Page 178 - Stand by Your Man

166 Jack Fritscher

“That didn’t kill any of ’em.”
“You can’t blame me. I didn’t kill them all,” Baby said.
“My ass,” Buddy said. “You did. Just to watch them die.”
“You’re an accomplice. An accessory.”
“No I’m not,” Buddy said, “I’m just a sick motherfucker.”
“Poor you.”
“Poor Baby.”
By this time, I did what I had to do. I called the police and
gave them a name to go along with the sketch. Within an hour, a
detective arrived at my ranch to pick up a photo of Buddy. I pulled
open a drawer, skipped over the snapshot of Buddy with Captain
Bill, and gave him a picture of Buddy as a proud new Marine.
“Can I ask you a personal question?” the detective said.
“The answer is I’m gay.”
“That’s cool.”
“You think so?”
“Is Buddy gay?”
“No. Buddy’s a homosexual.”
“What’s the difference?”
“If you have to ask, you’ll never understand.”
With Buddy’s picture, the cops, by asking around the streets in
the Tenderloin, made a description of the van, down to its current
1977 Kentucky plates and three of its digits. About eight o’clock,
on a dreary winter’s night, they located the van parked under the
huge cement battlements and industrial-strength arches of the San
Francisco end of the Bay Bridge. The SWAT team circled the area
of empty parking lots, abandoned buildings, and unused railroad
tracks. The live-action TV reporters from three competing stations
were talking earnest shit, with all sorts of phoney-baloney factoids,
into their cameras with the van spotlighted in the background.
The set piece was as perfect a Hollywood action film as was the
Symbionese Liberation Front shootout in LA a couple years before.
The police called through a loudspeaker to try to flush the mad dog
Dumpster Killer into the open.
Inside the van, Baby took the handgun and pointed it at his
right temple, Saigon-style.

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