Mark the Sparrow

by Clark Howard

  Glad you liked the title. I thought it very appropriate. Enclosed are the next eight pages.

  Cloud read the note and shook his head in irritation. Not a mention of the extensive rewriting he had proposed; not a word of agreement or disagreement with anything he had said in his letter.

  Cloud shot a quick note back to him:

  Did you read my letter??? I asked how you felt about my approach. I feel it is essential that we reach a definite understanding. Are you in agreement or aren’t you?

  To which Whitman calmly replied:

  If I were not in agreement with your proposal I would not have sent you the next eight pages.

  Please keep in mind that in addition to writing this book I am studying law books and preparing an appeal.

  There is nothing I would like better than to enter into lengthy correspondence with you—but unfortunately my time is limited. Very limited.

  This time Cloud read Whitman’s reply with chagrin rather than irritation. Whitman was right, or course. The man was facing death in the gas chamber, and he, Cloud, was making an issue of his not answering letters in the proper manner.

  Late one morning, nearly three months after starting on Room 22, Hotel Death, Cloud was called into Hoskins’s office.

  “I want you to go down to the Hall of Justice right after lunch,” he said, speaking as usual around a fat black cigar. He thumbed through the top pages of a scratch pad and tore one of them off. He tossed it to the edge of the desk. “Go to Department Six of Superior Court. There’s a jury trial about to begin there: five punks from some motorcycle gang, up for battery, rape, and sex perversion. The jury was picked this morning, so the opening statements by the prosecution and defense are first on the agenda for this afternoon. Go see the court clerk; he’ll give you a transcript of the preliminary hearing, plus the Superior Court proceedings so far: names of the jurors and so on. Slip him five bucks and fill out a voucher for it when you get back.”

  Hoskins leaned precariously far back in his chair; he re moved the cigar from his mouth and looked up at the ceiling.

  “Stay in the courtroom for the afternoon session. Look around, observe: especially the five punks. I want a story with some drama in it, some social comment, something to hook the readers for a possible series on motorcycle gangs and how their existence affects society as a whole. Give me something with a point of view, something creative.”

  The day editor jammed the cigar back into his mouth and suddenly sat upright again. His eyes narrowed at Cloud.

  “You got all that?”

  “Got it,” Cloud assured him.

  Cloud went back to his desk, quickly finished a story he was doing, and walked the page over to the city desk. Lew Lach was working the desk.

  “I’m checking out for the afternoon,” he told Lach. “On assignment for Hoskins.”

  “Anything interesting?”

  “Yeah, big bus wreck out on Interstate 15,” Cloud said straightfaced. “Bus was carrying a girls’ wiffle-ball team from some junior college. At least a dozen dead.”

  “Listen, I’ll take it for you if you want me to—”

  “I’d better not, Lew. The old man wants a story with some social comment in it.”

  “Social comment? In a story about a bus wreck? I think he’s been playing with himself again. Listen, get a lot of pictures, will you?”

  “Sure, sure.” Cloud walked away, vaguely wondering why he had put Lach on like that. Maybe it was the job; maybe he was getting tired of this one too. Damned if he knew why, but after he had been around a paper for ninety days or so, he just couldn’t seem to maintain any job interest at all. Three months: that was about the extent of his interest span. After that he went from boredom to apathy to lethargy. Then he quit and moved on.

  Except that in this case he probably wouldn’t quit. He’d already stuck it out six months. Because of Laurel.

  With his coat over his shoulder, he rode the elevator downstairs and walked out onto the street. There was a northbound bus waiting at the corner, and by hurrying he was able to board it. He found a seat by the window and slumped into it. Almost at once, he began thinking about Room 22, Hotel Death.

  In the weeks since he had begun work on Whitman’s book, Cloud had given little thought to anything else. At the paper, he went through the motions of doing his job. When he was with Laurel, he did pretty much the same, giving to their dates whatever he felt was required of him, but contributing nothing extra. His sex drive had decelerated considerably. He made no more intercourse demands of her, and in fact engaged in sex at all now more as a result of her initiative than his.

  The book had become the whole thing with him; it was something that did hold his interest, something that challenged him, something he felt good doing. He worked and reworked the pages, feeling his writing technique honing down to a fine edge. He watched the manuscript metamorphose from Whitman’s handwritten white sheets to his own handwritten yellow sheets to a typed yellow copy to a final typed white copy on the best-grade bond paper he could afford. He watched the manuscript grow and he was proud of it; he was proud of it somewhat the way a father is proud of a child whom he has created and is watching grow.

  Getting off the bus in the Los Angeles Civic Center, he continued to think of Weldon Whitman—now not as much in terms of the book, as in actual memory of the times they had met: the first two times right in this very Hall of Justice, then on Death Row. It was odd to realize that all the things Whitman was writing about now, times and events which came before him, would eventually progress to a point where he himself would be included. In helping Whitman to tell his story, he had in fact become part of the story. Whether Whitman was guilty or innocent, whether he lived or died, whether he was remembered or forgotten, Robert Cloud now shared part of the responsibility for it.

  Cloud entered the Hall of Justice and took the elevator up to Department Six. The court clerk was eating a sandwich at his desk. Cloud got the transcript from him and paid him five dollars as Hoskins had instructed. Going back downstairs to the lobby, he bought a packaged sandwich and an orange drink at the snack counter, and found a vacant bench where he could sit and read the transcript.

  The defendants were five men between the ages of twenty-two and twenty-five, and all members of a motorcycle club known as the Black Jacks. Some two months earlier, the five had attended a Saturday-night party in Long Beach, fifteen miles south of Los Angeles. The party was held in a municipal housing project containing apartments for both low-income civilian families and dependents of Navy enlisted personnel stationed at Long Beach Navy Yard. The party was in a basement room of a twelve-unit building tenanted by both civilian and Navy families.

  The party was an informal affair; the participants furnished their own beer and other refreshments. The host, also a member of the Black Jacks, lived in the building. There were five or six other Black Jacks present, and about two dozen more persons who drifted in and out during the evening.

  Shortly before midnight, a young Navy wife who lived in the building entered the basement laundry room to retrieve a bundle of clothes she had put into the coin-operated dryer several hours earlier. Another young woman, a neighbor who was attending the party, invited the sailor’s wife to join them. At first she declined: her husband was out on a practice cruise, and their year-old infant was alone in the apartment. After much urging, however, the sailor’s wife did agree to join the party just long enough to have one glass of beer.

  She stayed for approximately fifteen minutes and then excused herself. One of the defendants followed her into the laundry room and offered to carry the basket of clothes upstairs for her. She attempted to decline, but the defendant insisted; she finally consented to let him carry the basket as far as her apartment door and led the way to the second-floor apartment. Unknown to her, the man’s four friends followed a short distance behind.

  At the door to her apartment, the defendant asked if she would invite him inside. She declined, saying her baby was as
leep. The defendant persisted; when the woman continued to refuse, he forced his way past the door and grabbed her by the throat with both hands, threatening to choke her if she screamed for help. The four co-defendants, who had been watching from the stairwell, hurried into the apartment and locked the door behind them.

  At this point the young woman extricated herself from the defendant’s hold and screamed loudly. She was slapped heavily across the face by the defendant and one of the co-defendants; she fell to the floor, dazed. The defendant and one of the co-defendants then carried her into the small bedroom.

  The victim was stripped and forcibly raped, by each of the five in turn. Later she was forced to commit what the state termed an unnatural sex act by copulating with her mouth the penis of the defendant and one of the codefendants, as well as being subjected to various other sexual indignities. The five defendants remained in the apartment for approximately two hours, helping themselves freely to the victim’s food, drink, and cigarettes.

  After warning the victim not to mention what had happened, the defendants returned to the party. The victim took her baby and ran to a friend’s apartment in another section of the housing project. The friend called the police, and the victim furnished them with full details of the attack. Three police units were called and the victim accompanied the officers back to the party. Three of the five defendants were seized then; the other two were arrested the following day.

  The victim was hospitalized about three hours after the attack. She was treated for superficial bruises, minor internal abrasions of the vagina, and mild shock; she was released the following morning. Her husband, granted emergency leave, returned from his cruise by helicopter.

  The five defendants were held to answer the charges at a preliminary hearing and were bound over to the Superior Court for trial. Two of them had private attorneys; the other three were represented by the public defender’s office.

  Robert Cloud’s eyes swept the last line of the transcript, and he shook his head. Thoughts flashed through his mind: how terrified the sailor’s wife must have been; how her husband must have felt when he found out what had happened; how their future together, their very lives, would be marked by the memory of that one awful night. He could not help thinking briefly of Weldon Whitman. Frowning thoughtfully, he finished the last of his sandwich and went back upstairs to Department Six.

  As he sat down in the press section, Cloud saw a familiar figure enter from the judge’s chambers and walk over to the prosecutor’s table. It was G. Foster Klein, the district attorney’s chief prosecutor, the man who had convicted Weldon Whitman.

  “Hello, Mr. Klein. I’m Robert Cloud of the Ledger—”

  The dapper little lawyer turned, smiling. “Of course. How are you, Cloud? Nice to see you again.”

  “No hard feelings?” Cloud asked.

  “Certainly not. Not a bit.” His smiled widened. “Scrutiny like that keeps us on our toes. You covering this trial?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, you’re just in time.”

  “I’ve been reading the report of the preliminary hearing,” Cloud remarked. “Looks like you’ve got five more candidates for the Death House.”

  “Well, it isn’t quite as bad as that,” Klein said casually. “I expect they’ll get nice long sentences, though.”

  “You’re not asking for the death penalty?”

  “Oh, no. Not on rape and sex-preversion charges. The death sentence is reserved for murder and kidnapping offenses.”

  Cloud frowned and pursed his lips for a moment. “I thought the crimes in this case were very similar to those in the Whitman case. How is it that these five didn’t get charged with kidnapping?”

  “The best we could have done would have been technical kidnapping charges,” Klein explained. “Moving the victim from one room to another. I don’t think the charge would have held up—not for a death sentence, anyway. Even in the Whitman case, we asked for one of our death sentences on that technical charge of moving the store owner and his clerk into a back room, and the jury denied it.”

  “Yes,” said Cloud, “but on the kidnapping charge based on the crime against Doris Calder, he did receive the death penalty, for moving her from one car to another car twenty feet away. And she wasn’t subjected to near what this woman went through.”

  “Granted, she wasn’t,” Klein admitted, “but there’s a very important difference between the two incidents: The law calls for the death penalty only if the victim suffers bodily harm after being kidnapped for the purpose of robbery. Whitman looted Doris Calder’s purse while he had her in his car, so we were able to prove robbery as the motive for the kidnapping. Even on his other death sentence, we proved that same motive because he attempted to rob the Luza girl; she didn’t have any money on her person, however.” The prosecutor paused to nod at one of the defense attorneys who had just arrived. “Now, in the case of this sailor’s wife,” he went on, “the motive was obviously rape and not robbery—”

  “But they did commit robbery,” Cloud pointed out. “Not money, of course, but they stole her cigarettes and food. That’s still robbery, isn’t it?”

  “Very definitely. The point is, did they invade the victim’s apartment primarily to assault her or to rob her? I believe they did it to assault her. They had sex on their minds, not a few cans of beer and a couple of packs of cigarettes.”

  “Couldn’t the same thing be said of Whitman?” Cloud argued. “In the case of Doris Calder, he robbed—or was convicted of robbing—her companion while they were both in the man’s car, and then he forced Mrs. Calder to accompany him back to his own car. When he got her there, he took what money she had in her purse, then made her go down on him. If his primary intent had been merely to rob her, wouldn’t he have done it when he robbed her companion? The only reason for taking her back to his car was for the head job. How can you justify a death penalty in Whitman’s case and then not even ask for it in the case of these five defendants?”

  “Well, first of all, Mr. Cloud,” Klein said, stiffening, “I’m not attempting to justify anything; I don’t have to. The policy of the district attorney’s office is to ask the court for the maximum sentence which it feels a judge or jury will allow—”

  “Who decided when to go for the limit and when not to? Who makes the decision to send Weldon Whitman to the Death House and then says that five rapist punks will only go to jail?”

  “The facts decided that for us, Mr. Cloud.” Klein’s voice had now turned very cool and his face had lost its amiable expression. “The facts of the crime tell us what we have to prove. The facts of the evidence tell us what we can prove.”

  “Well, I’m no lawyer, Mr. Klein,” Cloud said flatly, “but I do deal in facts. And from the facts I’ve read in this case, it seems to me that it would be just as proper for you to ask for death sentenses for these five as it was to ask for death sentences for Weldon Whitman. That naturally makes me wonder why you aren’t doing it, Mr. Klein. It makes me wonder if perhaps there might not be some truth in a statement Whitman made just before he was convicted.”

  “What statement was that?” Klein asked crisply.

  “A statement to the effect that he was being persecuted by your office, the county sheriff’s office, and the city police department, because he had spit in your faces so many times.”

  “That’s absurd.”

  “Is it, Mr. Klein?” Cloud could feel anger building up inside him—anger at a system of justice that had such a flexible code of selectivity.

  Cloud stared relentlessly at the man who had put Weldon Whitman on Death Row. Whatever Whitman had done, he had not committed murder. But this man Klein and the office he represented would have committed murder if the state executed Whitman in the gas chamber. Legal murder, to be sure. But murder all the same, if only because they had arbitrarily selected him for the gas chamber.

  And that, he decided, was how he would write the story.

  “You’ll have to excuse me now, Mr. Cl
oud,” the prosecutor said, not bothering to conceal his hostility. “Court is about to convene.”

  Yes, Cloud thought, it is.

  That night in Laurel’s apartment, Cloud let her read a carbon of the story he had filed for the morning editions. Comparing the Whitman and Black Jacks cases, the story was a scathing denouncement of the ethics of the district attorney’s office.

  “What do you think?” he asked when she had finished.

  Laurel shook her head. “I don’t know, Rob. It’s very well written, of course, like everything you do, but …”

  “But what?”

  “Well, it—it doesn’t really read like what you ordinarily find in a newspaper. It’s more like—well, like an argument rather than a newspaper story.”

  “That’s what Hoskins asked for; I told you that. He said he wanted something creative, something with a point of view—”

  “Yes, but you also said he, was interested in a possible series of articles on motorcycle gangs. Most of what you’ve written is about your friend Weldon Whitman and why he’s been sentenced to the gas chamber and these five men won’t be.”

  “Exactly. That’s the whole point of it.” Cloud rose from the couch and paced the room. “Here we have five guys who have committed crimes almost identical to the crimes for which Whitman was convicted and sentenced to death. Sure, there are slight legal differences in the particular, acts, but basically they’re the same crimes: robbery, kidnapping, and what the state calls sex perversion. Now, Whitman is convicted and gets the death sentence—two death sentences, to be exact. But with the five punks, for the same crimes, the state doesn’t even ask for the death penalty. The state puts them on trial for sex perversion and for rape. They don’t even charge them with robbery, much less kidnapping. Why? What’s the difference?”

  Laurel shrugged.

  “I’ll tell you,” said Cloud. “There are five defendants in this trial instead of one. One man getting the death penalty on this kind of kidnapping charge the public might let slide past; but five—never. There’d be more committees and organizations and movements to save them than this town ever saw before. There’d be petitions and letters to the editor and pickets around the Hall of Justice and everything else. And at the next election there’d be a new district attorney, and the present district attorney—and his chief prosecutor—would be out of jobs. So the first reason is that the people in the district attorney’s office are afraid they couldn’t get away with it!