The Onion Field

by Joseph Wambaugh

  Then came the transfer to Hollywood Division, and with only two years’ experience, an assignment to the vice detail. There was seldom time to think of the old dreams of tomatoes glistening in the sun.

  Vice work was both enthralling and appalling. He found the bookmaking detail best, and was surprisingly good at working bookies. The prostitutes were impossible for him, at least as an operator. He could never master the lecherous role a vice operator must play. He was not an actor, could never pretend to be someone else.

  The omnipresent Hollywood homosexuals were perhaps most shocking, and the sordidness of the assignment was best mitigated by dark humor.

  “Look at the whanger on that one,” whispered his partner, John Calderwood, at midday, as they sat on a hillside in Griffith Park and watched a well dressed, middle aged businessman leave his company car two hundred feet down from the restroom and disappear into the bushes just below their place of concealment. There he conducted a bizarre ritual with a shoe, a jar, and a nylon stocking, ending in five minutes of violent masturbation.

  “He reminds me of a tripod I used to own,” said Karl dryly.

  “What a maniac,” said Calderwood, scratching his mane of blond hair. “What the hell can you do about people like that?”

  “Circumcise them,” said Karl.

  “What the hell’s that gonna accomplish?”

  “With a chain saw,” said Karl.

  On and on went the defensive vice squad comedy until partners began learning their lines so well they began playing straight man to each other in front of other members of the squad.

  One vice arrest of a homosexual was to have significance at a later time in his life.

  “We was up off the path in Ferndale Number Nine one afternoon,” said John Calderwood. “I always liked to work with Karl because he had more jokes than any man I ever met in my life. Clean jokes and dirty jokes, he had a million even though he was a little quiet. Anyways, Ferndale Nine is the famous restroom up in Ferndale Park. All the fruits congregate there and do everything you can think of in the restroom.”

  Karl and Calderwood were up on the hill that day directly east of Ferndale Nine. There was a trap where vice officers watched for homosexual acts and made arrests for lewd conduct in a public place. Though most of the homosexuals who frequented Ferndale Nine knew that vice cops lurked there, they still came because the possibility of being caught excited them as much as the sexual contact. In fact one effeminate young man with a puckered nervous face was seen writing “Peek here” on the wall of the restroom just under the observation window of the trap. So the homosexuals and the vice officers engaged in an endless dreary war there in Ferndale just below the Griffith Park Observatory.

  The homosexual who was to emerge later in Karl’s life was cruising that day and spotted Karl standing on the hillside by Ferndale Nine. He stared at Karl with a feverish panicked gaze. This kind of look often signals danger to vice officers. In terms of physical injury, vice work was more hazardous than any other police function with the exception of the motor squad. Panic made it so, and in terms of injury to the spirit, the vice squad produced more casualties than all other police details combined.

  Karl was anticipating danger and watching slant eyed and poker faced when the young man shook back a lock of brown hair, smiled, and without hesitation reached for Karl’s crotch.

  “Police officer! You’re under arrest!” said Karl, grabbing the man’s wrist. The burly young man drew back in disbelief. His bright round eyes blinked and filled with tears. Karl heard the crackling of branches as Calderwood ran from the bushes. Then the young man erupted in a blur of fists and feet, punching, kicking, screaming in outrage and betrayal, and the three of them were on the ground fighting. Not a movie fight where one stands back and resoundingly cracks homeruns cleanly off the other’s chin. A real fight—a choking, gouging, biting, kicking fight. Hate-filled, blood-smeared faces. Desperate vice officers. A burly neurotic filled with panic. Muffled curses. Blows thrown by the policemen which often as not hit a partner. Each of them with one thought in mind: a headlock, a choke hold, the crook of the forearm closing on the carotid artery. A hold which has saved more policemen than all the sophisticated self-defense holds combined, because anyone with average strength can get a choke and squeeze until the antagonist falls limp. But they couldn’t get a choke. He was thick and strong and hysterical. He was making animal sounds and Calderwood was around his neck bending him backward away from Karl whom he was stomping down on his back.

  Then the hold was firmly achieved and he was choked. They handcuffed him when he was flopping on the ground, face like a spotted plum, mouth gaping idiotically, gasping, swallowing his breath. Then, incredibly, he was on his feet, hands cuffed behind his back, running blindly across the hill. The two policemen did not have enough strength left to catch him, but tried, until he ran straight off a fifteen-foot embankment. They heard him shriek and fall. They ran to the brink and saw him at the bottom on his stomach, head twisted, eyes closed. They thought he was dead, but he was not. He only suffered a broken collarbone.

  Their hands were still unsteady twenty minutes after the booking when they sat in a Hollywood drive-in restaurant drinking coffee.

  “I don’t care if I never bust another fag,” Calderwood groaned, holding the coffee mug in both hands, gingerly shifting his weight in the chair. “I’d be tempted next time to use a magnum on an asshole like that.”

  “Ordinary magnums wouldn’t help much with that one,” said Karl, massaging his ribs.

  “Why not?”

  “You’d need silver bullets.”

  “Hope to hell he pleads guilty,” Calderwood moaned. “I don’t even wanna see that beast again.”

  But he did not plead guilty. They did see him again. In court. And they heard from him again. The man wrote letters complaining of brutality to the police department, and to the municipal court before and during his trial. Finally after his conviction he threatened in writing to kill Karl, Calderwood, the city attorney, and the judge. Then he was all but forgotten.

  By the time his vice tour was ending, Karl was ready for a less sordid assignment. He was sick of the intimate contact with wretched people, had had enough of the sweet sick smell of wine and stale sweat and vomit that permeated patrol cars until after a while you thought you smelled it everywhere. He hoped to work juvenile, was sure he would be good at it. He was patient and enjoyed children and was troubled by the tragic wandering teenagers he saw in Hollywood at night. When he mentioned to a partner that the young wanderers bothered him the partner grunted and said, “Wanna save the world, huh?” And Karl smiled self-consciously.

  By then he had met Helen Davis at one of the many parties Bob Burke arranged in their apartment. And though she was only twenty years old, Helen was a girl who knew what she wanted. She jokingly said that it was time a man almost twenty-eight years old got married. Karl laughed and treated the remark lightly but saw in her hazel eyes, or thought he did, a certain strength to match his own.

  In December of that year, Karl’s police friend Jim Cannell routinely reminded Karl of the fishing trip they had planned to Lake Isabella and asked him if he would be bringing Helen.

  “Can’t make it this week, Jim,” said Karl.

  “Why not?”

  “We’re going to Las Vegas to get married,” he said casually, and they did. Characteristically, he had told none of his friends.

  At the Hollywood Division Christmas party in 1962 they were more happy than they had ever dared dream. They glided across the dance floor, Helen’s light brown hair tumbling across his face when they whirled, and both had enough to drink to be sure they were the best dancers on the floor. They vowed to go dancing often, at least once a month, and to attend many of the police department’s dancing parties. But the ninth of March was less than three months away. This would be their last police department dancing party.

  Now the gardener looked up at the sun and without his watch knew he was an hour and
a half from lunch. That was certain. The certain things of life pleased him. He was sure for instance that if he cared properly for the old woman’s Aleppo pine it would grow to be a soothing pale green with lacy needles.

  After lunch when he would leave here maybe the headache would stop. He would get to do a beautiful yard this afternoon, the best on his route. The yard had some fine specimens of Monterey pine lining the driveway. They were so stately and deep green and symmetrical they hardly ever needed trimming.

  The gardener looked at the old woman’s petunias. They had good color: reds and whites and off-shade blues, but the old woman didn’t understand petunias. They bloomed profusely but they were delicate. You must never forget how delicate they are, he thought. You must be kind to them. Life was a tenuous thing to the gardener.

  And then, there in the petunias he caught a picture of himself in a store by an untended counter. Saw himself glancing to his right at a clerk whose back was turned to him. He hadn’t stolen anything big as yet, only pocket loot. Now, though, the bulkily packaged electric knife looked irresistible. Where could he secrete it? Under his coat? Inside his belt? Perhaps in his hand? Yes, brazenly in his hand. Store security men looked for telltale bulges, furtive behavior, but what if you just held the large thing in your hand and simply walked out with it? People don’t see the obvious. That was the way, yes.

  Now, suddenly, the crimes were almost too painful to recall. He’d continue to think of them later. He had all afternoon. When he started thinking about his crimes, he had to start at the very beginning and think of all of them, the same as when he used to think about the night in the onion field.

  He always thought of that night from the very beginning to the end. If it weren’t for the trials he wouldn’t think of that night at all. Why should he? It was seven years ago. Besides, he had all his crimes to think about. That was the real horror.

  THREE

  It was Ian Campbell’s turn to drive on the ninth day of the partnership: Saturday, March 9, 1963. He and Karl were dressed, as always, in old comfortable sport coats and slacks.

  Ian’s coat was wearing through where it rubbed against the butt of his revolver. They talked about clothes during the early part of the night, both of them ever thrifty, wishing that the department gave a clothing allowance to plainclothes officers.

  There were two other young men driving toward Hollywood that night in a maroon Ford coupe, who had begun a partnership on exactly the same day as Ian Campbell and Karl Hettinger.

  The two young men in the coupe also talked about clothes. The blond driver, Gregory Powell, admired the black leather jacket and cap he wore. The darker man, Jimmy Smith, hated his, but wore it because Greg insisted.

  “Fuckin Saturday night traffic,” Jimmy Smith muttered.

  “Stop griping, Jim,” said Gregory Powell, his gaunt face turning toward his partner on the swivel of an incredibly long neck. “Wait’ll we take off that Hollywood market. Wait’ll you get your hands on some money.”

  Jimmy Smith grunted and adjusted the Spanish automatic he carried in his belt.

  “I just wanna git it over with, is all,” said Jimmy Smith in his soft voice, and Gregory Powell smiled, his front teeth protruding slightly over his lower lip, and dreamed past this robbery to much bigger ones. And dreamed of having enough money to go into legitimate business.

  Imagine what they would say then, thought Greg. All the bitterness would be forgotten. They would come to him for money or favors. Gregory Powell chuckled silently as he thought of them—his family.

  “I didn’t really mature until I was thirty-three years old,” Rusty Powell often admitted, but by then his eldest son, Gregory, was already twelve years old, and had attended a dozen different schools before moving to Cadillac, Michigan. Rusty Powell had been pretty much of a drifter during the Depression and early war years, playing in small dance bands whenever possible, while his young wife had a baby every three years until after Douglas was born in 1942.

  At age thirty-three, Rusty Powell enrolled in the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music. But now, with new time-consuming zeal, and guilt-relieving work, he knew his children less than he did in the drifting dance band days.

  For his son Greg though, there had always been the Governor, his maternal grandfather, whose picture he would carry even as an adult, a sturdy old man with deep creases in his cheeks, with white hair and a white moustache, a pipe smoker, fond of comfortable baggy pants and suspenders, and a shirt open at the collar. A grandfather who looked as grandfathers should: strong, wise, patriarchal. Greg would spend hours talking with the old man and many of the talks would be about Rusty Powell. The Governor would try to make the boy understand his father.

  “He doesn’t have an easy time, your dad. Why, your mom’s had every disease and operation known to medicine almost, and what with four kids and all, your dad just hasn’t had an easy life. And sure, he’s an easygoing sort of man and maybe you think he lets your mom run over him too much, but a mountain is quiet too and I suspect there’s great strength in your dad. Maybe just going along with her and not riling her is a way to have peace in this world.”

  And the boy would nod and say, “Tell me about my dad when he was courting my mom, when he had the fight with the boy that insulted her.”

  And the old man would tell him once again of how Rusty Powell crushed the other boy in his arms, breaking a rib or two, and Greg would say to the Governor, “Do you think I’ll ever get as big as my dad?”

  When Greg’s mother, Ethel Powell, would unreasonably revoke an agreement that he could go ice skating, or to the movies, he would tearfully drag his father into her bedroom and confront the invalid woman with her broken promise. But she would deny that she had ever made it, and would rail at both of them and remind them of her thyroid and of the Bright’s disease and of her nervous condition. Invariably, Rusty Powell would shrug his large sloping shoulders, shortening his long muscular neck with the gesture, and he would yield—to her. And for an instant the boy would hate him even more than he hated her during those years of illness and “nerves” and he would try to think of his father as a boy whipping the tar out of Greg’s uncles, showing that he was a man. Greg would make allowances and resume his duties: the shopping, the minding of the three younger children, the ordering of the home.

  He didn’t always hate his mother. When she was even partly well, she could manage to look incredibly young and alive. They would go for walks or even skate together and she could be incredibly young, as young as he, and totally enter his child’s world. He was intensely proud of her during these times and wanted everyone to see her. He would forget the unreasonable nagging and the hateful lying she seemed unable to control. But then she would get sick and nervous again.

  “Listen, Greg,” the Governor would say. “I know it’s hard with your mom and dad, but a man can abide. It don’t matter what others do to you. Why, it just don’t matter at all because you can always come to me. The Governor’s always here to help you.”

  And Greg would nod and be comforted because it was true. The Governor managed to abide all these years, and his wife, Greg’s grandmother, was a Christian Scientist, to Greg a fanatic. He thought the old man was right, he could live in peace with someone he didn’t respect as long as he just didn’t show them how he felt. He only had to pretend to go along and do things his own way when he could. The Governor was always there to help, except that the Governor died in 1947.

  They were in the big two-story wood frame house in Cadillac then. It had a large yard and there was a fish pond in back, room for dogs and cats and birds and fish, and even without the Governor things were bearable. Except that his mother started to get well.

  At first it was a subtle change. Douglas, the youngest, was now well past the toddler stage and with Rusty teaching music, life was indeed much easier. Ethel Powell began fixing her face every day, paying attention to her hair, and her clothes and person. Then there were touches to the house here and there. Bright things, a p
reponderance of reds, lots of bright cloth-wrapped wires which only remotely resembled plants, and would later give way to a taste for plastic gimcracks. And then she, not Greg, started disciplining the younger ones: Sharon, Lei Lani, Douglas. Ethel Powell began to do the shopping, and assumed responsibility for paying the bills, and suddenly it was all too much for Greg, who was now fourteen. The fights started and were only bitter at first. Finally, outright warfare ensued.

  “Why should you listen to her?” Greg would say to the younger ones. “I always told you right, didn’t I? I took whippings for you when you were bad and never opened my mouth, didn’t I? I took care of you all your lives, didn’t I? How come now you got to do what she says? You always did what I said, didn’t you? It’s not gonna change around here, you hear me?”

  “But Mom says, Greg. Mom says.”

  And tearful battles were waged over the dinner table for many months to come.

  “You’re just gonna have to learn who’s the boss around here, young man,” Ethel Powell would warn. “You don’t just run things around here no more.”

  “I don’t, huh?” the boy would answer, his blue eyes sparking, his head turning on the swivel of a neck longer than his father’s.

  All of the children were blonds and rather fair, and the other three were better looking than Greg. They would remain silent during the flare-ups, not certain whose side to take, not certain whose authority was supreme.

  “Now all of a sudden you start bossing the house, huh?” he said, tears of wrath spilling. “Well how come you wasn’t bossing when Doug needed his drawers changed, or when the girls needed help with arithmetic, or when somebody had to get up an hour early every morning so’s to get them all off to school? I wanted to be a crossing guard and couldn’t because I had to get the kids off to school. You wasn’t the one taking care of them. It was me. Me.”