“Hi there, Joe Chaviski,” White greeted. “Meet my fishing partners, Frank Caprino and Jim Brown. Frank was watching you through the glasses and saw you pull out that big bass, and we thought we’d join you over here and see what you were using. Where is that bass? Let’s see how big he is.”
“Didn’t know you fellows wanted him,” I said. “I didn’t need him to eat, so I turned him loose.”
Brown swore. Caprino spat into the water.
“I don’t understand you damn fellows who drive miles to fish, then when you luck into a big one turn him loose again,” Caprino said with a sneer.
A policeman’s blood doesn’t boil easily. He’s used to men spouting off. I ignored Caprino and looked Brown over. Here was a youngster who would be tough handling. He was young — in his early twenties — and he was big, at least 230 pounds, and probably would stand six feet three or four inches tall. His shoulders were the shoulders of a heavyweight boxer, and his weight was sinewy bone and muscle. There was no fat on his entire frame. The boy was a perfect physical specimen.
Caprino was ready to kill at the drop of a hat, and you knew what to expect; but Brown was the one who could do the most damage, because you wouldn’t be sure what he would do. Brown’s face was sun-tanned, but his eyes were blue. He looked like a big, friendly, innocent kid — a bit too innocent. Through bitter experience I had a great deal of respect for baby-faced youngsters. You never knew what a friendly faced juvenile delinquent like Brown would do.
I spoke to White. “I was just getting ready to pull out of here. You can have the cove if you want it.”
Caprino chuckled as I started the motor. He dropped his field-glasses to the end of the leather thong about his neck and thrust his right hand beneath his coat, towards a bulge below his left shoulder. At that instant, White dropped a restraining hand on Caprino’s arm, just like a man steadying a vicious dog that was about to leap on a stranger.
I was glad to get away from there and scooted clear across the lake to a forest of dead tree tops sticking out of the water. Here I searched for a small buoy-marker, bobbing on the surface, among the tree tops. This marker, a slab of wood, anchored by wire to the bottom, marked a crappie bed.
Finding the marker, I tied up, unlimbered a couple of cane poles, lines and bobbers, baited with minnows, and began fishing for crappie. This was a lazy man’s way of fishing. I stayed over the crappie bed for hours, mainly dozing, enjoying the warm October sun. The crappie began hitting about one-thirty in the afternoon. I pulled out crappie until I got tired, keeping only a few of the big slabs. Then in an hour or so the flurry was over, and the crappie went back to sleep and so did I.
As I dozed there, half awake, I dreamed about the past. I was thinking of my wife Lucy, for whom my boat was named. Lucy had been dead more than five years now. And I thought of Johnson and Sauer, wild young buckaroos, whom I had made into plain-clothesmen, although the effort nearly killed me. And, with something akin to physical force, I pushed back into their graves, the 11 men I had killed during my 30 years on the police force. Then I thought of Billy Hearston. Billy was my good friend.
He had broken in with me as a rookie patrolman — in those dim, dead days of long ago. I had the First to the Main Hotel Alley beat, and Hearston had the Alley to Thirteenth Street. We worked seven nights a week, in 12 hour shifts. If a policeman made any arrests, he had to appear in Municipal Court next day to testify. A court appearance made one or two more hours in uniform, during the 24 hour day. Our pay was $80 a month, but $80 was good money in those days.
Day after day drunks had been wandering up on my beat. Day after day I walked them dutifully down the Main Hotel Alley and to the city jail — and appeared sleepy-eyed and red-faced next day in court.
One night it appeared there were going to be no drunks, and I was looking forward to grabbing a bite to eat and then just dying in my bed. I was that tired. Five minutes before off-duty time, a wobbly soul met me at the Alley. I grabbed the poor fellow by the shoulders and shook him. “Tell me,” I bellowed, “why do you drunks always have to come on my beat?”
“Why—” said the intoxicated one, between hiccoughs, “that other cop down the street told me to come up here and report to you.”
A great light dawned on me then. Next afternoon, right after 5 o’clock, just after I had started on duty for the night, I met Billy Hearston at the Main Hotel Alley. Billy was every bit as big a man as I was — about 245, and six feet tall. I walked straight up to him. “You so-and-so!” I yelled in his face.
“Whatta you mean Joe?” Billy asked, grinning from ear to ear.
“Why the hell are you always sending your drunks over on my beat and making me lose two hours’ sleep every day?” I slapped Billy with my open hand across the cheek so hard it sounded like a whip cracking.
Holding his ground, Billy returned the slap. For five minutes we engaged in a face-slapping exercise — both of us as stubborn as two young bull-calves butting heads in the pasture. We were still at it when Chief Ingersoll appeared and grabbed each of us by the coat collar.
“What are you two pups doing? Trying to kill each other?”
The Chief took us both over to his office, gave us a sizzling lecture on the dignity of our uniforms, threatened to fine us a month’s salary, then sent us both back on the beat, grinning sheepishly.
It was a week later we learned that the Mayor, who lived in an apartment across the street, had seen the slapping incident and had called the police station: “Hurry over here Chief, before two of your policemen beat each other to death!”
Poor Billy had died of Japanese bullets on a South Pacific Island in 1944.
But all the time as I lazed away there in the autumn sunlight, drinking in its warmness and haunted with a loneliness for Lucy — the Oklahoma dandy, Bill White, killer-type Hank Caprino, and the baby-faced young giant, Jim Brown, were in the back of my mind.
There was something wrong with that trio. I felt it — I knew it, and yet I knew also that criminals, gangsters, hoodlums, do not fish and hunt, and they do not enjoy the outdoors. And then I said to myself— Oh hell, Joe Chaviski, you’re no longer a cop. But my mind was still a cop’s mind.
The sunset was a scarlet band above the pines as I nosed my boat back into the cove where I had taken the lunker at sunrise.
Hank Caprino had reached for a rod that morning, fisherman or no fisherman. I hadn’t seen the gun, but I had seen the movement, and I was just as sure as anything that he would have blasted me out of the boat if White hadn’t restrained him. And here I was, clear away from base, without a sign of a firearm. I had left everything that would remind me of police work back at home.
I cast a big red-head surface plug about the shallows of the point, without success and then headed back for the landing, my cabin, a quick meal, and a soft bed. A patch of light was showing beneath the drawn window shade in the cabin next to mine as I drove up, and the blare of a radio told me that White, Caprino, and Brown were at home. I hoped they would quickly knock it off and let me get some sleep.
But before I got inside, the baby-faced giant, Jim Brown, was there. “Mister Chaviski, come over and have a drink with us. A shot will do you good.”
“No thanks Brown, I’m all worn out. Think I’ll eat a bite and turn in.”
“Aw come on, Chaviski, we caught some fish. Want to show them to you.”
I followed the boy into the cabin. The place was thick with tobacco smoke, and the radio was loud enough to burst your ear drums. “Turn off that damn noise,” shouted White, who appeared to be the only man in the room not drinking. When nobody stirred, White turned it off himself.