Death Sentence

by Brian Garfield

  The sky had thickened and gone pewter. Snow that had fallen in December remained in the park and on the curbs; there had been no thaw. At intervals while he waited he started the engine and ran up the heater until the interior of the car grew uncomfortably hot; then he sat in stillness while the cold pried its way through the sealed windows.

  He had the newspapers on the seat beside him; he went through them, turning the pages without hurry, keeping one eye on the court building. The car radio oozed wallpaper music as viscous as syrup but he didn’t bother to change the station; it kept him company without calling attention to itself and he had distractions enough: he kept thinking of Irene.

  He’d made a few unusual preparations. He’d smeared the car’s license plates, front and back, with oil and dirt to render them unreadable. He’d bought a winter hat, a Russian sort of thing with earflaps; when pulled down tight it covered everything above his eyes and behind his ears. He’d bought an oversize pair of sunglasses—the mirrored ones, motorcycle goggle-style. And he’d pasted to his upper lip a bushy mustache from a theatrical supply shop. It had occurred to him that if he were to stalk them in daylight he must run the risk of being seen. That was all right but he wanted them to remember the hat, the goggles and the mustache.

  The goggles and hat rested on the seat under the newspapers. The flat little .25 automatic was in his hip pocket; the .38 Centennial was clipped under the car seat where he could reach it fast.

  A patrol car crunched past and stopped at the courthouse door. A cop and a man in a business suit escorted two youths from the cruiser into the building; the cop returned in a few moments and drove away. Paul looked at his watch: 9:45.

  A number of people drifted into the building in the course of the next quarter hour. Paul watched them with distracted mild interest; his mind was on Irene. He kept picturing her laugh, the way her hips moved when she walked, the characteristic glint of secret amusement behind her long eyes.

  She was the woman he would love if he could afford to love.

  He watched people come and go; then around half past ten he saw two sullen boys emerge from the building and trail reluctantly after a very fat weary woman. Probably she was their mother: probably they had been released in her custody: they were small, likely no older than thirteen and fourteen, but they had the atavistic faces of children to whom brutality was the only reality.

  The three of them waited on Ogden for the bus and when they boarded it Paul followed, switching the radio off, fitting hat and goggles to his head.

  They transferred to a south bound bus on Ashland and he shadowed it into the ghetto; he was two blocks behind the bus when mother and boys left it and picked their way through the snow into a side street.

  A small tenement absorbed them and Paul sat in the car for an hour waiting for the children to come out. But when they emerged they only joined three other boys and the five of them went along to a small park. One of the boys was dragging a sheet of hard green plastic with an upcurved end—a sled. They had snowball fights and dragged the sled to the top of a diminutive hill and pummeled one another for the right to ride it; in the end three piled on the sled and tobogganed crazily down the slope, the sled tipping, two of them flying free and sledding to the bottom on the rumps of their trousers.

  Angry with himself for his misjudgment Paul put the car in gear and went away.

  He lunched cheerlessly on a hamburger which only put him wishfully in mind of Irene: her cooking was unpretentious but he’d rediscovered the fact that the most important pleasure in a meal was the sharing of it.

  By one o’clock he was back on station at the curb, posting watch on the Juvenile Court. He was here because he couldn’t very well return to the adult Criminal Court; if Paul visited that court again and his visit was followed by a vigilante incident involving a felon whom the court had turned loose on bail, Irene would see the connection.

  If a fourteen-year-old committed rape and murder the worst punishment he could receive was eighteen months in a training school and that usually meant seven or eight months because they were turned loose early on account of the overcrowding in the institutions. Perhaps the leniency of the juvenile laws had been justified in the days when the laws had been written: children then had been merely children. But the children of the streets had degenerated to vile savagery. Juvenile dockets were heavy with mutilations and murders, rapes, brutal vandalizings of human beings. The only purpose the law served was to reassure them they could commit bestialities without fear of punishment.

  The ones who’d attacked Esther and Carol had been young; no one knew exactly how young but they’d been boys, not men. The young ones were the worst: they hadn’t learned inhibitions. He’d read somewhere that the chief reformer was age. You rarely found a forty-year-old mugger; as they matured they learned fear.

  It was after two o’clock before he knew he had a strike on the line.

  The kid was probably seventeen or eighteen. He parked his half-wrecked car behind Paul’s by the fire hydrant and walked across the avenue kicking slush with his boots. He was tall and tight in a denim jacket and black chinos; he’d been wearing one of those insolent cowboy hats but he’d left it in the car. He made a show of not minding the cold.

  He was too old to be a respondent here; he could only have come to pick someone up. Paul waited for him to reappear.

  People came out of the building in little groups: parents and children, abraded by the machinery within, solemn and some of them alarmed by whatever had taken place inside the cold black building.

  Paul had the engine running and the heater fan blowing hard when the tall kid in the denim jacket came out of the building with another boy dressed in almost identical costume; the second boy was smaller and younger but his features had the same apathetic cast. The two of them came across the street with their hands in their trouser pockets, not talking; their eyes were glossy and hooded—completely without expression: nothing more than eyes, sighted organs.

  They got into the car behind him. He heard the doors rattle when they scraped shut. There was the growl of a rotted exhaust muffler and foul smoke erupted behind the ruined car; it swerved out past Paul and rutted forward on its shot springs to the corner.

  He let it go out of sight around the corner before he began to stalk them.

  The clanking old Mercury seemed to be moving in random directions at first: it turned corners, doubled back, wandered without purpose. Trying to disclose a tail? But he had no trouble staying with them. He remained a block or two behind them, allowing traffic to intervene; his own car was commonplace and anonymous, its paint a little faded, covered with the grey-black streakings of slush and road oil.

  Probably they were deciding what to do: thinking up entertainment. He found himself hoping they’d decide to go to a movie. It surprised him but he had no desire for violence.

  The Mercury ahead of him drew past the playground of a school. Paul slowed when he entered the intersection; he put his turn indicator on, flashing his intention to make a left. He’d decided to drop it: go back to the office, drop off the guns and the hat and goggles and mustache, go home and shower and shave and put on his tweed suit. He and Irene had been invited to dinner tonight by Harry Chisum, the old law professor.

  He was halfway into the turn when he saw the Mercury pull over to the curb and stop.

  It was at the far end of the playground on the street he’d just turned off. He stopped his car in the side street and watched through the mesh of the playground’s high fence. The two kids in denim got out of their car and began to walk. Young children were flowing across the playground from the gradeschool building, carrying their books; their breath clouded the air around them. School had just been dismissed for the day: the children were on their way home.

  The two thin boys in denim stood at the mesh fence with their gloved fingers hooked in the wire, watching the small children cross the playground.

  They had something in mind. Something evil.

 
Paul put the car in gear. Rolling through the side street he slipped his hands into the rubber gloves; he put on the hat, turned left at the corner, put on the sunglasses and went on to the farther corner; and turned left again.

  He’d gone around three sides of the block, behind the school, and now he drove slowly toward the front corner where the children were flowing through the gate onto the sidewalk. Ahead of him the two boys in denim had backed away from the fence and were walking toward the gate corner. They fell in behind a pair of, nine-year-old girls and crossed the street while a fat woman in traffic warden uniform held the cars at bay.

  When the woman blew her whistle to allow the traffic to proceed Paul crossed into the street beyond. The two youths were ahead of him, still walking with their hands in their pockets; the two little girls were ahead of them and skipped into a broad vacant lot where something had been torn down and few dilapidated cars were parked askew: they were short-cutting home. The empty land extended straight through to the far side of the block. The two boys in denim stood on the sidewalk and watched the little girls cross the lot. As Paul drove past them the two boys turned and began to follow the girls.

  Paul accelerated toward the far corner: he wanted to get around the block by the time the little girls reached the far side of it. While he drove through the narrow street he leaned across the car and rolled the right-hand window down; then he made the second right turn and slowed the car, reaching under the seat for the Centennial. Inside the rubber gloves his hands began to pucker in the confinement of sweat.

  He pushed the lever into neutral and let the car roll forward silently; he was leaning forward, peering past the brick corner as the vacant lot came in sight.

  The two denim-cased boys stood in the shadows. The little girls cowered against the bricks, cornered and terrified.

  The tall boy—the driver—flicked his hand out as if snapping his fingers. But Paul saw the glint of the knife blade as it flipped open.

  The younger boy moved forward, deliberately ominous, grinning with a sadistic show of teeth: dramatizing his brutality. He bent, reached for the hem of the larger girl’s coat and yanked it upwards, holding the hem in his fist and pressing the girl back against the wall. She wore white socks halfway up her thighs and dusky white underwear. The boy reached for the elastic.

  Paul steadied his aim. The boys were intent on their victims: they noticed nothing except the flesh beneath them. The boy with the knife moved closer to the smaller girl and held her throat with his free hand, pinioning her, choking off her attempt to scream. The other boy ripped the panties off the older girl. He was still holding her coat and skirt bunched up against her chin.

  Something made Paul lower the sights a fraction before he fired.

  The first bullet took the younger boy in the back of the knee.

  The Centennial leveled again across the car sill: Paul was leaning across the seat, firing through the open passenger window, his wrist balanced on the metal. The taller boy was turning, disoriented: the bullet had slammed his friend against him, upsetting his balance, and Paul shot him as he turned: the soft-nose punctured his calf and by the way the boy’s leg twisted it was evident it had smashed the bones.

  Both of them fell, broken-legged.

  The little girls flattened themselves in terror against the brick; their round eyes swiveled toward Paul.

  On the ground the taller boy crawled in a circle of pain like a half-crushed beetle. His partner seemed stuporous; his mouth hung slack and he hardly moved.

  In a sudden burst the older girl grabbed the younger one by the elbow and dragged her away. An instant later they were both running in panic, back across the empty lot toward the farther street, leaving their schoolbooks abandoned in the snow.

  Paul rolled up the window and straightened in the seat. He made a tight U-turn.

  30

  “CHILDRESS will eat you alive if you give him a chance,” Harry Chisum said.

  “I’ve been forewarned.” Paul caught Irene’s sudden smile. “Anyhow I’m sure it won’t be boring.”

  “It’s a dynamic firm,” the old man agreed. “Well then. More coffee, everyone.” He poured from a silver decanter; his aged hand shook a bit. The dining room was like the rest of the house: a relic. Probably nothing in it except the wiring had changed in fifty years. It was a frame house without pretension but it had been built in a time when there had been leisure for elegance of a kind; there was comfort in its solidity, in the heavy darkness of old woods and furniture built for relaxing.

  Irene looked at her wrist watch. She’d checked the time frequently in the past quarter hour. “I’m not being rude, Harry, but I don’t want to miss that program.”

  “You keep saying you want to see a program. I never knew you to be a television addict.”

  “It’s the Cavender interview. He’s going to be grilling Vic Mastro. I want to see what our famous cop has to say.”

  “What time does it begin?”

  “Nine.”

  “Then there’s plenty of time. Stop looking at your watch every half minute.”

  Around the house a frigid gale shook the windows. A wood fire burned on the hearth. Chisum measured out cognac and passed the goblets around; then he led the way into his parlor and seated Irene in an easy chair facing the television set. It was an antique console, a bulky block of walnut with a small screen set into it and a pair of tarnished rabbit ears perched on top.

  Irene made a gesture toward Paul, lifting her glass an inch; he warmed to her private signals—he nodded and smiled before he tasted the brandy.

  Chisum eased himself slowly into a wooden rocker. “How many did you have to turn loose this week?”

  She was very dry: “It was a short week. We only inflicted half the usual dose on the public.”

  “Something’s got your dander up, my dear.”

  “Gehler sentenced one of my prosecutions to a six-months suspended. The man’s got an incredible record—he’s been up the river as many times as an anxious salmon, and this was an open-and-shut burglary. Red handed. But Gehler let him off with an SS.”

  “It’s one of the things we’ve got to do, isn’t it?” Chisum said. “Take the discretionary power to set sentences out of the hands of the judges. It’s no good having one judge who regards robberies by poor people as legitimate readjustments of economic inequities, while another judge treats every crime as a grave threat to the stability of the society. To the one, any sentence is too heavy; to the other, most sentences are too light. How can we expect anything like ‘equal justice for all’ under those circumstances?”

  The fire made a good smell. Paul relaxed on the leather couch: it was old leather, deep red gone almost black, the crow’s-feet of age creased into it. An office couch—likely it had come out of the professor’s law office when he’d retired. Chisum had run a vigorous criminal practice, he’d learned, before turning to writing and teaching. He’d been a prominent defense attorney for several years. Paul had been keenly surprised by that revelation. Now Chisum glanced at him and resumed the subject:

  “You’re still baffled, aren’t you.”

  “I confess I am. You don’t make noises like a civil libertarian.”

  “I’m not. I believe in discipline. It’s the mortar that holds society together. Without discipline there’s chaos.” He smiled gently at Irene. “There was a time when this young lady thought me a fascist.”

  Paul said, “How do you reconcile that with your record as a criminal lawyer?”

  “Easily. I believe that for all its grievous faults, there’s no better juridical system than the adversary process where both sides are allowed to present their cases with the greatest vigor. There are dangers in it—chiefly the danger that the better of the two lawyers may win the case regardless of its justice—but in spite of those risks, I don’t know of any system in all history that’s proved better. If a fact is in dispute, you can only arrive at the truth by a vigorous examination of both sides of the story. That’s w
hat our system was designed to do, and when it works properly it’s a splendid example of human achievement.”

  “When it works properly,” Irene echoed, not without sarcasm.

  “Every case brought before a criminal court deserves an intense prosecution,” Chisum said. “But it also deserves the best possible defense. Defense attorneys, after all, are officers of the court, the same as prosecutors and judges. They’re all components of one system, and the purpose of that system is to arrive at the truth of each case. If you don’t have first-rate defense lawyers you may as well not have a trial at all.”

  “Forgive me if I’m impertinent,” Paul said, “but that sounds to me a lot like the kind of rationalization you hear from big-time shysters when they try to explain away the fact that they’re on some mobster’s payroll.”

  “The argument’s a valid one, no matter who uses it in his own defense,” Chisum said. “It breaks down, of course, in cases where the mobster’s lawyer is himself a member of the mob and a party to its illegal acts. That kind of syndicate mouthpiece is common enough, I’m afraid, but his existence shouldn’t be used to try and discredit the whole fraternity.”

  The old man began to move back and forth in the rocker. “Adversary law is workable, we’ve proved that. The trouble today is that it doesn’t apply in too many cases. The system to which we lawyers pledge our allegiance has become a shabby fiction. Most cases are decided by plea-bargaining, not by any genuine attempt to arrive at the truth. The guilty benefit while the innocent suffer, because a man who’s truly innocent is less likely to be willing to plead guilty to a reduced charge, while a guilty man is eager to do so. No, the problem we have in our courts isn’t the influence of defense lawyers. It’s the wholesale breakdown of the adversary system. What we need is a restoration of the adversary process, not a further erosion of it.”

  “That means an enormous expansion of the system,” Paul said. “You’d have to quadruple the number of courts and judges just to begin carrying the load. I’d like to see it happen, but who’s going to pay for it?”