Ed Lacy - The Best That Ever Did It

At 3:20 a.m. I drove home. Betsy Turner hadn't gone out, nor had the lights been turned on again. She hadn't been waiting for a man. That meant she'd dolled up in that sexy outfit for me.

And like the rest of the case, that didn't make any sense.

THE ARMY didn't make Martin Pearson a hustler—the war did. In an interview in the Syracuse Tribune, Pearson's mother, Mrs. Francine Pearson, blamed the army:

I'll never believe Martin is a murderer. Our family has lived here since the days of 1776 and not a single Pearson has ever been in trouble with the law—for any reason whatsoever. My Martin was raised as a sober, hard-working boy, but after those three-and-a-half years he spent in the army, he came home different. He was still a fine boy but it seemed to me his eyes were restless, always searching for something. He never seemed to look a person in the eyes any more.

But the army only taught a comparative few how to work an angle, while war made scrounging the main occupation of most of the world's population—scrounging for food, the fast buck, the fast lira or franc: hustling for life itself.

Pearson was born on a small farm some twenty-four miles from Syracuse, New York on August 25, 1920. The farm was four miles from the “town” of Bay Corners, which consisted of a feed store, a garage, and a general store run by one Andrew Marsh. The rear of this store was also the movie house with several rows of wooden benches. Twice a week (and every night during July and August) Mr. Marsh squeezed his barrel body into his homemade projection booth and ran his old 16mm projector. Farmers supported Bay Corners the year around, but in the summer passing motorists and the campers at a near-by lake gave Marsh a boom business.

Martin was the fourth child and received little attention from the rest of the family. As soon as he was big enough, he did his share of the farm work. When he was twelve years old a small incident changed his entire life. Mary Marsh—the plump ten-year-old daughter of the general-store owner—sported a new bike, the result of selling twenty-five subscriptions to a farm magazine.

Martin also wanted a bike and knowing she had covered all the people in Bay Corners (fifty-seven according to the last census) he spent the snow-free days of the winter tramping from farm to farm. By spring he had twenty-five subs and sent away for the bike. Two weeks later the rural mailman handed Martin a large package, although obviously much too small for a bicycle. An enclosed letter stated that there had been a misunderstanding on Martin's part—the bicycle was given for a hundred and twenty-five subscriptions. For his twenty-five subs they were sending him a box camera, three rolls of film, and a developing kit. The magazine sincerely hoped this would be satisfactory-

It wasn't. In a rage Martin accused Mary Marsh of lying. She said, “Honest, I thought it was twenty-five subs. Poppa sold them for me at the counter and I never did know how many he got. Gee, Marty, nobody here ever had a camera, except the summer people.”

Martin was still angry but he took pictures of his father and mother on a sunny day, developed them in the barn at night— carefully following the instruction booklet—and his folks and brothers stared at the hazy snapshots with awe. Martin realized the camera made him a person of importance, began spending his extra dimes for photo supplies and booklets.

By the time he graduated from high school at eighteen, Martin had a second-hand press camera and was making a few dollars a week cycling from farm to farm, doing “portraits” of the farm families. Mary Marsh was about to enter Teachers Normal College at Oswego, and had grown to be a squat young woman whose only beauty was her “clear skin.” There weren't many young people in Bay Corners and it was understood Mary and Martin were “going steady,” mainly because Martin hung around Poppa Marsh's theater, seeing each movie over and over, trying to understand the technique of motion pictures. Martin suggested she ask her father if he could set up a “portrait studio” in the store during the summer months, use the theater for a dark room during the day. For rent Martin offered 30 per cent of the take. Mr. Marsh settled for 50 per cent and Martin was in business with some badly lettered signs in the store window.

Martin would hang around the summer campers, quietly taking candid shots of them swimming and horsing around, return the next day with enlargements in cardboard frames. The happy campers gave him from three to five dollars a picture and during the summer he made almost four hundred dollars. Mr. Marsh hinted Martin would be welcome as a son-in-law and it was decided they would be married as soon as Mary finished college.

Martin bought a second-hand roadster (In his confession Martin Pearson stated: “Until I was in the army I never had a brand-new thing in my life. All my clothing, shoes, and toys were hand-me-downs from my brothers.”) and the photography business went into a slump; all the local people had photos and in the winter there weren't any tourists. Martin took pictures of a forest fire and sold them to a Syracuse paper, soon became a free-lance photographer for several small country papers. He would ride around the countryside, snapping weddings, accidents, church bazaars; returning to sell pictures to the people in the photos, to the local papers, and sometimes to papers in Syracuse, Ithaca, and Buffalo. Although he worked hard, had a good summer trade, Martin never averaged more than thirty dollars a week for a year.

When he was twenty-two, Mary graduated from college and was immediately hired to teach at the Bay Corners school. She and Martin were married and he moved into the Marsh apartment over the store. By local standards they had a decent income and Martin wasn't unhappy—he was bored. Nine months after they were married he received his draft notice and according to his own statement: “If I felt anything it was relief.”

Martin landed in an infantry basic training camp in the South. Every Friday afternoon the soldiers were reviewed by the elderly colonel in command. One Friday, while he was barracks orderly, Martin took his miniature camera and photographed the parade grounds. Using the camera as an en-larger, he ran off a few prints, found the soldiers eager to get copies—they offered him as much as five dollars per copy. Martin immediately wired Mary to send him supplies and was soon doing a flourishing business. A camp newspaper was being set up and Martin was made a Pfc., kept on permanent cadre, and assigned to the paper.

A large and steady stream of new men went through the camp, each new G.I. wanting a picture to send home. Martin had a stock shot in which he lay behind a small hill and snapped the new soldier jumping over the top, rifle and bayonet in hand, a scowl on his face. This was the five-dollar special and every payday Martin's hands were full of money, and it was all profit as he was now using army film and paper. Mary wrote dutiful letters, sent him homemade cookies and asked when he was coming home on leave, but business was too good for Martin to take time off. The editor of the camp newspaper was an earnest young man who was transferred in 1943 to Yank magazine. He wrote Martin the magazine might be interested in him too, but Sergeant Pearson wasn't the least interested in leaving his cozy deal.

In 1944 the camp cadre was suddenly shipped to Camp Kilmer, broken up for overseas shipment. Martin spent a fast week-end with Mary in New York City and in a fit of tender love-making gave her eighteen hundred dollars he had saved up, told her he'd won it in a crap game.

Three weeks later Martin was hanging around a huge repple-depple outside Naples, seemed to be taking his basic over again. One day Pearson read an article in Yank by his former camp editor and wrote to him, asking if it was still possible to be assigned to the magazine. The Yank man was stationed in Rome and to Martin's astonishment he spoke to somebody on Stars and Stripes and Martin was soon sent to Rome as a photographer on the army newspaper.