah, he’d let her sleep for a few more miles.

  But Roberts didn’t have to wake Vera. She awoke by herself, and when she did, she turned and snapped at him, “Where did you leave his body?”

  Useless. Vera had him nailed. Before Roberts had offered her a lift, she’d ridden all the way from Louisiana with Haskell. He picked her up at a roadside tavern outside of Shreveport, but dumped her in Arizona when she refused to “cooperate.” Haskell had the scratches on his arm to prove she’d meant business.

  As Roberts drove, he contemplated how fate had tripped him up again. Of all the broads in the world, why did she have to be the one standing there at the side of the road looking the way she did?

  He’d already given Vera all the money. Now, he hoped she would keep her word and not squeal to the cops about Haskell rotting in a ditch. About Roberts wearing the dead man’s clothes and cruising along the highway in his fine convertible.

  Another two hours of silence passed as he drove across the California desert, frantically ransacking his mind—creating, and then finding the obvious flaws, demolishing countless plans of how to get rid of the woman who called herself Vera.

  But after they drove through the Banning Pass and approached the outskirts of San Bernardino, she said, “I wanna stop in town. I wanna get some things before we hit L.A.”

  “Okay, we’ll find a store. I’ll drop you off and circle the block.” Sometimes unexpectedly, an opportunity appears…

  “Nothin’ doing, buster. From now on, we’re stickin’ together. We’re gonna be like Siamese twins.”

  …And disappears.

  It was twelve minutes past noon when the man slipped into number 2 at the motor court bungalow. Pausing, he glanced around the room and, noticing no one, tucked the gun back in his jacket pocket. He stepped lightly across to the bedroom door. Pressing his ear to the painted wood, he heard someone breathing heavily, snoring in the other room. Had to be her. This was going to be easier than he thought. He reached down and twisted the knob. It wasn’t locked.