Suspended Sentences

by Brian Garfield

  He wasn’t really very tough. I’d been looking forward to squaring off against him but evidently he didn’t enjoy playing a game against people who played harder than he did.

  The law doesn’t protect people unless people protect the law.

  ENDS AND MEANS

  “Ends and Means” is a story within a story; the interior story is an embellishment of alleged more or less actual events in my old home town, while the frame (outer) story reflects a self-questioning about moral contradictions that I’d undergone in the two years since a movie based on my novel DEATH WISH had been loosed.

  The judge put his coffee down and pushed himself back in the reclining chair until its platform flipped up under his feet. Harris watched the old man read the script. Attentive, undistractible, the judge read slowly and didn’t look up when the telephone rang. It rang only twice; someone elsewhere in the house must have answered it.

  Finally Judge Culver put the last page aside. “It’s a good yarn. But you already know that. Why bring it to me? I’m hardly a lit’ry critic.”

  “You may find this hard to buy, knowing me, but it’s one of those times when I’m really not looking for a reassuring pat on the back. I want your judgment — there’s something about the story that bothers me.”

  “If it bothers you then change it. You wrote it.”

  “The thing is,” Harris said, “it’s to do with justice. That’s your department.”

  “Justice is the concern of any writer of dramatic works.”

  “Not in this sense. The whole story revolves around definitions of justice.”

  “Yes,” the judge agreed.

  “Well, look,” Harris said, “I’m not sure it isn’t too expedient. The resolution of the story. I liked it fine while I was working it out but in retrospect it strikes me there’s a moral cynicism in it — it’s a little too much like letting the ends justify the means. There’s no problem about getting it published. The question in my mind is whether I want it published. Whether possibly it says something I don’t want to say.” He sat back on the couch and crossed his legs and laced his fingers behind his head.

  The judge had a sly smile that crinkled the lines around his eyes. “You wrote it. Don’t you know what it says?”

  “I know what it says to me. I’d like to know what it says to you.”

  “The detective catches the murderer but then lets him go because he feels it was justifiable homicide. It’s a sort of star-chamber acquittal.”

  “My protagonist places himself above the law.”

  “Yes,” the judge said. “But of course you’ve contrived unique circumstances in this story.”

  “Does that matter? Do you think this kind of thing ought to be justified under any circumstance at all?”

  “As I said, Jim, that’s your decision to make. You’re the writer.”

  “All right. But I’d like your judgment.”

  The judge had a weakness for long slender cigars. He had one going in his left hand; it had grown a tall ash. Now he tapped it off into the big glass ashtray by his elbow. “I’ve been on the bench quite a few years.” The abrupt change of subject bewildered Harris. “Municipal court, superior court, six years on the court of appeals. You may be asking the wrong man. If you want a cut-and-dried moral judgment you’d be better off asking a preacher. I’ve seen the law bent. Too many times. Not always to the detriment of justice, either. I agree with you that it’s morally disastrous to take the attitude that the ends justify the means. As a blanket principle, that is. But justice isn’t an abstract. It’s a guiding precept that ought to be adapted to the conditions of the individual case. I’ve bent the law a few times myself, you know. Even broken it. Flagrantly. When it served what I felt were the interests of justice.”

  “You have?”

  “I can’t criticize your script. The best I can offer is a parable. An anecdotal illustration. Shall I try?”

  “I wish you would.”

  “It’s a true story. The participants have mostly passed on to their rewards by now; in any case the statute of limitations ran out long ago so it can’t harm me — legally — to admit the part I played. At the time I had a hell of a tussle with my conscience. But I learned a great deal from it. Maybe I flatter myself, but I think it’s made me a better jurist.”

  The old man drained his coffee, adjusted the cigar comfortably between thumb and fingers, and began his tale.

  I was assistant district attorney at the time. Young, earnest, inflated with eager principles. And maybe a trifle ambitious. It was nineteen thirty-one, I think — give or take a year. I’m a bit vague on dates when I go back that far.

  It was during Prohibition in any case. The Volstead Law had been around for more than a decade. Down here in the Southwest there’d grown up a well-established bootleg trade — some of it ’shine from back-country stills and downtown bathtub operations, but most of the hooch came in across the border from Mexico. It was big business. The illegality of it had caused the emergence of disciplined criminal mobs — the beginnings of what we now call organized crime. There was an enormous industry in producing and distributing booze. In terms of the complexities and the quantity of distribution it was a far vaster operation than today’s narcotic drug trade, because there were so many more customers. Half the population, at least.

  The result was that even in a cowtown like Tucson we found ourselves up against a powerful underworld organization. Now the truth is we tended to wink at the bootleg trade, as you probably know. Nobody except a few overeager glory hunters had much interest in nailing whiskey peddlers. Most of us spent half our evenings patronizing speakeasies.

  But the booze trade had brought the crooks out of the woodwork en masse. Our problem wasn’t booze, except indirectly. Our problem was the by-products of the trade. The constantly increasing economic and political power that the criminal mobs developed. We weren’t concerned, really, about so-called white slavery or gambling or the other victimless crimes. What alarmed the honest folks was the specter of a takeover of our society by the criminal element. They were buying politicians. They were extorting fortunes from the business community through their bald-faced protection rackets. You don’t need a long litany of their crimes — the point is, we were concerned, we didn’t want to see things get out of hand. Bootlegging was one thing. Giving the mobsters enough power to elect a governor was another thing entirely. These people had — have — no respect for rudimentary human rights, let alone laws. We had to fight them. We know it now; we knew it equally well then, as anyone who’s ever seen The Untouchables on television knows.

  Down in Tucson our local crime czar was a fellow who went by the name of Irwin Sterrick. It wasn’t the name he’d been born with but never mind.

  Sterrick ostensibly was a restaurateur. He owned three establishments — steak houses, you know the kind of place. Gin and bourbon in coffee cups, slot machines in the rest rooms. A cut up from speakeasies. He didn’t actually own any of the wholesale operations and he didn’t actually run the extortion rackets, but he was the key man in the setup. Within the criminal organization he’d worked his way up from bookkeeper to chief accountant to high factotum. It was a loose confederation — the “organized” in organized crime is a misnomer — but to the extent that there’s a single boss in any company, Sterrick fulfilled that function here. If an underling wanted to start a new operation he had to get clearance from Sterrick; usually he got his financing from Sterrick as well. Sterrick controlled the coffers. Major transactions went through his hands. It wasn’t his money, most of it, but nearly all of it passed through his office in one way or another. He kept the books.

  We knew if we could nail Sterrick and get our hands on his books we could cripple the mob for quite a while. Sterrick was getting altogether too powerful and we had to stop him.

  Naturally the federal officers were eager to nail him as well. They wanted to put him away on income-tax violations. But none of us had any success in our initial efforts. We kne
w he kept detailed books — even criminals have to have records so tthey can check up on one another and make sure nobody’s cheating — but when we subpoenaed them the books would mysteriously disappear ahead of the officers with their search warrants. It appeared there was no lawful way we could solve the problem.

  Things were heating up to a boil because there was a gubernatorial primary coming up. Sterrick’s handpicked candidate had a pretty good chance of sewing up the nomination. If we allowed them to railroad their man into the governor’s mansion in Phoenix, we knew we’d face a terrible situation. The state would have been thrown wide open to a massive criminal invasion.

  The only way to stop it was to get Sterrick out of the way. Then the local political bosses who’d been in his pocket would be free to move in other directions.

  We had a meeting in the courthouse. Carefully selected people — the deputy police commissioner, the district attorney, two assistants. I was one of them. And the mayor. None of us was under the thumb of Sterrick’s machine. But we couldn’t be sure of many other officials. We had a council of war. I won’t bore you with the details but the upshot was that I was appointed a select committee-of-one to concentrate on the Sterrick issue. I was pretty much given carte blanche and I insisted that I be allowed to keep my operation secret until it produced results — I didn’t want to have to turn in regular progress reports because a secret is only a secret as long as only one person knows it. I had a few ideas but I didn’t want any risk of their getting back to Sterrick through his city hall contacts.

  The practice of criminal law in the halls of justice is pretty much a give-and-take affair, as you know. If you want to get a conviction against one felon sometimes you have to grant immunity to another. It’s not a system I’ve ever enjoyed working in but it’s better than most of the alternatives. Plea bargaining was just as commonplace in those days as it is today. In return for a lighter sentence a criminal might agree to turn state’s evidence. It really amounted to our only major source of information. The town’s population was only about twenty thousand. The mobsters knew every cop on the force by sight. We could hardly infiltrate them with an undercover spy — they’d know him instantly. So we had to rely on criminal informants.

  At that time I had three cases awaiting trial. I mean I had a dozen or so but there were three that had some importance to this matter. One was a man named Mendes who’d had the bad fortune to be arrested with a pocketful of numbers-racket slips. He was a runner for Sterrick’s mob. The other two were independent small-time crooks who’d been arrested on felony charges — one was a forger who’d been passing checks around town, the other was a minor-league safecracker who’d done a pretty good job of getting into one of our bank vaults but got tripped up by a silent alarm system — he was caught red-handed coming out of the bank with the loot.

  Because of the threat we faced, and the autonomy I’d been given, I made a deliberate decision to bend the law. That’s really the point of this little morality tale.

  I took Mendes into an interrogation room and sweated him down. I made it clear, without putting it in so many words, that we might see our way clear to dropping the charges against him if he’d provide us with certain bits and pieces of information. I didn’t tell him what information we wanted. I asked him all sorts of random questions about Sterrick and various mob operations. Most of them he refused to answer. He pointed out that if he unloaded he’d be killed as soon as the mob found out. I just kept asking questions. He’d answer a few of the seemingly harmless ones. By that process I managed to get the information I wanted — without letting him know that it was what I’d been after.

  What I found out from him was the location of Sterrick’s books. The organization’s books.

  They were kept, as I’d suspected, in a safe. The safe, Mendes informed me, was in a real-estate office on North Stone Avenue. It was one of those outfits that handled insurance and realty. A legitimate front for the illegitimate operations. The outfit was in the name of one of Sterrick’s cousins. I suppose they actually did some insurance and realty work. But it was also where Sterrick did his bookkeeping. In the back room. They had two or three accountants who worked in that room full-time. At night they had a private watchman there. Mendes had seen the safe several times. It was a big sturdy Kessler box, far too heavy to be stolen. There was an electric alarm system and of course the safe was never left untended — when the accountants weren’t there, the watchman was.

  We put Mendes on ice. I didn’t want him leaking anything back to Sterrick. Later on, when the matter was concluded, we turned him loose as we’d agreed. He was picked up again a few months later and spent most of his life in prison on one charge or another.

  The state primary was coming up in June. This was April — we had about seven weeks. I had the accused forger brought up to the interrogation room. We had him cold on passing some very heavy paper — forged checks for thousands of dollars. It could have cost him several years if we’d prosecuted fully. He knew that — he was a practical fellow. He and I reached a mutually agreeable arrangement. In return for certain services he was to perform, he’d be turned loose in another state and no fugitive warrant would be issued. This of course wasn’t illegal; it was a decision on my part, morally and ethically questionable to be sure, but legal in the sense that a prosecutor has the right to decide whether or not to prosecute any given case. I didn’t acquit the forger of the charges against him; I simply decided not to prosecute them. If he ever returned to Tucson after we exiled him, he could be picked up and tried on the original charges.

  I then interviewed the accused safecracker, separately, and reached a similar agreement with him.

  I hadn’t broken the law. So far.

  The next step required connivance by the police department. I went to the deputy commissioner’s office and managed to secure his participation in the scheme without telling him what I had in mind.

  The watchman at the realty office worked a twelve-hour shift. We didn’t have minimum wage laws or security-guards’ unions in those days — it was the Depression, of course, and the man was lucky to have a job at all. He would arrive at the office at seven-thirty in the evening. The accountants and sometimes Sterrick himself would still be there at that hour; they left the accounting room normally about seven forty-five or eight o’clock, turning the place over to the watchman. He went home about seven-thirty or eight the following morning, as soon as the first shift of bookkeepers arrived for work to tote up the previous night’s receipts. The bookkeeping work wasn’t round-the-clock but it was a seven-days-a-week operation. Sterrick’s people didn’t take business holidays; they staggered their work days instead. Obviously that was necessary because so much criminal activity takes place at night and on weekends.

  The safe usually was locked and unattended, except for the watchman, through the night. The watchman — a trusted young cousin of Sterrick’s, not brilliant but very loyal and as tough as they make them — undoubtedly had instructions to destroy the contents of the safe if anyone arrived with a subpoena or warrant. Mendes had boasted to me about the security arrangements. In addition to the electrical alarm system there was a device, triggered by a switch on one of the desks, that was designed to release phosphor pellets inside the safe and ignite it. That would destroy the safe’s contents instantly, of course. But clearly the watchman must have had instructions not to destroy the papers unless there was a clear danger of their being removed from the safe. It might not cripple Sterrick’s business to have those facts and figures lost but certainly it would cause a colossal headache. That button wasn’t to be pushed on any mere whim.

  We were counting on that.

  The watchman had a trivial criminal record. It was of no account but it made our next move more plausible.

  I arranged for the release from jail of our friends the forger and the safecracker. Armed with a police revolver, I took them with me in my car to a dusty lot less than a block from the rear entrance of the realty office.
From there we watched the place. It was about eight in the evening; by now the bookkeepers had gone home and the watchman was on duty inside.

  A police car arrived and the two officers went to the back door and knocked. There was some dialogue between them and the watchman on the far side of the door — we couldn’t hear it — but I saw one of the officers take out his revolver and bang on the door with it. Finally the door opened and the watchman appeared reluctantly. One of the officers spoke sharply, and I saw the watchman, half in anger and half in puzzlement, take out his wallet to show his identification. Then he made as if to back inside the building. Possibly he meant to go to the telephone to report that he was being arrested. But, according to our prearrangement, the officers didn’t allow him to reach the phone. They took him in custody, handcuffed him and drove him away in their car. Leaving the back door of the office slightly ajar.

  The watchman would be taken down to the jail and held incommunicado in a detention cell until six the next morning, when he would be turned loose with apologies — a mistaken arrest, the real culprit’s been found, sorry for the trouble. That sort of thing.

  In the meantime as soon as the police car disappeared, I and my two low-life cohorts entered the realty office and closed the door behind us. I had a gun and the two men knew it; they had no chance to run out on me. But we passed the time amiably enough — a curious admixture of types, as you can imagine.

  First it was the safecracker’s turn. He had to find the alarm system, disengage it by bridging the wires so that an interruption wouldn’t set it off, then set to work on the safe itself. It had to be opened manually: no drilling, no explosives. Because I wanted no indications afterward that it had been tampered with.

  It took him until well past midnight. The forger and I sat half-dazed with boredom because we weren’t allowed to speak; the safecracker required absolute silence. He had a physician’s stethoscope and an emery board — no other tools. He used the coarse board to file his fingertips at intervals while he worked with painstaking slowness twisting the safe’s two combination dials. With the stethoscope pressed to the steel he listened for the fall of tumblers. For a while I was sure he wasn’t going to get it open. But in the end it yielded. It had taken five hours.