The Onion Field

by Joseph Wambaugh

  “I was wondering about how Karl Hettinger might take it,” said the young vice cop.

  The red-faced policeman had good reason to wonder. Karl Hettinger did read it. He read it again and again. He memorized paragraphs. He could after a time recite portions of the order to himself in the night. He would eventually come to know the memorandum better than its author, John Powers, ever did.

  Ironically, the young vice officer later read an issue of Official Detective Stories magazine which featured an erroneous, lurid story of the killing of Ian Campbell, and also ran an article about a Salt Lake City police officer who, less than one month before Ian Campbell’s murder, was disarmed by a gunman while answering a robbery alarm in a market. Then the gunman ordered the officer to signal a second officer, a sergeant, into the store pretending that all was well. After disarming the sergeant, the gunman ordered him to signal yet a third officer into the store, and disarmed that officer too, finally kidnapping the sergeant and a store employee. Both hostages were later released unharmed.

  The young vice cop cursed and wished he’d also had this article that night in the crowded rollcall room. It was the perfect proof of his thesis: No less than three police officers in this single situation were suddenly and individually confronted with an armed bandit at point blank range. All three officers separately not only gave up their weapons, but cooperated fully with the gunman and urged the others to do so and submitted to kidnap. The suspect was caught a short while later and no one was hurt.

  But then, the young vice officer tossed down the magazine and admitted ashamedly that it wouldn’t have made any difference. Not after what the captain said.

  At that rollcall, the station captain, an ancient veteran of forty years of police work, prefaced the reading of John Powers’s order with a white-lipped remark:

  “Anybody that gives up his gun to some punk is nothing but a coward. And if any of you men ever think of doing such a thing you’ll answer to me. By God, I’ll do my best to get you fired! You do like the order says. You take positive action! You’re policemen! You trust in God!”

  The red-faced, green-eyed vice cop had difficulty controlling his anger, for he was an emotional young man. But he was also accustomed to line authority, first in the marines and now on the police force. He would one day try to record what he knew about police life, but for now he seethed in silence. He kept his newspaper clippings in his pocket. He could not stand and dispute the captain. He lacked that kind of courage and he knew it.

  Not all policemen though were as timorous as the young vice officer. Something very different happened at a crowded Central Division rollcall.

  “The department’s position is abundantly clear,” said the sergeant, at the conclusion of the reading. “What’s more it’s logical and carefully deliberated and …”

  “Balls,” said a heavy voice from the rear of the room, from the old-timers’ seats where rookies and slick-sleeved hot dogs dare not sit, where all the occupants of the chairs had at least three service stripes on the lower left sleeve, each stripe indicating five years of service.

  The voice was familiar to everyone. It was often heard rumbling through concrete valleys near Main Street or Broadway, and you smiled if you were a policeman. But you trembled if you were a hype, a paddy hustler, or a confidence man.

  The sergeant glanced self-consciously toward the voice. This was a challenge to his proclamation, his first challenge. He was a probationary sergeant, one of the youngest on the entire department. What’s worse he looked young and knew it. He had tried smoking a pipe for a time, and even tried cigars. He had dreaded the moment at hand, when one of the crusty veterans would challenge something fundamental and true, something from which no good natured wink or friendly grin would let him retreat with honor, something like the Powers memorandum.

  “Balls,” the voice repeated and now he was staring into the eyes of the gray haired, overweight beat cop whom he refused to admit he feared.

  “Is there some disagreement?” the sergeant asked breezily, trying a knowing glance around the crowded rollcall room to show he was going to patronize the owner of the voice.

  The beat cop had no reputation as a rollcall popoff. On the contrary, he was a quiet man, and this made the swollen rumbling voice more fearful when it commanded the denizens of the beat. He was a twenty-five year policeman who preferred the one-man beat, a virtuosic beat cop, one of those who fades into police myth and legend, who rules his beat, and is frequently the very best or very worst that police work has to offer.

  The sergeant lit a cigarette and hoped no one noticed the flame missed the tip three times.

  “Balls!” said the beat cop again and stood up and this was no longer anything to take lightly. No one ever stood up at rollcall to make a point on anything. The sergeant felt the blood drain from his face. It smacked of mutiny. But so far all the old policeman said was “Balls.”

  Then the beat cop added, “Sometimes I think there ain’t two fuckin man-sized balls on anybody in this organization. At least there ain’t none with hair on them.” He put his size thirteen hightop shoe on the chair and rested his elbow on his knee and locked eyeballs with the sergeant who had never noticed how tall he was before. He wasn’t just a fat man. His belly was big, but looked hard. He was a goddamn big man, thought the sergeant.

  “You disagree with some portion of the training?” the sergeant asked, keeping his voice even and talking slowly.

  “I disagree with the whole damn thing.” He lit a cigar and there wasn’t a sound in the room. Not a sound. A baby-faced cop in the front row absently let a portion of bubblegum pop through his lips.

  “I been walkin a beat down here pretty near as long as some of you kiddies been on this earth,” the beat cop began, looking again right at the sergeant who dropped his eyes and began fiddling with something on his sleeve. “I think I maybe made as many good felony busts as anybody on the job. I think I had my share of back-alley brawls, and I even been in a shootin or two.”

  His voice, pervasive, enveloping, was trembling a little because he was not accustomed to making speeches. So he spoke with more force to control the trembling, and now he was growling.

  “I’m tryin to say one thing here. In all my years there was one goddamn thing we was always sure of. One thing that was sacred, you might say. And that is that you’re the boss out there. You know what you shoulda done at the time you did it. Police work is that kind of business and only the guy that’s there knows what he shoulda done or shouldn’t a done. Before this Campbell murder we all sort of agreed on that. You see, unless I’m reading this wrong, it seems like the department is faultin these kids Campbell and Hettinger. Now I don’t know these boys, but I heard they were good coppers and I’m willin to accept that they did exactly the right thing out there the other night. Just because those psycho cocksuckers killed Campbell, that don’t change nothin.

  “Now I’m particularly pissed off about this order because once, a good many years ago, some asshole took my gun off me. He braced me and there I was point blank from this little prick and him with a .45 pointed right at my belly and not for one little minute did I even consider somethin as stupid as this crazy shit in this order. Sweet fuckin mother, can you imagine me rollin around on the ground like some big goddamn walrus tryin to knock him down, or yellin, ‘Look out behind you, you little cundrum!’ Or tryin to grab that scrawny neck so I can shove a pencil through his crummy fuckin jugular? What the hell is goin on up there these days?”

  The old beat cop paused and looked directly up, not at heaven, but at the true seat of power, the sixth floor where the chief sat, at that time with as much fearful authority as could be found outside the military service.

  “Anyways,” the beat cop continued, “I looked at that gun and at his mean little eyes and I knew as sure as there’s shit in a goat that if I didn’t do what he said, the coroner would be puttin in a special order for sawdust to fill this slop bucket.” He paused, patted his stomach, and puffed
on the cigar. “Anyways, I says, ‘Yes sir. Whatever you say, sir!’ And I gave him that gun real careful, and if he wanted my Sam Browne he could have it, and if he wanted my fuckin pants and shit-stained skivvies he coulda had them too! But he didn’t, and I was allowed to walk away with my life. One last thing is that if he had told me to get in a car and drive, I woulda done that too.”

  This has gone far enough, the sergeant thought, and his anger was taking hold. He interrupted the monologue saying, “The point of this training is …”

  “The point I’m tryin to make, Sergeant,” the beat man thundered, and the sergeant fell silent, his face draining again, “is that you got to leave total fuckin authority with the cop on the street. You go tellin these young tigers here to draw against a brace and you’re goin to be buryin some of these boys one day. Cause they might be stupid enough to believe you. Now I say normally you don’t never draw against a fuckin guy that’s got you cold, or that’s got your partner cold. Sometime you might feel you can get away with it. But normally you gotta be crazy to do such a thing. In any case, you fuckin well leave it up to the man on the spot.”

  “Well, the department is of the opinion …”

  “One last thing and I’ll shut up,” said the beat cop. “The guys that draft these orders don’t have to live by them. They work in cushy offices and pinch plump little asses that bend over their desks every day to stir their coffee. Now this is a stupid and panicky order with no thought put into it. Everybody’s shook up by this murder and they’re panicked. Christ, it’s all you see in the papers. This order is callin Hettinger and Campbell cowards no matter how you slice it. The thing I’m wonderin is this: Does this order make me a coward too? I’m wonderin if there’s somebody in this room or even on that fuckin sixth floor who’s got enough hangin between his legs to call me a coward too?”

  “It’s getting … getting … we’re late. Let’s relieve the watch,” said the sergeant, walking quickly from the room.

  In a relatively short time after the order was issued, a Los Angeles policeman was faced by a berserk gunman in West Los Angeles. The policeman ignored the memorandum of John Powers and surrendered his gun to the suspect who held him for a time in a private residence. The kidnapped officer, when he had the chance, dived out a window and escaped unharmed.

  The day after the memorandum was read, two nightwatch patrol officers in a station locker room were putting on an impromptu dramatic performance. One was dressed in his underwear and a Sam Browne belt. He held his right hand on his hip, the back of his left hand pressed to his forehead and he was saying, “Oh, please don’t shoot me. Oh, I’m gonna faint. Oh. Oh.”

  Then he collapsed in a heap like a hairy ballet dancer, while his half dressed partner stood imperiously over him holding a banana like a pistol saying, “Ah-ha! Just as I thought, all you cops’re a bunch of chickenshit fruits!”

  And as he leaned over, dangling his handcuffs, the hairy one in the underwear sprang to his feet, a number-two pencil like a dagger in his teeth, and jumped on the first one’s back shouting, “Gotcha! Gotcha, you prick! Where’s your fuckin jugular? Huh? Huh? Huh?”

  But the memorandum was given the chief’s blessing and became part of the Los Angeles Police Department manual. All of the police department training schools would from this day on have a class on officer survival wherein an instructor would dissect the actions of Ian Campbell and Karl Hettinger which led to what was judged to be a preventable murder. Both the dead man and the survivor were implicitly tried by police edict and found wanting. There had to be blame placed. If you let yourself be killed it had better be by an act of God. And He did not kill by the gun. He killed by thunderbolt.

  Working with the flowers was sometimes the best part of the working day. But on the other hand it could be the worst part. It depended on how hard the gardener felt he must work. Sometimes he would feel the fear come and he’d have to work like a field hand, and sweat, and hoped it passed. Sometimes, if he felt better, he could afford to do a more relaxing and artistic kind of work, and tend to the flowers.

  He didn’t think he’d bother with flowers today, not the way the day was going. He looked at the flowers, spied some foxglove. There was something about the foxglove. The flowers hung long and tubular and purple. They dangled limply from the stems. They looked sick, neuter, disgusting. Young foxgloves looked gelded. He started getting afraid. For no reason at all.

  He thought about when he had almost reached the end of his days as a thief, when he stole the fishing plugs. It didn’t seem particularly different from his other thefts. At a later time someone tried to say it was different, but the gardener only half understood, half believed him.

  He had driven to the Sears store in Glendale this particular time. That in itself was a little unusual. The store was a bit farther than he liked to go. Somehow though he had to go there that day. He had been stealing for a long time, almost a year. He had never been caught, never even come very close to getting caught even though he stole during peak shoplifting hours when the stores were sure to have watchers.

  He felt very strange when he walked into that Sears store. Usually when he entered a store to commit crimes he didn’t know what to steal, and just wandered until something struck his eye or he thought of something he might need. This time though, in the crowded store, in the middle of the day, he had seemed to know exactly what to steal. He didn’t consciously decide. It was very strange. He just found himself walking straight for the sporting goods department. Straight to the counter where the fishing plugs would be. But they weren’t there! They weren’t in the same place they had been when a young boy and his friend had pilfered them so many years ago. When they had been caught and warned by the store clerk. The store had changed the counters.

  He looked around frantically. Then he spotted them. Now the pulse ticked in his neck, his lightly freckled face was crimson. He stopped breathing when he approached the counter. He looked around. He dipped into the tray of lead plugs. He stole them. He put them in his pocket. He looked around. His heart was cracking. He stole some more. He couldn’t catch his breath. He walked slowly, deliberately from the store. There was no voice. There were no footsteps. There was nothing. He had escaped once more.

  ELEVEN

  At their annual Christmas party the Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office always selected an earnest young deputy district attorney to be the recipient of the Marshall Schulman Nasty Prosecutor’s Award. The namesake of this honor was the prosecutor chosen to try the killers of Ian Campbell.

  Marshall Schulman was not deemed nasty because of his out-of-court manner nor by his appearance. On the contrary, he was youngish, tanned, with a touch of gray in the sideburns. His nose had just enough of a curve to make him forcefully handsome. His voice was good. He was enthusiastic. He could charm a jury. But when Schulman was on the attack, and that was just about all the time, he went for the throat. His voice could sneer though his lip didn’t. He could confuse, worry and punish a witness without relent until that witness said what the prosecutor wanted him to say. He was not above inserting snide asides and derisive gestures which defense counsel would scream was cumulatively prejudicial. But he was deft in trial work and knew just how far he could go with a given judge and a given jury on a given day. He, like Pierce Brooks, knew that Gregory Powell was as good as dead, and his strategy was directed toward getting a death verdict for Jimmy Lee Smith.

  Marshall Schulman had been assigned the sensational murder case while it was still in the early investigation stage. The district attorney asked Schulman to contact Pierce Brooks, and if necessary, to direct the police investigation himself to assure an impervious court case. Schulman met with Brooks briefly, saw what kind of investigation the detective was putting together and returned to his office saying, “That detective doesn’t need me or anybody else.”

  Marshall Schulman had a few decisions to make. One of them was whether or not to file additional charges such as kidnapping for purposes of robbe
ry. Ultimately, he decided that he wanted nothing to complicate his tactical thrust. He would file one count of first degree murder on each defendant and that was all. The jury would then not be tempted to choose among various lesser offenses. There could be no later wavering should some juror be loath to sentence men to death.

  His other decisions were incidental, such as whether or not to subpoena the Campbell widow for dramatic effect, ostensibly to identify the picture of her husband taken in life. Schulman’s wife decided that question: “Counsel, you will never be accused by anyone of being overly sensitive, on that you can rest assured.” Schulman decided that Karl Hettinger could identify the pictures, and Adah Campbell was spared the subpoena.

  But despite Marshall Schulman’s self-admitted insensitivity he was nevertheless attuned to problems which might arise with his witnesses, which might disrupt testimony. And after his first interview with Karl Hettinger, the insensitive prosecutor became troubled by something.

  “Karl, I think you did a hell of a fine job that night. You should be commended.”

  There was no response from Karl Hettinger.

  “I don’t think many men could’ve handled themselves so well. If it weren’t for you keeping your wits, those killers would be free.”

  Karl did not respond.

  “Did you see in the paper a couple of weeks ago about the two policemen getting kidnapped and taken to a graveyard where they were released? That’s what anybody would’ve thought was going to happen.”

  Karl did not respond.

  “From the first moment, you were right, Karl. From the moment you had to give up your gun right through to the end. No one could expect you to do otherwise, or hold you in any way responsible.”