Mark the Sparrow

by Clark Howard

  “Well, I don’t know if it was legal or fair,” said Nancy, interrupting Cloud’s thoughts, “but it sure seems like a stiff price to make a guy pay for forcing a woman to give him some head. Personally, I don’t think I’d even testify against him if he didn’t hurt me any other way.” She smiled a mischievous smile that lighted up her freckled face. “Especially if he was Burt Reynolds, you know.”

  “I can imagine who’d do the forcing in that case,” said Laurel. She rose and took Cloud’s hand. “Come on,” she said, “I don’t want you around here when she starts thinking about giving head to Burt Reynolds.”

  Laurel and Cloud went back to the living-room couch. He put his head in her lap, and she played with his hair and traced his eyebrows with her fingers while they talked.

  “You seem a little preoccupied,” Laurel said. “Are you still thinking about that sex-perversion thing?”

  “In a way. But mainly I was thinking about Whitman himself. For some reason he just doesn’t seem to me to be the sort of person who would force a woman and a young girl to go down on him. I can believe he’d do everything else, but somehow the sex crimes don’t seem to fit him.”

  “Why not?”

  “I’m not sure. He impressed me as a tough, cocky, swaggering young punk. A confirmed hoodlum. I can see him spitting in a cop’s face, pistol-whipping someone, even shooting someone. I just can’t see him sexually abusing a woman at gunpoint.”

  “Well, I don’t understand why you’re so interested in him in the first place,” Laurel said rather impatiently.

  “I can’t explain that either.” A look of perplexity came over his face. What was there about Weldon Whitman that kept the now-condemned man so relentlessly on his mind?

  He sighed quietly and looked up past the underside of her breasts at her face. “I can probably swing a couple of tickets to the Ella-Fitzgerald concert Thursday night. Do you think you could get out of your counseling for one evening?”

  “No, Rob, I can’t,” she said. There was just the slightest trace of nervousness in her voice. “I’ve told you before that I can’t. I need the extra money.”

  “We might not see each other until Sunday, then,” he said cheerlessly. “I’ll be on nights Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday.”

  “Damn,” said Laurel.

  “My sentiments exactly,” Cloud agreed.

  At eleven o’clock, Cloud kissed her goodnight several times at the door and went home. Laurel turned out the lights and went into the bedroom. Nancy was propped up in one of the twin beds, reading Cosmopolitan.

  “I just took a test and my answers indicate that I’m sexually irresistible,” Nancy said.

  “Did you cheat?”

  “I always cheat on sex quizzes,” she drawled. “And speaking of sex, did you give that poor guy any tonight?”

  “Only with my hand.”

  Nancy shook her head disapprovingly. “Why in the hell did you ever tell him you were a virgin in the first place?”

  Laurel, holding the sweater she had just taken off, sat on the side of her bed. “I don’t know, Nan, I really don’t.” Her voice was tired. “I just liked him a lot from the very start. But I knew if I went to bed with him, I’d end up wanting to explain why going into me was like throwing a crowbar into an empty warehouse.”

  “Oh, come on now, it can’t be that bad, honey.”

  “Well, it seems like it,” Laurel said emphatically. “It may interest you to know that my lover from the Beverly Hills Tennis Club is hung like the proverbial horse. And don’t forget that he’s been putting it to me on Monday and Thursday nights for more than three years now. For a gal who’s never been married, I’m pretty well used.”

  “Laur, there’s nothing wrong with that,” Nancy said. “It wouldn’t matter to Rob. Besides, if you stayed away from it for a week or so, he probably wouldn’t even be able to tell.”

  “He wouldn’t be able to tell the first time, but he would the second,” Laurel said. “And it would matter. He really believes I’m a virgin, Nan. Tonight he even mentioned marrying me. What am I supposed to do, turn around now and say it was all a joke, that I’ve been putting him on for three months?”

  Nancy thought about the dilemma for a moment. Finally she said, “Look, you like the guy, don’t you? I mean, really like him?”

  “I’m crazy about him,” Laurel said.

  “Well then, why don’t you just stop seeing Ralph?”

  Laurel and she had met Ralph Blevins three years previously when Nancy’s father had given her a membership in the Beverly Hills Tennis Club. Nancy and Laurel had signed up for Saturday lessons. Ralph Blevins also played on Saturdays, usually with his partner. Blevins was the personal business manager for a number of actors. He and his partner, an accountant, had a prosperous business in Beverly Hills. Blevins also had a wife and two children, but that had not kept him from introducing himself to Laurel and subsequently beginning an affair with her.

  “I said, why don’t you just stop seeing Ralph?” Nancy repeated. “Lay off the sex for a while, then start with Rob, and later on marry the guy.”

  “I’m not sure I want to marry him,” Laurel told her. “In a way, I’m afraid to. I’m used to Ralph now. Used to seeing him, used to the things he buys me. It wouldn’t be easy with Rob. He’s irresponsible. We wouldn’t have any money.” Her eyes grew pleading. “Ralph has been good to me, Nan.”

  “Oh, sure,” Nancy said sarcastically. “He’s been great. Bought you some very nice jewelry. Takes you out for fancy dinners. Sends you flowers on Christmas and New Year’s Eve and the other times when you’re alone and he’s home with his wife and children. And for that he gets the same treatment that he’d have to pay a hundred bucks for with a whore.”

  “It’s easy for you to look at it that way, Nan,” Laurel accused. “You’ve always had everything you wanted. You don’t know what it’s like not to have … things …” Her shoulders slumped and she tried to blink back tears that were starting. Nancy got out of bed at once and came over to her.

  “I’m sorry, honey,” she said miserably, putting her arm around Laurel’s bare shoulders. “I didn’t mean to get so heavy with you. I just hate to see you screwed up like this.” She opened a drawer of the nightstand and got out Laurel’s pajamas. “Here, you get these on before you catch cold. I’m going in the kitchen and make us a couple of nice stiff drinks. Maybe we can figure a way out of this mess for you.”

  For a long moment Laurel did not move. She sat very still, holding the sweater on her lap, with her pajamas on top of it, staring for no reason at the Cosmopolitan Nancy had left lying on her bed. The woman on the cover was cool and poised, her complexion flawless, lips, eyes, nose, teeth, all perfect, her expression one of complete confidence and assurance. She was “that Cosmopolitan girl” and her life was totally and completely under control. She looked up at Laurel as if she ruled the world.

  “Fuck you,” Laurel said, and threw her sweater in the woman’s face.

  Then she started blinking again, but not rapidly enough to stop the tears that ran down both cheeks.

  Chapter Three

  Two weeks after Weldon Whitman had been found guilty, Robert Cloud returned to the Hall of Justice for the sentencing. He walked down the wide fifth-floor corridor to the thick double doors of Department Four of the Criminal Divison. Opening one of the doors an inch, he peered inside. The courtroom was practically empty; there were three spectators in the public section, and that was all: no judge, no clerk, not even a bailiff. Cloud closed the door and fingered a cigarette from the pack in his coat pocket.

  He had no reason, really, for being there that morning. Weldon Whitman’s conviction had rated only ten column inches of space the next day. The sentencing, a procedural formality, would rate no space at all. As far as the reading public was concerned, the story was dead. To Robert Cloud, however, it was still alive. Weldon Whitman and G. Foster Klein and Doris Calder had all intruded upon his thoughts with disturbing regularity since the
day of the verdict.

  Cloud had not told anyone at the paper that he was going to Whitman’s sentencing; he had merely called the city desk and said he would be late that morning. He was really not even sure why he had such an irresistible urge to be there. He had questioned Lew Lach about the ritual of sentencing, and learned that one of two things would happen: either the punk, as Lach referred to Whitman, would be sentenced to death, or the judge would recommend mercy and sentence him to life in prison. Cloud wondered if the outside chance of seeing Whitman beat the death sentence was what he hoped for that morning.

  Crushing out the cigarette under his foot, he opened one of the doors and looked into the courtroom again. A uniformed deputy was sitting near the railing, and Weldon Whitman was waiting, alone, at the defendant’s counsel table. Cloud pulled the door open and went inside.

  “I’m Robert Cloud of the Ledger,” he said, showing his press card to the deputy. “All right if I talk to your prisoner?”

  “Long as you stay outside the rails,” the deputy told him.

  Cloud nodded and moved along the empty row of press seats until he was as close as he could get to the counsel table. As Cloud approached, Whitman turned in his chair to face him.

  “Remember me?” Cloud said by way of greeting.

  “Sure,” Weldon Whitman answered, his mismatched lips curving into that irregular grin, and a sneer that, this time, was obviously innocent. “You’re the guy who offered to buy me some cigarettes. I should have taken you up on it; I ran out a few days ago.”

  “The offer’s still good,” Cloud told him.

  “Well, thanks, but I guess I’ll just quit.” Whitman’s grin widened grotesquely. “Maybe if old Judge Lukey finds out about it, he’ll think I’m putting down my bad habits and go easy on me.”

  “I thought you were the guy who didn’t have any bad habits,” Cloud remarked. “I thought you were the guy everybody was out to frame.”

  “Come on, buddy,” Whitman answered easily, “I never claimed to be an angel. I’m a burglar and a stickup man and a lot of other things. But I haven’t done anything that rates the gas chamber.”

  “Do you think there’s a chance the judge will set aside the death penalty?”

  “Are you kidding?” Whitman’s grin was replaced by an expression of utter astonishment. “Man, you sure don’t know much about Lukey, do you?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Well, let me clue you in on something, then. Do you know what the cons up at San Quentin call Condemned Row? They call it Carl’s Place, because Lukey keeps it populated most of the time. This guy hands out death sentences like a traffic judge hands out ten-dollar fines. Hell, he wouldn’t let me off with life if I was his own kid.”

  “He’s that bad, huh?”

  “Bad? Listen, you hang around the Hall of Justice long enough and you’ll find out for yourself.” Bitterness crept into Whitman’s voice and he said flatly, “Lukey is the worst killer in California. That’s why they tried me in his courtroom; that’s why they threw every lousy unsolved case in their files at me and assigned the chief prosecutor himself to handle the case. They knew I’d never get off if Lukey was the judge; they knew he’d give me the gas pill.”

  “You make it sound like they’re going to an awful lot of trouble to get you,” Cloud said. “What makes you so important to them?”

  “Look at my record,” Whitman told him. “I’ve been a thorn in the law’s side since I was a juvenile first-offender. I’ve probably given the law in this county more grief than any six other guys put together. And the thing about it, the thing that really gets to them, is that I’ve never backed down from them, see? I’ve never copped out and I’ve never crawled for the bastards, not once. I tell them to go fuck themselves every time they try to make me crawl.” Whitman’s eyes turned to piercing black dots. “Sure, they’re going to a lot of trouble to get me. What happens to me is important. Important to them. I’m the punk they can’t beat, see? As long as I’m alive, every cop in this county is a loser, because every time I make a fool of one of them it reflects on all of them—and believe me I’ve made fools of them more than once. The only way they can beat me is to kill me—and that’s what this trial is all about.”

  Cloud studied Whitman soberly, wondering how much was truth, and how much simply egotism. Whitman had served time in Chino, San Quentin, and Folsom, so he’d undoubtedly given the police considerable trouble along the way. But the rest of it—? Cloud found it difficult to believe that the city police, the county sheriff, the district attorney, and the Superior Court would all be involved in such an elaborate conspiracy simply to teach Weldon Whitman a lesson in respect for the law. Especially by sending him to the gas chamber. Still—one never knew.

  The door to the judge’s chambers opened, and the court clerk and G. Foster Klein strode briskly into the courtroom. Cloud glanced around. Several more spectators had entered, and the bailiff had appeared and was having them remove their hats and extinguish their cigarettes. Presently Cloud noticed a tall woman pass through the rails and begin setting up a stenographic machine at the court reporter’s table.

  “I got one lucky break,” Whitman said. “The court reporter at my trial died before he could complete the transcript. I might be able to get a new trial because of it.”

  “You mean the old man with the hearing aid?”

  “Yeah. Keeled over three days after the trail ended. One of the deputies said it was a heart attack.”

  “You call that a lucky break?” Cloud said. “An old man dying like that?”

  “That’s not what I meant,” Whitman replied, his voice growing cool. “I meant it was a lucky break that he didn’t get around to finishing the transcript before he died.”

  Cloud felt himself flush slightly. “Sorry,” he muttered, and shifted his gaze away from the condemned man’s flat, hard stare. What in hell am I trying to do? Cloud wondered. That was the second time in just a few minutes that he had tried to discredit Whitman. He saw that Whitman was still staring at him. “I misunderstood you, that’s all,” he said.

  “Forget it,” Whitman said.

  A buzzer sounded; a moment later the chamber door opened and Judge Lukey emerged. “Everybody rise!” the bailiff ordered. “Department Four of the Superior Court is now in session, the Honorable Carl V. Lukey, judge presiding. Be seated and remain quiet in the courtroom!”

  The aged jurist ascended the bench and opened a single manila folder. “State of California versus Weldon Whitman,” he announced. “Is the defendant present?”

  Whitman rose behind the counsel table. “Present,” he said simply.

  “State present?” Lukey asked.

  “Present, your honor,” Klein said from the opposite table.

  “This being the time and place set for judgment and sentence in this matter,” Lukey intoned, “is there any legal cause why such judgment and sentence should not now be pronounced?”

  “The defendant is absolutely innocent of the charges,” Whitman said for the record.

  “That,” countered the elderly jurist, “is a personal opinion of defendant and does not constitute legal cause. Anything else?”

  Whitman remained silent.

  “Very well then,” said Lukey, “there appearing to be no legal cause contrary to sentencing, it is the judgment and sentence of this court that you, Weldon Whitman, be delivered by the sheriff of this county into the custody of the warden of the state penitentiary at San Quentin, and there, at a date and time later to be fixed by this court, be by him put to death in the manner prescribed by law: to wit, the administration of lethal gas.”

  Robert Cloud, listening; absorbing each precisely spoken word of the judgment, felt his mouth go suddenly dry and found that, although he wanted to and tried, he could not swallow. It was a strange and distasteful experience for him, to sit and listen to one man tell another that he must die, and not only tell him he must, but also where and by whose hand and how. In an instant it all seemed barbar
ic, venomous, almost blasphemous, as if an invasion had been made into the domain of God.

  And, Cloud realized, it was not yet over, for Judge Lukey was still speaking. Frowning, the reporter leaned forward a fraction. His lips parted in incredulity as he became aware of a reiteration of the exact words intoned so emotionlessly a moment before; and he grasped then that the judge was sentencing Whitman to death a second time. He recalled Lew Lach’s crude observation: Now they can gas him twice.

  Is this right? Cloud wondered. Is this good law? The man hasn’t killed anyone; he hasn’t taken the life of another human being. Is this punishment just?

  He tried to moisten his lips, but his tongue was dry and thick and useless to him. The judge’s voice continued to flow into his head and register words like banner headlines in his mind. Down the list of charges the jurist’s monotone went, sounding heavily with doom. For the third and fourth kidnapping charges the convicted man received two life sentences without possibility of parole. For the two sexperversion charges, fifteen years each; for the attempted rape, five years; for the auto theft, three years; for the assault and battery, two years; for assault with a deadly weapon, five years; for attempted robbery, two years; and for the eight charges of armed robbery, a total of eighty years. All to run consecutively, which meant that in the event the death sentences were not carried out, the prisoner would have to serve one hundred twenty-seven years before beginning his life sentences.

  This is incredible, Cloud thought. This isn’t justice; it’s some grotesque parody of justice. Even if Whitman were guilty of every charge in the indictment, did this punishment fit his crimes? Two death sentences, two life terms, more than a hundred years in other sentences—and for what? Robberies? Hardly. Assaults? One woman slapped across the face, one man hit in the jaw with a gun barrel. Brutal, yes, but certainly not gas-chamber offenses. Kidnappings, then? Not the two technical incidents; those were ridiculous. And the other two? They were real enough; but did the victims actually suffer bodily harm? Was being forced to commit an act of fellatio that irreparable, that permanently damaging?