Ahead of the Press Publishing

Fan-Fiction

Pursuit

By S.L. Kotar and J. E. Gessler

Chapter 1

It was the plate that caught his eye. Of all the non-descript items in the room, although arguably there weren’t many, it stood out like a sore thumb. That, and the cleanliness. Rooms-to-let on the seedier side of the tracks were habitually dirty, with the type of ingrained filth that testified to the type of man who inhabited them. Drug addicts; drifters; down-and-outers. Those whose only luck, as the saying went, was bad. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have any at all.

Cheats; men slipping out on their wives for a quick tumble under the sheets. Veterans from the Big One and Korea who had seen too much war and couldn’t face civilization again after what they’d seen. Retirees who discovered, to their cost, that certificates of “Thirty Years Dedicated Service” from the power company or the bank or the loading docks didn’t pay the bills. Men in the first – or last – stages of consumption; those who had abandoned families years ago and had no home, either mentally or physically. Husbands who outlived their wives and realized, too late, that the penalty for the lack of value they accorded them in life was to discover they had no idea how to run a house, cook a meal, balance a budget or schedule doctor’s appointments.

Some were life’s losers; others were gamblers who had lost their bets. Most, after their fashion, were petty thieves, liars and bums. None of them, not one, would have kept a small, saucer-sized plate with the image of a bright red geranium glazed on its face.

His first thought was that the plate had been used as an ashtray, in all likelihood pilfered from a Mom and Pop restaurant some hundred miles down the line. Taken for no better reason than the fact no one was looking. An urge to steal, gratified. Or, with the idea to pawn it at some down-and-out place displaying three brass balls, for the grand sum of one nickel. Enough for a cup of coffee. But that was not the explanation. Not in this case. There were two glass ashtrays in the room, one on the nightstand lacking a top drawer, and the other on the tenth-hand piece of furniture that passed for a dresser. Both were filled with butts. Even from a distance, his professional eye told him some were smoked to the bitter end, while others, fewer in number, had been lit, puffed on and then crushed out.

A frugal man would have smoked them all, knowing that a twenty-five cent pack of cigarettes was twenty-cents more than he could afford. That indicated the last resident of this miserable, depressing hole-in-the-wall was nervous. Restless. Pacing incessantly up and down the confined quarters of what could be and was, in so many ways, a cage. Pausing to stop at the window, draw back the wrinkled curtain and peer outside.

A man on the lam.

What was he looking for?

The observer in the suitcoat, tie tightly knotted at his throat and hat unevenly drawn down so that it nearly, but not quite, covered one eye, knew the answer, and silently corrected the question he posed.

Not ‘what.’ Who. Who is he looking for?

The answer came in one word.

Me.

    There was an odd sort of gratification in the thought.

    He had had his doubts. When the call came in, he had answered it with professional detachment. Not that he didn’t care, for it was said of him he was obsessed. A word he resented but nevertheless accepted. There was no point trying to explain. No one understood. The fact he could hardly explain it to himself didn’t count.

He’s looking for me, just as I’m looking for him.

    “We’ve had a report, Lieutenant,” the local cop from some hick town in Anywhere USA had begun. “Someone thinks he’s spotted your man. Working at the gas station. Going by the name of Bill Preston. I went over there with the wanted poster and got a positive ID.”

“Where is he, now?” the tired voice had asked.

“He’s staying at a boarding house on Pine Street. Room in the front. I have a man staking it out. There’s a light on. Is he dangerous?”

That interrogative was harder to answer.

He’s dangerous to me. He may be dangerous to himself. But not in the way you think.

    “He’s a convicted murderer. He must be considered dangerous.”

“Then, we’re to shoot to kill?”

A long pause before another one word reply.

“No.”

“What was that?”

“No gunplay. If it can be avoided.”

He owed the local cop that much.

“Sure.”

“Are you certain it’s him? I’ve been on so many wild goose chases.”

He could count them in the hundreds. Seen here. Seen there. Working at a gas station. In a convenience store. As a truck driver. Farm laborer. Handyman.

Anywhere but a hospital. The state had stripped the murderer of his license after the conviction.

“Positive ID. I told you.”

They all said the same thing. In the beginning, he had jumped at the chance to find his fugitive. Driven to Boise; flown to California. He had been to “Hither And Yon” back and forth so many times he might as well have been a world traveler. Yet, his world, for all practical purposes, comprised no more than the contiguous United States.

Manifest Destiny.

    His boss, the captain, had said that to him, once. It had not been meant kindly.

The room was hot and stuffy. The man in the business suit, which constituted the uniform of a plain-clothed officer of the law, crossed to the window and stood there, debating whether to open it. Stared out. Just as his man must have done.

No rest for the weary.

No, he corrected himself. No rest for the wicked.

    Was the man he sought wicked?

He killed his wife. The jury found he had done so with premeditation. The neighbors had heard them arguing.

    Guilty, as charged.

    The prosecutor had gone for the death penalty. Twelve assorted men and women who may or may not have been the defendant’s peers, had agreed.

The man in the hot, stuffy room had been the arresting officer. He had been the one assigned to take him to the death house. It was meant as an acknowledgment of his hard work in investigating the case. An honor. It had not seemed so at the time. It did not seem so now. He knew, without being in possession of second sight, it would never seem so. Even if the journey was repeated in some far-off future.

He did not open the window. He knew procedure like the back of his hand. It would have to be checked for fingerprints. Among the dozen latents removed, one might give him the proof he needed. But that was a lie and he knew it. He had all the proof required. In the shape of a small, saucer-sized plate with a red geranium glazed in the middle.

Taking a step backward, then turning on his heels, the police lieutenant jutted out his chin and crossed to the night stand. It was said of him he led with his jaw. Not the way a fighter did, but from a sense of arrogance. He would have called it righteousness.

Removing an ironed handkerchief from his pocket, he unfolded the cloth, then wrapped it around the rim of the plate. It had no psychic feel to it, which did not disappoint the officer. He didn’t work that way. Clues were derived from the five senses. That didn’t include mental waves from the beyond. He had graduated first from his class at the Police Academy. They taught him to do things by the Book. To follow the law. He had been an adept student. It would have surprised him to know his quarry thought otherwise of him. The fugitive would have said, had anyone asked, “He feels things, the way a hunter senses his prey long before he sees it.”

The saucer was exactly as he expected it to be. Plain. Cheap. A piece from a set, probably. The type claimed when a patron of a gasoline company turned in a book of green stamps. If he remembered right, there was a catalogue from which to choose a gift. Half a book earned the claimant a cup and saucer; a full book earned him a dinner plate. Twelve books, filled with green stamps, collected over years of saving, earned a service for four.

The local informant had stated the fugitive worked at a gas station. Since the lieutenant never knew him to own a car, he could not have collected green stamps from multiple gas purchases. How, then, had he collected enough for a saucer? Did he ask those who didn’t bother collecting to give theirs to him? Or, did he collect a green stamp for every candy bar he bought? How many Hershey’s would it take to fill half a book? Twenty-five? Fifty? Five cents times fifty equaled $2.50. That was a lot of money for a gas jockey earning less than ten dollars a day. Could he afford to be that extravagant?

The rent on this stinking hovel was $2.50 a night. A man – any man – had to eat. If he afforded himself the luxury of three squares a day, that was another $5.00. Which put him figuratively at the end of his rope. What else would he need? A toothbrush and toothpaste; a razor and comb. A change of socks and one or two shirts. A suitcoat, if he ever hoped to get a better-paying position. A hand-to-mouth existence.

A far cry from the $55,000 a year the fugitive had made as a pediatrician.

I’ll have to ask my wife, he mused. Not about the bare necessities a man needed to survive. About the green stamps. She didn’t have to collect green stamps. He earned enough as a homicide detective so they could afford to live with their two children in a modest ranch in a middle class neighborhood. She “liked to,” she said. It was a waste not to; like throwing away money. If the gas station offered an incentive for buying their products, it was a sin not to take advantage.

He wondered if the doctor’s wife had collected green stamps, too. Of all the facts he had assimilated about the man in the nearly seven years he had been on the case, that was not one of them. The doctor and his wife had belonged to a country club. Did country club wives pinch pennies and save stamps? Not because they had to, but because it was a sin not to?

Killing your wife was a sin, too. That hadn’t stopped the physician from committing it.

It was possible, of course, the saucer hadn’t been obtained through green stamps, at all. He was just using that idea to stave off other thoughts. Ones he did not care to dwell on.

Flipping the cheap white porcelain over, he stared at the bottom. Nothing was stamped there.

“China,” he said in derision. Everything cheap came from China. Or Japan. “What is it about this saucer that appealed to you?”

He asked the question as though the fugitive were in the room, and he paused as if expecting a reply.

Because it reminded me of home, Lieutenant. My wife grew geraniums. We had them in the front yard the way other families planted roses. I told her a story, once, you see. About a geranium plant that was growing outside a tenement house. It was during my pediatric fellowship. I was treating a child who lived there. The little boy had polio. He was thin as a matchstick and weighed about forty-five pounds. His parents didn’t have any money for rehab so I volunteered to go to his home after I got off the night shift. I know it sounds kinda funny, but every morning I’d stare at this geranium plant to gauge how the therapy was going to go that day. If it was bright and green and maybe had buds on it or something, I knew it would be OK. But if it looked wilted or the buds had fallen off without flowering, I’d worry.

   It was about the sixth month or so when that geranium plant took a turn for the worse. Most of the leaves turned yellow and fell off. It looked more dead than alive. Believe me, it made my heart sink to see it. At the same time Tommy – that was his name, Tommy – became gravely ill. So ill, I thought he was going to die. I had one of the doctors at the hospital come over and examine him. He said there wasn’t anything anyone could do, the disease had turned critical and it was only a matter of time.

    That didn’t stop me from going to his house every day but I did so with a sinking heart. One morning when I arrived I looked at the plant and it was dead. Dead. I started crying so bad I couldn’t make myself go inside. It was all so unfair, you see. The plant told me little Tommy was dead. So I staggered over to an alley – strewn with junk and weeds and broken booze bottles – and fell to my knees. I prayed to God that if only that poor, dead geranium could somehow… resurrect, I’d have the courage to go inside and do what had to be done.

    I didn’t go back for three days. It wasn’t until my conscious got the better of me that I faced reality. You can’t save them all, I told myself. Death is nature’s answer for relieving suffering. If Tommy wasn’t going to get better – if all he had to look forward to was great agony  – then maybe it was better he be ‘saved’ by a higher power. Who was I to ask for a miracle? So after a particularly long night when I was nearly dead, myself, from exhaustion, I went back to the tenement house. And what do you think I saw? I saw that ‘dead’ geranium, which hadn’t been dead, at all, but merely dying, full of bright green leaves.

    I ran up the steps – all five flights – to Tommy’s apartment and knocked on the door. His mother opened it and when she saw me, she started crying. Not tears of mourning, but tears of joy. Somehow, some way, the little boy had pulled himself back from the grave. He was not only alive, he was strong enough to grasp my hand and smile at me. They gave me credit for the miracle but it wasn’t me. It was God and the message He sent me through that plant. Never give up hope. Keep fighting. Man and science and medicine don’t know everything. Some things are just meant to be, if we never lose faith.

    That’s why my wife grew geraniums in our front garden. As a reminder to me.

    After a moment’s pause, the healer finished his story.

The real lesson, of course, is that what we want – and what we pray for – are always heard and always answered by a higher power, but not always in the way we want. I learned that, too. Along the way. But it never stopped me from crying.

    The homicide detective did not need fingerprints from the window to tell him his prey had stayed in this room, for however short a time. The saucer, devoid of a matching cup, told him.

But that was only part of the story. Someone had tipped him off. He had come to his nominal home and packed his bag. He had taken his shirts and socks and his razor and toothpaste and black hair dye. But he had left the saucer behind. Why?          

Did that mean after two-and-a-half years of a harrowing trial and countless, mind-numbing appeals and two years on the run he had finally given up hope? Had the geranium he planted in his mind finally withered and died? Had the spirit of faith fled his corporeal body?

If it had, the policeman understood. He and the fugitive were not the same two men whose paths had crossed that fateful night of September 17, 1960. Time had changed them both. Fate had linked together two men from very different walks of life: first, in a brutal investigation, then an arrest, a trial and a conviction. A trip to the death house, a train wreck and then flight to avoid the ultimate penalty for a crime committed in a fit of passion. And between them, a bond stronger than a pair of handcuffs had formed. Slowly. Over the years.

A one-armed man the husband saw leave the scene of the crime. A one-armed man the defense used to proclaim innocence.

A one-armed man the investigator had been unable to find.

A one-armed man the policeman did not believe existed.

Not because he had failed to find him. Because a jury had failed to believe the defendant’s story. They made the judgment for him.

Both the hunter and the hunted had planted a geranium seed. One hoped it would grow into capture and justice served; the other freedom and exoneration.

Neither plant had flowered. Both plants had withered.

God answered all prayers but not always in the way the petitioner wanted.

Such was the nature of plants and men and miracles.

Link to :       Chapter 2