by Mark Johnson
For Tom Whitaker, I imagine the encounter was somewhat unsettling, but nothing like what rocked me. He had already seen my mug in the photograph I’d enclosed with the letter. Besides, he had three grown sons who favor him. They also look like me.
I knew I was finally at the right place when I saw the hand-painted sign proclaiming “Whit’s End” posted at the curb of the oyster-shell driveway that curved through a dense jungle of palmettos, scrub oaks, and sago palms. A middle-aged woman in an apron, her hair pinned up in a loose bun, greeted me at the door. She was plumper, and about a decade younger, than my own mom (Margaret Johnson—Judy had asked me to call her Mom, but that title will always belong to Margaret).
Mrs. Whitaker’s eyes got big and her mouth opened but nothing came out. I had been purposely vague about my arrival time, to grab what little control I could. I had insisted that I would find the place on my own. This had been a stupid, prideful mistake.
Whit’s End is way out in the sticks on a bayou of Perdido Bay, closer to the Alabama state line than it is to downtown Pensacola—something you’d never know from a mailing address. I had left Colorado Springs on a Friday afternoon and flown to Memphis, where I borrowed a cousin’s truck and headed down I-55 into the black Mississippi night. At Jackson, I left the interstate system to cut across piney woods and farmlands on two-lane blacktops, choked with slow-moving farm tractors and threshers headed to the fields in the misty gray predawn hours of Saturday. At Mobile (the first time I had ever been here, having no idea I’d be returning to settle years later), I hopped briefly onto eastbound I-10 to cross Mobile Bay, then slowly zigzagged my way south and east across rural Baldwin County behind more pokey farm trucks, finally reaching the Florida line by late morning.
Navigating Dallas in search of Judy Culkin had been a cakewalk compared to navigating Pensacola. Its roadways, conforming as they must to the irregular geography of coastal waters and bays, are a tangled mess. The Rand McNally was useless. (This was decades before GPS.) But calling Whitaker for directions was simply not an option, for reasons I chose not to examine. As a result, I spent almost as much time driving around Pensacola and its environs as it had taken me to get from Jackson to the Florida line. The whole 1,500-mile trek had required twenty hours by air and asphalt, then hubris had added three more hours of maddening drive time just circling around Pensacola.
By another measure, though, the journey had led me from Beaufort to Parris Island to New Orleans to Dallas to D.C.’s archives, then finally to this backwater bayou, and had taken thirty years to complete. What’s a few lost hours driving backroads around Perdido Bay? I simply used the frustration to fuel the rage that had been simmering since hearing Judy’s story two years earlier.
Mrs. Major Whitaker finally finds her voice. Without taking her eyes off me, she turns her head slightly and bellows, “Tom! He’s here!” then recovers her southern hospitality and says, “Well, come on in, sugar. You must be plumb wore out from your trip!” and gives me a warm hug.
I stiffen at her embrace and hear Tom bounding up steps from a lower level. I ball my hands into fists. Then I see a fifty-year-old version of myself coming at me down a hallway. He stands next to his sweet-smiling wife and extends his hand and I see myself giving him the firm handshake my father had taught me and I know he’s saying something, and so is Marilyn, and my own mouth might be moving in response but I’m not hearing any of it. There’s a roar in my ears like the “white noise” setting on Nancy’s sleep machine (a noise box she needs to sleep through my rip-snorting slumber).
Our handshake breaks and I feel myself straighten up, my chest swelling, my shoulders squaring, my stance widening, but I’m paralyzed, riveted by my own middle-aged face on this stranger.
That evening we feast on a bountiful spread of Marilyn Whitaker’s home cooking, I meet two half brothers (the elder of whom looks even more like me than Tom), and all of us talk late into the night around the table, exchanging life stories and tall tales and family histories. Tom regales us all with war stories from two Asian conflicts, the first seen from frozen foxholes, the second from the air.
Marilyn’s heard it all before. “Don’t believe a half of it, Mark,” she warns, shaking her head. Then with a laugh, “Tom never let the truth stand in the way of a good story, did ya, dear?”
Tom just frowns and shakes his head back at Marilyn.
“While you were galavantin’ off halfway ’round the world, Major Whitaker, who do you think was back here runnin’ this household fulla your kids with no daddy around? You wanna talk battlefields? It wadn’t exactly Romper Room around here all those years.” They’re grinning broadly at each other.
Tom gets up and begins clearing the table. “Look at this, now, honey. Don’t say I’m shirking my domestic duties.”
I follow his lead and take my plate toward the sink, but Marilyn shoos us both away. “Go on now, y’all just git! Outta my kitchen. You’ll only make it worse. You both got a lotta catchin’ up to do.”
Tom takes me downstairs to his den and shows me the family photo albums, starting all the way back when he was a boy in Detroit. We cover several generations of Whitakers in portraits and snapshots and lore; he tells me his father served in the navy, and if I’d like to visit him he’s buried in the military cemetery right there in Pensacola.
He says I’d have had something in common with his dad. “He did PR for GM. Like you, didn’t you say that’s what you do with the United Fund? You’re both wordsmiths.
“Me, I used to keep journals when I was overseas, thinkin’ I might turn ’em into stories if I lived through it, but when I got back stateside and reread ’em, I thought, This is crap, and never did anything with it.”
Around midnight we’ve worked our way over to the trophies and relics of his career in the corps. The rest of the Whitaker clan have long since shuffled off to bed. Tom shows me framed photos of the wreckage of a plane he crash-landed and walked away from in Viet Nam, his flight suit and pilot’s goggles and mask, his steel pot and service .45 from Korea. He points out a nick in the pistol’s barrel and explains that it came from the tooth of a North Korean infantryman who jumped into his sniper nest one night.
“I heard him just in time to roll away from his bayonet thrust. He was right on me, and there wasn’t enough space between us to get my rifle around on him, so I pulled my sidearm and backhanded him across the face with it before firing five rounds into him at point-blank range.”
Thinking back on that story years later, having had a few scrapes of my own as a cop, I have an idea of the impact that experience must have had on him. But that night, my response was to mutter something like “Wow. That was a close one” and let it drop. I was hunkered down in my own foxhole that night, too preoccupied with my own confusion and questions, struggling to muster the courage for my own confrontation.
I wish I’d asked him if he’d been scared or if it had all happened too fast for fear to even register; or if he had hesitated, even for an instant, before squeezing the trigger. Did he look into his enemy’s eyes as he fired? Did all his rounds find their target, or had he shot wildly with the first one or two? Did he get the shakes during or after? Did he check the soldier’s pockets to find out his name, see a snapshot of his family? Did he stay in that foxhole the rest of the night with his slain enemy, bracing to be overrun by more North Koreans, or did he hightail it out of there as soon as the smoke cleared? I wonder how long he had nightmares about it afterward.
Instead, after an awkward silence, I clear my throat and say, “I gotta ask you something, not about Korea or Viet Nam. I feel like we’re kinda dancing here.”
“I ain’t much for dancing,” Tom answers. “Shoot.”
“Well, when I first met Judy, I asked her about you, and she said you were dead. Killed in action, in Korea. I asked her how she knew for sure, did she get something from the Marines, or the Pentagon. She said no, of course, she never got anything official because y’all weren’t married, but she knew you were
dead ’cause she got a letter from one of your buddies, a fellow Marine.” I pause and study his face. He cocks his head but holds my gaze. “How did that happen?”
He frowns. “Hmmm. Guess that’s why I never heard from her.” He muses to himself for a moment. “That would explain it.” Then he looks at me, and with a straight face tells me how there was a guy in his unit, a real oddball, eventually discharged on a “Section 8, mentally unfit” ruling, who they discovered had sent a whole series of letters to the families of other guys in the unit, with all kinds of crazy tragic stories about how their boys had been killed or were POWs or MIA.
“He caused a lotta uproar and needless heartache, you can imagine. Nuttier than a fruitcake, that guy. I guess he musta sent one of those letters to Judy.”
“But how’d this guy get the names and addresses of everybody he wrote to?”
Tom doesn’t skip a beat. “They investigated that. Discovered that he’d been getting into guys’ footlockers, finding their mail from home. Figured he got the return addresses from the envelopes.”
I’m thinking, is that the best you can do, Tom? You really expect me to buy this? A crazy guy sending bogus death notices to strangers? Besides, Judy was so pissed at you for denying paternity and skipping out to Korea, I know she never sent you any mail. In fact, didn’t you just say yourself, moments ago, that you never heard from her? So from what letter sent to you by Judy did Mr. Section 8 Crazy Guy get Judy’s return address?
I’m wondering, why don’t you just tell me the truth? You didn’t love her. It was a one-night stand. You were scared. You weren’t ready to get married, be a father. You had villages to burn, commies to kill, teeth to knock out! You were only twenty. I get that. Just tell me the truth, Tom.
But I let it go. Why make the guy squirm? Thirty years had passed. He’d been a horny young man, itching to get in the fight. I understand, more so than I’d readily acknowledge, if I were in his shoes. How honorably had I behaved at that age with some of the girls I dated?
There’s a long silence while neither of us looks upon the other.
Then he offers, in a lowered voice conferring confidentiality, “I hafta say though, and I don’t want to offend you—I don’t know how close you are to Judy—but she was a most enthusiastic lover. She was like no other woman I’ve known, before or since.”
Another long pause. I can’t face him. I’m remembering my own night of drinking and staggering with Judy, and Tom’s disclosure doesn’t surprise me. I feel torn between the urge to defend Judy—originally, my whole purpose for this visit—and a temptation to agree and commiserate with Tom. I just don’t know what to think or feel or say, so I say nothing.
But I know this: I didn’t want to hear this. It just might be the truth, but I wish I hadn’t heard it.
Definitely didn’t want to hear that about the woman who had given birth to me, even though “bastard son of a whore” had gotten me used to a bad image of my biological mother ever since the concept had been so rudely thrust into my imagination at that Boy Scout camporee so long ago.
But then, neither had I wanted to hear from her of his moral cowardice and duplicity in her time of need thirty years ago. Or maybe worst of all (or just the freshest of all my emotional wounds) to hear the outrageously, insultingly improbable whopper of a lie he’d uttered to my face only minutes ago. I feel like throwing up.
19
Thievin’ Hoes, Prehensile Toes
You boys can keep your virgins. Give me hot old women in high heels with asses that forgot to get old.
—Charles Bukowski, Love Is a Dog From Hell
The best thing about being in patrol is the constant variety and the fast pace. About every forty-five minutes, a new set of players and circumstances is served up by Dispatch. But patrol’s best feature is also its major frustration: you never really get to know how the story ends, much less anything about the players involved, beyond name, DOB, and the nature of the complaint.
Detective work allows a calmer, slower-paced interaction with the parties involved. The detective follows the case all the way through the court system, through preliminary hearings, deal making between the assistant district attorneys and the counsel for the defense, to trials and sentencing of the offender. Probably 30 percent of my time as a detective was spent at the courthouse.
One result of that was running into other cops there whom I had no opportunity to see when confined to shagging calls in my beat as a patrol officer: guys from my old academy class and others whose assigned units in the department require frequent court appearances. One I encountered often at the courthouse was the living legend, Tom McCall, who had shared with me his memorable observation about sheep and wolves, back before I had even started the academy and was working at the firing range. McCall had since switched to the Sheriff’s Office, where he was working undercover narcotics—perhaps the most dangerous type of police work there is. (And he was in his fifties by then.) His wife, like mine, was also a member of the Mounted Unit Auxiliary, and I’d occasionally see him at training events our wives and their horses attended at the police barn.
McCall looked even rougher to me than when we’d first met, partly the result of being undercover: unshaven, longish hair, dressed in jeans or fatigues with black Harley T-shirts and a vest with skull-and-crossbone insignia. He would always acknowledge me with a nod or a slight smile, but rarely would we exchange words.
Then shortly after Nancy quit the auxiliary, he spoke to me.
“Charlene tells me Nancy’s hung up her spurs.”
I nodded. We shook hands. His grip was as firm as the last time, at the shootin’ house. I offered something about Nancy’s increased workload, by way of explanation. She had started a new job as communications director for the County Commission. “But we’re keeping the horse, of course. I ride him as often as she does.”
“Good,” he said. “He’s a good one.”
Shortly after Prince died, a couple years later, I ran into McCall in the courthouse elevator again. He offered condolences. It was still fresh with me, and painful. Putting down a horse is far more traumatic than putting down a dog, which is awful enough. But a horse is so much bigger. Especially a sixteen-hand Tennessee walker, with whom you’ve become one, in all kinds of places and circumstances. Nancy couldn’t bear to be there. When the vet administers the fatal injection, a horse has farther to fall than a dog. It seems to shake the ground. And then he has to be pushed into his grave with a front loader.
My eyes clouded up in the elevator with McCall. No matter how stoic I aspire to be, my damn eyes always betray me. McCall looked away, squeezed my shoulder, and got out on his floor, mercifully, without another word.
Because the nature of investigations requires more interaction with offenders than the mere “cuffing and stuffing” of patrol work, the detective gets to know people and their backstories in more depth, which often makes it interesting, if not surprising. Over the weeks, or even months, of an investigation, a detective may talk to most members of a suspect’s family: parents, siblings, girlfriends, children, homeboys, probation officers, even employers or coaches or neighbors. We get glimpses of personalities, causes, and conditions that the patrol officer never sees.
The story frequently changes as the stories evolve. The same person can seem reasonable and credible the first time, only to trip himself up with inconsistencies later. When these are pointed out, that “reasonable” person can explode in defiance or melt down in shame. Or both, alternately.
Based on who the players are and what kind of evidence we have, we stage our interviews with some forethought. Who and how many detectives are needed? Who plays what role? How much do we bluff? Where’s the best setting? Will bringing his mama in help us or hurt us?
We even give some thought to the clothes we wear. Some people get more candid as they get more comfortable. A uniform or even just a white shirt and necktie can be off putting and stop an interrogation before it even starts. Alternately, sometimes a
gray flannel suit and tie produce the desired effect. I once posed as an FBI agent called in on the case “due to possible federal charges,” because I looked the part way better than any of my colleagues. The suspect was duly intimidated and became more cooperative.
Earl Slocumb’s casual, rumpled, unshaven look is calculated and most effective. (It’s purely coincidental that he’s actually a slob in real life, too.) He’s the champion of confession acquisition. He never leads with the Miranda warning and waiver. It’s presented as an afterthought, a mere formality, after the guts start spilling. Earl will talk Crimson Tide or fishing or whatever he can get our guest interested in for as long as it takes to develop commonality and something akin to trust. Earl never raises his voice or shows anger. He reasons with them. They come to believe that Earl is offering a fair deal that allows them both to win. All the while the “guest” is handcuffed to a table and knows full well he’s talking to a cop. I’ve had them refuse to even confirm their date of birth to me, only to see Earl emerge an hour later with a list of all the licks the suspect has hit, the names of all his homeboys who hit the licks with him or got rid of the stolen goods for him, and for little more than a Big Mac and a Newport, the suspect has agreed to take a ride with Earl through the ’hood to point out the specific houses he’s burglarized in the last six weeks. It’s astounding. It’s why he has that Officer of the Year award adorning his office wall. If Earl applied his natural style to, say, sales, or contract negotiations, or consulting, he’d be living in a Gotham City penthouse.
Except then he wouldn’t be Earl.
Lusty’s style often begins with horny talk about bitches and hoes. Most guys, especially criminals, are more than willing to shoot the breeze about big-assed nasty women, and I’ve never met anyone who can articulate the id with the unabashed, unfettered, purely puerile enthusiasm of Lusty Lopez. But after a few minutes of booty banter, he abruptly switches to his unique style of Hispanic hellfire. Lusty gets into a rhythm, using the first name of the suspect in almost every phrase, as he describes with lurid detail the despair and degradation awaiting the suspect in prison:
