Ahead of the Press Publishing

Haunted

By : S.L. Kotar and J.E. Gessler

Chapter 9

“Had him and lost him.”

Listening to the voice on the other end of a long distance call, Marie Gerard shuddered.

“Are you all right?”

“Got a nasty sock on the jaw. It’s not broken, just knocked out of alignment. The police doctor here set it right and says it’ll heal on its own.”

“Kimble beat you?” she asked in horror.

“No. It was some ‘well-meaning’ citizen. Another one of those people who think they know better than a judge and jury. I’ll never understand it.”

“When are you coming home?”

“I’m at the airport, now. I’ve got a flight out in half an hour. I… just wanted you to know when to expect me. And that I’m all right.”

What you want me to know, she thought, is that you’re not bringing Richard Kimble back with you. You needn’t have bothered.

    “So close,” he was saying. “Had him and lost him. Through no fault of my own.”

“I’ll see you when you get in.”

Not home. “In.”

Marie Gerard’s heart sank as she hung up the telephone. He was already blaming himself. Or, more accurately, he was mounting a defense against what Captain Carpenter and the others would think, while in the back of his mind he was chastising himself for whatever interference from above had ripped the fugitive from his hands. Whatever it was, she would never believe it was his fault. He didn’t make mistakes.

There were plenty of others who made them for him.

Her husband was a good cop. He had dedicated his life to the service of others. No one understood what such a vow meant; not if they didn’t walk in his shoes. It was so easy to judge from the outside looking in. Year by year she watched the man she loved wither under the strain. Few, if any, comprehended the toll the Kimble case took on him. They only saw what he presented to the world. The hard-nosed cop with his jaw set and his hands clenched. No one but she witnessed the furtive way he jumped when the phone rang; the tortured sound of his voice when he admitted, “Had him and lost him.” The depression he turned into nervous energy. The absolute, nearly… insane strength he called upon to face another journey into the unknown, never knowing what to expect. Or, what the ultimate outcome would be.

And then there was the greater tragedy: denying his own emotions.

That was the worst. It had nearly wrecked their marriage. That story, like the one that wrapped them both in Richard Kimble, was just as tenuous as the doctor’s eventual capture. They were all “men on strings,” pulled this way and that, without any assurance it would ever end. Unlike Phil, who had to believe he would bring the fugitive to justice, she had no such expectation. In her mind, Kimble would run for all eternity and on her husband’s gravestone the unappreciative citizens of Stafford would chisel, “Lieutenant Phillip Gerard, still running in hell.”

She had no illusions on that account.

They called Stafford, “The Friendly City,” but the jury had long been out on that. The Kimble murder had dominated the local news for months and everyone had an opinion. There was a one-armed man; there wasn’t a one-armed man. A physician would never kill; physicians were known throughout history for getting away with murder. Some saw Richard Kimble as a saint and a martyr to an inept police investigation; others condemned him as being guilty as sin.

From her perspective as the wife of the lead detective, most of what she heard was negative. It had caused her considerable surprise to learn that Dr. John Kimble and the Tafts had all suffered from similar disparaging comments. That might have given them some common ground, but to the contrary, the two families most closely aligned with the case were often pitted against one another, particularly in the press.

Reporters took quotations out of context, shoved microphones under their noses in the grocery store or outside a bank or a church; attempted to contrast the two families until a deep-seated animosity had developed which existed throughout the trial. Inside the courtroom it was Burnett v. Ballinger, but outside, in the realm of public opinion, it became Gerard v. Kimble; or, depending on the perspective, Kimble v. Gerard. After the verdict when Burnett lost to Ballinger, Marie had expected matters to quiet down but every two or three months another story would appear in the paper and accusations would again rear its ugly head.

Through two years of the appeals process the story never died, reaching a climax when the governor refused to commute the physician’s sentence to life in prison. She remembered the day as though it were yesterday. The headline in the Gazette read, “No Mercy for the Doctor,” and in smaller type, “Governor says let the jury’s decision stand.” That had not been the last of it, for there was always the hope whoever held the state’s highest seat would relent at the final hour, but that point had never been reached. Between one and the other, the condemned man escaped.

Whose fault was a train wreck, anyway? she thought bitterly to herself as she went about cleaning the kitchen for Phil’s return. Whether or not he was hungry, she would have dinner waiting for him. It was the least she could do. She had left that simple offer of a meal go the past several times he had returned from his hopeless cause and felt the worse for it. He was trying his best, only doing what he thought was right. The fact the two of them had grown apart over the intervening years was as much her fault as his.

Give it up, Phil. Let it go.

    But she saw it in his eyes; read it in his expression; heard it in his tone. They might be sitting in the living room watching television and she could sense his mind wander. Or on those many sleepless nights when he shuttered himself in his den and wrote in that damned journal, reliving the investigation or the trial or one of any times he “had him and lost him.” When he called on the phone with that edge to his voice that meant only one thing to her: Richard Kimble.

He would never let it go and because he couldn’t, Stafford couldn’t either. The news had gotten out, somehow, about the debacle in Bennington. It might have come from Donna Taft bitterly chastising him to an eager listener, but more likely Marie suspected Mr. Hendricks at the mortuary. That had been front page news, too: not the headline but an article prominently placed for those in the “Friendly City” to read. Because Phil had changed their phone number and paid to have it unlisted they were spared the calls, but letters came in the mail. Some were mocking, others angry. Few were supportive. It made no difference. One way or another they all hurt.

Worse were his twisted feelings toward Kimble. She didn’t understand them and when she demanded an explanation, he repeated the same lines as though they were written on Moses’ tablets.

I obey the law.

    I’m only doing my duty.

    Which was true as far as it went, but it didn’t go far enough.

He had changed.

There had been no perceivable emotion in the beginning. He had merely been a detective doing his job. The same as he had been for any of the hundred cases in which he had been involved. Interrogate the witness, get his story, check his alibi. Follow whatever leads there were, assemble the evidence, make a determination. Present the charge, make an arrest. Nothing to touch the heart, except, perhaps pity for the victim and a cold, clinical anger at the perpetrator.

    But, the Kimble case had been different. Right from the start as though he had known in his bones this was the one that would haunt him the rest of his days. The case all good cops dreaded; the one where neither conviction nor exoneration would satisfy. Where the questions outweighed the answers and the evidence pointed neither up nor down.

He had hoped for a confession and hadn’t gotten one.

Only Richard Kimble knew the truth and his story was too farfetched to believe. And too outlandish to be proven.

Or disproven.

Marie Gerard fully comprehended her husband absolutely believed he had done his job to the best of his, or any other policeman’s, ability. She believed it, herself. She had seen him come home, not night after night, but on those few times he stole away to spend an hour or two with her and the children before he fell asleep at the table or crashed into bed, too tired to undress. He had done more than was humanly possible and failed. He hadn’t failed in the eyes of the district attorney or those of the jury. He had failed to dispel the shadow of doubt. And that was the killer.

Doubt was a wondrous thing. It was and it wasn’t. It came and went with the wind. One moment it wasn’t there and the next it had a choke hold on the victim.

In Marie’s eyes, her husband, not an “innocent Richard Kimble,” was the victim. It may not have earned him a seat in the electric chair but it had gotten him a train ticket. And with that passage, he had transferred from one universe to another. With the sound of screeching brakes and the violent jarring of wheels jumping off tracks, he lost one identity and assumed another. For Richard Kimble, the assumption of a hundred new names and a gross of different rooms to lay his head was the price he paid to stay alive. For Phillip Gerard, two surpassed those numbers by light years.

Lieutenant to cop and hunter to haunted.

And if she were feeling particularly bitter, innocent to guilty and duty to obsession.

Or, on nights like this, husband and father to strange and stranger.

Moving into the spare bedroom with no real aim in mind, she found herself stripping the bed. When he got home from one of his “jaunts,” as she privately called them because that word sounded better than “failures,” he was always overwrought and restless. If she happened to be in bed, he had lately developed the habit of sleeping in a chair in his den, head resting on his journal for a pillow, or crawling under the linen in the only empty bed in the house.

I didn’t want to disturb you, he would explain in the morning.

He needn’t have bothered. His nightmares were vivid enough for two.

It hadn’t always been that way. B.K.: Before Kimble, when they had lived together as man and wife, he had been reticent about the homicides he investigated, but they had talked. About the trivial details of the office, the pet peeves of the officers under him, the paperwork, the leaking watercooler. He had cracked jokes on how an unpolished pair of shoes had gotten So-and-So into trouble; mimicked the way a witness tried to pass off a lie; described the various and sundry ways “the boys” used to trap and retrieve the loose coins that slipped under the candy machine, never feeling guilty they were, perhaps, cheating the vendor.

They had gone to the movies on Friday nights, played euchre every other Saturday with friends. He had taken pride in paste waxing the car until the chrome shone; explained the rules of baseball to Phil, Jr. or taught him how to tie flies for a fishing expedition. He had even sipped “tea” with Frances and delighted in carrying her around on his shoulders. He “had never been a kid,” as he explained to her once their kids had gone to bed. It was a learning process for him, but he tried and they had been a family.

A.K.: After Kimble, things had altered. Subtly, slowly. They went out less often. He told fewer antidotes about work and nothing was as amusing as it had once been. She could hardly tell from his face whether he had a good day or a bad one. He still tried and occasionally succeeded in being a husband and a father; asked the right questions, planned family outings and trips, but always there was that one lurking fear she read behind his suddenly steely eyes: the phone might ring; someone, somewhere may have, could have, certainly did see the wanted man. And a change would come over his demeanor.

I-must-go. Heed the call, not of the wild, but of the fugitive.       

Had the cause been anything else, even another woman, Marie could have rationalized it. Phil was at that age when a man’s eye wandered. She wouldn’t have appreciated it but it was normal; what every wife dreaded, if not expected. And she would fight it the way wives did. Make that special dinner with wine and candles. But a new negligee, put on the perfume that had one inflamed him. Suggest a private weekend just for two.

But how did she fight a private tormentor who offered nothing more than to assuage the hurt pride of the man who had let him escape. No one said that, of course. No one believed it. A train wreck was an act of God. The unfortunate set of circumstances had not gone down on his record as a black mark. He had told her, in one of his more sanguine moments, his captain had asked him to take the test for promotion and assume his place when he retired.

Do it, she had silently begged, but he had dismissed the idea out of hand. Being a captain meant holding the responsibility of running a department, not running down errant “tips.” He did not want to be a captain, he explained, because he wasn’t an administrator, he was an operative. He had pronounced the word with a peculiar emphasis, as though it were connected to some private emotion he dared not share.

She had stored it away with all the other “tics” he had developed: blowing air through his front teeth; biting the end of his reading glasses. Turning a water glass or a wine glass one way and then the other as if checking for latent fingerprints. Like a good detective, Marie had stored them all away, precious clues in determining what Phil Gerard was metamorphosing into. Some lonely nights she repeated them to herself the way other insomniacs counted sheep. Not using them to bring on slumber but forming them, like a 1,000 piece jigsaw puzzle, into one cohesive picture.

One thousand bits of highway and road, cloud and sky, handcuffs and wanted posters but none of her arrangements made any sense until he inadvertently gave her the one piece that made the whole: he had come to love Richard Kimble. Neither a carnal love nor a tender love, but an emotion predicated on their shared plight. As long as Richard Kimble was alive, Phillip Gerard existed. He had purpose. His life made sense. He associated with Kimble, shared his dreams of desperation and freedom. Somehow, in the five years their lives had been joined at the hip, they had become one, interdependent. Stronger together than alone.

Without the man pursuing him, Kimble would fade into shadow. The one-armed man would go back where he came from: either his imagination or on a long, distant road, never to be reached. Lacking the impetus to run before the relentless pursuit, Kimble would settle down into anonymity. Find a hole where Jim Davis or Stan Blake or Pete Macumber would be safe. Not safe-safe, but safe enough. He would be a mechanic or a short order cook or a bookkeeper. He might fall in love and marry and his face on the post office would be covered by two dozen other “most wanted men.” He would abandon one hope for another. Just to be left alone.

Without the man he was pursuing, Gerard would lose the spark in his life which gave him purpose. Getting up in the morning would be a challenge. Homicide – other than the one that had marked his very essence – would bore him. Ordinary killers were a dime a dozen. But Kimble was different. He had a story to tell. It didn’t matter if it was real or not, he was the spark of life. A reason to go on, whether to prove he existed or to show the world one solitary officer of the law had not let him slip through his fingers.

It had come to her at Halloween. When Phil thought Kimble was dead. He had grieved. His heart had been broken. He understood the unfairness of it. He hadn’t wanted to accept the truth.

He’s not your son, she had said.

No, Richard Kimble wasn’t his son. He was much more than that. He was his other self. Gerard had seen his own death and fought it the only way he knew how. With denial. The other side of fantasy.

There could not be one without the other. That was what Marie read into the jigsaw puzzle she completed and it left her as cold as death, for the inevitable was around the corner. Tomorrow, or next month or two years down the railroad tracks. She had wanted Richard Kimble to be dead so Phil could start to live again. She realized as she threw the blankets on the floor and withdrew fresh sheets from the linen closet, she had been mistaken. “Live again” was a euphemism for die. There was no fresh start. The past was too deeply engraved in his soul. In both their souls. When it was over, when they both came face-to-face with inevitability, freedom would not come calling. Not in the way either expected.

Wiping tears from her eyes, she made the guest bed, laid the pillows at the headboard and smiled. Like her husband, it had no humor.

She realized she wasn’t making it for Phil. She was preparing it for Richard.

 

March 4, 1966 10:00 A.M. – Friday

(March Forth)

The trail was cold when I got the call. Two days old, at least.

Sunnyside, Wyoming (Like the egg – always served cold)

 

Curling the edge of the journal’s upper left-hand corner, he read his note. The last sentence – the fourth one – he had meant to be amusing, although his notes were private and the words fell flat as he re-read them.

This time, the alert hadn’t come through official channels but from what the department called a postal watcher: a crime buff who read detective magazines and somewhere in the back of his mind fancied himself Sherlock Holmes. As a category, buffs fell somewhere to the right side of the spectrum. Under informants and snitches. Which was unfair but accurate. The police needed all three types of – involved citizens wasn’t the right expression. “Peripheral” sounded better. Falling somewhere between praise and contempt.

“I’ve seen him,” Gerard heard as his memory un-scrolled.

“Seen who?” he had queried, already suspecting.

“Your man. Kimble.”

“Who am I speaking with?”

“My name is Alex Hammer. I’m calling from Wyoming.”

“I see. If you think you’ve seen Richard Kimble, your best course of action would be to alert the local authorities. They’ll know how to handle it. And I might suggest you do it as quickly as possible.”

“I tried. They gave me your number.”

Quelling his rising annoyance, he was tempted to hang up and dismiss the caller as just another crank. “Cranks” were on the left side of the police spectrum. Individuals who either hated law enforcement, or those who found a perverse satisfaction in extracting pleasure at the expense of others. This man didn’t sound like that but it was hard to tell.

“Why would they do that? Fail to investigate?”

A hesitation and then, “I don’t know. Because there’s no reward money?”

“Are you asking me or telling me?”
“I heard them discuss it. In the background when I called. Then, the officer got back on the phone and said I shouldn’t bother them because there wasn’t anything in it for me. He tried to make it sound like that’s why I called. I’m not interested in money, Lieutenant Gerard. I never thought about a reward.”

“What did you think about?”

“I liked him.”

Picking up the base of the telephone as if that would bring him nearer the caller, Gerard paced as far as the landline cord would allow.

“You spoke with him?”

“Sure. We worked together.”

The back of Gerard’s hand began to perspire, a sure sign his interest was piqued.

“Doing what?”

“Ranch hands. But I really got to know him when we volunteered to go out on a rescue mission. A kid got lost in the forest. He was a sort of a slow kid, you know what I mean? He was out with some others like him from the home, or whatever you call it. A terrible storm came up and the kid got separated. The guardian in charge put out a distress call, so Paul and I – that’s the name he was using – Paul Duggan – took the jeep and went out looking for him.”

“Go on.”

“We ran it into a ditch – didn’t see it because it was so dark and couldn’t back out because the water made everything slick. So, we struck out on foot. Ended up having to make camp in the woods that night. It was in the morning we found him – the poor kid. He was a mess. Half frozen, half drowned and scared out of his wits. And bloody, too. Jesus, he was covered in blood. I don’t know what I woulda done if Paul hadn’t been there.”

Feeling the pulse throb in his neck, Gerard made a policeman’s decision.

“All right, Mr. Hammer. You’re calling long distance. Give me your number and I’ll call you back so we can talk on the department’s dime.”

Since there isn’t any reward to collect and you still haven’t told me why you’re calling.

    So I can have your number if this turns out to be a bad joke.

    The idea had originally occurred to him to have the line traced, but there was no one in his office to carry the message. He was gratified, if not surprised, when Hammer supplied the number. Jotting it down on a piece of foolscap, he studied the sequence as though they might reveal a special code, then dialed it back. It was picked up on the first ring.

“Hello? Lieutenant Gerard?”

“Yes. Go on with your story. About the man who called himself Paul Duggan.”

“I had no idea what to do about the kid, but Paul got kinda… I’ve given it a lot of consideration since then. I guess the best description I can come up with is that he got all soft around the edges. The way maybe you feel when you hear a piece of music that stirs something inside you and gets your heart racing. Or, when you see a painting in an art gallery and it gives you goose bumps because you say, without knowing why, ‘I’ve been there,’ even when you haven’t.”

Both descriptions conjured up a sense of poetry but Gerard wasn’t feeling sentient. Not when his instincts had flared. As close as he could get to touching the implied awareness of infinity in the statements was, Who is this man?

    “I get the picture.”

“I was hoping you would. Anyway, Paul held out his hands and started talking low, in a singsong cadence. To listen to it over and over almost made me want to sleep. Maybe the kid felt the same way because he got real still and just stared at Paul. So, he goes up to him and puts his arms around him and then signals me. ‘Make a fire,’ he said. ‘Quickly.’ I had some waterproof matches in my pocket but there wasn’t anything dry enough to burn. Not if I had a blowtorch. It was then Paul took off his parka and made a lean-to with it. I’ve been camping all my life but I never saw anyone make a shelter that fast or that effectively.”

He’s had a lot of practice.

    Escaping into the woods, hiding there for days, perhaps even a week. A fugitive learned survival skills, or one day his decomposed body would be found by hikers, or eaten by wildlife.

Without anyone ever knowing he died. All of a sudden the calls would stop coming; or, those that did would all be… dead ends. Until one day I’ll be forced to realize I hadn’t had a legitimate lead in months.

    Seven years, Dr. Kimble. Seven years from the final confirmed sighting. That’s how long it will take to have you declared dead.

    Legally, that is. There will be two people on this Earth who’ll keep believing you’re alive.

    The corporeal Phillip Gerard dissolved into the future and anyone dropping into his office for a chat might have seen him standing by his desk, phone in hand, as still as a tombstone. Or, perhaps, they wouldn’t see anything at all and depart, believing he had stepped out for a cup of coffee, or gone in search of the mythical fugitive. Which, in a way, he had….

 

Gerard didn’t feel any older. His hair had thinned but he still had enough on top to comb in the morning when he stared into the bathroom mirror. The night’s stubble came in a greyish-white, too, on those long weekends when he didn’t bother to shave. The lines around his eyes had grown to crevices, too, but he wore his familiar black-framed glasses most of the time now, so he hardly noticed. What bothered him were the brown age spots that had appeared on the backs of his hands during sleep one night and never gone away. But that didn’t really matter, he told himself, and tried to ignore them.

Phil, Junior was into his teenaged years and talking about getting his driver’s license. Marie had casually mentioned the dreaded word “college” the other night and he had shuddered. Not that his son would go onto higher education. It was the bill that bothered him. They would have to take out a loan.

Frances had graduated from dolls to ballet lessons, and Thursdays night for the past year he had made every effort to get off work early to attend her impromptu recitals. At the end of the spring the class was going to perform at the high school. Although two months off, Marie had already warned him it was his responsibility to sell two packets of tickets at $2.00 a pop. With ten tickets to a packet, that meant he’d have to come up with $40, most of it out of his own pocket. The fellows down at the station might buy a few. He’d have to hit up those from whom he’d bought Girl Scout cookies or for those whom he’d reluctantly volunteered to act as a counselor on Boy Scout jamborees.

It was March 4, 1973 and the Beatles had broken up years before. He remembered the announcement in the Entertainment section of the newspaper and it had made him sad. While he had never particularly liked the so-called White Album, he knew the lyrics to “A Hard Day’s Night,” by heart and occasionally found himself humming “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” His and Marie’s social calendar was still anchored around Gunsmoke, although it was on Monday nights and not what it used to be.

Who is? he wondered, working the electric razor around his grizzled chin. It was a Sunday but he had decided a week ago he would go out in the morning. Before anyone was up. A private trip to a private place. No sense disturbing anyone. He’d be back before his wife and children were up and about. Sunday was their day to sleep in, too, although it could be fairly said that he hadn’t “slept in” because he hadn’t been to bed. He had spent the wee hours of the morning in his den. Re-reading his journal.

He had found himself doing that more frequently of late. Marie, bless her, hadn’t said anything about it. He presumed she had gotten used to his solitary ritual. In that, Phillip Gerard was mistaken, but as she never said, he had no reason to suspect otherwise.

Last night he had pursued the recent entries: recent, meaning the last seven years.

 

March 4, 1966 10:00 A.M. – Friday

(March Forth)

The trail was cold when I got there. Two days old, at least.

Sunnyside, Wyoming (like the egg – always served cold)

Alias: Paul Duggan

A call from Allen Hammer (“No reward”)

Positive ID – fingerprints

Escaped into the woods. No further trace.

 

Several years later he had gone back and underlined the last sentence. That was when he started counting.

 

June 10, 1966 4:11 P.M. – Friday

Salt Lake City, Utah

Working at a gas station

Unconfirmed

 

October 30, 1966 7:37 P.M. – Sunday

Called from the station

Palm Beach, FL

Boatman/sailor/fishing guide

Suspicious but Unconfirmed

 

February 23, 1967 – Thursday

Marietta, Georgia

Truck farm hand

No viable proof

 

He had forgotten to add the time the call came in.

 

July 7, 1967 – Friday

Police reported a “sighting” by a patrolman who stopped male Caucasian for running a red light. Remembered seeing a wanted poster of Kimble. Called for back-up and ordered the man to “stay put.” He sped away. Patrolman was unable to keep up.

Unsubstantiated

Unlikely. The description didn’t match closely enough

 

1968

 

1969

 

August 1, 1970

Contacted by a reporter in Pittsburgh. He said he was doing a story on the Kimble case and wanted updates. When pressed, he admitted he thought he had seen Dr. Kimble in the local supermarket working as a bagger. I alerted the police there. They sent a man out to check.

Nothing came of it.

 

1971

 

May 30, 1972

Man brought in as a witness to a beating; a ranch hand in Phoenix, AZ.

Very reluctant and nervous

Man well-dressed and educated. Head accountant at one of the cattle ranches there – a familiar face but not well-known in the area. Had been there “some time.”

Monica Welles lives outside Phoenix (reference 1963 Tucson)

Did Kimble go back to her? She could offer him the sanctuary of a private ranch. That could explain why there have been so few sightings.

Alias: Ray Prince

 

    Is he her prince?

    Her ray of light?

 

The opportunity had been too good to pass up.

Link to HAUNTED Chapter 10