Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 43, No. 7 & 8, July/August 1998

The Dragnet Burglar by Philip Haldeman

You had to watch Kenny Beal like a hawk. In 1956 he was ten years old, short and lean, fast at sports, fond of wearing colorful Hawaiian shirts, and a notorious cheater at Monopoly. In the middle-class district of the city where I stayed with my grandparents for the summer, he and I and a couple of other kids would sit outdoors on our large wooden porch, move little silver tokens around Go, occasionally end up in jail or miserably land on Boardwalk with hotels. Each of us had his own strategy, but Kenny’s was unique. Stealthily he would watch our hands, our eyes, the turn of our heads, and when he found us distracted by talk or laughter, would, like a praying mantis, snatch a gloriously orange five hundred dollar bill out of the bank and hide it under his stack of tens. If he succeeded, he’d wait until later in the game, then with a dramatic flourish reveal the money and claim he’d been secretly saving it for an emergency.

We’d accuse him in blasts of invective, groan our contempt, then wait for the hilarious quirk that would give him away, for in a textbook demonstration of the guilt-ridden personality he could not for the life of him look anyone in the eye while lying. Under the fuzzy lid of his blond crewcut he’d shift his gaze up and sideways as if tracking a fly and say with feigned sincerity, “I didn’t steal it, I had it before!” He’d look just off to the side or above your head. When he got caught, he’d make a joke of it. “Can’t blame me for try-ing.” His mouth would curve ever so slightly downward in a pose of mock-criminal sophistication, causing one to imagine an invisible cigarette dangling from his lip.

It was a great show.

Winning, money, and sleight of hand were the surface priorities of Kenny’s life, and his father was probably responsible. Kirk Beal was first and foremost an entrepreneur. Sometimes his thin frame, long legs, and copious head of straight blond hair could be seen on the sidewalk in front of a neighbor’s house, his favorite venue for discussing a potential enterprise. Most of it was just talk, but one year — I think it was 1959 — he came close to achieving immortality in the fast-food delivery business. And he might have retired a millionaire by age fifty if only he’d chosen a different kind of food to deliver. But instead of initiating pizza delivery in a major American city, he opened a phone-in restaurant called The Chicken Shack — then ironically bought an entire fleet of little red Italian Fiats.

The year of 1956 was especially significant for a different reason. In that year our neighborhood was struck by the Dragnet Burglar.

At the time I didn’t know there was such a person and therefore had no hint he might enter the life of anyone I knew. The story of Frank B. Harrison was an anomaly in (as they say) the annals of crime. The newspaper eventually described him as “a divorced white male in his late twenties whose most recent employment was as an aircraft-seat upholsterer at Boeing.” Photographs of him show a tall, fashionable, slightly brawny man with a peculiarly slanted middle-American smile and no sign of the dark, bitter emotions apparently resulting from an abused childhood. An alcoholic, he’d had to leave his home state of North Carolina to find work. His wife remained behind, and two years later she and Harrison were divorced.

In November, 1955, the Boeing company discovered that Harrison had falsified part of his resume and fired him. Embittered and out of work, he resumed drinking heavily — and also watching television (then a relatively new luxury). Heaps of broken glass were discovered along the baseboard of one of his living room walls. The plaster was cracked and smashed, apparently where he had been hurling bottles as soon as they were emptied. Around March of 1956 he took to the streets, trying to walk off his alcoholic urges. He wrote to his ex-wife in North Carolina saying that he was so tired after one of these long walks he didn’t even have the energy to open a bottle. “I he awake at night,” he wrote. “I do not know what will happen to me. Soon my money will run out, and there are no jobs for upholsterers within five hundred miles.”

Even in the early days of television, residential sidewalks were abandoned at night. Walking alone in the dark, Harrison must have casually gazed into the window of a house, perhaps seen the glow of a television set, and realized how alone and unseen he was. That spring was unseasonably warm, and while people sat entranced before the black and white electronic hearth, windows were left open. Rear windows. And Harrison became aware of an optimum, statistically confirmed period of time when all those people were likely to be frozen in place, unaware of his, or anyone else’s, presence.

Dragnet, the most popular show since the beginning of television, provided the true advantage he needed. The show had a compelling documentary-style realism from actual L.A.P.D. cases, and a police detective, Sergeant Joe Friday (Jack Webb), who solved cases without ever cracking a smile. Its gritty procedural approach was completely different from any other detective show. “The story you are about to see is true. Only the names have been changed to protect the innocent,” ran the intro, followed by: “It was two forty-five. We were working the day watch out of homicide...” Certain fines of Joe Friday’s dialogue entered common usage: “Just the facts, ma’am.”

With the aid of Dragnet, Harrison became an efficient, calculating, and maddeningly systematic burglar. During the thirty minutes of Joe Friday’s investigations, he, the real-life criminal, entered through back windows. His success generated a public reputation, and just as Clyde Barrow had written to Henry Ford complimenting him on the getaway virtues of the Ford V-8, so too did Frank Harrison write to Jack Webb complimenting him on the virtues of Dragnet. In heavy black ink Harrison proclaimed his gratitude and catalogued his ability to hit at least two and often three houses in a single neighborhood every Thursday evening between eight thirty and nine P.M. “I have extreme confidence,” he wrote Webb, “both in your talent as a low-key, cool actor, and in your skill as a director.”

The police took three weeks to catch on to the pattern of the burglaries, but just as they began to issue warnings, Harrison decided to vary his schedule by switching to Gunsmoke, on Saturday nights at ten. His anonymous letters to actor James Arness mention only that he, as a fan, wished he could see the program rather than merely hear it from dark bedrooms as he rifled through drawers in search of money and jewelry. “You are a fine actor,” he told Arness, “and the situations are believable and realistic.”

Harrison began to push his luck during summer reruns. He almost got caught twice in June, but it seemed he would continue during this high-risk period until the beginning of the new fall season.

It was on a midsummer evening that the Dragnet Burglar made his final excursion.

That day I had stupidly gotten locked inside Kenny Beal’s garage. I was more embarrassed than angry at being tricked into going in there and hearing the click of the latch behind me — and too miffed to yell for little Kenny-the-creep to let me out.

As I strained to see into the shadows, I discovered by a crack of light that Kirk Beal was storing a lot of gasoline in there. I could make out at least a dozen five-gallon containers. Maybe Mr. Beal was hoarding it for all those future Fiats, or maybe it was for some other reason, but it was a cryptic sign of serious adult irrationality. “I got somethin’ to show you,” Kenny had said before I’d stepped ahead of him into the trap.

After banging on the door, I took a deep breath and sat down on a relatively clean area of the concrete floor. In about an hour I heard someone. A dark shadow covered the crack between the big wooden doors. Then I heard Mr. Beal’s low voice.

“David, are you in there?”

I hesitated. “Yes,” I said as resentfully as I could.

The latch clicked open, fight flooded in, and Mr. Beal peered into the garage.

“Kenny locked me in,” I said.

“He told me a couple of minutes ago. He’s sure as hell in trouble. How long have you been in here?”

“I don’t know. An hour, I guess.”

Mr. Beal motioned me outside. I squinted into the afternoon brightness and stepped out onto the sidewalk while he closed the doors. I’d had only a vague impression of him before. Maybe he was okay — an understanding father with a miscreant son. Then, as I thought of the gasoline, it was a potential arsonist who rested a thin white hand on my shoulder. “There’s no excuse for what Kenny did. We’ve put him in his room. He’s going to stay there for two days. We’re going to serve him meals in his room. Scant meals. He’s allowed to come out to use the bathroom, but that’s all. When he comes out for good, he is going to come over to your grandparents’ house and apologize to you for locking you in the garage.”

Not enough, I thought, but I didn’t say it.

“Kenny may be a little wild sometimes, but he’s a good kid. We want him to be aggressive and self-sufficient. I hope you don’t take this shenanigan too seriously.” His expression was confident, contemplative, and he had the tone of someone giving thoughtful advice. “The Russians have a lot of missiles pointed at us, you know. And we have a lot of missiles pointed at them.” The lines on his forehead deepened. “We have a lot of missiles pointed at each other. You know what I mean?”

I nodded at this incomprehensible leap in subject matter. We walked a few paces toward a heavy wooden gate that led into the Beals’ back yard.

“When the next war comes, it’s going to be pretty tough, and only those who are prepared will survive.”

I thought of how we kids played “army,” and tried to connect this with what Mr. Beal was saying. I remembered the rumor from the summer before that the Beals had built a bomb shelter in their back yard. No one believed it.

“We have to be prepared for any eventuality,” he continued. “Kenny will be prepared to survive the next war if that war should ever come.”

“Sure,” I said, trying to imagine how cheating at Monopoly would help.

Mr. Beal smiled knowingly. “You kids are all good kids, but you have to be tough. Maybe it wasn’t so bad you got locked in that garage after all. Maybe you’ll learn something from it. Okay?”

“Sure.”

“But we’ll see it doesn’t happen again.”

“Yeah. I gotta go now.”

“All right, David. Tell your grandparents we’re disciplining Kenny and he’s going to apologize.”

“Sure,” I said. “Bye.”

The Beal household had become an arsenal. Kirk Beal, as a result of his personal visions of nuclear apocalypse, had discovered “survivalism.” Neighbors’ conversations with him in the following months — conversations that filtered down to us — revealed that not only was he hoarding fuel and food, but that he’d acquired a number of deadly weapons, mostly of World War II vintage. I knew about one of the guns because Kenny had shown me a loaded German Luger pistol in his father’s desk drawer in a corner of the living room. Not only had Kenny known the gun was there, but he knew where to get the key to open the drawer. It’s hard to keep secrets from one’s own kids, especially when they’ve been trained to be observant, clever, and opportunistic. But perhaps I’m being too hard on Kirk Beal, having the advantage of hindsight.

That night, the night the Dragnet Burglar arrived, I was sitting on our front porch reading an Uncle Scrooge comic and gulping an Orange Crush. It was nearly dark, and a deep sunset-magenta tint shone on the houses across the street. I heard a car engine start, and a moment later the Beals’ cream-colored ’55 Dodge went past toward Northeast Sixty-fifth. I saw them from above street level, since the houses on our block were built atop grassy embankments held back by concrete walls or rockeries, with concrete stairs leading up to the porches. I saw Kirk Beal driving and Kenny’s sister Katy in the back seat. That would mean Margaret Beal, Kenny’s mother, was riding in front. I wondered if the whole family was going out.

I remember an acute sensation of betrayal as the Beal car drove by, for I assumed that Kenny, who was supposed to be in his room, was in that car. But I couldn’t see. I didn’t know.

The sky turned a deep blue above the city’s roofs while I thought about sneaking around to the back of the Beal house and looking in Kenny’s bedroom window. At the same time Frank Harrison, observing the Beal house from the shadows, was thinking of doing exactly the same thing.

Harrison could see the TV glow in the Beals’ living room from Sixty-third Street. Taking risks during the rerun season had not been a matter of overconfidence. He had been regularly playing seven-card high-low split and, being a man who rarely folded his cards, found himself bankrupt. Nothing is worse than being clever only half the time, and now he silently made his way to the dark side of the Beal house, dropping out of sight into the shrubbery.

I got to the back gate next to the garage and unfastened the latch as quietly as possible. The rear of the house was quiet. Two downstairs bedrooms were along the side, and all I had to do was round the corner, walk a few feet between houses to Kenny’s window, and look in to see if Mr. Beal had gone back on his word. Pausing, I leaned against the clapboard siding and smiled. Man, I thought, if the little bastard is in there, I could scare the crap out of him by banging on his window.

Harrison had already made it into the house by way of the front bedroom.

I checked out the house next door, but there was no sign of anyone. Cockily running my hand along the side of the house, feeling my way in the dim light from a nearby streetlight, I crept up to Kenny’s halfopen window. I raised my head and looked inside.

Just as I’d thought. No Kenny. The room was dark. But then I heard the sound of the television coming from the living room. Devious Kenny had obviously left his room while his parents were gone and was illicitly watching TV. Or had his father given him permission?

Stepping up onto the clapboard skirting, I grabbed the windowsill, forced myself higher, and hung there suspended, leaning awkwardly into the emptiness. A voice on TV said, “He’s got a fast horse, marshal.”

I remember the line exactly because the next moment I lifted myself up and into the room, landing quietly on the floor next to the bed. I was going to scare the crap out of Kenny, I thought, for locking me in the garage.

It didn’t turn out that way.

From the living room there was a short, staccato scream — and it didn’t come from the TV.

“Shut up, kid.”

“Who are you?”

The voices were only a few feet from the open bedroom door, and I could hear them clearly. One was Kenny’s, the other a man’s.

“Just shut up and I won’t hurt you.”

“What do you want? What do you want?”

“Show me where your parents keep their jewelry and money, and I won’t hurt you.”

It was as if my flesh, muscles, and blood had frozen into a block of sculptured ice. Some guy was in there robbing the Beals. It was not the television, it was really happening.

“Hurry it,” the man’s voice said.

“I don’t know where it is,” said Kenny.

There was a click as the television was turned off. I wanted to go home and call the police, but I was afraid the floor would creak, afraid I couldn’t get out the window fast enough.

Then I heard an awful sound as if Kenny’s breath had been knocked out of him, a kind of “uhff.”

“Don’t yell or I’ll kill you,” said the man. “Find it.”

Terrible brutality was unfolding, and I seemed to be floundering on the moon.

“Sure,” said Kenny, “sure, my dad’s got money. I’ve... got a key.”

“Then get it.”

It was Kenny’s “I’ve got a key” that brought me down to earth, that resonated, returned, and finally anchored me in reality. I’d heard that phrase before, that very same phrase. Kenny had said the same thing just before he’d shown me his father’s German revolver in the desk drawer.

The confluence of personalities at that point was far more volatile than the amount of gasoline in the Beal garage. Harrison was about to get a gun pulled on him by a half-clever, pathetically sly, overconfident ten-year-old.

A noise, as if Kenny were now fumbling with the drawer to his father’s desk, came from the living room. I couldn’t run, and I couldn’t stand still for what I imagined would be a suicide play. I knew Kenny’s track record at sleight-of-hand only too well, and he just couldn’t get away with this. A quick calculation registered in my brain, and I realized (was it something I’d read or been told?) that if I interfered with what was happening there was a good chance the robber would panic.

My own panic overcame my paralysis, and I let out a yell in the dark that might have shattered glass.

“DON’T DO IT, KENNY! DON’T DO IT! DON’T DO IT!”

Terrified at the volume of my own voice, I rushed to the open window, jumped out, and hit the ground painfully. Would the burglar emerge from the window behind me?

Looking up, I heard an aftermath of noises. One was Kenny, yelling for help. The other was a crash of furniture. I heard a lamp break. In another moment the sound of the very thing I’d tried to prevent cracked and echoed through the air. A gunshot!

I lay still on the ground, scared to death.

Then the strangest thing.

As if in a dream, a cascade of bright flashing red light coincided with a sound of squealing tires. Light beamed up the narrow passage between houses and reflected off the siding. The night was suffused with amazing phenomena. Apocalyptic visions of Mr. Beal seared through my mind. I didn’t know what was happening, and I could only think of exploding nuclear missiles. In my confusion it seemed that the confrontations in the Beal house just now had turned, into the world’s own. I looked up again. As if in a horror movie, a woman’s silhouette appeared in a darkened, backlit window. She was staring down at me from what I’d thought was an empty house next door.

Wrenched back to reality, I knew what it meant. The woman next door had called the police. She’d seen the burglar enter the house.

I ran to the back yard, hurried to the gate, and hurled it open.

Running along the grassy parking strip was a man caught in the glare of the flashing lights. He was holding his side. Between his fingers was a bloody mass of red-soaked shirt. He turned. His half-lit face seemed to shrink in fear. Then he slowed, stumbled into the street, knelt on the pavement and remained still for several seconds until finally he fell over, sprawled on the concrete.

Two uniformed officers hurried toward him. People were emerging from the houses all along the block. Even my grandparents came out on our front porch across the street. In ten minutes the whole neighborhood was active with police cars, a white ambulance, barricades, and roving investigators in search of evidence and witnesses. I stood like an animal caught in a beam of light, watching all the kids talking and jumping around. It was like a carnival. Then I hid in the shadow of the alley.

Soon, the Beals’ big Dodge rolled down the street, stopping at the far curb behind the barricades. The ambulance roared off. Whispers from a group of people nearby broadcast the news. The man was shot. The man was dead.

Until the next day only the police and I knew who had killed the Dragnet Burglar. Then everyone knew.

Two detectives came to interview me, and I told them what had happened. Kenny, of course, was questioned, yet nothing more of the actual shooting was ever told us. In the coming months two of Harrison’s poker buddies were arrested for receiving stolen goods, and the details of Harrison’s life and career were printed. The Dragnet Burglar was history.

Soon we started to play kickball in the street every afternoon until school started. Kenny didn’t come outside much, though he’d always liked neighborhood sports. When he did come out, the kids kept asking him exactly what had happened, but Kenny wasn’t talking. How a ten-year-old handles killing someone I don’t know and can’t imagine. But a permanent change seemed to befall him. He lost his cocky nature and stopped cheating at Monopoly, and it soon became clear that the neighborhood would never be the same.

Because of Kenny, the Dragnet Burglar’s remarkable career had begun and ended within the span of a single spring and summer. For the most part Frank Harrison had played it safe. Too bad he had to die.

Anyone might have told him that you had to watch Kenny Beal like a hawk.