A Matter of Conviction

by Ed McBain

  Before the rain, a murder would be committed.

  The street was long.

  It ran clear across the island of Manhattan, starting at the East River, running westward with the precision of a shishkebob skewer. Hanging on that skewer, one modulating into the other so that all geographical boundaries were lost in the polytypic overlap, were Italians, Puerto Ricans and Negroes. It was a long, long street, piercing the island at its heart, rushing with geometric inevitability toward the rain clouds banked over the Hudson River.

  The three came down the street.

  The word had gone around that afternoon, passed from lip to lip, mouth to mouth, “The stuff is on, the stuff is on,” and now they came down the street, three tall boys walking rapidly and without fear as they passed el-liberated Third Avenue, and then Lexington Avenue, walking more cautiously as they approached Park, cutting through one of the arches supporting the overhead New York Central tracks and then bursting into the mouth of the street like alien hand-grenade explosions. Their combat boots hit the pavement in regulated chaos, their fists were bunched, there was in each a high-riding excitement which threatened to blow off the tops of their skulls and dissipate their generated anger. The tallest of the three pulled a knife, and the blade glittered in the paling light, and then there were three knives, the silent performers in a vaudeville pantomime, and a young girl shouted in Spanish, “Mira! Cuidado!” and one of the boys yelled, “Shut up, you spic whore!” and a boy sitting on one of the stoops turned his head toward the sound of unaccented English and then suddenly rose.

  “There’s one of them!” a voice said, and another voice yelled, “Get him!”

  The boy lifted a blank face. A blade flashed, penetrated, flesh ripped in silent protest as the knife gashed upward from the gut. And now the other knives descended, tearing and slashing until the boy fell like an assassin-surrounded Caesar, crumpling to the pavement. The knives withdrew. Blood spattered like early rain to the sidewalk. From the opposite end of the street four boys began running toward the intruders.

  “Go, go!” a voice shouted, and the three ran, crossing under the railroad tracks on Park Avenue, running, running, and suddenly it was raining.

  The rain drummed relentlessly on the figure balled against the stone of the stoop, diluting the rich red blood that ran from his open belly, washing the blood into the gutter that traversed the long street.

  The boy was dead even before the squad car picked up his attackers not four city blocks away.

  Detective Lieutenant Richard Gunnison was a tall thin man with stringy blond hair and slate-gray eyes. He had suffered a bad case of acne as a youth, with the result that his face was now pitted with holes of various minuscule sizes. His complexion made it difficult for him to shave without cutting himself, and the various healing slashes on his chin and cheeks gave him the appearance of an undernourished German who’d been on the losing end of a duel.

  The lieutenant was in charge of the Twenty-seventh Detective Squad of the Harlem precinct through which the long street ran. His jurisdiction actually ended on Fifth Avenue—ended, to be more exact, at the white line which ran up the middle of Fifth Avenue through Spanish Harlem. The lieutenant had eighteen men on his squad, and he was fond of calling Harlem “the sinkhole of corruption,” a phrase he had heard somewhere and which he’d used since with all the battering power of a non sequitur. The lieutenant was not a very learned man. He had picked up Crime and Punishment once because he thought it might give him an insight into his job, and then had laid it down after a week of laborious and tortured reading with the renewed certainty that nobody—but nobody—could tell him anything he didn’t already know about crime and punishment. The best teacher any man could ever have was Harlem itself, and Gunnison had been working in Harlem for twenty-four years. He knew everything there was to know about this sinkhole of corruption; he had seen it all and smelled it all and touched it all.

  The three boys who stood before him now in the squad room were no different—no better, no worse—than the hundreds of criminals he had seen in his twenty-four years of service. Youth was not, to Lieutenant Gunnison, an argument for leniency. A punk was a punk—and a young punk was only an old punk with less experience. Standing before the three boys, his powerful hands on his hips, the butt of a .38 police special protruding from the shoulder holster strapped to his chest, Gunnison was only annoyed because he’d been dragged back to the squad room from his home and his after-dinner newspaper. The boys had been brought into the station house by the arresting officer, who had stopped at the desk only long enough to record the boys’ names with the desk lieutenant and then proceeded upstairs to the Detective Division and the squad room, which ran the length of the building’s upper story. He had informed Detective First Grade Michael Larsen that a homicide had been committed, and Larsen—the official catcher on the three-man detective team which was handling the squad room on the 6 P.M. to 8 A.M. shift—had immediately called the lieutenant at home before calling the district attorney’s office.

  The assistant district attorney—a young blond man who looked as if he were fresh out of N.Y.U. Law—was already there when Gunnison arrived. He had, since the case was a homicide, taken the precaution of bringing along a stenographer from the D.A.’s Homicide Bureau. The stenographer, a balding man in his early forties, sat in a straight-backed chair and stared with boredom at the steady rain which streaked the grilled windows of the squad room. Gunnison had a short whispered consultation with Larsen, and then he walked to the boys.

  “All right,” he said, looking at the slip of paper in his hand. “Which one of you is Danny Di Pace?”

  The boys hesitated. Behind them, the rain oozed monotonously against the glass panes. Night had come in earnest, following instantly on the spikes of the rain. Neon smeared its color splash against the windows; the squad room was curiously silent except for the whisper of raindrops against the asphalt outside.

  “You hear me?” Gunnison said.

  The boys did not speak. The tallest of the three, a powerfully built youth with dark-brown eyes, stood between the other two, presenting—because of his size—the natural apex of the triangle. The lieutenant took a step closer to him.

  “You Danny Di Pace?”

  “No.”

  “Then who are you?”

  “My name is Arthur Reardon,” the boy said.

  “How old are you, Arthur?”

  “Seventeen.”

  The lieutenant nodded. He turned to the redheaded boy on Reardon’s left. “And you?”

  “I’m Di Pace.”

  “Why didn’t you say so when I asked you?”

  “I’m only fifteen,” Di Pace said. “I won’t be sixteen till September. You can’t hold me here. You can’t even question me. I’m a juvenile offender. I know my rights.”

  Gunnison nodded sourly to the assistant D.A. “We got a lawyer in our midst,” he said. “I got news for you, sonnyboy, and you better listen to it carefully. The upper age limit for a juvenile offender in New York State is sixteen years old.”

  “That’s what I said—”

  “Shut up and listen to me!” Gunnison snapped. “The New York code states that a delinquent is a child who violates any law or any municipal ordinance or who commits any act which, if committed by an adult, would be a serious crime, except—and get this, sonnyboy—except any child fifteen years of age who commits any act which, if committed by an adult, would be a crime punishable by death or life sentence. Now homicide, whether you know it or not—”

  “Excuse me, Lieutenant,” the assistant D.A. said firmly.

  “Yes?” Gunnison said. He turned to face the young man, his hands still on his hips.

  “I’ve no desire to interrupt your interrogation. But in all fairness, the boy hasn’t yet been charged with anything.”

  Gunnison was silent for a moment, weighing his years of police work against the young man’s inexperience, weighing too their comparative ranks. Calmly, he said, “A homicide was
committed.”

  “True. And the boy was brought in for questioning in connection with it. He hasn’t yet been booked as either a defendant or a material witness. Besides, you left out an important part of the penal code.”

  “Did I?” Gunnison said, and he hoped the sarcasm did not show too clearly in his voice.

  “Yes. You forgot to mention that a judge can make and file an order removing the action to the Children’s Court.”

  “The fact remains,” Gunnison said levelly, “that homicide is a crime punishable by death or life sentence, and I don’t expect any fifteen-year-old snot to go spouting law texts at me.” He glared at the assistant D.A. as if to make it clear he didn’t expect twenty-five-year-old snots to go spouting law at him either. The young man seemed unruffled.

  “May I talk to you privately for a moment, Lieutenant?” he asked.

  “Sure,” Gunnison said. His eyes held the hard flat glare of contained anger. Purposefully, he walked to one of the desks inside the slatted rail divider which separated the squad room from the corridor outside.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  The assistant D.A. extended his hand. “I don’t believe we’ve met before,” he said. “My name is Soames.”

  “Glad to know you,” Gunnison said by rote.

  “About procedure,” Soames said, “and I’m only anticipating later objections from whoever defends these boys. But you know as well as I that a fifteen-year-old kid isn’t supposed to be interrogated in a police station. All right, granted there’s no place specifically provided for this theoretic interrogation. But most police officers—”

  “Most police officers handle the interrogation in a separate part of the precinct so that the rule is at least given some sort of observance. I’m well aware of that, Mr. Soames. If you don’t mind my saying so, however, I just this minute discovered the kid was fifteen.”

  “I didn’t mean to imply—”

  “I’m sure you didn’t. But I’d like to find out how old the third boy is before I separate the adult killers from the baby killers. With your permission, of course.”

  “Go right ahead,” Soames said.

  “Thank you.”

  Gunnison walked back to the group of boys, stopping before the third one, a dark boy with black hair and brown eyes. Fright crouched behind the wide white of those eyes.

  “Your name?” he said.

  “Aposto,” the boy answered. “Anthony Aposto.”

  “How old are you, Anthony?”

  “Sixteen.”

  “Okay,” Gunnison said. He turned to Larsen. “Mike, talk to this Di Pace kid in the clerical office, will you? I’ll question the others here. And before we get the A.S.P.C.A. down on our ears, you’d better call Di Pace’s parents and tell them their little darling’s been arrested.”

  “Right,” Larsen said, and he led Di Pace from the room.

  “So now,” Gunnison said to the two remaining boys, “you killed somebody, huh?”

  The boys did not answer. The tall boy glanced sideward at Aposto.

  “Or didn’t you know he was dead?” Gunnison asked.

  Reardon, the tall one, said, “We just had a little scuffle, that’s all.”

  “With knives, huh?”

  “You didn’t find no knives on us,” Reardon said.

  “No, because you probably dumped them down a sewer or handed them to some pal on the street. We’ll find them, don’t worry. And even if we don’t, your clothes are all smeared with blood. How long were you planning this thing, Reardon?”

  “We didn’t plan anything,” Reardon said, and again he glanced at the dark, frightened Aposto.

  “No, huh?” Gunnison said. “You just happened to be walking down the street, and you saw this kid, and killed him, is that right?”

  “He started it,” Reardon said.

  “Oh? Is that right?”

  “Yeah,” Reardon said. “Ain’t that right, Batman? The spic started it, didn’t he?”

  “Sure,” Aposto said. “He started it, Lieutenant.”

  “Well, now, isn’t that interesting?” Gunnison said. “How did he start it? Let’s hear about it.”

  “We were walking down the street, like you said, the three of us. And he stopped us and started looking at us funny,” Reardon said.

  “He was wearing his bopping hat,” Aposto put in.

  “His what?” the D.A.’s stenographer asked, looking up from his notes.

  “His bopping hat,” Gunnison explained. “A high-crowned, narrow-brimmed fedora.” He turned back to the boys. “So he was wearing his bopping hat, and he stopped you, is that right?”

  “Yeah,” Reardon said.

  “And then what happened?”

  “He began giving us dirty looks,” Reardon said.

  “That’s right,” Aposto agreed, nodding.

  “And he started saying we had no right on his turf, like that. Then he pulled a blade.”

  “He did, huh?”

  “Yeah. And he come at us. So we had to protect ourselves, didn’t we? He woulda killed us otherwise. We had to protect ourselves, can’t you see that?”

  “From this kid who stopped you and gave you dirty looks and pulled a knife and came at you?” Gunnison said. “That’s who you had to protect yourselves from, right?”

  “Yeah, that’s right,” Reardon said.

  “Do you know who this kid was?”

  “Never saw him in my life. We were just out for a little stroll. What the hell, who expected to get japped?”

  “Get what?” the stenographer asked.

  “Japped,” Gunnison said. “Ambushed. This kid ambushed you, right?”

  “Sure. He stops us with a blade in his fist. Man, we didn’t want to get killed, so we fought back. Naturally, we fought back. Anybody would.”

  “And you killed him.”

  “I don’t know whether we killed him or not. But whatever happened, it was self-defense.”

  “Sure,” Gunnison said. “That’s easy to see.”

  “Sure,” Reardon agreed.

  “The boy’s name was Rafael Morrez, did you know that?”

  “No,” Reardon said.

  “No,” Aposto said.

  “You didn’t know him until you had the fight, right?”

  “Right.”

  “And he stopped you, and gave you dirty looks, and warned you about walking on his street, and pulled a knife and came at you, right? That’s your story, right?”

  “Right,” Reardon said.

  “And you didn’t know him until he stopped you tonight, is that also right?”

  “That’s right.”

  “That’s pretty obvious,” Gunnison said.

  “What do you mean?” Reardon asked.

  “Rafael Morrez was blind,” Gunnison said.

  They took three sets of fingerprints from each boy, one to be forwarded to the Federal Bureau of Investigation in Washington, another to be sent to the New York State Bureau of Criminal Investigation, and the third copy to be sent to the city’s own B.C.I. that night, so that fingerprint information would be ready and waiting at Centre Street before lineup the next day. They made out two arrest cards for each of the boys, and then they took them down to the desk in the precinct muster room and formally booked them.

  In the blotter, the desk lieutenant wrote down the names of the three boys, their addresses and the time of day. The desk lieutenant also entered the time of the accident, and the name of the detective assigned to the case, and the case number, and he wrote “arrested and charged with homicide in that the defendant did in concert with others apprehended and arrested herewith commit the crime aforesaid.”

  The record listed Detective Lieutenant Richard Gunnison and Assistant District Attorney Albert R. Soames as present at the time of the entry. The boys were searched and their property was confiscated, put in separate envelopes and listed in the record.

  The entries in the blotter all ended with the identical three words: “… and to cell.”
>
  On Friday afternoon of that week, the assistant district attorneys assigned to the Homicide Bureau met in the chief’s office. Leisurely, they reviewed for their colleagues the various cases they had handled that week. Albert Soames reviewed the Morrez homicide. The men then voted that they would ask the Indictments Bureau to prepare an indictment for first-degree murder.

  They did not seem to harbor any doubt that the grand jury would decide that a crime had been committed and that it was reasonable to assume the defendants had committed it.

  The man assigned to the prosecution of the case was Henry Bell.

  THREE

  Monday was starting wrong.

  Or, he supposed, perhaps Sunday night had ended wrong. In any case, and in whatever sequence, this was going to be one of those days which—unless something positive were done about it immediately—would rapidly succumb to the battering combination of error and circumstance. Sitting behind the desk in his small office, the sheaf of transcripts finally, finally, finally before him, Hank tried to reconstruct the events which, like elements of a sorcerer’s evil brew, had united to overboil in chaos.

  The first of these elements had been the party last night at the Bentons’. Sunday night was no damn good for parties anyway, since all of the men drank too much in an effort to obliterate what was coming on the morrow, and all the women tried too desperately to maintain a weekend glamour which would instantly evaporate at the first ring of the Monday morning alarm. Add to this particular Sunday night party the fact that Charlie Cooke had got really drunk, absolutely stoned beyond the reaches of civilized inebriation, stinko, blotto, blind drunk, and that Alice Benton had begun wailing about a legendary beating her husband had administered to her some eight years ago, which memory had apparently been evoked by Charlie’s supine position in the middle of the living room, and the pall of the usual Sunday night get-togethers assumed titanic proportions which drove every guest (except the unconscious Charlie Cooke) home long before midnight.

  Back in their own house, Hank and Karin had discussed the party over a nightcap. The more they talked about it, the more horrible it seemed until finally, in an attempt to blot out the events of the evening, they’d gone to bed and sought the cleansing solace of love-making. This, as it turned out, was another mistake. Neither of them was in a particularly loving frame of mind, and the harder they drove themselves toward a passion they did not feel, the sharper became the memory of the very real images they were trying to eradicate. Whatever pleasure they derived from their forced mating that night was instantly counteracted by the knowledge that it had been a truly loveless act designed to soften the impact of an evening spent with people who seemed totally devoid of love. They had fought lovelessness with more lovelessness, however mechanically precise, enjoyable only in its precision, but totally unsatisfactory otherwise. Exhausted, beginning to feel the flat aftermath of their hard drinking and their coldly manic intercourse, they had drifted off into restless, dissatisfied sleep.