Many, many times. Then we got a little further afield. Like they say, eliminate everything you can, and what you have left is likely to be what happened. Right.
The rumors, both within the law enforcement community and in the community in general, began to fly. One of the best was that Howie, a.k.a. Turd, had been hunting for mushrooms, and accidentally got shot by an officer. Howie’s estranged mother heard that one, and promptly took it to an attorney. He, just as promptly, began a wrongful-death suit against the county. Normally, since he wouldn’t have access to any investigatory information at that stage, we would have simply picked up the phone and, as a courtesy, let him know what had happened. At which point, he would probably not have filed the suit. Unfortunately for him, he went public instantly, called a press conference, and generally became a pain in the ass. We didn’t call. We felt it would be better if he found out later that he didn’t have a case. Especially since Howie’s estranged mother didn’t have a dime, and he had to be doing the work on speculation, as it were. Also called a contingency fee. It did tell me a bit about Howie, though. How many people have ‘‘estranged’’ mothers?
With rumor and speculation floating about all over the place, nobody was immune.
Hester and I even began to wonder whether or not there had been a DEA surveillance going, and there had been a horrible mistake and people got shot and they were covering it up. That sort of thing happened years ago, and there was no reason to think it couldn’t happen again. Then again, there was no evidence to indicate they’d ever try to cover something like that up. We checked everything, and talked to everybody who might have known. No evidence to support it. No evidence to deny it either. That’s the problem with conspiracy theories. Can’t prove, can’t disprove. But it shows you how far we were reaching.
Theories were great. What we needed were facts, and we didn’t have any. In a case like this one, when you run up against a wall, you drop back and start all over from the beginning. If you’ve done it correctly in the first place, you should be able to retrace your steps, see where you went wrong, and move on in the right direction. Sure. Both Hester and I spent long hours going over the physical evidence, the scene diagrams, the interviews. There were a lot of people I wish we’d been able to pin it on, but none of the evidence put them in the right place at the right time. Actually, it never put them anywhere near the right place at even close to the right time.
I hate excuses as much as the next cop, but we did have a problem we weren’t able to do anything about, and it didn’t originate with us.
Ever since the narcotics people had started in on the case big time, we hadn’t known exactly what to do, or where to do it. Let me explain. Hester and I and the General Criminal investigation didn’t know who the undercover cops were who were working the case for DEA and DNE. Johnny Marks, for all we knew, could be an undercover Fed. That was the first narcotics-related problem.
The second was who they were looking at. We didn’t know that either. The ‘‘connections’’ they were saying existed in Nation County were, in my opinion, tenuous at best. But the last thing Hester and I wanted was to stick our noses in and maybe screw up the DEA’s case.
George of the Bureau wasn’t any help either. There was a lot he hadn’t been told. Well, at least he assumed there was a lot. As he told me during a telephone conversation: ‘‘There’d better be a lot they’re not telling me. If there isn’t, they don’t have shit.’’
So who was to know?
We talked with both Lamar and Al about it. Both said to do what the federal narcs had requested. That wasn’t much of a help, as they had pretty much said to go on about our business. We’d tried that, but were getting spooked by lack of information. They knew full well they were hindering us, of course. But telling us to go ahead and do our thing was just the conventional thing to do.
Anyway, what it did was pretty well shut Hester and me down for a good week. We had to restrict ourselves to reexamination of the physical evidence and rereading initial interviews. I don’t know if it cost us much or not. But it sure as hell frustrated both of us.
Then, on Thursday, I got assigned a child-neglect case from one of the smaller towns in our county. Fewer than a hundred people, in fact. With three of them involved; one a victim, one sort of a victim, and one a perpetrator, I was dealing with a crime that involved a little over 3 percent of the population. It gives you an interesting perspective when you look at it that way. It helps rationalize the prying attitude of the rest of the community as well. I mean, in Los Angeles, if you had a crime that involved 3 percent of the population at the same time, the uproar would be incredible. Just a matter of scale.
In this case, a man who earned minimum wage, Hank Boedeker, insisted that his wife, Kerri, work as well. She’d hired out to clean chickens for a farm woman who sold them two days a week in Maitland. She worked four to five hours a day. Her husband, with considerable mathematical precision, told her that because of the payments on their satellite receiver they couldn’t afford a babysitter for their eight-month-old daughter. Consequently, she would leave the kid in the trailer when she and her husband were both gone. After about two weeks of that, we got a call.
When I got there, Kerri was just home. She looked to be about twenty or so, very thin, with long, straggly brown hair. It was about a hundred degrees in the trailer, but it would have been whether or not she was there. No air conditioning. The kid had a hell of a heat rash, the place smelled like a combination gym/nursery, and the kid was totally quiet. That bothered me. I called for Human Services, opened what windows I could, rearranged the two fans to get real ventilation, and waited with the mom. She was terrified, afraid for her daughter and afraid her husband would beat her when he came home and found that the cops had been there. It seemed he’d been in an especially bad mood lately, since his friend had been killed, and his dope source had dried up. No shit?
Was Turd his friend? Sure was. Who was his local dealer? She didn’t want to say. Wasn’t sure. Didn’t really remember. Between the heat, the guilt, and me, she was just about a goner. I didn’t press too hard. The kid came first.
I found out where Hank worked: Russell amp; Company, a small-time pork processor, family-owned. His job was cleaning up the floors after they were done eviscerating the pigs. After Human Services arrived at the mobile home, I went to Russell amp; Co. to talk with Dad.
If the trailer had smelled bad, this place was olfactory hell. Just as hot, much more humid, as he cleaned the floors with high-pressure water, and the smell of guts was so thick you almost had to use a swimming motion to breathe. I asked him to come outside. I explained to him that the money he spent on the satellite dish would likely have been better put toward a window air conditioner; that he could not have his child unattended; and that if I heard he’d ever struck his wife, I’d be on him like stink on his job. His only real question was regarding who had ratted him off. I left him with the thought that whoever it was would probably be able to tell me if he ever hit his wife.
I got back to the office, and before I could call Hester and discuss an approach, I had a request from Human Services for a complete report on the incident. Great. It would take them three weeks to do theirs, and it likely wouldn’t be any more thorough than mine. But they wanted mine now. Probably to copy.
I went up to Maitland General Hospital, where the baby was being examined by my good friend Dr. Henry Zimmer.
Doc Z was his usual self, hearty and cheerful. The kid turned out to be in fairly good shape, a little dehydrated, hell of a diaper rash, but nothing that was life-threatening.
‘‘We’ll keep her for observation for a day or two,’’ said Henry. ‘‘I’d like to keep her longer, but the insurance people won’t let us.’’
‘‘Yep.’’
‘‘You want my report to copy, don’t you?’’
I grinned. ‘‘Well, to include, more like.’’
‘‘Anybody getting charged with this?’’
‘‘Have to be both Mom and Dad, but, yeah, they are.’’
‘‘Can I look forward to court again?’’ he asked.
‘‘No. They’ll plead to a serious misdemeanor. No problem.’’
‘‘Good,’’ said Henry. ‘‘I hate court.’’ He paused. ‘‘You might want the baby’s hair tested for marijuana residue.’’
Grounds for child abuse, if they found it. Smoking dope in the kid’s presence was a hazard. The problem was, it had been declared obligatory to remove the child. No room to negotiate. I hated that. Plus, Human Services would now know that the couple used dope, and the couple’s usefulness as informants or as buyers would be compromised.
