Grog knew that years before, Chrissie had brought her husband's body here and that she had given this plot of earth to Adah for Ian's burial beside his father. There were two flat stone markers: William Campbell, M. D. (1898-1944), and Ian James Campbell (1931- 1963). And next to Ian an unused plot, conspicuous in the crowded graveyard. And Grog imagined how it must have been when Chrissie offered Ian's plot to Adah and how Chrissie must have looked: unruffled, controlled. And how she must have been inside: not breathing, heart hammering, until Adah said, "Yes. All right. I guess so. I don't care." And how Chrissie must have closed her eyes, and secretly: "Thank you. Thank you. Thank you."
The only still-unused plot of ground was not beside Dr. Campbell. It was beside Ian. Grog never had to ask. He knew who owned that unused plot of ground. And who would one day lie next to him.
So you're not fooling me with that relentless impassive expression, thought Grog, his shirt soaking against his chest. I know who he was to you, your young lord. Your sun, yes, s-u-n. And what's left now? Adah has the kids and she's young. She'll marry again. But you, what've you got? What is this Gaelic, Calvinistic, monstrous ethic that's holding you up? I don't understand it. I don't. And what. . .
The wail. Clear and piercing. Eerily distant at first. But then, like cold wind slashing through the crowd, cascading down on those who really knew him.
Art Petoyan said: "It was like a deja vu experience. I thought of Piper Major Aitken's funeral with Ian standing beside me. I knew it was coming but still I started trembling when I heard it. Back, back, up on the hillside he was. That solo piper. That solitary piper. Playing that ancient plaintive dirge for clansmen killed in battle, Tleurs of the Forest.' And I was shivering all over, and I noticed the hairs on the back of my hands were moving, swaying. I looked at her. She sat there erect, looking straight ahead. Adah of course was totally destroyed even before the piper started. She was almost collapsed across her brother's arm. But though I was worrying about Adah's condition I took my eyes away. I had to look over at the other chair, at her, sitting there, straight, impassive, motionless."
Wayne Ferber was standing at the grave looking at Ian's wrist- watch which Adah had given him. He was thinking of Ian's killers. "I thought how the Ian I'd always remember couldn't even have believed there were people like that. Then I saw the wreath shaped like an anchor. It was sent by an old limping sailor, who looked like Popeye. I thought of us as children, playing in Hancock Park. Of how he was. Never frivolous. How even his kid games had to have an end, a conclusion, a point. He'd insist on it. And now I thought: Is there a point to it, Ian? Maybe you know at last. Then I heard those pipes. . . ."
Grog Tollefson's eyes were raw and burning, and he looked around and saw the effect of the pipes on those who really knew.
Well, Ian, he thought finally. Well, my friend, we got to them with that one. We got a little of you into this mad carnival.
Now his cheeks were wet and he found himself swallowing hard. He stole a look, one last secret look, at Chrissie Campbell. Still she was motionless. Without expression. Staring. Straight ahead.
Chapter 10
"Outrage and horror" was the phrase most often used by police spokesmen. And it hardly described the police climate. For this was 1963, before the revolutionary assassinations of policemen. Despite their cynicism, American policemen are Americans. Perhaps a gendarme or polizidtto would only have been deeply angered by the gratuitous act in the onion field. But an American policeman was horrified There had always been rules in the game. One had to have a good reason to kill a cop, such as eluding capture. Smith and Powell had already won that night. In killing Ian Campbell they had scoffed at fair play, scorned the rules of the game. This was the thing an American policeman could not bear.
The young red-faced vice officer at Wilshire Station had been a policeman less than three years, but he had learned certain fundamental truths about policemen. Policemen'thoroughly believed that no man-caused calamity happens by chance, that there is always a step that should have been taken, would have been taken, if the sufferer had been alert, cautious, brave, aggressive-in short, if he'd been like a prototype policeman. They saw themselves as the most dynamic of men, the ones who could take positive action in any of life's bizarre and paralyzing moments.
To suppose that a policeman's vicious murder was inescapable from the moment that little Ford made the wrong turn on Carlos Avenue was inimical to the very essence of the concept of dynamic man.
The ranking Los Angeles Police Department officer who went to Bakersfield the night of the killing was Inspector John W. Powers.
John Powers was greatly admired by Pierce Brooks and indeed by most policemen. Some twenty years before, when he was a young detective, he had been involved in a sensational shootout wherein he was wounded and had earned the nickname "Two Gun Johnny." He'd lived up to that name. Even now, when he was a police administrator whose most hazardous task was driving to his office on Los Angeles freeways, John Powers wore two guns on his lean hips. It did not matter that many of his administrative colleagues left their guns in lockers or desk drawers. John Powers never was without both of his guns under the coat of his business suit. He was said to be the Patton of the Los Angeles force. He was tall like the general, with white wavy hair and eyebrows like crow's wings. And Inspector Powers had the Patton charisma with the line policemen, would talk their language at rollcalls, would brief stakeout squads and robbery teams in regard to shooting. A good clean bandit-killing pleased him as it does most policemen. He was known as a cop's cop.
What John Powers said carried much weight with the street cop. He had been one of them somewhere back in the old days, they were sure of it. And they were sure he wouldn't kiss anybody's behind. He talked like a real man.
Just five days after the murder of Ian Campbell, John Powers drafted what would be called by many policemen the Hettinger Memorandum. Actually it was Patrol Bureau Memorandum Number 11. The subject was: "Rollcall Training-Officer's Survival." It was considered so urgent that no officer in uniform or plainclothes was excused from rollcalls, and the division commanders were instructed to assure that every man was apprised of it:
The brutal gangland style execution of Officer Ian James Campbell underlines a basic premise of law enforcement. You cannot make deals with vicious criminals, such as kidnappers, suspects who have seized hostages, or those who assault police officers with deadly weapons.
Officer Campbell will not have died in vain if his death causes each member of the department objectively to evaluate his personal role as a policeman and the objectives of the department as a whole. . . . Just as the armed forces protect the nation from external enemies, local police departments protect their communities from internal criminals every bit as vicious as our enemies from without. The police are engaged in a hot war. There are no truces, and there is no hope of an armistice. The enemy abides by no rules of civilized warfare.
The individual officer, when taking his oath of office, enters a sacred trust to protect his community to the best of his ability, laying down his life if necessary.
All men return to dust. The manner of a man's living and dying is of paramount importance. Although some moderns have attempted to sap the strength and ideals of this nation by slogans such as, "I'd rather be red than dead," there are situations more intolerable than death.
John Powers' lesson number one of the rollcall lesson plan was read once by the red-faced vice officer, three times by Karl Hettinger:
Surrender is no guarantee of an officer's safety or the safety of others, including that of his partner and other brother officers. The decision to place these lives and his own in the hands of a depraved criminal is not one to be made lightly.
In lesson two, Powers became specific in his recommendations to officers who find themselves suddenly covered by a gunman. Some of the suggestions are to tell a nonexistent policeman behind the suspect not to shoot, hoping the suspect might turn around to look, or to pretend to faint to get nea
r the suspect's feet and trip him, or to jab a pencil through the suspect's jugular vein.
Perhaps the entire memorandum is summed up in lesson four, where officers are advised that, "If shot, all wounds are not fatal." And that, "A strong religious faith gives you calmness and strength in the face of deadly peril." And, once again, that, "Surrender is no guarantee of safety for anyone."
Pierce Brooks had mixed emotions when Inspector Powers consulted him about the memorandum he was about to write. On the one hand Brooks subscribed to the unwritten police commandment about not second-guessing a field situation where you were not present. On the other hand, he was too much policeman not to believe in the dynamic man concept. Campbell's death had to have been preventable. Powers was right. But in his final reports some weeks later he softened his appraisal of the officers' conduct. He couldn't go so far as the Powers memorandum and imply that Campbell and Hettinger were almost-he hated even to think the word-cowards. So he finally concluded that Karl had merely used poor judgment in surrendering his weapon, and that once surrendered, it was too late on the ride up to use any of the fancy tricks recommended in the memorandum. He wished Powers would have waited before releasing the order. Brooks by now had come to know Hettinger, knew that the murder had disturbed him, but not how much. Still, he thought that the Powers memorandum could cause the young policeman to feel some guilt. Then he dismissed the thought. He was too much policeman to believe very strongly in other than physical trauma. He had been too often frustrated by defense psychiatrists.
"I've read the order," said the young red-faced vice officer to his sergeant. "And personally, I don't like it. We've been telling robbery victims for years not to try something as stupid as drawing, or shooting it out with a guy who had the drop on you. Now we're throwing it out the window as far as policemen are concerned."
"They call that typical police overreaction," said a second vice cop, an older policeman who was reading a racing scratch sheet trying to pick a daily double.
"The department's writing general policy because of one specific isolated case," the young vice cop argued. "It just doesn't make sense."
"I'm not saying I disagree with you," said the big sergeant to the younger officer. "In fact, I more or less agree. But you have to understand what's happening in the department. Policemen are . . . are . . ."
"Outraged."
"Yes, outraged. We've never had an officer taken to an onion field and tormented and needled at the very end and ..."
"Look," said the red-faced vice cop, "I understand that. Christ, I feel the same, but I think the department's making a bad mistake with this Hettinger Memorandum. I'm gonna say so when we go the patrol rollcall tonight."
"Now just a minute," said the sergeant, "the captain said the whole damn station has to go and hear this memorandum, that's all. Just listen to it. You're still free to do as you like in a combat situation. It's not handed down from a mountain." "Have you read it?" "No."
"It's on the watch commander's desk upstairs. Read it. It was handed down from a mountain."
"Well, I don't see any sense of you or me popping off about it." "Listen to this," said the young vice officer, his face not just ruddy now, but flaming, his voice cracking with emotion as he thought of standing at the crowded rollcall and daring to dispute the order of Inspector Powers. "These are articles I clipped. It says that this is the fourth kidnap of policemen in Los Angeles County in the past four weeks." Then the vice cop began heatedly reading:
On February 24, officers Albert Gastaldo and Loren Harvey spotted a woman parked alone in a car. She told them she was waiting for her husband. The officers remained nearby. Soon a man appeared, his arms buried in packages. The police ordered him to drop the packages. The man complied, but when packages fell, a sawed-off shotgun remained. He disarmed both officers. The officers were released unharmed.
On March 1, Whittier police officers Arthur Schroll and Richard Brunmier made a routine field check on an auto containing two men. The men drew guns, took the officers to an isolated section where road work was in progress and handcuffed them to a piece of heavy equipment. The men, both robbery suspects, escaped with the officers' revolvers.
On March 9, Inglewood police officers Arthur Franzman and Douglas Webb signaled a lone male driver to pull over to the curb in a routine traffic violation. The man got the drop on the officers, took their revolvers and made them drive to Inglewood Park Cemetery where he ordered them to lie down. The man later was identified as a bandit who held up a cafe and escaped with twenty-seven hundred dollars.
"So what's the point?" asked the sergeant. "The point is that this kind of thing's been going on since time immemorial and right here in the L. A. area, and in fact on the same night Campbell and Hettinger were snatched. Now all of a sudden because one set of maniacs blows up a cop we're gonna say Campbell and Hettinger did it wrong and change our whole policy. Campbell and Hettinger must've known about these recent kidnappings. They must've figured their case was no different. They were gonna be taken somewhere, maybe handcuffed, and that'd be it."
"I think you better keep your articles in your pocket," said the older vice cop. "Once our leaders make up their minds there's no changing them. If they say Campbell and Hettinger done wrong then that's it. If they wanna tell us how to do it right, fine, I'll listen, then I'll do what I think best anyways. So who's gonna be hurt by their chickenshit special orders and rollcall training?"
"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' 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 diff
erent 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.
the Onion Field (1973) Page 25
