After his father had died, he and the two younger ones had been in the Home for over three years. Then his uncle took him out. His uncle, Mose Keefler, had run a small grocery store in the Sink and lived over it with his wife and his two daughters and the monster son they kept in the room in the back. Johnny Keefler had been nine when Mose got him out of the Home. Mose was a burly, somber, hardworking man and Johnny had adored him. The store was open from seven in the morning until eleven at night six days a week, noon to nine on Sundays. Mose drove himself, his wife, his daughters and Johnny hard. He scouted the farmers’ market for half-spoiled merchandise that could be salvaged. Johnny could still remember the slime and the stink of rotten potatoes, remember squatting in the shed behind the store, sorting good from bad. The store made just enough to support the six of them. For Johnny it was school and work and exhausted sleep on the army cot in the shed. He was a small spindly boy, subject to head colds, and with the tight, pinched, gray face of a slum diet.
Mose Keefler tried to maintain a fruit rack outside the store during the daylight hours. There was a bus stop at the corner and he picked up additional business that way. But he was in constant warfare with the roving band of tough kids who considered it their neighborhood. They would post a lookout across the street to signal when nobody was near the front of the store. Then the others would come on the run, snatching the pears, peaches, melons, apples, oranges. Johnny knew who they were. They went to the same school, the John X. Moran School on Hoffer Street. Red Annlie was the chieftain. And there was Gil Kowalsik, Hank Rillyer, Stubs Rollins, Tooey Gennetti, Pete Casey. They were all in the seventh and eighth grades at the school, even though Red was seventeen and big as a man. They made the lives of smaller kids a misery. They had casually tormented Johnny Keefler, but he was too small and cowed to provide much sport.
The police told Mose Keefler that if he could catch one of the kids, then maybe they could do something. Mose thought about it a long time and finally piled cartons just inside the door, made himself a peep-hole and hid behind it. On a Saturday afternoon there was a raid on the fruit. Mose came roaring out and, in two bounds, caught Hank Rillyer by the arm and started beating him around the head with his other hand. Johnny had run out, too. It was a day of misty rain. Hank was a wiry kid. Johnny saw the sleek gleam of the broad blade of the knife, gray as the sky, and yelled as he saw it sweep and cut. The knife had a razor edge. It cut across and through the stained apron, through the threadbare gray pants, through paunchy skin and the deep fat layers. It cut from side to side, an inch below the belt, a cut over a foot long. And Hank Rillyer ran, head down, thin legs pumping. Mose caught at himself with both hands, but he felt through his hands and looked down with wet ashen face at the gray and white and red, at the coils and clumps of his own substance. He went to his knees, still staring, and fell forward screaming in a voice that sounded far, far away. And died of shock on the operating table while they were rinsing the sidewalk filth from his organs.
Johnny Keefler, dry-eyed, feeling as far away as Mose’s screams, told the police who did it, how it was done, and who was with the boy who did it. He had seen Rollins and Gennetti. They were picked up. They were sixteen and over. Rillyer got life for felony murder. Rollins and Gennetti were also tried. Gennetti got ten years. Rollins, whose father had good connections, got a suspended sentence. But long before they were sentenced, Johnny Keefler had been taken into the alley that had become so much a part of him. Annlie, Kowalsik and Casey took him into the alley, around the corner where no window could see. They did not kill him. Had they known it, their lives would have been easier to bear had they done so. They tied him to the iron stanchion of a fire-escape, gagged him and stripped him and worked on him for over three hours. After he was found hanging there unconscious, the interns who worked on him were sickened by what had been done to him, and marveled that he had been tough enough to survive it. They unwound the wires, and probed for the fragments of glass and the small rusty nails, and sewed ripped tissues and soothed the carefully burned initials and extracted the stumps of the broken teeth.
When he was able to answer questions, he said that he did not know who had worked him over. He had not recognized them. He could not identify them. He was ten years old, but there was nothing left of the child in his eyes. And never after that was there anything left of childhood. He was released from the Home when he was sixteen. He passed the examinations on the third try and got on the police list when he was twenty. He got his appointment when he was twenty-one, served his year of probation and acquired patrolman status.
After two years of traffic, he obtained a transfer to the Robbery Detail, and a promotion to patrolman first class, the highest rating he achieved in his police career. He was not the kind of cop who achieves promotion. He did not take orders well. He was frequently censured for excessive brutality when making arrests. But he did not take a dime of grift. In the view of his co-workers, he was embarrassingly, excessively honest. He lived in a cheap room in the Sink. He never married, never had time for the casual formalities of friendship. During off-duty hours he prowled the Sink, the implacable hunter, armed and alert. He was a superb marksman. During the times when he was in disfavor he would be given a walking beat in the farthest residential areas of Hancock. But when he was off duty, he was back in the Sink.
A very special transformation took place in that alley on that dreary day thirty-two years before. It was not iron that entered his soul. It was a corrosive acid, and the walls of the soul were impervious to it. In the beginning there were six names on the list. Annlie, Rollins, Rillyer, Gennetti, Kowalsik, Casey. Rillyer was knifed to death in a prison riot. While he was still in the Home, Rollins put a stolen car into a bridge abutment at ninety miles an hour.
His first killing was Red Annlie. According to the official report, Annlie was creating a disturbance in a bar where off-duty Patrolman Keefler had stopped in. Keefler had identified himself and arrested Annlie. As he was taking Annlie to the nearest precinct house, Annlie broke away and attempted to flee. Patrolman Keefler called on him to stop, fired one warning shot in the air and then fired at Annlie’s legs. The shot carried too high and hit Annlie at the base of the spine. Annlie, a door-to-door salesman with a record of three arrests for minor offenses, died thirty-six hours later in Lakeview Charity Hospital.
There were three left.
Pete Casey, wanted for auto theft and extortion, was located by Patrolman Keefler in a third-floor apartment in a relatively good section of Hancock. He was armed. He inflicted a flesh wound on Patrolman Keefler, the bullet nicking the inside of Keefler’s left thigh. Casey died on the way to the hospital with three slugs in his lower abdomen.
Theodore Gennetti, on his way home from work, walking home after a late shift at the Hancock Wire and Brad Company, was arrested by Patrolman Keefler. Keefler reported that Gennetti was “acting suspiciously” and he decided to bring him in for questioning. Gennetti had served six years in State Prison at Alton. When Gennetti pulled a knife, Patrolman Keefler beat him into submission. Gennetti was operated on for a depressed fracture of the occipital bone, and died the following day of a massive cerebral hemorrhage. Patrolman Keefler was reprimanded and given a sixty-day suspension.
Only Gilbert Kowalsik left, and Keefler had learned he had gone to the West Coast. Kowalsik returned after Keefler had been a cop for fourteen years. He came back on vacation. He was a union official on the Los Angeles docks. Four days after his return his body was found in the lake and identified. The autopsy indicated Kowalsik had been tortured to death.