Mark the Sparrow

by Clark Howard

  Mark the Sparrow

  Clark Howard

  Chapter One

  It was Tuesday morning and it was warm. The Los Angeles Ledger offices were sticky; the air conditioning had gone out again. Outside, it was drizzling a thin, undetermined rain. The air on the street and the air inside the building were equally saturated, and the Ledger staff was wilting an hour after the day shift started.

  In the newsroom, Robert Cloud could feel perspiration across the small of his back as he leaned forward at his desk to type. He was an ordinary-looking young man, ears slightly too large, hair in need of trimming. His only outstanding feature was his eyes, unusually brilliant for gray, and icily intense when he concentrated. His fingernails looked bad: chewed down to the quick; even the skin showed signs of having been bitten at occasionally.

  Cloud typed rapidly, with four fingers. He was doing a story on an early-morning freeway collision; one driver had been killed. He was in the middle of the last line when a copyboy spoke to him over his left shoulder.

  “Hoskins wants you in his office right away.”

  “Mister Hoskins to you, kid,” Cloud said. “Wait a minute and you can take this.” He finished the last sentence, dragged the paper out of the machine, and handed it over his shoulder. “Better start showing a little respect for the day editor, or you won’t last long around here. Mr. Hoskins insists on proper respect; even his wife addresses him as Mister.”

  “I’ll try to remember that,” the copyboy replied indifferently. He took a cigarette from Cloud’s pack on the desk and lighted it. “You want in for the World Series pool in the composing room?”

  “No. Those guys in the composing room are a bunch of thieves; they grab off the good numbers ahead of time. How much is it?”

  “Buck a number, pays off a hundred.”

  Cloud fingered a dollar bill from his pocket and held it over his shoulder.

  “Try to get me a decent number for a change, will you?”

  The copyboy headed for the city desk with the story, and Cloud went toward the day editor’s frosted-glass office. Cloud had seen Lew Lach, the paper’s top feature writer, go into Hoskins’s office several minutes earlier and had not seen him come back out. So Cloud was in for some leg-work. That was always the way when you were new on a paper; you had to spend half your time birddogging news-hustlers like Lach: seasoned pros who would make news if they couldn’t find any. Cloud had been through the routine on three papers already in the five years since he finished school.

  He tapped on the door. Inside, he found Hoskins pacing the floor, talking. Cloud could tell from the suspiciously attentive expression on Lach’s face that he was paying only token attention to the pearls of wisdom delivered by Hoskins. Quickly, while the day editor’s back was to him, Cloud eased into a chair next to Lach.

  “So there’s this punk, see,” Hoskins was saying, “and he’s up on a dozen or so counts of armed robbery, kidnapping-with-bodily-harm, and sex perversion. That makes him an A-Number-One candidate for the little green gas chamber upstate. So what does he do? What does this punk do when he’s going on trial for a capital offense? He decides to conduct his own defense, that’s what he does.”

  Hoskins turned and paced back toward them, appearing not to notice Cloud. As he walked and talked, he chewed juicily on a half-smoked cigar held professionally between his teeth. Cigars were the only thing in the world that anyone had ever heard Hoskins admit he liked.

  “Now, I can’t blame him much for deciding to be his own lawyer. Right now there’s not an attorney in this town worth his weight in bullshit. Which is about all they use in courts nowadays,” he added, coming dangerously close to smiling at what he considered his sage humor. “There hasn’t been a good defense lawyer since Darrow and there hasn’t been a decent prosecutor since Dewey.” Hoskins paused and scratched his upper lip, skillfully avoiding the cigar.

  “All right, so maybe this punk has got a good idea, after all. He’s got nine women on that jury, and everybody knows there’s nothing any goddamned dumber than a housewife pulling jury duty. Now personally, I don’t think they’re going to let this boy off the hook. He’s a four-time loser now, and if this was any other state except California, he’d already be doing life as an habitual. On top of that, he’s on trial in old Carl Lukey’s courtroom, and everybody knows Lukey is the state’s hanging judge.

  “Still”—he took the cigar from his mouth and waved it in the air—“there’s always the chance that one of those dames in the jury box will wet her bloomers over this punk and talk the rest of them into an acquittal; so maybe he goes free. And that”—he jabbed a cigar at Lach—“is what we’re looking for.”

  Hoskins sat down in his ancient swivel chair and leaned back precipitously. He extracted a large, ornate timepiece from his vest pocket.

  “The jury has been out for about three hours now. They won’t reach a verdict until after lunch because the lunch is free. Hop over there and get a quick interview with the punk, just enough to size him up. Then wait for the jury to come in. If they spring him, see if you can pick out the one that wet her bloomers and get an exclusive that we can build up for a nice page one. If they don’t spring him, just put together about two-columns-by-a-half for the back of section one. Of course, if you see anything we can put a little whipped cream on, maybe we’ll throw in a short feature on Sunday. You got all that?”

  “I’m not sure,” Lach said blandly. “Would you mind going over it again?”

  “Get your ass moving,” Hoskins growled. He turned to jab his cigar at Cloud. “You. Go with him, give him a hand.”

  “Let’s go, pal,” Lach said, walking out of the office. Cloud followed, not having spoken a word.

  In the elevator, Lach said, “So what have you been doing lately, pal?”

  “Nothing earthshaking. Piecing, mostly. Little rewrite here and there. Covered a wreck on the freeway this morning.”

  “Bodies?”

  “One.”

  “Female?”

  Cloud nodded. “Yeah.”

  “Young? Built?”

  “Yeah.” Cloud wished he hadn’t mentioned it. A couple of people in the newsroom had already told him about Lach’s interest in young, physically attractive dead women. There was even a story that Lach had paid another reporter two hundred dollars to let him take over his assignment to cover the Marilyn Monroe suicide, just so he could see the body.

  “Get any pictures of the girl?” Lach asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Maybe I’ll take a look at them when we get back.”

  “Sure.” With Lew Lach it really didn’t fit. To look at him, you’d think he stepped right out of Front Page. He was small and Cagney-like, a seasoned war correspondent before Cloud was even born. He had gone ashore with the first wave at Normandy, had been aboard the observation plane when Nagasaki was devastated, and probably had seen as much combat as the average infantryman. And still, Cloud thought, he has a thing about looking at dead young women.

  Downstairs, they checked out a car, then drove over to the Hall of Justice. Lach parked in the police lot, flipping the visor down to show the PRESS permit. It had begun to drizzle more strongly on the way over; now they hurried into the big gray building as the downpour started in earnest. Lach stopped at the jail office for passes to the top-floor detention room.

  “Ever been here before?” he asked.

  Cloud shook his head. “I’ve only been in L.A. a couple of months. I haven’t hit the courtroom circuit yet.”

  Lach led him over to the jail elevator. “All defendants not out on bail are kept in one big tank up here when court’s not in session.”

  They stepped off the elevator into a long, narrow area separated from a large jail dayroom by a floor-to
-ceiling wire grille. Several visitors stood talking to inmates at various places along the grille. A guard sat on a high wooden stool at each end of the area. A third uniformed man occupied a small desk off to the side.

  “Hiya, Oscar,” Lach said to the man at the desk, handing over their passes. “I saw your boy in that Notre Dame game last weekend. Looks like you’ve got an All-American in the family.”

  “Takes after his old man,” the guard said, smiling. He glanced at an overhead clock and scribbled the time on their passes. “I wasn’t half bad myself, you know, back in the old days.”

  “The kid’s already better than you ever were.”

  “An insult I’ll gladly accept,” Oscar said soberly. He leaned over to a public-address amplifier on the wall. “Whitman, Weldon, to the grille!” he ordered, his voice blaring statically from two speakers in the dayroom.

  “We’ll take Number Eight, Oscar,” Lach said, walking away.

  “As if I didn’t know.”

  Lach chuckled. Cloud followed him to the middle of the grille, where a large white eight was painted on the gray floor.

  “Always take Number Eight if you can get it,” Lach told him. “There are fifteen spots, and eight is the farthest from the guards. Puts the guy on the other side more at ease.”

  “Makes sense.” Cloud lighted a cigarette and looked around idly. Once again he heard Oscar speak commandingly into the public-address system.

  “Whitman, Weldon, to the grille! Number Eight!”

  Weldon Whitman was sitting in a corner of the big bullpen, sharing sections of a newspaper with two other prisoners, when he heard his name over the loudspeaker. The two men with him stopped reading at once and looked over at the grille. Whitman neither looked up nor moved.

  “Who is it?” he asked after a moment.

  “Two guys. One old, one young.”

  “Fuzz?” said Whitman.

  The prisoner studied the visitors clinically, then shook his head. “Not fuzz,” he ruled.

  Weldon Whitman carefully folded his part of the newspaper and laid it aside. His mouth opened slightly as he turned casually and scrutinized the two men, considering whether to go over and talk to them. With his lips parted, Whitman appeared to be sneering; an illusion created by his nose, large and prominently hooked, which so overshadowed his upper lip that it accentuated a very slight, possibly unintentional smirk. As if to draw attention to both his nose and his smirk, Whitman’s thick black hair formed a severe widow’s peak that pointed like an arrow directly down to both of them. Overall, he had a tough, even sneaky look; but at the same time there was something about him, some very elusive quality, that quietly asked for sympathy. It may have been simply that, with his mouth open slightly, he seemed a shade dumbfounded—almost as if he needed someone’s guidance, someone’s protection. Anyone’s. Like a child sometimes needs an adult—any adult.

  After a moment’s contemplation, Whitman stood up and walked toward the grille. He walked with a swagger that looked practiced, yet suited him. He was dressed for court: a cheap blue suit tight at the shoulders and too short in the sleeves, and a drugstore tie with too much green in it. Impassively, he stepped up to the Eight-spot.

  “You Weldon Whitman?” Lew Lach asked.

  “Yeah.”

  Whitman’s voice was moderately deep, slightly hoarse, perhaps from his week of speaking in court. There was a hint of defiance in the single word he spoke.

  “Lach and Cloud of the Ledger,” the older reporter said. “How about an interview?”

  “Sure.” Weldon Whitman, smiling a half-smile, took out a cigarette and lighted it. “What do you want to know?”

  “Well, to begin with, what do you think your chances are of getting off?”

  “Not so hot,” Whitman answered frankly.

  “Oh?” Lach raised his eyebrows. It was the first time he had ever known a defendant in a capital case to publicly take any position other than the adamant belief that justice would triumph and he would go free. Lach was caught off guard. “What makes you think that?” Lach asked.

  “They’ve decided to railroad me, that’s why,” Whitman said.

  “They?”

  “The judge,” Whitman said, his lips tightening briefly. “And the D.A.”—he began counting them off on his fingers—“the witnesses, the city police, the county sheriff—”

  Lach shot Cloud a quick look: Same old bullshit.

  “You pleaded not guilty, right?” asked Lach.

  “Right,” Whitman nodded. “I didn’t pull those jobs. The law is trying to clean up their unsolved-crimes file and they’re making me their patsy.”

  “Sure,” Lach said. “What made you decide to represent yourself in court?”

  “Simple. I don’t have money for a private attorney and I don’t trust the public defender’s office.”

  “Well, that’s a switch,” Lach said lightly. “Most of the time you guys swear by the public defender’s office. Mind telling me why you don’t trust them?”

  “Who pays the public defender’s salary?” Whitman asked.

  “The county, naturally.”

  “And who pays the district attorney’s salary?”

  Lach nodded. “The county. Okay, I get the drift.”

  “I thought you would,” said Weldon Whitman confidently.

  Cloud, watching and listening closely, pursed his lips slightly. You couldn’t really blame Whitman for having a theory like that, he thought. He had heard accusations of collusion between the offices of the district attorney and the public defender.

  “Okay, how about a little background info?” said Lach, taking out his pocket notebook. “How old are you?”

  “Twenty-seven.”

  “Married?”

  “No. Not anymore. I was.”

  “Where’s your ex?”

  Whitman shook his head. “Forget it.”

  “Sure,” said Lach. Cloud saw him write wife and underline it twice. If Whitman were acquitted and the case became front-page news, Lew Lach would find the ex-Mrs. Whitman wherever she was.

  “You’ve done time, haven’t you?”

  “Yeah. I’ve been the whole route. Chino, San Quentin, Folsom.”

  Even Cloud, a newcomer to California, knew the route he meant. Chino was the honor farm for first-offenders, the nationally known prison without walls. San Quentin was a maximum-security prison for second-timers, and housed the state execution chamber and Death Row. Folsom was the big joint, the high walls, the last stop for long-termers and those so tough they had to be kept in almost perpetual solitary confinement.

  Whitman had been the route, all right, Cloud thought. All in twenty-seven years, too. That might be some kind of record.

  “On parole now?” Lach asked.

  “Yeah.” Whitman dropped his cigarette to the floor and stepped on it.

  “When did you get out?”

  “The second week in May.”

  Lach frowned. “The second week in May? You were picked up for this beef in June, weren’t you?”

  “Yeah. June twenty-third.”

  “For Christ’s sake,” Lach said incredulously, “you mean you were only out six weeks?”

  Whitman nodded solemnly, his mouth tightening again as if silently cursing his luck.

  “Well,” Lach shrugged, “that’s the breaks, I guess.”

  Whitman looked at Lach intently but did not respond. Cloud glanced at the older reporter, thinking there were times when Lew Lach was just a little too insensitive to suit his taste.

  “Is there anything else you want to know?” Whitman finally asked in a quiet voice.

  “I guess not,” said Lach, flipping his notebook closed. “See you downstairs in court.”

  As Lach started toward the elevator, Robert Cloud impulsively held back for a moment. Whitman paused too, as if he wanted to be the last to leave.

  “How are you fixed for cigarettes?” Cloud said, a little awkwardly. “I could have some sent up.”

  Whitman w
as as surprised at Cloud’s words as Cloud himself. At first his mouth just hung open in its characteristic way, and he stared at Cloud openly, unguarded, for the briefest instant; then his eyes narrowed slightly and Cloud knew he was scrutinizing him for a motive, a reason, for the offer.

  “No strings,” Cloud said, embarrassed now. “I just thought—”

  “Thanks anyway,” Whitman interrupted. “I’ve got enough.”

  Cloud nodded. “Good luck downstairs,” he said. He turned and followed Lew Lach to the elevator.

  Weldon Whitman walked away from the grille and headed back for his corner. One of the prisoners sitting in a group on the floor reached up and grabbed his sleeve.

  “Hey, Whit,” he said, “we’re smuggling a cocksucker up from Tier Two tonight. He charges three bucks and you can pay in cash, cigarettes, or commissary chits. Interested?”

  Whitman thought about it for a moment, then said, “Check with me later. I want to see how it goes this afternoon first.”

  He walked on. If he got lucky this afternoon and beat the death rap, he might just celebrate by treating himself to a blow job.

  If he got lucky.

  Department Four of the Criminal Division of Superior Court reconvened at two o’clock. It was merely a technical reconvention, however, since Judge Carl V. Lukey remained in his chambers to await the pleasure of the jury.

  The rest of Department Four’s staff were at their appointed positions: the court clerk shuffling papers at his desk, an elderly court reporter—wearing a hearing aid, which Cloud thought unusual—going over his notes at a small table near the witness stand, and the uniformed bailiff sitting at the end of the jury box, his chair tilted back, reading an afternoon paper. The prosecutor and his trial assistant lounged at one of the counsel tables, talking in quiet, idle undertones. A dozen or so spectators had wandered in and taken seats in the public section.

  Whitman had been brought to a small lockup immediately behind the courtroom. He would remain there until a verdict was reached or until the jury was locked up for the night, in which case he would be returned to the county jail until court opened the following morning. The general consensus, however, was that the verdict would be reached sometime during midafternoon.