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  “Not all of us are like that,” the other woman said. “Mean like that.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t say that man is mean,” the clerk said. “I don’t guess he ever harmed anybody in his life. They were very nice people. I think it was strictly a case of misunderstanding. I think that the old man thought they were laughing and making fun of him, and it was more than he could take. I know this: a person isolated in these hills, they often grow old and eccentric, which I think they have a right to do.”

  “But he didn’t have a right to kill,” the other woman said.

  “Well, no,” the clerk said. “But us hillbillies, we don’t bother nobody. We go out of our way to help people. But we don’t want nobody pushin’ us around. Now, that’s the code of the hills. And he felt like—that old man felt like—he was being pushed around. You know, it’s like I told those men: ‘I wouldn’t have gone on that old man’s land to pick me a mess of wild greens without I’d asked him.’ They said, ‘We didn’t know all this.’ I said, ‘I bet you know it now. I bet you know it now.’ ”

  I’ve Always Been Clean

  * * *

  West Chester, Pennsylvania

  JUNE 1970

  John Mervin, a menacing-looking young man with long unkempt hair and a shaggy beard, was arrested for murder last November, confirming the suspicions of a lot of West Chester citizens about the kind of crimes young people who looked like that were capable of perpetrating. The killing that Mervin was accused of—shooting to death an unemployed nineteen-year-old named Jonathan Henry—had taken place during what a newspaper account referred to as a “liquor and drug party.” Anybody who had seen Mervin around town knew that he wore not only a beard but the jacket of an outlaw motorcycle gang called the Warlocks. The lead story on his arraignment in West Chester’s Daily Local News revealed that at the time of the killing Mervin was out on bail on a charge of assault with intent to kill—a charge resulting from an October shooting in front of a West Chester saloon. The paper identified Mervin as a student at West Chester State College, which might be considered an odd thing for a Warlock to be, except that some people in West Chester were ready to believe almost anything about the kids at West Chester State. The type of school that used to be known as a teachers’ college, West Chester State is sufficiently conservative so that someone with a beard would not have been permitted to take classes there a few years ago, but lately the townspeople have been concerned about what they often call “that small element” in the college, an element associated with drugs and demonstrations and bizarre appearance and a lack of respect for accepted values. The small element at West Chester State that worries the townspeople blends easily with a small element among their own children—the most visible result being a band of students or ex-students or drifters occupying the ledges around the steps of the county courthouse, flaunting mustaches and long hair and dirty T-shirts, staring arrogantly at the respectable citizens who walk by.

  West Chester has about fifteen thousand citizens, almost all of whom consider themselves respectable. Some of them commute to Philadelphia or to Wilmington or to industries in towns in surrounding Chester County, but West Chester is too self-contained to be considered a suburb. It has a few small industries of its own, plus the legal and bureaucratic machinery that goes with being a county seat. The area that surrounds it still looks rural; the fields and barns of Chadds Ford, familiar from the paintings of Andrew Wyeth, are only a few miles to the south. The law offices clustered around the county courthouse are not in modern office buildings but in brick row houses, marked with neat white shingles. There has always been a lot of talk about history in Chester County—about when the county was founded and how many covered bridges it has and how many generations it has been Republican. But in the last year or two there has also been a lot of talk about drugs and disturbance and crime. The borough council made an effort to improve the police force, buying some new equipment and hiring the chief of county detectives, Thomas Frame, as police chief, at a considerable raise in pay. But a series in the local paper last June said that marijuana was easily available a few steps from the courthouse, the black people of West Chester continued to raise questions about equal treatment, and the kids on the ledges around the courthouse steps continued to symbolize all that menaced the traditional tranquillity of West Chester. The arrest of John Mervin for shooting Jonathan Henry caused some angry outbursts about just how far things had gone with the “hippies.” (Although motorcycle gangs have been known to break up peace demonstrations and harass flower children, West Chester citizens tend to bunch all oddly dressed people together as hippies.) Then, a few days after the arrest, Chief Frame held a press conference to announce that John Mervin was an undercover police officer, having been recruited from the Warlocks and secretly sworn in a couple of months before. The police arrested a dozen or so people, most of them from around the college, for having sold drugs to Mervin. Frame announced that thanks to Mervin’s efforts the police force had gained possession of forty-eight thousand dollars’ worth of dangerous drugs. Mervin, who appeared at the press conference in a neat business suit, said that the arrests resulting from his work would “nearly annihilate any drug distribution” in West Chester. The chief, without commenting on the details of the shootings, said Mervin had “handled himself in the best manner a police officer could” and would begin to work on regular police shifts. John Mervin became a hero.

  —

  After it was revealed that Mervin had been an undercover agent, The Philadelphia Inquirer decided that he was not merely a student but an honor student, as well as a former high school football star—a young man who, underneath that hippie disguise, had precisely the attributes any American parent would be proud of. In an Inquirer story headlined HIPPIE POLICEMAN LIVED IN DEGRADATION AND FEAR, Mervin said that the most difficult part of his assignment was not the physical danger but the frustration of not being able to tell his loved ones that he was actually a policeman. “They thought I had gotten into bad company,” he said. They were, of course, right: by his own account, Mervin had been in the Warlocks, a group that takes some pride in being considered just about the worst company in eastern Pennsylvania, for two years before anybody approached him about being a policeman. But the stories in the Philadelphia papers made it sound as if practically anything Mervin had ever done was part of the hippie disguise that he had manfully suffered under until he was at last able to throw it off, the drug traffic in West Chester having finally been annihilated. “His love of his motorcycle gained him admission into the Warlocks motorcycle gang two years ago,” the Inquirer piece said. “And that helped him in his disguise.” In a later piece, Philadelphia’s Evening Bulletin reported the assurance of Mervin’s contact man in the police department that Mervin was “always polite, never using elsewhere words and actions he had to use as a hippie drug purchaser and twilight world character.” Mervin told the Inquirer that his first action after his identity was revealed was to call his mother.

  Although the initial reaction in West Chester to Chief Frame’s announcement was overwhelming support of Mervin, the support was not unanimous. The October shooting outside the West Chester saloon had been investigated only perfunctorily by the West Chester police after Mervin was arraigned and released on bail. But the killing of Jonathan Henry had taken place in an apartment behind a restaurant-and-bar just outside West Chester, in the jurisdiction of the West Goshen Township police, who continued their investigation even after Chief Frame publicly expressed his confidence in Mervin’s innocence. The district attorney’s office made it clear that it was pursuing the murder charge, and eventually it even got a preliminary hearing held on the October shooting—a hearing that produced the testimony of a couple of witnesses that Mervin, after an argument at the bar, had shot his victim in the leg and then had stood over him and shot him in the back. Chief Frame hinted that the district attorney was sore at not having been informed in advance of Mervin’s mission and that the other law-enforcement agencies
in the county resented West Chester’s success in arresting drug dealers. Frame supported Mervin’s story that the October shooting had been in self-defense; after the man who had been shot in the back testified, the West Chester police arrested him, on a complaint by Officer Mervin.

  Some people familiar with the drug scene in West Chester scoffed at the notion that arresting some college kids for offenses such as selling Mervin a Chiclets box full of LSD tablets had had any effect on the drug traffic. The college crowd began to tell anyone who would listen that Mervin, far from being an honor student, had for a couple of years been a motorcycle tough who bragged about his violence—a bully who had merely redirected his bullying toward coercing people into selling him drugs. Some conversations among West Chester citizens were not about Mervin’s heroism but about why someone with his background was sworn in as a policeman and why he was allowed to continue after the first shooting and why he was getting such vigorous support from the police department. “I would like to know what line of duty Mervin was performing on both October 4 and November 19,” someone eventually wrote to the Daily Local News. “Or who has something on whom?”

  Black people in West Chester have the wariness that black people anywhere would have toward a policeman who shoots two people—in this case, two white people—within six weeks, and they have even more reason than most black people to be worried about having an armed former member of a motorcycle gang patrolling the town in a police car. Last Labor Day, during a demonstration in the Chester County town of Parkesburg, a prominent black leader named Harry Dickinson was shot to death, and three members of a motorcycle gang called the Pagans were among those accused (but not convicted) of his murder. No Warlocks had been named by Mervin as drug dealers; when the preliminary hearing on the October shooting was finally held, there were complaints that witnesses testifying against Mervin were intimidated not only by threats of arrest from the West Chester police but by the threat implied by the presence of six attentive Warlocks in the courtroom. Liberals in West Chester were concerned about what has developed in other parts of the country into a sort of alliance between the police and the motorcycle gangs, with the gangs almost in the role of police auxiliaries in the rougher dealings with peace demonstrators and black people and students. At a West Chester borough-council meeting not long after Chief Frame’s press conference, the only black councilman moved that, in line with the procedure followed elsewhere when a policeman is accused of a felony, Mervin be suspended until he was exonerated. The motion failed to get a second.

  Mervin continued to ride in a police car, carrying a gun, and he began to appear with Chief Frame around the county to lecture on the evils of drugs—explaining to service clubs and PTAs and high school assemblies that “popping a pill” meant taking a tablet and that “acid” meant LSD. The forty-eight thousand dollars’ worth of drugs that Mervin had captured—Frame’s estimate of the retail price of the drugs Mervin had purchased for twenty-two hundred dollars in borough funds—became fifty thousand dollars at some point in the lecture series. As time went on, it was quoted occasionally as a hundred and thirty-five thousand dollars. The kids around the courthouse steps began to put on mock drug-buying scenes for the benefit of passing citizens: “Hey, you got any grass to sell?” “No, but I hear there’s a guy down at the police station…”

  On January 26, a Chester County grand jury indicted Mervin for the murder of Jonathan Henry. West Chester had a new mayor by then, the first Democratic mayor in a century or so, and on the evening after the grand-jury decision he ruled that Mervin had been a special officer whose duties were at an end. There was angry reaction to both the indictment and the mayor’s ruling. A number of policemen staged a brief protest in which they handed in their guns—apparently symbolically, since they took them right back when Chief Frame told them to. The police started the John A. Mervin Defense Fund. A number of letters to the Daily Local News said that the borough was behaving shoddily by taking away the gun and the position of a man who had saved untold numbers of the community’s children from the perils of drugs and had since reported attempts on his life by the murderous elements who control the drug traffic. The borough council, overriding the mayor, voted to hire, and immediately suspend, Mervin as a regular rather than a special police officer—guaranteeing that a salary would be put aside for him while the cases were in court and that West Chester would have, among its other historical claims, the distinction of having hired as a policeman someone under indictment for two felonies, one of them murder. A few days later, Mervin reported that he had been shot in the thigh with a .22 while he lay watching television. The mayor felt compelled to write a letter to the Daily Local News stating that the decision to end Mervin’s service and take away his gun had been made with the approval of Chief Frame and in the best interests of Mervin as well as of the borough. “The futile debate which councilmen and the mayor engaged in on Wednesday night regarding Mervin’s pay fades into insignificance today in light of what occurred last night,” the Daily Local News editorialized the day after Mervin was shot. “What are a few hundred dollars compared to the life of a man who risked everything in order to smash a flourishing drug ring in West Chester?”

  “There are only two opinions in West Chester about Mervin,” a local reporter said when Mervin came to trial for murder this month. “Either he’s a trigger-happy thug who conned the cops or he’s a dedicated police officer.” People on both sides thought that public opinion was about evenly divided, the word of mouth against Mervin having partly undercut almost universally laudatory press notices. Some of Mervin’s most vocal support was judged to be based on a fear of drugs (“Drugs have become such a fearful thing people want to stop the problem and they don’t care how,” Devere Ponzo, head of Chester County’s Black Action Committee, has said. “If a couple of people get killed—tough”); some of it may have come from political considerations (it was thought that raising questions might have been insulting not only to the chief of police but to the Republican establishment that supported him); some of it was undoubtedly a matter of ideology (one group that backed the John A. Mervin Defense Fund—the Association of Alert Citizens, a group that grew out of an anti-sex-education organization called Taxpayers for Decency—based its support partly on the ground that, in the words of one of its spokesmen, “we support the police—period”). But a lot of the talk about the Mervin case in West Chester emphasizes, aside from any political or ideological or antidrug feeling, how much people want to believe in John Mervin. Some people in Chester County (and in the newsrooms of Philadelphia newspapers) seem to have fastened on the Mervin case as a belated sign that the threatening and inexplicable manifestations of the youth culture are not true after all—that the long-haired, arrogant-looking kids around the courthouse steps might also throw off their disguises and reveal themselves to be honor students and former high school football stars and battlers against the deadly menace of drugs, that other mothers who are worried about their children’s having fallen in with bad company might be told, as John Mervin’s mother was told, that it was all an illusion. As the pool of jurors—most of them middle-aged or elderly people, virtually all of them white—walked into the courthouse on the first day of Mervin’s trial, one of the usual “hippies,” a thin young man with long hair, sat cross-legged on the ledge next to the courthouse steps. He stared at them with a slight smile, occasionally taking a swig of orange juice out of a quart bottle. When any of the jurors being examined said that he already had a firm opinion about the case, both the assistant district attorney and the defense lawyer assumed the opinion was that John Mervin was innocent.

  —

  The John Mervin who appeared at the trial was clean-shaven and dressed in summer-weight Ivy League clothes—a baby-faced, somewhat stout young man who answered his elders with polite “Yes, sirs” and “No, sirs.” It would have taken an extraordinary leap of imagination to envision him as a hoodlum biker, dressed in a greasy Warlock jacket, swinging a chain—except, of
course, to the extent that he had to wear a costume in the line of duty. (When Mervin testified that he had joined the Warlocks two and a half years before, his attorney said, “Were you engaged in any other activities that made you valuable as a police officer?”) Mervin testified that after being recruited by Chief Frame he had let his clothing and hair become unkempt and had started attending psychedelic and exotic parties. Trying to show that Mervin had not had to play any role to be accepted in local lowlife, the assistant district attorney asked him if it wasn’t true that as an undercover man he wore the same clothing he had worn as a private citizen, merely allowing it to get a bit dirtier. Mervin looked offended. “I’ve always been clean,” he said. According to Mervin, Jonathan Henry had been shot as he was about to shoot a West Chester State student named Jeffrey Saltzman, whom Henry suspected of being an undercover policeman—a scene precisely like those conjured up by Chief Frame’s statements that as an undercover man Mervin had constantly risked his life in “this drug jungle.” Saltzman, who happens to be the son of the mayor of the tough Delaware River town Marcus Hook and the nephew of a West Chester policeman, appeared as a defense witness to corroborate the story. He turned out to be a husky, collegiately dressed young man who also said “Yes, sir” and “No, sir.” When the assistant district attorney, trying to argue that Saltzman had been a prospect for membership in the Warlocks, asked him why he had had one of his ears pierced, people in the courtroom looked flabbergasted—as if someone had, for reasons too bizarre to contemplate, asked Saltzman why he had begun talking to his friends in Urdu or why he had taken up the lute.

  The witnesses against Mervin made no claim to being the type of people West Chester parents would be proud of. A West Chester State student testified that he had found Mervin’s Warlock jacket in his front yard, and that Mervin, saying that Jonathan Henry had worn the jacket while assaulting a girl, had sworn vengeance. The student had long hair and a mustache; the only question he was asked by the defense attorney was one eliciting the admission that he knew some of the people against whom Mervin had brought charges of dealing in drugs. The fourth person present at the scene of the shooting—Eugene Moran, the tenant of the apartment where the shooting took place—testified that Mervin, with Saltzman’s acquiescence, had shot Henry in cold blood; the assistant district attorney argued that the bullet angles supported Moran’s story and made the Mervin-Saltzman version physically impossible. But Moran also admitted having told the grand jury that he remembered nothing about the crime; he said he had been threatened by Mervin and Saltzman and was terrified of talking. Moran, a thin man in his thirties who was wearing a suit that seemed too large, had been to college and was said to be fond of discussing philosophy—although on the night in question he happened to be speechless from overconsumption of Southern Comfort and water. He didn’t look in the least collegiate.