the Onion Field (1973)

The Onion Field

Joseph Wambaugh

*

PROLOGUE:

The Gardener Was A Thief. That's The Thing That Bothered him most The trials didn't bother him so much anymore. It was strange how much he used to fear the trials, but not now. He just went to court and testified when he was told
and
then went back to his gardening.

For a while they feared the trials would continue clear into the new decade. But now they assured him it was almost over and 1970 was still eight weeks away.

Sometimes the gardener wore a hat, the battered wide-brimmed straw he was wearing today. Mostly he wore it to keep the sweat out of his eyes, not to protect himself from the sun. The gardener loved the sun. He hated dark places, hated the night in fact, and sometimes sat up until dawn. No matter how tired he was and how much work he had to do the next day he was always glad to see the daylight come.

"Would you like some iced tea?" The old woman had come out on the porch without the gardener seeing her.

"No ma'am, I just h
ave to trim back this junipery
he answered, squatting in the grass, his shears poised.

"That's a blue pfitzer.

"Yes, I know. It's one of the tallest junipers. It's very pretty," said the gardener. He was trying to remember what he'd learned about the blue-green juniper while landscaping with his friend. His friend knew all the botanical names. For the last year, though, he'd been working alone. He preferred to be alone these days.

"You know about junipers? How nice," said the old woman.

"I used to know the names better said the gardener removing the straw hat and raising his sweat-stained dusty face to the November
sun. Yes,
I
used to remember
, h
e thought But so many things were slipping away. It was getting so hard to remember.

Then the
gardener glanced at a "no parking" sign on the street He stared at the red arrow on the sign and something flashed in his mind, an indefinable glimmer. He
was
getting afraid for no reason at all and a throbbing pain started at the base of his skull He crossed the small yard to the mower because he didn't want to talk to the lonely old woman today. The fear was weakening him and the pain was ferocious. He wanted to work it off.

The gardener yanked the rope and the motor caught and he was behind the mower, the engine roaring in his ears. The pain was spreading like fingers of blood, spreading from the tiny spot at the base of his skull He knew it would flood over his head until his entire skull felt crushed by a merciless bloody hand. Sometimes then it would go away.

Even the pain would not stop the gardener from thinking about his crimes. As he walked behind the mower the pain pulsing clear through his eyes, the gardener thought of how the first time had been.

He had been walking through the store as part of a job when he saw something he needed: masonry drills. He needed them for some cement work he was doing on his duplex. He had picked up the drills and put them in his pocket And that was that He couldn't believe it until it was done. But his heart began pounding then, more from excitement than fear. Or was it excitement? It was so hard these days to recall all the emotions clearly. The crimes he could remember as if they just happened. The feelings were what eluded him.

All thieves start small, the gardener thought gravely, as the shower of grass in his face helped him forget the pitiless driving pain. He used to think about the night in the onion field all the time-before he became a thief. But now the crimes he had committed overshadowed all else, even the four men and the death in the onion field.

Chapter
1

The night in the onion field was a Saturday night. Saturday meant impossible traffic in Hollywood so felony car officers did a good deal of their best work on side streets off Hollywood and Sunset boulevards. On those side streets, revelers' cars were clouted or stolen. F-cars also cruised the more remote commercial areas, away from intersections where traffic snarled, and the streets undulated with out-of-towners, roaming groups of juveniles, fruit hustlers, desperate homosexuals, con men, sailors, marines.

Nothing the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce said could camouflage the very obvious dangers to tourists on those teeming streets. Most of the famous clubs had closed, the others were closing, and Hollywood was being left to the street people. The "swells" of the forties and early fifties had all but abandoned downtown Hollywood and were gradually surrendering the entire Sunset Strip, at least at night.

In spite of it all, Hollywood Division was a good place for police work. It was busy and exciting in the way that is unique to police experience-the unpredictable lurked. Ian Campbell believed that what most policemen shared was an abhorrence of the predictable, a distaste for the foreseeable experiences of working life. It wasn't what the misinformed often wrote, that they were danger lovers. Race drivers were danger lovers. That's why, after Ian and his old friend Wayne Ferber had crashed a sports car several years before, he had given up racing, though he would never give up police work.
He felt that the job was not particularly hazardous physically but was incredibly hazardous emotionally and too often led to divorce, alcoholism, and suicide. No, policemen were not danger lovers, they were seekers of the awesome, the incredible, even the unspeakable in human experience. Never mind whether they could interpret, never mind if it was potentially hazardous to the soul. To be there was the thing.

Karl Hettinger was newly assigned to felony cars and Ian was breaking him in. The partnership had jelled almost at once.

"You were in the marine corps too?" Ian asked, during the monotonous first night of plainclothes felony car patrol.

"Communications." Karl nodded.

"Really? So was I," Ian said, flickering his headlights at a truck coming onto Santa Monica from the freeway.

"The voice with a smile," Karl said, and they both grinned and made the first step toward a compatible partnership.

Each man learned after two nights together that the other was unobtrusive and quiet, Ian the more quiet, Karl the more unobtrusive, but a dry wit. It would t
a
ke two men like these longer to learn the habits and tastes of the other, but once learned, the partnership could result in satisfying working rapport. There is nothing more important to a patrol officer than the partner with whom he will share more waking hours than with a wife, upon whom he is to depend more than a man should, with whom he will share the ugliness and tedium, the humor and the wonder.

"You dropped out of college in your final semester?" asked Ian during their third night. "So did I. What were you majoring in?"

"Agriculture, beer, and poker, not in that order," said Karl, who was driving tonight, a slow and cautious driver who now wore glasses at night, finding he had some trouble reading license plates.

"I was in zoology and pre-med. Looks like we're both out of our elements."

"I'm taking police science courses now," said Karl.

"So am I," said Ian. "You must know something about trees, don't you?"

"Probably not as much as I should!' said Karl. "An ag major has to know a little bit about tree and plant identification."

"I'm really involved in trees now," Ian said, becoming unusually garrulous as he always did when something interested him. "I'm landscaping my house, or trying to. You know anything about fruitless mulberry?"

"Not much."

"Well, it grows big and wide and fast. Instant shade. I like that. I get impatient waiting for things."

"You have to be patient to make things grow."

"Sometimes I think that's why I'm a policeman," said Ian. "Not patient enough. Antsy, my wife calls me. I guess I just have to be free and moving around."

"I don't know why Vm a policeman," said Karl. "It just happened. But I like it. I couldn't have a job where I was closed up inside four walls and a roof. That's the latent farmer in me."

"The best thing is that no matter how boring things get, like tonight for instance, something might be right around the corner. A little action I mean," said Ian.

Karl touched his cotton shirt, open at the throat, and the threadbare sport coat. "I'm glad not to go back to uniform."

"One thing to remember is that all those working hours you spent in patrol refereeing family beefs and writing tickets and taking reports-we'll use all that time in felony cars for one thing: to find serious crime on the street. You're bound to run up against a hot one once in a while. You just have to be a little more careful working this detail."

"Don't worry, I will." Karl nodded. "By the way, you ever cruise around behind the bar up here on McCadden? In the parking lot?"

"Parking lot? Don't think I know it."

"You just go north on McCadden from Sunset till you smell it, then go east till you step in it. It's like a zombies' convention back there. When I worked vice I used to see a lot of activity at night. Probably hypes more than anything."

"Let's check it out tonight," said Ian, pleased to see that his new partner was energetic. Good police work made time race.

"Hey look at that," said Ian on their fifth night, slowing as they passed a wooded acre in front of a white Spanish colonial home on Laurel Canyon. It was a balmy evening because the warm Santa Ana winds were blowing, and the canyon was a respite from the Hollywood traffic.

"Whadda you see?" Karl asked, twisting abruptly in his seat, tensing for a moment, as he peered through the smoky darkness in the woodsy residential valley.

"Liquid amber," Ian said, admiring the foilage almost hidden by tall shaggy eucalyptus. "You should see them in the fall. They change colors like flames. Beautiful. Just beautiful."

Karl shook his head and grinned.

Ian Campbell never noticed the grin. He watched the trees. The eucalyptus reminded him of a park in the heart of the city where the smell of tar filled the air and had once ignited a boy's imagination.

- > -

Ian had been a bookish romantic youngster-a dreamer his mother called him-and even as a high school senior, loved to dawdle for hours by the pits and stare into the tar until he vividly imagined great Pleistocene creatures there.

The boy could guess how it was when Imperial Mammoth went to the tarpits to die. Or rather went to drink. The pool at night looked inviting to Mammoth and the ominous bubbles rising were of no consequence. Nor was the black slime that slithered between his toes and climbed sucking his ankles. Panic struck when, loin deep in water and having drunk his fill, he tried to take his first step out and found himself trapped in the tar.

Mammoth was bewildered after the first surge of terror. He stood fifteen feet tall and his curved tusks even measured a greater length. Yet with all his might he could not drag his hairy bulk more than inches through the tar. His fearful bellow paralyzed the other creatures of the forest.

The great bellowing pipe suddenly blew a plaintive blast, and upon hearing it some of the creatures were filled with grief and dread because they instinctively knew death was upon him. Many of the predators, despite their fear, were then drawn to him and themselves would die that night locked to his flesh, sucked down by the tar as they fed.

Ian Campbell heard Mammoth clearly as he lay there on the grass and stared into the dank pond, like ice varnished black except for the gaseous bubbles plopping on the surface in the moonlight. It was very dark despite the moon, and quiet, and the tar smell was everywhere. Ian heard how Mammoth sounded at the last: plaintive, yes, but defiant.

Somehow Ian knew that Mammoth would be defiant at the end. And Ian suddenly had the urge to jump to his feet and sound a call which he was sure somehow would drift across the ages to Mammoth who would sense what every piper knew-that there is no death.

Then to prove it he stood, adjusted the braces on his teeth to better taste the reed, and breathed deeply of the tarry chewy night air which could be blown into a tartan bag.

His silhouette there on the grassy knoll startled a little girl who was strolling with her father through Hancock Park along the path just north of Wilshire Boulevard. The child stopped and gasped as the silhouette took shape in the darkness. It had three horns which protruded from the side of it. It was tall, slender, erect, its head thrust back from a length of horn distended from its mouth. Then the sound came out of it-eerie, baffling-and she started to cry from fear. Her father picked her up and laughed reassuringly.

"It's a bagpipe, honey. It's just a boy playing a bagpipe."

Ian Campbell never heard her cry. He was preoccupied, struggling to get the reeds vibrating the right way. Sometimes they just wouldn't snap in there. In their own way the pipes were much harder than the piano. With no chords you just couldn't put harmony into them, and the timing and grace notes which embellished the melody notes meant everything. He took a deep breath, moistened the valve, and was careful to keep an imperceptible pressure on the bag with his elbow, hoping to keep the constant flow through the reeds. He blew and hoped, and on top of everything else the reeds began to chirp!

Ian tossed the three drones off his shoulder and began pacing disgustedly. For this he had pleaded with his mother to sell his piano. For this crazy instrument! Three hundred years ago Pepys heard one and said, "At the best it is mighty barbarous music." He was dead right, thought Ian.