Michale Washburn
If you are reading these words, I am off in another country, living a new life. You will never see me again. I have been sick to death for years of this town of ours, or rather of yours. It really arouses my loathing, what with the makeover of the police force and all the efforts to make the place less provincial, less rustic, more a part of a global community. I have felt sick and beaten and angry for years now, but the cliché is true, when a man has a job and a routine and friendly faces in a bar to greet him, he can put up with a hell of a lot. So you may be wondering what finally pushed me over. Well, when they announced my retirement, this kid from the local paper said he’d love to take me out for drinks, it would be an honor to interview a detective at the end of a long career. He wanted to pen a retrospective. Why not? My name and face would be in the paper, circulation thirteen thousand. Ho, boy. But after we went out and talked over drink after drink, I felt just awful. I am done being fake and shoveling crap. If the article they run in that sorry rag speaks for me, if that’s what folks remember me by, then it is hard to say what the point of my life has been.
You may think that I enjoy some respect in the department, given all the cases I’ve cracked and arrests I’ve made over the years, but I don’t really, at least not compared to Pete Brennan. With his youth and his bright demeanor, Pete has long had one of the best reputations of any cop in this town. People are so sad he’s no longer protecting and serving. But, if you want the truth, some people are very glad to see me leave the force, and I can tell you that from the day he joined up, Pete was always on my case, always looking for a way to belittle me as a dinosaur and an embarrassment to a town trying to change its rep as a poor cousin of Upper Sandusky and other burgs on or near the river. Pete always struck me as a kind of man you meet
sometimes, who makes a big show of how enlightened and forward-looking he is but never says one remotely interesting thing. He claims status and cachet by always contrasting himself with others. I get sick at the whisper of his name. I almost didn’t write these lines, but why keep anything from anyone here. If you don’t ever get to a place in life where you can say what you want . . . but I’m repeating myself. Anyway, about six months before my retirement, Pete Brennan came to the shooting range when I was there and started razzing me about my eyesight.
Pete stood by me with a smug look, knowing I wouldn’t turn the gun on him. How I wished he would leave. I was trying to hone my aim as always, and it was frustrating that my vision seemed to be declining a bit as I aged. Without my marksmanship, I was nothing at all. A recovering alcoholic with a high-school diploma who lived alone and read popular history, mostly World War Two and Civil War, but not much else. I was jealous of every second at the range, but Pete had to say his piece. He told me he used to think my outdated attitudes were faintly silly and irritating, just something that he and Ron Jenkins and the other cops had to put up with, but they were much more.
Artie Pullman, the investor who lived alone in a big house on the western edge of the town and had a seat on the city council, was friendly with the police chief and kept voicing concerns about me during their weekly lunches, Pete said. The city councilman disliked my “broken windows” approach to policing or my frequent public criticisms of the opening of a shelter or welfare hotel on one of the prettier blocks or the appointment of enlightened judges who think mandatory sentences are anachronistic. I asked him if that was so and what he thought I could do about it. So Artie Pullman didn’t like the aggressive way I went after drunks and vagrants and junkies and drifters. Exactly the people who commit serious crimes if you don’t
stop them from being a nuisance in public. Pete once called me a fascist for talking this way. My old man was in that war and believe me, I don’t like fascists.
They really ought to ponder what will happen to this town, what property values will be, when lax policing is the norm and sociopaths get more chances than anyone deserves, I told Pete. Standing there, inhaling the rich odor of gunpowder, hearing shots that were really loud even with my earmuffs on, I thought here was where I had ended up, an aging cop whose values had no place in the world, the last Neanderthal talking to the first Cro-Magnon, receiving a lecture about my deportment and competence from a man twenty-three years my junior.
Pete watched me fix my eyes on the target and fire carefully, obsessively, at the dark outline of a man far down the range. He looked in puzzlement at my gun and said, Dan, is that a Colt or a Beretta? I felt like belting the ignorant kid but explained that it was neither of those, but a Mil-Spec M1911 A1, the same sidearm my dad had with him in the Philippines and used to drill a hole in a sniper or two from dozens of yards off. Now there’s an A2 on the market as well as some other models, but this is the gun to use if you venerate an older generation. None of what I said impressed the young man a bit. If anything, it fed his contempt. Pete said, that’s just the perfect gun for ’ol Dan Palmer. A World War Two-era weapon for a cop who resists efforts to diversify the force and objects to civilian oversight and is otherwise an anachronism and an embarrassment to us all. Is that the same model as your dad’s gun, or is it literally your father’s gun, Pete asked. You know there are guns out there more suited for someone with declining eyesight.
Ignoring this provocation, I asked Pete what he thought he knew about the realities of policing after eighteen months on the job. He said you know, Dan, you think you’re Philip Marlowe, a tough no-nonsense lawman, but in truth you’re that other cop in that novel The Lady in the Lake, not the hero but the wicked corrupt cop, Degarmo. I had to give Brennan credit here for one of the more original put-downs I had heard in a while. I haven’t read The Lady in the Lake but I’m sure this Degarmo is a creep who makes his department look bad. After that harangue at the range, I got to thinking that Pete Brennan’s visit had not been a spontaneous thing at all. He had come, at the behest of someone pretty important, to let me know that I didn’t have a future in the town and was damn close to getting fired.
Not all the other cops treated me this way. I have been friendly with Ron Jenkins for most of my time on the force. We’ve had our share of arguments about things, like what is the best Dirty Harry movie. To my mind, that would be Magnum Force. It may surprise you to learn how much I enjoy a movie where the villains are right-wing vigilantes, rogue cops who take it upon themselves to act where the system has failed and take creeps off the streets forever. But keep in mind that there are lots of reasons someone can like a movie. In the subtler ones even the villains can have relatable traits. Anyway, Ron’s favorite Dirty Harry outing is The Enforcer, the third in the franchise, the one where terrorists kidnap the mayor. I hate that flick. It’s a stretch to believe the head terrorist would climb to the top of that tower at the end and leave his hostage, the mayor, on a level below, making himself one huge target. Take it from someone who knows, crooks on the lam are more calculating than that, even the dumb ones, and this one was anything but dumb. He’s been stuck on that rock and had oodles of time to think through the scenario now unfolding. Even when Harry fires the rocket, he just stands there like an idiot. It’s stupid as hell. But Ron enjoys the film’s satire of self-righteous civilians who know nothing of the realities of the job meddling in cops’ affairs.
If that was true in ’76, when the movie came out, it’s a thousand times truer now. Ron, buddy, sorry if this writing this here gets you in trouble, I don’t know who is going to end up reading this and it could be some pretty powerful folk, given what I have to share here, but I think they already do know you agree with me on a good many things, you just aren’t as outspoken. You’ve bowed to so many changes in protocol and internal culture that you silently loathe. I came around partly to Ron’s view of The Enforcer after Artie Pullman’s visit to the briefing room one morning in April. The visit reminded me of a scene in the movie, where Harry and the other cops have to grill candidates in the presence of a civilian observer who speaks of weeding out Neanderthals from the force.
You may be starting to think that the account you are reading is fundamentally a political story. That it’s about a clash of values in a changing Midwestern town. Well, it is going to take a radically new direction in a minute. You don’t know how radical, even if you are aware of what happened to some of the people mentioned here. First I have to relate this sordid crap that almost resulted in my firing.
Artie Pullman strolled into the briefing room that morning with the bright aggressive manner of a busybody. He proceeded to tell the twelve cops seated in the room that there was all kinds of good news for this town of ours on the economic front, that a European private equity firm was in the exploratory stages of a purchase of waterfront property and that would totally alter the dynamic. Soon we could see more purchases and more openings of businesses downtown and on a sliver of land on the riverbank where for now there was little but a bunch of fettered graffiti-covered buildings. It was an exciting time to be here, and the future of what not so long ago was yet another dingy decaying Midwestern town had never looked brighter. But the firm in question, like many prospective investors these days, had a few criteria in mind, they wanted to know that people would not come to associate their money and their presence with the most pigheaded reactionary elements of society, some of whom sat in this very room, Artie said.
That sure got laughs. A few of my colleagues turned their heads to look at me. It is time for change, Artie went on. Even in a town more homogeneous than average, the department here does not at all reflect the makeup of the population it serves, and there is no excuse for that. Police forces everywhere are diversifying, adopting enlightened, community-based approaches, and really the last thing the town needs is to be an outlier.
I got up and challenged Artie then and there. I reminded him that the wino who kidnapped and raped a high school girl named Janet Greene three months before had had run-ins with cops in the weeks prior for offenses ranging from menacing to public lewdness. In almost all these instances, he had gotten tickets and a court date. He once spent a night in jail, which may have been preferable to whatever sleeping arrangements the bum would have had anyway. The cops were under unwritten orders to stand down and law-abiding folk paid the price. I asked Artie what those shiny-shoes buyers would think when bums and winos pissed and shat all over the riverfront properties he was bringing them to look at. And of course in this day and age cops need to be more than careful not to put anyone in a chokehold or a headlock, but two suspects had broken free and run away from cops recently and we were sure to see more such incidents with the stand-down orders in place. It was easy for Artie Pullman to damn the actions of police in areas where he himself didn’t live. He had us in a chokehold.
Artie looked at me kind of the way people might gaze at a rube in overalls and a straw hat who wanders into a graduate seminar. He lit into me right there in front of everyone, saying if I was so smart and so aware of the direction of things then maybe I should take over business development for this town of ours, and bring in the twenty-million-dollar contracts and the tourism and the wine and lifestyle magazines, it shouldn’t be too tall an order for a man with a high-school diploma, now should it, and he finished with a quip that devastated almost everyone in the room. If I tried to be more socially conscious, to wear such a guise publicly, it would give new meaning to the phrase, fools no one and annoys the pig. He thought he was so damn funny. Pete Brennan and the other young cops screamed with laughter. It was so unprofessional but they hardly cared. Ron Jenkins looked at me as if to say, gotcha there, Dan. Then the chief of police took over and talked about security for a convention coming up in our town the week after next.
I spent a lot of time after that briefing down at the range, feeling the sleek barrel of my M1911 and its checkered grip, steadying the weapon, aiming it, firing it with a kind of fascination as if all I could ever hope to do or become in this world depended on the precision of my aim, my ability to hit a tiny circle in the dark figure fifty feet off. My vision was faltering a bit as I aged and no one knew it better than I did. Over the hours I spent there, firing away, putting holes into and around that circle far away, the sense came that the strength in my torso and my right arm still had not faded and the worst mistake I could make now was to be lazy and let my muscles turn to blubber.
In my dreams the faces came now, vivid and hideous against a background so dark I thought of the attic of a house in the country where I had slept once as a kid. But it was unlike that attic because I could not know the borders and dimensions of the dark place, maybe it went on forever. It was the immediacy of the memories that suggested to my mind the personal nature of a space whose depths I could not fathom. That made it scary because what I saw did not belong in my private space. You wouldn’t want it in yours, let me tell you. When your job requires you to engage with strangers all the time, you can find yourself thinking about those strangers constantly and lose track of the distinctions that make life bearable.
The face of the muscular junkie with a mohawk and a nose ring swam up out of the dark. It was the punk who’d been selling pot and ecstasy and crystal meth to kids from the high school.
He had a long record, theft and drug possession and misdemeanor assault. I finally slapped the cuffs on the sociopath on a street downtown on a cold drizzly day, after one of his young clients took too much ecstasy and ended up paralyzed. This dealer looked kind of surprised when I got out of my car and walked up and flashed my badge and took out the cuffs, but then the bluster started. For such a nasty punk he knew some big words. He began talking about demographic change and how soon there would be no one from my generation left in the world, and a revolution was coming and the streets would run with blood and those cops still left would hang by their own guts from the lampposts. He chortled as he laid all this on me. Then there came the hideous, I mean hideous face of the whiskey-guzzling lady with a raspy voice and clumps of dark cruddy hair, who punished her seven-year-old daughter with an iron, turned it on and let it heat up and held it against the girl’s cheek. The neighbors heard the screams and when we showed up she shot at a deputy but she was so inept at handling the weapon that the recoil made her drop it. Then there loomed the face of the bald, middle-aged drifter who kidnapped a little girl and brought her to a remote place. I’m not going to begin to describe to you what that man did. He sat there in a room at the precinct and related everything to us calmly, as if talking about last night’s basketball game. At the end, I asked him how he could tell all this in a relaxed way, and you know what he came out with, he said, I ain’t real concerned about you or what you may do, I think the world is moving now to a time without laws.
They had no right to be at the forefront of my mind. In my dream, I aimed and pulled the trigger and the bullets sheared away parts of those ghastly faces and I had to keep firing until they were totally beyond recognition. Okay, I don’t really know if it was technically a dream as most people understand the term or a vision I had somewhere in that hazy border zone between alertness and deep sleep. In the vision I was as strong as ever and my arm did not tremble.
These were just some of the demons who occupied our town. They were still on some people’s minds. I had used the example of Janet Greene in my rebuke to Artie Pullman. But the truth was that all around us possibilities like these hovered, waiting to materialize into shocking reality. You may be getting a bit of a sense now of my mindset during this time. This is not a nice story. Maybe some literary type will publish it someday under a title like “Sandusky Nocturne” or something equally ridiculous. It’s possible because here is where the story really diverges. I know very little about literature but my English teacher in high school once talked about unity of effect. That is what you find in a story like Poe’s “The Pit and the Pendulum,” he said. A solid premise and a cleanly executed plot. Not hard to say what the story’s about, what it is, though I believe people do argue about the meaning of that particular tale. But truth matters a bit more than unity of effect.
I was in the bottle shop on Durant Road, reading the labels of various spirits and comparing prices, when the call came in about Artie Pullman. I ran out and jumped into my car and raced to his house on the west side of town, from which a neighbor had heard loud screams. A few uniformed cops were already there, putting up tape, and Pete and Ron got there almost exactly when I did. I went inside and entered the living room and saw the bathrobe-clad city councilman lying in a pool of blood, his face and head raked multiple times by something big and sharp. It seemed possible that the other cops thought of me as a person of interest here. Well, I can’t say I felt devastated. Surprised as hell, though, given that most murder victims in these parts are people of low social status, not wealthy investors with political clout.
Pete and Ron pushed past me into the living room and voiced their probably heartfelt shock. It was right then that I noticed the laptop on the elegant marble table in front of the plush couch. As soon as I made a move toward it, Pete darted in front of me and said I knew full well the protocol here. Soon a forensics team would arrive and how dare I presume to touch any evidence, let alone a laptop. I wasn’t going to touch it, I just wanted to get a closer look, but I saw no point in arguing with a young detective eager to prove himself. The cops with the tape moved inside and I let the matter drop. Pete said that the bastard who did this must have waited outside for Artie to come home and then pushed his way inside just as Artie entered, but the creep was stupid, had no idea how fucking stupid. Ron asked what he meant by that. Pete said there was a tiny camera in the bushes outside, very easy to miss, and in a room upstairs we could watch footage of everyone who came and left. We had to watch it right now while the perp was still not far away. We ran upstairs and watched the footage and saw a man we quickly recognized as Otis Gray, a local lout who got laid off from the auto plant awhile back, coming up the walk and entering the house and then leaving minutes later. Right now the kid I had never thought was much of a cop looked sharp as hell.
Otis had done it. We drove as fast as we could to the rickety trailer with peeling gray-green paint on the outskirts of town where that degenerate sat around all day drinking away his unemployment money, and found it empty. But one of the faucets was still dripping just a bit and we guessed that he had just peered through a window and seen the cars approaching in the dusk. Maybe he realized just how stupid and clumsy he was.
We gathered flashlights and walkie-talkies from the trunks of our cars and then Pete, Ron, five uniformed cops, and I split up and moved into the tree line forty yards from the trailer. Ron kept close to a pair of the uniformed cops as they moved off into the woods. They moved swiftly to the north on the theory that Otis might try to get through the forest and down to the freeway two miles west of here. Pete and I took separate paths to the northeast and the east, respectively. A few other uniformed cops entered the woods behind us but I didn’t really pay attention to their moves. I think they basically were there in case Otis doubled back and tried to emerge into the clearing again. After all, the cars parked by the trailer were the fastest way out of here. I soon lost sight of Ron and the others as I darted through the trees, brandishing my M1911, keeping my flashlight at my belt, relying on the bright moonlight that gave the trunks an eerie glow. I thought of Otis Gray, his unshaven face, thinning mud-colored hair, and slurred speech. Any face that appeared before a cop out here would be pale and incandescent like a vampire’s face and might scare the cop so bad he’d cry out and drop his weapon. I had heard of stranger things during my long career. The gaps and folds in the bark here and there kind of resembled the features of people in agony and rage.
My feet squished as the firm ground near the clearing segued into a more varied terrain of hard earth, rock, and mulch amid the trees and bush. I stepped on a few sharp rocks as I ran and it was almost like when a bullet hits your bulletproof vest. You are okay but you sure as hell feel it. The moon looked majestic in its silent aloofness and made life down here seem so puny and fleeting. The trees and shrub were navigable but their density grew quite severe in places and I rued the fact that they were dictating my path. Then again, Otis had to move over the same terrain. The further I got from the clearing, the tougher the terrain got and soon some gigantic cottonwood trees entered my path, their thick canopies hiding the moon and myself from one another. My fear was that Otis might be crouching under one of those big trees, ready to blow me away. But I didn’t turn on the flashlight just yet. That would make it so much easier for him. It would make me a big target.
As I ran, I heard a few words from the other cops on my walkie-talkie. The uniformed cops had formed a cordon to block passage toward the freeway and Ron was splitting off from them. Pete urged Ron to get up to where he was. That figured. For all his bravado, Pete didn’t want to go it alone out here. I switched the device off in annoyance and ran faster, ducking and darting among the trees and branches, grateful every time the moon reemerged and the ghostly sheen on things intensified. The terrain was really getting wild and I could not know what was out there in the growing pockets of dark, crouching, aiming, waiting.
Just as I was about to reach for the flashlight at my belt, I thought I saw a shape dart between two of the big trunks up ahead on my left. I tried to run faster in that direction without making noise. But when I got to the space between those trunks, I paused, anticipating what might be on the far side. I waited and tried to keep from panting, acutely aware of my age. Then I peered cautiously at the tangle of trunks and the worsening mulch further off in the wild. When just about to move again, I heard a shot from a .45 followed fast by two answering shots from a different weapon. It was possible, or even likely, that Otis had just killed Pete Brennan. I ran in the direction of the melee, thinking that probably the only chance to catch Otis was now.
I passed through two more pairs of trunks of the great cottonwoods. To my mind they were like portals to lower and lower circles of hell, though I knew the land was marvelous when you had the time and leisure to take it in properly. In the area from which I thought the noises had come, I stopped and looked hurriedly around. Then I saw a shape move again, darting to the northeast. I followed it. As I moved around one of the biggest trunks I’d encountered so far tonight, I dropped the walkie-talkie and grabbed the flashlight with my free hand. I wasn’t going to let anything or anyone surprise me. As I emerged into a tiny area with a somewhat lesser density of trunks and branches, a mini clearing, the moonlight fell on the sneering face of a haggard middle-aged man and two shots rang out, the same kind as the pair of shots I had heard earlier. I raised my M1911 and fired twice at the fugitive just as a round tore into my stomach, passed through my torso, and came out behind me, and then I lurched and fell onto my back, amazed that I was alive. It felt like my whole body wallowed in lava. Pain is an inadequate term. The M1911 lay a few feet off in the dirt to my right. I couldn’t reach it. I lay there gasping and gazed at the moon, its unobstructed brilliance. Then, craning my neck, I looked at the crumpled unmoving form twelve feet off at the base of a big tree.
“Otis … you alive?” “Fuck you.”
“Come on. Think you’re gonna make it?” “Shut up, copper. Die.”
“I’m asking for a reason, Otis. I don’t give a flying fuck about your life, but if you’re going to die, it would be nice to know why you killed Artie Pullman. But if I can make only one request, please don’t unload on me, okay?” Painful minutes went by as I lay there in agony, trying to remember where I had dropped the walkie-talkie. Then Otis spoke again.
“I ain’t gonna shoot you, copper. You hit me in the chest and the right arm. I’m bleedin’ like fuck and I can’t barely move or point the damn thing.”
If he wasn’t pretty seriously hurt, maybe even worse than I was, surely he would have finished me off. He went on.
“Look, I ain’t got no feud with you or with the other man I shot.”
“Was it Pete Brennan?” “I don’t fuckin’ know. I think so. Listen, copper. Artie Pullman deserved to die. And I’m not full of hate like someone people. Like you, maybe. I don’t say that about everyone.”
“I’m listening,” I said, pulling off my right sock in order to try to stanch my wound.
“Fucker was sextin’ with a girl in Germany. A fourteen-year-old girl. You know what sextin’ is, I presume. Anyway, Artie was sayin’ all kinds of stuff to her and gettin’ her to say and do things for his pleasure. And then when she said she didn’t like it no more and didn’t want to text with him, Artie told her some crap about how she was horrible and manipulative and said things that made her parents fight and sucked up their money like a little leech. She tried to hang herself, copper. But didn’t do it right and ended up gettin’ paralyzed.”
“You’re making this up.”
“Wish I were. Anyway, her father of course contacts law enforcement here. But tell me where you think that led. Artie and the mayor and the chief of police were all in bed together, copper. No arrest warrant. And if anyone from outside starts breathin’ down Artie’s neck, he’ll have his laptop scrubbed so clean it’ll be like no one ever used it. Artie don’t care. He’s rich and got friends and he’s been doin’ this to a lot of girls in different places with no one sayin’ nothin’. He don’t care. I can’t get in the head of someone like that. But the father, he don’t give up.”
“What the hell can he do? He’s in Germany.”
“Yeah. In Germany. And happens to have a pal who’s an exec at one of the big auto makers over there. The one that happens to own the plant near here where I used to work.”
As I tried to stop the life from leaking right out of me, and watched the moon, at last things began to make sense. Otis’s voice was getting hoarse. Maybe I had very badly wounded him.
“So, one of the mid-level execs over here, I ain’t tellin’ you which one, he secretly comes to me with an offer. Hey, Otis, want your old job back? And I’m like, sure, that’s the one decent thing I’ve ever had in my life. And he says, well, guess what? You can have it back if you’ll do one little thing. Do it quick and quiet and make it look like a random break-in. And I said, I’d love to rid the world of that sick fuck. And have a job again.” “Oh, man. I hated Artie as much as you, but you shouldn’t have done that, Otis.”
I waited for him to reply, but he just lay there wheezing. Then Pete Brennan came out from behind one of the big trunks.
“Good evening, gentlemen,” Pete said.
He wasn’t hurt at all. So Ron was the other casualty tonight.
“Pete. Is Ron gonna make it?” I asked.
He grinned.
“I have no idea, Dan. Ron’s almost as irrelevant to the future of this town as you are. But I can offer both of you total certainty about a different question. That was a very interesting conversation just now.”
“Come on, Pete. Get us help fast. My torso’s ripped open and Otis here—”
Pete laughed.
“I’m barely half your age, and yet you’re the naïve one.”
He aimed his .45 at my face, his grin broad in the moonlight.
“Hey, copper. Don’t make him die on my account,” Otis said.
Now Pete aimed the gun at Otis.
“I don’t think either of you has a clue how the world works,” Pete said.
He took careful aim and fired at Otis’s head. Just as Pete pulled the trigger, Otis tossed his own weapon, a Ruger, in my direction. The round from Pete’s .45 entered Otis’s forehead as I caught the Ruger in my right hand and pivoted in agony.
Pete turned quickly toward me. I saw him clearly in the moonlight and my strong hand didn’t tremble a bit. I shot Pete in the face and neck. He screamed and fell backward, his face blown off. Before the cops swarmed over the area, I had time to wipe the Ruger carefully, removing all my prints, set the Ruger down, pull my hand up into my sleeve, and toss the weapon back in Otis’s direction.
So that’s how it all went down. That’s the truth behind Pete’s status as a fallen hero. Beloved Pete. Whoever you are, reading this now, maybe you’ll come to understand just how horrible a place this town is and how it can drive a man insane with repressed fury. Or maybe not. Again, I don’t know the point of getting to the age I am now if I can’t call it like I see it.
Now that I’m somewhere, maybe Mexico or Cuba or a country in Africa with no extradition treaty where a friend and fellow vet of mine runs a little bar, now just maybe I’ll find a little more time to write. I know you may destroy the account you are reading. Nor do I really imagine this effort could ever possibly set an example for people within or, just imagine it, beyond this miserable town’s borders. I’m just awfully glad to have finally come clean about one discrete little part of the world.