Summer People (13 page)

“Sheriff, was my client adequately Mirandized?” she asked in an accusatorial, angry tone.

“Yes, Ms. Hawthorne. It was the first thing we did after we took him into custody. If you check with your client, I’m sure he will remember my reading him his rights and asking if he understood what had been read to him.”

“I asked him; he seemed confused, but given the excessive force used to make this arrest, it’s no wonder that he was confused.”

Ray could feel his pulse throbbing against his collar; he imagined that his face was growing red. He tried not to respond too quickly, taking several breaths, concentrating on inhaling slowly, holding the air for several seconds, and then slowly exhaling. When he felt in control he said, “The force used at the scene of the arrest was appropriate given the weapon the suspect was thought to have in his possession. In point of fact, the suspect did have an assault rifle and did use it when we attempted to arrest him. We used three canisters of tear gas. No bullets were fired by any police officer. We have the AK-47 Mr. Buck fired at us, lots of spent cartridges, and four bullet holes in the side of my car. There are a score of witnesses to his use of this weapon, including members of my department and the state police.” Ray could hear the tension in his voice.

“And you all sing the same party line when anyone suggests that you used excessive force. I think the public is on to your little game,” she responded with a sarcastic chuckle.

Ray let her comment pass and turned his attention to Lennie Buck. “Did you know Kit Hammer?”

“I have instructed my client to answer no questions until we go to trial, Sheriff.”

“Ms. Hawthorne, you can instruct your client to do or not to do anything you want. But I have the authority and right under our system to question Mr. Buck. Mr. Buck, being competent, can decide whether or not he is going to answer my questions. You don’t get to speak for him.”

“I won’t have my client badgered or intimidated.”

Again Ray didn’t respond to her comment. “Let me repeat the question for you again, Lennie. Did you know Kit Hammer?”

“That’s a dumb question, Sheriff. By now everyone knows that.”

“I told you not to answer any questions,” commanded Hawthorne.

“Lady, I didn’t ask for you. Stay the fuck out of my face. I’ll say what I want to say, and you can go to hell.”

“You do what I tell you. Do you want to spend the rest of your life in Jackson?”

“Like I care,” he responded.

“Sheriff,” Hawthorne began, “I need to talk with my client alone for a few minutes. I’m not sure we are communicating effectively with one another.”

Ray was struck by the fact that her tone was almost pleasant. He got up; Sue followed his lead. “When you’re ready, let the deputy know, and we’ll try again.”

As they left Ray pulled the door closed and had a word with the deputy posted outside. “Let’s get some air,” he said to Sue. They exited out the back door and sat on a sandbank above the parking lot.

“It’s times like this that I really miss cigarettes. When you’re angry or tense, that’s when a cigarette is wonderful.”

“I don’t know how you kept your cool; she’s really vicious,” said Sue.

“I’ve had to deal with her a number of times in the last several years. I think I’m just starting to get used to her style. She doesn’t get to me as much as she used to. Her last pregnancy was rumored to be very difficult. I enjoyed not having to deal with her the last six or eight months.”

“How does someone as nasty as that get pregnant?” she asked.

“I suspect the usual way. I can’t imagine that she would do anything immoral or unnatural.”

Sue slapped at his arm with the back of her hand. “You men are all alike. What I’m saying is how could someone sleep with such an unpleasant person?”

“Maybe she is sweet and loving at home. Perhaps she reserves her ugly side for public occasions….”

“Sheriff, they’re ready,” came a summons from the deputy at the back door.

They reentered the interview room and took the same chairs they had previously occupied.

“Lennie, I was trying to establish that you knew Kit Hammer.”

“Yes, I knew her.”

“Remember my instructions,” urged Hawthorne.

“I say what I want, and you can go to hell, lady.” Hawthorne jumped to her feet and shouted, “I am not going to sit through this. I’m not going to watch this judicial travesty.”

“Ms. Hawthorne,” said Ray in a calm voice, “it’s important that you stay. We want to make sure Mr. Buck’s constitutional rights are not abridged in any way.”

Regaining control, she settled back into her chair.

“This is what happened Sheriff. I started seeing Kit in November or December, not too long after I moved up here. I was at the laundromat in Thompsonville doing my wash, and Kit was there. We talked while we waited, and she helped me fold my clothes. I usually don’t fold them, just throw ’em in a bag. We were the only ones there most of the time. She told me she was having lots of marital trouble. Her husband was some kind of religious nut that made her go to this real strict church. She wanted to know where I lived, and I told her.

“A couple of days later she shows up at my trailer with a bottle of whiskey and some beers. She tells me she’s lonely. We get sorta smashed, and she just starts taking off her clothes and tells me she needs to be fucked. She was really a hungry bitch. She told me her husband hadn’t been fucking her for some sort of punishment.

“At first I didn’t care about her none, but hell, it was a free piece of ass a couple of times a week. But then I really started liking her.

“Somehow her husband found out she was messing around. He beat the hell out of her until she told him everything. He said if she ever seen me again he’d kill both of us. She snuck back and told me.

“Somehow he found out about that, too, and beat the hell out of her again. He told her that he’d kill me if she didn’t confess to her sins in front of the whole fucking congregation at that church they go to.

“She did, and those bastards came over to my place. I was still sleeping. They busted in, dragged me outside, and messed me up pretty good. That was Sunday. Monday, after her old man goes to work, she comes over and says that I got to do something. She says he’s going to kill me and probably kill her, too. She asks me if I’m going to run. I tell her I don’t have enough gas to get to TC, and I don’t have no money. How am I going to run? She gives me this big roll of bills she says she’s been saving for a long time. She says I got to do something. Then she fucks me real good and tells me this is what it could be like every day if she could get away from her old man.”

“Lennie, did she ever say to you directly that she wanted you to kill her husband?” Ray waited for Hawthorne to object, but she just sat silently and glared at him.

“Not that way, but I knew what she was getting at.”

“Then what happened?”

“I took the money, went to that gun shop at Cedar Junction. They had a big display of those AK-47s with a sign that said you should buy one before the law changed. I had enough for one of them and a bunch of ammo.”

“Did the clerk question you about why you wanted that particular type of weapon?”

“No, but he seemed happy as hell that I was buying it. He said the pointy heads in Congress was trying to outlaw them, and peace loving citizens should have the right to defend themselves.”

“Did he have you fill out the gun purchase forms?”

“He had the forms, but he filled them out. He was a bit bothered that my driver’s license didn’t match my current address, but he said that nobody would notice, and it really didn’t matter.

“I took the gun home and practiced a bit. I’ve never been much of a shot, but with one of those it doesn’t matter much. You just aim, and it throws out a shit load of bullets.”

“Tell me about the night of the shooting,” said Ray.

“I knew from what Kit told me that Joe worked till nine in the summer. At first I thought I’d get him when he left the store, but I was afraid there’d be too many people around, so I decided to get him when he came home.

“I left my car by the highway and got a hiding place near their house. When he came home from work, I waited until he got out of his car and then blew the hell out of him.”

“Then what did you do?”

“I stopped and had a couple of beers and a pizza at the Village Tap. And then I got a bottle and went home and drank until I passed out. I didn’t hear nothing until you was shouting for me to come out.”

“Lennie, why didn’t you take off? You must have known that we would find you fairly quickly if you went back to your trailer.”

“Where was I gonna run to? I got no money, I got no place to go. I’ve been to Jackson before, probably you know that. I’m not afraid to go back.”

“But this time you’re going for life,” said Ray.

“We’ll see about that,” said Hawthorne. “There’s not much of this that will be admissible.”

Lennie continued, “Being out ain’t much better than being in. At least there you know what tomorrow will bring.”

Ray went to the door and got the deputy. He turned to Hawthorne, “If you don’t have further need of your client, I’ll have him returned to his cell.”

“Not now,” she responded.

After he was escorted from the room, Hawthorne said, “You won’t get to use any of this.”

“Counselor, I’m sure that you and the judge and prosecutor will have an interesting time working out what’s admissible and what isn’t.

She glared at him as she gathered up her things. She slammed the door behind her.

They sat there for a few minutes in silence. “It’s interesting,” began Sue, “the only time Buck showed any emotion was when he was pushing back against Hawthorne. I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone so completely defeated, so hopeless. I’m surprised he cared enough for Kit, or was he angry enough to kill Hammer?”

“Which was it?” asked Ray. “Did he do it for love, or was he just trying to get revenge for the beating?”

“I don’t know. There was so little affect. I think he cares about her, or at least appreciates the fact that she cared about him.”

“And does she care about him? What’s your best guess based on what he’s said?”

“Hard to tell. She might care, or she might have been just using him for sex or companionship.”

“Does he know the difference between right and wrong?”

“Hard to tell,” said Sue. “What do you think?”

“I think he knows; I don’t think that there is any question about that. But he doesn’t care. I don’t think he sees any of his actions or their consequences as having real meaning, any importance.”

“It would be much easier if people were either good or evil. It’s never that neat?”

“Never.”

The lot was empty, save a pickup that, by the markings on the side, obviously belonged to the owner, as Ray parked near the main door. Bud converted a general store to his gun shop when he moved up from down state in the early seventies. He had the clapboard siding covered with rough-cut cedar to give the building a more rustic appearance. Next to the front door, with red, white, and blue ribbon streamers hanging on the side, was a sign that read AK-47 Freedom Sale Now In Progress. Ray noted at the bottom of the sign a bumper sticker with Fire the Wimp, Hire a Hammer.

Ray pushed his way through the heavy front door. The high tin ceilings, installed when the building was constructed in the early days of the century, remained. The walls, although not changed, were now covered with heads of deer. A stuffed grizzly lunged from one side of the store, its mouth open, its arms and long claws reaching into the room. A moose, sad and mangy, peered from the back of the store toward the freedom of the parking lot. Smaller animals—a fox, a wolf, a badger, a porcupine, a wild turkey, a pair of wood ducks, and pheasant—stood on wooden shelves and stared through lifeless glass eyes.

Bud, in his late sixties, was standing behind a glass showcase at the back of the store. He was wearing khaki pants and a shirt with a military style web belt with a brass buckle. A string tie hung on his chest; a Petoskey stone cut in the shape of the Michigan mitten was centered on the two strands of the tie.

Bud, his arms in front of him, his large hands on the counter, fingers spread, rocked his large frame forward. “Good morning, Sheriff.”

“Good morning, Bud.”

“Something I can help you with this morning, Sheriff? “We are investigating the Hammer murder. We found an AK47 at the scene of the arrest, and the suspect, Lennie Buck, said he bought the weapon here on Monday. I want to confirm that this information is correct.”

“That’s correct, Sheriff. Although I’ll have to check on the day, but I’m pretty sure it was Monday. We’ve had a lot of action on those AK-47s. Surprised you haven’t been in to pick up a few for the department. With all the riffraff coming up from down state, I’d sure want my people to have adequate fire power to protect themselves.” Bud gave him a sardonic grin.

Ray let the comment pass. “Would you please show me the paper work on the sale?”

“I’ve got everything right here, Sheriff. As you know we do everything by the book.” Bud turned to a tall, gray file cabinet and rifled through the top drawer and then the second drawer. Finally, he extracted a worn manila folder, smudged and tatty, from the drawer. “His application is right here, Sheriff,” he said laying a slightly rumpled sheet on the glass-topped counter.

Ray looked at the application. “Did he fill this out himself?”

“No, I helped, but all the information came from him. He seemed to have trouble reading the form, so, in the interest of accuracy, I read it to him and copied his responses, but it’s just the same as if he did it himself. And that is his signature at the bottom. He signed it himself.”

Ray studied the form carefully. “Bud, it says here that Mr. Buck is a resident of this county and lives at an address on Indian Hill Road. His driver’s license has him living in Flint, in Genessee County.”

“Yes, Sheriff, he told me he had moved and was going to get that corrected right away. I thought it was better to record his current address, just to get things right. You know how slow bureaucracies are, they’d never get his address right. That’s not going to cause any trouble, is it?”