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November 5, 1943
This morning Doc and I drove out to Eagle Rock, ostensibly to move a supply of radios out of our garage there and up to our buyer at San Berdoo. Doc lectured on moral terror as I drove. He talked of the smallness of 99.9% of all lives, and how this smallness generates and regenerates until it creates an effect that is a “snowballing apocalypse of pica yunity.” He then said that the natural elite (i.e–us, and others like us) must send messages to the potential elite by “throwing a perpetual monkey wrench into the cogs of the pica yunist’s machinery.” He explained that our buyer in San Berdoo was continually trying to bring us down in price by the intimidation tactic of threatening to look elsewhere for radios. Doc said that it could be tolerated no longer and that I should visit the man with a spiritual message that would teach him humility. Doc said no more until we had loaded our radios into the truck and were almost to San Berdoo, then he told me: “This picayune has a cat he dotes on. Pica yunes love dumb animals because by comparison they are even more powerless than they themselves are. I want you to strangle that cat in front of its picayune owner. If you grab the cat lengthwise by its head, and wrap your little finger and thumb around its neck and squeeze abruptly with your first two fingers stationed firmly above its eyebrows, it will cause the cat’s eyes to pop out of its head as you strangle it. Do this for me, Johnny, and I will teach you other ways to consolidate your power: the real mental power that I know you have.” 1 did it. The buyer pleaded with us, pledging all his business to us exclusively and offering Doc three hundred dollars as a bonus. Doc declined the money and said, “My bonus is the lesson you have learned and the good that will come from it for you and many others.”
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I read on through 1943, as Doc Harris consolidated his hold over John DeVries, moving him into a widening arena of violence interspersed with counseling on the philosophy and psychology of terror. Johnny beat up and robbed homosexuals at Doc’s command; he broke the arms and legs of bet welehers; he pistol-whipped burglars who Doc thought were holding out on their take. And he never, ever questioned his mentor. The philosophy with which Doc dominated him was Hitlerian-Utopian, tailored to fit Johnny’s history of overdependence on supportive figures:
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“You, Marcella and I are the natural elite. You must respect Marcella for saving you from Tunnel City, Wisconsin, and respect her as your blood; but know that she has her faults. She is weaker than we on the level of action; you and I have reached for the beast within ourselves and have externalized it. We will always do what we have to do, regardless of the consequences to others, rendering ourselves above all of man’s laws and moral strictures designed to keep that beast at bay. Marcella will never reach that point, yet she is a valuable comrade for us at the level of wife and sister. Respect her and love her, but keep your emotional distance. Know that ultimately she is not of our morality.
“The Navy has you now, John, but soon we will have the Navy. Keep your uniform neatly pressed and shine your shoes. Play your part well, and you will be a rich man for life. Your sister is pregnant with the child who will be your nephew and my son and our moral heir. Watch your intake of hop and you will have the power of hop over millions. Listen and trust me, John. You must acquiesce more, and when you do that I will tell you of the literal power of life and death I have exercised over many people.”
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I saw where that paragraph was taking me, so I flipped ahead in time to August, 1945. What I already knew was strongly confirmed: John DeVries, Eddie Engels, and Lawrence Brubaker had robbed the infirmary of the aircraft carrier Appomattox of forty-five pounds of undiluted morphine. Doc Harris was the mastermind. DeVries, Brubaker, and Engels were questioned, then released. Doc’s intimidation of Johnny was so absolute that Johnny never cracked under questioning. The diary indicated that Engels and Brubaker were equally cowed, equally in the grip of the incredible Doc Harris’s stranglehold. What I had strongly suspected was also confirmed; Marcella Harris did not participate in the crime–she was in the naval hospital in Long Beach miscarrying her expected child.