(1982) The Almighty

by Irving Wallace

  ‘No, I didn’t,’ said McAllister calmly. ‘I came to tell you something she didn’t put in the story.’

  Dietz was instantly attentive. ‘Go on.’

  ‘Pagano told her he was one of many who had been digging a secret escape tunnel from beneath Sam Yinger’s Death Row cell to the outside. Yinger doesn’t know about the tunnel. Of course, Pagano told her about it off the record.’

  Only Dietz’s small eyes reacted, narrowing. ‘Tell me more, Ollie.’

  In an effective, contained monotone, McAllister related the details of the Green Haven prison tunnel. When he had finished, he shrugged his shoulders. ‘I thought this was something you should know,’ he said casually.

  Dietz sat up. ‘You’ve told me everything?’

  ‘Everything I know.’

  ‘Very interesting,’ said Dietz. He tendered the managing editor a tight-lipped wisp of a smile. ‘That was smart of you, coming right in here with that.’

  ‘I thought it was something you and Mr. Armstead would want to know.’

  ‘Yes, I’m sure he’ll be interested. He’ll appreciate your -your sharpness - and your loyalty.’

  ‘I know you can’t do anything with it,’ said McAllister, ‘but I thought you should be informed of every tidbit.’

  Dietz considered him briefly. ‘As no doubt you, and everyone else suspects, with a new management taking over the Record there will be a reappraisal of the staff. Inevitably, some major changes will be made. Mr. Armstead intends to clean house, sweep out some of the incompetents that his father kept on. When your name comes up, I’ll be sure to

  remember this. It may be only a tidbit, as you say, but passing it on shows a certain alertness that we’re looking for and appreciate. It is also evidence you are on our side. Continue to keep your eyes and ears open for us. Of course, I’ll see that Mr. Armstead is informed.’ ‘Thank you, Harry.’

  Edward Armstead had been sitting squarely behind his massive oak desk, staring up at the row of Yugoslavian primitive paintings on the office wall as he listened to Harry Dietz.

  After ten minutes there was no more that Dietz could add. ‘There it is, Chief,’ he said.

  Armstead continued to stare at his paintings, absorbing what he had heard. Slowly a smile opened on his face. He swung his attention to Dietz. ‘Beautiful,’ he said. ‘Just beautiful, Harry.’

  ‘We must keep in mind that Pagano told her this was off the record.’

  Armstead’s smile disappeared, and he seemed to examine his assistant’s face to see if he was serious or not. ‘Pagano said off the record? You’re not serious, are you? Who in the fuck is Pagano? A tinhorn crook whose neck we saved. Screw Pagano. Whatever is off the record - that’s what we’re going to publish from now on.’

  Dietz indicated his assent. ‘You’re going to run the story, then?’

  ‘I’m not going to run it,’ said Armstead. ‘I’m going to do better than that.’ He savored the information he had just heard. ‘An unused and unknown escape tunnel running from Sam Yinger’s cell to freedom. What if Sam Yinger knew about that tomorrow?’ Armstead was all action now. ‘Let’s not waste any time, Harry. Find out the name of Yinger’s attorney. Call him and tell him to meet me for a drink at Perigord Park at seven tonight. If he gives you a hassle about being tied up - tell him to get untied. Tell him this is really important.’

  Ymger’s defense attorney, George Tatum, was waiting for Edward Armstead when the publisher arrived at Perigord Park. He was seated alone in a booth to the left of the entrance

  in the otherwise empty room. He was a pale, middle-aged man wearing thick glasses and an unfashionable brown suit. He had probably not received as much attention in his entire life, Armstead surmised, as he had received in the Sam Yinger case. He certainly had never been in this fancy restaurant before.

  George Tatum was nursing a drink when Armstead approached him.

  Armstead stuck out his hand, introducing himself, then called over his shoulder for a double scotch and water as he pushed himself into the seat across from the lawyer.

  Tatum seemed embarrassed about his drink. ‘I thought I’d get started,’ he said. ‘It’s been a long day.’

  ‘By all means,’ said Armstead, unpeeling a cigar. He guessed that Tatum was impressed to be with him. Impressed, and curious.

  ‘Do you know why I wanted to see you?’ Armstead asked.

  ‘Only that it is about my client, Mr. Yinger, and - and that it is important.’

  ‘Correct on both counts,’ Armstead acknowledged, accepting his drink from the waiter. He tasted his drink, assessing his tactic with the lawyer, and swallowed slowly. Armstead put his glass down, lit his cigar, then exhaled a puff of smoke. ‘I’ll tell you why I wanted to see you,’ said Armstead. ‘You know I’m the publisher of the New York Record.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘What would you say if I told you I’d like one of our reporters to have an exclusive interview with your client before his execution?’

  Tatum’s disappointment was immediate. ‘I’m afraid,’ he said with reluctance, ‘I’d have to say that’s impossible.’

  ‘Absolutely impossible?’

  Tatum pushed the thick glasses higher on his nose. ‘Mr. Armstead, believe me, it would be impossible.’

  Having expected this reply, Armstead remained nonchalant. He sucked at his cigar until it was aglow again. ‘AH right, let’s try it another way. How much would you like to see your client go free?’

  ‘Go free?’ Tatum was plainly bewildered. ‘He can’t go free. He’s condemned to death. He’s going to the chair the

  morning after next. I spent the entire day trying to get the governor to modify Mr. Yinger’s sentence from death to life. The governor turned us down. It’s the chair for sure.’

  Armstead measured his words. ‘Mr. Tatum, I’m not asking you if your client can go free. I am asking you how much you want to see him go free.’

  Tatum’s bewilderment remained. ‘I’m not sure what you mean, Mr. Armstead. I am Mr. Yinger’s defense attorney. I defended him. I tried to get him free. I appealed the verdict. I went to the governor. I’ve done my job.’

  ‘Your job aside,’ said Armstead, ‘do you want him to die in the electric chair?’

  ‘Of course not. He doesn’t deserve the chair. I’m not saying he’s a good guy or that he’s innocent by any means. If the witnesses were right, and he did what he did, then he’s a maniac, totally insane, and was insane when he did it. We don’t send the insane to the electric chair. I’m against that. It’s not humane.’

  ‘So you would like to see him go free?’

  Tatum hedged his answer. ‘I don’t want to see him executed.’

  ‘You’d do anything to prevent that?’

  ‘As a matter of principle - yes.’ Puzzlement had crept over Tatum’s face. T don’t understand you, Mr. Armstead. What are you leading up to?’

  Armstead laid down his cigar. ‘Simply this. You want to prevent Yinger’s execution? I can help you prevent it. I can get him out of it.’

  ‘Out of the electric chair?’

  ‘Out of prison,’ Armstead said flatly.

  Tatum’s expression was one of total disbelief. ‘Are you serious?’

  ‘Very serious.’

  ‘I repeat - the governor turned down the stay of execution. It’s the chair, morning after next. There’s no way out.’

  ‘And I repeat - there is a way out.’ Armstead was beginning to savor the game.

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘I’ll be happy to tell you in a minute.’ He retrieved his cigar and relit it. ‘Presuming I can get your client out of prison, would you let my reporter see him before that?’

  Tatum nodded. ‘Under those circumstances, yes. It could be arranged. No problem with the warden. And I could persuade Yinger to cooperate.’

  ‘You guarantee you could arrange it?’

  ‘I could arrange it. But the deal you’re offering is impossible. It simp
ly makes no sense.’

  Armstead became businesslike and brisk. ‘It simply makes no sense if you don’t know all the facts.’ Armstead dropped his voice. ‘All right, Mr. Tatum, come closer and listen. The facts. You can convey everything to Sam Yinger - only to Yinger - otherwise it is confidential and could get us into trouble. All right, I want my reporter in - and you want your client out - and here is how we do it. There is a tunnel way down beneath Sam Yinger’s cell.’

  Lowering his voice even more, Armstead went on without interruption.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Victoria Weston had been thrilled by the unexpected assignment given her by Harry Dietz personally.

  She had rented a new Chevrolet sedan, charged it to the Record, and obtained an intricate set of directions. She had been told that the eighty-mile drive from Manhattan to Green Haven prison would take her about two hours. Since her appointment to interview Sam Yinger had been arranged for three o’clock in the afternoon, she had left at noon to be certain that she would arrive on schedule.

  Once she had attained the East River Drive, after passing the United Nations Plaza, she had believed that she would have time to formulate her questions for Yinger. It had been a marvelous surprise, getting the interview, although it was a natural follow-up piece to her backgrounder - how could it possibly have been arranged? - and a chilling assignment to talk to a real live person of flesh and blood who little more than a dozen hours later would be laid out on a slab, an unmoumed corpse.

  But the drive proved to be too complicated for Victoria to be able to work out many questions. Around the entrance to the Triborough Bridge, there was a confusing interchange, she had missed the turn onto the Major Deegan Expressway and had gotten badly lost in the Bronx, but eventually found herself on the New York Thruway. Finally she had taken the Taconic State Parkway that brought her to Interstate Highway 84 and the turnoff for the small hamlet of Stormville, located on State Highway 216. The countryside, with its undulating hills, had been beautiful. Suddenly the two-lane road had dipped, and the thick concrete wall of the prison had loomed before her. Off to one side there appeared to be a farm, with green-garbed men, obviously prisoners, toiling in the fields. Straight ahead, beside the entrance, a metallic sign read: green haven correctional facility.

  Leaving her car in the parking area outside the thirty-foot-high wall, Victoria had climbed the stairs near the main gate to the glass-enclosed reception room. There she had cooperated in the routine procedure of establishing her identity, having her shoulder bag searched, going through the metal detector, and allowing her left hand to be stamped with invisible ink. After that she had descended a staircase that brought her to the grounds inside the prison wall.

  Now, five minutes before her interview, she was ascending another flight of steps to the lobby of the Administration Building. There, escorted by a surly, hefty blue-shirted guard, she was led to one more security check, where a new guard took her left hand, examined the back of it under an ultraviolet light beam. Signaled on, she caught up with her personal guard, followed him through a dimly lit corridor, up one more stairway into the red-brick Hospital-Segregation Building. Striding beside her guard, she found herself led through a gate into what seemed to be one of the visiting rooms. She was directed to sit at a table bisected by an eye-level screen built to prevent a caller from passing anything to a prisoner on the opposite side. As Victoria extracted her notepad and pen from her shoulder bag, she observed beyond the table the ominous presence of one more unsmiling guard, a sergeant, on a raised platform at a desk. Near him she detected a closed-circuit TV surveillance camera.

  Victoria’s escort guard was addressing her. ‘Instructions are to sit you here instead of the Death Row visiting rooms. Guess it’s because the bulletproof glass and hole make it too hard to talk through. The new visiting room is better.’ He pointed to the sergeant up on the platform. ‘He’ll be keeping an eye on you and your pal, to see that you don’t pass him anything or -‘ He made an evil grin.’- try to make love. The inmate’s on his way.’

  Five minutes later Sam Yinger was brought in and led to a chair across the table. Yinger, hands cuffed and shackled to a special belt at his waist, was flanked by two huge, grim guards. Yinger was smaller and blander in appearance than she had anticipated. His thinning blond hair, watery eyes, undershot chin gave him the look of just another figure in a crowd. Outwardly he resembled an unsuccessful door-to-door salesman, not the callous murderer of seven human

  beings, six of them mere children.

  Yet from his first words spoken after his uniformed chaperons stepped back, Victoria knew that she was dealing with a savagely angry man.

  ‘You the broad I’m supposed to talk to?’ he said, once seated.

  ‘I’m Victoria Weston of the New York Record, and I was told you would be willing to give me an interview.’

  ‘I’m not willing, just doing it as a favor to my lawyer,’ Yinger snarled. T don’t know why I’m here. What in the fuck’s in it for me? What good’s doing an interview you’ll never be able to read?’

  ‘Maybe something will turn up before morning.’

  ‘Shit, you know nothing’ll turn up. The governor was the only chance and he turned us down. I’m a dead man, good and dead.’

  Victoria squirmed, uncertain as to how to proceed. She wanted in some way to justify her interview. ‘Well, Mr. Yinger, to begin with, everyone has to die sometime - at least you’ll have a chance to justify yourself, speak your mind by speaking through me. You can let the world know how you feel - and your friends and relatives. Surely you have some friends and relatives out there?’

  ‘Sister, I got nobody out there I give a damn about.’

  ‘Not a soul?’

  ‘There’s nobody I give a damn about except Caroline, and she’s dead.’

  ‘Are you - are you sorry you shot her?’

  Yinger did not reply.

  Victoria swallowed. ‘The children - what about the children…?’

  ‘I had to,’ he said, his voice suddenly reasonable.

  ‘Had to? Why?’

  ‘It was logical, that’s why. They were eyewitnesses against me. What’s the difference? They won’t miss much.’ He reflected. ‘They didn’t know what hit them.’

  ‘I suppose not,’ she muttered, weakly, busily writing her notes.

  He watched her write awhile, and finally caught her eye. ‘You know what, lady, let me tell you something. You can print it. You can tell them Sam Yinger said it. I don’t mind

  dying. I’m just as glad I wasn’t commuted to life. Imagine having to spend your whole goddam life, years and years of it, in this two-by-four concrete sewer. Dying is like going to sleep, sort of. Before or after, you don’t know what happens. Blink and you’re out of it. Darkness. Big long sleep. No dreams. No thinking. Nothing. Just rest. I’m not scared of that. You tell them Sam Yinger isn’t scared one bit. How’s that, lady?’

  ‘It’s a philosophy,’ Victoria said, writing furiously.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Yinger. He thought for a moment. ‘There are worse things than dying. There’s living.’ He paused. ‘My life was lousy.’

  ‘Do you want to tell me about it?’

  T don’t know.’ He picked his way through remembrances. No parents that he knew. Bleak orphanage years. In and out of several gangs. Handyman jobs. Night school to make something respectable of himself. Still no decent work. Scrounging, more handyman jobs. Something better with the city - truck driver for the garbage department. Only relaxation!, cheap midnight movies. And women. Whores who gave you syph and clap. First grownup love was the schoolteacher, Caroline, and she double-crossed him, a whore like the rest with all her men. The bitch. He stopped. ‘What the hell,’ he said.

  ‘That’s the past,’ said Victoria. ‘What about the present? What do you do with yourself in your cell?’

  ‘Only two things to do. Watch TV and jerk off. The first’s not as bad as they say, and the second doesn’t give you pimples.’ He appea
red pleased that he had embarrassed her. ‘Anything more, miss?’ he wanted to know.

  ‘There’s one more question - well, maybe a few more.’

  ‘Go on.’

  T was wondering about this: how you look at life on the outside today. Is there anything you wish you could do out there?’

  ‘Not a fucking thing, nothing. Not even screwing.’ A grin. ‘Not even screwing you.’

  She tried to avoid reacting.

  ‘Not a put-down,’ he added quickly. ‘You got nice tits. It’s just, I got bigger things - like maybe the chair - on my mind.’

  ‘So there’s not a thing you want on the outside.’

  Yinger was lost in thought. Victoria did not prod him. ‘Yeah, there’s… there’s something.’

  He fell silent again.

  Her pen poised, she inquired, ‘Do you want to speak about it?’

  ‘One thing,’ he said quietly. ‘I’d like to get out to have revenge on people who treated me unfair in the trial. Especially one. I’m talking about the D.A. - what’s his name?’

  ‘You mean District Attorney Clark Van Dusen?’

  ‘Yeah, him. Cheap-shot bastard. I never liked the way he talked about me to the jury - to the reporters after - even to the governor yesterday, when he put in his two bits against commuting.’ Yinger gnawed at his lip. ‘Van Dusen, yeah. He said I deserved to be removed from society. He called me an animal, did you know that? An animal. I’d like to show him you can’t treat another human being like that. It’s the only-thing I’d like to be free for - to kill that prick Van Dusen.’

  Victoria concentrated on her writing, but her mind was boggled. Here was a man who had cold-bloodedly taken the lives of six children, put bullets into the heads and bodies of six innocent youngsters, yet his only grievance was that the district attorney had characterized him as an. animal.

  ‘Anything else?’ Yinger was asking.

  Victoria finished her writing, and busied herself thumbing through her notes. ‘Let me see -‘ ,