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.

Souvenir

The percentage of Canadian dimes in the New York State tollway machines in the Buffalo area was higher than the percentage of Canadian dimes in people's pockets, so the tollway people knew that people were using Canadian dimes deliberately, trying to rob the tollway of the .8 cents difference in their value. So they figured out how to make the machines know the difference between American dimes and Canadian dimes, and they upgraded the machines.

Bob Armbuster, a successful businessman who traveled to Canada a lot, was one of those people who had been using Canadian dimes in the machines. But Bob also traveled to Brazil a lot, and discovered that the new machines still couldn't tell a Brazilian dime from an American dime. Actually the Brazilian coin wasn't really a dime, but it looked like a dime and was the exact same size; when he used one, he saved 6.7 cents, a more sizable reward.

He smuggled dimes into the country in a hollowed-out statue of the Christ the Redeemer of Rio de Janiero; on one of his trips, he asked around about where he could find a hollow statue, and kept asking until he got just the right one. The coins fit in there easily without weighing too much. Once in customs, however, they actually opened it up, and he simply explained that he liked the coins and brought a whole bunch of them back for the little children in the classes he visited; they bought the story and let him bring them in. Once in the country, he'd use Brazilian coins in place of dimes at every toll machine and actually enjoyed going through the toll machine, knowing that he had something over on the toll association.

At the Buffalo Sabres hockey game it was common practice for irate fans to throw dimes on the rink when they were mad about a referee's call or they wanted to heckle an opponent's goalie. The dimes would melt the ice and become a hazard until the zamboni operator dealt with them; at that time they still didn't use cameras to figure out who was actually throwing them, but obviously the dime-throwers weren't the favorite fans of the team, the stadium, or the zamboni operators. Bob started throwing the Brazilian dimes, figuring that he was not only wreaking havoc on the team and its rink, but he was saving 3.7 cents with every throw. He was aware that he was probably giving Brazil and Brazilians a bad name in the Sabres' stadium, but he didn't care. He kept the dimes in a different pocket from the rest of his money and only used them when he needed them.

One time, though, he was getting a sausage and a coke and was short forty cents on a $5.40 bill; he accidentally pulled out the dimes from the wrong pocket and counted them out. Maybe the cashier saw the look on his face when he realized that he had the Brazilian dimes, because it drew her attention to the dimes and she looked at them, and sure enough noticed that they weren't American dimes; they weren't even Canadian ones, which were fairly common and usually accepted in such circumstances. She called her boss over and said, "Do we accept these?" innocently, and he, after observing them for a minute, said, "Hey, these are Brazilian coins!" in horror, as if they had been looking for the perpetrator of the Brazilian-coin crimes for months. In a panic Bob turned and fled, left his sausage and his coke, and left without even his five dollars; he missed the rest of that hockey game and a few others also, and that turned out to be a pity because the Sabres were at that moment doing a little better and actually winning a few games.

After that he rethought his strategy a little, and used them less often. He was aware that they had installed cameras at places like the sausage vendor's window and the toll machines, and assumed these cameras were there to catch scofflaws like him; after all, how many Buffalonians went to Brazil regularly? So he waited to use his remaining Brazilian coins, until he was at the machines on the other side of town, or he was buying cigarettes downtown; he made a point to be a little less predictable. But eventually the problem solved itself; he ran out of them, and his company stopped sending him to Brazil altogether, making him unable to get more. He was left with only the statuette, as a kind of souvenir.

Buckville

O'Grady was the main policeman, the only one, in Buckville on Tuesday night. The night before his fiftieth birthday, before he went to work, at about 9 PM, he noticed that his '65 Corvette was missing, and this disturbed him considerably, but both his wife and his son knew how to get it and take it out of the garage, so he thought he'd check with them before he reported it stolen. At work, there was only the dispatcher, Corky, and a bunch of routine work to do besides the usual patrols and response to calls.

At about 1:50 AM he found himself as usual waiting in the alley between Main and Elm for Joe's bar, at the corner of Main and 1st, to let out at 2. This was his usual activity. Joe's had a regular clientele that included members of a motorcycle gang, and a bunch of people he'd known for years, including one guy named Winslow, who was there tonight; he had actually graduated from high school with Winslow, but Winslow had been much more of a rebel; Winslow had a Harley, hung around with the motorcycle gang, drank hard, and drove that cycle around town making noise, not wearing a helmet, and smoking a cigarette, while driving, a kind of flagrant way of saying he didn't care about anybody's rules.

Winslow was a kind of hardened guy, a rebel, but he had the money to drink, and lots of evenings, he would start at about 8 or 9 and go right up until 2 AM. There was really only one place, Joe's Bar. He was well aware that O'Grady would be waiting outside that bar at 2 AM waiting for any drunk to drive away, so he could pull them over, hit them with DUI, a huge fine, loss of license, a few days in the slammer. It was well known around the bar that walking out of the bar drunk at 2 AM was a dangerous activity; one guy, Smith, once walked out to his car, but then just basically sat there waiting O'Grady out. Smith didn't have the luxury of not driving; he lived out in the country. It wasn't the eight mile walk that bothered him, it was being without a car when he got there. So he'd just waited. When O'Grady finally pounded on his window, he rolled it down and asked him if it was a crime to sit in your car for a while on a city street. Other people made a habit of parking six or seven blocks away so that O'Grady would be nowhere near them when they finally got into their car. But Winslow was dismissive of this kind of game.

Back to this Tuesday night: Winslow got out of the bar at 2 AM sharp, got on his motorcycle, and drove it out on 1st Street right in front of O'Grady, who was in the alley, in his patrol car; as he crossed the alley, he gave a disparaging look in O'Grady's direction which might just as well have been giving him the finger, and O'Grady set out in pursuit, siren on. A small group of people were standing outside of Joe's as he drove past, siren on, and he was disturbed that their reaction was slightly different from usual; he couldn't quite place his finger on it. They couldn't have been surprised to see him chasing Winslow; maybe they were wondering whether it was legal to chase after a guy, just basically for knowing he was probably drunk.

Winslow turned left quickly in the alley between Main and Washington, just a half a block on the other side of Main there just past Joe's. But when O'Grady turned left behind him, in pursuit, he was distressed to find some dumpsters had been moved out from their usual spots behind the Chinese restaurant and another one further up the block, behind the insurance place. A motorcycle could pass through, but a police car couldn't. He was enraged at Winslow, but he did what he had to; he backed up, went over to Washington, and, siren still on, sped up Washington still listening for the sound of Winslow's Harley.

About ten blocks up he cut back over to find whether Winslow was still in the alley or had gone back over to Main. There was a convenience store there on 10th and, much to his surprise, Winslow stood there, next to his Harley, smiling. That's right, he was smiling. I'll get you, O'Grady thought, evading a police officer, shooting down the alley, waking up the whole town at 2 AM, I'll wipe that smile off your face.

But Winslow, smirking and laughing a little, submitted to a sobriety test and passed it; he wasn't drunk at all. O'Grady wondered for a minute if somebody had messed with his measurement system but, in fact, Winslow even appeared sober. There was not even a trace of alcohol on his breath.

They stood there in the convenience store parking lot, under the pallid light of the overhead parking lot lights, and this was the first O'Grady began to suspect something was amiss. Winslow, sober? It didn't make sense. From 8 until 2, and he hadn't drunk even a beer? Something was wrong here. In his mind for some reason he was thinking about the '65 Corvette, but that didn't make sense either; how could they be connected? What could be going on here? At that moment, he and Winslow were suspended in time, Winslow with a smirk on his face, knowing something he wasn't telling, and O'Grady, ready to release him reluctantly, about to tell him that he would get him sometime, give him what he deserved, as soon as he could, but deciding against saying anything imprudent.

At that moment Joe Foster came out of the convenience store, and laid into Winslow for owing him money. With this development O'Grady backed off a little and just watched. He tried to remind himself that he was a policeman on duty and nobody had committed a crime here. On the other hand, they were also three high school classmates, meeting by chance in the parking lot; Joe Foster had become a lawyer locally, and also was a hunter of whom many bizarre stories were told. But, this evening, it was all about the money, and Joe and Winslow went back and forth, back and forth. The thirteen-year locusts made a shrill squeak in the background; all else was quiet; it was, after all, about 2:30. The discussion went on for about a half hour, extended by complications, until O'Grady was called away on a call from Corky that had originated with the widow Swalley.

The widow Swalley lived beyond the convenience store, but needed a ride to the hospital, which was near the convenience store, and let him know very directly that she had very little business with the police in general, but was still mad when that young guy Kowalski had been hired and had ticketed about sixty cars throughout town for violating an ordinance by parking facing the wrong way. People had done that for so many years that nobody considered it illegal, and they went down to the police station in large groups protesting loudly that they had all gotten tickets; the police eventually had to withdraw them. Mrs. Swalley had been ticketed in this particular incident and hadn't forgotten it even a little, but she thanked him for the ride as she exited at the hospital.

To make a long story short, O'Grady didn't arrive back at the station until his shift was over at 7, and when he got there, much to his surprise, there was his '65 Corvette, tucked in the lobby of the police station. Some guys had taken it entirely apart and put it back together inside the lobby where it couldn't be driven, but had to be walked around, and where its redness reflected every wanted poster on the wall. He was flabbergasted. This was some birthday present!

Winslow was there, but only for a short while; Corky, who was obviously in on the prank, was there longest and laughed hardest. He recognized a bunch of people from Joe's bar, although it was 7 in the morning and some of them would have had to work hard to be up at that hour. A group of guys had done it, all in league with each other, and with his son's cooperation; all kinds of people were in on it, even Joe Foster and the widow Swalley, whose role was basically to stall him and keep him away from the place for a while.

You would think this would be a kind of tribute to a small-town guy like O'Grady, but the fact was that the people of the town, particularly the Joe's bar crowd, were kind of mad at him, mostly for hanging around near the bar at 2 every morning, harassing the regulars, and things worked out so that having his Corvette jammed in the lobby of the police station was more of a major inconvenience than a tribute to a well-loved citizen. Winslow, who left for a Great Lakes ship the following day, was blamed for virtually everything, and was everyone's excuse for not helping O'Grady undo the problem. It was Winslow, after all, who knew who had done the work and how to undo it, and it took O'Grady a long time to figure out how to have the car removed and put back where it belonged. Some of the mechanics at Floyd's garage were key figures, but they were much more willing to do a favor for Winslow than for O'Grady, and it took O'Grady weeks of pleading and doing favors for them to get them to take it apart again and reassemble it in O'Grady's garage. Fortunately it was a Corvette, and was small, but even a Corvette is heavy and can't exactly be carried around by hand. And in the intervening time, when the police chief started getting angry, and everyone made comments about how the police station lobby looked like the local mall, and asked whether it was for sale, and some young punk ran his key along the door on his way to being arrested or whatever. By the time the experience was over, in the beginning of October sometime, O'Grady was thoroughly exasperated and ready to arrest everyone he'd considered responsible. He'd now be unable to drive that car around, without people telling that story.