The Devil's Stocking
Page 10
Calhoun liked Lowry. Most people did. He’d been a puncher in his day and tried to make punchers out of his fighters. Most of them weren’t. You could teach a kid balance, how to move and how to throw combinations; but you couldn’t teach him to have power. He might be strong as seven, but that wasn’t the name of the game. It was in sensing how to use it, and few had that sense. Watching Lowry’s latest ‘good-looking kid’, a light-heavy out of North Africa who’d already won half a dozen fights here with great ease, Calhoun’s guess was that he’d be back in Casablanca in six months.
He suited up and saw a middleweight, moving about the ring, whom he recognized.
“How you doin’, old billy goat?” he greeted him.
It was Salazar, to whom he’d lost, after being outbutted, in Union City. Salazar came to the ropes and looked down. His right eye appeared to be slightly crossed and he gave Calhoun no sign of recognition. He merely gestured, with his glove, inviting Calhoun into the ring.
Lowry handed Calhoun headgear. “José don’t remember too good,” he warned Calhoun.
“I remember him, ’’Calhoun assured Lowry.
Salazar came at him as though he were still fighting the bout in Union City, forcing Calhoun to his right. He had to keep wheeling to the right to avoid Salazar’s left. Calhoun jolted him twice with left hooks. The man still, after all these years, had no defense. When Lowry called time, Calhoun climbed down out of the ring.
“This dude is still fighting-mad,” he told Lowry laughingly, handing him the headgear. “I don’t need no billy goat like that.”
Calhoun drove two blocks from Lowry’s and stopped, against a red light, still thinking of that poor punch-drunk Salazar, and wondering whether the Boxing Commission still permitted him to fight, when a police car drove up beside him.
“‘Keep your hands off the wheel!’” Calhoun recalls, was his first police warning, “and I can tell you I kept my hands off. Two squad cars, both loaded. They handcuffed me behind my back. When they shoved me into the police car I thought we were going to the station, it was only a couple of blocks away.
“No way. They drove me up to Garrett Mountain, above Paterson, by then there were six squad cars behind us in unmarked cars. What they had in mind, at that moment, I didn’t know then and I don’t know now. Two detectives in front of me and one on either side—one of them a black dude. I’d seen him somewheres before but I hadn’t known, wherever that was, that he was on the force.
“When we got up on that stupid mountain we just parked and waited. Their microphone kept chattering, it was real excited. But I couldn’t make out what about. We stayed up there the whole afternoon until somebody said ‘Bring him in.’
“They locked me and I couldn’t get in touch with nobody two whole days. The second day a trusty slipped me a note from somebody held in protective custody on the third floor. Name of Baxter. So I knew who the witness was the papers had been talking about.
“Baxter wrote me that a conspiracy to charge me with murder had begun while I was in South America. He himself, he told me, was in no way implicated! He was only being held as a material witness. This dude has to be a space cadet, was what I thought.
“‘Nobody living in Jersey City,’ he wrote to me, ‘could have committed those murders and remained in the city because there are too many paid informers for the police not to have heard something. Rewards,’ he wrote, ‘of twelve thousand five hundred dollars had been posted for information leading to the conviction of the killer or killers.’
“I realized that he was trying to collect the reward money and at the same time to protect himself against getting killed for it.”
“Do you feel vengeful toward Baxter?” a reporter asked Calhoun.
“Toward that pitiful boy?” Calhoun appeared surprised by the question. “No way. Baxter is merely a product of the penal merry-go-round. He is like one of those creatures who are born without a digestive tract; he had to live off the tracts of others. When I feel vindictive it has to be toward a man worthy of my vindictiveness.”
Calhoun named no names.
The judge’s forebears had been German Jews of that highly assimilable tribe who had made such excellent Germans of themselves; and, the moment they’d passed the Statue of Liberty, had become the most American of Americans. Grandfather Turkowitz had changed the family name, at Ellis Island, to Turner. His grandson, now presiding over the criminal court in Jersey City, had been named after Grover Cleveland.
The Turners had never seen Delancey Street, nor Hester. Their friends had never been Jews. Their friends, from the beginning, had been Anglo-Saxon suburban types who belonged to country clubs with constitutions limiting membership to white Christians.
Judge Grover Cleveland Turner had himself married into a Christian family; his two daughters were blue-eyed blondes. Yet he had always been privately aware that he owed his rise, from practicing attorney to district attorney to a judgeship, to some shadowy figure chanting, head bowed, in a long-abandoned synagogue of Galicia. He had retained a talmudic mind.
New Jersey vs. Ruby Calhoun was the first occasion in which Judge Turner had presided over a criminal case. He was not made uneasy by that: he liked the challenge. He was a small, slight man who carried himself with the cockiness of the actor Claude Rains; and, indeed, in his youth, that actor had been Judge Turner’s model for the face and figure he now turned to the world.
“Capital punishment may exist as something distasteful to you,” Judge Turner advised one prospective juror, “but what you are being asked here is whether you will be able to support a first-degree murder conviction without recommendation of mercy—should the evidence so warrant—despite your personal reluctance.”
A first-degree murder conviction, without recommendation of mercy, automatically demanded the death penalty under New Jersey law. Recommendation of mercy reduced it to life imprisonment.
“What the court is trying to do here,” Calhoun’s attorney, Ben Raymond, protested, “is to seat a special class of jurors, all of whom believe firmly in capital punishment.” Raymond was a black man.
“Helen Shane was on the floor between the bar and the air conditioner,” Eric Heim recalled on the stand, at Raymond’s opening query. “I didn’t touch nobody, I just set on the stool. I was bleeding and bleeding. I just waited for the police.”
“How tall was the man with the revolver?”
“I only seen him like, I just turn here and see this woman, I wouldn’t even know if she had glasses on. I seen that miserable gun all right. I seen that. I think he had a little mustache, like I said, and that’s all I can say about it.”
“I show you a report,” Raymond persisted, “indicating you had told the police you had seen a light-skinned black man wearing a pencil-line mustache, about six feet tall or slightly taller. Is that correct?”
“No!” Heim shouted. “I told Gallegher the man had a dark mustache, well, it was a mustache, whatever you want to call it. I didn’t look at him that long, I told Gallegher I couldn’t identify him. Do I have to say this or do I have to?” Heim turned to the judge to ask, “because at that time I was in shock.”
Calhoun is five foot eight, dark-skinned, and was wearing a Fu Manchu.
Miss Violet Vance had been watching television, one floor above the tavern, while Heim and Vincio had been shooting pool.
“I was lying on my couch,” she remembered, “I’d fallen asleep. I was wakened by a loud noise. It sounded like a big bang. I heard two more noises, I thought Dude was closing up. I saw the neon sign still lit. I heard a voice saying, ‘Oh no.’ An excited voice. It sounded like a woman’s. It was coming from the tavern, it sounded. I went to my bedroom and saw a white car double-parked in the middle of the street. I saw a colored man come running out of the bar to the car. It was white and he had taillights like two triangles starting at the outside of the car and narrowing at the center. He jumped into the driver’s seat and wheeled off. I didn’t see any weapon.”
“Did yo
u see anyone else in the car?”
“No. But the way he took off I figured something was wrong. I tried to get the license plate numbers but I couldn’t make out the lettering or the numbers, but I saw they were dark plates with yellow or gold lettering, not a Jersey plate. I saw the car pull away and threw on a raincoat and went downstairs into the tavern. I saw Eric Heim holding on to a pole. I started to walk toward him and just past the pool table I saw Helen Shane. Her head was by the juke, laying on her back. Then I saw the man.”
“What man?”
“The man standing in the door. He was holding it open. I just looked at him. He just looked at me. Finally he said, ‘Stay where you are. Don’t move.’ It was like in a dream.
“Then I saw Eric had blood on his head. I saw by the way he was holding the pole he needed help, and I went to him.”
“Was the man who told you to stop where you were white or black?” “White.”
“Had you ever seen him before?”
“In the tavern.”
“What was his name?”
“All I ever heard him called was Nick.”
“Do you see him in this courtroom?”
“Yes.” (Rising, she approached a short, heavyset youth of twenty or twenty-one, sitting on the witnesses’ bench, and pointed to him.)
“When you heard the command: ‘Stay where you are! Don’t come in!’ it was from this man, and he was inside the bar?”
“That’s right. And he kept coming toward me, walking along the bar, then he went behind the bar.”
“He went past Mrs. Shane?”
“Yes.”
“He went past Vincio still sitting at the bar?”
“Yes.”
“What did you do?”
“I went to Helen Shane. I knelt down alongside of her. She asked me to phone her boyfriend. She was shortwinded, very faint. She had on a black uniform and the whole top of it was like a rust color. I called her boyfriend. I saw a police car pull up and a civilian car behind it. Officer told me to go look at the tailgate of the civilian car. I walked around behind it and looked at the taillights and they were the same as the ones I’d seen from my bedroom window.”
“Did you look behind the bar?”
“Yes. I saw Dude Leonard lying on the floor with money all around him.”
“When I brought Mr. Calhoun into the operating room,” Detective Mooney recalled, “Eric Heim was incoherent, hollering and mumbling. The doctors were trying to subdue him and treat him all at the same time.”
“Did he have a full chance to look at Calhoun there?”
“He did, but he was not able to identify Calhoun as the gunman. He was unsure of what he’d seen. He said, All niggers look alike to me.’
“In the latter part of July,” the same detective went on, “I spoke with Mr. Iello in a tavern then called Pete’s Playpen. He brought a beer to where I was sitting and asked me did I remember him and I said I did. ‘I never told the police,’ he then told me voluntarily, ‘but someone else was with me that night.’ And gave me the name Dexter Baxter. We’d been on the hawks for Rabbit Baxter for a stickup and an escape. He wasn’t hard to catch but he was hard as hell to hold. We apprehended him along with Esteban Escortez, and tied him into four armed robberies. Then we questioned him about the triple homicide at the Melody. Every question we asked Baxter, he made a wild dash for the door—in his mind. Fortunately, we had him shackled.
“He admitted he was with Mr. Iello and that he’d seen a car with two occupants, one of whom had been a woman. He’d heard shots, but had seen no shooting, he told us. Two weeks later I saw Mr. Iello going into a tavern and followed him in.
“‘You look scared, Iello,’ I told him, sitting down beside him.
“‘I’m all messed up since that shooting,’ he told me. ‘A black gal hit on me, ‘Forget the whole thing or you’ll regret it,’ she told me. ‘You talk to the police you’ll take the consequences.’ There was a redheaded nigger a few feet away. I’d seen him around, he used to be some sort of fighter. I seen him once in the Jersey City Armory. He said nothing but I thought they were together.’
“‘Who do you think did the shooting?’ I then asked him. ‘You had the man and you let him go,’ he tells me. ‘What man was that, Iello?’ He just shakes his head, No, he ain’t talking. ‘Was it Tiger Keller, Iello?’ He shakes his head, No. No again. Then he says, ‘His initials are R.C.’
“‘Why has it taken you so long to tell us this?’ I asked him.
“‘R.C. has friends,’ he tells me. “I’m a parolee. I have a brother in Trenton. I have to think about him. If you try to use this conversation I’ll deny everything.’
“He had to have protection, that much was certain. So we brought him in handcuffed but not under arrest. Handcuffing was his own idea. He wanted to give the impression that he was being taken by force. He didn’t want to look, in the papers, like a man volunteering information, which is what he was. The poor clown was really caught. He’d caught hisself.”
“The handcuffing,” Sergeant Mooney added, “was just to make him feel a little secure. He feared for his life. That was why we quartered him in Atlantic City. He felt he was in peril of suffering great bodily harm. De Vivani promised him protection and made good on that promise.”
“We got a call there was trouble at the Melody,” Sergeant Conroy supported Mooney’s testimony. “At the intersection of Jefferson and Twelfth a white car shot across our lights, it had a foreign [out-of-state] license. We shot down McLean to Route 4 and came over the underpass into East Jersey City where you can look down Route 4 for quite a distance. We didn’t see it so we did a U-turn and just as we reached the bus station we seen a white car cut across Jefferson at Twenty-ninth. We stopped it at Thirtieth. A black man was driving, and there was a girl lying down in the rear seat. It was a rented car.”
“Who was the driver?”
“Ruby Calhoun. We checked them out and let them go. Half an hour after, at the intersection of Eighteenth and Broad, we came up against the same white car. We pulled it over to the curb. Now there was only one person in the car—Calhoun. We told him to turn around and follow us back to the station.”
“Do you have testimony sir,” Raymond asked Mooney, “that this was the same car you’d seen speeding past you toward New York City?”
“What testimony?” Judge Turner interposed. “Testimony from whom?”
“The officer’s own testimony, your honor,” Raymond assured the judge, and turned back to the witness. “How many police cars were at the scene when you returned there with Calhoun?”
Six or seven.
“How large a crowd?”
“Enormous.”
“What was your reason for bringing him there instead of directly to headquarters?”
“After all, sir, he was only a suspect. I had no reason to actually take him to headquarters.”
“What was your purpose in pursuing such a roundabout route to catch the car that got away?”
“I felt that, it being an out-of-state car, when they reached Thirtieth Street they’d find themselves in a dead end. They would have had to make either a right or a left turn there in order to get out of town.”
“And what happened?”
“We lost it.”
“You have no specific knowledge of what happened to that car?”
“It could have proceeded, turned around, done anything. And when we returned to the scene of the homicides a man told us he’d been chased down an alley by a black man with a revolver.”
State prosecutor Scott then took over the examination of Nick Iello.
“Mr. Iello, do you see the man whom you saw coming out of the Melody Bar and Grill immediately after three persons had been shot dead inside it?”
“I do.”
“Please point him out.”
Iello rose, moved half a dozen steps toward Calhoun, then pointed directly at him and returned to the witness chair.
“What did you do then?”
“Don’t tell us what she said,” Judge Turner cautioned Iello.
“‘Please help,’” Iello went on all the same, “then she grabbed my arm and I just backed up because there was blood over everything. I stood up. As I stood up two things happened. This man sitting at the thing. He stood up and said something about going to the men’s room. But just about the same time in the door came a girl. She stopped for a minute. She walked over and screamed. She left. I walked down here. Around the bar. To the cash register. I took a dime and went back around the bar and phoned the police.”
Ben Raymond took over the witness:
“Did you tell Sergeant Mooney that whoever you’d seen had chased you up the street?”
“Yes.”
“That’s not true, is it?”
“Not actually.”
“You served in the armed forces?”
“Yes.”
“How were you discharged?”
“Fraudulent enlistment.”
“Undesirable discharge?”
“Yes.”
“You served some time in the stockade after a general court-martial, did you not?”
“Yes sir, I have a fradulent enlistment discharge. Undesirable conditions because I was on parole from Jamesburg when I entered the service. I was seventeen.”
“And because you beat up another soldier and served time in the stockade for that?”
“The charge was not for beating up anybody. The charge was because I hadn’t mentioned I was on parole.”
“Now sir, with respect to the indictment number nine-eight-eight-dash-six-one, did you, with another individual, plead guilty to nine-eight-eight-dash-six-one, which indictment states that you unlawfully and feloniously made an assault upon one Imogene McElway against her will and by violence and putting her into fear, from the person and against the will of the said Imogene McElway then and there did feloniously, forcibly and violently to steal, take away and carry the same. Did you plead guilty to that?”