Death Sentence

by Brian Garfield

  The three of them walked, bouncing heel-and-toe, to Western Avenue where they waited for the northbound bus and got aboard it.

  He gave the bus several blocks’ lead. When it discharged Crubb and his companions he had no trouble recognizing them at the distance; by the time he reached the corner they had walked a block into a neighborhood of small private houses and low brick apartment buildings. Paul glanced at them and drove a block farther along Western, then made the right turn and went two blocks and turned right again. When he parked in the middle of the block he saw the three men walk across the intersection in front of him. None of them looked his way. They had something in mind: they were looking for something, scanning the houses as they walked. Paul locked the car and walked to the corner and watched from there, staying next to the building where he could curl back out of sight if one of them looked over his shoulder.

  Crubb was talking and the performance involved a great deal of body expression: his shoulders and arms and hands moved in great balletic patterns; with his friends he was a different creature from the prisoner in the courtroom. From a block away it was impossible to tell what he was talking about but his gestures expressed petulant complaint. Possibly he was expounding on the injustice of his arrest.

  They passed a small apartment building without a glance; they were studying the detached houses across the road. One of the men passed something heavy from his coat pocket to Crubb—perhaps a tool, perhaps a weapon. Crubb pushed it under his tight leather coat and held it there, one hand inside the lapel.

  Paul stayed where he was; it was as good a vantage point as any, at least until they went a block or two farther. There were no other pedestrians on the street; a plumber’s van went by but when it was gone nothing else moved in the street except Crubb and his two friends.

  They were looking at the garages, Paul discovered. Looking for an empty one?

  Then as if on random impulse they turned the corner and went out of sight. Paul hurried down the street.

  It began to snow: large slow flakes. Paul turned his collar up. When he reached the corner he walked straight across the intersection, merely glancing both ways as if to make sure there was no traffic. The three men were jive-walking down the sidewalk peering at garages; one of them glanced back and Paul quickly looked the other way and kept walking until he’d interposed the corner house between him and their line of sight. Then he doubled back and peered carefully around the edge of the house.

  The two companions stopped and Crubb walked up a driveway and cupped both hands to look through a window into a closed two-car garage. He shook his head and rejoined the others and they moved on.

  Paul was sure of it now. They were looking for an empty garage: a sign that no one was home.

  They were walking away from him but he saw Crubb’s head turn—an instinctive wariness toward the backtrail. Paul swiveled back out of sight before Crubb had a chance to see him. He gave it a few seconds and then reconnoi-. tered cautiously.

  They had nearly reached the end of the block. Crubb poked a finger toward a house on the near side of the street; it was set back and Paul couldn’t see it. All three of them crossed the street.

  There was only one thing to do. He went back across the intersection, retracing his own path. None of them looked his way; they were intent on the house. From the south corner he could see the edge of it and the garage into which Crubb was peering. Crubb made a quick hand motion and all three men disappeared into the passage between houses; the third man paused to look both ways and Paul faded back. When he looked out again they were gone from sight. They’d be checking out the house before breaking into it.

  Paul crossed the intersection a third time and turned left and walked toward the house, looking for a place to post himself and ambush them when they emerged with their loot. On his palms the cold dampness of fear was an old familiar companion.

  13

  ¶ CHICAGO, DEC. 24TH—Five men were shot to death yesterday in two separate incidents in Chicago, bringing to a boil the rapidly heating controversy over the disputed existence of a “vigilante” on the city’s streets.

  Early yesterday afternoon three separate residents of the Humboldt Park residential area telephoned police to report gunshots, bringing fast response by motorized patrolmen who discovered the bodies of three men in a passage beside the residence of Ernest Hamling, of 3046 West Hirsch Street. On and near the bodies were a cassette tape recorder, silverware, two cameras, a shotgun, a small battery-powered television set and other items identified as the personal property of Mr. and Mrs. Hamling, neither of whom was at home at the time of the shootings.

  Announcement of the identities of the three dead men has been withheld by police pending further investigation and notification of relatives. It was revealed by a police spokesman, however, that one of the three men had been released on bail by the Cook County Criminal Court only that morning, pending trial on a charge of robbery and assault.

  The three men were allegedly killed by bullets from a single .38 revolver which may have been the same weapon that has been credited with the deaths of five alleged criminals in recent days. Police ballistics laboratories have taken the bullets for analysis.

  In a separate incident last night, two youths were shot to death on a South Side fire escape while allegedly escaping from an attempted burglary of the Lincoln-Washington Social Club. The youths, identified as Richard Hicks and John R. Davis, both 16, were found by the club manager, Sherman X, after several loud gunshots were heard; allegedly the youths had broken in through a rear window and had stolen the club’s cashbox containing receipts from a benefit discotheque dance, and were shot while escaping down the outside fire stairs at the rear building. A police spokesman said, “We’ve analyzed the angle of entry of the bullets. They were fired up at the victims from the alley beneath.”

  The bullets have been identified tentatively as having been fired by a .45 caliber automatic pistol. Interviewed in his Headquarters office this morning, Police Captain Victor Mastro, in charge of the “vigilante” investigation in the Homicide Division, pointed out that the two South Side youths were not killed by the same weapon which reportedly killed the other eight “vigilante” victims. “But,” Mastro said, “the modus operandi is very similar, you’d have to say. We can’t rule out the possibility that the killer owns more than one gun.”

  14

  HER EYES FLASHED angrily. She’d been waiting near the door; she stood up when Paul entered the courtroom. He was once again surprised by how diminutive she was: she hardly came up to his shoulder and he was not especially tall. She wore a light sweater with the sleeves pushed up casually above the elbows; a long plaid skirt that was mainly orange and yellow; she’d done something with her hair and it was softer and fuller around her face than it had been yesterday.

  “I’m not late, am I?”

  “Actually you’re early. No—it’s not on your account I’m breathing fire. Let’s go, shall we? I need a drink.”

  He helped her into her coat and they went down the steps trying to avoid puddles and slushpiles left from last night’s snowfall. She said, “I was supposed to try an aggravated assault and attempted murder case this morning. The bastard didn’t show up.”

  “Jumped bail?”

  “That’s right. Eight hundred dollars bail. I fought it at the hearing—it was ridiculously low.”

  “Do they skip bail often?”

  “Not so often that I’m used to it.”

  He held the car door for her and then went around to get in. “Where to?”

  “Do you like German food?”

  He didn’t, especially, but he said he did and she gave him directions; they put the car in a multistory garage in the Loop and walked to the Berghoff.

  They ordered highballs and Paul lit her cigarette from a restaurant matchbook. When the drinks came they touched glasses. “Merry Christmas,” he said.

  “Happy New Year.” She drank and shuddered theatrically. “Hoo boy.” />
  “A tough one?”

  “Some of them bother you more than others,” she said. “This one was a fairly vicious little bastard. I hate to imagine what he’s up to now.”

  In the restaurant light she had a softer prettiness than he’d remarked yesterday. Her cheeks were high and freckled; she had a short nose and wide grey eyes. Her bones were prominent and she was curiously rangy—that was what made her seem much taller than she was.

  She blew smoke through her nostrils. “I feel awkward. It’s not a habit of mine, making dates with strangers. I did it on impulse, you know.”

  He smiled to reassure her. “So did I.”

  “Have you ever been to a psychiatrist?”

  He was taken aback. “No.”

  “Neither have I. I wonder what a shrink would say about my ‘motivations.’ I’ve never had a loved one mugged. I’ve never even been burgled. But when I passed the bar exams I went straight into the DA’s office and I’ve been there ever since. I’ve never been able to picture myself as anything except a prosecuting attorney. I never had the slightest urge to defend the downtrodden and support the underprivileged. It’s strange because I don’t think of myself as a redneck. I’m not politically right-wing at all. I don’t know. Right now I’m in one of those agonizing reappraisals about the people I have to deal with every day. I’ve started asking myself whether there’s any possibility of a society surviving without the things we think of as the old traditional civilized values. Personal dignity, respect for the law.”

  She wanted a sympathetic ear; he didn’t interrupt.

  “I’ve never believed crime was an illness that could be cured by treatment. Maybe one day we’ll be able to go into them surgically and program new personalities and send brand new good citizens out into the world. I’d rather not live to see that either. But in the meantime I keep hearing about rehabilitation and reform, and I don’t believe a word of it. The law isn’t supposed to rehabilitate people or reform them. You can’t force people to behave themselves. You can only try to force them not to misbehave. That’s what laws are for. The humanitarians have forced us into this illogic of reforms and rehabilitations, and all they’ve succeeded in doing is they’ve created an incredible increase in human suffering.”

  “Crime isn’t a disease to be treated,” Paul suggested. “It’s an evil to be punished.”

  “It’s more than that,” she said. “It’s not just an evil to be punished. It’s an evil to be prevented.”

  “By deterrence?”

  “By getting them off the streets and keeping them off the streets.” She lit another cigarette, inhaled, coughed, recovered and said, “Protections keep expanding for the rights of the accused. What about the rights of society to be free from criminal molestations?”

  She went on, “The ‘we’re all guilty’ approach used to mean something to me. You know: ‘As long as one man anywhere is not free, I’m not free.’ It’s a great argument for doing away with prisons. But it’s no good. I haven’t committed atrocities. I’m not guilty of the crimes I have to try in that courthouse. I’ve never mugged anyone. There’s a difference between me and them—we’re not all the same. And if we haven’t got the confidence and courage to make these moral judgments and act on them, then we deserve every dismal thing that happens.

  “These kids from the Legal Aid hang around our office talking high-minded idealism. They keep talking about the causes of crime. What causes? I’ve heard ten thousand. Families have broken down. Unemployment. The evaporation of religion. Violence on television. Welfare. Corruption in high places. Racism. Poverty. Abnormal genetic chromosomes. That marvelous word ‘alienation.’ Permissive parents. The laws are too lax, or the laws are too severe—take your choice. Rootlessness, the breakdown of a sense of community, over-population, underachievement, drugs, too much money, too little money. Moral decay and disrespect. Pornography. What’s the cause of crime? Every crime has its own causes. Every defendent I try has a marvelous excuse of some kind. But when the Nazis mobilize and arm themselves and invade your country, you don’t ask why—you defend yourself and leave the causes to the historians.”

  “Yes,” he murmured. He didn’t dare say more.

  “That’s what I’ve believed for years,” she said. “It’s what I still believe. But I’ve begun to wonder whether it matters a whole lot what I believe.”

  “Why? Because you can’t do much about things?”

  “No. I do as much as I can. I suppose you could say I do more than most people do.”

  “Then what’s bothering you?”

  “It’s so accidental, isn’t it. I could just as easily be one of those Legal Aids in the outer office. My best friend in law school took a job with the Civil Liberties Union.”

  “It’s like that line in the Western movies,” he said, echoing the words he’d said to Spalter. “You play the cards you’ve been dealt.”

  “It depresses me to think maybe that’s all it is. A chance turn of the cards. An accident, no more significant than a bet on a horse.” She put her glass down; she hadn’t drunk much of the second one. “I feel as if I’ve lost something important. Should we get menus and order something?”

  Later she said, “I’m sorry. I haven’t been much help to either of us, have I.”

  “I didn’t know we were expected to give each other therapy.” He smiled. “You’re good company, you know.”

  “Actually I’m horrid today. I hope you’ll forgive me—I don’t usually behave so badly.”

  He shook his head, denying it. “Do you have children?”

  “No. I’m not married any more. I was for a while, but as they say it didn’t work out. Maybe it was my fault. I’m not the homemaker sort.”

  “I wasn’t trying to pry.”

  She put her knife and fork on her plate. “Why do you and I keep apologizing to each other?”

  “Nerves.” He tried to smile. “I don’t know about you. But I haven’t done much—dating.” Well there’d been one woman in Arizona, very briefly.

  He wanted to change the subject. “What are your plans for the evening?”

  Amusement narrowed her eyes. “It’s Christmas Eve,” she said, “and I thought you’d never ask.”

  15

  ¶ CHICAGO, DEC. 26TH—In a bizarre Christmas Day tragedy, a man who tried to rob Santa Claus was shot to death yesterday outside a church on Lake Shore Drive.

  Witnesses leaving the First Methodist Church described the events. Claude Tunick, 54, dressed in a Santa Claus costume, was collecting donations on the sidewalk for a Methodist crippled children’s fund. At 12:45 p.m. the noon Christmas Service inside the church came to an end, and the first worshipers to leave the building were in time to see a youth with a knife in his hand accost Mr. Tunick and wrest the cylindrical donations box away from him. Several of the witnesses ran down the church steps, trying to catch the thief or frighten him off.

  Suddenly a shot was fired. Witnesses have been uncertain where it was fired from; most of them believe it was fired from a passing automobile which then sped away. The bullet struck Mr. Tunick’s assailant, William O. Newton, 17, in the chest. Newton died less than twenty minutes later in an ambulance en route to city hospital.

  A police spokesman said the death bullet had been fired from a .45 caliber automatic pistol. Ballistics technicians are comparing it with bullets of the same caliber which yesterday were reported as having killed two alleged burglars on the South Side.

  “If the bullets match up,” the spokesman said, “we’ll regard it as a strong indication that the vigilante is still in operation. He may have traded in his .38 revolver for a heavier .45.”

  The vigilante—whose existence is still disputed in some official circles—has been accused of at least eight killings in Chicago in the past week, all of them involving the deaths of convicted or suspected felons. If the three .45 caliber homicides can be linked to the eight committed with a .38 caliber revolver, it will raise the vigilante’s death toll to eleve
n.

  Captain Victor Mastro, in a telephone interview last night, said, “Eleven homicides in a week isn’t unusual for Chicago, unfortunately. Sometimes we have eleven in a single day. But if all of these have indeed been committed by one man, then it’s not too strong a statement to say we’ve got a one-man murder wave on our hands. We’re doing everything in our power to locate and arrest whoever is responsible for these killings, whether it’s one man or half a dozen.”

  Captain Mastro, of the Homicide Division, is in charge of the vigilante case. His closing remark may have been in reference to several heated statements made lately by members of civil rights organizations, religious leaders, spokesmen for community groups, and two members of the Chicago Crime Commission, one of whom, Vincent Rosselli, spoke up in a County Council meeting on Tuesday, demanding “an end to vigilante terrorism in the streets of Chicago.”

  16

  HE MET HER for cocktails at the Blackstone; she was at a table reading a newspaper. She was in her working clothes—the orange tweed suit he’d seen before. “How’d your exploring go today?”

  “I did a couple of museums,” he said. “No point driving around in this blizzard.”

  “Have you seen the papers?”

  “Yes.”

  She put a fingernail on the vigilante headline. “It’s got the machine in a real uproar.”

  “I imagine it would.” He contrived to make his voice casual. “Do you want another one of those?”

  “Not just yet.”

  He ordered scotch and water. The waitress repeated the words in a heavy French accent and went away wiggling the tail of her bunny costume.

  “I spent half the day in the Museum of Science and Industry. You could get lost in that place.” He’d been looking for muggers in the dark corridors where they liked to prey on wandering teen-agers and old women.