by Ed McBain
“Yeah? That’s what you got to prove, mister. I’m innocent until I’m proved guilty.”
“That’s true. Now suppose you tell me what happened on the night of July tenth?”
“I told the story a hundred times already. We were out for a stroll. The spic jumped us, so we stabbed him. It was self-defense.”
“The boy you stabbed was blind. You surely must realize that no jury is going to believe he jumped you.”
“I don’t care what they believe. That’s what happened. You can ask Batman and Tower. They’ll tell you the same thing.”
“Who’s Batman?”
“Aposto. That’s what they call him.”
“Who calls him that?”
“The guys on the club he belongs to.”
“What gang is that?”
“You know all this already. Who the hell are you trying to con?”
“I’m asking you anyway,” Hank said. “What’s the name of the gang?”
“The Thunderbirds.” Danny paused. “And it ain’t a gang. It’s a club.”
“I see. And what differentiates a gang from a club?”
“The Thunderbirds never go around looking for no trouble.”
“Then what were you doing in Spanish Harlem on the night of July tenth if not looking for trouble?”
“We were out for a stroll.”
“You and Tower—who I suppose is Reardon—and Batman. Is that correct?”
“That’s correct,” Danny said.
“Why do you call him Tower?”
“I don’t know. I guess because he’s a tall guy. Also, he’s very strong. Tower kind of rhymes with power.”
“What do they call you?”
“Danny.”
“No nickname?”
“What do I need a nickname for? Anyway, Danny is a nickname. My real name is Daniel.”
“Why’d you join the gang, Danny?”
“I don’t belong to no gang.”
“The club then.”
“I don’t belong to no club.”
“Then what were you doing with two members of the Thunderbirds on the night of July tenth?”
“They asked me would I like to go for a stroll, so I said yes. So I went. There ain’t no law against that.”
“There’s a law against murder.”
“Yeah, but this was self-defense.”
“Danny, that’s sheer nonsense and you know it. The boy was blind!”
“So what?”
“So I’m telling you this. If you stick to this story, I can guarantee one thing. I can absolutely guarantee that you’ll end up in the electric chair.”
Danny was quiet for a moment. Then he said, “That’s what you want, ain’t it?”
“I want the truth.”
“You got the truth. Tower and Batman and me were out for a stroll. The lousy spic jumped us and we knifed him. That’s the truth.”
“Did you stab Morrez?”
“Sure, I stabbed him. The lousy spic jumped us. I stabbed him four times.”
“Why?”
“I wanted to stab him. What’s the matter, you think I’m afraid of stabbing somebody? I’d stab anybody got wise with me.”
“A blind boy?”
“Oh, lay off the blind-boy jazz, willya? He jumped us.”
“How could he jump you when he couldn’t even see you?”
“Ask him. Maybe he heard us. Maybe he wasn’t really blind. Maybe he was only faking like he was blind so—”
“Danny, Danny.”
“How the hell do I know why he jumped us? But he did, all right. So we give it to him. One thing about the Thunderbirds, they got heart. They don’t go looking for no trouble, but if it comes, they don’t turkey out, either.”
“All right, Danny. The three of you made up a story, and maybe it was a good story. But it doesn’t work in the light of the facts, and I should think you’d be smart enough to change the story now that you know the facts. This way, you haven’t got a prayer.”
“I’m telling you exactly what happened. You want me to lie?”
“What are you afraid of, Danny? Who are you afraid of?”
“I ain’t afraid of nothing or nobody on the face of the earth. And don’t you forget that neither. And I’ll tell you something else. You may think I’m going to the chair, but you got it all wrong. ’Cause I ain’t. And if I was you, I’d watch my step, mister. I just wouldn’t go walking around no dark streets at night.”
“Are you threatening me, Danny?”
“I’m just advising you.”
“Do you think I’m afraid of a bunch of teen-age hoodlums?”
“I don’t know what you’re afraid of or what you ain’t. All I know is I personally wouldn’t want to tackle fifty guys who are out to burn.”
“The Thunderbirds, do you mean?”
“I ain’t mentioning no names. Just watch your step, mister.”
“Thanks for the warning,” Hank said dryly.
“Because just between the two of us,” Danny said, “you don’t look to me like you could handle a skinny dame, no less fifty guys.”
“You’ve got quite a talent, Danny,” Hank said.
“Yeah? What’s that?”
“I came here because your mother told me—”
“My mother? What’re you dragging her in this for? Why’d you send for her?”
“I didn’t. She came to see me. She told me you didn’t belong to the Thunderbirds, and that you’d had nothing to do with the stabbing. When I explained this to your lawyers, they agreed I might see you. So I came. And now I’m convinced more than ever that you did belong to the gang and that you killed that boy cold-bloodedly and with premeditation. That’s your talent, Danny. It should work well with a jury.”
“I didn’t kill him cold-bloodedly or nothing. I stabbed him in self-defense, and I wasn’t trying to kill him. I was only trying to stop him from hurting me.”
“He was blind!” Hank said angrily.
“I don’t know what he was, and I don’t care. All I know is he got off that stoop like a madman, and he had a knife in his hands, and when he come at us—”
“You’re lying!”
“I ain’t lying. He had a knife. I saw it. For God’s sake, I saw it! You think I wanted to get cut? So when Tower and Batman went at him, I went at him, too. I ain’t turkey, mister. When there’s trouble, I got heart.”
“It certainly takes a lot of heart to attack a boy who can’t see.”
“You don’t have to see to be able to stab somebody. There’s guys been stabbed on the blackest night. All you got to do is feel, and stick the blade. What the hell do you know? You lousy pansy, you was probably born on a big estate in—”
“Shut up, Danny!”
“Don’t tell me to shut up. You’re lucky my lawyers are even letting you talk to me. Nobody sent for you, you come of your own free will. Okay, you’re here and this is what I got to say. I say we were walking down that street, and that spic got up off the stoop like a crazy man and come at us with a blade in his fist. We stabbed him because it was either us or him. If he died, that’s tough. He shouldn’t of got wise.”
Hank rose. “Okay, Danny. That’s your story. I wish you luck.”
“And keep away from my mother, mister,” Danny said. “Just keep away from her. You hear me?”
“I hear you.”
“Then you better do it.”
“There’s only one thing I’m going to do, Danny. I’m going to send you and your friends to the electric chair for the murder of an innocent boy.”
The note was waiting for him back at the office. It was addressed to MISTER DISTRICT ATTORNEY HENRY BELL. The letters were scrawled across the face of the envelope in ink. He tore open the flap and pulled out the single sheet of notepaper. In the same hand were written the words:
IF THE THUNDERBIRDS DIE,
YOU DIE NEXT
FOUR
He went back to the street the next morning and realized in an instant th
at the image of Harlem as he knew it was no longer valid.
Standing on the corner of 120th Street and First Avenue, he looked westward and tried to visualize himself as a boy and found that geography had passed the dagger of befuddlement to time, and that both had conspired to stab memory.
On the north side of the street, spreading from Second Avenue where the grocery store used to be, where he’d flipped picture cards on hot summer days, spreading from there almost halfway down the block was an open lot, leveled by the bulldozers for a new housing project. The house in which he’d been born and raised—his Aunt Serrie had served as midwife during the delivery—still stood in the center of the block on the south side of the street, but the candy store that had been alongside it was boarded up and demolition had already begun on the houses across the way from it.
“This isn’t where the kids come from,” Detective First Grade Michael Larsen said. “It’s a few blocks over, sir.”
“I know,” Hank answered.
He looked up the street again, feeling change as a sentient thing, wondering if change were truly synonymous with progress. For if the geography of Harlem had changed, if the architecture of the city had imposed upon the gridwork of streets a new pattern of sterile red brick, the model caves of the Miltown Men, the people of Harlem had changed, too. His earlier concept of the three Harlems was one of clear territorial division: Italian, Spanish and Negro. In his mind, he had almost erected the border inspection posts. He recognized now that there was no true border separating the three. Harlem was Harlem. The streets of Italian Harlem were dotted with the tan and white faces of Puerto Ricans, the deeper brown of Negroes. In Harlem could be read the entire immigration pattern of New York City: the Irish and the Italians being the first to succumb to the slow steadiness of integration; the Negroes—later arrivals—melting imperceptibly into the pot of white Protestant respectability; the Puerto Ricans entering last, reaching desperately across a cultural and lingual barrier for the extended hand of acceptance. The hand, they discovered, held an open switch blade.
He wondered what the city had learned, if anything. He knew there were studies, countless studies of housing conditions and traffic problems and schools and recreation centers and occupational opportunities, scores of studies compiled by learned men who knew all about immigration. And yet, projecting the city into the not too distant future, twenty years, twenty-five years, he could visualize it as a giant wheel. The hub of that wheel would be the midtown area where the Idea Men worked, grinding out communications for the entire nation, Eat Crunchies, Wash With Wadley’s, Smoke Saharas, shaping the taste and the thought of the country with their words. And surrounding the camp of the Idea Men would be the nomadic tribes, fighting among themselves for the unproductive earth of the city streets, roaming, shifting, still searching for that welcoming hand of acceptance. A huge loudspeaker would be set atop the Empire State Building in the heart of the hub owned by the Idea Men. And every hour on the hour, the loud-speaker would bleat out a single word which would ring loud and clear on the air of the city, crossing into the territories ruled by the barbarian tribes roaming the fringes of the hub.
And that word would be “Tolerance!”
And Rafael Morrez, swimming in a sea of words, drowned because words don’t float.
“Are you familiar at all with Harlem, sir?” Larsen said.
“I was born here,” Hank answered. “On this street.”
“Oh? Yeah?” Larsen looked at him curiously. “Well, it’s changed a lot since then, I guess.”
“Yes. It has.”
“You know,” Larsen said, “we could’ve brought this girl to your office. You didn’t have to come to Harlem.”
“I wanted to come.”
Walking with the detective who’d caught the initial squeal, he wondered now why he’d wanted to come. Perhaps it was the note, he thought. Perhaps the note challenged my bravery and my manhood. Or perhaps I wanted to see what it was about Harlem that could alternately produce a district attorney and three young killers.
“This is the block,” Larsen said. “The three of them lived right here. And the Puerto Rican kid lived on this same street, only farther west. Great, huh?”
Hank looked up the street. The asphalt had grown gummy in the heat of morning. In the middle of the block, a group of boys had turned on the fire hydrant, and they ran through the stream of water in their clothes, tee shirts sticking wetly to their bodies. The water plunged upward, deflected by a tin can wired to the nozzle of the pump, cascading downward in a waterfall that was costing the city money. Farther up the block, a stickball game was in progress. The garbage cans were stacked alongside the curb, awaiting the D.S.C. pickup trucks. Women in housedresses sat on the front stoops, fanning themselves. Outside the candy store, a group of teen-age boys stood talking.
“If you’re wondering what Thunderbirds look like in their leisure time, you’re looking at them now,” Larsen said.
The boys looked entirely harmless. Sitting on the wooden newsstand outside the store, they chatted and laughed quietly among themselves.
“The girl lives in that building alongside the candy store,” Larsen said. “I phoned before I left the squad, so she knows we’re coming. Don’t mind the dirty looks on the faces of the yardbirds. They know I’m a bull. I’ve kicked their asses around the corner more times than I can count.”
The boys’ conversation tapered off and then stopped as Hank and Larsen approached. Tight-lipped, inscrutable, they studied the pair as they entered the tenement. The entrance hallway was dark and narrow. A stench hit the nostrils immediately, the stench of bodies and of body waste, the stench of cooking, the stench of sleeping and waking, the stench of life contained, confined.
“I don’t know how the hell people manage to live here,” Larsen said. “Some of them make good salaries, too, would you believe it? You’d think they’d get out. This ain’t good for people. You live like a pig, you begin to feel like a pig. She’s on the third floor.”
They climbed the narrow steps. He could remember climbing similar steps when he was a boy. The façade of Harlem might have changed, but the guts were the same. Even the stench was familiar. As a boy, he had urinated behind the first-floor staircase, adding to the stench. You live like a pig, you begin to feel like a pig.
“This is it,” Larsen said, stopping before an apartment marked 3B. “Both parents work, so the kid’ll be alone. She’s sixteen, but she looks a lot older and a lot harder. She seems to be a nice kid, though.” He knocked on the door.
The door opened almost instantly, as if the girl had been standing behind it waiting for the knock. She was a dark-haired girl with wide brown eyes and clean features. Lipstick was the only make-up she wore. She wore a red peasant skirt and a white blouse, and her hair was caught at the back of her neck with a red ribbon.
“Hello,” she said, “come in.”
They entered the apartment. The linoleum was worn, and the plaster was chipped and peeling, and an electrical outlet hung loose from the wall, its naked copper wires exposed. But the apartment was scrupulously clean.
“Miss Rugiello, this is Mr. Bell, the district attorney.”
“How do you do?” the girl said. She spoke in a low whisper, as if she were afraid of being overheard.
“How do you do?” Hank said.
“Would you like some coffee or something? I can put some on. It’d only take a minute.”
“No, thank you,” Hank said.
The girl nodded, as if, convinced beforehand that he would not accept her hospitality, she were now affirming her conviction.
“Well … sit down … won’t you?”
They sat at a kitchen table with an enamel top, the girl sitting at the far end, Hank and Larsen taking chairs on opposite sides of her.
“What’s your first name, miss?” Hank said.
“Angela,” she said.
“I have a daughter almost your age,” Hank said.
“Yeah?” the girl said i
n seeming interest, but she watched Hank suspiciously.
“Yes.”
“That’s nice,” Angela said.
“Mr. Bell would like to ask you some questions,” Larsen said.
“Yes?” She put the word almost as a question, but she nodded simultaneously, indicating that she knew why the district attorney was here.
“About what happened on the night Morrez was stabbed,” Larsen said. “About the knives.”
“Yes?” she said again, and again it was almost a query.
“Yes,” Hank said. “Can you tell me what happened in your own words?”
“Well, I didn’t see the stabbing or anything. You understand that, don’t you? I didn’t have anything at all to do with the stabbing.”
“Yes, we understand that.”
“Is it wrong that I took the knives? Can I get in trouble for taking the knives?”
“No,” Hank said. “Tell us what happened.”
“Well, Carol and I were sitting on the front stoop downstairs. Carol is my cousin. Carol Rugiello. It was, you know, early yet. Just after supper. You know. Quiet. And none of the fellows was around, but we figured that was because they were getting ready to go bopping. It was decided that afternoon, you see. About the stuff being on between them and the Horsemen, I mean.”
“The Spanish gang?” Hank asked.
“Yeah, the spies,” she said gently, nodding. “They had a truce on before, them and the Birds, but that afternoon the warlords met and decided the stuff was on again. So we knew they were going bopping that night. And there’s a lot of things they have to do before they go, so we figured that’s why none of them was around. Carol’s boy friend is the warlord of the Thunderbirds, so she knew all about it.”
“Do you have a boy friend on the club?”
“Well, no, not a steady or anything like that. I go to their jumps and like that. But I ain’t really interested in none of them. I mean, not for a boy friend. But they’re nice boys. I mean, they seem like nice boys, you know?”
“Yes, go on.”
“Well, we were sitting there on the front stoop, and it was very quiet. It looked like rain. I remember saying to Carol it looked like it was going to rain.…”