A Death in California

by Barthel, Joan;

  Wendy Shancer was excited but, to tell the truth, a little scared too, as she stared at the picture in the Monday morning paper. She knew there was no mistake, and as soon as she got to work at Montgomery Ward’s in the Old Orchard Shopping Center, she told her boss, Mr. Hirchert. Fred Hirchert called the police.

  Mrs. Shancer said that G. Daniel Walker’s picture had been in the morning Tribune and that she definitely recognized him as the customer she’d had two days before, on Saturday, in her deli department, Swiss Colony. He picked out some sausage and cheese. He was very nicely dressed in a blue suit and a maroon striped tie, so she was a little surprised when the computer check she ran on his credit card came back “Lost or Stolen.” It was store policy not to call the police when that happened, but to tell the customer directly, because of the embarrassment, so Mrs. Shancer had suggested he go upstairs to the credit office to straighten it out.

  The man went willingly. When the credit manager, Lucille Milling, asked for identification, he showed her the owner’s file copy—not the actual license—of Illinois driver’s license number P3627743216, Pietrusiak. Mrs. Milling shook her head. “That’s not sufficient identification,” she said. The man smiled. “It’s the only identification I have,” he said. “But my wife is over at Marshall Field’s. I’ll go get my wallet from her, and I’ll be right back.”

  Both Mrs. Milling and Joanne Steffeck of the credit department said yes, that was the man, when they saw Walker’s mug shot. The only thing, they told Swalwell, was that he had been wearing gold-rimmed glasses and his hair was much neater.

  When Swalwell got back to his office, he found a message to call Bob Pietrusiak.

  “I just got a sweater,” Pietrusiak reported. “It’s from Carson, Pirie & Scott, but I didn’t buy it.”

  At another shopping center then, in Mount Prospect, Swalwell talked to another sales clerk, Kenneth Heinrich. On Saturday, around 1:00 in the afternoon, Heinrich said, a man had bought a tan sweater, using a credit card. The clerk took the card, rang up the sale, and handed the card back. But before he gave the customer his sweater, he told him, almost apologetically, that he had to call up on any sale over $20.00, and the sweater came to $23.09, with tax.

  The customer smiled. “I’ll go look at some shoes while you do that,” he said.

  The credit check was okay, but after a while, Ken Heinrich was worried. “What should I do with this sweater, now that it’s been rung up?” he asked the manager of his department. “Send it to his house,” the manager said.

  Swalwell brought out the mug shot, then, though he already knew what the clerk would say—and he did.

  By the end of the week, Swalwell felt like a salesman for a cheap photo outfit, passing out free samples. He and Rowe had left Walker’s mug shot at all the department store branches they could think of, with the security guards and with the clerks in likely departments—books, pipes and tobacco, men’s clothing, ladies’ lingerie. Still Walker eluded them. Though he’d strewn clues like walnuts in a fruitcake, he was managing to stay a day, a day and a half, ahead. He’d already been loose nine days. That ninth day, in fact, had been an especially rotten day in a rotten week for Swalwell. He had driven some distance to question an ex-jailmate of Walker’s, but the man would say nothing. He had driven back downtown to see C.J.’s lawyer, but the man wasn’t in.

  Back at his desk, he made a lot of phone calls, trying to keep busy. He knew as well as anybody that police work involved a lot of false leads, a lot of legwork that seemed to amount to nothing, a hell of a lot of just driving around, trying to talk to people who didn’t want to talk at all, and, that often, just when you thought you were getting nowhere, there’d be a break. He knew that; it had happened to him before. Still, he had to admit he was a little discouraged. He slammed the phone down on his last call, and shoved aside the papers on his desk, all the maddening pieces that weren’t fitting together. What the hell, he thought. I’ll go home for supper, for a change. In the days when he was patrolling the roads—which he tended, now and then, to think of as the good old days—he’d had plenty of time to eat with the kids, help with their homework, play football in the back yard on Saturdays. Now he hardly saw them.

  Pat and the children were delighted to see him home early that evening, Friday, February 9, just about suppertime, just about the time a jewelry salesman, Taylor Wright, was checking into a hotel in Ann Arbor.

  “Every day is different,” Bob Swalwell would say, when someone asked him why he liked police work so much. “You don’t have anyone leading you by the hand; you have to depend on your own initiative and energy, and you never know what the next day is going to bring.” The next day, Marcy Purmal drove out to O’Hare Field.

  By that time, Marcy had begun to cooperate with the authorities. Specifically, she was cooperative with the Department of Corrections; teams of Corrections men had moved into her apartment, bringing shotguns. Marcy had reported a kidnap threat from her vanished client, and she had agreed to let the officers attach a recording device to her phone. Marcy told them that before the device was attached, she’d had a call from Walker, asking her to meet him at the airport, and Marcy had agreed. “I felt the airport was a safe place for me,” she later explained, “with so many people around. My thought was to meet him there and persuade him to surrender.”

  A little after three o’clock that afternoon, Marcy parked her little yellow car in Parking Lot B and strolled around the terminal for a while, looking into windows of the shops and restaurants. In the plastic covering on a display menu in a restaurant window, she saw state troopers following her, and she decided “to have a little fun.” She ducked behind a pillar and when an airport shuttle bus came by, she hopped aboard.

  A pair of Corrections men spotted her just before she got on the bus, talking with a man in a tan raincoat. They tried to chase the bus, then they ran back to get their car. When they were finally able to force the bus to the side of the roadway, it had already made one stop. Marcy was still aboard; the man in the tan raincoat was not.

  Swalwell was furious that he hadn’t been informed of Marcy’s afternoon activity earlier, before she left her apartment. When he got to O’Hare, he had the Corrections men paged from the TWA terminal, but by the time everybody converged, it was nearly five o’clock. When they checked Parking Lot B, Marcy’s car was gone.

  Muttering, Swalwell radioed an ISPERN alert on Marcy’s yellow convertible, 1972 Illinois license WK 8970. Trooper Frank Waldrup spotted the car leaving O’Hare, and stopped it.

  Marcy rolled down the window. “What are you doing?” she asked.

  “This is in reference to Gerald Daniel Walker,” Waldrup said formally.

  Marcy’s expression did not change. “Yeah, I know who you are talking about,” she snapped. “Why, no, I haven’t seen him.”

  Frank Waldrup asked Marcy to come over to the police car and show him her driver’s license. When she opened her handbag, he saw a large stack of bills, with a ten on top. While he waited for Swalwell, Waldrup struck up a conversation.

  “How far would you go to protect a client?”

  “Well, I wouldn’t turn somebody in, if that’s what you mean,” Marcy said coolly.

  “Well, what are you doing out here at the airport?” Waldrup asked.

  “Oh, I just came out for a ride,” Marcy said airily. “And it’s such a nice day for taking a trip to someplace warm.” She smiled, but Trooper Waldrup noticed that she seemed extremely nervous, smoking one cigarette after another, constantly looking at her watch.

  Swalwell noticed her nervousness, too, when Trooper Rowe brought her into the U.S. Marshal’s Office at O’Hare.

  “Am I being arrested?” Marcy asked.

  “No,” Swalwell told her. “This is strictly an interview.” He got right to the point. “Did you come out here to meet Walker?”

  “Are you accusing me of something?”

  “I’m not accusing you of anything,” Swalwell said evenly. “I’m just stating the
facts.” It occurred to him that he sounded like a “Dragnet” cop as he set out the facts he’d heard about her and Walker, telling her bluntly that he knew their relationship extended beyond attorney-client.

  “What are you doing out here at the airport?” he asked.

  “Oh, I just came to watch the airplanes take off,” Marcy said, as airily as she had answered Frank Waldrup. Then she looked at Swalwell very earnestly.

  “If I knew where Walker was, I would contact him and advise him to surrender,” she assured the officer. “The last time I saw him was at the hospital on the night of January 30, and I haven’t seen him since then.”

  Swalwell was not impressed. “You’re lying,” he snapped. He then confronted her about the drinking in Walker’s hospital room, the kissing.

  “That’s not true,” Marcy insisted. “None of that is true.”

  Swalwell gave her his iciest, bluest stare for what seemed a long time, but she didn’t wilt.

  “Can I leave now?” she asked.

  “Yes,” Swalwell said.

  First thing Monday morning, Bob Swalwell called Mort Friedman, chief prosecutor for the Cook County State’s Attorney’s office. He stated all the facts again about Walker and his friends. Swalwell told Friedman, “We need your help.” Friedman helped quickly. He issued subpoenas on Marcy and C.J. and on Mark Kadish, who was lawyer for both of them now, and on the Oak Park Savings and Trust, where C.J. and Walker had had their joint account. The grand jury hearing was set for the very next morning.

  The rest of the day was a hectic blur. Swalwell and Trooper Rowe met with Ronald Tonsel of Corrections to arrange for Lane and Hepner to check on parolees who had been behind bars with Walker; Swalwell knew the legal work Walker had done for his jailmates, and he’d always thought some of them could be useful. Swalwell didn’t like Ronald Tonsel; he considered him arrogant and difficult to work with. But Tonsel agreed to send his men out to Lake County.

  Swalwell had a call from an FBI agent named Baucom, with news of a phone call that the old girlfriend Walker had terrorized had had that morning from Walker. When Baucom called her at noon, she told him she was scared. She said she’d told Walker that if he called her again, she would call the FBI. Agent Baucom reassured her and thanked her for calling.

  Lane and Hepner of Corrections called in to say they were following a tip and looking for a waitress named Leslie at a place called Melvin’s, near The Cedars on Rush Street.

  Mort Friedman, the prosecutor, called to tell Swalwell that Marcy had had a phone call from Walker. She had told him what time she was to appear before the grand jury, what room, what she was going to say. Friedman said Walker had told Marcy he wouldn’t show up unless she was indicted.

  Sometime that day, a man fitting Walker’s description walked into the Legal Aid office on South Halsted Street and dropped off a black purse.

  At eight o’clock the next morning, Marcy left her apartment and drove to the Hyde Park Bank. Then she drove to Legal Aid, and when she arrived, Agent Willis Stephans of the Parole Board followed her into her office. Alan Dockerman of Legal Aid held out the purse to Marcy, and Stephans intercepted it. He then rushed over to the State’s Attorney’s office with it.

  Swalwell, who had driven into town on four hours sleep, was waiting there. He opened the purse. It contained a watch, some books, and three notes. Each note was brief, written in a bold, black hand in the center of each page.

  If I could be

  Where I hope these

  Will soon be—

  D.

  Save your snatch

  for me—but look

  pretty and flash it

  like November 30th

  D.

  God made little

  green apples—but

  God Dammit, will I

  never make you?

  D.

  The notes were written on stationery from the Chicago Marriott on West Higgins Road. Swalwell and Rowe checked it out, with no results. They checked all the better hotels around the Marriott, including the International Motor Inn, the Sheraton Inn, the Holiday Inn, the Embassy, the Oriental Gardens, the Roadway Inn, the Regency Hyatt House, and Howard Johnson’s. All negative. They left Walker’s picture with all the desk clerks.

  Later, Marcy got another letter dated that day, Monday.

  Just back from dropping off your purse at Ye Olde Neighborhood Legal Services office—which believe me was a funny scene, if you can picture yours truly prancing into the office to confront two surprised secretarial types: “Hi! Do you know Marcy Purmal?” Two heads nod. “Good. I want to leave this purse here for her. I suspect it is hopeless to ask if Alan is in.” Two heads shake from side to side. “Fine. Just tell Marcy that one Dan Walker dropped this off for her.” While I do have other things for you, I must admit theyxxxx (this god damn typewriter has a mind of its own and besides that it is a lot like you—it don’t fuck either!). As I was saying, I do have other things for you, however, they take up more room than the small purse and little things. Another day at still another place, my darling. I am sorry that the purse could not be a good one of real leather and all that sort of jazz but $ are in short supply and the only thing I could find at Dunhill’s which I liked costed over two hundred beans—that shooked me, when I could just picture you carry goodies to the next guy who lands in the hospital and captures your fancy. Tell me that I meant more than just a fancy. Well, dammit, tell me!

  As I mentioned, I am sick over what happened to you on Sunday or rather Saturday. I should never have asked that of you and yet, I can only say that I will trust you to the ends of the earth over the way you conducted yourself. No one, and I mean no one, slipped anywhere near where I was supposed to await. You could have saved yourself at my expense—and remember this one thing, darling, in the event they ever do arrest and charge you, I will make it possible whereby you can make a deal to arrange for the charges to be dropped. Fair enough, sweet one?

  I would like to hear everything that was said to you and exactly how they treated you, etc., etc. To make their lives a bit fuller, I did today start contacting everyone I know in the area, arranging with some for meets, and with others just making my presence known—one thing about it, they cannot watch everyone, huh. Funny bit: I called Donna and she immediately started begging me not to hurt her. What the fuck kind of a reputation do I have that people who once loved me and bore me a child would start crying and begging. Some more bullshit that they have been spreading around, I am sure. (Who did you say you met with that they think was me—I may beat your ass, lady.)

  One point, they are good at playing two people against each other, so let us not fall for anything that may or may not be true about the other—wherever I may go, I will keep in touch, whether it be directly or through one of your friends—so always feel free to check things you may hear about me as I will do the same concerning you. These are dangerous times, as you damn well now know, and once we are over the hump we can then laugh and joke about ’em, my lovely Laura Lawyer.

  It is time that I check with you via telephone and I want to mail this to you then. By the way, I just had shrimp de jonghe. Ummmmmmm—good! As you can see, about the only thing I haven’t had since being out is YOU! Ah well, you can’t have everything, so they tell me. Double seriously and all that rot, you impressed the hell out of me with coming and going through the hassle and continuing to have that tone of love in your voice when I called. Suppose from now on when I call you and you wish to tell me you love me you just tell me about giving myself up. Good for the tap. Love & Stuff.

  The afternoon at the airport seemed to sum up the conflicts and confusions that surrounded the Walker case. Marcy Purmal vehemently denied she had been carrying a lot of money in her purse that day.

  “Bullshit! I don’t have any money. I work for Legal Aid.” She said that the man in the tan raincoat was an attorney she knew, a man named Fox, whom she’d bumped into accidentally. She insisted that her motive for driving out to O’Hare had been
to meet Walker and persuade him to surrender.

  Swalwell scoffed at that explanation. He felt Marcy’s cooperation resulted solely from her realization that she was in over her head, involved in a situation that could lead her into professional disgrace, perhaps disbarment. He called her a “radical.” (She called him and his men “the Stormtroopers.”) He was never persuaded that if Walker and Marcy met, surrender would ensue, which is why he came to be hanging around the volleyball court in the Ida Noeis Building on the University of Chicago City Campus. It was Marcy’s habit to play there on Friday nights, and Swalwell thought Walker might come by, because Walker loved games.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Hope jerked her head away from the cold, hard object in her mouth. She rolled across her bed, then across the other twin bed. She ran out the bedroom door and through the hall door into the living room.

  “Bill!” she screamed. “Bill, help me!”

  The living room was dark, but in the glow of the dying fire, she could see Bill sitting in his usual place, at the end of the sofa nearest the fireplace. His feet were stretched up on the coffee table. He was holding his drink in his left hand, resting it on the arm of the sofa. His eyes were closed. As she ran across the room, Hope saw the rocking chair was empty. Taylor is gone, she thought in a flash of panic, and a maniac has come in.

  “Bill, Bill, help me!” Hope kept screaming.

  She reached the sofa and grasped Bill by the shoulders. She shook him slightly, and his head wobbled and fell backward against the sofa. “Bill, Bill, wake up, help me!”

  The voice came from behind the sofa, from the darkness in the dining area.

  “He can’t help you. He’s dead.”

  But Hope kept shaking Bill and screaming. “Help me, wake up, help me!”

  The voice came again, a deadly calm, flat monotone that Hope did not recognize.

  “He can’t help you. He’s dead.”