Death Sentence

by Brian Garfield

  He locked the car carefully and made sure all the windows were shut tight. When he walked back toward the light at the intersection he passed a tall black-bearded man in a wide-brimmed leather hat who moved to the far side of the sidewalk and didn’t look at Paul as they passed each other; the tall man receded into the shadows and Paul turned the corner.

  There was a thin stream of pedestrian traffic to and from the late-closing supermarket; he went past it, the price placards in the windows and the closed-circuit security eyes high on the walls and the armed private guard near the door. Next to it was a liquor store, closed, a steel grillwork locked over its windows; then an Army-Navy surplus store and finally at the corner the pawnshop overhung by its spherical brass triad. Paul went inside and browsed for five minutes, exchanged not more than four words with the proprietor and returned to the street.

  When he reached the sidewalk he had his wallet in his hand and he was counting the money in it as if he had just put it there. He thrust the wallet clumsily into his outside coat pocket, making a show of it, and walked back past the supermarket to the next corner, moving his hand inside the coat pocket, switching his grip from the wallet to the .38 revolver.

  A policeman, even a dedicated one, had to wait for a crime to be committed within reach before he could act on it. His very presence, in uniform, would discourage the crime’s commission in any case. Long ago Paul had learned not to waste his time in fruitless search for felons in the act of committing crimes; the odds were too long. A robbery took place in the city every three minutes according to Mike Ludlow but it was an enormous city and there were three million potential victims.

  It was much more certain if you invited them to make you their victim.

  When he turned the corner he half-expected to be followed but he wasn’t. No one had been tempted by the bulging wallet or the pawnshop customer’s evident carelessness.

  Dry run: a dud. Well you couldn’t expect them to tumble every time.

  He continued into the deeper shadows and his eyes had to accustom themselves to the inferior light farther along the block; he turned once, squinting, to make sure no one was tailing him. The sidewalk remained empty. Summoning patience he put his back to the boulevard, relaxed his grip on the gun and continued along the cracked concrete without hurry. As his eyes dilated he looked up along the sagging weathered stoops of the tenements: here and there a dim bulb but most of the entrances were unlit. There was no one in sight: it wasn’t a place where you would sit on the porch to take the air. In any case flakes drifted by and the night was too chill for it.

  It was only the suggestion of a stirring in the corner of his vision but it made sweat burst out on his palms. He stopped bolt-still.

  There by the car. His car.

  Nothing.

  But when he passed his eyes over the car again he saw a subtle line that wasn’t part of the car’s silhouette: just visible, a flat shadow no bigger than a paperback book.…

  He walked forward. Twenty-five feet, twenty and he had it then: it was the flat crown of a hat behind the fender. The man was crouching behind the car and didn’t realize quite how high his hat was.

  Paul kept walking as if to go by the car. A sidewise glance: the hat was moving, the man was circling behind the car, crabbing his way into the street in order to stay behind cover as Paul walked past.

  By the front bumper Paul pivoted on his right foot and leaped between the cars and hauled the Centennial from his pocket. He wheeled past the car and the man looked up in naked amazement—reared back in fear, lost his balance and had to whip one stiff arm behind him to brace his palm against the pavement.

  Something extended from the man’s hand. The man lifted it as if it were a weapon.

  Paul shot him in the face. The man’s elbow unlocked and he went down on his back. His leather hat rolled into the center of the street.

  The tool rested in his splayed hand: a twisted length of coat-hanger wire. Standard for breaking into car windows.

  Paul plugged his key into the door, dived into the car and started it with a gnashing grind. He locked the wheel to the left and cramped the car out of the parking space. He felt it when the rear wheel rolled over the dead man’s outstretched arm.

  He went down the street without lights: if there was a witness he didn’t want his license plate to show. He turned two successive corners before he switched on the headlamps and slipped into the stream of boulevard traffic. He drove up Lake Shore Drive obsessed by the knowledge that he might have left a clue: the print of his rear tire on the dead man’s flesh.

  He worked it out in his head. He drove right past his apartment building and continued into the North Side and turned off there, cruising until he found a quiet block. Ignored by occasional passing cars he jacked up the car and changed the rear tire, putting the spare on the car. Then he unscrewed the valve of the tire and bled the air out of it.

  When it had gone soft he used the tire iron to pry the tire off the wheel rim. He didn’t have proper tools and it was a hard job; he worked steadily, without desperation but steadied by necessity. Finally the tire came off the wheel and he drove west until he found a weedy lot cluttered with trash. He wiped the tire off, wary of fingerprints, and left it there amid the junk; then he drove back to the apartment. Tomorrow he’d buy a new spare tire.

  It was well after midnight by the time he’d cleaned and reloaded the Centennial. He switched on the radio and tuned to the all-news station but there was no report of the South Side killing yet. At one o’clock he turned it off and showered and went to bed, trying to put faces on the images of the three men who always drifted in the back of his mind: the savages who’d broken into the apartment and mauled Esther and Carol.

  He’d never found them; he’d never expected to. When you set out to eradicate a disease-bearing species of insects you didn’t hunt for particular individual insects.

  7

  IT WAS a cool day oppressed by a hydrocarbon haze. Sea gulls from the lake flew inland reconnaissance over the city. It was four o’clock; soon it would be dusk. Paul walked into the shop: Tax Returns Prepared—CHECKS CASHED—Xerox While-U-Wait. He went to the check-cashing counter and engaged in twenty seconds’ conversation with the cashier: he asked direction to the nearest El station, the location of which he knew already but for anyone watching him it established that he’d gone to the check-cashing window. He took his wallet out of his pocket and fiddled with it before he turned away from the window; he was still counting the money in it when he emerged onto the street.

  He had performed the ritual several times and it hadn’t tempted anyone yet but he kept at it because he needed at least one more immediate target to convince the press of his existence.

  When he reached the street a police cruiser was prowling by with its roof-bar of siren and lights and its lettered decals on the door. Paul counted his money again and then put the wallet in his coat pocket and turned the corner into a street lined with old frame houses streaked with watermarks.

  Halfway down the block he stopped and patted his pockets as if he’d lost something. It gave him an excuse to turn a circle on his heels and search the sidewalk behind him. Down at the corner a thin jittery figure in a threadbare jacket stood restlessly: a youth bouncing on his arches like an athlete waiting to compete. Behind him a woman went across the street jerking a small wailing child by the hand.

  A second youth appeared and joined the first.

  Paul reached down and picked up an invisible object and put it in his pocket and walked on.

  To his right a windowless clapboard wall had been decorated with spray-gun artwork. The houses beyond were dreary and lifeless. Chicago’s slums were spacious and airy by comparison with New York’s crowded high tenement buildings; the streets were wide, the buildings low. But the desolation had the same smell.

  He kept the wallet in the same pocket as the gun for two reasons. If a mugger demanded his wallet he could produce the gun instead. But if a policeman went into that po
cket Paul wanted him to find the $250 cash in the wallet.

  The two kids watched him from the corner behind him: he saw their reflections in the rear window of a panel truck as he walked by it. They were all jerks and jitters: wired as if they’d been plugged into a wall outlet. Addicts? He had no way of diagnosing; maybe they were only natural mannerisms. But when he reached the end of the block and continued along the second block he had a chance, when looking both ways for traffic before crossing the street, to see the two kids out of the corner of his eye and they were following him at a discreet distance. His hands began to sweat: the familiar telltale.

  He slowed the pace imperceptibly. His car was near the end of the block. A block farther along the empty street a traffic light blinked red, on and off. Daylight was draining out of the sky. He tasted the brass of fear on his tongue.

  The two kids were running now. He heard them come.

  8

  ¶ CHICAGO, DEC. 19TH—Two teen-age boys were shot to death on the South Side late yesterday, apparently by the same revolver that has killed three others on Chicago streets in the past 72 hours.

  The boys, Ernesto Delgado, 16, and his brother Julio, 15, of 4415 W. 21st Place, were found dead on a Wolcott Avenue sidewalk at 5:10 p.m. yesterday by a passing Chicago police patrol car.

  According to a preliminary examination by the police laboratory, the bullets that killed the Delgado brothers may have been fired by the same .38 revolver alleged to have been the weapon used in last night’s killing of James Washington, 26, on Lowe Avenue, and in the prior night’s homicides on North Mohawk, the victims of which were identified as Edward A. Smith, 23, and Leroy Thompson, 22.

  Police Captain Victor Mastro this morning said, “We may have a ‘vigilante’ on our hands.”

  Mastro spoke in reference to the recent spate of “vigilante” killings in New York City. They have been discussed widely by the national press and television.

  The three adult homicide victims all had criminal records, Mastro said. And while juvenile records cannot be published, a police spokesman remarked that the Delgado brothers were alleged to have been heroin addicts. A neighbor, interviewed this morning, described the two boys as “violent and vicious kids.”

  Captain Mastro stated that photographs of the bullets in all five cases have been sent to New York for comparison with those found in the bodies of the victims of the alleged “vigilante” killer in that city.

  Chicago Police Chief John Colburn, asked to comment, said, “I’d rather not speculate at this point until we’ve got more facts to work on. At the moment we’ve assigned detectives to investigate these homicides and the connection, if any, between them. It’s too early to jump to conclusions.”

  A “VIGILANTE” IN CHICAGO?

  Commentary

  by Michael Ludlow

  Reports from the police blotter indicate that a “vigilante”-style executioner may be prowling the streets of Chicago, possibly inspired by the New York killings attributed to that city’s unidentified “vigilante.”

  Whether or not such vigilantes exist, speculation and rumor have fostered a wave of emphasis on the “crime problem” which seems unprecedented even in this age of soaring crime rates and law-and-order politics.

  Despite the nation’s unemployment, recession, inflation, revelations of political chicanery, crop failures, petroleum and energy crises, and all the other burdens our society has to bear—despite all these tribulations—every poll conducted in the past weeks has indicated emphatically that the “crime crisis” has become the number one concern of Americans, helped along clearly by New York’s (and Chicago’s?) “vigilante.”

  It is a concern that is nearly unique, in that it is shared by members of every economic level, race, age group and region.

  Obviously it is more than momentary hysteria. It may be true, as has been alleged, that the “vigilante” is a myth created either by New York’s police or by the news media; but the fact remains that crime in America has become a true crisis.

  We can’t pretend it doesn’t exist and hope it will go away. Quibbling about the inaccuracies in the FBI’s recent Uniform Crime Report statistics will not change the fact that ordinary people are not safe on the streets, or even in their homes. If a citizen is so terrified that he refuses to leave his locked apartment, he has been deprived of his freedom. His civil liberties have been revoked just as surely as have those of the vigilante’s presumed victims.

  Vigilantism is not an answer. We cannot solve the crime problem by increasing the number of murders.

  But we must act.

  It is time our institutions fulfilled the missions for which they were established. The inadequacy of police budgets, the alarming back-up of cases on the calendars of overcrowded criminal courts, the overwhelming prevalence of plea-bargaining in felony cases, and the revolving-door bail-bond situation that puts felons back on the streets within hours after their arrest—all these and other aspects of the police-judicial-penal systems are becoming recognized as intolerable weaknesses that threaten the very survival of our democracy’s structure of freedom and law.

  Legal punishment, to deter, must be immediate and impartial. The only thing known to deter criminal acts is the reasonable certainty that they will be exposed and that prosecution, conviction and punishment will follow. Without that reasonable certainty we risk the rise of chaotic anarchy in the form of vigilantism—the citizenry taking the law into its own hands, mindlessly and individually. The “vigilante” is ample evidence that our institutions must act now—before it is too late.

  9

  FRIDAY EVENING it began to rain. Reflected neon colors melted and ran along the wet streets. Paul sat in his parked car and switched on the radio softly to have company. Under an awning a man with a square dark beard dressed in black coat and wide black hat was reading a newspaper, turning the pages left to right. Girls in shabby clothes paraded the boulevard under two-dollar umbrellas with a pretended indifference to the eyes that followed them; smudges of dirty illumination drifted across the bellies of the clouds.

  Old Town: night life, drunks, tourists, night-blooming girls. Someone came out of a cocktail lounge near the car and a gust of hard rock music blew across the pavement, loud enough to reach Paul’s ears despite his closed car windows and the muttering radio. There was a busy singles’ club and next door to it a spiritual adviser (Palms Read). The bearded Jew licked his thumb and turned a page of his newspaper. Raindrops glistened, caught in his beard.

  Two youths stopped to gaze at the photos under the marquee of a “Topless-Live-Girls” emporium across the street; the youths moved on into the rain, a bit marble-eyed or perhaps it was only the way the lights reflected from their eyes. At the corner they stopped under a hooded whip-lamp on a silvered stalk; their clothes were pasted against them and they must have had rain inside their shoes but they didn’t seem to mind. They talked and one of them shrugged and then they moved on.

  Paul was watching the drunks emerge from the clubs because those were the obvious marks. He’d seen two couples stagger out of the singles’ club but they’d got into a car parked directly across the street. A drunk had come out of the topless joint but he’d been collected by a taxi which evidently had been summoned by phone.

  There was a counter food place on the near corner and he could almost smell the vapors of the frying fat; people drifted in and out of the place but one group had taken possession of part of the counter shortly after Paul arrived and they were still there: toughs, the night crazies. He could see them through the smoke-stained plate glass. They’d have been loitering on the street but for the rain. They wore the uniforms of their kind—leather, tight trousers, boots with high heels, the hats tipped far to one side.

  After a while one man separated himself from that group and moved into the doorway to look up and down at the street. His face seemed to be covered with sores or the pits of some old disease.

  A couple had left the hard rock club. The man with the pitted face
watched them unfurl their umbrella and hurry away. Paul watched all of them, his attention returning time after time to the man in the doorway. But the tough didn’t move, not even when a tall heavy black man approached the place and had to squeeze past him to get inside.

  The old Jew turned another page. Paul wondered what he was waiting for. A friend?

  The man with the pitted face stepped out of the doorway after a long time. He crossed to stand under the marquee of the topless club, his hat obscuring the “Go-Go” lettering beside the doors. He lit a cigarette. The light was very low; the cigarette described a red arc in the dimness as it came away from his lips and dimmed.

  Paul felt the stir of his blood. He had become sensitive to the subtle recognition signs of the predators. He’d heard it said that in Africa a herd of game antelope might allow a lion to prowl very close by without taking alarm because somehow they could sense whether or not the lion was hungry and if it wasn’t hungry it was not to be regarded as a threat. Paul might have passed the man with the pitted face and not given him a thought at another time; but tonight the man was hungry and Paul knew it.

  He’d known it the other night—the two men on the stoop near the Irish bar: he’d known they’d come after him.

  He knew it the same way with this one. He turned, deciding which bar to go into: he’d follow the same drill, do the drunk act, draw the man with the pitted face after him.

  He settled on the singles’ bar and got out of the car, locking it behind him, crossing the sidewalk quickly and pausing under the shelter of the awning. He glanced across the street, but the man wasn’t watching him—the man’s whole attention was fixed on a woman walking wearily past him under an umbrella: a middle-aged woman with a handbag carelessly pendulant from her crooked elbow. Reasonably expensive clothes: a businesswoman perhaps. There were enclaves of fashionable housing in the neighborhood: perhaps she was on her way home after a long day’s work keeping the shop open in the Christmas rush.