The 85 Year Old Dot to Dot Detecrive Read online

Rick Bates, the 85 Year Old, Dot to Dot Detective

  My name is John Charles Weeks. As a writer/journalist on Cape Cod for the

  last ten months, I have covered two or three notable stories but most of what I write about is pretty mundane.

  I spent three weeks in the Spring watching the Right Whales in Nantucket Sound as over half the world's population of the big beasts came to Cape Cod. As magnificent as a right whale breach is the first time you see it, it quickly becomes a chore to try and present it to readers with a fresh approach.

  After two weeks doing stories on the lushly appointed local golf courses the only thing I did not know about that boring sport is how the grass always looks freshly cut, though it seems like nobody ever mows it.

  But for the fact that I watch the duffers scoop up great mounds of earth as they are trying to drive the ball, I would be convinced that the courses use artificial turf.

  So, it was with some relief that I accepted the invitation of the old retired Police Chief Rick Bates to talk to him about writing his biography. Bates

  was a storied Cape Cod figure prior to his retirement some 30 years ago.

  He still pops up on the news occasionally, as he did last year when he returned from his winter retreat in Key West to solve the infamous Cape Cod Name Game Murders.

  At 85 years old, he was, and still is, a force to be reckoned with and respected. To a man, the cops on Cape Cod do. In a previous story, I recounted my first meeting with the old gentleman.

  I had tried to get started on his biography but he had settled into a mix of champagne and orange juice; and his memories of mimosas and Elizabeth Taylor. This first meeting yielded only a story from 40 or 50 years ago. I had hoped to have better luck with my second visit.

  Arriving at the designated day and hour, the old Chief admitted me to his spacious three level home overlooking Nantucket Sound in the middle of Cape Cod.

  "Come in Watson," he smiled.

  "It's Weeks, Chief, John Charles Weeks."

  "Of course it is,Weeks but you are my Watson. AND DON'T CALL ME CHIEF!

  I am just kidding as usual Weeks. Let me get you a drink."

  "No Chief. Just a water for me please."

  "As you wish. I am having a Slippery Nipple. It's a mix of Bailey's and Sambuca. Notice how the ingredients remain separate from each other like

  two pages of an open book. It's delightful. You know, I didn't.........."

  "start drinking until you were 75 and now you are making up for lost time. You have said it before."

  "And I will say it again! Look Weeks, at 85 anything goes! At Sloppy Joe's in Key West or anyplace on Cape Cod, when I order Slippery Nipples I am instantly everybody's favorite uncle or grandfather or old geezer. And nobody ever lets me pay for anything! Life is good for an old, old guy.

  Now what about you Weeks. How did you acquire this name that interests me, John Charles Weeks?"

  "Well Chief, my Mother was a news 'junkie' born in the 1940s. There was a man on television she admired. He was a radio personality and a newspaper columnist and eventually had a program on TV called What's My Line?"

  "I know the show well Weeks. The host was John Charles Daly."

  "Correct Chief, and my Mother had a crush on this guy like the girls of today have a thing for George Clooney. If my Mother ever had been in the TV audience of What's My Line, she would have thrown her house keys up to Daly, wrapped in her underwear. I swear to you, she searched high and low for a man named Daly to marry but finally ran into my father and settled on the name Weeks. When I came along, it was a given I would be named John Charles."

  "It could have been worse Weeks. If she had admired comics like Shelley Berman from Curb Your Enthusiasm, you'd be Shelley Weeks. And you don't look like a Shelley. I think John Charles fits you well and I don't want my Watson to have a girl's name."

  "Let's get back to your biography Chief."

  "First a refill of my Slippery Nipple. It really is delightful. The Bailey's moderates the Sambuca which envigorates the Bailey's. It takes some practice to make this drink. A steady hand is required as you pour down the side of the glass.............."

  "Pardon the interruption Chief. How did you develop your powers of detection?"

  "Weeks I told you before, you watch too much television. Police work is not like TV. Oh maybe one case in 5,000 could be a film script, but mostly the work of detection is simply connecting the dots. In fact, I think you should use that as the book title. Call it, "Chief Rick Bates, the 85 year old Dot to Dot Detective.!

  Also, please remember Weeks, that Sherlock Holmes, and those SUV

  television programs are just fiction."

  "SVU Chief, not SUV."

  "Whatever. The point is that in most cases, a police officer simply puts one foot in front of the other starting at the beginning and walking to the solution. That's how I solved the biggest serial killing case ever on Cape Cod and maybe anywhere."

  "I thought the Name Game Murders was the greatest number of killings ever."

  "That case was only the most publicized. The biggest case ever, I call 'The Vanishing Homeless.' It involved vagrants and semi professional prostitutes. Nobody really cared about them or their deaths. That's why the case never received much notoriety It all started back in the 1960s shortly after I became Chief.

  My little town is only a few miles away from Hyannis, which as you know is the commercial center of Cape Cod. As such it has a larger and more diverse population than the rest of the Cape. It is more similar to a city like Boston, than it is to neighboring Yarmouth, Harwich, and Dennis.

  In Summer it was not only a destination for thousands of well off tourists, but also for hundreds of down on their luck homeless people. We didn't call them 'homeless' back then. They were just 'bums'. If they ended up in court we dressed them in a little fancier name. We called them Vagrants. Vagrancy was a crime.

  Most of the homeless in Hyannis congregated around the transportation centers of the bus and rail companies. They had a camp set up. Some people made hovel homes from large boxes. Others had tents. Some had no barrier from the elements. They simply slept on bare ground with cardboard for a mattress. They mostly kept to themselves except for panhandling by the docks and in front of the bus station. Other than a fairly rare case of a drunk getting out of hand, they caused few problems and the police mostly left them alone.

  The other chiefs and I had suspicions that a few people had gone missing, but it was a transient community and usually ninety per cent of the homeless moved on to somewhere else by the end of Autumn. Most of them did not have IDs or even social security numbers or driver's licenses. They were pretty much 'off the system'.

  Every once in a while the newspaper would run a story about 'a missing person' but it was rarely followed up. 'Policing' is a business in some respects just like any other business. You have a staff and you have a budget. You allocate your resources according to priority and looking for a missing 'bum' is always just about the last priority.

  On Cape Cod, getting on a ladder and going up a tree to rescue a taxpayer's cat is much more important work for a police officer than searching for a missing vagrant who does not want to be found anyway.

  The other chiefs and I were pretty sure that a fair number of vagrants were meeting with unpleasant ends, but we had no idea how many and we also felt that if somebody killed a bum, the perpetrator was probably another bum.

  "So you knew that murders were being committed and did nothing," Weeks interrupted.

  "Yes and no, John. Yes, we would make a preliminary investigation and record the case in our files. But no, when we heard of a missing vagrant we did not mount an active investigation for the simple reason that in the vast majority of these situations, the vagrant was missing simply because he or she moved on to another location. As I mentioned, in winter, probably 90 per cent of the homeless made their way to Florida. Som
e jumped on freight

  trains, others hitched rides, some even walked a good part of the way.

  In Southeastern Massachusetts around Fall River and New Bedford during the 1980s there was a serial killer who only murdered prostitutes. That person was never brought to justice despite slaying nine victims. If those women who were killed were prominent citizens, you can bet your last dollar that someone would have been tried and convicted for the killings. It's all about priorities.

  In the Cape Cod case, I got involved because of a woman. She interested me, so I made the case a priority. The woman was Dorothy Barton who tried hard not to look beautiful, but failed."

  "Stop a second Chief. You're telling me you only took this case because you were attracted to the woman?"

  "Yes. I told you before, I am not a bad guy. But I am not a good guy either. She was so pretty and so sweet looking that I immediately felt sympathy for her and wanted to please her. I listened to her story and said I'd push the case. It wasn't about making a move on her; though I would have loved to try it. I guess you could say I felt like Sir Galahad and she was the Holy Grail. I just felt like I had to do my best for her.

  Her tale was tragic. She was the mother of two young children. That in itself is a hard job, but it was made much worse by her husband. Jimmy Barton. He was a bright young auto mechanic with his own gas station when he and Dorothy married. They had a nice house in Centerville and were positioned for a great life until Jim got drafted and sent to Southeast Asia.

  I don't know exactly what happened, but Jim was captured and held prisoner for months before escaping and finding his way back to American troops. He was broken both physically and mentally. The government sent him home and thankfully granted him 100 per cent disability, which gave Dorothy enough money to take care of the kids and the house.

  Jimmy became more distant and withdrawn. Eventually he left home and wandered into the Hyannis homeless camp. He felt much less 'broken' when he was in the company of other unfortunate people. He was liked by the homeless group and on some days, was fairly clear headed.

  On those good days, he would sometimes go back to his wife and kids for a day. Dorothy would get him bathed and shaved and spread out a king-like meal for him.

  For a few hours, he was almost normal, but like the werewolf of mythology, when the moon came up, Jimmy's mood would change and he would leave. He would wander the streets for a time and then end up back at the homeless camp. Mrs. Barton might not see him again for four or five weeks. She stuck by him, Weeks. Through it all, she never stopped thinking that the old Jimmy would come back.

  I had been to the homeless place a time or two and I had seen Barton. You couldn't miss him. Jimmy was well known in the camp. He was a tall, once strapping man, with thick curly black hair. Blue eyes, almost as large as cat's eyes, gave his face the appearance of a lit-up sign board. He was big, but not threatening and was popular with all the homeless men and women.

  I talked to him once. He came over to me, a wide smile on his face, and asked me if I was joining the camp. I laughed and told him that I was there on police business. He was interested in my job and especially in my weapon.

  Though I have used Glocks for the last couple decades, back then I had a Smith and Wesson 38 Special. Barton spoke for a while about his service record. He proudly told me that he qualified for an "Expert" marksmanship badge in the army and that he won the Silver badge in competition shooting."

  "How good is that Chief?. I don't know because I never served in the military."

  "It's pretty good John. Soliders qualify as marksmen, sharpshooter, or Expert. Jimmy said that he made expert which is the highest. In competition, the highest award is Silver, and he said he won that. I believed him too. He didn't say it like he was bragging. He just said it as a matter of fact.

  That was the only time that I saw him or spoke to him. I guess it must have been six or seven months before his wife came to my office.

  She was concerned because it was almost Winter and Jimmy had not come back for his heavy seasonal clothing as he had promised her he would. It had been more than two months since he had been at the family home. She felt sure that something was wrong.

  "Chief," she said, "I have been to the homeless camp six times. He's not there. Nobody will tell me anything. I just know he would not go off to Florida or anywhere else. I think he's getting better. The last time he was home he stayed three days and two nights and for the most part he was acting like his old self. He even worked in the yard for a bit, doing some mowing and trimming of hedges. I think a bad thing has happened. Please go and check for me."

  She touched my hand as she asked and I made up my mind right then and there that I would personally investigate the case for her.

  "Mrs. Barton. I'm not the Chief in your town, why did you come to me?"

  "Because I have been to almost every other Chief on the Cape and they smile at me and say they will look into it, but they have not. I have heard that you are a bit unconventional and......"

  She stopped speaking and tears began to well up in her eyes, but she bucked up and continued.

  ".........and I have just about run out of Chiefs," she laughed, "So won't you help me? Please!"

  "I told her I would start on the case the very next day and make a written report to her in a week. I'm no six footer like Jimmy Barton, but I did have black curly hair back then and green eyes that looked like they were scooped out of a swimming pool, so I figured I could go to the homeless camp and win over the female population and possibly get a clue as to what happened.

  There was no 'detecting' involved, Weeks. It was just connecting the dots. The first dot was that homeless camp. My talks with the 'bum' ladies would lead me to the next dot."

  "It was just normal police work. Right Chief?"

  "You are correct Weeks. Just regulation. Put one foot in front of another. All that dramatic baloney is an invention of Arthur Conan Doyle to sell magazines and books. Films and television perpetuate the myth. They do it because real life police work is almost always boring and nobody will watch 'boring'. Am I right?"

  "Yes. I've got that Chief. Now what happened when you went to the homeless camp?"

  "I dressed in dungarees with a sport shirt and I drove a private car. I didn't want anyone to be scared off by a police vehicle. I carried a paper bag full of chocolates. I figured that if my green eyes and black curly hair failed to loosen the ladies' tongues, the chocolates would come to the rescue.

  I walked in to the camp and headed for a fire that was blazing inside of a group of stones. Seated on an assortment of rickety chairs, boxes, and logs around the edge of the fire were eight women. Steam escaped from the spout of a coffee pot perched on some embers."

  "Hello ladies," I smiled, "I am a little lost. I wonder if you could give me some directions."

  "I will give you more than that sweetie, Come on over here," said a plump white haired old woman wrapped in a tattered blanket that covered five or six layers of shirts and skirts.

  "No, she'll give you the stink and crabs, you come over here with me cutie," said a cadaverous ghostly looking woman wearing only a short sleeve shirt despite the late November chill. Her arms were covered with bruises and needle marks. I nearly lost my breakfast just looking at her.

  A solid looking woman, with a heavy jacket stood up. She had long hair, just turning to grey. She was attractive in a rugged kind of a way.

  "I know who you are Pal. What do you want," she said.

  "I only want to talk. Nothing more. I am trying to help Mrs. Barton find her husband, Jimmy. He's the tall, skinny guy with the blue eyes that you ladies like so much."

  "What's in the bag?" she asked.

  "Chocolates for you, ladies."

  "I'll take the bag. Give it," she said.

  I handed it over and she distributed the candy to the other ladies, taking a few for herself. Wh
en the bag was empty, she threw it in the fire and looked at me. She pointed to a drab tent and began walking. She motioned to me to follow her.

  "My name is Phil. It's short for Philomena and if you call me that your going to have a high voice for the rest of your life. Get it?"

  I smiled. I had to admire this woman who in the middle of a homeless camp, exuded class, brains, and power all at once.

  "Phil I got it for sure. I like your style. My name is Rick. Can we talk?"

  "We have already spoken before Rick. When you hassled me for telling fortunes without a license at the Scallop Festival in your town in July."

  "I thought you were familiar Phil. But I didn't recognize you without all your make up and your fortune telling costume."

  "It's okay Rick. You didn't book me. You were square with me. And I should have spent the fifty bucks at your town hall to get a license. Next year I will. So what do you want to know?"

  "Mrs. Barton came in to my office and asked me to help find her husband. He has disappeared and she's certain that something has happened to him. You knew Jimmy. I am sure you liked him. Everyone did."

  "Yes Rick. I knew him. I don't know what's going on but I do know who talked to him last. There's a guy who comes here every few weeks to pick up women. He tries to get the best looking and least sickly women to go to a motel with him for the night. He never fails. He flashes fifty dollar bills around. He takes the girl to his hotel, gets her a warm bath and a hot meal and she's so grateful she will do anything he wants."

  "So, this guy is some sort of a pervert who can't meet girls on the outside so he picks up vulnerable homeless girls. He's probably a sick-o, but I wouldn't bust him for it. He's actually giving the girls a pretty good deal unless he's getting rough with them."

  "No. He's not into rough stuff. Just the opposite, he wants them to treat him gentle and he's gentle with them. He calls them his kitties. He says he loves kitties and likes to take care of them."

  "Do you think that this guy has anything to do with Jimmy's disappearance?"

  "I don't know Rick. But sometimes. A lot of times actually - when he brings the girl back the next day; he flashes a hundred bucks around and says that if any guy wants to work for a week in his warehouse moving stuff around, they will get $500.00. He offers a hundred in advance. There's usually a dozen guys who want to take him up on the offer. He picks one and off they go. Funny thing is Rick. I didn't think about it before, but I never saw one of those men come back."

  "Did this guy talk to Jimmy?"

  "Yes he did. The last time he was here, he gave Jimmy the hundred and Jimmy went off to work with him. The guy's due back any day now if he keeps his regular schedule."

  "Phil. You have been a great help to me. I'll give you fifty bucks and you don't even have to come to a motel with me to get it."

  "Honey, I'll give you fifty bucks if you come to a motel with me," she laughed.

  "Phil, that's very flattering, and I sure would take you up on it except for this case. Listen, here's the dough and I will give you another fifty if you let me know when this guy shows up again. I want to know who he is."

  "As soon as he comes in and picks up his girl, I will walk over to the drug store by the bus station and call you."

  I thanked Phil and drove back to the office. I couldn't contain myself. I wanted to call Dorothy right away and tell her that I made some progress on the case. My better judgment stopped me before I called her. It would not make sense to raise her hopes.

  Phil Tips Me Off

  It was Sunday night and I was watching the Ed Sullivan show. Lou Monte had just finished singing "Pepino the Italian Mouse" and Hypnotist Sam Vine was up next. I had seen him work in person up at the National Hotel in Madawaska, Maine and he was an amazing performer. He had seven female volunteers on stage and he had convinced them that they were exotic dancers.

  Just as they were beginning their routines, my phone rang. I snapped off the TV.

  "Hello."

  "Hi Cutie. Want to take me to a motel? This is Phil. He just left Rick. He took a new girl named Maizie with him. Swing by and pick me up and I will show you where he took her."

  "You are a doll Phil. I will be there in 20 minutes."

  I did not need to bring Phil along She could have just given me the address, but I felt I owed her something and if she wanted to come along, that was okay.

  Connecting the Next Dot

  When we arrived at the motel I was not surprised to see only three occupied spaces in the parking lot. In November on Cape Cod, there are few tourists. Many of the motels close from Columbus Day to the following May.

  "Phil, I am going to snoop around the lot and run a check on the license plates. Do me a favor and go in and talk to the clerk. Get him to tell you who's staying here and find out what rooms they are in. If the guy doesn't want to talk, give him that line about fixing it so he will have a soprano voice for the rest of this life. Okay baby?"

  "You call me 'baby' again and I will do whatever you want Rick."

  "You're a doll Phil. I'm going to give you a free license to tell your fortunes at all the Scallop Festivals! I will be inside in a few minutes."

  I made a quick examination of a Lexus, a BMW, and a Box-Truck and determined that the owner of the truck was the guy I was seeking.

  When I went inside I found that Phil had made a list of the occupants of the three rented rooms.

  "Good work Phil. Now just tell me which room belongs to that truck."

  "The clerk said that a Mr. and Mrs. John Johnson arrived in the truck."

  "Ask the clerk if Mr. Johnson has brown hair, is about 40 years old, about five and a half feet tall and weighs close to 400 pounds."

  Speaking for himself, the clerk said that I had indeed described Mr. Johnson.

  On to the Next Dot

  "Hey Rick, how did you figure out that this Johnson guy was the one?" Phil asked me after we were back in the cruiser.

  "Elementary my dear Phil. Elementary. It's just connecting the dots is all. The two cars had out of state plates. The lettering on the truck said "Sam's Music and Film Exchange" and that store is in my town.

  I know the guy. He's gentle enough but being so heavy, he's kind of scary looking. He's semi-weird. He sells movies and books. A lot of his stuff is just South of illegal: girly movies and books and things like that. He's never sold anything outright unlawful and he always pays his taxes. He keeps up his building but he has about ten cats that live in the store. When customers are browsing the cats browse right along with them."

  "I like cats," Phil said.

  "I do too. But it just seems a little odd that he has so many of them. I don't really care that he has to buy a woman - he would probably never get one any other way. The guy seems okay but I never have fully trusted him."

  "So what are you going to do now, Rick?"

  "After I drop you off, I am going back to the Motel and fix it with the clerk to let me know when Sam and his rented girlfriend check out."

  "How bout taking me for a little cocktail at the 'Improper Capon'?

  "I don't drink Phil I haven't touched a drop since I was a kid. But, here's 20 bucks, you go have one for both of us."

  The motel clerk said that he would call me just as soon as his guests departed. I had also told Phil to be on the lookout for him and contact me when he brought the woman back to the homeless camp.

  I decided to drive out to Sam's place of business. His store is in a large two story former shoe machine factory that was closed down in the late 1950s. He inherited the building when his Father died.

  He has managed to make the old structure quite profitable. Sam leases out part of it as warehouse and storage space. His store is on the first level which fronts on main street. He is a known hoarder, and he has thousands and thousands of items in the store and in storage in rooms on both the first and second floors as well as in the exp
ansive cellar. But though he has an inordinate amount of materials, everything is boxed, labeled, and orderly. The cats are all clean and well cared for. He regularly takes them to the vet for shots and wellness treatments.

  After riding around for an hour thinking about the case I decided to call on the smartest man I know. His name is Ben and most people in town think he's dim witted. They don't know him. It's shyness. He's a huge, muscular six footer who can bend an iron bar with his hands, but is too bashful to talk to most everybody in town.

  I got to know him when my cruiser broke down on desolate Telegraph Road that runs along the dunes on the East side of town. There are no homes on Telegraph Road, because a lot of times, there's no Telegraph Road! Storms and high tide surges frequently submerge and temporarily obliterate it.

  The engine of my Galaxie 500 suddenly stopped, about two miles away from the intersection of Depot Street, which is a paved and well traveled byway. Just when I thought I was going to have to make that long walk in the Summer heat, a big strapping pirate looking guy said softly. "Do you want me to start your car?"

  He wore only a ragged pair of faded denim shorts. A bleached out bandana partially covered a tangled mass of reddish brown hair that looked like it came from a Bob Marley album cover.

  For the next half hour, he spoke less than a word a minute and with almost no tools, fixed the ignition problem that had caused the cruiser to come to a dead stop.

  Over the ensuing weeks, I visited Ben at his shack that he had made from plastic tarps and we became friends. Though he was not considered intelligent, I found that he could do just about anything. I hired him to maintain the police cruisers and he did that to perfection, while also fixing broken locks on cell doors, balking heating and cooling units and anything else in the station that troubled us.

  By this time, Ben had moved into a rented room in town and the owner of the rooming house was so grateful to him for the hundreds of repairs he did simply because of his good nature; that he gave Ben the room rent free.

  "Hey Ben," I knocked on his door. "It's Rick Bates, come to take you out to the clam shack for a couple lobsters. You in?"

  That door opened quicker than a Northeaster sweeping down the bay and it was followed by a bear hug that almost knocked the wind out of me.

  As we ate, I told Ben about the case. I explained that people have gone missing and may have been killed. I told him how Sam was offering people $500 for a week's work, but those people were never seen again.

  "I'll go to work for that guy and I will find out what's going on," Ben promised.

  "It is going to be very dangerous. As soon as anything looks off key, get out of there and come and get me."

  I dropped Ben off at the homeless camp. Phil promised to speak up for Ben to help make sure that he was selected for the job. I was worried about him, but I was certain that a slow plodder like Sam could never get the best of Ben.

  Back at the office, I sat waiting. At six in the evening I got the call from Phil. She told me that Ben had just left with Sam in the Box Truck. I went to the Town Garage and got an unmarked car to stake out Sam's store.

  It was Saturday night and the business would be closed on Sunday. I had people manning the phone at the station and I had three officers with me, ready to break in, if we heard any kind of a signal from Ben.

  Ben Goes to Work

  "Well Mr. Sam, I sure do appreciate this job you have given me. I am ready to go. What do you want me to start on?"

  "Nothing tonight Ben. Tomorrow, we are going to be moving things from the cellar up to the store. Tonight you turn in early and we'll have a nice big breakfast in the morning at the 'all you can eat buffet'. How's that sound?"

  "All I can eat? That sounds really sharp. I can't wait."

  "Okay. Downstairs, I have a beautiful room set up for you. Come on down and I will show you."

  Sam walked as fast as his huge frame would allow as they headed for the stairs. His cumbersome movements reassured Ben that there was no way he could be harmed by the plodding, gasping fat man.

  Sam opened a door near the foot of the stairs revealing a well appointed room with a twin bed on one wall. A desk and bookcase covered another, that also contained a door. There was an easy chair and coffee table near the desk. A large curtained door was behind the easy chair. The room was neat and clean but Ben thought it odd that there were no rugs on the bare cement floor. He noticed too that the floor had a slight pitch to it, leading to a drain next to a wall that had an over sized door.

  Sam bid him good night and left. Ben waited until he was sure that the Sam was back upstairs, then he tried the door. It was locked from the outside. He went to the other door. It was covered by thick, black draperies that extended from the floor to the ceiling. He drew apart the curtains, revealing a solid oak door with a small window, about the size of a lady's handbag mirror. He peered through and saw that it led to another room that that had windows and a door to the outside. The only problem was that the door in his room was secured by six iron bars that were planted in the cement floor and were connected to a hardwood ceiling beam.

  Ben knew he was a prisoner. He heard a kind of a scraping noise that seemed to be coming from behind the door next to the bookcase.

  The Chief Gets Jumpy

  By mid afternoon Sunday, I had run out of patience. I had expected Ben to break a window or do something, so that I could rush in and arrest Sam. But there had been no activity. No one had left the building and no one had entered it.

  I called Judge Francis Lee at his home and asked him again for a warrant to enter the store. Again, he said no. The judge was a friend of Sam's and refused to believe that Sam would be involved in the disappearance of anyone.

  By four o'clock my nerves were stretched to the breaking point. I signaled the team to break the door down. The solid oak portal was strong, but our forty pound steel doorbuster splintered it as if it were made of toothpicks.

  I expected that I would have to search for Sam, but to my surprise, he came waddling towards the remains of his front door.

  "What's the meaning of this?" he demanded.

  I answered by winding up and backhanding him across his fat face. It was like slapping a blood-soaked sponge. Sprays of crimson rocketed out from a dozen eruptions. He fell to the floor and burst into tears. I kept smacking him until my crew pulled me off.

  "Where's Ben?" I screamed at Sam and made another charge for him.

  "Easy Chief," commanded Sgt. Jim Bengini, as he and the others dragged me away. "He can't talk if you beat him to death. Back off a minute and let us get him sitting down and then we'll see what he has to say."

  They gave Sam a wet cloth to wipe away the blood on his florid face and then Bengini, in a soft voice, said: "Tell us everything. Now."

  "It wasn't my fault. I didn't do anything," Sam whined. "I gave the guy a job. If anything happened, I can't be held responsible."

  "What could have happened to Ben?"

  "Well Sgt. Bengini, like I said. I didn't do anything. I gave him a room in the cellar and you guys know I have a lot of cats."

  "Ben's not afraid of cats Sam. What are you not telling us?"

  "Well one of the cats is a lot bigger than the others."

  "How big is it Sam?", Bengini questioned.

  "It's a lion."

  Shoving Bengini aside, I pulled the sweating 400 pound lump from his chair and pushed him towards the entry to the cellar. On the way down the steep stairs Sam admitted that he had been keeping a lion for more than three years. He got it as a cub and managed to hide his secret from everyone, including his employees and the tenants in the building.

  The stairs ended at a dry, airy cellar lit by large lamps hanging from the ceiling. The space was divided in half by a long corridor with four large doors on either side and an overhead door at the end.

  "What's the setup here Sam? Be quick," I advised, "
What's in all of these rooms?"

  He explained that one side of the building was devoted to his store stock and to items that he had collected. The other side of the cellar had two bedrooms and a larger chamber that could be entered from either of two regular doors, or the overhead door.

  "The big section is where Kitty is. It's next door to the bedroom I gave Ben. It's not my fault. When big cats are hungry they need to eat almost 200 pounds of food. Kitty might have pushed his way through the door....OUCH!"

  "Shut up," I cut him off with a vicious backhand across the mouth. It was like cuffing an over ripe tomato. Teeth and red juice shot from his maw. "Get Ben's door open. You're going in first Sam. We'll follow."

  As Sam opened the door, Bengini and I, along with the other two uniformed officers, drew our weapons. All four of us pushed the fat man aside and then trained our guns on the biggest lion any of us had ever seen.

  It took us a second to realize the thing was dead and then another second to spot Ben who was busy trying to get through the barred door.

  "Are you hurt Ben?," I asked.

  "No I am fine. As soon as he locked me in here, I began working on these iron bars. They were in pretty solid, but lucky for me I had one of them pulled out when that door over there opened and that big cat came bounding through. I didn't have enough time to be scared or even think. When that lion came at me I shoved the iron bar down its throat. I guess it hit the thing's brain, cause it died instantly."

  "Ben," I said, "That animal weighs about 500 pounds, you're lucky the momentum didn't kill you."

  "You are right Chief it was luck. I was right in front of the door, when I swung around and saw it, I had the iron bar in my hand. The bar is over six feet long and sharpened to a point at one end. The other end is flat. When I shoved the point in the creature's mouth, the bar got pushed back to the door and the door didn't give way, it just allowed the big cat to impale itself.

  We learned later from Sam that in the middle of the night, he had pushed a button which opened the door, letting the lion into Ben's room. Sam admitted that he had done it many times; resulting in human meals for Kitty.

  Sam told us that the lion was a cub that he had stolen on a whim from the circus, which sets up in a field behind his building every Summer. He had simply walked in to an unlocked cage and taken the cub while its mother was performing in the center ring.

  As it got bigger, the lion required more and more meat. Sam felt that many of the homeless would be better off dead anyway; so he decided that each time he went to meet a homeless woman, he would bring back a homeless guy to feed to the lion.

  We never got an exact count of how many deaths Sam was responsible for but we believe that it is at least 24 and perhaps double that. We based our findings on small bits of remains, such as teeth and pieces of bone.

  "Well that's a gruesome case," said John Weeks after the old Chief finished his story. "What happened to Sam? And what happened to you for the beating you gave him? I imagine his lawyer used that against you."

  Chief Bates didn't say anything for a minute. He just looked at his recently refilled glass with the 'slippery nipple' inside. He watched as the Bailey's and the Sambuca gently rolled up to touch each other but still stayed separated.

  Taking a swallow and then smiling, he said. "I told you I am not a bad guy. But I am also not a good guy. I smacked him around pretty good. I did it because I knew he was guilty, because I was mad at him, and because I wanted some fast answers. Weeks, do you know the date of the last execution in the State of Massachusetts?"

  "No. But I suspect that it happened during your time as Chief."

  "It did not. The last execution of a convicted murderer in the State was in 1947. I will tell you this Weeks, I believe very strongly in the Death Penalty and I knew that Sam was not going to get it. I figured the best we would get would be to put him in Walpole Prison for the rest of his life. I also suspected that he would hire a team of high priced lawyers who would use an insanity defense and get him placed in a mental hospital."

  "Is that what happened?", Weeks asked.

  "As long as we stopped Sam and got him off the street, I didn't care if he rotted away in Walpole Prison or the Taunton State Mental Hospital. So I made a deal with his lawyers. I told them I would not contest their insanity defense, if they didn't bring up the roughhousing. They agreed. Sam was put away for life in a 'hospital'. His room has got bars and he's institutionalized. It was the best we could do."

  "Why was there so little publicity in this case?"

  "I told you at the start. It is all about priorities. Except for poor Jimmy Barton, we didn't even know the names of the victims. The newspapers told some of the story but the public never knew that we had solved the biggest murder case in the history of the Commonwealth. And it was done with no sleuthing. There were no mental acrobatics. It was just like I always say. Connect the dots. That's what I did.

  I'm tired now and going to take a nap. Come back next week and we will do another chapter. I'll tell you another story that never got any publicity, but was pretty bizarre."

  "Okay. Goodnight Chief."

  I drove back to my apartment in Hyannis and wrestled with myself about whether I should keep the next appointment with the old Chief. I wanted to write his story but he was holding me back. Every time I submitted a dramatic, but factual account of what he told me, he complained that I didn't write it the way he said it. I explained to him that he had exciting cases, but a pretty boring way of explaining them. He shot back that he told me in the beginning that I had to write it down just the way he told the tales.

  In the end, I decided to go back for another meeting, and air out my feelings.

  The Chief' House

  The noonday sun was shining on his sea-shell driveway when I arrived. Unless you've been snow blinded in Alaska, you cannot imagine the brightness of those white shells. It's like driving into a double sided row of 10,000 high intensity photographer's lights. Shading my eyes from the glare, I took a moment to look around his home.

  At one time, the Chief's massive house had been the site of a cottage colony of eight buildings. There was a three bedroom house, a pair of two bedroom cottages, three single bedroom units, and two efficiencies. Starting in the 1960s he began buying up the units as they became available. After he had collected the last one, he got permission from the town to knock them all down and build an elegant, three story structure on a cliff overlooking Nantucket Sound, in one of the villages of Barnstable Township.

 

  The back portion of the home had his living quarters, spread across all three floors. There were several bedrooms, a dining room, sports room, library, television room, kitchen and more. Facing the sea, the front of the building featured a single, great room of one floor, sixty feet tall, with a nearly all glass front. Catwalks were positioned in various spots; complete with telescopes and video recording equipment so the Chief could indulge in favored pastimes such as storm or sky watching.

  Getting out of my car, I walked along the sandy trail that wound from the back of the house and around the side, before ending at a wooden deck built right at the edge of the cliff.

  A table was set with some kind of foamy white drink in martini glasses and a variety of appetizers. Without being invited I sat at the table and began working on some shrimp and salad while wondering what kind of a crazy drink was in the glasses.

  A few moments later, a section of the wall of glass that formed the ocean facing part of the home, parted, and Rick Bates walked quickly across the deck and sat down opposite me.

  "Ah my Watson. How are you?"

  "Not really great Chief. I am pretty frustrated. I would like to do your book, but so far you have not let me write anything interesting. You tell me a story. I try to make it readable and then you say that I have to rewrite it exactly the way you say it."

  "Yes, Mr. Weeks. That is the a
rrangement that we made and I am paying you to do it my way."

  "Your way is boring Chief. You need to let me write these stories in a more dramatic fashion."

  "What was wrong with last week's story?"

  "Everything!!!!!! You captured a serial killer. You told a story of a lion trying to eat one of your best friends. He killed the lion with his bare hands and yet when you tell the story, the reader never hears a single word about the battle. The reader never feels the tension that the man experienced when that 500 pound monster lept at him with razor sharp fangs more than a half foot long! It was way too boring."

  "It's simple enough Weeks. I don't know why you don't get it. I wasn't there when the lion attacked Ben. I can't tell you about it. Anyway, I don't see how solving a huge case like that could ever be boring. Let me offer you a drink, and then we will talk some more."

  "Well Chief, I don't usually accept your offer of a beverage, but I think today I need one. What's in the glasses?"

  "This is a little drink called the Ghost Martini. I made them because we are near the end of October. It's almost Halloween, so this is the perfect, scary little drink Notice how everything in the martini glass is white. I use whipped vodka, vanilla vodka, and white chocolate liqueur."

  "It's kind of girly, but it is cute. How did you make that ghost shape that's floating on the top?"

  "That's vanilla ice cream, cut into a ghostly form and plopped into the ocean of vodka. It's excellent. Try it."

  After four or five Ghost Martinis and some really good crab dip and salsa, things began to look a little better. The Chief promised me that if I wrote one more story his way, the next one after that, could be written my way.

  "So let me get this straight Chief. You are going to dictate another case to me today. I will write it down in exactly the same boring way as you say it. Then, the next case you tell me; I can re-write any way that i want?"

  "Mr. John Charles Weeks. My Watson. Yes. Yes. Yes! Just write this one down exactly as I tell it. Then the next one is yours to tell - any way you wish."

  "Deal," I said. "Start the story."

  "Okay," the Chief replied. "Now, I want this narrative typed up and sent to the newspaper. I already talked to the editor and they will print it."

  "I can't 'type it up' Chief! There hasn't been a working typewriter on Cape Cod in 20 years. But don't worry, I will create the story in Word on my laptop and email it to the "Independent", and they will use my file for the printed version."

  (Editor's note: The following is the story as printed)

  The Cape Cod Independent

  Barnstable County's Senior Weekly Newspaper

  Published continuously since 1856

  Hyannis

  September 2014

  by retired Chief Richard Bates as told to reporter John Charles Weeks.

  A Look Back at

  "The Case of the Verdant Man"

  from the files of former Chief

  Richard Bates

  Forward by Weeks. Chief Bates cites this case as another proof of the lack of detection involved in solving mysteries. He maintains that all he did in this situation, as in all matters, was simply put one foot in front of the other and connect the dots ------