The Big Witness (A Dragnet Fan Fiction Story) -- Chapter Three

The Big Witness

(A Dragnet Fan Fiction Story)

By:  Kristi N. Zanker

 Disclaimer:  All publicly recognized characters, settings, etc. are the property of Mark VII Limited and Universal.  The original characters and plot are the property of the author.  I, in no way am associated with the owners, creators, or producers of Dragnet.  No copyright infringement is intended.

Warning:  This chapter contains strong language, and some violence.

Chapter Three

Joe told Ben of his ideas on Monday morning, while doing routine paperwork, about contacting Evie again and Dr. Baird.  By two that afternoon, as it turned out, his thoughts from last night’s restlessness came true—only it wasn’t one disgruntled citizen—it had been several.  The five-year-old case would have to be put on hold for the time being. 

The dead body of a woman who looked to be in her early to mid-20s was located in an empty house in a new subdivision.  Next to her lay a bloodied claw hammer to which the detectives presumed was the murder weapon.  The realtor of the new housing development ranted and raved at Joe and Ben, saying how something like this would ruin his business and no one would want to buy a house where a murder had been committed.  They discovered that the killing didn’t take place in the house—the body had been dumped there.  When they saw the deceased woman for the first time, they learned quickly that there hadn’t been only one murder—but two.  She had been about five months pregnant.

For the next few days, they delve into Missing Person’s reports and when they found a match, Joe and Ben interviewed the person who filed it, who turned out to be the dead girl’s mother.  She informed them that when she found out her daughter had gotten pregnant, she demanded to know the name of the man she’d been with and that he’d better do the “right” thing and marry her.  A row ensued and finally, her daughter broke down admitting that the man she had been seeing was already married with a wife and had two children.

Joe and Ben could piece together the rest of the story.  It was an old and common one, unfortunately.  Their guess was that when the young woman went to confront the man, another fight transpired and he killed her.  However, mere guesses and hunches weren’t actual proof.

Another Missing Person’s report fell onto their table early Thursday morning, this time detailing about a man who seemed to have dropped out of sight.  The wife had reported it and when Joe and Ben went to question her, she went on about an affair her husband had been having.  She kept referring to the woman as a “hussy,” “that bitch” or “that whore” and couldn’t understand why he would stray after she gave him everything.  She said she filed the Missing Person’s report because the children kept asking where their father was and that her conscience was getting the better of her.  As they left the residence, she told them that if they found her husband she hoped he would be dead, next to his whore.

Back at the office, they sent out a teletype of the missing man’s description throughout California and surrounding states, finally receiving a phone call later in the afternoon.  The Las Vegas police had picked up a man for speeding and called when they saw the teletype.

They were able to go home, shower, pack a change of clothes and eat a quick dinner before heading back to City Hall to check out the trip car.  Joe wanted to return as soon as possible hoping they wouldn’t have to stay in a motel.  He told his mother he’d try to be back in time to see her off on the train to her brother’s.  He also wondered about cancelling tomorrow night’s dinner with Dorothy, but Ma Friday said he should wait and see when he returned.  She looked forward to having dinner with the both of them and said, in jest, that it would be their “last meal” together until she arrived back home on Saturday, May 29th.

At five-thirty that evening, they began the nearly 300 mile, five hour journey to Las Vegas.  Joe puffed away on a Fatima while Ben griped about the rush hour traffic.  If it wasn’t the traffic, it was the car they were given—a Sahara tan 1940 Ford sedan that had survived the war years, but both weren’t so sure it would be able to handle this trip.  Joe was worried the car would overheat and constantly reminded Ben that the speed limit was 45 miles per hour.  They had only been on the road for about an hour and a half, beginning on Highway 99, over to Route 66, and now on Highway 91, before his partner started on about being hungry.  They were driving through Colton, California.

“Didn’t Amy feed you before we left?” Joe asked, tapping out the last of the cigarette in the ashtray.

“Yeah, she did, but I always get hungry on car trips.  What did you have, Joe?”

“Ma made beef stew.  She’s been in a cooking frenzy all week.”

“What for?”

“She’s going to visit her brother up north in Washington for a couple of weeks.  I’m supposed to take her to Union Station on Saturday morning.  That is, if we’re back in time.  She wants to make sure I have something good to eat, I guess.  The other night she got on my nerves about me eating in restaurants again.”

“You want me to come over to your house while your mother’s gone?  I could make you my Spanish omelet for breakfast.”

“No, Ben,” he said, with a sardonic smirk.

“I’ve done that before.  Remember the last time your—“

“Please, do not come over.  I can take care of myself,” said Joe, now fidgeting with his fedora that sat on his lap./p>

“But Joe, you can’t just eat out of a can.  I’ll ask Amy to—“

“No, Ben!”

“Well, there’s no need to get testy!”

“As much as I appreciate your concern for my well-being while my mother is away, I mean it—do not come over!  If I really wanted anyone else to make me breakfast, it would be Dorothy.”

Ben laughed.  “How do you know she can cook?  She lives in a boarding house.”

All Joe could do at that moment was give an exasperated sigh.

“I’ll be over at eight in the morning on Sunday,” said Ben, beaming.

“I won’t answer the door,” he emphatically replied.

It was then that Ben put out his hand to signal he was turning left onto Mount Vernon Avenue.

“You should’ve turned onto E Street,” said Joe.

“I’m hungry,” Ben grumpily replied, who then slammed on the brakes and yelled at the Studebaker in front of them.  “Crazy woman driver!  Why the hell can’t you learn to put out your hand when you’re going to turn?!”

“We passed a place called McDonald’s Bar-B-Que back at the corner of 14th and E Street.  Why didn’t you stop there if you were so hungry?”

“No carhops.”

“What?”

“There were no carhops.”

“What’s that got to do with it?”

“I don’t want to walk up to a window and get my food.  I want someone to bring it to me.”

“You are so hard to please, Ben.  If you wanted a drive-in restaurant, we passed a place called Bell’s Drive-In.”

“I don’t want a hot dog.”

"Ben, what the hell—!" Joe gripped the dashboard as his partner suddenly swerved the car into the parking lot of a Mexican restaurant named Mitla’s Café.

“We’re eating here!” Called Ben as he grabbed his fedora from the backseat and opened the car door.

They gulped down two cups of strong black coffee while waiting for their dinner.  A waitress brought Ben’s order of six tacos, while Joe ate three.   Feeling full and content after their meal, and before heading back onto Highway 91, they stopped at a Signal station and got a full tank of gas.

“Now, everybody’s full!  I think this old girl is going to make it!” announced Ben, after the attendant gave him the receipt. 

All Joe could do was nod, hoping he was right.

In the next hour or so, Ben amused Joe about the time his son was born and how Amy put up a fight when the doctor insisted she should have the baby in a hospital rather than at home.

“She won that time,” said Ben, snickering at the memory.  “She had the boy at home.  Her sister-in-law gave us a bassinet.  Only we couldn’t use it.”

“Why not?”

“It had bedbugs.”

Joe winced and the two of them fell silent.  He dozed for a while until he felt the car speed up a little, to which Joe told Ben he’d better slow it to 35 if they didn’t want the engine to overheat.  Looking out the window, the desert sand and green cacti trailed by.  It was still light enough, but the sun was fading.  A wave of fatigue swept over him.  Perhaps it had been the dinner or the fact that he was sleep-deprived, but whatever the reason, Joe’s eyelids began to close.

There was an eerie stillness.  Where was he?  The car and Ben were gone.  It looked like the desert with all of the sand, but why were the cacti moving?  Some passed him by slowly, while others lay still on the ground.  Joe just kept moving forward and would crouch down to feel the sand on the terrain and pick up something small.   It must’ve been okay because he’d then put whatever he had found into a rusty, metal child’s pail.   He crawled around on the sand some more until he came across some dog tags.  He picked them up but couldn’t read them.

“Joe!  Wake up!  Joe!” he heard someone calling him.

“What!  What is it?!  Go away!”  He was still half asleep, his mind in a fog, and felt very frightened and agitated. 

Joe pushed the hand away that had been on his shoulder, shaking him awake.  As he did so, he knocked his hat off his lap onto the floor.   At first, he couldn’t remember where they were and wondered why he and Ben were in a car, stopped on Highway 91 in the middle of the desert.  His heart beat rapidly.  He felt clammy and wordlessly thanked God he wasn’t crying.

“Are you all right, Joe?” asked Ben with an alarmed look on his face.

“Why does everyone always ask me that?!” he said irately, as he picked up his fedora and hurled it into the back.  “I get it from my mother… Please, not you, too!  I’m fine, goddammit, why don’t you just leave me alone!”  He felt so degraded and mortified at the thought of Ben seeing him fall apart.  It was bad enough his mother had to endure the wrath of these nightmares—but now his partner had witnessed it.  He hoped Ben wouldn’t turn him in and say he was loony or something.

“Settle down, Joe.  You must’ve had one hell of a bad dream.”

“Start the car,” he said, the dejection rising.  As if continuing down the road would ease his pain.

“No, not until I—“

“Start the fucking car, now!” he erupted.

“Joe, what is it?  I’ve seen you mad before, but not like this.  What were you dreaming about?”

“It’s none of your damn business!  Please, let’s go!” At that moment, Joe wished he had that whiskey bottle, but it was hours and miles away on his closet shelf.  And to top it off, he was on duty.

“I’m not driving anywhere until you tell me what’s going on,” Ben sounded stern—almost father-like.  “You haven’t been yourself lately.”

They sat there, motionless, waiting.

“You want to know what I was dreaming about?” Joe said softly, but still with an edge in his voice.

“Yes.”

“The war.”

“What was your dream like?”

Why did Ben want to know?  What did he care?  Joe was still apprehensive about what he would tell his partner, fearful at what he might do or say upon hearing about it.  He spoke slowly and carefully, not saying much, but enough in that he hoped it would satisfy his curiosity and ease off of the personal questions.

“I don’t know.  It was so…quiet.  There were others around me.  I don’t know who,” he said, realizing that the moving cacti in the dream were indeed camouflaged soldiers.  Joe omitted the part about how at first he’d seen moving cacti though.  Ben would really think he was crazy then.

“Have you had these kinds of dreams before?”  Ben’s voice still had that parental tone to it.  After all, he was 48 years old and a father himself.

“Yes.  My mother knows about them.”

“Do you remember anything else?”

“I was crawling around, looking for something.  I had a kid’s pail in my hand.  I don’t know why I had it or where it came from.  It was just there.  When I’d find something, I’d put it in the pail.  I found someone’s dog tags.”

“Who do you think they belonged to?”

“I don’t know!” Joe’s voice began to rise again out of frustration and nervousness.  “Quit asking so many questions.  Come on, let’s go!”

“You sure you’re okay now?”

“Yes!”

Ben started the car and eased back onto Highway 91.  After a while, Joe took a handkerchief out of his pin-striped jacket pocket and did his best to clean his face.  He rolled down the window a little ways and let the fresh air calm him down.

“How long was I asleep for?” Joe asked, now staring straight ahead.

“About ten minutes.”

“I haven’t been sleeping well lately,” he confessed.

“That might be why you’re having these nightmares.”

“Yeah, you’re probably right.”

“It was like that for me when I got back from France thirty years ago.”

“What?”  Joe sat up, surprised.  “You were in the First World War?”

“Yeah, I was.”

“I never knew that.”

“It’s not something I like to broadcast, but yes, I went over there in 1917.  I was seventeen years old.  When you’re born in 1900 like me, people always know how old you are.  When I got home from the war, everybody made such a big to-do about it.  There were bands, parades, the works.  But I realized something.”

“What’s that, Ben?”

“You can have a parade when you leave for war, and there’ll most likely be one when you come back—if you’re one of the lucky ones.  But wars will always end in funerals…always.

“Yeah...”

 “I would have nightmares.  Moreso when I came back than I do now.  Amy knows, of course, but never says anything, which is fine with me.  Over time they’ll fade, you’ll see.  It will happen to you, too.”

Joe pondered for a while at what his partner just told him and then remembered something.  His own father had also fought in the Great War.  Maybe he went through the same things Ben did and now him.   His mother seldom spoke of his father who had died when Joe was two years old.  He had no memories of him.

“Thanks, Ben.” Joe said just above a whisper.

“Yeah, okay.”

And the subject was dropped.

After stopping at a greasy spoon restaurant for breakfast and filling up the car, they arrived at the police station in Las Vegas around 11 p.m.   After a splash of cold water on the face, a hasty shave, teeth brushing, and hair combing, the daunting task of extraditing the murder suspect could begin.  By 1 a.m. the three of them were ready to make the trek back to Los Angeles.

As they left the station with Joe and Ben flanking the man, gripping his arms, Joe coarsely told him, “I hope you didn’t drink a lot of coffee because we aren’t stopping.”  Thankfully, he had been fed a couple of hours before they showed up.

Joe drove this time, while Ben minded the arrestee in the back, whose wrists were handcuffed together behind his back.  The ride was quiet as they passed through the desert; this time in the opposite direction.  The suspect must’ve been sleep deprived as well because he eventually began to snore.   At least he wasn’t a talkative person.  Overall, the ride through the remainder of Nevada was uneventful.

Joe felt grateful as they crossed the California state line, knowing they were getting closer to Los Angeles, City Hall, to home, a nice hot meal, to Dot, and to what he hoped would be a good night’s sleep.  It had better be after driving ten hours straight, not to mention working a full day before that.  He was looking forward to the two weeks where he’d have the house to himself.  If there wasn’t a discordance within their work schedules, he and Dorothy could spend a lot of time together.  He could have her over and she could stay as long as she wanted to... Just then, the murder suspect rousted Joe out of his thoughts.

“Hey, Sergeant?  Where’s the fire?” he said.

What the hell was he talking about? And that was when Joe heard the siren, and saw the red light, too.

“Oh, shit!” he said, under his breath.  This can’t be happening!

“Oh, man!” said the perp.  “This is gonna be good!”

“Oh, shut up!” said Ben, to the arrestee, who just grinned.

The California Highway Patrolman was only doing his job.  Joe knew this.  After all, he had been going 55.  His daydreaming made him anxious.  On the way there, it was Joe who harped on Ben about the speed limit being 45.  It was he who was concerned about the car overheating and perhaps it was luck or the cooler weather at night that this did not happen.   Joe felt gracious to have a partner like Ben, who sat calmly, yet hunched over in the backseat, not uttering one spiteful word.   He was kidding himself of course, because if they hadn’t had their passenger, he’d never hear the end of it.

The CHP officer was a nice kid, though, not even twenty-one years old, more wide-eyed and fascinated with Joe’s badge than adding another citation to his quota for the night. Still, Joe was handed the citation, and before they went on their way, the officer asked to see Badge #714 again. He tactfully obliged, glancing over at Ben, knowing that he, too, was remembering their early days as patrol and traffic officers all those years ago.

The sun was up by the time they reached City Hall around seven that Friday morning.  But this didn’t mean their day was over.  They still needed to interrogate the guy and have a stenographer take his statement.  Then, the endless yet tediousness of paperwork would begin once again.  While the suspect was being processed, fingerprinted, showered, and changed into prison clothes, Joe and Ben took the elevator up to the 8th Floor where the cafeteria was located and had breakfast.

Three hours later, in an interrogation room, the man confessed to murdering his mistress in his car with a claw hammer.   He was so sick of her nagging him to marry her because she was pregnant.   During the argument, he had discovered the claw hammer on the floor of the car, and in a fit of rage, hit her with it.  After disposing of the body in the new house, he abandoned his car, not realizing that the license plate would be traced right back to him.  But this never entered his mind, as he sprinted home to shower and change his clothes.  While doing all of that, his wife apparently had been grocery shopping. The man threw away the soiled clothing he wore when committing the crime.  He then walked to a U-Drive rental and fled the state, only to be pinched in Vegas for speeding.  A stenographer was promptly summoned.  Before he was hauled off to the jail, he bellowed and pointed at Joe, “Wait until everyone hears about me witnessing a copper being pulled over for speeding!”  Joe glared at the perp, thinking, You fucking son-of-a-bitch! He gave a hearty howl as he was led out of the room, but Captain Blaine Steve, who was right there the entire time, wasn’t laughing.

“Yes, sir.  No, sir,” was all Joe responded to Captain Steve in his office, with the door shut.  Joe sounded professional and polite, saying what he knew his superior wanted to hear.  The captain then said he wanted him and Ben to get out of his sight until Monday, that is, until they completed the paperwork for the day.   Just as he passed through the doorway of the Skipper’s office, Joe turned toward his voice one last time.

“Oh, and Friday?”

“Yes, sir?”

“Slow down.”

“Yes, sir.”

By five, Joe phoned Dorothy at Georgia Street Juvenile, glad that she hadn’t left yet for the day.  He apologized saying he wouldn’t be able to pick her up to take her over to his mother’s for dinner like they had planned earlier in the week, but would it be all right if she took the streetcar instead?  She told him that would be fine and he’d see her very soon.  His mother told him, that afternoon, when he called to let her know he was back in town, that dinner would be ready by seven.  He and Ben weren’t able to leave City Hall until a quarter to seven after signing out.  Ben remarked, as they descended the steps of the Main Street entrance that he was going to sleep around the clock.  Joe added that he would do the same after taking his mother to the train station the next morning.  Both of them had been up for a little over 26 hours straight.

Copyright © 2017 by Kristi N. Zanker