The Other Cheek

When Abel Beck's pickup went over a small cliff within the city limits of Cincinnati, killing him, authorities assumed that he'd been run off the road by someone from the Martin clan and immediately checked the pickup for signs that another vehicle was involved. Sure enough, his blue pickup had signs of being scraped and bumped by something red, but they would have to wait for the labs to find out for sure; that scraping could have been done well before the accident.

Nevertheless, the Martins and the Becks were like the Hatfields and McCoys in many ways, and one of those ways was that everyone assumed that one family was responsible for any calamity that happened to the other. It was assumed to be murder, and it was assumed to be done by a Martin, and therefore it was only a matter of time before suspicion centered on one Arlen Martin, a junkyard operator who lived alone and was about 26. He was perhaps one of the more visible of the Martin cousins, who were spread out around town, including the countryside and Kentucky and southern Ohio, and included lots of other people who weren't specifically named Martin. Arlen, however, denied it strongly, and even said that he had renounced the killing involved in the Martin-Beck feud. There was no question that the Becks were responsible for the death of Cassie Martin six months ago, he said, and that one of them deserved to die for it, but he, Arlen, would not be the one to do the killing, because he didn't do such things, and, he said, you can check every red car or truck in his junkyard, if you wanted to, for the evidence. His brazen challenge sounded authentic to Dale Green, the first investigator, who eyed all the red cars in the lot and noticed that most of them had rusted into a condition that could no longer be considered "red" as the term was known anyway. Arlen Martin did not have an alibi for the Friday night in question, but that also wasn't unusual, who did? Pick any time, any day of the week, and he probably didn't have a good alibi for that either. He was the kind of guy who filled one cheek with tobacco, and left it there for hours, and practically growled out of the other cheek (I'd interviewed him before) – but, as it turned out, he didn't seem to be lying.

Cassie Martin had been brutally killed and dumped in the river, but she was part of a shady drug deal that involved a lot of people, outsiders, people from the coast, and they couldn't find a Beck directly involved in that either; in addition, at the point of her murder there hadn't been a Beck-Martin murder for many months or even years before that. Authorities were frustrated that such a prominent murder could go unsolved, but in drug cases there were a lot of possible enemies and when the body was in the river there was less for clues, and, some of the key players in the investigation had such a bad attitude about the whole Martin-Beck feud that it seemed they'd begun to turn their backs on serious investigation just as a matter of course. This only showed how time and patterns of perception came to be more important than the facts of what actually happened, in many cases like these; I'm sure it was true of Hatfields and McCoys also.

Back to Abel's truck: since drugs were found both in the truck and in Abel's house, Abel was assumed to be part of the drug trade, which meant that he associated with a wider and worse group of people, and that there were lots more suspects than just your worst or nearest Martin. But he was a quiet kind of guy, mostly cut timber on Beck land out by the ancient serpent mound, and had no ring of enemies like you'd suspect of a more serious druggie. Authorities were about to drop this investigation also; one said, what are we going to do, check every red car or truck in Cincinnati? But, one day, a deputy was going past Arlen's junkyard early in the morning, around 5 am, and saw a red truck driving through it, and coming out of it, in the bed of the truck were personal belongings, like clothes, a dresser, a table. A woman was driving it, a woman who was a little disturbed at being seen. On checking what he had seen of the license plate, they learned that this could have been Marcie Beck Johnson, a cousin of Abel Beck who had married and divorced several times but was only 23. They considered hauling her in for questioning, but had nothing to go on, no reason to haul her in, aside from driving a red truck.

This was where I entered the case, as an investigator, when Dale Green bowed out of the case for reasons that weren't clear to me at first. The first thing that surprised me was how easily and quickly everyone around me seemed to have given up; as I said, the worst thing about these family feuds is that everyone begins to assume that they are inevitable and that nothing we can do can stop them from perpetual killing. I, on the contrary, believed that if we could quickly and decisively convince both sides that it was a vicious cycle, that in killing everyone loses, then we would have more people like Arlen Martin, who renounced the killing and went on with their lives. I was determined to catch the killer if there was one. To that end I sought out Marcie Beck Johnson and popped in for a visit. I was mystified that a Beck of any kind would be in a Martin junkyard, and wondered what she was doing with clothes and personal effects at 5 am. But most of all I wanted a look at that truck.

She lived in a tumble-down ranch in the middle of the city, no red truck in sight, kind of a dump, no evidence of children around, but lots of beer, ashtrays, etc. She was kind of pretty, but what you would call a hostile witness, not pleased to be interviewed, not happy about entertaining an investigator. When I identified the red truck and its license plate, that she had been seen in on a certain Tuesday morning, she said that the truck belonged to her ex-husband, Vern Johnson, who lent it to her occasionally, but she dodged the question of where she was moving clothes and personal effects on that morning, and why exactly she, a Beck, might have been in a Martin junkyard. She denied ever even being there, red truck or not. She didn't know anything about a Martin junkyard.

Being a Beck, she was pretty sure that a Martin was responsible for the death of Abel Beck, a distant cousin of hers, but had nothing to say about the death of Cassie Martin, who, she said, probably deserved whatever she got. She said these things mechanically though, almost confused, as if it were the party line but she didn't quite believe it. She did mention that her ex-husband Vern had apparently dumped her, a Beck, and taken up with a Martin, specifically Arlen's older sister Arianna, who could have been the one in the truck.on that Tuesday morning, she said. By taking up with a Martin now, Vern was officially a traitor and universally hated in the Beck camp, but, she said, she still got along with him ok. This was about all the information she was going to give out, so I left.

So now I had at least three people who could have been driving the truck on the night of the murder, and I thought I'd make sure the paint of the truck matched the paint that was found on Abel Beck's truck; this required a trip to yet another junkyard, and now to a driveway outside Vern Johnson's place, which was in the city, yet backed up against some woods that looked very dark and foreboding. By now it was early evening, and I got out my flashlight and started poking around. Vern Johnson came out and confronted me immediately, shotgun in hand. I showed him my badge and asked him if I could ask a few questions. He insisted on a lawyer; the hair stood up on the back of his head, and he was taking short quick breaths that had a kind of whiskey-soaked odor about them.

I made a split-second decision to go after him, and told him that I could tie his truck exactly to the murder of Abel Beck, but that I also suspected him in the murder of Cassie Martin, since he was on the Beck side at the time of the Martin murder but on the Martin side at the time of the Beck murder. I wasn't sure of this, and wasn't sure of the truck either, any old red truck could have done it, but it just seemed that pushing around a whiskey-drunk old guy with hostile questions was going to get me more than standing around being polite and letting him become more hostile first. To tell you the truth, I was ready for all kinds of trouble, but I had very little to lose; if he was guilty, my gun was easier to handle than his, but if he was innocent, he would surely just show me the truck.

Being a northerner, I already felt like I was deep in the twisted ravines of Appalachia, down south here where it's hilly and the trees reach in and choke you when you're trying to think. It was hard not to superimpose my feelings and all my experience with these family feuds on this kind of situation. I occasionally thought of an argument I'd heard in the police station a couple of weeks earlier, where one cop mentioned a study they did where they took subjects, asked them to walk to the back of a room, and had somebody trip them, and saw if they would exact revenge or not; how many would get the guy back? In Appalachia, most would, one cop said; it was an old rural Scot thing, there's no such thing as turning the other cheek, or you'd lose all your sheep. Revenge was normal, expected, necessary, under this thinking, he said, but at this point another cop, a guy named Floyd, also Appalachian, I believe, got offended and and thought it was a slur against all the mountain people, of whom Cincinnati had plenty. You ran into that conflict occasionally as mountain folks often figured the rest of us were looking down on them; that wasn't it. We were just trying to get to the bottom of the Cassie Martin murder, and were wondering what were the odds that it was a Beck, who did it just because he or she was a Beck, or some drug-soaked low-life who killed her for cocaine, or this Vern guy, who apparently dumped a Beck for a Martin and probably could have killed either one, just to impress one or the other of his loves.

So I'm yelling at him, telling him I'm tired of his lame excuses already and I'll get a warrant on his truck because I believe it ran Abel Beck down into the ravine, and furthermore I believe he'd hang for the murder of both Cassie Martin and Abel Beck, and sure enough, he backed off a little and let me look at the truck. When I matched it to my memory of Beck's blue truck, I found myself convinced that this was the guilty vehicle, but lab tests would have to confirm it. Johnson, however, now looked a little scared, and was not behaving as I'd expect a true murderer to behave. And finally, with a little pushing, he told me everything he knew: that Marcie had run off with Arlen Martin, presumably to get back at him for his slipping out with Arlen's sister Arianna, but had fallen for Arlen, quite unexpectedly, and this was a surprise development, since she was a Beck and he was a Martin. Now in danger of their relationship becoming public, Marcie had moved out from his shack also (that explained the clothes and the odd time); he wasn't sure where she'd gone; he no longer kept track of her, but, and he confirmed what she'd said here, they got along well enough so that he could lend her his truck in the process. On the night of Abel Beck's murder he was right here, drinking whiskey, and didn't know who had his truck; sure it could have been involved, but all kinds of people borrow it, not only Martins.

So I'm hot on the trail of whoever was driving this red truck; it seemed like somebody had bashed Abel Beck's truck on the front left with the front right of a red truck, probably this one, and it only seemed natural that it would be a Martin here, or someone who had it in for the Beck clan in some way or the other. Back at the police station, in the ancient coffee room with its run down filing cabinets and sawed-off pencils, I got into it again with old Floyd and a couple of the other guys. We're all cops; we know killing is wrong; we're against killing. Sure, they said, Christianity says you're supposed to turn the other cheek. But if someone killed your mother or your brother, you'd kill them back, wouldn't you? Or kill one of theirs? Revenge is a natural thing. And so, Floyd says, you can't blame these guys if their definition of family is a bit wider than ours.

In fact the investigation got murkier as it went on. A visit to Arianna turned up an alarming development: she'd sworn she was in the red truck, and had bashed a blue truck just like Abel Beck's, about a week before Abel's death. Abel's truck had been in the McDonald's drive-through and there were three people in it at the time, one of them Marcie, and she didn't recognize the other two; it seemed neither was Abel, given a picture, but both were likely Becks. So these people were harassing her, she said, and she finally let them have it, and smacked their truck right in the front. The odd thing was, her story was corroborated, not only by Marcie, who had forgotten most of the details and particularly the truck, but admitted to the harassment, and by a McDonald's employee also, and I ended up believing it. Arianna also admitted to dating Dale Green, at one point, long ago, which explained why I'd gotten the case. And she also renounced the killings, but, being a Martin, was sure that the Beck's were guilty, particularly in the murder of Cassie.

I'd gotten no closer to solving any murder though, and if anything was more convinced that at least Abel's death was suicide, or perhaps just blind coincidence. Sometimes these feuds are invented by the rest of us, someone had said, and you have to watch that you don't miss some little clues, just in the process of assuming the other clan was responsible for someone who might just as well have died, entirely on their own. In any case, the clan war between the Martins and the Becks had cost people their loves, if not their lives, and that was bad enough, There was no reason to dwell on it; there were too many other cases. I left Cincinnati soon after, glad to be rid of this one; I couldn't seem to solve it, or even resolve the questions it brought up.