Helen Read online

  So there it was, and it was connected to the old building by an air-conditioned tunnel, and everyone said that this portended desert cities of the future, contained under glass and totally air-conditioned. Progress is a rewarding thing, no doubt, which was in my thoughts as I walked through to the old building; but when I sat down with Billy Cominsky, our chief of police, he complained bitterly that if our state had any real sense of progress we would have done away with hanging years ago. “And not for the electric chair,” he said. “Jesus God, that is exactly the kind of thing that takes a man’s appetite away. Give me a gas chamber—clean, decent and civilized. I mean, I don’t want you to feel, Blake, that Charlie wants you to give this bitch a clean bill of health and let her walk out of here. Nothing is further from the thoughts of any of us. If she is sprung out of the murder-one rap, we got enough to lock her up and throw the key away, prostitution, soliciting, larceny large and small and half a dozen other complaints—”

  “Any of them real?”

  “Ha ha—sure some of them are real. But on the other hand, it will be no skin off your back if she hangs. Sure it is lousy public relations to hang a woman, but it’s been done and it’s going to be done again. Nobody is going to say that Blake Eddyman let them down, and if you want to know what people will say, they will say that bitch murdered Alex Knowton in cold blood and she deserves to hang, and Blake Eddyman was smart enough to put up a good, solid defense so nobody can’t say that we railroaded a woman onto the gallows. So the way I look at it, Blake, you don’t lose, no matter what happens.”

  “You knew Judge Knowton, didn’t you, Billy?” I asked him.

  “I knew him. But I am not making her out to be any public benefactor. You got rock bottom when a lousy hooker can do that to a man of public stature. On the other hand—”

  I waited.

  “No—nothing.”

  “On the other hand, what?”

  “Nothing,” he said, beginning to evidence a certain amount of annoyance. “Nothing. The hell with it. Go see her. She’s your client. I’m just a cop.”

  “Who was the arresting officer?”

  “You haven’t seen your client yet.”

  “Let me do it my own way, will you, Billy—please? I don’t want to rub you the wrong way, God knows. But I would like to talk with the arresting officer. I wasn’t even in town when this happened—”

  “All right. Johnny Capehart.”

  “Where is he?”

  “If he hasn’t checked out yet, upstairs in the rec room.”

  I suppose that in every town in America there is someone like Johnny Capehart—who is almost entirely defined because he was never John but always Johnny and he grows up to be a cop. As a kid, he is nice to everybody because he is afraid of everybody, and when he grows up he still has the habit of being nice but he becomes a cop. Mostly, he looks like Johnny Capehart, tall, loose-limbed, light-haired and not stupid and not bright—respectful of those to whom he should be respectful and a lot more decent than you expect a cop to be; except when he blows out the stops, and then his decency goes away. Johnny Capehart was in his middle thirties, and as a cop in San Verdo, he was good for ten thousand dollars a year of take without ever pushing for it. He also had a base pay of six thousand a year, so he was luckier than most cops.

  I found him up in the rec room, drinking a Coca-Cola and clipping his fingernails. He went on duty at ten-thirty, so we had twenty minutes to talk. I introduced myself to him and told him what I was there for. His first reaction was to brush it off, and he said to me that I was wasting my time talking to him, because there was nothing he could tell me that would do me any good.

  “Why don’t you let me decide that, Johnny?” I said good-naturedly.

  “Look, Mr. Eddyman, I know that you’re a friend of Mr. Anderson, and I know that Chief Cominsky would not have sent you up here if you weren’t important, but I am telling absolutely the gospel truth. So I was the arresting officer—so what can I tell you except that I made the arrest?”

  “Maybe, Johnny, you can tell me why everyone gets cagey and with a real case of the cutes when we get onto Miss Helen Pilasky?”

  “I don’t know what you mean, Mr. Eddyman.”

  “No?”

  “Look, Mr. Eddyman—I’ll take you to her cell, if you want me to. That’s the easiest way. You talk to her yourself.”

  “Suppose you leave that to me, in my own good time.”

  He stopped cleaning his fingernails, and he sucked at the Coke bottle and sulked.

  “Johnny, was that the first time you ever saw her?”

  “Pilasky?”

  “Pilasky.”

  “No.”

  It was like pulling teeth, and I pretended to get a little angry and pointed out that he was doing himself no good, not with me and not with people like Chief Cominsky and Charlie Anderson, who mattered a lot more than I did.

  “All right,” he nodded. “I don’t need to make enemies. As sure as hell, Mr. Eddyman, I don’t want you to think I am deliberately standing in your way.”

  “I don’t think that. I think there is something about this broad.”

  “You ever seen her?” he asked me.

  “No.”

  “There is something about her,” he agreed. “You’re right—I saw her before. There is something about her.” Then he told me, and it turned out that as far as he knew, he was the first man in San Verdo who ever saw her.

  That was on a Friday, the eighth of May in 1964, about seven months ago. He was driving highway patrol in a single-man prowl car, and he saw her on Route 147 on the Silver Plate, which is about nine miles east of San Verdo. The Silver Plate got its name because from the air it looks something like a silver platter, being a five-mile-in-diameter, flat, circular piece of the desert that is composed of white sand and soda or something of that sort. From the ground it blends into the surrounding desert, glares in the sun, smells caustic and hurts your eyes; from the air, as I said, it has more or less of a circular shape. Route 147 bisects it. By May, the desert is heating up very substantially, and the Silver Plate retains the heat. To try to walk on it is disastrous, and the best thing to do if your car breaks down is to sit in your car and to wait for help from the highway patrol or some passing motorist. But nobody walks across the Silver Plate, and I have heard that in the old days some were trapped there and some died there.

  Well, Johnny Capehart was driving on 147 when he saw Helen Pilasky standing at the edge of the road. He pulled over alongside of her, and he saw that she wasn’t even looking at him or waiting for him, but standing with her back to him and staring out across the desert.

  (“You mean she didn’t hear the car?”

  “No, sir. Nothing wrong with her hearing.”

  “She didn’t care?”

  “Well, something like that.”

  “Was it hot?”

  “Just as hot as hell, the way it does on that lousy salt flat. Maybe one hundred and five in the sun. It was only May—not yet real summer heat.”

  “What do you mean, something like that?”

  “I mean I just don’t know,” Johnny Capehart said. “I don’t know that she cared that I was there or not or she was there or not or if I picked her up or not.”

  “How did she look—I mean, her clothes—you know, was she roughed up or anything like that?”

  “No. She was wearing a print shirtwaist dress, sandals, no hat, like she had stepped out of her house into her own back yard—”)

  Johnny Capehart parked on the side of the road, got out of his car, walked around and said, “Are you in some kind of trouble, miss?” It was a lame kind of thing to say to a girl who was standing in the desert and ignoring him, but he couldn’t think of anything else. She did not seem to be hurt or disturbed or frightened or bothered in any way. But when he spoke to her, she turned and faced him, and that was the first time he knew what Helen Pilasky looked like. He had an impression of a beautiful woman, but not overwhelmingly beautiful at first, the
way we talk about beauty. He made a point of the fact that his sense of her beauty increased each time he looked at her. What he remembered most from his first impression of her was the placidity of her face. Not that he used that word. He said things to describe a sense of repose, contentment, assurance—or maybe only a cowlike indifference. He could not be sure.

  She turned to him but said nothing.

  “I’ll be glad to give you a lift into San Verdo,” Johnny said.

  “San Verdo?”

  “The city.”

  “What city?”

  “San Verdo. Nine miles from here, down this road. Don’t you know that?”

  “Should I? Am I supposed to know that?”

  Her comments were like that, tangential and often non sequiturs, and Johnny had the initial impression that she spoke with some sort of foreign accent. But that impression went away after a while. She said that someone had given her a lift, and when they came to the salt flat, she made him stop the car and let her out, because she wanted to look at the salt flat.

  “You wanted to look?” Johnny asked her.

  “Yes.”

  “Why? What is there to look at?”

  “If you don’t know, how can I tell you?”

  (“You ever seen anyone on heroin?” Capehart asked me.

  “Why?”

  “They live on a high, and it detaches them. It’s what the doctors call intense euphoria, and there’s not one damn thing in the whole world that they want or care about.”

  “Is that what she was, a heroin addict?”

  “No,” Capehart answered slowly, “no, she wasn’t. Her arms were clean. She wore this short-sleeved dress, and right away I seen that her arms were clean.”

  “Maybe she took it by mouth.”

  “You can’t take heroin by mouth.”

  “How about cocaine?”

  “No—no, there’s nothing else but heroin makes them like that. Anyway, she’s been sitting in a cell now, hasn’t she? I don’t hear any stories about her busting a gut over withdrawal. She’s not an addict.”

  “Then what’s all this about heroin?”

  “That’s what I thought. I had to think something, didn’t I?”

  “I suppose you did,” I agreed.)

  Nevertheless, he talked her into getting into the car with him, and he drove her into San Verdo, where he dropped her on Commerce Street. And from that, he skipped over to when he had arrested her a few weeks ago for the murder of Judge Knowton.

  (“Wait a minute, Johnny,” I said to him.

  “What?”

  “Do I have to tell you that whatever I say goes no further? Do I have to start pulling teeth?”

  “I don’t know what you mean, Mr. Eddyman.”

  “You picked her up, you dropped her down. Nothing else—nothing said, nothing done.”

  “I swear I don’t know what you want, Mr. Eddyman.”

  “I want to know about this dame. Did you make a pass at her?”

  “What difference—?”

  “Let me decide.”

  “So I made a pass at her.”

  “Is that routine with every girl you pick up, Johnny?”

  “You know goddamn well it is not!” he replied, loud enough to attract the attention of every other cop in the rec room; and then dropping his voice, he went on, “Don’t make a cheap lecher out of me, Mr. Eddyman. Maybe I don’t want you for an enemy; you don’t want me for one. Nothing ever happened in my car. Just look at my record if you don’t believe me. I’m a family man. I got my own kids. But someone puts candy in your mouth, you don’t spit it out. You know a little about dames yourself, don’t you?”

  “Maybe a little.”

  “So you try, and you try like a gentleman. You don’t make a pass unless it’s asked for. And you haven’t seen this Helen Pilasky yet.”

  “No, I haven’t seen her yet.”)

  What happened—and there was no reason to doubt him then—was that she sat down in the car and her dress was rumpled back over one knee and part of the thigh and she made no move to adjust it, and he let the back of his hand brush against the exposed flesh. I suppose that kind of thing was second nature to a guy like Johnny Capehart. He was a big, handsome man, and his comparison to candy in the mouth was apt enough. If she had pulled away even slightly and then drawn the dress down to cover her thigh, he would have dropped it right there. In one way or another, I have done the same thing myself often enough, and it’s a part of a game. But she didn’t draw away, and he touched her again, and still she didn’t draw away from him, only turned her head to look at him with a pair of cool and level blue eyes.

  He said that no one had ever looked at him in just that way before, but he could not describe what that way was. There was no censure or hostility in the look, and he put his palm against her knee. Still no reaction except that she continued to look at him, and he made the point here about how her beauty grew on him. Then he moved his hand up her thigh. Still no reaction. His hand moved on, pushing the dress back. First he had thought about sitting there on Route 147, a two-lane concrete road, his car parked on the right-hand lane because the shoulder was apt to be tricky, and how sooner or later a car would pull up behind him or alongside of him; but as his hand moved, he realized that she was naked under the little shirtwaist dress, and suddenly he began to sweat and tremble all over, and he knew that he was on the edge of what he was going to do, and he would have been over the edge if she hadn’t said:

  “Why are you doing that? Does it give you pleasure?”

  It pricked the bubble of his heat. He was wet and sweating, and he thought that maybe he was afraid but he could think of no reason why he should be afraid; but when passion drains away that quickly, it means fear of some kind. At the same time, he could think of no answer to her question, nothing to say, because what can you say to something like that?

  “Is this your reaction to all women?” she asked evenly.

  He didn’t answer. He started the car and drove her into San Verdo and he let her out on Commerce Street, and as far as he was concerned, this was all that had happened.

  I wasn’t sure. A man like Johnny Capehart is almost inarticulate when he is not using stock words for a stock situation. Mostly, he is capable of describing only the kind of a thing he has heard described, either in his life or in the movies or on television. If he is faced with something entirely new, he cannot define either the experince or his own reaction in words. Helen Pilasky was something new to him.

  Before he dropped her, he asked what her name was.

  “Helen Pilasky,” she said. But she didn’t thank him, and when she walked away, she didn’t even look back at him.

  Between that time and the time he arrested her for the murder of Judge Knowton, Johnny Capehart saw her half a dozen times on the streets of San Verdo. He saw her once at the bar of the Desert Haven with Joe Appolonia and Bugass Berger, the big New Orleans hoodlum, and then she smiled at him good-naturedly and asked him, “How are you, Johnny?” He was in plainclothes on his day off then. He was also in plainclothes when he saw her diving at the Emerald House pool. She was a good diver and she used the high board. She had an excellent figure, and by then she was tanned golden brown.

  (“I suppose that if she had pushed it,” Johnny said, “I would have done anything in the world that she wanted me to, but I wasn’t in her class.”

  “Who was? Hoodlums like Bugass Berger?”

  “You know what I mean, Mr. Eddyman.”

  “Maybe. And that was all?”

  “Until I arrested her, that was all. The word was around that she had taken up with Judge Knowton. It didn’t surprise me. Knowton was a big man. He would have been governor—wouldn’t you say, Mr. Eddyman?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Well—you know I’m glad it was me. I was right here—in the rec room, and they called me over to the phone, and as soon as I heard her voice I knew who it was.”

  “What did she say?”

  “It’s more
exact on my statement than the way I remember it—”

  “The way you remember it is good enough.”)

  The way he remembered was that he had been sitting there and she asked for him, and her voice was not disturbed or strident or even suggestive of the hysterical, but very level and calm—and gentle, he felt, more gentle than it had been months before. She said:

  “Is this Officer Capehart?”

  “That’s right.”

  “This is Helen Pilasky.”

  He claimed that she didn’t have to tell him, that he knew from the first word exactly who it was.

  “What can I do for you?” he asked.

  “I am at Judge Knowton’s house,” she said calmly and precisely. “He’s dead. I shot him. It was not an accident. I shot him deliberately. I am afraid his wife is in shock, so bring a doctor too, Johnny. I will wait here until you come.”

  He couldn’t remember making any response. Her words robbed the action of all melodramatic content, and without the melodramatic trimming it appeared to have no real meaning. She might have been talking about shooting a jack rabbit or stepping on a bug. Instead of following normal procedure in such a case and giving the information to the dispatcher, who would have sent the nearest radio car to the Knowton home, Capehart picked up Frank Donovan, his partner, left a message for Dr. Seth Homer, the medical examiner to follow to the Knowton address, and set out to check the information and make the arrest if the facts warranted it. If this procedure had allowed the criminal to escape, Johnny Capehart would have been thrown out of the department. But since Helen Pilasky waited for him to arrive and then surrendered to him, he got away with no more than a reprimand from Chief Cominsky.