“This is Brad Bathos. I’m down here in the streets of Washington now, and it is a moving and heartrending sight I see. Ever since the news first broke that the President had been found dead in a baggie at Walter Reed Hospital, the people of this great country, his people, have been pouring into the capital from all over the nation. Thousands upon thousands simply standing here in the streets surrounding the White House, with heads bowed, visibly shaken and moved. Many are crying openly, not a few of them grown men. Here is a man seated on the curbstone holding his head in his hands and quietly sobbing. I’m going to ask him if he will tell us where he comes from.”
“I come from here, I come from Washington.”
“You’re sitting on the curbstone quietly sobbing into your hands. Can you tell us why? Can you put it into words?”
“Guilt.”
“You mean you feel a personal sense of guilt?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because I did it.”
“You did it? You killed the President?”
“Yes.”
“Well, look, this is important — have you told the police?”
“I’ve told everyone. The police. The FBI. I even tried to call Pitter Dixon to tell her. But all they kept saying was that it was kind of me to think of them at a time like this and Mrs. Dixon appreciated my sympathy and thought it was in very good taste, and then they hung up. Meanwhile, I should be arrested. I should be in the papers — my picture, and a big headline, DIXON’S MURDERER. But nobody will believe me. Here, here’s the notebooks where I’ve been planning it for months. Here are tape recordings of my own telephone conversations with friends. Here, look at this: a signed confession! And I wasn’t even under duress when I wrote it. I was in a hammock. I was fully aware of my constitutional rights. My lawyer was with me, as a matter of fact. We were having a drink. Here — just read it, I give all my reasons and everything.”
“Sir, interesting as your story is, we have to move on. We must move on through this immense crowd… Here’s a young attractive woman holding a sleeping infant in her arms. She is just standing on the sidewalk gazing blankly at the White House. Heaven only knows how much anguish is concealed in that gaze. Madam, will you tell the television audience what you’re thinking about as you look at the White House?”
“He’s dead.”
“You appear to be in a state of shock.”
“I know. I didn’t think I could do it.”
“Do what?”
“Kill. Murder. He said, ‘Let me make one thing perfectly—’ and before he could say ‘clear,’ I had him in the baggie. You should have seen the look on his face when I turned the little twister seal.”
“The look on the President’s face when you—?”
“Yes. I’ve never seen such rage in my life. I’ve never seen such anger and fury. But then he realized I was staring at him through the baggie, and suddenly he looked just the way he does on television, all seriousness and responsibility, and he opened his mouth, I guess to say ‘clear,’ and that was it. I think he thought the whole thing was being televised.”
“And — well, was your baby with you, when you allegedly—?”
“Oh yes, yes. Of course, she’s too young to remember exactly what happened. But I want her to be able to grow up to say, ‘I was there when my mother murdered Dixon.’ Imagine it my little girl is going to grow up in a world where she’ll never have to hear anybody say he’s going to make something perfectly clear ever again! Or, ‘Let’s make no mistake about it!’ Or, ‘I’m a Quaker and that’s why I hate war so much —" Never never never never. And I did it. I actually did it. I tell you, I still can’t believe it. I drowned him. In cold water. Me.”
“And you, young man, let’s move on to you. You’re just walking up and down here outside the White House, very much as though you’ve lost something. You seem confused and bewildered. Can you tell us, in a few words, what it is you’re searching for?”
“A cop. A policeman.”
“Why?”
“I want to turn myself in.”
“This is Brad Bathos, from the streets of Washington, where the mourners have come to gather, to pray, to weep, to lament, and to hope. Back to Erect Severehead.”
“Erect, we’re up here on top of the Washington Monument with the Chief of the Washington Police Force. Chief Shackles, how many people would you say are down there right now?”
“Oh, just around the monument alone we’ve got about twenty-five or thirty thousand; and I’d say there are twice that many over by the White House. And of course more are pouring in every hour.”
“Can you describe these people? Are they the usual sort of demonstrators you get here in Washington?”
“Oh no, no. These people don’t want to disrupt anything. I would say they are actually bending over backwards to cooperate with the authorities. So far, at any rate.”
“What do you mean by so far?”
“Well, we haven’t yet had to make any arrests. We’re under orders from the White House not to arrest anyone under any conditions. As you can imagine, this is putting something of a strain on my men, particularly as just about everybody down here seems to have come for the purpose of getting himself arrested. I mean I’ve never seen anything like it. A lot of them are down on their knees begging to be taken in, and just about every Tom, Dick and Harry seems to have documents or photographs or fingerprints, proving that he is the one who killed the President. Of course, none of it is worth the paper it’s written on. Some of it’s kind of laughable, in fact, it’s so unprofessional and obviously a slapdash last-minute job. But still and all, you got to give them credit for, their fortitude. They grab hold of my men just like they had the goods on themselves, and actually try to handcuff themselves to the officer with their own handcuffs and get carted off to prison that way. We can’t park a squad car anywhere, without half a dozen of them jumping into the back seat, and screaming, ‘Take me to J. Edgar Heehaw — and step on it.’ Now you can’t arrest anybody without taking the proper procedural steps, but go try to explain that to a crowd like this. We’re sort of humoring them, however, the best we can, and the ones who just won’t quit, we tell them to wait right where they are and we’ll round them up later. What we’re hoping for is a good thunderstorm during the night, that’ll sort of break the back of the whole thing. Maybe if they stand around long enough in the rain they’ll get the idea that nobody is going to arrest them no matter how much evidence they produce, and they’ll go home.”
“But, Chief Shackles, suppose the rain doesn’t come — suppose they are still jamming the streets in the morning. What about the workers trying to get to government offices—?”.. “Well, they’ll just have to suffer a little inconvenience, I’m afraid. Because I am not subjecting my men to the charge of false arrest just so somebody can get to his office in time for the morning coffee break. And then there are these orders from the White House.”
“Your assumption then is that all these people here are innocent, each and every one?”
“Absolutely. If they were guilty, they would be resisting arrest. They would be running away and so on. They would be screaming about their lawyers and their rights. I mean, that’s how you can tell they’re guilty in the first place. But all these people are saying is, ‘I did it, take me in."