Dirty White Boys (7 page)

“I hate guns,” said Willard.

“Gwus,” said Odell. “Bangy like bangy.”

“Son, that doesn’t surprise me.”

“I know where there’s a gun store,” said Willard, trying to help.

“Now, Willard, I can see you’re trying to get with it. But a gun store don’t fill the bill. How can I rob a gun store if I don’t got no guns? And if I had a gun, I wouldn’t need to rob no gun store. Plus, these days, you run into your scum
in gun stores. Them boys all pack and they just looking for excuses to shoot a man. Read about it in gun magazines, they want to blow someone away. Peckerwoods, trashy boys, your basic Okabilly scum. No sir, gun store ain’t no place at all. I need a citizen with guns. A man who keeps guns, a hunter, something like that. Willard, I know if you think real hard, you’ll be knowing somebody who’s got guns.”

Willard scrunched up his face in despair until at last a little light came on behind his eyes.

“Mr. Stepford says his father hunts,” he said. “Says his old man sends him a haunch of venison every fall.”

“Hmm,” said Lamar. “Now who would Mr. Stepford be?”

“Mr. Bill Stepford, regional vice-president for Hostess Baking Division of Oklahoma. My boss’s boss. He give me the job. He said his father been up in Canada hunting elk, been to Mexico to shoot them doves, wants to go to Maine to hunt bear before he dies.”

“Where his father live?”

“Uh, he’s a big farmer. Owns a spread out near Ratliff City.”

“Do this old man have a first name?”

“Sir, I don’t—You’re not going to hurt him, are you? He’s an old man. Fought in World War II as a bomber pilot. 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? Odell, don’t hurt him none. Makie still.”

“Yoppa-yoppa,” said Odell.

And Odell 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 Odell.

T
he 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 whiteboys 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 Lt. 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 answers 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 hangerlike 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.”

“C.D., 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.”

“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.