To acknowledge Tanner’s jokes in any way is to encourage him, so I said, “Tell Willis I’m on my way down to see Hayes, the guy who runs the diner where Penn worked. And tell him I want to talk to him about my Sunday story.”
The only thing Hayes could add to what he had already told me on the phone was that Penn had seemed unusually relaxed when he reported to work at four o’clock on the afternoon before he was killed.
“He wasn’t the relaxed type,” Hayes said, setting a cup of coffee in front of me. The Cinderella Diner owner was large and hairy in a loud Hawaiian-print sportshirt and wrinkled slacks; a gap-toothed man with a sidewall haircut. “Jack didn’t talk much and we didn’t socialize. He was a good cook and a hard worker but his mind was always somewhere else. When he came in here last Tuesday, though, he seemed — well, looser. We even talked a little and had some lemon meringue pie and coffee. I left at five like always, and that was the last time I ever saw him.”
Hayes said the pie-and-coffee talk was about football and the weather. He said he’d never asked Penn what he was doing in Riverton. Judging from the fading lettering, the fly specks and the thumb marks on his Help Wanted sign now in the diner window again, I could see that Hayes was used to hiring people who didn’t stick around to make a career of it.
Leo Nagursky, the “Bronk” of Bronk’s saloon, is an ex-Navy gunner and said the only time he really talked to Penn was the first time he saw the Texan at the bar.
“He was a draft-beer drinker,” Leo said, “so I set up a few on the house for a new customer. I knew he was Navy and not out long. Those were regulation whites he wore. We talked a little Navy, a little football — he was a big Oilers fan — and that was it. I don’t pry, so I didn’t learn much about him except he was a Texan, did a four-year hitch out of Dago, and made commissary third — that’s a cook — before he got out. I asked him if he’d thought about shipping over — you know, re-enlisting. He said he had thought about it but right then he had something more important to do. I remember wondering how important it could be to work in a diner somewhere so far from home.”
On Saturday morning I stopped at a doughnut shop on the way to the Sentinel and picked up a pint of black coffee and three plain doughnuts to go.
My mail included the photo Thelma Day had promised to send and I made my way to my desk. There, tepid coffee and sinkers at elbow, I pecked out a lead for the Penn story I had in mind for our fat Sunday edition. I didn’t have much in the way of news nor any way of knowing what the rest of the day would bring, so I started out:
No one knows why Jack Penn, a burly ex-sailor from Crockett, Texas, came to Riverton five weeks or so ago. No one knows why he came here and, as yet, no one knows — except his killer — why he was murdered here in the early-morning hours last Wednesday.
No one heard a noise and no one reported seeing anything unusual, but at about 4:00 or 5:00 A.M., in a Merchant Street alleyway, someone sent two .38-caliber bullets crashing into Jack Penn’s skull and neck.
Next I recapped Penn’s Navy background, his short-lived marriage, the tragic death of his sister from a drug-connected leap or fall from her dormitory window, Penn’s disappearance from Crockett, his appearance in Riverton, and his employment at the diner. I quoted Thelma Day, Richard Hayes, Lieutenant Quinn of Homicide, and Leo Nagursky.
I took the unfinished story over to Willis and told him I intended ending it by telling of my own experience with Penn at Bronk’s saloon, the cryptic remark he made to me about something I had written recently, my clipping search, and my idea that there might be a connection between Joann Penn’s death at the college in Houston and Jack Penn’s coming to Riverton and his visits to Riverton College.
Willis speed-read the copy and flipped it back to me. “You got any new art?” he asked. We had used Penn’s driver’s-license mug with the second-day story.
“I got a snapshot wedding picture of Thelma and Jack Penn,” I told him. “It’s usable.” Actually it was better than that. It was possible somebody would recognize him from it and come up with some information.
Before getting back to the typewriter, I put a call in for Charlie Craddock. He was in Houston but expected back shortly. I left a message.
By the time I finished talking to Craddock this time around I had grown to like him a hell of a lot, and we promised to get together, either there or here, some time soon.
He had left the Chronicle in the hands of his managing editor on Friday and had spent the better part of the day on the Southeastern Texas State campus, where he had come up with two important pieces of information — one, Joann Penn had died with a familiar drug in her bloodstream: PCP, the much-publicized “angel dust,” and, two, Penn had made a nuisance of himself on campus questioning students, security officers, faculty members, and anybody else he could collar, trying to find out who the drug dealers were.
Craddock had met a couple of students who had talked with Penn. They had told Penn Joann and some of her friends were involved in drugs — either as buyers or pushers. The students said it was possible Penn had picked up a lead, although they doubted it and refused to supply any names to Craddock.
As for the PCP, the students said it was a glut on the market.
“Now you know what the spray-paint was all about,” Craddock said, “and you’re makin’ out of all this the same thing I am. You got a pretty good story for your Sunday paper and so have I. Do you have a way of runnin’ a check at Riverton College for anybody that might have transferred there from Southeastern? If you find somebody you can bet your entire butt that Penn found him too.”
I told Charlie I’d be back in touch in a few hours.
The edges came together a little after that conversation. In newspaper work you need to know about drugs and I have a file drawer full of dope data: government pamphlets, clips from scientific journals, and wire-service copy. PCP is nothing new. It was originally an animal tranquilizer and is still used by some veterinarians. Its chemical name is phencyclidine hydrochloride. It can be a powerful central-nervous-system depressant or stimulant, depending on the amount taken. If s very versatile: you can eat it, inject it, snort it, or sprinkle some on tobacco, grass, oregano, or mint leaves and smoke it.
What it can do to you is equally versatile. You can get simple hallucinations, a hard-to-describe spaced-outedness, or a schizoid psychosis. You can claw your own eyes out, you can open your veins with a razor blade and feel no pain, or you can kill somebody or yourself.
Leaping from a window fits a PCP pattern and Joann Penn’s death was not the first such manifestation of it. The stuff first came into use in this country in the early 1950s as a surgical anesthetic but its potential for horror removed it from the market in 1965.
Two other PCP facts: Anybody who can read a recipe and get the ingredients can make it by the tubful. And among its nicknames, besides “angel dust” and “rocket fuel,” is one I hadn’t known or remembered until Craddock reminded me of it. PCP is also known as “hog.”
Connie Oates, as I mentioned, is our education reporter, a big, lovely woman who’s married to the Sentinel and can find page-one news in a PTA meeting. It was Saturday and getting late — not a good time to find out anything on a college campus — but Connie managed to get hold of a friend who works in the Riverton College personnel office. The idea was to run a check, as Craddock had suggested, on the faculty, starting with the Chemistry Department, to see if anybody had been hired recently from Southeastern Texas State.