Killings Read online

  Copyright © 1984 by Calvin Trillin

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  RANDOM HOUSE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Ticknor & Fields, in 1984, in different form.

  The pieces in this book first appeared in The New Yorker.

  Hardback ISBN 9780399591402

  Ebook ISBN 9780399591419

  randomhousebooks.com

  Book design by Victoria Wong, adapted for ebook

  Cover design: Alex Merto

  Cover image: Jim Dow

  v4.1

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Introduction

  Author’s Note

  A Stranger with a Camera

  I’ve Always Been Clean

  Jim, Tex, and the One-armed Man

  Sergei Kourdakov

  You Always Turn Your Head

  Harvey St. Jean Had It Made

  Partners

  Melisha Morganna Gibson

  Family Problems

  Todo Se Paga

  It’s Just Too Late

  Called at Rushton

  Resettling the Yangs

  Among Friends

  The Mystery of Walter Bopp

  A Father-Son Operation

  I’ve Got Problems

  Right-of-Way

  Rumors Around Town

  Outdoor Life

  At the Train Bridge

  Covering the Cops

  Dedication

  By Calvin Trillin

  About the Author

  Introduction

  * * *

  Reporters love murders. In a pinch, what the lawyers call “wrongful death” will do, particularly if it’s sudden. Even a fatal accident for which no one is to blame has some appeal. On a daily newspaper, in fact, an accident is one of the few news events whose importance can be precisely measured by the editors who decide how much space and prominence each story is worth. In general, the space it is assigned varies directly with how many people were killed. Sufficient loss of life can elevate an accident story into a category of news that is almost automatically front-page—a disaster.

  I have always been attracted by stories of sudden death. For fifteen years, starting in the fall of 1967, I traveled around the United States to do a series of reporting pieces for The New Yorker called “U.S. Journal”—a three-thousand-word article every three weeks from somewhere in the country. (Magazine writers asked, “How do you keep up that pace?” Newspaper reporters asked, “What else do you do?”) Once or twice every year I found myself at the scene of a killing. When I began writing somewhat longer pieces, the attraction continued. Several of those longer pieces are included in this edition of Killings, along with a 1986 profile of Edna Buchanan, whose job as the Miami Herald’s homicide specialist called upon her to approach the subject from a different angle.

  What attracts me to killings is not importance as a newspaper editor might measure it—the number of people killed, for instance, or how closely they resembled the readers (“According to airline officials in New Delhi, there were no Americans aboard the plane”), or the prominence of the victim in the community or in the nation. A magazine like The New Yorker does not have the record-keeping function that a newspaper has. If a federal judge is assassinated in Texas or twelve people are killed by floods in the West, The New Yorker is not responsible for registering the event for the record. By the same token, it can—and did in some of these pieces—record the death of a single unimportant person without feeling the need to justify its interest the way a newspaper might in what reporters sometimes call a “nut graf” (“The Iowa murder is part of a growing national trend toward vaguely disreputable people in small towns killing each other”).

  While I was in the South working on one of the stories in this book, I happened to meet some reporters for the local newspaper, and they couldn’t imagine why I had come all the way from New York to write about a death that probably hadn’t even made their front page. Only one person had died, and she had not been an important person. Her family was not particularly important, and neither was the person accused of causing her death. The way she had died did not reflect any national trends. Her death had been the central event in what struck me as a remarkable family drama, but it seemed trivialized by the old newspaper phrase used to describe such dramas—a human-interest story. The best I could manage was “It sounded interesting.”

  I often wished that I could come up with something grander than that, particularly when I was asked by relatives of some victim why I was pursuing a subject that caused them pain to discuss. Not having to justify your interest is a great luxury for a reporter, but it is also a small burden. At times, I would have welcomed the opportunity to say “The public has a right to know” or “This story could prevent something like this from happening again.” I couldn’t even claim that I was an innocent party who had been assigned the story by the callous city editor of newspaper legend (“Hey, champ, get on your roller skates and get out to Laurel Avenue and talk to this lady whose husband just shot himself—and don’t come back without their wedding picture”). I’ve chosen which stories to do for The New Yorker myself, mostly on the basis of what sounded interesting.

  What I’ve been interested in, of course, is writing about America—or, as I realized a few years after I began “U.S. Journal,” in writing about America without an emphasis on politics and government. Some ways of doing that didn’t suit my needs. I wasn’t interested in doing what is sometimes called Americana—stories about people like the last fellow in Jasper County, Georgia, who can whittle worth a damn. I didn’t want to do stories about typical or representative Americans—stories about, say, the struggles of a Midwestern Farm Family to make ends meet. Although I was interested in places, I wasn’t comfortable writing about a city or a state or a region in general terms; I didn’t do stories that could be called “Boston at Three Hundred” or “Is the New South Really New?” I went every three weeks not to a place but to a story—to an event or a controversy or, now and then, a killing.

  A killing often seemed to present the best opportunity to write about people one at a time. There were occasions, of course, when I found myself treating a killing as an element in a controversy that involved blocs of people rather than individuals. I once did a piece in Seattle after a white policeman had shot and killed a black armed-robbery suspect: in the controversy that followed the shooting, they both became so enveloped by their roles that the incident could have been described in just that way—a White Cop had killed a Black Suspect. There were occasions when not knowing the identity of someone involved in a killing meant writing about a sort of person rather than a person—the sort of person who might get killed that way or the sort of person who might do the killing. Once, in the early seventies, I went to the west coast of Florida to do a piece that involved efforts by the authorities to learn the identity of a body that had been found in a trunk left in the woods next to a restaurant on the interstate. The body was that of a twenty-five- to thirty-five-year-old woman. She had bad teeth. She had no scars. She had a bolo tie pulled tight around her neck It turned out that a lot of twenty-five- to thirty-five-year-old women were considered missing by someone. In the first few days after the trunk was discovered, fifty people called the St. Petersburg Police Department to say that they thought they knew who the dead woman might be. A man in his late forties phoned from central Florida to say that he thought the woman in the trunk was his wife, who had run off, with several hundred dollars of his money, in t
he company of a man in his thirties who drove a truck for a fruit company. A woman in Tampa said that her daughter had left home on October 28—wearing a white blouse, pink pants, and green flip-flops—and had not been in touch since, although it had been said that she met some men in a bar in Tampa and went with them to the dog races in St. Petersburg. A twenty-six-year-old woman had been missing from Wimauma, Florida, ever since her father threatened two men who had been staying with her. A man in St. Petersburg phoned to say that the woman in the trunk might be the daughter he had thrown out of the house three months before. She had been carrying on with several different men while her husband was in Vietnam, the father said, and only the intervention of his wife had kept him from killing her himself on the day he threw her out. The man became so angry talking about what he would do if he ever got his hands on his daughter that he had to be warned that he could be considered a suspect and that anything he said might be used against him.

  The reports called into the St. Petersburg Police Department could conjure up a composite of the victim, but the stories of sudden death that most interested me were not those in which the people involved could be thought of as a type of person or a representative of what the lawyers call “others so situated.” When someone dies suddenly, shades are drawn up, and the specificity of what is revealed was part of what attracted me. In London, in the summer of 1970, I accompanied an employee of the American consulate to a drab hotel room in Paddington where he had to collect the possessions of an American who had died suddenly, without any known relatives or friends in the area. The man had left nothing in the hotel room except the contents of a couple of cheap suitcases, some half-eaten sweet rolls, and three empty Coca-Cola bottles near the bed. At the consulate, an inventory was taken. There was twenty-one dollars in cash. There was an old membership card for the Screen Actors Guild. There was an outdated passport, issued in the fifties, listing the man’s occupation as car salesman. There was a letter, dated 1961, from an MGM executive in New York: the executive said he was sorry to hear about the man’s having been under the weather and regretted that he couldn’t provide the World Series tickets the man was looking for. There was another letter, dated 1968, from a Las Vegas men’s store telling whomever it might concern that the man had been a courteous and responsible employee and had been let go only because of a business slowdown. There was a card indicating graduation from a bartender’s school in Los Angeles in 1968. There was a form letter from the governor of Louisiana expressing appreciation for the interest shown in investment opportunities in that state. There were a lot of disposable syringes and an insulin bottle. There were a couple dozen boxes of false eyelashes and an invoice listing their wholesale and retail prices and some U.S. Commerce Department booklets on how to set up small export businesses. The inventory, of course, provided some hints as to how the man had come to be alone in that dreary hotel room, with a supply of both insulin and Coca-Cola. It also provided me with another reminder of the appeal sudden death has for reporters: it gives us an excuse to be there, poking around in somebody’s life.

  Reporters also tend to love trials. It may be that we are transfixed by a process in which the person being asked a question actually has to answer it. He cannot say he would rather not comment. He cannot tell an anecdote on a different subject. He has to answer the question—under oath that he is telling the truth. I associate trials with killings. I think of a trial as one of the principal illumination devices switched on by sudden death. I suppose I carry around a kind of composite murder trial in my mind, along with a composite trunk murder victim. The prosecutor is a cautious young man—an assistant district attorney—who wears wingtip shoes and works methodically out of a loose-leaf notebook. The defense attorney is a bit flashier, and perhaps indiscreet enough to hint to reporters that his client is, in fact, guilty—the assumption being that a defense attorney who wins acquittal for a guilty client must be particularly brilliant. A defense lawyer can afford the style of a man not haunted by the prospect of having a victory reversed on appeal; there being no appeal from not guilty, he has to win only once. The caution of an assistant district attorney comes not only from the danger of reversible error but also from the conditions of his employment: a defense lawyer is engaged in private enterprise, and an assistant district attorney is a man who works for the government.

  Of course, I’ve been to a lot of trials in which the lawyers didn’t fit my composites—Daniel Boone Smith, the commonwealth’s attorney of Harlan County, Kentucky, was nothing at all like a cautious assistant DA—and a lot of trials that were not particularly illuminating. Over the years, I spent a lot of courtroom hours wishing the testimony would move away from bullet trajectory and toward some accounts of how the victim liked to spend his time or some speculation on why the defendant might have wanted him out of the way. Even so, I remain fascinated by trials. I even like the examination of the jury. In fact, I particularly like the examination of the jury. When I’m in a public place among strangers—on a bus, say, or in an airplane—I sometimes have a sudden urge to make an announcement: “All right, we’re going to go right down this aisle and have everyone state his name and address and occupation and then answer a few questions I have about your immediate family and your background and your prejudices.” In jury selection, that actually happens—and everybody is under oath to tell the truth.

  The techniques of jury selection vary widely from place to place. In Eastern Kentucky, the jury-picking method of Daniel Boone Smith leaned heavily on what he knew about most of the families in the county—including how they felt about one another. In Brooklyn, I once sat through jury selection on a wrongful-death case with a plaintiff’s lawyer whose strategy was based partly on a kind of informal ethnic sociology. The victim was a young woman—a thirty-two-year-old college teacher who had been killed in an auto accident. The lawyer for her family was looking for jurors who might be expected to place a high value on the life that was lost. To some extent, he was hoping for a personality type that he could describe only vaguely—open rather than closed, warm rather than cold. In another sense, though, he had his perfect juror specifically in mind: a fairly well-educated Jewish male in his sixties who had put two or three children through college.

  Obviously, an interest in the ways that thoroughly American places like Brooklyn and Harlan County differ was one reason I started on my travels. In these stories, the place was the context for the killing, and the killing was an opportunity to write about the place. I sometimes read murder mysteries, and the ones I find absorbing are those that evoke a specific place. I’m more interested in what life is like in a Boston hospital or on the Navajo reservation or in South Africa than I am in who done it. The pieces in this book are nonfictional whodunits only in the sense that they are concerned with setting. Writing about, say, the murder of a prominent Miami criminal lawyer seemed to me inseparable from writing about the high life in South Florida.

  At times during my travels, I may have become more interested in the community where the killing took place—or at least in the effect the killing had on the community—than I was in the victim. I was never much interested in the violence involved. Only a couple of these stories go into much detail about how someone was killed. This is not a book about the level of violence in America, except insofar that in this country a large selection of sudden deaths is taken for granted by a reporter looking for a story; I suppose someone doing “British Journal” or “Swedish Journal” would have to find another excuse for his presence. These stories are meant to be more about how Americans live than about how some of them die. If the old newspaper phrase didn’t bring to mind an item about a motherly cocker spaniel adopting orphaned ducklings, I would be comfortable with calling them human-interest stories. Their appeal was that they were about specific humans, and I chose to tell them, of course, because they sounded interesting.

  Author’s Note

  * * *

  I am grateful to the late William Shawn, who, as the editor of Th
e New Yorker, encouraged the “U.S. Journal” series. I am also grateful to the late Robert Bingham, who edited most of the pieces in that series, and to the other New Yorker manuscript editors and fact-checkers who, week after week, did their level best to keep me from embarrassing myself.

  Except for some minor corrections, the stories in this book are printed as they appeared in The New Yorker. With one exception, they appear in chronological order and in the tense they were written in, because I think their settings include the times as well as the place. These stories are obviously not meant to reflect a statistically balanced picture of how or where Americans meet sudden death. There is no story about a storekeeper killed during an armed robbery. There is no story about a carload of teenagers wiped out by a drunken driver. There are three stories that take place in Iowa. As it happens, I have always thought of Iowa as a relatively peaceful state—all in all, an unlikely place for a killing.

  A Stranger with a Camera

  * * *

  Jeremiah, Kentucky

  APRIL 1969

  On a bright afternoon in September, in 1967, a five-man film crew working in the mountains of Eastern Kentucky stopped to take pictures of some people near a place called Jeremiah. In a narrow valley, a half-dozen dilapidated shacks—each one a tiny square box with one corner cut away to provide a cluttered front porch—stood alongside the county blacktop. Across the road from the shacks, a mountain rose abruptly. In the field that separated them from the mountain behind them, there were a couple of ramshackle privies and some clotheslines tied to trees and a railroad track and a rusted automobile body and a dirty river called Rockhouse Creek. The leader of the film crew was a Canadian named Hugh O’Connor. Widely acclaimed as the co-producer of the Labyrinth show at Expo 67 in Montreal, O’Connor had been hired by Francis Thompson, an American filmmaker, to work on a film Thompson was producing for the American pavilion at HemisFair in San Antonio. O’Connor went up to three of the shacks and asked the head of each household for permission to take pictures. When each one agreed, O’Connor had him sign the customary release forms and gave him a token payment of ten dollars—a token that, in this case, happened to represent a month’s rent. The light was perfect in the valley, and the shooting went well. Theodore Holcomb, the associate producer of the film, was particularly struck by the looks of a miner, still in his work clothes and still covered with coal dust, sitting in a rocking chair on one of the porches. “He was just sitting there scratching his arm in a listless way,” Holcomb said later. “He had an expression of total despair. It was an extraordinary shot—so evocative of the despair of that region.”