Dirty White Boys Read online

  “C.D., 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 C.D.’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 C.D., 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 highhanding 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 thing: he wasn’t a handyman. C.D. visited the house after the arrest and didn’t see a single piece of home-built furniture, not even a bookshelf. In the basement there were no tools at all, just boxes. He knew there was a vast gulf between men who did things with their hands and men who didn’t: he didn’t believe a man who didn’t would actually take it upon himself to build a bomb.

  “The FBI was all over the newspapers with their big triumph,” C.D. said. “But to me, the thing smelled to high heaven. They couldn’t find no trace of explosive residue in the house or office. I don’t know much about bombs, but if they’re trying to tell me he built it, I got to satisfy myself that he’d have the confidence in his manual skills to do such a thing without leaving a crater over one half of Cleveland County.”

  So C.D. set to work: first piece of evidence—insurance policies over $35,00, not over $100,000.

  “To city boys like the FBI, used to working organized crime, white-collar crime, drugs, that sort of thing, nobody’d do nothing for less than a hundred grand. But to a country person or a small-time middle-class shopkeep or just-barely-making-it professional man who’s not got by on much his whole life and is way deep in debt, thirty-five thousand or so can sound pretty damned big.”

  This yielded him not twenty-three names but forty-seven.

  Now he cross-referenced for some kind of explosives experience or exposure and achieved … nothing. None of the new names had any identifiable explosives experience.

  So he figured the person must have gone to the library to learn. He called the Oklahoma City library and learned that of the forty-seven, thirty-one held cards in its system; computers were just coming in to use, and he was able to examine the records of the thirty-one cardholders. He discovered that one of them had checked out a book two months earlier called Principles of Explosive Exploration: a Guidebook for Petroleum Geologists.

  This happened to be one Freddy Dupont, thirty-eight years old, of Midwest City, Okalahoma … a dentist.

  “A dentist, I thought,” C.D. told his listeners. “Now why the hell is a dentist checking out books on oil field explosives? And isn’t a dentist by the very goddamned nature of his job the kind of manual tinkerer that would have the skill necessary to put something like a bomb together?”

  But it wasn’t enough. He needed a third piece of evidence.

  So he took the book to an oil geologist he knew and said to the man, “I know what this book tells me. What don’t it tell me?”

  The geologist examined the volume for several minutes, scanning the table of contents and the index, and then said one word that sent a shiver down C.D.’s spine.

  “ ‘Fuses.’ That’s what he said. It didn’t say nothing about fuses. How to set the thing off.”

  “Where’d a feller go to learn about fuses?” C.D. had asked him.

  “Only one place I know. The military,” was the reply.

  “He ain’t been in the military.” But then C.D. had a moment. The military puts every damn thing it knows into … field manuals.

  It was pretty easy after that. Calling the U.S. Government Printing Office, he learned that a dental hygienist named Rose Fluerry, in Dr. Dupont’s office for less than a year, had ordered a field manual entitled Special Forces Improvised Field Munitions Detonation Techniques. An examination of the book yielded a blueprint for “Timing Device Simple, with Expedient Materials,” which looked pretty goddamn much like the one the FBI said blew the airliner. A day’s worth of surveillance revealed that in fact the dentist had moved in with Rose Fleurry; another day’s investigation showed he’d moved in the day after the blast that had claimed the lives of, among others, his wife and three children.

  C.D. had picked up Rose, interrogated her gently for an hour, and she had rolled over on her lover just that fast. Turned out she didn’t care for him much anymore by that time. He didn’t put the toilet seat down. And the fifty thousand dollars in insurance money on the wife and three kids? Strictly an afterthought, a little fun money for a fling in Mexico that he never got to take.

  “Put him in the death house, proud to say, though goddammit, the sentence was later reduced to life. The funny thing is, when we arrested him—he had model airplanes everywhichgoddamnwhere. He loved airplanes. But it was that third piece of evidence that done the trick.”

  This final observation fell on largely deaf ears, for by now the old man had begun to bore the younger crowd. C.D. felt it happen all the time. They pretended to want to know, but somehow they just didn’t have the patience, the concentration.

  As they turned away to sleep for tomorrow, C.D. pretended to go back to the data, the OSBI file on Lamar.

  But he reached into his coat pocket and slipped out the I. W. Harper bottle. The lid was loose; with deft fingers he removed it. He hunched, seemed to shift in his old man’s dry-boned way, and managed to draw a large, fiery swig from the bottle. It tasted like charcoal, gun smoke, and old plums. It knocked him where he wanted to be, which was into a state of blur.

  Bud rolled over, trying to get to sleep. On this job it was six on the damn block, peeking into cars, then twelve on the road for what was called “aggressive patrolling,” and then six off, and his six off was three gone and goddamned if old C.D. wasn’t holding court with a bunch of Bureau boys a couple of bunks on down the goddamned way. There were dog teams outs
ide, yowling, just in case. An OSBI helicopter made a buzz overhead every once in a while. The communications center, in one corner, crackled and yammered. Men were cleaning guns that hadn’t yet been fired. Sleep was a hard bargain tonight.

  Yet Bud wasn’t an unhappy man. He and Ted alternated on the driving, and after close to twenty-five years of driving himself, Bud hated it when someone drove him. And was it his imagination, or was Ted’s ambivalence about his life somehow expressing itself in his driving? Made Bud pretty itchy to sit there while the boy diddled with the accelerator. You go trooper, you got to love to drive a car, because that’s 98 percent of the duty day: you’ll see death in all the ways it can come to drivers and you’ll give chase and maybe kill, but it all turned on the powerful automobile. You had to love that bitch on wheels or get another line of work.

  But in three hours it would be his day to drive again. A certain secret part of him responded to the pleasures of the wheel, and he hoped they wouldn’t nab those goddamned boys until after he had his eighteen.

  But that was only a surface thing. Truth was, Bud felt another deeper pleasure, though he could put no name on it. For now, in the temporary suspension of normalcy that the statewide manhunt brought, he felt something singing and vibrant. It was freedom, or the illusion of freedom, from It.

  That’s how he thought of it: It. It was It, that was all It was.

  It, being the thing, the mess, the situation. It, meaning Jen and the boys and the placid pleasures of duty versus the sweetness of renewal as experienced in young Holly, and all the pleasures it promised, all the places to go, all the ways to be.

  Bud was no romantic. His idea of reading was the new Guns & Ammo or Car and Driver, and his idea of fun was to go to a high school baseball game and watch Jeff play or to zero in the .270 for deer season. He went to the movies once a year, which was one time too much. He didn’t watch TV since they took Johnny off for that other goof, and it still pissed him that they went and did such a goddamned fool thing. Mainly, he just did his duty as he saw it, hard and fair, and expected otherwise to be left alone.

  Then It happened and all craziness broke out. Three months ago he’d been cruising 44 near to shift’s end and had pulled off at a favorite place, a diner called Mary’s in the little town of Cement, where the coffee was hot and black and the hash browns crispy, the way he liked them.

  He was sitting at the counter, taking his twenty, when he heard his name.

  “Bud? Sergeant Bud Pewtie?”

  He turned, and there she was. He remembered now. When he’d been partnered up with Ted during Ted’s six-month provisional, he’d met Holly off and on, and when Ted got his First Class stripe, he and Jen had the younger couple over to dinner to celebrate with a barbecue. But then as Ted changed, he’d drifted away, and he hardly ever talked to Bud anymore.

  “Holly, how are you? Damn, what brings you up here?”

  The part of Bud that he no longer thought he had reacted first. It wasn’t that Holly was just pretty; some other secret thing under her surface just teased him in a strange way. Her youth, her boyish body, those freckles, that bright smile, but most of all it was something behind her eyes, something secretly merry and conspiratorial. She was a plotter, all right.

  “Well, Bud, truth is, I came looking for you.”

  “Well, sit yourself down and I’ll buy you a cup of coffee. You ever hear of such a thing called a telephone? Real easy to operate. You just drop a dime in and push some buttons and, like magic, you’re talking to the man you want.”

  “Well, Bud, thanks for the tip, but it ain’t so easy. I wanted it private.”

  “You got it. But this isn’t some sad song I heard on the radio a hundred times and still can’t say Jack Jump about? That damn fool Ted’s found a new girl, or some such. I know I look like Ann Landers but I don’t have her wisdom. My idea would be: I’ll loan you the gun and you go shoot him. I don’t think Ann would ever tell you that.”

  She giggled at old Bud.

  “Oh, Bud, you love to flirt and make all the girls laugh, don’t you? I’ll bet you were a pistol back in high school.”

  Not so; he’d been a fullback, big and awkward and a little smarter than people thought when they considered his bulk, but no showboat with the girls. He’d married the first pretty one that was nice to him.

  “Sure I was.”

  “Well, anyway,” she said, “you’re not far wrong. But I don’t think it’s a girl. It’s just a thing. He’s just not there anymore. I was wondering if something’s going on in the patrol or on the road I should know about.”

  It was true. Ted had drifted off. He went his own way, put in his hours and disappeared. He was no longer a part of the elaborate Smokey culture—the gym, the shooting range, the optional SWAT exercises, the speed pursuit course—and when you took yourself out of that, you sort of guaranteed you’d stay at First Class for a long time.

  “Oh, he’s probably working some things out.”

  “That’s what he says, when he says anything.”

  “It can be a hard life.”

  “But Bud Pewtie didn’t let it turn him sour.”

  “Well, old Bud Pewtie, he went through his dog days, too. Holly, give him some room. Maybe he ain’t made to be a policeman. That’s okay. No shame in that. There’s other things that he can do and make you and himself proud, I swear it. It’s a hard life and more than once I’ve regretted the path I chose.”

  “Well, you’re so John Wayne I find that hard to believe, but I love the way you tried to make me feel good.”

  She laughed and it suddenly occurred to Bud how easy it would be for him to like her. He wished sometimes he’d stopped it there and just frozen that moment in his heart forever: her laughter, his pleasure in it, her blinding beauty, his sense of having done the right thing.

  But a couple of weeks later, having thought pretty much of nothing except her, he’d just up and called her one day and made up some pretext about Ted’s problems and one damn thing led on to another; it became It.

  “Bud?”

  It was Ted, in the next bunk.

  “Yes, Ted?”

  “Bud, I can’t sleep. I’m gonna go sit in the car.”

  “Ted, you need your sleep.”

  “But I can’t.”

  “Ted, you have to be sharp. Is something bothering you?”

  “I’ll tell you about it sometime, Bud. You’ll know what I should do.”

  Bud watched Ted go on out. He tried to feel something for Ted. Shouldn’t he feel awful, partnered up with the man whose wife he was sleeping with? But he didn’t. Ted had made his own bed with his strange ways. Bud couldn’t believe a bad thing about Holly, and some of the things she’d told him made him sick. Ted watched dirty movies on the VCR alone late at night. Ted didn’t seem to even think about touching her anymore. Ted just didn’t care; he was letting it drift apart.

  Ted, partner, you made a dumb mistake. I wish I were man enough to help you out, but I got too much involved.

  They were on the swing between I-44 at Chickasha and Anadarko, where the Pye boys hailed from, and where they just might head (though Bud thought not; whatever Lamar was, he wasn’t that dumb) when Ted finally broke his silence.

  “Bud, I got a thing or two on my mind.”

  “Well, that’s no place for a thing or two. Spit ’em out.”

  The young trooper’s face seemed to knit up in pain as he struggled for the words. But then finally he relaxed a bit and just said it.

  “Ah, Bud … something’s been eating me alive for months now. I even went to a psychiatrist, through that employees’ assistance program the Department of Public Safety runs. But you’re the first real person I breathed a word to.”

  “Well, then you’d best get it out. Just flat say it, and we’ll pick up the pieces and see what we got.”

  “It’s this: I don’t think I got the guts for this line of work. The pure guts.”

  So that was it. The moment hung in the car. On either s
ide, the countryside, like a green river, flowed by, rolling yet mountainless, the wheat fields and pastures and alfalfa fields all green in the sunlight. Soon Anadarko would come up, an ugly, desolate little town, with its customary bright strip of cheesy fast-food mills, a mile off the dead center of town.

  “It’s a scary job, Ted. Every one of us feels it when we strap on the gun. You run into a crazy, a hopped-up Tulsa gangbanger, a bad Okabilly with an attitude, you could stop a slug. I feel it, too, specially in these crazy days, where every goddamned body has a gun.”

  “No, Bud, you’re just talking about duty anxiety. That’s what the shrink said. But it’s something deeper.”

  “Well, okay, Ted, if you say so. But I think everybody in our profession feels the horsecollar.”

  “About a year ago, I had a bad ten-seventy. I got good radar on a Nova about twenty miles below Oklahoma City. Pulled him over. It was around three in the goddamned morning. Not a soul about. Couldn’t even see any lights on the horizon. I did a run through Dispatch and found there was no paper on the driver. Still, I don’t know why, I was scared. A trooper in Maryland got one in the head just that way a few years back.”

  “I remember, Ted. I went to his funeral.”

  “Anyway, I approached the car.… It was four blacks. You know, in the X caps, the workout suits, and, man, that car just reeked of grass. They’d been having a high old time, I like to got buzzed just standing there. So I ask for the license and the guy hands it over. And I feel these eight eyes on me. And I look. And they’re just staring at me, the reefer smoke just pouring out of that car, and I’m all alone and I’m thinking … I’m dead. I’m sure they were hauling a load. And they were just staring at me, waiting for me to make a move, daring me to make a move. And then I saw the first gun. An AR-15, like mine, only with the shorty barrel. It came up on the off-driver’s side. One of ’em gets out. He’s got a fucking Uzi! I see the guy in the back seat fiddling with something I couldn’t even ID! Some weird thing with ventilation holes in the barrel shroud, a red-dot scope, a goddamned banana magazine. And here I am with a Smith and six cartridges. Goddamn, Bud, my dad fought in Vietnam and his dad fought in Korea and World War II and on down the line us Pepper boys have stood up and been counted. And all of a sudden it came over me so hard I thought I’d faint: I don’t have it.”