A Matter of Conviction

by Ed McBain

  “It’s just another murder, Ephraim. We prosecute hundreds of murder cases each—”

  “It’s not just another murder, and don’t you think that for a minute. It’s damn important. I want you to prosecute it, and the Boss wants you to prosecute it, and I’m not going to reassign it unless you can give me a better reason than you’ve given me so far.”

  “All right,” Hank said, sighing. “I know the mother of one of the boys. Di Pace.”

  “She’s a friend of yours?”

  “No, not exactly. I knew her when I was a kid—before I went into the Army.”

  “How well did you know her?”

  “We were going steady, Ephraim.”

  “Mmm. I see,” Holmes said.

  “I asked her to wait for me when I went away. I got a Dear John while I was overseas. I never saw her again until this morning.”

  “This all happened how long ago?”

  “About fifteen years, I guess.”

  “That’s a long time ago, Hank.”

  “Yes, but the defense might use it, and it might weaken our case.”

  “I don’t see how.”

  “Suppose they put Mary on the stand? Suppose she claims she jilted me in 1943 and that petty revenge is the People’s motive in pushing for the death penalty?”

  “How well did you know her, Hank?”

  “I told you. We were—”

  “Did you go to bed with her?”

  “No. Nothing like that.”

  “Might she perjure herself along those lines?”

  “To save her son? She might do or say anything.”

  “I still don’t think it’ll hurt us. Either way.”

  “I wish I could agree with you.”

  “Let me explain this case a little, Hank. You said it was just another murder, and I told you it wasn’t. Would you like to know why?”

  “Yes, I would.”

  “Okay. To begin with, this whole damn juvenile-delinquency thing is giving the city a fat pain in the foot. Everybody’s screaming about it, the cops, the schools, the judges, the press, the grand juries, the whole town’s suddenly full of experts who’ve just discovered that two per cent or more of the nation’s kids wind up before the courts each year. And do you know what they’re all screaming? ‘Let’s get tough! Expel the troublemakers from the schools! Fine the parents! Impose curfews! Give them stiff jail sentences! Stop the murderers! Show them we mean business!’

  “God knows, they all mean business and they’re all in the same business, but they’re like a bunch of corporation vice-presidents who can’t seem to decide on the best way to sell their line. Maybe they’ll never decide, but that’s not our problem. I’m only telling you this to illustrate the first pressure being put on this office. We’re being urged in a thousand and one indirect ways to use these killers as examples. We’re being pressured to send them to the electric chair so that others will take heed of the terrible sword of justice.”

  “Ephraim, this office has never buckled under to—”

  “That’s number one, Hank, and only the beginning, and I think you’ll see in a minute why this is an important case requiring the best legal mind on our staff. Number two is the tolerance groups. Now, the kid who was killed was Puerto Rican. The Puerto Rican people in this city are probably the most oppressed people in the world, the new scapegoats, the new whipping posts for a neurotic society. Whenever a Puerto Rican commits a crime, the newspapers have a field day, playing on an undeniably existing prejudice to form a ready-made villain. I don’t want to go into the psychological relation of crime to minority groups. I just want to say this. This time, the victim is a Puerto Rican. And the tolerance groups have all piled on the band wagon demanding equal justice—and reasonably, I feel—for the dead Rafael Morrez. In short, we’re not only being asked to get tough, we’re being asked to get tough indiscriminately, to show that we’ll take no nonsense from any killer, white, black, brown or tan. We’re being asked to show that justice is not only terrible, it is also fair.”

  “I see what you’re driving at,” Hank said. “I still think any other person on the staff—”

  “And lastly, there is what the sob sisters would call the human-interest angle. We’re prosecuting this case in the interests of the people of this county. And do you know what the people see? The people see three strapping killers striding into a quiet street and stabbing to death a blind boy. A blind boy, Hank! Don’t you see the outrage here? Don’t you see the affront to decency? How can the streets be safe for anyone if a blind person, protected and sheltered by the unwritten laws of humanity ever since the beginning of time, can be brutally attacked and killed?”

  “I see,” Hank said.

  “Do you? Then you must also see that it’s essential for this office to prosecute this case with all the talent and energy it can muster. You’re our boy, Hank, and we’re going for the death penalty.”

  “I still think—”

  “No. Your request is officially refused. For God’s sake, Hank, a lot more than three boys is going on trial here. This office is going on trial.” Holmes paused. “And,” he said, “if you want to look at it in another light, maybe the whole damn city is going on trial.”

  He stood on the deck of the ferry, and on his right he could see the high span, beautiful in its ugliness, of the Queensboro Bridge. Dead ahead, squatting on the water like a giant half-submerged whale, was Welfare Island. In the Youth House Annex there, a fifteen-year-old boy named Danny Di Pace was being held, awaiting trial for murder. They had not taken him to the Twelfth Street building because too many escapes, legend held, were successfully executed there.

  A cool breeze blew off the East River, caressing the back of his neck, dissipating the dull heat of midsummer. Far off in the distance, pristine and cool, a delicate tracery against the shrieking raw blue of the sky, was the Triboro Bridge. He could remember when the bridge was being built. He could remember walking in the excavation site on 125th Street, a fourteen-year-old boy picking his way among the cinder block and concrete, the steel supporting rods, the freshly turned earth. The summer of 1934, and a young boy who visualized the bridge as a gateway to the treasures of the world. If you could cross that bridge, he had thought, you could get out of Harlem. There was purpose to the bridge, and meaning, and he had decided on that day, with the bulldozers and the steam shovels noisily pushing the land around him, that one day he would leave Harlem—and he would never return.

  He did not know whether or not he hated the neighborhood.

  But he had recognized with the clear vision of the very young that there were better things to be had from life. And he meant to have them.

  One of those better things, he thought later, was Mary O’Brien.

  He did not meet her until he was seventeen. Born into an Italian family, possessing a grandfather who—even on the brink of war with the Axis powers—proclaimed Italy as the cultural leader of the world and touted Mussolini as the savior of the Italian people, Hank had found it difficult at first to believe that he could fall in love with an Irish girl. Hadn’t he been told repeatedly by members of his family that the Irish were all drunkards? Hadn’t he been told by brothers of his street fraternity that all Irish girls were fast girls? Hadn’t most of the street fights taken place between the Italians and the Irish? How then could he possibly fall in love with a girl who was as Irish as her red hair?

  She was fifteen when he met her. She didn’t wear lipstick then. He dated her on and off for a year before she allowed him to kiss her. Her mouth was a wondrous thing. He had kissed girls before, but he had never known the sweetness of a woman’s mouth until the day he kissed Mary O’Brien. And from that day on, he loved her.

  His grandfather took a dim view of the situation.

  “Why,” he asked in Italian, “must you go out with an Irish girl?”

  And Hank had answered, “Because I love her, Grandpa,” and there was the ring of youthful authority in his voice. Loving her, he discovered her
. And discovering her, he loved her more, until she became a part of his plans. When he left Harlem, Mary O’Brien would accompany him. He would carry her away, her red hair streaming over his shoulder, her rich laugh floating on the wind.

  In 1941, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. Hank, who was twenty-one at the time and in his senior year at N.Y.U., was called up almost instantly. They gave him a party at his grandfather’s house. And while the others ate lasagna—his mother’s specialty—and drank good red wine, his grandfather took him aside and put his tailor’s hands on Hank’s shoulders and said, in hesitant English, “You go to fly aeroplani?”

  “Yes, Grandpa,” he said.

  The old man nodded. At sixty-eight, he possessed a head of snow-white hair. His eyes were brown behind thick spectacles, the natural accouterments of a tailor who studied his stitches with meticulous care.

  “You will bomb Italy?” he asked, and there was sadness in his eyes.

  “If I have to,” Hank answered honestly.

  The old man nodded again, and his eyes held Hank’s, and he said, “Will they shoot at you, Enrico?”

  “Yes.”

  His hands tightened on Hank’s shoulders. With great difficulty he said, “Then you will shoot back.” He nodded. “You will shoot back,” he continued, nodding. He lifted his glasses and brushed at his eyes. “Caro mio,” he said gruffly, “take care of yourself. Come back safe.”

  He went to see Mary that night. She was nineteen years old now, a woman with the slender curves of a girl. They walked along the East River Drive with the lights of the three-year-old bridge spanning the dark waters uptown, and he kissed her and said, “Will you wait for me, Mary?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I’m young, Hank. You’ll be gone a long time. I don’t know.”

  “Wait for me, Mary. Wait for me.”

  None of them had waited for him. He received Mary’s letter the next year. His grandfather died six months later. They would not allow him to go home for the funeral. He’d always been sorry that the white-haired man with the weak eyes and the gentle hands had never met Karin. He knew intuitively that the pair would have formed their own axis, with none of the sinister qualities of Hitler’s and Mussolini’s.

  The ferry hit the dock pilings. The captain pulled her in smoothly and easily. The dock lowered to meet the deck of the boat, and then the guardrails were raised, and Hank disembarked and walked rapidly to the building where Danny Di Pace was being held.

  The man Hank spoke to was busy answering telephones all the while Hank was there. Three phones rested on his desk, and they rang in frightening succession, so that he barely managed to wedge his conversation between the jangling of the telephones.

  “You see how it is,” he said. “A rat race, an absolute rat race. We try to keep up with the boys and girls remanded to us by the Children’s Court, and it’s just like shoveling sand against the tide. It’s too much for us, Mr. Bell. It’s just too much. Do you know what we’d like to do here? Do you know what we could do if we had a staff?” He shook his head dolefully and then glanced abruptly at the phone, as if dreading a further interruption.

  “What do you do, exactly, Mr. Walsh?” Hank asked.

  “We try to find out what makes these kids tick. We dig. But how much digging can you do when you’re short of shovels?”

  “Have you ever had any members of either of these two gangs before, Mr. Walsh?”

  “Yes.”

  “And what happened?”

  “We ran our tests. We always try to find out what it is about a boy’s mentality or his emotional make-up that—”

  “Try?” Hank asked.

  “Yes, try. We don’t always succeed. For God’s sake, Mr. Bell, we’re swamped with—”

  The telephone rang. Walsh lifted the receiver.

  “Hello,” he said. “Yes, this is Mr. Walsh. Who? Oh, hello, how are you?” He paused. “Yes, I have a report on him. Just a minute.” He covered the mouthpiece. “Will you excuse me, Mr. Bell? This won’t take long.” He opened a folder on his desk and began speaking into the phone again. “Hello? Yes, we’ve confirmed that. The father is an alcoholic. No, there’s no question, the report is right here on my—Yes. All right, thank you for calling.” He hung up and then sighed deeply. “Deviant homes. We get more damn kids from deviant homes than I can count on—”

  “What do you mean?” Hank asked.

  “Well, surely you’re aware of all the research that’s been done,” Walsh said, glancing at Hank in surprise.

  “No, I’m afraid I’m not.”

  “There’s so much, I hardly know where to begin,” Walsh said, the surprise still on his face. “The Gluecks, for example. Their prediction table was based on four principal factors—discipline by the father, supervision by the mother, affection by both parents for the child, and cohesiveness of the family group. It was computed that, if these factors were unfavorable, the possibilities for delinquency were ninety-eight point one out of a hundred. Now, that’s pretty damned high, don’t you think?”

  “If the research were accurate, yes.”

  “There’s no reason to believe it wasn’t,” Walsh said. “It certainly comes as no surprise to anyone working in the field that deviant homes produce the vast majority of our delinquents.”

  “I still don’t know what you mean by deviant homes.”

  “Broken homes, immoral homes, criminal homes, homes where there’s a cultural conflict—such as is evident in the homes of some Puerto Rican gang members. We’ve had many such cases here.”

  “Have you had Danny Di Pace here before?”

  “No. But Reardon was with us for a while.”

  “And what happened?”

  “What did we discover about him, do you mean? He seemed to us to be an extremely aggressive boy, with a mother who’s overly permissive and a father who’s overly strict. He’s what we term an ‘acting-out neurotic.’”

  “I’m afraid you’re going a little beyond me, Mr. Walsh.”

  “I’m simply saying that his delinquent behavior seems to be compounded out of strong resentment to his repressive father and the desire to evoke some emotional response from his mother, whose permissiveness he distrusts.”

  “I see,” Hank said, not seeing at all. “Why was Reardon here?”

  “Oh, some street trouble. I don’t remember now what it was. This was several years back, you understand.”

  “What was the final outcome?”

  “What was the court disposition, do you mean?”

  “Yes.”

  “He was released on probation.”

  “Even though your study showed him to be—well, potentially dangerous?”

  “We’re lucky we were even able to make a study, Mr. Bell. We’re operating with one case worker for every seventy-five boys. That’s spreading it pretty damn thin, don’t you think?”

  “Yes, I would say so. What happened while Reardon was on probation?”

  “Well, the probation officers are pretty much in the same boat we’re in. Each of them is handling a case load similar to our own. This doesn’t leave time for very much individual attention to a boy’s problems. What happens is that a good percentage of boys on probation get into trouble all over again.”

  “Like Reardon?”

  “Yes, if you wish to use him as an example. He’s only one of hundreds, though.” Walsh paused. “We could do such a job, Mr. Bell, if we had the money and the staff. Such a job.”

  Hank nodded. “Don’t you feel, though, that you’re simplifying things somewhat? I mean, by hiding behind all this psychological—”

  “Hiding?”

  “Perhaps that’s not the word I wanted. But do you feel that delinquency can be reduced to such simple psychological equations?”

  “Of course not. There is practically no such animal as a pure delinquent type. The acting-out neurotic, the wayward egocentric boy, even the passive or socialized delinquent—the one who’ll succumb to the pressures of his environment o
r his group while not truly being a disturbed personality—are hardly ever encountered in a pure state. And we certainly can’t discount the influence of environment, or a poor school situation, or even the unenlightenment of many police officials, as contributing factors to delinquency. But this is not psychological gobbledygook, Mr. Bell. I hope you didn’t mean to imply that.”

  “These boys, Mr. Walsh, killed another boy.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “Would you excuse their act by telling me their parents have personality disorders?”

  “Would I excuse the act of murder?” Walsh asked.

  “Yes.”

  “It is your job to decide the law, Mr. Bell, not mine. I am dealing with people, not torts.”

  Hank nodded. “May I see the Di Pace boy now, please?”

  “Certainly,” Walsh said. As he rose, the phone rang again. “Damnit,” he said. “Betty, would you answer that, please? This way, Mr. Bell.”

  The boy had his mother’s red hair and brown eyes, the same oval face, the same mouth, which looked curiously feminine on a boy turning into a man. He was a tall boy, muscularly loose, with the huge hands that identified the street brawler.

  “If you’re a cop,” he said, “I don’t want to talk to you.”

  “I’m the district attorney,” Hank said, “and you’d better talk to me. I’m prosecuting this case.”

  “All the more reason I got nothing to say. You think I’m gonna help you send me to the electric chair?”

  “I want to know what happened on the night Morrez was killed.”

  “Yeah? So go ask Morrez. Maybe he’ll tell you. I don’t have to tell you nothing. Go talk to the big-shot lawyers the court appointed. I got four of them all to myself. Go talk to them.”

  “I’ve already talked to them, and they had no objections to my questioning you and the other boys. I guess you know you’re in serious trouble. Your lawyers have told you that.”

  “I’ll go to Children’s Court.”

  “No you won’t, Danny. You’ll be tried with the other boys in General Sessions, Part Three.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yes. The case will be tried in this county next month. You’ll get a fair trial, but nobody’s going to try to coddle you. You killed a boy, Danny.”