Soul Searching

After 35 years on the Force, I'm six months away from retirement.  Which in this department means I get to work easy street--cold cases mostly--nothing too strenuous and I like that.  Now if this was t.v., well I'd been drawn into some gun fight or some case that niggles at my heart--but hell, life ain't a t.v. show.  And I for one am counting the days and hours until I can kiss the gun and the badge goodbye.

I know it won't be that easy. My dad and my grandad were both on the Force--and they wore out a couple of rocking chairs telling all their stories and when folks were in trouble they'd come to dad and granpa.  I know I got some of that coming and I'm prepared for that.  What I hope to spend my time doing, is collecting police journals--not the just the rags that were popular in the 1920s and 30s but the actual journals kept by real officers.  That's what interests me. 

So I'm down in the archives pulling out a case file for a broad named Allison Whitman, she was the niece of the DA Whitman who got the conviction of Charles Becker for the murder of Herman Rosenthal.  That was a pretty damn big case back in the day--folks still talk about it.  Grandpa knew Becker--liked him, seems like.  But Allison was murdered back in the 50s.  Crazy story, she was a novitiate--which is a starter nun in those days--hadn't taken her final vows--she was on her way to spend her final weekend with her parents, when she disappeared.  The media went crazy.  The governor called out the national guard to look for her.  Weeks passed and then they found her body dumped on the grave of Herman Rosenthal.

You can imagine how crazy things went then---it was all the media could talk about for months and months.  But eventually it died down--there were no good leads--nothing to go on and finally she and the whole Becker, Rosenthal, Whitman fiasco was forgotten.  Until now.

Since I can pick my cases (anything to keep this old fart out from under the rapid feet of the new recruits) I've decided to look into Allison Whitman's murder and see what I can discover.  You won't believe the shit that is in the evidence boxes (15 in all and that's just what they decided to keep).  They don't keep everything despite what you see on t.v.--we only have so much room.  Now days we can film most of it--but back then we just kept what we could and tossed the rest.  It's the tossed stuff you got worry about.

So I've been two weeks reading through the files of the Whitman case and going through the evidence that's left and what I find is Allison's journal--or should I say journals--there are three in the box--but the file indicates that there were at least ten.  Not uncommon I hear, for girls for that time, especially devout Catholic girls.  And I start to read them---not very interesting for the most part--but the last journal--the last journal in the box--because it looks to me like there was another journal after that we either didn't get or didn't keep.  Talks about her moral dilemma--are the sins of her family--sins she is bound to confess?

"I'm so confused," she writes, "what if I know something bad that happened, something really good people did, but still it was wrong--as a bride of Christ--aren't I bound to tell?"

Maybe these words didn't mean anything to the original detectives---maybe they did--and they just weren't going to open that can of worms. Or maybe, I'm just reading too much into it. So that's what I say to myself and I try to make myself believe.  And I do, until I read:

"I read Uncle's journal again.  Hoping God would give me some guidance.  It was so clear, the money he paid--not just to the gunman, but to the judge, and folks on the jury. Uncle's an old man now, he will die soon--he has to confess.  He has to --to save his immortal soul."

Suddenly I know, as the original detectives surely knew, that Charles Becker was innocent and that in all likelihood Allison was murdered for what she knew--and for what she was about to expose.  The date on the journal was three months before she disappeared.

Allison's mother has died, but it seems to me that she is a likely suspect in Allison's death--though she was never thoroughly questioned in that regard--and her Uncle, the former District Attorney Whitman, another likely suspect.  He's dead too.  Not that that changes anything--only that it makes it harder to find direct evidence.


And what about my immortal soul--do I just close up the boxes and go sweetly into my retirement and then to my grave saying nothing.  Or do I, open a wound that will tear families and the department apart once again.  Justice I'm told is revealing the truth.  Peace, however, is imperfect. Apparently you can't have both and I have to choose.