Clandestine

I slammed a furious succession of 3 irons straight into a grove of trees, hoping they would ricochet back and knock me dead. They didn't; they just disappeared, never to be seen again, sacrifices to a golf god I had ceased to believe in.

I drove home. I could hear my phone ringing as I pulled into the driveway. Thinking it might be Lorna, I ran for it.

The ringing persisted as I unlocked my front door. I picked up the receiver. "Hello?" I said warily.

"Underhill?" a familiar voice queried.

"Yes. Captain Jurgensen?"

"Yes. I've been calling you since six o'clock."

"I've been out. I drove out to San Berdoo."

"I see. Then you haven't heard?"

"Heard what?"

"Eddie Engels is dead. He committed suicide in his cell this afternoon. He was about to be released. Evidence came up to point to his innocence."

"I . . . I . . ."

"Underhill, are you there?"

"Y-yes."

"The chief himself asked me, as your last commanding officer, to inform you."

"I . . . don't . . ."

"Underhill, you are to report downtown at eight tomorrow morning. Central Division, room 219. Underhill, did you hear me?"

"Yes, sir," I said, letting the receiver slip out of my shaking hands and fall to the floor.

14

There were three of us present in room 219. The two cops, my interrogators, were named Milner and Quinn. Both were sergeants from Internal Affairs and both were burly and sunburned and middle-aged. They had both doffed their suit coats as they had ushered me into the crowded little room. I strangely relished their fatuous attempt at intimidation, and was certain I could best them at any form of psychological warfare.

We were all wearing Smith and Wesson .38 police specials in shoulder holsters, which gave the proceedings a ritualistic air. I was nervous, high on adrenaline and phony righteous indignation. I was prepared for anything, including the end of my career, and that strengthened my resolve to defeat these two obdurate-looking policemen.

I pulled up a chair, propped up my feet on a ledge of recruiting posters, and smiled disarmingly while Quinn and Milner dug cigarettes and Zippo lighters out of their suit coats and lit up. Milner, who was the slightly taller and older of the two, offered the pack to me.

"I don't smoke, Sergeant," I said, keeping my voice clipped and severe, the voice of a man who takes trouble from no one.

"Good man," Quinn said, smiling, "wish I didn't."

"I quit once, during the Depression," Milner said. "I had a good-looking girlfriend who hated the smell of tobacco. My wife don't like it either, but she ain't so good-looking."

"Then why'd you marry her?" Quinn asked.

"'Cause she told me I looked like Clark Gable!" Milner snorted.

Quinn got a big bang out of that. "My wife told me I looked like Bela Lugosi and I slugged her," he said.

"You should have bit her neck," Milner cracked.

"I do, every night." Quinn guffawed, blowing out a huge lungful of smoke and pulling up a chair facing me. Milner laughed along and opened a tiny window at the back of the room, letting in rays of hazy sunshine and a flood of traffic noise.

"Officer Underhill," he said, "my partner and I are here today because doubts have been raised about your fitness to serve the department." Milner's voice had metamorphosed into a precise professorial tone. He started a dramatic pause, drawing on his cigarette, and I answered, mimicking his inflections:

"Sergeant, I have grave doubts about the brass hats who sent you here to question me. Has Internal Affairs questioned Dudley Smith?"

Milner and Quinn looked at each other. Their look was informed with the humorous secret knowledge of longtime partners.

"Officer," Quinn said, "do you think we are here because a queer slashed his wrists in County Jail yesterday?" I didn't answer. Quinn continued: "Do you think we're here because you initiated, illegally, the arrest of an innocent man?"

Milner took over. "Officer, do you think we're here because you have brought great disgrace on the department?"

He took a folded-up newspaper out of his back pocket and read from it: "'Hero cop quick on the trigger? L.A.P.D. in hot water? Thanks to crack legal beagle Walter Canfield and a courageous anonymous witness, Eddie Engels almost walked out the door of County Jail a free man. Instead, humiliated and tortured by his ordeal of false arrest, he left under a sheet. Canfield and the man with whom Engels spent the night of August 12—the night he was alleged to have murdered Margaret Cadwallader—tragically got to the authorities too late with their information. Eddie Engels slashed his wrists with a contraband razor blade in his cell on the eleventh floor of the Hall of Justice yesterday afternoon, the victim of gunslinger justice.