A Matter of Conviction

by Ed McBain

  The heat had rendered the boys on the block lifeless. They had matched War cards for a while—at that time the War cards showed the Sino-Japanese war and vividly illustrated the atrocities of the Japanese—but then had grown weary of even such limited activity. It was too hot to be flipping cards. Eventually, they all just stretched out alongside the brick wall of the grocery store and talked about swimming. Hank sat with the rest of the boys, his sneakered feet stretched out, lying on one hip so that the lock in his trouser loop hung suspended and caught the unblinking rays of the sun.

  One of the boys in the crowd was called Bobby. He was only thirteen, but one of those kids who are very big for their age, with straight blond hair and a lot of pimples on his face. He was always picking at his pimples or saying, “I need a shave again,” even though all the other kids knew he didn’t shave yet, although he did have a lot of blond fuzz all over his face. The kids in those days hadn’t tipped to the luxury of dungarees. In the winter, they wore knickers with knee socks, and in the summer they wore shorts. Hank’s knees were always scabby in the summer, but all the kids’ knees were that way, because flesh and concrete didn’t blend too well. Bobby was wearing shorts. He had big muscular legs, well, he was big all over, and he had this thick blond caterpillar fuzz on his legs, too. Everybody was just laying there talking about swimming, and all of a sudden Bobby said, “What’s that?”

  At first, Hank didn’t know what he was talking about. He’d been listening to the swimming talk and wishing he was swimming, and he was in a sort of hazy dream mood because he was so hot and because it was nice to just sit with the fellows and talk about swimming on a day like this.

  “What’s that on your pants, Hank?” Bobby said.

  Hank looked at him sleepily and then looked down to where the lock hung on his trouser loop. “Oh, that’s a lock,” he said.

  “A lock!” Bobby said.

  “Yeah, a lock.”

  “A lock!” The idea seemed to repel and fascinate Bobby. He turned to the other boys and said, “He’s got a lock on his pants,” and he laughed his curious laugh, a mixture of a man’s and a boy’s, and he said again, “A lock!”

  “Yeah, a lock,” Hank answered, not seeing at all what was so peculiar about the darn thing.

  One of the other kids started talking about how to do a jackknife dive, but Bobby wouldn’t let it go. He brought his voice up a little higher and he said, “Why you got a lock on your pants?”

  “Why not?” Hank said. He was not angry. He just didn’t want to be bothered. It was much too hot to be going into why he did or didn’t have a lock on his pants.

  “What’re you lockin’ up?” Bobby wanted to know.

  “I ain’t lockin’ up anything.”

  “Then why you got the lock?”

  “’Cause I want the lock.”

  “That seems pretty stupid to me,” Bobby said.

  The kid who was explaining the jackknife said, “The whole secret is how you get the jump on the board. You got to spring so that …”

  Bobby said, “That seems pretty stupid to me,” a little louder this time.

  “Hey, you mind?” the other kid asked. “I’m trying to explain something.”

  “Well, it seems pretty stupid somebody should have a lock on his pants,” Bobby persisted. “That’s the first time in my life I ever seen anybody with a lock on his pants, I swear to God.”

  “So don’t look at it,” the other kid said. “If you don’t spring right, you can’t get to touch your toes. Sometimes, you get these boards where …”

  “You wear them on all your pants?” Bobby asked.

  “Yeah, all my pants.”

  “You change it from pants to pants?”

  “Yeah, I change it from pants to pants.”

  “That seems pretty stupid. It looks pretty stupid, too, you want to know the truth.”

  “So don’t look at it,” Hank said, repeating the other kid.

  “Well, I don’t like it. That’s all. I don’t like it.”

  “Well, who cares what you like? It’s my pants, and it’s my lock. So if you don’t like it, who cares? I don’t care.” He was beginning to feel a little frightened. Bobby was much bigger than he, and he didn’t want to start a fight with a boy who could kill him. He wished desperately that Bobby would let go of the conversation. But Bobby wasn’t in a mood to let go of anything. Bobby was having a real good time.

  “Whyn’t you put the lock on your shirt, too?”

  “I don’t want no lock on my shirt.”

  “Whyn’t you put it on your underwear?”

  “Whyn’t you shut up?” Hank said. He was beginning to tremble. I’m not afraid, he told himself.

  “Whyn’t you stick it on your pecker?”

  “Oh, come on,” Hank said. “Shut up, willya?”

  “What’s the matter? You nervous about your damn lock?”

  “I ain’t nervous at all. I just don’t want to talk about it. You mind?”

  “I want to talk about it,” Bobby said. “Let’s see that damn lock, anyway.” He leaned over and stretched out his hand, ready to touch the lock, ready to have a closer look at it. Hank backed away a little.

  “Keep your hands off it!” he said, and he wondered in that moment why this had to be, why he couldn’t be left alone, and he felt the trembling inside him, and again he told himself, I’m not afraid, knowing that he was afraid, and hating the fear, and hating Bobby, and watching the older boy’s face break into a malicious grin.

  “What’s the matter? I can’t touch it even?”

  “No, you can’t touch it,” he said. Come on, stop it, he thought. What do we have to fight for? Come on.

  “What’s the matter? It’s gold?”

  “Yeah, it’s platinum. Keep your hands off it.”

  “I only wanted to look at it.”

  “You said you didn’t like to look at it. So keep your hands off it. Go look someplace else. Go look around the corner, why don’t you?”

  The lock hung from the trouser loop, steel and fabric wedded together. Bobby glanced at it. And suddenly he reached out for it, grasping the lock and pulling it, ripping the trouser loop, clutching the lock in his closed fist. Hank was too shocked to move for an instant. Bobby was grinning. Hank hesitated. The gauntlet had been dropped. Trembling, fighting to keep the tears from his eyes, he got to his feet.

  “Give me the lock,” he said.

  Bobby stood up. He was at least a head taller than Hank, and easily twice as wide. “What’s the matter?” he asked innocently.

  “Give me that lock!”

  “I think I’ll throw it down the sewer with the rest of the crap,” Bobby said, and he took a step toward the gutter, not realizing that for all intents and purposes he was holding Hank’s heart clutched in his fist, was holding an identity, an existence, a life in his fingers. He had reasoned correctly that Hank was afraid of him. He could see fear in Hank’s narrow, trembling body, could read it in the tightly controlled face, the eyes moist and refusing to succumb to the onslaught of tears. But he did not know he was holding something precious in his hand, something that gave meaning and reality in a concrete and asphalt maze that threatened anonymity. He did not know until Hank hit him.

  He hit Bobby quite hard, so hard that Bobby’s nose began to bleed instantly. Bobby felt the blood gushing from his nostrils, and his eyes went wide with surprise. Hank hit him again, and then again, and Bobby kept trying to feel his nose while he was being hit, and suddenly he was falling to the hot pavement, and Hank was straddling him, and he felt fingers around his throat, wildly clutching at his windpipe, and he recognized in a moment of terrifying awareness that Hank would choke him to death.

  “Give him the lock, Bobby,” one of the other kids said, and Bobby—twisting his head, trying to escape the viselike fingers around his throat—sputtered, “Take it, here, take it!”

  He opened his fist and the lock dropped to the sidewalk. Hank picked it up quickly. He held the lock clenched
in one fist, the other hand closed over it, and the tears finally reached his eyes, spilled down his face. Stuttering, he said, “Why why why c-c-c-couldn’t you m-m-mind your own b-b-business?”

  “Go home, Bobby,” one of the other kids said. “Your goddamn nose is all bloody.”

  That was the end of the fight, and the last of the trouble he was to have with Bobby. He stopped wearing the lock immediately afterward. He wore something else from that day on: a recognition of his own fear and the lengths to which he would go to keep it from erupting.

  “Dad?”

  He looked up. For a moment, he did not recognize the young lady standing before him, the long blond hair, the face with the questioning look of a woman, the firm bosom, the narrow waist and long legs. My daughter? he thought. A woman already? When did you leave my knee, Jennie? When did you join the mysterious sorority?

  “Are you all right, Dad?” she asked. There was concern in her voice.

  “Yes,” he said. “Just having a last cigarette before I turned in.”

  “It’s a nice night,” Jennie said. She sat on the stoop beside him, pulling her skirt over her knees.

  “Yes.” He paused. “Did you walk home from Agatha’s?”

  “Yeah. The kids are still there, but I left. It was a big drag.” She paused. “Lonnie wasn’t there.”

  “Lonnie?”

  “Lonnie Gavin.”

  “Oh. Oh, yes.”

  They sat in silence for several moments.

  “It sure is a nice night,” Jennie said.

  “Yes.”

  The silence closed in on them.

  “You … you didn’t see anyone in the street, did you? On your way home?” he asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Some boys?”

  “No. Nobody.”

  “You shouldn’t go walking around alone at night,” he said.

  “Oh, there’s nothing to be afraid of around here,” she answered.

  “Well, still.”

  “Don’t worry,” she said.

  Again they were silent. He had the oddest feeling that Jennie wanted to talk to him. He felt it would be good for the two of them to talk together, but instead they sat like strangers in the waiting room of a small-town railroad station, uncommunicative, ill at ease.

  At last his daughter rose and smoothed her skirt.

  “Mom up?” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “Think I’ll have a glass of milk with her,” Jennie said, and she went into the house.

  He sat alone in the darkness.

  At nine o’clock the next morning, he started his working day by requesting the assignment of a team of detectives to a twenty-four-hour surveillance of his house.

  FIVE

  The entrance to the candy store was on the right-hand side of the shop, its door opening on the three tightly cramped booths which sat alongside the wall there. A fountain with four stools was opposite the booths closest to the rear wall. A telephone booth stood against the rear wall next to a curtained doorway which led to the back of the store. A glass display case upon which was an assortment of chewing gum and a cash register was just inside the door, forward of the fountain and stools.

  There was a combined feeling of shoddiness and hominess to the candy store. For whereas the place was badly in need of a paint job, whereas the leatherette of the booths was stained with hair oil and thumb smears, whereas the penny candy in the display case looked stale and unpalatable, the store exuded an atmosphere of relaxed comfort. Standing in the doorway, he could understand why the Thunderbirds had chosen the spot as their hangout. He walked into the shop just as the telephone rang. The proprietor went to answer it, and he remembered for a moment the days in Harlem when telephones were not to be found in every apartment. The owner of the candy store would answer the phone and then send a kid to get whomever the call was for. The rules stated that the messenger rated a tip—usually a nickel, sometimes a dime. The rules further stated that the tip had to be spent in the store. There was always a mad rush from the street whenever the telephone in the candy store rang. Today, on a similar side street in Italian Harlem, the kids barely looked up when the phone rang. Telephones were no longer a luxury. They were as essential to day-by-day living in Harlem as were television sets. The rooftops bristled with electronic antennas, irrefutable testimony to the effectiveness of installment buying.

  The proprietor of the store held a brief conversation with whoever was on the other end of the line and then hung up. The four boys sitting in the booth closest to the phone did not look up as he walked back to the display case. He was a short man with a spotlessly clean white apron and a spotlessly clean bald pate. He walked with a slight limp, but the limp—rather than weakening him—seemed to give him a strength of character which was totally lacking before the limp was noticed.

  “Help you, Mac?” he said to Hank.

  “I’m looking for the members of a club called the Thunderbirds,” Hank said. “I’ve been told this is their hangout.”

  “Somebody told you wrong, mister.”

  “The somebody who told me was Detective Lieutenant Richard Gunnison of the Twenty-seventh Squad. He’s not a man who makes mistakes.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. Where are they?”

  “And who are you?”

  “Assistant District Attorney Henry Bell.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  The boys in the rear booth looked up. One made a motion to rise, but a second boy laid a hand on his arm, and he sat instantly.

  “Well, well,” the proprietor said, “we never had a D.A. in this store before. I’m honored.”

  “Where do I find the Thunderbirds?” Hank gestured to the rear booth. “Are those boys members of the gang?”

  “I sure as hell wouldn’t know, mister,” the proprietor said. “All I do is run a candy store.” He extended his hand across the case. “Name’s Joey Manetti. Pleased to know you.”

  Hank took the hand. “Mr. Manetti,” he said, in a voice which carried to the rear booth, “the lieutenant gave me a list of names and addresses of known members of the Thunderbirds. Now, I can have these kids picked up and brought to my office for questioning. I thought I’d save time if I could talk to them here—in Harlem. Which will it be?”

  Manetti shrugged. “You’re asking me? Mister, I run a candy store.”

  Hank turned to the rear booth. “How about it?” he said.

  A boy with heavy shoulders and muscular forearms studied Hank with pale hooded eyes. He nodded imperceptibly. “Come on over,” he said.

  Hank walked to the booth. The boys sitting there ranged in age from fifteen, he guessed, to nineteen. The one who’d called him over was the oldest of the group, and the biggest. He wore his black hair combed flat against his skull, the sideburns long. A silver identification bracelet dangled from his left wrist. There was a scar on the forearm, several inches above the bracelet. His brows were heavy and black, shading thickly lidded blue, almost gray eyes. When he spoke, his lips barely moved.

  “Sit down,” he said. “Concho, get the district attorney a chair.”

  One of the boys slid out of the booth and went through the curtained doorway at the rear of the shop. When he returned, he put the chair down at the head of the table and then took his position in the booth again. Hank sat.

  “My name’s Diablo,” the oldest boy said. “You know what that means?”

  “It means devil,” Hank answered.

  “That’s right.” He smiled thinly and then looked to the other boys. One of them nodded.

  “Are you Spanish?”

  “Me?” Diablo said. “Me? Cut it out, willya?”

  “Diablo is a Spanish word.”

  “Yeah?” the boy said, surprised. “I thought it was Italian. I’m Italian.”

  “Diablo Degenero,” Hank said. “Your real name is Carmine. You’re the so-called warlord of the Thunderbirds.”

  “That’s right,” Dia
blo said. “Boys, this is the district attorney. These are some of the boys. Concho, Nickie and Bud. What can we do for you?”

  “You can answer a few questions,” Hank said. “Either here or downtown. It’s up to you.”

  “We’ll answer them here,” Diablo said. “If we like the questions.”

  “If you don’t like the questions, you can answer them downtown. With a stenographer present.”

  “You got a lot of courage, Mr. District Attorney,” Diablo said. “Coming in here without an escort of bulls.”

  “I don’t need any detectives,” Hank said.

  “No?”

  “No. Do you think I do?”

  Diablo shrugged. “Mr. District Attorney, I would say—”

  “The name is Bell,” Hank corrected. “Mr. Bell.”

  Diablo was silent for a moment. “Mr. District Att—”

  “Mr. Bell,” Hank said.

  Diablo stared at him. Then he smiled again, the same thin mocking smile. He shrugged. “Sure. Mr. Bell. Whatever you say, Mr. Bell. What are your questions, Mr. Bell?”

  “Is Danny Di Pace a member of your gang?”

  “What gang, Mr. Bell?”

  “The Thunderbirds.”

  “The Thunderbirds ain’t a gang, Mr. Bell. It’s a social and athletic club. Ain’t that right, boys?”