the Onion Field (1973)

by Wambaugh, Joseph

  So Gregory Powell stole a car, was caught, and sentenced to the state prison at Jackson, Michigan. This time there was no doubt in his mind. He wanted to stay, but they put him out when he was twenty years old. He discovered it was easier to get in than to stay in. You only had to steal a car and cross the state line to assure entry.

  This time out he was to have his first sexual experience with a woman. She was six years older and taught him about heterosexual love, and though he was to maintain in later years that he was a confirmed homosexual early on, it is clear he was not. Greg would, during his years of incarceration and freedom, rebound back and forth between men and women, never knowing what it was he pursued. When he was in prison he was always certain that repressed homosexuality was at the root of his troubles and he would be as overt a homosexual as prison authorities permitted. By now, jail- house tattoos adorned both arms: "Greg" on one arm, "Mother" on the other, the two people about whom he felt most ambivalent.

  In Leavenworth Greg was to meet a willowy Indian boy called Little Sheba. They formed an alliance. Prison was their home and they would remain together. By now Greg had reverted to a masculine type. But they were caught by guards in a sex act and separated, and then Little Sheba was suddenly "given a date." He was going home.

  After his separation from Little Sheba, Greg was temporarily quite mad. He began chewing holes in his wrists, sitting on the floor of his cell bleeding surreptitiously into the toilet, flushing the blood away until he became too ill to continue, inflicting wounds which would heal into ugly ropelike wrist scars. Finally he was hospitalized, given transfusions, and tied into bed so he would not strip the tubes from his arms.

  As always, Ethel Powell was soon by his side. Nothing stopped her, not prison walls, guards, nor wardens. She would invariably enlist the aid of a prison chaplain, travel to whatever prison her son was in, and practically camp out at the prison gates until she got whatever she felt her son needed. This time she felt it was a transfer, and he got it. Her boy was sent to the prison at Milan, Michigan, where he could receive that which she believed would undoubtedly restore him to health-visits from his mother. But upon his arrival there, and five minutes after the removal of his handcuffs, he chewed the stitches out of his wrists. He was resutured and placed in a padded call.

  The next several years were repetitious of the others: in and out of prisons, gonorrhea, psychotherapy, liaisons with women, including a promiscuous black juvenile who accused him of fathering her child. Cruising for gay men in between and during heterosexual affairs, always masculine in appearance now, the queen years far behind. A passionate two years in and out of prison with a black drag queen called Pinky who could be used to rationalize later problems: "If only they had paroled me to Los Angeles where I could be with Pinky . . ."

  And yet the heterosexual relationships were the most lasting during his short months of freedom, belying his rationalization. As always, his mother was arduous in her visits and letters to the various penal institutions, while the other children were faring only slightly better than the eldest. Douglas was to become for a time a heroin addict. Lei Lani, the most vivacious of them all, was to run away to an unhappy life of bad luck and tragedies. Sharon was to have a stormy marital life.

  The Powell family was finally to move to Oceanside, California, which permitted an occasional visit to Greg, who was in prison in Vacaville Medical Facility where he had undergone a craniotomy to determine if calcification of the brain found in an X ray could have been caused by a tumor-a tumor which could explain his behavior. The exploratory surgery revealed no tumor but the neurosurgeon reported that he found "mild atrophy." That finding would be used as a defense at a later trial to mitigate Greg's volcanic behavior, but other experts would challenge it as impossible to recognize in exploratory surgery, and actually "mildly" present in many prudent, reflective, prominent persons.

  Regardless, the craniotomy provided a necessary rationale for Rusty and Ethel Powell. It comforted them. Greg's troubles were organic, they were sure of it. The old guilt became at last tolerable. It was a blessing.

  Greg was almost twenty-nine years old when, in May of 1962, he was finally paroled from Vacaville to his parents' home in Ocean- side, California. He had spent ten of the past thirteen years in penal institutions, only nominally able to shape the family's affairs through scolding extravagant letters. His prospects were not good when, shortly after release, one of his sisters introduced him to Maxine.

  But then neither were Maxine's, and had not been for years. She was twenty-six years old, plain, with worn out eyes and three children. But her smile was pleasant enough and Greg began seeing her often. Soon he had all but moved in with her.

  Maxine, like Greg, had been through years of family wars and was currently involved in a separation from her soldier husband from whom she drew an allotment, and was in a court battle with her parents, who wanted custody of the children. In September, by court order, the children were given to Maxine's mother and partially blind father, who proved their daughter's failure to care for them. Some months later the army discontinued Maxine's monthly allotment check, which she and Greg had been spending, and diverted it to Maxine's parents for the children. Maxine was upset and wrote to the army, to no avail.

  "You and me'll soon get married, honey," Greg promised her.

  "Yes," she sobbed, "and we'll get the kids back from my folks."

  "You bet we will," said Greg, hugging her close.

  "And then the allotment check'll stay with us."

  "Well, not if we're married, honey," Greg reminded her.

  "Oh, that's right. But I'll get something, won't I?"

  "Those things have to be worked out. But don't worry, my luck's gonna change."

  And Greg tried a car wash and gas station and finally a scheme to open his own automotive garage, and for one reason or another all ended in failure. Then the final battle of Gregory Powell's family war drove him out of the house for good. It evolved over an anonymous letter one of his sisters received accusing her of various marital infidelities and of having had incestuous relationships with Greg. The girl took the letter to the family council, and Greg's father found some notes in Greg's pocket written by Maxine and, after a family conference and homemade handwriting analysis, it was decided that Maxine was indeed the culprit. And further, that the vile and libelous letter should be brought to Greg's attention. It was, and Greg drove Maxine straight to San Diego to a detective agency where he paid sixty dollars for a polygraph examination and the examiner said he was satisfied Maxine was telling the truth. Next, Greg returned to the family with his polygraph results and demanded they turn the letter over to a handwriting analyst for further clues as to who wrote the despicable letter. But they had already made up their minds. "You've got no feeling for my private life," Greg told them, his jaw muscles throbbing. "You went in my pockets and took notes from my girl to me. You had no right. None at all."

  "Look what she wrote about your sister. And about you."

  "I don't believe she wrote it. She said she didn't. And now the point is that you'd treat me like this! Just go into my pockets!"

  "It's for the good of all of us. It's for the family."

  "I oughtta tell you what I think of this family. That's what I oughtta do. But I won't. I'm leaving this house as of now. Oh, I'll still see you, don't worry about that. I won't abandon you. Somebody's gotta direct you or you'd all walk off a cliff or something. But I'll never live in your house again."

  And he was right. He never would.

  Toward the end of 1962, Greg and Maxine decided to go to Boulder City, Nevada, to care for his sister Lei Lani, who had been in a traffic accident, leaving her neck broken and her leg terribly burned by battery acid. Gregory Powell found he still couldn't get away from them, and it was not only his sister but his mother who became disabled by illness and again announced that she was going to die. He found himself making trips between Boulder City and Oceanside with Maxine, his father, brother, and moth
er when she was able.

  In January they knew Maxine was pregnant, and Douglas, by now a heroin user, had come to Boulder City. Greg told Maxine that he could never escape the family. Never. And once again he was right. But he was always to wonder if he really wanted to escape.

  Greg was growing restless at his sister's home surrounded by his family. One day he concocted a bizarre scheme in which he and Doug were to drive to Oceanside and kidnap Maxine's children from their grandparents and bring them to Boulder City and their mother's loving care. After several hours of planning the brothers drove to Oceanside but they returned the same day. Greg once more had changed his mind.

  Then on January 29, Douglas Powell, using the identification of a cousin, Thomas Powell, residing in Michigan, bought a Beretta 7.65 automatic from a Las Vegas pawnshop.

  On January 31 a service station in Las Vegas was robbed by a lone gunman. On February 6 a Las Vegas drugstore suffered the same fate. On February 9 the original service station was robbed again. The Powell brothers announced to the other family members that they had acquired a night job driving a truck and unloading boxcars. The job would last about four hours on each night they worked. The pay was surprisingly good.

  Then Douglas and Greg both left Boulder City separately for Los Angeles, Greg explaining he wanted to collect some money owed him. On February 15 Greg made two "collections" at a West Covina liquor store and another at a Santa Monica liquor store, but by then Douglas had returned to Oceanside. In late February Greg's "collections" were interrupted when his sister broke into his apartment and took his automatic. Every dollar he had stolen also disappeared, more than six hundred. It was the final ignominy.

  "I know why she did it," he raged to Maxine during the telephone call to Boulder City. "She's trying to stop me from robbing, Max. She's trying to straighten me out by stealing my gun. But goddamnit, why the hell did she take the money too? She could at least have left me the money. It'd take the whole goddamn staff at Vacaville to figure out just one goddamn move by one goddamn member of my family! They'll drive me to a little rubber room, I tell you!"

  Greg drove to Las Vegas, bought a Colt .38 revolver with a four-inch barrel, and returned to Los Angeles with Maxine, where they moved into the apartment of a black drag queen he had dated in the past. One day a knock at the door startled Greg, who ran into the kitchen, drew the revolver from his waistband, and accidentally fired a shot through the floor. The drag queen suggested that they find other lodgings.

  Then Greg met a little black man named Billy Small who helped them find an apartment in a black neighborhood on 65th Street. Billy and Greg were to keep very busy for the next few nights. After the gardener had finished the old woman 's yard, he went to his next stop, an old California home, with a line of yuccas out front They were sound healthy yuccas with long stout spiny leaves bending from massive trunks. Out near the street was a leaning Japanese black pine. In just the right place, so that the majestic plants didn 't overwhelm it, was a dwarf nectarine with droopy shiny leaves. The gardener wished he had the training and license to landscape places like this, not just maintain them. A landscape architect, that would be the thing to say when people asked what you did for a living.

  When the gardener used to do his job with an old friend it was always he, the gardener, who had the touch for slipping plants. The friend often admired the way the gardener could make things grow from cuttings.

  He has a way of making things live," the friend would say. "He cares about living things and that's something a license can't give you. I'd rather have him landscape and care for my yard than someone with more imagination. He cares about living things."

  And now the gardener knelt beside a potacarpus and wondered if perhaps this weren 't the only error the owner had made in this otherwise magnificently landscaped property. A touch of greater delicacy was needed on this side of the yard, not this evergreen with its illusion of fullness. The Italian stone pines around it were enough. You mustn't be afraid to have a little spot of bare earth with nothing growing there. You must know when you 're finished and then stop. That's the way he committed his crimes. He had a regular route. He stole from each place on his route and he didn't stop for the day unless he got something of value from each of them.

  Then he unloaded his mower from the bed of the truck and with the sun straight up and hot, rolled up the sleeves of the workshirt and took off the hat to wipe the sweat from his forehead and neck. The headache wasn't so bad now. As he stood there on the lawn he saw a mailman walk down the street carrying a leather mailbag. The mailman looked familiar, but the gardener couldn't remember. He started getting stomach cramps and hoped it wasn't another attack of diarrhea. It was so hard to remember faces anymore. Maybe the mailman was from the other life, back in those days. But how could he be? Then it struck him. The mailman looked like the man in the yellow shirt, the one who was surely a security officer, the one who watched him that day when he had his pockets loaded with loot and a set of wrenches under his coat inside his belt, and even his hands full of packages of screws and bolts and other items of hardware.

  The man in the yellow shirt had followed him, never taking his eyes from him. He had walked slowly toward the doory waiting, tensing, waiting for the sound of running footsteps or a shout: "Store security officer. You're under arrest."

  He had walked through the door with his loot and across the busy parking lot to his car. There had been no footsteps, no voice. He had made it.

  The gardener watched the mailman pass by and cross over to the other side of the street The gardener thought: No, that's not the man in the yellow shirt. Strange, up close he didn't even look like him. Not at all.

  Chapter 4

  The partners in the four-door Plymouth and the partners in the little Ford coupe were both battling traffic at that moment.

  Ian Campbell, the driver of the Plymouth was turning east on Hollywood Boulevard but decided momentarily it was a mistake and quickly got out of the traffic. Karl Hettinger was cleaning his glasses, feeling his belt binding him and wondering if a hamburger would add to the bulge.

  "One good thing about Saturday night traffic is it gives you a better chance to get lost after a job!' Gregory Powell said as they began to ride from Wilshire Boulevard to Hollywood in the little maroon Ford.

  His partner did not reply but continued fiddling with the gun in his belt, twisting in his seat.

  "Goddamnit, Jim, relax," said Greg. "You know I'll do all the real work once we get inside."

  Jimmy Smith grunted and watched the cars that passed them. The March night air was cold, but he was sweating, and his mouth and throat were dry and hot. He lit a fresh cigarette with the butt of the last one.

  "After tonight we'll have a stake, Jim," Greg said and Jimmy Smith wished his partner would shut up for five minutes. He had to think.

  "I've got a feeling you and me're gonna score big tonight," Greg said. "Our little family's gonna get well tonight."

  Family, thought Jimmy. If I hear another fuckin word about family Til. . . Then he looked toward his partner's belt. He couldn't see the Colt .38 in the darkened car but he knew it was there.

  He hated it when his partner talked about his family and how Jimmy was now part of it. Jimmy Smith had never been part of anybody's family, never wanted to be. And if he did, there was always his Nana. I'll go see my Nana one of these days, thought Jimmy. Soon as I cut this crazy bastard loose, that's what I'll do. I'll go find my Nana.

  "Jimmy is not really my son," his Nana would one day tell a jury, "but he's the onlyest son I'll ever have. I'm really his auntie, his great-auntie. I raised his mother from when she were a little girl and then she went and had her baby in Crowell, Texas, when she weren't but thirteen years old and she couldn't take care of him so she give him to me in Fort Worth. I think his daddy was a fifteen year old white boy but I ain't even sure of that.

  "When he were just a little tiny boy about three years old, I had this accident with a Colt .45 revolver, and he wer
e there with me when it happened. What happened is my husband's gun was under my mattress. I slept on the floor. I just stuck it under the mattress on the floor, and when I got up to put the mattress on the bed, I rolled it up, little skinny mattress as it was. I looked back and Jimmy were there and I were afraid he would get the gun so I got the gun and the mattress all in one hand. I guess I got it by the trigger when I started to the bed with it. The mattress started to slip and I gripped the mattress. I guess I pulled the trigger.

  "I were shot in my left leg and I had to wear a cast for a year without turnin over. It went up to my waist, and over my left leg all the way down, foot and all. And I laid there a year with that cast on.

  "Well, you might say Jimmy took care of me. We had nobody. I had been makin six dollars a week before this happened, but after this I was crippled for life. And Jimmy would give me water and do things for me. Jimmy turned the gas on at three years old. We had one of those open stoves and if it would get too cold I'd tell him, 'Son, you have to try! And I'd tell him to light a match and lay it on the stove and then turn the knob because I weren't able to get up at all.

  "And the same way with the lights. We had lights that swung down from the ceiling and we had to turn them off from there, and Jimmy would pull the breakfast table out of the kitchen, get on the table, and turn the lights off. Nobody was there with me daily, just Jimmy and I. My first husband finally left me, you see, after I got shot.

  "After I was shot I were never able to get Jimmy to take a nap anymore unless he could wrap his head up and just smother hisself practically, so I just had to discontinue his naps because after that he was afraid to go to sleep in the day. It was all right at night, but takin a nap in the day, Jimmy refused to sleep unless he could wrap his head up.

  "When Jimmy were about seven, a playmate got hit by an automobile. Jimmy thought he was dead. It didn't kill him, but Jimmy ran to the woods. It happened at school, and Jimmy told them he was goin to the woods and never come back.