The private detective had moved to new and plushier quarters. When I paid him a visit, he took me into his private office, handed me a thick report and said, “Here’s some sad news, I’m afraid.”
The report informed me, graphically and in detail, how long and hard he had looked for my mother’s parents. Still, he had been unable to find any trace of them. Their identity remained a dark mystery.
I stared at the last page of the report. “Damn!” I said very softly.
The private detective put an arm on my shoulder. “Believe me, I did everything humanly possible to find those two people.”
It was obvious he had. But that didn’t make my disappointment any less keen.
The idea of having to admit defeat galled. “Do you think you could find them with more money?” I asked.
“I’ll be honest with you. I don’t think I could find them with all the gold at Fort Knox. While I’ve still got two or three feelers out, I don’t believe they can be found.”
I stood up. “Well, I guess that’s that, then.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Yeah. So am I.”
I walked for a long time, until I was physically weary. I thought about the report, mulled it over and over. Bitterly I realized that it would have been different in fiction. The private detective would have found my mother’s parents, or at least one of them, and there would have been a joyous reunion followed by a compelling explanation why my mother had been abandoned as an infant. Surely, too, the fictionist would have revealed these two—my maternal grandparents—as people of refinement and substance, tragic people perhaps, and somehow my learning their identities would have favorably altered the course of my life, and given it direction, purpose.
But this wasn’t fiction.
Only life itself would have the temerity to create—for its own perverse entertainment—such a mockery: a juvenile delinquent who had turned bagnio bandit to finance a search for unknown grandparents and who, as a consequence of his banditry, served a second savage term in a reformation factory that he might be conditioned for God alone knew what sort of unbelievable future.
Clearly, Chessman at eighteen was a character much too improbable for fiction. Well, life had something to learn—that the mocked could mock.
The days passed. I talked the nights away at my mother’s bedside. I worked with my father. I spent many of my evenings at a local branch of the public library, reading, studying. We traded the family sedan for a little Ford convertible which I hopped up, put in faultless running order. The Ford became my pride, my sparkling little black jewel. Two friends from grammar-school days began dropping around. Sometimes my father would join us and we’d play cards. Sometimes we’d just sit around and shoot the breeze. Other times we would go roller skating at a small rink in Glendale or to the beach, or perhaps we’d take in a show. And late at night, alone, I would feed a piece of paper into my mother’s portable typewriter and write, only to tear up and write some more, as a discipline and an index, a barometer—of that which writhed and burned and glowed unnaturally within, of a warder named Hate, of a tall, broken-nosed, sardonic young man who found it so ridiculously easy to be profound, profoundly wrong. How incredible that, on his father’s side, this violent young man should be a direct descendant of that gentle and quaint old Quaker, John Greenleaf Whittier!
“And the Rebel rides on his raids no more.”
I was marking time and knew it.
Word had gotten around that I was home. Youngsters from the reformation factory came to see me, full of tough talk and ideas. “We got a big score lined up,” they’d say. “Wanta get cut in?”
I’d shake my head. “No, not right now. I feel like taking it easy for a while.”
And then I’d read in the papers that they’d been caught and shot up and killed. Sometimes they’d come to see me after a wild adventure and relate it. Then, “You sure you don’t want to join us?” as though flying bullets, wild rides, gun fights and near death were irresistible inducements to “caper.” These youngsters—and I was one with them psychologically—were anomalies. They committed crimes, often senselessly violent crimes, and so were criminals; but they stubbornly refused to accept crime’s cynical and harsh disciplines. For the most part, they genuinely scorned those who regarded crime as a business, unspectacularly. Crime was an adventure, kicks, glamor; crime was rebellion, a psychopathic crusade, an inviting, deadly pilgrimage; crime was getting even and forcing recognition of identity—but certainly it was nothing so utterly unalluring as an unheralded, workaday means of obtaining a livelihood.
The police got into the habit of scooping me up every time they needed a suspect. I’d be given a ride to the police station, marched to the detective quarters and grilled by impatient, large-sized dicks. The more they rousted me around the more I needled them, gave them smart answers. What had I been doing, smart guy? Oh, just the usual stuff, robbing banks, kidnaping millionaires and that sort of thing.
Angrily, they’d warn me, “Don’t let your foot slip.”
I’d laugh. “You flat-footed clowns couldn’t catch a cold.”
To me it didn’t make sense—or it made too much sense. The whorehouses and the gambling joints were going full blast and not getting so much as a rumble from law enforcement. But eighteen-year-old Chessman was constantly being grilled, rousted. He was the guy to watch, not the big-time pimps and madams and gamblers and fixers.
Tim put in an appearance—the same old Tim, still full of bold, bad ideas, still shifty-eyed, still with his tough-guy complex, a short, husky eighteen-year-old with a fox face and a swagger in his walk. And a Tim in trouble.
“Jeez, Chess, you gotta help me. These guys are after me and they mean business.”
“These guys” meant business for a fact. They were a couple of mean characters from Burbank and Tim had gotten himself into deadly serious trouble with them. They were gunning for him. I served notice that I was taking over Tim’s beef and was promptly invited to the hills to settle accounts. “And you better come ready 1” I was warned. Luckily I did. Even more luckily, running into a sort of ambush, I received nothing more than a superficial flesh wound and then raised a little hell of my own.
There were other adventures and misadventures too numerous to mention. I loaned my gun to a friend and it bought him a bunk at San Quentin. A mincing homosexual, big enough to fight grizzly bears with his bare hands, punched a tough friend and myself groggy when this friend got it into his head to try to roll him. There was a wild ride in a hot car through Hollywood, widi the cops in hot pursuit and shooting. Seated beside me were two gay young things who squealed with fear and delight. Today, one of them is an internationally famous movie star. I arranged to spring a young hoodlum confederate from the courtroom. At the last instant he lost his nerve and, in getting away, I very nearly lost my life.
Then it happened, perhaps inevitably, the ridiculous thing. One evening Tim and I drove onto the parking lot of a department store in Glendale, with a five-gallon can and a hose on the floor of the car. Tim got out with can and hose and walked to a nearby car. Suddenly, the vicinity was alive with people. They grabbed Tim. They had been lying in wait for burglars who had been regularly looting the premises, and they figured the hose and can were a stall, a front. Tim pointed to my Ford and said he was with me. They jerked and shoved him over to the car. “Do you know this guy?” they asked.
“Never saw him before in my life,” I assured them.
They marched Tim away and I drove off. Tim was quite a boy. He couldn’t keep his mouth shut. I went home. Anger mounted. If Tim talked, this penny-ante, spur-of-the-moment caper could cost me too much time in jail. I put a recently acquired little .32 revolver under my pillow and lay down, thinking, waiting. I didn’t have long to wait. Within minutes someone knocked loudly on the garage door and a gruff voice said:
“All right, Chessman, we know you’re in there. Open up!”