The Price of Murder

Chapter Two Johnny Keefler

When Keefler looked back the second time, Bronson was no longer standing behind the screen door. There were four blocks to walk, and even though it was five o’clock, it was still a thick hot day. He felt satisfaction when he thought of Lee Bronson.

A punk like his brother. Hide behind that big education, but still a punk. Two kinds of people. The ones with a record and the ones without. Traffic arrests were the only kind you couldn’t count. The rest of them all had larceny in their hearts. Give Lee Bronson the right chance and he’d make a grab, same as the rest of them.

There was an alley in the back of Keefler’s mind. It had been there the day it happened, and it would be there all the days of his life. A squalid alley in the Sink, a narrow path between the knee-deep litter that lay against the walls of the buildings on either side. No window looked down into that alley.

After his father had died, he and the two younger ones had been in the Home for over three years. Then his uncle took him out. His uncle, Mose Keefler, had run a small grocery store in the Sink and lived over it with his wife and his two daughters and the monster son they kept in the room in the back. Johnny Keefler had been nine when Mose got him out of the Home. Mose was a burly, somber, hardworking man and Johnny had adored him. The store was open from seven in the morning until eleven at night six days a week, noon to nine on Sundays. Mose drove himself, his wife, his daughters and Johnny hard. He scouted the farmers’ market for half-spoiled merchandise that could be salvaged. Johnny could still remember the slime and the stink of rotten potatoes, remember squatting in the shed behind the store, sorting good from bad. The store made just enough to support the six of them. For Johnny it was school and work and exhausted sleep on the army cot in the shed. He was a small spindly boy, subject to head colds, and with the tight, pinched, gray face of a slum diet.

Mose Keefler tried to maintain a fruit rack outside the store during the daylight hours. There was a bus stop at the corner and he picked up additional business that way. But he was in constant warfare with the roving band of tough kids who considered it their neighborhood. They would post a lookout across the street to signal when nobody was near the front of the store. Then the others would come on the run, snatching the pears, peaches, melons, apples, oranges. Johnny knew who they were. They went to the same school, the John X. Moran School on Hoffer Street. Red Annlie was the chieftain. And there was Gil Kowalsik, Hank Rillyer, Stubs Rollins, Tooey Gennetti, Pete Casey. They were all in the seventh and eighth grades at the school, even though Red was seventeen and big as a man. They made the lives of smaller kids a misery. They had casually tormented Johnny Keefler, but he was too small and cowed to provide much sport.

The police told Mose Keefler that if he could catch one of the kids, then maybe they could do something. Mose thought about it a long time and finally piled cartons just inside the door, made himself a peep-hole and hid behind it. On a Saturday afternoon there was a raid on the fruit. Mose came roaring out and, in two bounds, caught Hank Rillyer by the arm and started beating him around the head with his other hand. Johnny had run out, too. It was a day of misty rain. Hank was a wiry kid. Johnny saw the sleek gleam of the broad blade of the knife, gray as the sky, and yelled as he saw it sweep and cut. The knife had a razor edge. It cut across and through the stained apron, through the threadbare gray pants, through paunchy skin and the deep fat layers. It cut from side to side, an inch below the belt, a cut over a foot long. And Hank Rillyer ran, head down, thin legs pumping. Mose caught at himself with both hands, but he felt through his hands and looked down with wet ashen face at the gray and white and red, at the coils and clumps of his own substance. He went to his knees, still staring, and fell forward screaming in a voice that sounded far, far away. And died of shock on the operating table while they were rinsing the sidewalk filth from his organs.

Johnny Keefler, dry-eyed, feeling as far away as Mose’s screams, told the police who did it, how it was done, and who was with the boy who did it. He had seen Rollins and Gennetti. They were picked up. They were sixteen and over. Rillyer got life for felony murder. Rollins and Gennetti were also tried. Gennetti got ten years. Rollins, whose father had good connections, got a suspended sentence. But long before they were sentenced, Johnny Keefler had been taken into the alley that had become so much a part of him. Annlie, Kowalsik and Casey took him into the alley, around the corner where no window could see. They did not kill him. Had they known it, their lives would have been easier to bear had they done so. They tied him to the iron stanchion of a fire-escape, gagged him and stripped him and worked on him for over three hours. After he was found hanging there unconscious, the interns who worked on him were sickened by what had been done to him, and marveled that he had been tough enough to survive it. They unwound the wires, and probed for the fragments of glass and the small rusty nails, and sewed ripped tissues and soothed the carefully burned initials and extracted the stumps of the broken teeth.

When he was able to answer questions, he said that he did not know who had worked him over. He had not recognized them. He could not identify them. He was ten years old, but there was nothing left of the child in his eyes. And never after that was there anything left of childhood. He was released from the Home when he was sixteen. He passed the examinations on the third try and got on the police list when he was twenty. He got his appointment when he was twenty-one, served his year of probation and acquired patrolman status.

After two years of traffic, he obtained a transfer to the Robbery Detail, and a promotion to patrolman first class, the highest rating he achieved in his police career. He was not the kind of cop who achieves promotion. He did not take orders well. He was frequently censured for excessive brutality when making arrests. But he did not take a dime of grift. In the view of his co-workers, he was embarrassingly, excessively honest. He lived in a cheap room in the Sink. He never married, never had time for the casual formalities of friendship. During off-duty hours he prowled the Sink, the implacable hunter, armed and alert. He was a superb marksman. During the times when he was in disfavor he would be given a walking beat in the farthest residential areas of Hancock. But when he was off duty, he was back in the Sink.

A very special transformation took place in that alley on that dreary day thirty-two years before. It was not iron that entered his soul. It was a corrosive acid, and the walls of the soul were impervious to it. In the beginning there were six names on the list. Annlie, Rollins, Rillyer, Gennetti, Kowalsik, Casey. Rillyer was knifed to death in a prison riot. While he was still in the Home, Rollins put a stolen car into a bridge abutment at ninety miles an hour.

His first killing was Red Annlie. According to the official report, Annlie was creating a disturbance in a bar where off-duty Patrolman Keefler had stopped in. Keefler had identified himself and arrested Annlie. As he was taking Annlie to the nearest precinct house, Annlie broke away and attempted to flee. Patrolman Keefler called on him to stop, fired one warning shot in the air and then fired at Annlie’s legs. The shot carried too high and hit Annlie at the base of the spine. Annlie, a door-to-door salesman with a record of three arrests for minor offenses, died thirty-six hours later in Lakeview Charity Hospital.

There were three left.

Pete Casey, wanted for auto theft and extortion, was located by Patrolman Keefler in a third-floor apartment in a relatively good section of Hancock. He was armed. He inflicted a flesh wound on Patrolman Keefler, the bullet nicking the inside of Keefler’s left thigh. Casey died on the way to the hospital with three slugs in his lower abdomen.

Theodore Gennetti, on his way home from work, walking home after a late shift at the Hancock Wire and Brad Company, was arrested by Patrolman Keefler. Keefler reported that Gennetti was “acting suspiciously” and he decided to bring him in for questioning. Gennetti had served six years in State Prison at Alton. When Gennetti pulled a knife, Patrolman Keefler beat him into submission. Gennetti was operated on for a depressed fracture of the occipital bone, and died the following day of a massive cerebral hemorrhage. Patrolman Keefler was reprimanded and given a sixty-day suspension.

Only Gilbert Kowalsik left, and Keefler had learned he had gone to the West Coast. Kowalsik returned after Keefler had been a cop for fourteen years. He came back on vacation. He was a union official on the Los Angeles docks. Four days after his return his body was found in the lake and identified. The autopsy indicated Kowalsik had been tortured to death.

They were all gone, but the memory of the alley was vivid in Keefler’s mind. It had not changed. The six were gone, but it seemed there were always others to take their places.

Keefler, healthy, and with no dependents and with no friends in the department, was picked up by one of the World War II drafts that took men in their thirties. Because of his police background he was made an M.P. As a sergeant in London in 1944 he was broken for a brutal beating administered to three enlisted men of the Eighth Air Force on leave, and was reassigned to a stockade where men convicted of minor offenses were held for punishment and retraining. Keefler and three other members of the station complement were implicated in the death of two enlisted men serving time for theft, and all four of them were cleared.

In 1947 Patrolman John Keefler was given an indefinite suspension for the beating of a man apprehended in a car reported stolen. Keefler and his partner, Corporal Richard Benedict, had spotted the license and forced the car to the curb. Through an error on the part of the dispatcher, the car had not been taken off the hot list when it had been recovered and returned to the rightful owner. The rightful owner, a Mr. Paul Keller, an engineer at a local radio station, had attempted to explain to Keefler when he was pulled out of his car. Keefler misinterpreted Keller’s agitation as resistance and, while subduing him, had broken three ribs and his jaw.

Keefler was reinstated after a five-month suspension.

Nine years later the amputation of his left hand as the result of a gunshot wound rendered him unfit for further duty. He was retired from the Hancock Police Force on a pension and appointed a parole officer.

He stood on the corner four blocks from the Bronson house and waited for a city bus. The stump ached where it fitted into the socket of the artificial hand, and the skin under the strap itched. He saw the white-faced kid standing, trembling, eyes wide, hands raised, the big .45 on the floor at his feet. Again he felt the numbness in his left arm, from fingertips to elbow, and again he brought the sight pattern into slow clear focus, felt the jump of the .38 in his right hand, saw the perfect blackness of the round hole in the kid’s white forehead in the same instant the impact knocked the kid back against the wall to rebound and fall boneless across the big automatic.

He could feel the weight of the Detective Special in the side pocket of his jacket. He thought of Lee Bronson and wanted to see him on his knees with his face split and the big words forgotten, begging in the remembered language of the Sink. Begging like they all begged. Like Kowalsik had begged.

He saw the bus in the distance, coming through the heat-waver over the asphalt of Sherman Boulevard. He could feel the city around him, sweating and sighing and settling toward the dusk and the night. This was better than being a cop. This could be much better. They let them out too fast, too soon. But they would come out and they would find that it was just a slightly larger cage. They would meet Johnny Keefler and then they would know about the bars around the bigger cage.

The bus, on its way downtown, was nearly empty. He stepped up, showed his pass, and went back to one of the red plastic seats. Danny Bronson would find out just how strong were the bars of his new cage. Until he showed up it would be nice to call on the kid brother once in a while. Keep him in line. It was a little disappointing the way Bronson had knuckled under so easily. Scared of his job. A big bastard, but soft all the way through. Even after Danny was picked up and sent back to Alton, it might be okay to stop around. Do a little checking. If the professor wanted to get his back up and knew how to go about it, he might make trouble. But it was a reasonable chance to take. It would be nice to stop around and talk to that Lucille, too.

He half shut his eyes and remembered just how her legs had looked. They were very vivid in his memory, the rounded tender way her tanned thighs had been pressed together, the cherub face on her knee, the little bones of the slender ankles.

He wondered how bad the professor wanted to keep his job. And how bad she wanted him to keep his job. No Bronson should have exclusive rights to a piece like Lucille. The way she looked, maybe he thought he had, but the odds said he didn’t. He was too solemn and dignified for a Lucille. Big sad-faced bastard. Full of the long words. Just another punk from the Sink who ought to get a good shove right back into the Sink. Apparently that Brookton Junior College wasn’t too careful about who they hired.

At least the vividness of the image of the lovely legs solved one problem of scheduling. He decided that after he checked in the office he would go drop in on Talliaferro at the hotel where he worked and lean on him a little and watch him sweat. Sooner or later Talliaferro would slip. Maybe the way Judson had slipped. God, how Rich had stood up for Judson! You would have thought Judson was his son or something. He remembered the scene in Rich’s office, with Rich wringing his narrow hands and steaming his own glasses.

“But, Keefler! You must use discretion! You have to exercise judgment. Terry Judson has stayed out of trouble for over eighteen months. He’ll be off parole in another four months. He’s got a wife.”

And Keefler had stared at him, registering shock. “Rich, you asking me to goof off on my new job? I can show it to you right in the book. It says if a guy goes into a public place and drinks in public, it’s a violation of parole. I saw him myself. I got here a statement from the bartender that served him and a statement from one of the guys on the team.”

“But Terry is on that bowling team. So he had a beer.”

“It’s a public place with a liquor license and he could have had a coke, couldn’t he?”

“I’m going to have to ask you to drop it, Keefler. Your job isn’t to hound these men.”

And then it had been time for him to show his hand. “Richardson, I didn’t come here for you to try to tell me how I should do or what I should do. I come here to tell you I turned Judson in. I got him picked up. I appear against him in the morning. I’m covering my list. You cover yours.”

“I’ll appear, too.”

“Suit yourself,” he said and walked out. The law was the law. He had the proof. He presented it. Terry Judson went back to finish out his term. Richardson nearly found himself in contempt of court.

So tonight, after squeezing some sweat out of Talliaferro, he decided he would drop in on Connie Judson again. She was a hefty healthy redhead, and the rearrest of Judson had taken all the steam out of her. It wasn’t his fault she got the idea he could get Terry sprung again. She was willing to put out. There wasn’t much life in her, but how much choice did a one-handed guy have? Her heavy freckled legs didn’t compare with the professor’s piece, but it was a very nice thing to lie there and have a cigarette and think about Terry Judson back in the box, and think how you put him there. When she cried she didn’t make much noise.

How much choice would you have if you didn’t lean on them a little? And Judson was just another punk. He had a habit of writing worthless checks when he got tight. And after he got out he’d get the habit again.

His hand ached — the hand that was gone. Sometimes he felt like they’d buried it under a heavy stone, a cold stone. He often wondered what they’d done with it.

God damn that kid!

All the bad ones deserved was a sudden death and a dirty one. As dirty as Kowalsik’s.

He bit the inside of his cheek. “I’ll get them all, Mose,” he said to himself. “I’ll get them all for you.”

He could still feel the rough affection of the hand that had rumpled his no-color hair, had patted the shy head of a scared kid in the waiting room of the Home.

And he felt something weep inside when he saw again Mose’s ashy face and helpless clutching hands.

“Every one of them, Mose.”

Mose wore the face of Christ.

And they had done that thing to him.

They had all done it. The Bronsons and Judson and Talliaferro. The G.I.s in that stockade had done it too, and answered for it in yelps of anguish as the billy stick splintered shin bone.

Keefler warred against all the foulness in the world, against everyone who had helped hold the knife that had spilled Mose onto the dirty sidewalk of the Sink. In his mind, even Lee Bronson had helped hold that knife.

When he got off the bus his lips were moving and there was a quiet madness in his eyes. And he hit the artificial hand against his thigh so as to feel more clearly the aching and the pain.