blazing, and kill a doctor or a judge or a politician. That'll do Becker no end of good.'
'listen here, Maddox,' said the old man. 'We come to talk straight out. You can't scare us, you can't bluff us, you can't stop us. We mean to keep coming at you. The more you squawk, the more killing there's going to be. Why don't you just cash in and get out now. You've got your millions. Move off to Mexico or Switzerland or out to Nevada or someplace.'
'Well spoken, old fellow. He's got a bit of the philosopher to him, doesn't he? But you see the analysis is faulty: this isn't about money. We all know that. It's about some other thing. It's about who's the boss.'
'We don't care much about that,' said the cowboy. 'We just mean to rim you out of town or bring you down. Them's the only two possibilities.'
'A third: you could die.'
'It ain't likely,' said Earl. ''Less you get some real bad boys.'
'A fourth,' said Owney. 'For the old fellow, a nice retirement contribution. A nice nest egg. Well invested, he could live grandly. As for the cowboy here, he comes to work for me. I've heard the reports. You're a good gunman. They say as good as Johnny Spanish, maybe better. You come work for me.'
'I bet you even think that's possible,' said the cowboy. 'See, here's the thing. You're a bully. You like to push people around. I don't like that, not even a little. In fact, it gets my blood all steamed.'
It was amazing, and truly rare. Here was a man who seemed literally fearless. His own death had no meaning to him. Owney could read his essential nihilism in the blackness radiating from his eyes. He had Vincent the Mad Dog's contempt for life and willingness to risk his own anytime for any stake in any fight in any street or alley. Memphis Dogood was right: he didn't fear death. And that made him very dangerous indeed.
'Do you really think you can scare me?' said Owney. 'I've fought on the street with guns and knives. I've shot it out with other gangs in the most brutal city on earth. When you've had a crazy black Irish boyo named Mad Dog out for your blood, and you're alive and he's dead, let me tell you, you've done something. And Mad Dog's only one.'
'Yakkity-yak's cheap. We talk lead.'
'You listen to me, cowboy. Oh, hello Judge LeGrand'?he waved his champagne glass in salute to the politician and issued a wondrous smile at the judge and Mayor O'Donovan, who accompanied him?'and you listen intently. The day after the next raid, a bomb will go off. In the Negro town. It'll kill twenty or thirty Negroes. Everybody will think some night riders did it, or some fellows in hoods. The investigation will be, I think one can safely predict, feckless. But you and I, friend, we'll know: you killed those Negroes. And you'll kill more and more. So I'm afraid you'll have to be the one who leaves town. Or turn the streets red with Negro blood and think about that for the rest of your life, old man. Enjoy your champagne. Cheers.'
He rose and walked away.
Chapter 32
'Why are you showing me these?' said the doctor, his face pained.
'Well, sir,' said Carlo, 'I went to the library and I looked up medical journals. I spent three days. Shoot, a lot of it I couldn't even understand. But you wrote a paper published in 1937 called 'Certain Patterns in Excessive Discipline in Situ Domestico.' I read it. You seemed to be talking about a similar thing.'
'It's the same/' said the doctor, who was head of the Department of Pediatrics at the University of Oklahoma, in Norman, in whose office Carlo now sat.
The doctor?his name was David Sanders and he was in his forties, balding, with wire-frame glasses?looked squarely at Carlo.
'That paper didn't do me a bit of good, except that it got me laughed at. A man has a right to beat his children, everybody says so. Spare the rod, spoil the child. To suggest that a child has a right not to be beaten, well, that's radical. I even got some letters accusing me of being a communist.'
'Sorry to hear that'
'So I gave it up. It was infinitely depressing and nobody wanted to hear about it. So I gave it up.'
Carlo said, 'I see you won a Silver Star. It's up there on your wall. So you can't be a coward.'
It was, next to degrees and other professional awards, books and photos of fat, smiley babies.
'That was a war. It was different.'
'Still, if anybody can help me, maybe you can.'
'You want a lot. Officer Henderson.' Sanders sighed and looked at the photographs.
There were eight of them. The boy, naked on a morgue slab, from various angles. The rope burn was livid, and his neck was elongated, strangely wrong, clear testament to asphyxiation by hanging. But that was only part of it.
'The welts,' said Carlo.
'Yes. This boy has been beaten, many times, with a heavy strap or belt. There's second-degree scar tissue all over his back, buttocks and upper thighs. He's been beaten beyond all sense or reason. Almost daily, certainly weekly, and nobody cared or intervened.'
'Was he tortured? Them spots on his chest. Look like cigarette bums to me.'
'Oh, I think to his oppressor, the beatings were satisfying enough. The cigarette burns were almost certainly self-inflicted. When I was looking into these matters, I saw a lot of it.'
'I don't get it. Why would he do that to himself? Why would he want more pain?'
'The victim comes to believe that somehow it's his fault. He's the problem. He's no good. He's too weak, stupid, pitiful. If only he were gone, it would be all right. So he finds himself guilty and sentences himself to more torture. He finds small, cruel, barely bearable rituals for inflicting the punishment upon himself. He is blaming himself for the crime, not the person who is beating him. It's a fairly predictable pathology. I gather from the elongation of the neck he finally ended it?'
'Yes sir,' said Carlo. 'This was all back in 1940.'
The doctor turned one of the photos over, where the date had been stamped: OCTOBER 4, 1940, POLK COUNTY
PROSECUTING ATTORNEY'S OFFICE.
'Well, at least the pain stopped.'
'Do most of them commit suicide?'
'It's not uncommon, from my preliminary survey. But the rest? Well, go to any prison and ask the right questions and you'll find out. You raise a child in great pain, he comes to believe pain is a normal condition of the universe. He feels it is his right to inflict it. From what little research I did, I saw what looked to be a frightening pattern: that our most violent criminals were beaten savagely as children. They simply were passing the lessons of their childhood on to the rest of the world.'
'Who would do that to a boy?'
'Oh, it's usually the father. I see a father who secredy hates himself, who almost certainly has a drinking problem, who quite possibly works in a violent world, who was almost certainly savagely beaten himself. He considers it his right to express his rage at the world for disappointing him in the flesh of his son. But he's really expressing his rage at himself for knowing that he's not the man the world thinks he is, and he's feeling the strain of maintaining the facade. I don't know. I only know he'd be pitiful if he weren't so dangerous.'
'Suppose he was a policeman?'
'Again, I'm just speculating. But he'd be a man used to force. He'd believe in force. His job was to use force.'
'This one used it a lot. Not just on his sons. The people in his town consider him a damned paragon, a hero.'
'Again, not surprising. Almost banal. Who knows why, really. That's the difference between public and private personalities. We consider that what goes on at home, in the privacy of that casde, to be nobody's business.'
'Suppose this boy had an older brother. Would he have been beaten too?'
'I don't know. But I don't think this kind of behavior pattern just starts up suddenly, out of nothing. It's
