He was a hero. He was a—”
“Do he have a first name?”
“I don't know,” said Willard.
“Except that now that I think it over, I kind of think Mr. Bill Stepford is a Mr. Bill Stepford, Jr. You're not going to hurt that old man, are you?”
“Now, Willard,” said Lamar.
“I cut a square deal. You helped me, I didn't hurt you. Would I hurt that old man? Do I look like that sort? O’Dell, don't hurt him none. Makie still.”
“Yoppa-yoppa,” said O’Dell.
And O’Dell didn't hurt Willard. He strangled the young man to death as peacefully as he could, though the young man squirmed and bucked.
The van accelerated to close to ninety. Lamar turned and yelled, 'Goddammit, Richard, you slow this thing down, you stupid little cocksucker, you get us chased by the police and I will have your ass for breakfast.”
Richard tried to get control of himself. The boy's struggle had at last ceased. He checked the mirror as he dropped back down under sixty-five, and saw no red flashing light.
He was all right. He tried to breathe slowly.
“Dink-ie.” said O’Dell.
CHAPTER 4
The world had ceased to make sense back in the seventies, and it just got worse and worse and worse: crazed kids with automatic weapons, crimes against children and women, these nutcase white boys who thought they were God's chosen, niggers gone plumb screwball on delusions of victimization and fearfully nursed grudges. Sometimes he believed the communists or the trilateralists or somebody, some agency—the CIA, the FBI, the KKK—was behind it all. But still It. C. D. Henderson clung to certain convictions against the mounting chaos. Primarily, he believed in logic. He was a detective, that most specialized and refined and renowned type of lawman, the most famous detective in Oklahoma, a celebrity at police conventions, a consultant on cases far and wide. His core belief was that if enough data could be assembled, a clever fellow could find a pattern in it somehow and make sense of it, and bring it to its logical conclusion.
He was sixty-eight years old, and still a lieutenant. He'd always be a lieutenant, just as inevitably as when they needed someone to run an investigation, they'd always call him. Careers had been built on his intelligence and insight, and still he made less than forty thousand dollars a year.
The men he'd broken in with were mostly dead, the men he'd trained had retired or gone to other, better jobs, and he was now primarily working for rude young people. But he still had the gift: he saw the connections the others missed, he was willing to do the dreary work, the collating, the sifting, the endless examination of details.
“These kids,” he often lamented to the Missus, 'these damned kids, they just don't want to do the work. Get a wiretap, bust a raid, go to SWAT, sweat an interrogation, call forensics. They ain't got the patience to nurse the answer;?
out. They won't look at the stuff and just figure it out.”
“Carl,” she'd say, 'they ain't worth a glass of hot gravy in July.”
It was the bitterness, mainly, that drove him to the loving arms of I. W. Harper. With his daily pint of Harper's resting comfy and promising in a brown paper bag in his right inside pocket, he could get his mind loose and fluent and quell the seething anger that dogged him like a mean little dog. Maybe he made a few more mistakes, maybe he missed a trick or two, maybe the younger men could smell the whiskey on his breath and knew to leave him alone after four in the afternoon, it didn't matter. It was drink or eat the gun, he knew that.
Now acolytes and cynics had gathered around in a hanger like facility at the Oklahoma Turnpike Authority in Chickasha, as a whole flood of men in the second day of the Pye cousins manhunt came off duty and tried to grab some rest and perhaps seek advice. He'd run a manhunt or two in his time, it was said.
“So Lieutenant,” someone said, 'got me a gal I'd like to git back to. What do you think the chances are we gonna git off this detail soon?”
“Most of em just wander around with no damned idea of what to do,” he began, staring out at the young, unformed faces, 'and they run into a roadblock in the first few minutes or hours. They're easy, they're the ones the roadblock system is designed to catch. Then there's those who have some kind of organization sponsoring them, and can count on it for support—transportation, weapons, new IDs, that sort of thing. But sooner or later, somebody rats them out, when there's an advantage in doing so.
“But every now and then,” he continued, 'every now and then you get a smart one. One who’s full of natural cunning from the get-go, you know, has the gift for such a thing. Add to that, he's been calculating the angles for years, he's thought over all the mistakes he made, he's been smart enough to pick up tips from the older inmates. And let me tell you, he gives you a run. He gives you a goddamn run.”
“CD.” you think this Lamar is going to give us a run?”
“Well, now son, it's early yet. But he has been out forty-eight hours and he seems to have goddamn disappeared.
That's very impressive, I have to tell you. So maybe Lamar is your boy, your hardcore bad man on a hot streak, getting bolder and bolder. And I'll tell you this—if he is, he'll be hell to catch.”
“CD.” if the governor asks you for advice, what will you say?”
“I'd solve it like any crime. I'd say, 'Look for the third piece of evidence.” Sometimes you can do it on two. You can't do it on one, that I know from long and bitter years of trying. Sometimes, maybe, just maybe, two will set you on your way. I've seen it happen a time or so. But this here is just an investigation. Every damn case, whether it's some SWAT team hoedown in the city or a domestic dispute or a goddamn high-speed motorized chase along the turnpike, it's still fundamentally an investigation and the fundamental rules apply. And it's that third piece of evidence that takes you where you want to go every damn time. That's how I got Freddy the Dentist.”
It was CD's most famous case; it had even been written up in a magazine, and there'd been talk about making a movie, though nothing ever came of it.
But no one shouted: Tell us about Freddy the Dentist,
C.D.
At least not for a bit.
“Wasn't that—”
“That's the one,” said CD.” and he was off. The old glory unrolled before his eyes. Lord, how he wished for a drink to ease the telling, but tell it he would, to show these young men the way.
It was 1975, American Airlines Flight 354, Oklahoma City to Chicago, twenty minutes into its trip: Ka-boom!
One hundred twenty-one souls vanished in a thunderclap.
Body parts over four counties. The FBI high handing it. It didn't take them long to determine an explosive device, generic as all get-out—four sticks of dynamite wired to a drugstore clock—had blown the guts out of the plane before it even reached altitude. They figured whoever had done such a thing had done it strictly for the money. Thus they made a rapid assumption that it was a crime for profit, and quickly examined the data on newly acquired life insurance policies over $100,000 on the victims. That was their first piece of evidence. This yielded twenty-three suspects;
they then cross-referenced against engineering or demolitions experience on the theory that building such a device was a sophisticated enterprise, demanding expertise. This was the second piece of evidence, and damned if in a day they didn't arrest a forty-four-year-old petroleum executive who’d done fieldwork for Phillips in the Choctaw Fields, where dynamite was regularly employed for sonar testing.
But C.D. just didn't buy it. The man always took out a short-term insurance policy on his wife when she flew, as far back as 1958 when they were married. There were no accounts of marital difficulty, and the fellow was a deacon in his church. And he was screwing a secretary, probably his true crime, but one so easily uncovered it would have pointed the finger at him so quickly he could never have hoped to escape it. But the most important
