Manhunt. Volume 14, Number 2, April/May 1966

City Cop by Jack Belck

“A girl named Tillie Miles was found beaten to death and criminally... hell, raped... in her father’s barn.”

He checked his watch. Ten a.m. It would be after noon before he arrived, got out of his suit, and started to breath fresh air again. Half the weekend shot already. Damn.

Damn them anyhow, complaining about the way he did his work. Always complaining, but that didn’t stop them from shoving a sixty or seventy hour week down his throat. Pushed for an excuse, they probably would have mumbled something about a critical shortage of manpower in the department and needing every man they could get, even a detective sergeant who was too quick to shoot, too quick to use his fists, too quick to bully witnesses and threaten suspects.

He slowed for one of many sharp corners on the back road, driving from habit while he thought. The cabin was his one escape from people. The precinct captain had said he needed rest, but he didn’t understand that Martin’s homemade shack in the woods supplied him with all the rest he needed. Each month for two days, or one and a half if he was unlucky like this time, he could get away and let off steam by just cooping himself on his two acres with only a bag of groceries, a portable phonograph, and a bottle for company.

He knew that he could get to the cabin faster by going through town, but the second grade, tarred road he was on served as a silent insult to the townsfolk. He was bypassing them, detouring around them, so the nosey ones wouldn’t see his five-year-old car every time he came up for a weekend and say, “Just seen Martin, the city cop, go by.”

The road was bordered by brushy fields and an occasional rundown house that still managed to stand erect long after farming had ceased to be profitable, if it ever was, in this neck of the woods.

He lit another cigarette and slowed the car as it approached a low-lying white house on the left, its front yard littered with rusting derelict machinery and scavenged cars. Across from the house was an odd-angled, leaning and weatherbeaten barn to which was fastened a lazy fenced corral.

The horses were there as usual, and so was the girl. He could see her sitting on the fence when he was still a hundred yards off. His practised eye told him she wasn’t wearing a bra under her faded man’s shirt, and there wasn’t room for anything more inside her blue denims either.

She didn’t turn as he drove past, showing the back of her head with its long black hair.

Horses, Martin mused to himself. Horses! She was about the closest thing to a real, live human being he had seen around these parts, and all she cared about was horses.

Some day the right kind of man would come along, and the horses would go and starve.

He picked up speed again, then braked as he saw a small cluster of whitehelmeted men leaning against a pickup parked on the gravel shoulder just ahead. They wore ordinary work clothes and seemed to be looking at a map. One of them, a pot-bellied, red-faced hick if he ever saw one, had his big ear glued to a walkie talkie. He wondered about it for a moment, then realized they were playing Civil Defense games. He laughed aloud. In the cities, the big ones, no one gave a damn about Civil Defense, and they were the ones who would get the big fat bombs if a war started. But the hicks, the yokels in the one horse towns you couldn’t hit with a bomb even by accident, they were ape on CD.

He grew suddenly irritated by his own thoughts on the stupidity of mankind and flicked on the radio.

Detective sergeant Martin was fast asleep when the pounding started on his rough boarded door. He grunted and forced an eye open. Nobody ever came to his cabin unannounced, nobody, especially at this time of night. He peered at his watch. Christ! Three in the a.m. “Who is it?” he yelled without making any effort to go to the door.

“Tom Barkus, Head Selectman. Can we see you, Mr. Martin?” The voice was deep and carried authority in its rural tones.

Martin slipped into his shirt and pants and shoved his revolver into its holster. He’d been a cop too long to take opening doors to strangers at three in the morning lightly.

Wordlessly, he stood in the open doorway for a moment, looking first at the beefy, sparse-haired man, the selectman, and then at the tired-looking thin man with him wearing a gaudy police badge on his greasy sweater. “Come in.”

Martin dropped into a wicker chair and waited for someone to talk.

Barkus looked ill at ease. “Sorry to bother you this late, Mr. Martin, but we had to see you.”

“What about? I’m on vacation, and it’s pretty damn late.”

Neither of the two men sat down, even when Martin gestured to his other empty chairs.

The selectman slipped his hands into his back pockets and rocked slowly on his heels. “There’s been a murder and we thought you could help.”

Martin frowned. “This town isn’t in my jurisdiction, you know that. I got no authority around here.” He pointed at the elderly man with the badge. “Why doesn’t he take care of it?”

“I’m only the constable,” the man replied apologetically. “I don’t know nothing about this sort of thing.”

The selectman looked sympathetically at his companion before addressing Martin. “You know how it is with us in the country, Mr. Martin. Charlie here has been reelected as constable for close on twenty years. All he ever got to do is post town meeting warrants, draw jurors, round up stray dogs, and do traffic duty in front of the church Sunday mornings. He’s not expected...”

Martin cut in. “So? Call in the state police. They love to get away from washing cruisers and nailing speeders. Let them handle it.”

The selectman spun a chair around and sat down on it, resting his large hands on its back. “We’d kind of like to keep them out of it for awhile, if we can.”

“Oh?”

“Tell him who got murdered, Tom,” the constable suggested.

“Yeah, I guess we better start with that. A girl named Tillie Miles was found beaten to death and criminally — hell, raped — in her father’s barn.”

Martin said nothing.

“Her old man works the eleven to seven shift down at the plastics plant in the city, so he doesn’t know anything yet. We got about four hours before he finds out for himself.”

“Who found her?” the city cop asked finally.

Tom Barkus wiped his brow with his sleeve. “That’s why we came here instead of calling the state cops in. You see, my son was the last one to see her alive and the first one to see her dead.”

While he dressed and stuffed a few stale cookies into his mouth, detective sergeant Martin laughed to himself, thinking about the two men waiting for him out in the constable’s battered old car.

What a hell of a lousy alibi! The son had been courting Tillie, he said. Then he said goodnight and went home, he said. Then, just before he went to bed after the late movie, he found his wallet was missing and went back to the father’s barn to find it. And there she was, dead. Or so he said.

No wonder the selectman was having a fit. Well, he’d go through the motions of being a dedicated cop, he decided, but come seven in the morning one selectman’s son was going to find himself in the county jail for murder. The selectman wouldn’t like it, and the son’s wife wouldn’t either, but that was tough.

He played the beam from his flashlight on the ground in front of the barn.

“See!” the selectman said. “The boy’s tire marks are right here in the mud, clear as can be. And there’s his foot prints, I guess.”

How dumb can anybody be? Martin wondered to himself. “It’s bad. Let’s look inside.”

The girl lay in a skimpy pile of dusty brown hay, her arms and legs at odd angles, their whiteness marred by ugly gashes and welts. The blood looked black in the probing light. “Really gave it to her, didn’t he?” Martin said to no one in particular. He bent over to study the broken pick axe handle lying next to the body. “This is it, all right.” He stood up again. “You didn’t touch anything I suppose?”

“No sir,” the constable said.

“Good. OK, let’s go talk to the boy.”

A typical two-bit punk, Martin decided, watching and listening to the boy tell and retell his story. A big, gangling, slow-witted nitwit who got caught with his hand in the cookie jar and was about to cry.

His story wouldn’t hold up for a minute, even if he stuck with it. With a sharp lawyer, it would probably go second degree murder. With a sharp psychiatrist, he might end up with only a few years in the nut house.

He was getting tired of asking the same questions over and over again. “But you haven’t got one single idea who might have done it, not one?”

The boy shook his head slowly. “No, I told you.”

“All right, you wait here.” He stood up, noted that there were no windows or other doors in the room, and slipped out into the stuffy living room where the constable waited with Jim Barkus and his wife.

The foursome sat silently, drinking coffee as the sun came up and brightened the cluttered room. The selectman stared into his coffee mug and said for the hundredth time, “I guess there’s nothing else we can do, is there?” Martin shook his head tiredly. “Guess not.” He looked at his watch. “And I suggest you get ready for the state police. Her father’s due home any minute.”

“I’ll walk you to the car,” Barkus said finally and rose to his feet.

As the selectman’s wife reached from behind to pour him another cup of coffee, Martin stood up. His arm slammed into the enamel pot, sending it clattering across the room.

He yelled, more from surprise than pain as the overcooked brew soaked through the side of his shirt. A look of animal wrath disappeared as quickly as it came and he laughed. “Thanks, don’t mind if I do take some home with me.”

Mrs. Barkus began making fretting sounds, making futile efforts to wipe the browness off the big man’s shirt.

“Never mind, Sarah. I’ll give Mr. Martin one of my shirts to wear home. It’s the least we can do for him.”

The woman dropped her rag onto the table, a look of remembrance mingled with fear crossing her lined face. “Oh! My boy!” She turned and fled from the room.

The constable watched silently as Martin slipped out of his dripping shirt. The room was strangely quiet. The detective turned to look at the selectman, who stood in the doorway holding a fresh shirt over one arm. The old man said nothing. Puzzled, he looked at the skinny constable behind him. The long time elected keeper of the peace held an elderly revolver in a knotty fist, its muzzle aimed at Martin’s middle.

“What the hell is this?” the city cop demanded.

The selectman pointed at him. “You’ve got scratches on your back.” He lay the shirt carefully on the table and lifted the telephone from its hook.

Martin started forward, then thought better of it as the constable backed cautiously away and cocked the gun. “What the hell have my scratches got to do with anything?”

He sat down again after the selectman had made his call to the barracks.

Barkus looked levelly at the city cop. “My boy didn’t do it. I knew it then and I know it now.”

“OK, so you’re kid didn’t do it. So what? Any one of a million creeps could have come into town, fixed the girl, then taken off! Why me?”

The constable allowed the trace of a smile to cross his face. “It’s a funny thing. Us small town lawmen may not be much on police work, but we got one big advantage over you city fellows. We know everybody in town, everybody. And that can come in mighty handy.”

Martin reached for a cigarette, then thought better of that too. He said nothing.

“You remember seeing some fellows out on your road wearing white helmets? They were on a civil defense exercise. It’s a big thing around here. And you know what they were doing?”

Martin didn’t reply, showing no sign of having heard. He hated his new role and loathed the little man who had taken on his.

The constable went on, ignoring the silence. “They were setting up check points on every road coming into town.”

“In other words,” Barkus added, “we know that no strangers stopped in town anytime around the hour the girl was murdered.”

Martin hunched his shoulders, drove them into the table and sent it flying while his right hand dove for his gun. It was gone.

Now another gun was pointed at the city cop; and this one was his, and it was in the hand of the town’s highest elected official. “Put the table back up, Martin, and sit down.”

This quick defeat forced him to think again, urging him on to some defense, some comeback that would get him out from under those guns. “But why me? Hell, there’s probably a dozen guys in this town alone who might do a thing like that!”

“Except for one thing, Mr. City Policeman.”

“What’s that?”

“Like you said out at the barn, somebody really gave it to her.”

“So?”

The constable almost smiled without losing a speck of his caution. “Nobody but you could have raped and beaten her.”

“Why the hell so? What do you think I am?”

Selectman Jim Barkus craned his neck at the sound of the siren in the distance. “You’re the only stranger in town. Any of the local men would just of asked for what they wanted. You see, city cop, Tillie Miles was the town whore.”