What with the way the situation unfolded…
When the police arrived at Melba Fischer’s home they found Wally Whitcomb hogtied with a burlap sack secured over his head. Blubbering inconsolably, the high school dropout was covered head-to-foot with tar and chicken feathers. Dana arrived fifteen minutes after the first patrol car. Wearing latex gloves, the detective, delicately removed the handwritten note pinned to the outside of the sack, depositing it in a plastic evidence bag. Totally hysterical now, Wally was carted off to the hospital by ambulance, red light and siren all the way.
Only when she arrived back at the station, did Dana examine the note.
Take Notice!
Rotten coyotes and smelly, flea-bitten varmints beware!
The Hopalong Cassidy Gang don’t stomach no
Egregious, scoundrelly behaviors.
Perpetrators of said unruly mischief will receive
The requisite curbstone justice.
Hopalong Cassidy
Max B.
Zane
Louis
Tyrell Sackett
Major Molineux
On a second note the police later found stuffed in the victim’s shirt pocket a grim message was scribbled in red pencil:
Any more shenanigans
and you’ll spend the rest
of your natural-born days
singing soprano in the eunuch’s choir.
Dana wasn’t sure if anyone had bothered sharing that additional bit of unsettling trivia with Chief Polanski, but the message was crystal clear. Town bullies’ only got one warning from the Cassidy Gang before they lowered the boom!
The rap sheet on Wally Whitcomb dated back to third grade when he set the wildlife sanctuary in back of the Baptist Church on fire. Throughout middle school, the remorseless thug shook down half the freshman class each year for lunch money. Chump change. One boy who refused to cooperate ended up with his head wedged up to his earlobes in a toilet - an unflushed toilet. A distraught mother even enrolled her daughter in parochial school to spare her child further torment.
There were the endless fistfights, pulverized mailboxes (an unofficial count registered two dozen), shards of broken flagstones and roofing nails thrown in Mrs. Horowitz’ new swimming pool, and on and on and on and on. The list of outrages, personal insults and abominations were all catalogued in his juvenile record. Wally Whitcomb had terrorized the townsfolk with impunity for over a decade. Now he finally got his just dessert—a classic example of curbstone justice at its finest.
On her drive back to the police station, one question recurred with nagging insistence: did anyone in Brandenberg or anywhere else on planet earth really care if this crime was solved? What happened to Wally Whitcomb - could it even be properly defined as a crime or was it simply a matter of belated retribution?
Dana doubled back to town and went directly to the second floor of the public library. “These names mean anything to you??” She slid the list, which she had copied onto the back of an envelope from the original note, across the desk.
Eunice Crabby, the reference librarian, adjusted her bifocals and surveyed the names. In her late sixties, Eunice was something of town celebrity. Possessed of an encyclopedic knowledge of all things literary, the elderly woman had spent the last thirty years behind the reference desk on the second floor.
“Not much of a challenge here,” Eunice observed.
Dana took out a pad and stubby pencil. “Tyrell Sackett,” the old woman tapped the second name from the bottom with an arthritic index finger, “is a frontiersman, a colorful character in a series of Western novels written by the fourth person on your list, Louis L’Amour.”
“One character’s real,” Dana interjected, “the other pure fiction.”
Eunice nodded. “Zane quite obviously is Zane Gray, author of Riders of the Purple Sage.” She looked up from the paper. “Quite a literary classic in its time. Defined the shoot-em-up Western genre.”
“And this one?” Dana gently drew her attention back to the list.
“Max Brand. The Jewish cowboy.” Eunice tapped her chin reflectively. “His real name was Frederick Faust. Dreamed of writing classic poetry in the European tradition, but proved a much better commercial novelist than poet.” Eunice fixed Dana with an amused expression. “This wouldn’t have anything to do with that despicable thug covered in chicken feathers that showed up on Melba Fischer’s front lawn?”
Dana was beginning to wonder if there was anyone in Brandenberg who hadn’t heard about Wally’s fall from grace. “Maybe yes, maybe no,” she muttered noncommittally. “What can you tell me about L’Amour?”
Eunice emerged from behind the desk, heading off in the direction of the fiction shelves. The woman had a pronounced hitch in her gait, as though one leg was decidedly shorter that the other. From the standpoint of speed, the aberration presented no impediment, as she covered the distance from her desk to the stacks in seconds leaving the much younger Dana lagging far behind. “Louis L’Amour, the most prolific Western writer on the planet, wrote eighty-nine full-length novels, including a slew of works about the Sackett clan and the wily gunslinger, Hopalong Cassidy.”
“I don’t know what you’re up to,” Eunice said, suddenly shifting gears, “but Louis L’Amour isn’t going to help you get to the bottom of what happened.”
“Why not?”
Eunice grabbed a volume randomly off the shelf, opened the front cover and held the date stamp flap just under Dan’s nose. “How many times has this novel been out of circulation in the past few years?” Dana stared at a flap of paper peppered with dozens of purple markings. Eunice replaced the book in its rightful place alongside thirty other Louis L’Amour offerings. “Judging by Louis’ popularity,” Eunice was grinning mischievously, “half the male population of Brandenberg ought to be at the top of your list as probable suspects.”
“I use to be a big fan of Charles Bronson,” Eunice said. “You ever see any of those movies he made in the late seventies?” noticeably.
To this day, Dana retained a morbid fascination with the protagonist, a successful New York architect, who, after his wife is murdered and daughter raped, becomes a vigilante, one-man, crime-fighting machine. “There wasn’t much humor in those movies as I recall. No tar and feathers.”
“Or geriatric diapers,” Eunice added with glee.
“No, such foolishness for sure,” Dana confirmed. What the Hopalong Cassidy Gang did to Wally Whitcomb bordered on theater of the absurd.
They headed back to the front desk where a high school girl with braces needed help with a modern poetry assignment. “Stay away from Berryman’s Dreamsongs,” Eunice indicated a slim volume the girl had rested on the counter. “Most literary scholars have no idea what he’s babbling about. And that wretched Ashbury you’re clutching like it’s God’s gift to the literary set isn’t much better. His free verse reads like gibberish.” The girl’s mouth fell open. “Go back to the stacks and get some ee cummings, Whitman and Adrienne Rich. That should suffice.”
When the girl was gone Dana said, “Tell me something I don’t know that would be helpful.”
Eunice Crabby lowered her eyes for a moment. When she finally raised her head the expression was sober. “Louis L’Amour believed that, even if it meant putting one’s life on the line, a person should never back down from a bully. Otherwise, life simply wasn’t worth living. In his fiction, the Sacketts and the Cassidys always stood their ground.” Another high school student was waiting with a question and Eunice abruptly turned away.
What if? What if? It was a cerebral game crime scene investigators played when trying to break a stubborn case, ferret out the truth from all the false leads, idle conjecture and miscellaneous nonsense. There was little likelihood that one person alone could have pulled off the crime. And the notion that the crippled Eunice Crabby along with a battalion of brazen hussies attacked Wally was equally ludicrous. Dana had talked to virtually every neighbor up and down the length
of Elmgrove and, though there were plenty who openly wished they had been a part of the brutal mayhem, no one jumped out at her as a credible suspect.
What if a family feud triggered retaliation? Brothers, uncles, halfwit cousins, in-bred nieces and nephews once removed settling a longstanding grudge? Highly unlikely. Wally lived alone in a squalid bungalow that probably hadn’t seen a drop of paint since the Kennedy assassination. Most of his immediate family were either dead, wasting away in prisons, mental asylums or relocated in a witness protection program.
Dana descended to the lobby. A group of young mothers with preschoolers had assembled in the children’s section. Every Thursday at eleven-thirty through the summer months the staff read selected stories and did simple crafts. Dana wondered if Wally Whitcomb’s mother had ever brought her son to similar enrichment classes. Fat chance!
Armed with a list of local residents, Dana headed over to Elmgrove Street. Rufus Dracut lived in the tidy cape abutting Melba Fischer’s property. She found him out back painting his shed. “Wally Whitcomb ended up in the hospital last night.” Dana tried to sound breezy, nonchalant, but Rufus wasn’t buying any of it.
“That fat turd?” the big boned, heavy set man replied. “First I heard of it.” He scratched a scraggily, brown beard and pointed at the plywood door. “See that?” Dana peered at the plywood panel where the metal latch had been ripped away leaving an ugly gash. A replacement latch and sturdy lock had been installed directly below the old one. “Wally did that just last October.”
“Did you actually see him break the lock?”
Rufus scowled and spit on the ground no more than six inches from Dana’s shoe. “No one ever sees Wally when he does his dirty work.” Without warning his anger dissolved in mirthful snicker. “Course what they done to him with the geriatric diaper - that was pretty damn funny.”
“Thought you just said this was the first you heard of it.”
“Don’t remember any such thing.” He wagged a paintbrush loaded with pea green latex paint in Dana’s general direction. “Regardless, I sure wish I had a hand in it.”
“Any idea who did?”
His expression soured instantly. “Wouldn’t tell you if I did.” Rufus muttered something else under his breath followed by a slew of vulgar epithets.
“Excuse me?”
“A dozen times I called the cops, when I caught sight of that piece of crap prowling the neighborhood.” Rufus raised a fist as big as a hammer and shook it in Dana’s face. “A patrol car hardly ever showed up.”
Dana held her tongue. Rufus Dracut’s’ last remark was dead on the money. Over the years, there had been no end to the number of complaints registered against Wally Whitcomb, the town bully. Ultimately, it was a Death Wish type bounty hunters, not the local authorities, who put an end to the fat slob’s reign of terror.
The color was beginning to separate from the latex base coat. Rufus dropped down on his haunches and began stirring the syrupy mix with a wooden stick. “Like the color?”
Dana would have opted for either a minty pastel or darker earth tone. “Nice. Yeah, real snazzy.” The detective wandered back out to the street. The split-level ranch with the decorative shutters diagonally across from Rufus Dracut’s place was owned by Sheldon Rothstein, a bone fide eccentric who spoke to none of the other neighbors. He power walked up and down the main drag every evening around supper time, averting his eyes or crossing over to the opposite side of the street when people approached from the other direction. The misanthrope was just too damn weird. Dana mentally scratched Sheldon off her list of plausible suspects and headed off in the direction of a brown cape with a flagstone walkway.
Later that night, Dana recalled a chilling incident dating back to when she first joined the Brandenberg PD. She was working the graveyard shift. At three a.m. on a late August morning, Dana spotted a mud-splattered pickup truck weaving all over the road on a stretch of highway bordering the town dump. She pulled the truck over. A bleary-eyed Wally Whitcomb was craning his thick neck out the driver’s side window. “What’s the problem?” His tone was hoarse, combative. Suddenly and without warning he lurched down from the cab and leaned drunkenly up against the fender. “What the hell you pull me over for?”
Dana glanced anxiously about. The section of road was still undeveloped with no houses for a good mile in either direction. No street lights either. Wally was less than ten feet away. If the glassy-eyed thug jumped her, the mace and nightstick strapped to her waist would be of no practical benefit. Her sidearm, a 9mm, short recoil Glock, was still wedged in its holster with a leather strap buttoned over the hammer. The semi-automatic pistol featured a spring-loaded firing pin with a 17-round magazine. When a bullet was fired, the trigger bar quickly reset so the striker was captured in half-cock. But all this modern efficiency was of no benefit unless the officer’s hand was firmly wrapped around the stippled grip, the snub-nosed barrel aimed at the offender. “Your left break light is out.”
“Big deal.”
Dana could smell the stale liquor on his breath. “What did you say?”
“I’ll replace the crummy light.”
“What happened to your face?” A ragged gash trailed down the right side of Wally’s cheek. Stained with clotted blood the grisly, quarter-inch wound was too deep to heal of its own accord.
“Some biker dude whacked me upside the head with a Heineken longneck.” He ran a stubby finger over the bruised flesh. “This ain’t nothin’. That sorry-ass fool’s in a hell of a lot worse shape than me.”
“You’re going to need stitches.”
Wally just shrugged and stared sullenly into space. He wouldn’t go to the hospital. In the morning, the bloated lout would scrounge a Band-Aid or scrap of surgical tape to rig a butterfly bandage. A month from now, the unsightly scar would be just one more badge of honor.
The breathalyzer testing kit was sitting on the passenger seat of the cruiser, but she made no effort to retrieve it. Ten minutes earlier, the only other late-shift patrol car was called away on a domestic disturbance. She heard the dispatcher’s message over the short wave radio. “You get that break light fixed.” The fear had inched up from her wobbly, spaghetti legs to her voice now, and she knew he heard it—smelled her fear. Dana retreated back to her patrol car. She was having trouble catching her breath.
Wally Whitcomb kicked at the loose dirt sending a rock skittering in her general direction—one last brazen act of defiance. Swinging his beefy leg up, he missed the interior of the cab altogether and keeled over in the dirt. He just lay there, laughing like hyena until he finally hoisted himself back into the truck. Once Wally’s tail lights were gone from sight, Dana began to cry. She wept silently letting the tears dribble down into her lap without bothering to even arrange a handkerchief to catch the wetness. Eventually the emotions ran their course. She turned the cruiser around and drove aimlessly about the town, avoiding the distant back roads for the remainder of her shift.
For months afterward, Dana agonized about that frightful confrontation. Had she done the right thing backing down? Was her choice on that backwater road an act of cowardice or intuitive good sense? Wally Whitcomb was a bona fide psychopath. You sensed it in the coldblooded, leaden eyes. The man possessed no conscience, utterly no sense of common decency. With one swipe of his pudgy fist he could have knocked Dana senseless, strangled her and hurled the broken body in the drainage ditch. She never doubted for a moment that, if she had forced the issue about his drunkenness on that deserted highway where the only palpable witnesses were crickets, bullfrogs and a lone hoot owl, certain diabolical inclinations might have gotten the upper hand.
The hospital kept Wally for less than a week. His tar-covered skin healed nicely, but the town bully had arrived in an incoherent, vegetative state. When the mental condition did not improve from one day to the next, the medical staff transferred him to a locked ward at
Bridgewater State Mental Hospital.
On Thursday morning, Dana drove out to Bridgewater where she met with Dr. Macgregor, a red haired, neatly dressed Scotsman. “Sadly, Mr. Whitcomb still remains in a regressive funk.”
They were seated in Dr. Macgregor’s office. The locked section where Wally resided was situated two floors above. The ward was kept locked at all times to make sure patients didn’t accidentally wander off or get in trouble. A separate unit for the criminally insane was located in a building at the far end of the grounds.
“Why isn’t Wally getting any better?”
“Hard to say.” The psychiatrist rubbed his chin thoughtfully. Strolling leisurely over to the far wall, he reached down and yanked an electrical cord out of the wall. The computer blipped out and the screen quickly faded to black. Dr. MacGregor inserted the cord back in the outlet. After a while the computer cycled through a series of test patterns before settling on a ‘safe mode’ screen.
“When the brain has been traumatized in some grotesque manner, it shuts down to protect itself from further, irreparable harm. Like a computer that’s been turned off improperly, it loads in ‘safe mode’.”
“Think of Wally’s primitive state as a coping mechanism.”
“But, eventually, he’ll get better?”
“Maybe yes, maybe no. Unfortunately, there’s not much we can do to facilitate the process.” The psychiatrist grabbed the mouse, clicked ‘normal’ on the computer screen icon and watched as the programs loaded in orderly fashion. “The human mind isn’t always as accommodating as a personal computer.”
“Can I see Wally?”
Dr. Macgregor rose to his feet. “Don’t get your hopes up. He’s still in a very fragile state.”
At the far end of the hallway on ward 3-B was a glass enclosed solarium. Wally Whitcomb was sitting alone dressed in street clothes. At three hundred pounds, the flabby-faced man with stringy brown hair gave new meaning to the term ‘freaky’. He didn’t bother to raise his head when she approached. “How are you feeling today, Wally?”