Suspended Sentences

by Brian Garfield

  Now the forger and I took the safecracker’s place by the open safe. I went through the safe’s thickly packed contents until I’d identified the items I sought: the organization’s accounting books. I had quite a thrill of excitement just to lay eyes on those documents. They revealed, even to my untrained financial eye, an entire spectrum of information about the mob’s methods and operations.

  But we weren’t there simply to give me a chance to gloat over Sterrick’s secrets. It wasn’t possible simply to steal the books. If I took them away with me, they’d be inadmissible in court. It’s not enough to present evidence, of course; you’ve got to show how you obtained the evidence. In this case I had no warrant. I was trespassing, I’d committed the felony of breaking and entering, and if I made off with Sterrick’s books I’d be guilty of theft as well.

  No. I wasn’t there to steal those books. I was there to photograph them.

  The forger wielded the camera — it was his expertise. Page by page we photographed the ledgers and notebooks. It took hours.

  I was sweating, examining my watch every few moments. The last page wasn’t captured until after six o’clock; by then we knew the watchman had been released and was on his way back to the office. We packed up the scores of rolls of film we’d exposed. The forger took his last close look at the ledgers. He had to know exactly the style, make, color, and condition of the books so that we could purchase identical blank bindings in which he could perform his forgeries, based on our photographs. He had to remember the color of each ink used, all that sort of thing.

  We left the office at ten minutes past six. I’m sure the watchman must have returned within minutes. Later we learned there’d been an intensive debriefing session. Sterrick and his men had grilled the watchman for several days. They examined the office and the safe with a fine-toothed comb. But finally they decided nothing had been disturbed. The watchman kept his job, and his arrest that night was chalked up as a simple case of mistaken identity.

  It took our forger nearly the full seven weeks to complete his work; it was a monumental job. The man was physically and emotionally exhausted at the end. I felt he’d earned his freedom. He and the safecracker were taken under police escort by train to El Paso where they were given their freedom. I never saw or heard from either of them again. I hope they stayed out of trouble.

  We made our move while the forger and the safecracker were still on the train; we wanted to take no chances on one of them phoning Sterrick with what he knew.

  We had three days’ grace before the primary elections. I wasn’t sure it would be enough time to swing the primary, but it had to be tried. Without any attempt to maintain secrecy I went before the superior court bench with applications for a warrant to search the realty-insurance office and a subpoena for the books and record-ledgers of the Sterrick operations.

  Naturally the word of our attack preceded us. By the time I arrived with my phalanx of detectives, the safe in the back room was empty except for a few props — insurance policies, land deeds, and so forth. All very innocent and aboveboard. Everyone in the office had been herded into the back room while the safe was being opened. I lingered briefly in the front room, then joined the others in back. I pointed out to the detective in charge that our warrant gave us the right to search the entire premises, not merely the safe; I instructed him to give the whole place a thorough toss.

  A while later, to my loudly expressed amazement, a young officer discovered an entire set of criminal ledgers in the bottom two drawers of a salesmen’s desk in the front room.

  The rest of the story would strike you as both foregone and anticlimactic, I’m sure. We nailed Sterrick. We didn’t have time to prevent Sterrick’s man from being nominated in the gubernatorial primary but he was forced to resign from the race as a result of the revelations that came out in the trial evidence. A party caucus nominated another candidate — a reasonably honest one — and he was elected in due course; it was a one-party state in those days, of course.

  Sterrick spent seventeen years in the state penitentiary and finally died there. And your obedient servant, the ambitious young assistant DA, went on to become county prosecuting attorney and then a judge.

  Now the question is: was justice served?

  Harris uncrossed his legs and sat up. “They must have suspected those books were forgeries.”

  “Of course they did,” the judge said imperturbably. “The defense brought in a whole gaggle of experts to try and prove that the documents had been forged — that those weren’t the handwriting of Sterrick and his bookkeepers.”

  “Then why wasn’t your case thrown out?”

  “The experts went away without testifying.”

  Harris said, “I don’t understand.”

  “Well, they determined that the books weren’t forgeries. When they told that to the defense lawyers, the lawyers bundled them out of town as fast as possible. We had to bring in our own experts to testify to the legitimacy of the books. Naturally I’d have preferred to have the testimony of the defense experts but they’d skipped town too fast.”

  “I’m not sure I’m keeping up with you.”

  The judge flashed his shrewd smile again. “They weren’t fakes, you see. That night we broke into the safe to photograph the books, my safecracker friend noted the combination down for me after he’d opened it. I had the combination. The night before we raided the place, I had two policemen roust the watchman again. They never took him farther than their car, which was parked just around the corner. He wasn’t out of sight of the safe for more than three minutes. But it was time enough for me to slip in and substitute our forgeries for the real books. Then, the next day, I planted the real ones in that front office desk. So you see we weren’t defrauding anybody. We came with a warrant and a subpoena. We found exactly what we were trying to find: Sterrick’s books. The real ones. And we presented them in evidence.”

  The judge lit a fresh cigar. “Of course Sterrick didn’t know how we’d done it. When he learned we were on our way with our warrant, he had the safe emptied and its contents removed to some secret hiding place — possibly over in another county, I have no idea. He didn’t realize, of course, that the ledgers and books he was so carefully hiding away were fakes, designed to resemble the real thing. We’d switched books on him, that’s all.”

  Harris grinned at him. “You old fox.”

  “We played it absolutely straight, as far as the trial was concerned. We faked no evidence. We defrauded no one. But, at the same time, I’d broken half a dozen laws to nail this one. Now how would you judge the case, Jim? Ends justifying means? Or absolute moral justice?”

  Harris shook his head slowly. “I’m just not sure.”

  “To tell you the truth — even after all these years — neither am I.”

  SCRIMSHAW

  “Scrimshaw” is, you should permit the immodesty, one of my favorites among these yarns. It was written where it is set — in the town of Lahaina and along the coast of Maui — and was provoked by a conversation with a waterfront scrimshaw shopkeeper who complained at length about the high cost of real ivory in the age of Endangered Species laws…. This story was filmed as a half-hour TV play and shown as an episode of the “Tales of the Unexpected” anthology series in 1981; the stars were Joan Hackett and Charles Kimbrough, and their performances were so good they — and John Houseman’s Hitchcockian introduction — nearly made up for the show’s questionable production values.

  She suggested liquid undulation: a lei-draped girl in a grass skirt under a windblown palm tree, her hands and hips expressive of the flow of the hula. Behind her, behind the surf, a whaling ship was poised to approach the shore, its square-rigged sails bold against a polished white sky.

  The scene was depicted meticulously upon ivory: a white fragment of tusk the size of a dollar bill. The etched detail was exquisite: the scrimshaw engraving was carved of thousands of thread-like lines and the artist’s knife hadn’t slipped once.

  The price
tag may have been designed to persuade tourists of the seriousness of the art: it was in four figures. But Brenda was unimpressed. She put the piece back on the display cabinet and left the shop.

  The hot Lahaina sun beat against her face and she went across Front Street to the Sea Wall, thrust her hands into the pockets of her dress and brooded upon the anchorage.

  Boats were moored around the harbor — catamarans, glass-bottom tourist boats, marlin fishermen, pleasure sailboats, outrigger canoes, yachts. Playthings. It’s the wrong place for me, she thought.

  Beyond the wide channel the islands of Lanai and Kahoolawe made lovely horizons under their umbrellas of delicate cloud, but Brenda had lost her eye for that sort of thing; she noticed the stagnant heat, the shabbiness of the town, and the offensiveness of the tourists who trudged from shop to shop in their silly hats, their sun-burnt flab, their hapless T-shirts emblazoned with local graffiti: “Here Today, Gone to Maui.”

  A leggy young girl went by, drawing Brenda’s brief attention: one of those taut tan sunbleached creatures of the surfboards — gorgeous and luscious and vacuous. Filled with youth and hedonism, equipped with all the optional accessories of pleasure. Brenda watched gloomily, her eyes following the girl as far as the end of the Sea Wall, where the girl turned to cross the street. Brenda then noticed two men in conversation there.

  One of them was the wino who always seemed to be there: a stringy unshaven tattered character who spent the days huddling in the shade sucking from a bottle in a brown bag and begging coins from tourists. At night he seemed to prowl the alleys behind the seafood restaurants, living off scraps like a stray dog: she had seen him once, from the window of her flyspecked room, scrounging in the can behind the hotel’s kitchen; and then two nights ago near a garbage bin she had taken a short cut home after a dissatisfying lonely dinner and she’d nearly tripped over him.

  The man talking with the wino seemed familiar and yet she could not place the man. He had the lean bearded look of one who had gone native; but not really, for he was set apart by his fastidiousness. He wore sandals, yet his feet seemed clean, the toenails glimmering; he wore a sandy beard but it was neatly trimmed and his hair was expensively cut, not at all shaggy; he wore a blue denim short-sleeved shirt, fashionably faded but it had sleeve pockets and epaulets and had come from a designer shop and his white sailor’s trousers fit perfectly.

  I know him, Brenda thought, but she couldn’t summon the energy to stir from her spot when the bearded man and the wino walked away into the town. Vaguely and without real interest she wondered idly what those two could possibly have to talk about together.

  She found shade on the harborfront. Inertia held her there for hours while she recounted the litany of her misfortunes. Finally hunger stirred her and she slouched back to her miserable little third-class hotel.

  The next day, half drunk in the afternoon and wilting in the heat, Brenda noticed vaguely that the wino was no longer in his usual place. In fact, she hadn’t seen the wino at all, not last night and not today.

  The headache was painful and she boarded the jitney bus to go up-island a few miles. She got off near the Kapalua headland and trudged down to the public beach. It was cooler here because the northwest end of the island was open to the fresh trade winds; she settled under a palm tree, pulled off her ragged sneakers, and dug her toes into the cool sand. The toes weren’t very clean. She was going too long between baths these days. The bathroom in the hotel was at the end of the corridor and she went there as infrequently as possible because she couldn’t be sure who she might encounter and anyhow the tub was filthy and there was no shower.

  Across the channel loomed the craggy mountains of Molokai, infamous island, leper colony, its dark volcanic mass shadowed by perpetual sinister rain clouds, and Brenda lost herself in gruesome speculations about exile, isolation, loneliness and wretched despair, none of which seemed at all foreign to her.

  The sun moved and took the shade with it and she moved round to the other side of the palm tree, tucking the fabric of the cheap dress under her when she sat down. The dress was about gone — frayed, faded, the material ready to disintegrate. She only had two others left. Then it would be jeans and the boatneck. It didn’t matter, really. There was no one to dress up for.

  It wasn’t that she was altogether ugly; she wasn’t ugly; she wasn’t even plain, really; she had studied photographs of herself over the years and she had gazed in the mirror and tried to understand, but it had eluded her. All right, perhaps she was too bony, her shoulders too big, flat in front, not enough flesh on her — but there were men who liked their women bony; that didn’t explain it. She had the proper features in the proper places and, after all, Modigliani hadn’t found that sort of face abominable to behold, had he?

  But ever since puberty there’d been something about her gangly gracelessness that had isolated her. Invitations to go out had been infrequent. At parties no one ever initiated conversations with her. No one, in any case, until Briggs had appeared in her life.

  …She noticed the man again: the well-dressed one with the neatly trimmed beard. A droopy brown Hawaiian youth was picking up litter on the beach and depositing it in a burlap sack he dragged along; the bearded man ambled beside the youth, talking to him. The Hawaiian said something; the bearded man nodded with evident disappointment and turned to leave the beach. His path brought him close by Brenda’s palm tree and Brenda sat up abruptly. “Eric?”

  The bearded man squinted into the shade, trying to recognize her. Brenda removed her sunglasses. She said, “Eric? Eric Morelius?”

  “Brenda?” The man came closer and she contrived a wan smile. “Brenda Briggs? What the devil are you doing here? You look like a beachcomber gone to seed.”

  Over a drink at Kimo’s she tried to put on a front. “Well, I thought I’d come out here on a sabbatical and, you know, loaf around the islands, recharge my batteries, take stock.”

  She saw that Eric wasn’t buying it. She tried to smile. “And what about you?”

  “Well, I live here, you know. Came out to Hawaii nine years ago on vacation and never went back.” Eric had an easy relaxed attitude of confident assurance. “Come off it, duckie, you look like hell. What’s happened to you?”

  She contrived a shrug of indifference. “The world fell down around my ankles. Happens to most everybody sometimes, I suppose. It doesn’t matter.”

  “Just like that? It must have been something terrible. You had more promise than anyone in the department.”

  “Well, we were kids then, weren’t we. We were all promising young scholars. But what happens after you’ve broken all the promises?”

  “Good Lord. The last I saw of you, you and Briggs were off to revitalize the University of what, New Mexico?”

  “Arizona.” She tipped her head back with the glass to her mouth; ice clicked against her teeth. “And after that a state college in Minnesota. And then a dinky jerkwater diploma mill in California. The world,” she said in a quiet voice, “has little further need of second-rate Greek and Roman literature scholars — or for any sort of non-tenured Ph.D.’s in the humanities. I spent last year waiting on tables in Modesto.”

  “Duckie,” Eric said, “there’s one thing you haven’t mentioned. Where’s Briggs?”

  She hesitated. Then — what did it matter? — she told him: “He left me. Four years ago. Divorced me and married a buxom life-of-the-party girl fifteen years younger than me. She was writing advertising copy for defective radial tires or carcinogenic deodorants or something like that. We had a kid, you know. Cute little guy, we named him Geoff, with a G — you know how Briggs used to love reading Chaucer. In the original. In retrospect, you know, Briggs was a prig and a snob.”

  “Where’s the kid, then?”

  “I managed to get custody and then six months ago he went to visit his father for the weekend and all three of them, Briggs and the copy-writer and my kid Geoff, well, there was a six-car pileup on the Santa Monica Freeway and I had to pay
for the funerals and it wiped me out.”

  Eric brought another pair of drinks and there was a properly responsive sympathy in his eyes and it had been so long since she’d talked about it that she covered her face with the table napkin and sobbed. “God help me, Eric. Briggs was the only man who ever gave me a second look.”

  He walked her along the Sea Wall. “You’ll get over it, duckie. Takes time.”

  “Sure,” she said listlessly. “I know.”

  “Sure, it can be tough. Especially when you haven’t got anybody. You don’t have any family left, do you?”

  “No. Only child. My parents died young. Why not? The old man was on the assembly line in Dearborn. We’re all on the assembly line in Dearborn. What have we got to aim for? A condominium in some ant-hill and a bag full of golf clubs? Let’s change the subject, all right? What about you, then? You look prosperous enough. Did you drop out or were you pushed too?”

  “Dropped out. Saw the light and made it to the end of the tunnel. I’m a free man, duckie.”

  “What do you do?”

  “I’m a scrimshander.”

  “A what?”

  “A bone-ivory artist. I do scrimshaw engravings. You’ve probably seen my work in the shop windows around town.”

  Eric’s studio, high under the eaves in the vintage whaler’s house that looked more New Englandish than tropical, revealed its owner’s compulsion for orderly neatness.

  She had never liked him much. He and Briggs had got along all right, but she’d always found Eric an unpleasant sort. It wasn’t that he was boorish; hardly anything like that. But she thought him pretentious and totally insincere. He’d always had that air of arrogant self-assurance. And the polish was all on the surface; he had the right manners but once you got to know him a little you realized he had no real understanding of courtesy or compassion. Those qualities were meaningless to people like Eric. She’d always thought him self-absorbed and egotistical to the point of solipsism; she’d felt he had cultivated Brigg’s friendship simply because Eric felt Briggs could help him advance in the department.