should've called you folks myself," old Mr.. Heart gloomily told police, "--except law enforcement officers and me have had our separate views of things." Then at about I,50 A. M. there was a commotion from Mrs..
Heart's s bedroom, heavy footsteps, thuds and sounds of struggle, and Mrs..
Heart's cries, and John Reddy who hadn't gone to bed yet "might've run upstairs to investigate. Or maybe not. Everything became confused," Mr..
Heart said.
Asked by police where he was at the time of the commotion, Mr..
said he believed he'd gone to bed.
From this point onward, the sequence of events became unclear. It would never be untangled. Dahlia Heart told police she wasn't able to recall what had happened in her bedroom during the minutes leading to Riggs's death, "That man tried to strangle me! I kept fading in and out of consciousness. I was on the bed, or on the floor. I was in terror of my life. I must have screamed for help and Melvin threatened to kill me and--it was a nightmare. I didn't realize my son Johnny had come home--I never had a glimpse of him, I swear. I don't remember hearing a gun go off.
When I came to, a paramedic was reviving me. I didn't know where I was.
Why there was blood all over. I was convinced something had happened to my children.
My little girl. But I hadn't seen a thing. I swear." Dahlia Heart's testimony to police was breathless, agitated. She said repeatedly that she somehow hadn't "seen" the body of Melvin on the floor of her bedroom, when she was revived, she might have heard a gun fired, but couldn't truly remember--"It was such a nightmare. It didn't seem real." There was no contesting the fact, however, that the weapon, the. 45-caliber Colt revolver licensed to Aaron Leander twelve years before in Nevada, had been discharged at a distance of less than six feet from Melvin Riggs, sending two bullets into the bedroom ceiling and a single bullet into Riggs's head at an upward angle, piercing his brain and Iodging in the top of his skull, killing him within seconds.
Neighbors would report having heard "shouts, screams, slamming and cars" earlier that night as well as, just after 2,00 A. M. , "gunfire." Irma Bannister of 10 Meridian Place was the first of several persons to dial 911 to report an emergency. By 2,12 A. M. of March 19, four officers arrived in two squad cars to discover lights blazing at the Heart residence. The front door was ajar, and upstairs, in a large, sumptuously furnished bedroom, lay the naked corpse of a man they despite the damage done to his face--Melvin Riggs, Jr. The middle-aged man sprawled on the floor just inside the doorway, about twelve feet from an opened, rumpled bed where, apparently unconscious, in a blood-splattered white silk negligee, Dahlia Heart lay, the apparent victim of a beating.
On the stairs, dazed, the elderly Aaron Leander Heart babbled to officers that there'd been an "accident"--"the gun hadn't been loaded"--he "hadn't seen, didn't know what had happened" or who even had been shot.
A boy of thirteen, Farley Heart, in pajamas, his thin, face drained of blood, stood barefoot in the hall rocking from side to side and whimpering, too, of an "accident"--"John didn't k-know the gun was loaded, he meant to--" At this remark, as the officers looked on in surprise, old Mr..
Heart turned sharply on the boy and shook him by the shoulders like a rag doll before one of the officers could intervene, saying, "You damned fool!
Johnny wasn't even here."
"The night Mel Riggs was killed." Matt Trowbridge, by this time a Willowsville lieutenant, would times speak marveling of that night. Of how, though John Reddy Heart had vanished, his car gone, the Colt revolver gone with him, neither the adult Hearts seemed to know if he'd been in the house, at or anywhere near the scene of the shooting. It was like a mist had come over things.
"A sweet, heavy odor, a smell like of lilies." Mrs.. Heart was hysterical, calling for her daughter no one could find. It required several officers twenty searching the house before the eleven-year-old Shirleen was found, by Trowbridge, in a shut-off, unheated part of the house used for storage, beneath a heavy, old-fashioned sofa covered by a white shroud.
"You wouldn't have thought anyone could squeeze up into that little space. Not just under the sofa but inside it, where some of the stuffing had pulled out.
The girl was crying, but making no sound. She'd jammed her in her mouth. She seemed to be in shock. When I shone the flashlight face her eyes were blank like glass eyes, she might've been blind.
Seeing that child, the age of my own daughter, helping her crawl out of the dust and dirt, feeling her hands that were cold and ice, and smelling the animal panic on her, I had a harsh thought for the mother. I thought, Ma'am, you hadn't ought to expose your daughter to such ugliness as happened tonight in this house. That's not right." Both Dahlia Heart and Shirleen would be taken to Amherst General I Iospital for emergency treatment and retained for observation.
By that time, John Reddy in the acid-green Caddie with the zigzag trim and the prominent chrome tailpipe was miles away. He'd peaceful Village of Willowsville at once. He didn't linger. We him running down the stairs, grabbing his leather jacket he'd down earlier in the front hall but forgetting the red wool muffler if clumsily knitted by Sasha Calvo, then fourteen, for John Reddy's birthday, as we would subsequently learn) he'd been wearing around his neck most of the winter. His leather gloves were jammed in the jacket pocket, he wasn't wearing them, the Colt revolver, still heated from its discharge, clutched in his right hand, would be covered in John rheart's fingerprints--and no one else's.
Iohn Reddy, run! John Reddy, take care!
We envisioned the wind, our perpetual wind, damp and bone-chilling from the lake, clots of snow and sleet blown into John Reddy's heated face.
We envisioned (how many times! singly or together, in reverie or conversation, stone cold sober or woozily drunk or high on drugs which some of us admittedly had a predilection in the next decade) the grim young face of John Reddy, the stoic-boyish set of his jaws. His oiled black hair romantically disheveled in the wind. The gun--its barrel heated, smelling of gunpowder--dropped onto the car seat beside him. We John Reddy jam his key in the ignition, desperate to escape. tohn Heart ain't gonna stay. Revving the Caddie's motor. For he would know that Meridian Place neighbors had called the police. He had scant seconds to escape. (Even as Mrs.. Bannister was wailing into the telephone, "Those whitetrash Hearts! They're killing one another!
"--sounding, for the moment, not so refined herself. ) We could hear the scream of John Reddy's tires, a thrilling sound rare as a peacock's scream in staid St.. Albans Hill. That sound of John Reddy's acid-green Caddie that lodged deep in our memories, more familiar to us, we'd one day realize, than any of our adolescence in Willowsville, and more prized. "When I hear tires screeching, no matter where I am," Bart Digger once remarked, "--I'm back in Willowsville again. I'm sixteen." Now came the embarrassing incident. We'd have preferred it hadn't happened but, well--"It happened. A toss of the dice." To certain of our fathers this was evidence that John Reddy Heart wasn't overly bright. To us, it was evidence that he'd panicked. We understand. We could sympathize. We did stupid dumb-ass things every day our lives. Steeling ourselves as we envisioned, yet again, John Reddy in the Caddie turning with screeching tires off Meridian and onto Castle Creek, pressing the gas pedal to the floor even as he pumped the brakes, not wanting to skid on the snowy pavement, slowing as the car across the single-lane bridge over the creek, rolling down his window in to throw the gun out over the rail, and into the night, into what he must've was oblivion, speeding away as he accelerated, not hearing the gun clatter on ice--not splash into water.
For of course, in mid-March, shallow Castle Creek was frozen solid.
Never mind what our dads, like Verrie Myers's sneering father, seeing John Reddy in that famous newspaper photo, captured, handcuffed, in custody. It was our moms who surprised us. Like Shelby Connor's saying, incensed, as she studied the photo of a wounded boy in a camera's unsparing flash, "To me, that's proof of how unpremeditated it all was--whatever John Reddy Heart did. Tossing the
gun out onto ice even our Willowsville police could find it. It shows how innocent he is. How pure in heart." John Reddy fled to the east.
John Reddy fled to the west.
Sure put them cops to the test! ohn Reddy, tohn Reddy Heart.
In fact John Reddy drove east and north into the Adirondack Mountains by a shrewd circuitous route. Taking back roads, even alleys and lanes, lurching across parkland and open fields (like the spit of land between Garrison Road and North Forrest where the Caddie's tire tracks would be discovered in the morning) when he could, for the first five hours or so fleeing by night, in sleet, in the acid-green Caddie that by day would have been identified within minutes by cops, for they'd sent out an alert he wanted, prime suspect in a murder cuse. Caucasian, sixteen years old. John Reddy sped through these towns without registering their names, Lancaster, Batavia, Le Roy, Honeoye, Shortsville, Waterloo, Seneca Falls, Auburn. In the Village of Skaneateles at the northern tip of narrow Skaneateles Lake sometime before four a. m. he abandoned the Caddie, with what regret we could only imagine (for this was the spectacular vehicle that had brought him and his family east from Las Vegas to Willowsville and new life, and this was the vehicle John Reddy had lovingly repainted and claimed for his own, the flashy vehicle with which he was identified in all our eyes), but of necessity John Reddy abandoned it, for it could too easily be identified, and its gas tank was empty, and John Reddy hot-wired a newmodel Jeep to take its place, fleeing then in the Jeep on his panicked northeast trajectory through suburban Syracuse, Phoenix, Parish, Fernwood, Pulaski, Salmon River, now in the Adirondacks through Constableville, Old Forge, Big Moose, Raquette Lake, Lost Lake and Mount Nazarene where, on foot, in a desolate landscape he would be captured two hundred and miles from Willowsville and seventy-two hours after the shooting death of Melvin Riggs, Jr. , by two dozen police officers equipped with high-powered rifles, bulletproof vests, tear gas and attack dogs, and taken shackles to Onondaga Medical Center in Salmon River preparatory to being returned to Willowsville for booking and interrogation. ("They got him! They got John Reddy! But he's alive! "--the cry went out at school from a dozen points where we'd been listening anxiously for local news bulletins on transistor radios smuggled into our classrooms. A number of us, ninth, tenth, eleventh and twelfth grades, had hardly slept sincewe'i learned of John Reddy's flight, we refused to eat actual meals our families, we refused to shower or wash or apply deodorant, brush our hair or our teeth for days and when at last word came of John Reddy's capture girls fainted dead away including certain distraught girls of the Circle whose ashy faces, sleep-deprived dilated eyes and bloodless lips had a strong impression on those of us who adored them. And so we would wonder in our radically different ways, in our radically different vocabularies Will any girl ever keep such a vigil for me? ) In the crossroads town of Parish Route 22 shortly after five a. m. , John Reddy forced the lock of a 7-Eleven store where he devoured two chocolate cream-filled Hostess cupcakes and drank an entire quart of milk on the spot (cupcake wrappers and empty carton left behind as evidence), he stuffed into his pockets what he could grab to eat later, in the stol& Jeep or in Mount Nazarene, a ten-ounce bag of Planter's peanuts, three lwlky Way candy bars, the last remaining Italian hero sandwich from the previous day and a quart container of orange juice from the refrigerated unit, on the counter by the cash he left $7. 60 in small crumpled bills and change, and a hastily note, in pencil-Dear sir or mam, I am sorrv.
It would be discovered that, at 5,11 A. M. , he made a telephone from the store to his home at 8 Meridian Place. (But no one was there to answer.
Dahlia Heart and eleven-year-old Shirleen had been hospitalized and Mr.. Heart and the boy Farley were in a waiting room at Amherst Hospital where Willowsville police officers closely monitored them.
Mr..
Heart, disheveled and smelling of whisky, repeatedly muttered, "We ain't seen nothing, and we don't know nothing. And we ain't saying anything." Farley, his clothes pulled on in haste over pajamas, his eyes blurred and blind, wavered between the conviction that his mother had been
"that terrible man Mr.. Riggs" and was dying, and a childish persistence in wanting to go to school as usual that morning--"You don't seem to realize," the boy said to the cops, "I have a geometry test third period.
can't miss that test! ") It would be discovered that John Reddy next Calvo residence where as Joseph Calvo would later tell police the rang waking him, in the pitch dark, but when he managed to answer it he heard only the sound of someone hanging up--"I didn't know anything about any shooting or John Reddy being a fugitive so I never gave it a second thought, just hung up. A wrong number, I thought. Some asshole.
" In booth at the Haven, where we met most nights during John Reddy's trials in the fall, Dougie Siefried snorted in derision when the subject up of John Reddy's call to the Calvo house and Mr.. Calvo's testimony.
"Bullshit!
The old wop's protecting Sasha. You wanna bet it happened like this? --John Reddy calls and Sasha picks up the phone on the first or second ring, she's been awake all night because maybe she and John went all the way night in the backseat of the Caddie--for the first time--maybe--and she's walking around the house in her nightie (a great-looking girl like Calvo wouldn't wear pajamas like some dog like Evangeline Fesnacht)-she's Catholic, she's Italian, they believe in premonitions and signs and maybe Dino's been talking to her, John's been confiding in him how up he's getting that this bastard Riggs is banging his mom in more ways than one. Like any guy would who's normal. Like I sure would! So as as the phone rings Sasha answers right away and John Reddy says, real quiet, "Sasha. It's me, and Sasha says, John? What's wrong? and says, kind of choking back how he feels, Just want you to know I'm O. K. I'm in some trouble, honey, but I'm gonna be O. K. , don't worry. So Sasha says, "What trouble? What happened? John--" and John says, Don't feel you to lie or anything for me, Sasha, and before Sasha can ask what he the old man picks up the phone in his bedroom and hears voices on the line says, Who the hell is this? What's going on? and Sasha's scared as hell and John Reddy stays quiet and the old man says, Who's on this line?
Dino?
Sasha? Whoy and Sasha sort of stammers and says, Daddy, it's me, Sasha, the phone rang and it's a wrong number, and the old man says, "Yeah? You sure? Who's on this line? and Sasha says he's hung up, and says, "Good night, Daddy. So the old man slams down the receiver, and Sasha hangs up, and John Reddy out in Parish hangs up. That's how it was." tohn Reddy, run! tohn Reddy, take care!
In the stolen Jeep he wavered in and out of our vision. Sometimes saw him clearly as in a film close-up (the Jeep swiftly and bravely approaching the camera along a country highway, mountains in the distance and John Reddy Heart's face glimpsed through the windshield splotched with reflected sunshine and clouds, haggard, unshaven, the face of someone older than sixteen and the eyes of someone who has registered this fact), more often not. It was the second day of his flight as a fugitive.
Now it was daylight and the sun bright, glaring on snow, he had to be wary cruisers, helicopters. In Big Moose, Raquette Lake, Lost Lake.
was running low on gas for the second time. But kept going.
Where? By now might have realized he couldn't make it to the Canadian border.
was our theory that John Reddy had been headed for Canada but this was a never to be confirmed since John Reddy would never confirm it, neither did he deny it. In later years some of us, turned skeptical, would wonder if John Reddy, with only a vague sense of geography, had even kriown was. Or, if he'd had a general idea, reasoning it must be north, would he have known he couldn't have crossed for hundreds of miles since the St..
Lawrence River was due north, a natural border, and there were into Canada and these, of course, were monitored by customs of ficials? He'd have had to drive farther north and east toward the border at Quebec where in a desolate snowy wilderness a wanted man might have crossed, on foot. ) In the Adirondack Mountains in winter there isn't much even on larger roads. These J
ohn Reddy tried to avoid. But unpaved, roads led--where? Maybe his flight to Mount Nazarene wasn't shrewd circuitous as some of us argued but haphazard, desperate. Maybe hadn't known what the hell he was doing! He didn't doubt he might be shot sight. He'd had encounters with cops in Niagara Falls. He'd seen the same movies we'd seen. He was willing to die (we surmised) but not without a fight. We suspected that by this time he'd begun to consider the of passing from one category of being to another, for sixteen years he'd been just himself, John Reddy Heart, a kid, and now he was a fugitive, a wanted man. There had been issued a warrant for his arrest. Police bulletins. Possibly roads, behind him. He devoured potato chips as he drove, mouth chin greasy. He tried to listen to the radio which was mainly static. He listened for the sound of his name--tohn Reddy Heart.
Which he wasn't he might've heard, or maybe not. Mount Nazarene, pop.412, is Lost Lake. Many of us knew Lake Placid, Saranac Lake, Blue Lake, Lake--these were resort areas. Our families owned lodges--"cottages" as they were called--in those places. None of us knew Lost Lake.
of us knew Mount Nazarene. We'd have to admit that John Reddy had ended there by chance. You could call it destiny but it hadn't been his choice for you don't have any choice when you're a fugitive, a wanted man, running out of gas. In Mount Nazarene he might've had a vague sense of a post office, a laundromat, a taxidermist's, the log facade of the Mountain Inn