The Mad Chopper

by Fred Rosen

  “Yeah, but, hey, that’s a long ways from Sixth and Mission.”

  “No, it’s not a long ways.”

  “Sure it is,” Breshears answered brightly. “Where was this bank at on Market Street?”

  “It’s not on Sixth and Market. It’s between Sixth and Seventh there on Market.”

  “No, it isn’t,” Breshears shot back. “It’s farther, way farther up. It’s almost up to where the day-and-night bank is. That’s the Bank of America.”

  “Now, the day-and-night bank is—”

  “The Bank of America.”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s seven, eight blocks farther up the road. You said one block. You specifically said one block. I’ve written it right here.” He showed him the note he’d made on his pad, before continuing. “And you said the bank was one block from Sixth and Mission where you would meet them on Saturday. There’s no bank there.”

  “There’s the day-and-night bank is only a block …”

  Breshears shook his head. “You specifically showed them where that bank was, one block from Sixth and Mission where you dropped them off.”

  Breshears continued the questioning along these lines, trying to show Singleton that he was lying by catching him in inconsistencies regarding the fabricated directions he gave to “Larry” and “Pedro.”

  “How could you convince them that you were on the level if you tried to show them where a bank isn’t? That’s not being on the level, Mr. Singleton.”

  Singleton looked around like a caged animal, and licked his lips. He was trying to think of a way out of the verbal prison he found himself in. “I know where the day-and-night branch is, too. It’s not one block from there. It’s several, many blocks from there. And I told them I’d meet them right back there at Sixth and Mission.”

  Is this the best he can do? the cops thought. Back to this crap?

  “See, I wanted them to get out of the car,” Singleton explained rationally.

  “At Sixth and Mission? Why at Sixth and Mission?”

  “Because I could turn around and come back on the freeway,” Singleton answered in triumph.

  “No, I don’t think so.” Breshears burst his bubble. “You could have dropped them on Harrison, Howard, any of those streets, just one block away, and as soon as you dropped them off, you could have shot right around the corner and got back on the freeway.”

  “Well, all I wanted to do was convince them.”

  “Yes, but how could you do that if you weren’t on the level?”

  “Well, by that time they were pretty well stoned, too.”

  “Yeah, but I mean you showed them a building and said, ‘That’s the bank,’ and there wasn’t any bank there. And they believed you? Come on!”

  “Well, I told them that it wouldn’t be good for us to be seen together.”

  “So you showed them where the bank was that isn’t there, and dropped them off at Sixth and Mission one block away?”

  “Yeah.”

  Singleton failed to see the contradiction.

  “But there’s no bank there.”

  “I told them the bank was a block up and over.”

  “You pointed it out to them. You said it was there and it wasn’t.”

  “I didn’t point it out. I said it’s right over there.”

  “Why did you pick them up in the first place?” Reese wondered.

  Singleton turned and looked at Reese.

  “She insisted.”

  “She already had a stick and a knife and she insisted. You had a gun, of course. And she insisted,” said Breshears.

  If a person’s words could be said to be dripping sarcasm, Breshears’s were at that moment.

  “But I didn’t even know the gun was in the car,” Singleton protested. “That’s the God’s truth!”

  “You didn’t know.”

  “Yeah.”

  “The gun …”

  “Pedro got the gun.”

  “Pedro got the gun,” Breshears repeated. “Where did he get the gun from in the car?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Breshears looked at Singleton closely and pointed at his nose. “You know, she even described the little marks right here on your nose. Those little broken blood vessels.” From drinking, he thought.

  “Listen, I don’t know what she described, but—”

  “Hairy chest.”

  “But—”

  “Over fifty.”

  “She must have been awful—”

  “Receding hairline, balding on top, graying on the sides.”

  “Gray hair on the chest,” Reese added.

  “I don’t know why she picked me out.” Singleton was pleading.

  “What are you going to do?” Breshears asked.

  “I don’t know why she picked me out.” And now, Singleton was almost in tears. It was time to move in again.

  “Did you do it?” Breshears asked quietly.

  “No, I did not do it, sir.”

  “Yeah, you did it, Mr. Singleton.”

  “I did not do it, sir! I could not do it.”

  “You’re saying to yourself that you could not do it,” said Reese, “but it happened.”

  “It wasn’t me!” Singleton screamed.

  “She says that you’re the one that did it,” Reese answered, looking him straight in the eyes.

  “No!”

  “You have a fifteen-year-old girl who you say you were afraid of ’cause she had a stick. A man like you that’s been in Korea, been in combat, as big and as strong as you are, who likes to fight. And you couldn’t take care of one little girl with a stick and a knife?”

  “A guy who admits he has a violent temper?” Breshears added.

  “You could have stopped at any time and told her to get out, and she would have got out of the van and—”

  “She could have stuck me in the eye with that goddamn stick, or in the stomach!”

  “How about when you got out and went into that A & W? You were away from her then. Why didn’t you go over and dial the phone and send the cops on her?” Reese wondered.

  “How about when you went in and paid the money for the tokens at the gas pump,” Breshears remembered. “You could have called the cops then.”

  “I got out of the van three times,” Singleton recalled.’ “Now, she obviously took some pills or something up there in Auburn, because she was a completely different person when she came back in that van. She was violent.”

  “She’s different, too. She’s a lot different. For some reason, her arms are a lot shorter than they used to be,” said Breshears.

  “Now, sir—”

  “Three times you got out of the van and three times you had a chance to call the police if you wanted and you didn’t,” said Reese.

  “I did not want to. You see, I picked up many hitchhikers.”

  “Yeah, but we’re talking about this one. Just this one hitchhiker. ‘Course, I probably wouldn’t have picked her up in the first place. But if I had picked her up, I wouldn’t have cut her arms off.”

  “Well, I did not cut that woman’s arms off, sir.”

  Ignoring him, Reese asked, “Were you mad because she said she’d come to Reno with you and then all of a sudden she wants to go to L.A.?”

  “No. I don’t want her to come to Reno. I even offered to give her money. I told her, I said, ‘Well, if you want to.’ She said, ‘You’re going to drive me to L.A.”

  “Then why did you turn around from above Sacramento,” Breshears asked, voice rising, “and start going south?”

  “Because she whacked me with a stick.”

  “Were you going to drive her to L.A.?” Breshears repeated.

  “I would have driven her to L.A. if I hadn’t of picked up those other two clowns.”

  “You would have driven her to L.A?”

  “Yeah.”

  “But she whacked you with a stick and it petrified you?”

  “No, it didn’t, I …”

  �
�You weren’t scared of her?”

  “Look, if you had a sharp stick and you figured that …”

  “Well, how about three times when you got out of the van? You were a long way from that sharp stick. All you had to do was say, ‘Hey, get out of my van or I’ll call the police. Hey, somebody, come over here, and watch while I get this woman out of my van.’ You didn’t do any of those things. You got back in,” Breshears accused him.

  “She had already—”

  “In with that girl with the vicious stick.” Breshears was being sarcastic again. “That doesn’t make sense, Mr. Singleton. It doesn’t make the least amount of sense. Not even a little,” he added, shaking his head sadly.

  “Sir, could I have some more coffee?” Singleton asked.

  What was this, a Folger’s commercial, the cops wondered.

  “Sure,” said Breshears.

  Breshears looked at the middle-aged man. On the surface, he seemed harmless enough, but Breshears had seen his grisly handiwork. And that’s why Breshears just wasn’t going to give up. He wanted a confession, and by God, he was going to get it.

  Chapter Six

  The press was there at Modesto’s airport to greet Jaime Sommers when she stepped out of her Learjet. She had come to Modesto to visit with Mary Vincent, whom she passionately identified with.

  Sommers was also a young woman, though in her twenties. Her injuries, however, had been worse than Mary’s: she had lost both legs and both arms due to a sky-diving accident.

  She would have been left a helpless cripple had it not been for her friend Steve Austin. Austin, an astronaut, had lost his limbs in a horrible accident, too. But they had been replaced with bionic members that gave him ten times the strength and agility he had had. It had cost six million dollars to put Austin together again. It would cost just about the same to fit Sommers with bionic limbs, but Austin convinced the super-secret government agency he worked for to help Jaime.

  Austin’s doctor, Rudy Wells, was called in to oversee the reconstruction, and when Jaime awakened, she, too, had lifelike bionic limbs and, most importantly, no deformities. Reporters were aware of her history as Jaime climbed out of the two-seater. They stared at her in awe, but not at her bionic limbs.

  Jaime Sommers was actually a fictitious character, the heroine of a popular TV series on NBC called The Bionic Woman. The actress who played the part was Lindsay Wagner, and it was Lindsay, not Jaime, who climbed out of that plane to pay a hospital call on Mary Vincent.

  Some people thought it was ludicrous—a Hollywood actress, who played a woman with prosthetic limbs, trying to relate to a woman who was being fitted for them. The line between reality and entertainment had blurred.

  Miles away from the hospital, as Wagner spent four hours trying to give Mary what help she could, Breshears looked Singleton straight in the eye.

  “You know, you only tell us the truth up to a point.”

  Singleton frowned.

  “Yeah, you do,” the cop continued. “You’re afraid to tell us the rest.” He leaned closer, crowding Singleton into the corner. “Why don’t you tell us the rest of what happened?” he asked softly.

  “I don’t know, now as far as I know, that girl just got out of the van,” Singleton sputtered.

  “You know what happened,” Breshears answered. “You do know what happened.”

  “I do not know what happened,” Singleton protested.

  “What did she do to scare you,” Breshears continued, “to the point where you had to cut her arms off? What did she say? What did she do to make you do that?”

  Singleton thought for a moment. “I did not cut that woman’s arms off, sir,” he answered politely.

  “They’re gone,” Breshears reminded him. “And these two phantoms, Larry and Pedro, weren’t there because you never picked them up. Isn’t that right?”

  If this had been television, it would have been the point where the TV cop leans in menacingly and begins to rough the suspect up a bit to get a confession. But in real life, if that was done, the judge would throw the case out because the suspect’s constitutional rights had been violated. All Breshears could do was keep up the verbal and psychological pressure, and hope Singleton would crack.

  “Well, I’ll tell you guys the truth about it. It seems like I’m taking the rough end of this all day.”

  “Yeah, so why not be truthful?” Breshears asked.

  “Truthfully, I don’t understand this myself,” Singleton responded in a rather perplexed manner. It was as though he was saying, “Why bother me? I’m a good guy. I pay my taxes. Why don’t you go out and get a real bad guy?”

  “Well, if you don’t understand it, I certainly don’t,” Breshears continued. “I want to know what would make a man so afraid that he would try to get rid of her? She had to say something, to do something to you. What did she say or what did she do to cause you to do that?”

  “But I wasn’t angry with the girl!” Singleton denied vociferously. It was beginning to sink in how much trouble he was really in if he couldn’t convince this cop of his innocence.

  “You had to be scared then,” said Breshears.

  “In fact, I was actually …”

  It had been a moment of truth, but Singleton faltered and backtracked. “I figured we’d all go back to San Francisco, I’d dump them off, and I’d get some sleep.”

  Breshears reminded him that, “If she’d been holding a stick on you, she would have probably hit you with it again if you started to go to San Francisco.” She had wanted L.A.

  “I told her that she started playing Larry off against me and that’s when I figured, ‘Now I’m in real trouble.’”

  “Did she threaten you with the stick any more?”

  “No, she told Larry that I’d been bugging her.”

  “How do you mean ‘bugging her’?”

  “She insinuated that—”

  “What were her words?” Reese interrupted him.

  “I’ve forgotten now, sir. I’ll try to recall later. But at any rate, there’s a five-or six-inch hunting knife laying there in the brown bag I keep in the van.”

  “Did she just reach down and open it up and pull the knife out?”

  “Yeah, she did.” Singleton nodded vigorously.

  “How did she know it was in there?”

  “Because the bag was wide open.”

  “Do you always keep the bag wide open? That’s funny, because when we saw it today, it was closed.”

  “Well, normally, like I said, what I did was just throwed the junk in the car and that’s exactly what I did, throw that junk in the car. The bag was just laying there open.”

  “Man, the bag was closed,” Breshears contradicted him.

  “The bag was open in the van,” Singleton corrected him.

  “You reached in, you got the knife out, and you cut the ropes off of her hands.”

  “That’s a lie, sir!”

  “It isn’t a lie. We got the rope out there—it’s been cut.”

  “To my knowledge, that girl never had any ties on her. In fact, she’s the one that wanted to stay stoned.”

  “Right, and you found out how old she was and you got scared afterwards. Isn’t that the way it was?”

  “I did not know how old she was.”

  “She’s fifteen years old. Fifteen.”

  “Now, she told me she was …”

  “Fifteen years old,” Breshears repeated.

  “Almost twenty-one,” Singleton insisted.

  “And no arms, no hands,” Breshears added.

  “Well, sir, I could not cut anybody’s arms off.”

  “You couldn’t, unless you were scared enough, and you were. Why were you so scared?”

  “I was not scared,” Singleton protested again. “I was not.”

  Breshears leaned across the table and Singleton could feel his breath.

  “What made you so scared?” Breshears whispered.

  “Actually, for a while, I was frightened,” Singleton
admitted. It was the first time he had clearly indicated fear at all. “But,” the merchant marine continued, “like I say, I did pull those checks out.”

  “Then you weren’t scared. You did it because you thought she would die in that pipe. And she didn’t die. She crawled out and walked away.”

  Singleton didn’t answer.

  “It’s obvious that you never did anything like that before, or you would have seen that she wasn’t dead. But you were too scared. You left in too big of a hurry, because you were too scared for what you did.”

  “Sir, I don’t even know when the girl got out of the van. In fact, we all got out about four times.”

  “You helped her out of the van, Mr. Singleton,” Breshears answered. “You helped her out of the van and you were petrifying her. You didn’t know what to do.”

  “Sir, that’s not right!”

  “It is right! She watched you cut her arms off!”

  “That is wrong!”

  “Why’d you do it?”

  “I did not do it,” Singleton repeated.

  “What did she do? What happened to make you that scared or that angry?”

  “I did not take that girl out of the van. Now, we all got out of that van two or three times.”

  “Uh-huh,” Breshears said dubiously.

  “Including me,” Singleton added.

  “And one time,” Breshears corrected him, “she didn’t get back in the van, and it was just you and her and the ax there.”

  “No, sir, absolutely not.”

  “That’s all that was there. No one else.”

  “Absolutely not, sir.”

  “You know, you shouldn’t lie about something like that.”

  “I’m not lying!”

  “If somebody chopped your arms off and there were three people, wouldn’t you pick the right one? Wouldn’t you identify the right person? Wouldn’t you?”

  “If she identified me, she’s wrong.”

  “When you got rid of her hands, did you notice that ring on them?”

  “I did not get rid of her hands.”

  “Where did that ring go?” Breshears wondered.

  “I don’t know. I don’t even know if it’s the same girl or not, except for what has been said here. For the last time, I do not know what you’re talking about. I’ve told you everything I know.”