Death Sentence (6 page)

He kept the wallet in the same pocket as the gun for two reasons. If a mugger demanded his wallet he could produce the gun instead. But if a policeman went into that pocket Paul wanted him to find the $250 cash in the wallet.

The two kids watched him from the corner behind him: he saw their reflections in the rear window of a panel truck as he walked by it. They were all jerks and jitters: wired as if they'd been plugged into a wall outlet. Addicts? He had no way of diagnosing; maybe they were only natural mannerisms. But when he reached the end of the block and continued along the second block he had a chance, when looking both ways for traffic before crossing the street, to see the two kids out of the corner of his eye and they were following him at a discreet distance. His hands began to sweat: the familiar telltale.

He slowed the pace imperceptibly. His car was near the end of the block. A block farther along the empty street a traffic light blinked red, on and off. Daylight was draining out of the sky. He tasted the brass of fear on his tongue.

The two kids were running now. He heard them come.

8

¶
CHICAGO, DEC. 19TH
—Two teen-age boys were shot to death on the South Side late yesterday, apparently by the same revolver that has killed three others on Chicago streets in the past 72 hours.

The boys, Ernesto Delgado, 16, and his brother Julio, 15, of 4415 W. 21st Place, were found dead on a Wolcott Avenue sidewalk at 5:10 p.m. yesterday by a passing Chicago police patrol car.

According to a preliminary examination by the police laboratory, the bullets that killed the Delgado brothers may have been fired by the same .38 revolver alleged to have been the weapon used in last night's killing of James Washington, 26, on Lowe Avenue, and in the prior night's homicides on North Mohawk, the victims of which were identified as Edward A. Smith, 23, and Leroy Thompson, 22.

Police Captain Victor Mastro this morning said, “We may have a ‘vigilante' on our hands.”

Mastro spoke in reference to the recent spate of “vigilante” killings in New York City. They have been discussed widely by the national press and television.

The three adult homicide victims all had criminal records, Mastro said. And while juvenile records cannot be published, a police spokesman remarked that the Delgado brothers were alleged to have been heroin addicts. A neighbor, interviewed this morning, described the two boys as “violent and vicious kids.”

Captain Mastro stated that photographs of the bullets in all five cases have been sent to New York for comparison with those found in the bodies of the victims of the alleged “vigilante” killer in that city.

Chicago Police Chief John Colburn, asked to comment, said, “I'd rather not speculate at this point until we've got more facts to work on. At the moment we've assigned detectives to investigate these homicides and the connection, if any, between them. It's too early to jump to conclusions.”

A “VIGILANTE” IN CHICAGO?

Commentary

by Michael Ludlow

Reports from the police blotter indicate that a “vigilante”-style executioner may be prowling the streets of Chicago, possibly inspired by the New York killings attributed to that city's unidentified “vigilante.”

Whether or not such vigilantes exist, speculation and rumor have fostered a wave of emphasis on the “crime problem” which seems unprecedented even in this age of soaring crime rates and law-and-order politics.

Despite the nation's unemployment, recession, inflation, revelations of political chicanery, crop failures, petroleum and energy crises, and all the other burdens our society has to bear—despite all these tribulations—every poll conducted in the past weeks has indicated emphatically that the “crime crisis” has become the number one concern of Americans, helped along clearly by New York's (and Chicago's?) “vigilante.”

It is a concern that is nearly unique, in that it is shared by members of every economic level, race, age group and region.

Obviously it is more than momentary hysteria. It may be true, as has been alleged, that the “vigilante” is a myth created either by New York's police or by the news media; but the fact remains that crime in America has become a true crisis.

We can't pretend it doesn't exist and hope it will go away. Quibbling about the inaccuracies in the FBI's recent Uniform Crime Report statistics will not change the fact that ordinary people are not safe on the streets, or even in their homes. If a citizen is so terrified that he refuses to leave his locked apartment, he has been deprived of his freedom. His civil liberties have been revoked just as surely as have those of the vigilante's presumed victims.

Vigilantism is not an answer. We cannot solve the crime problem by increasing the number of murders.

But we must act.

It is time our institutions fulfilled the missions for which they were established. The inadequacy of police budgets, the alarming back-up of cases on the calendars of overcrowded criminal courts, the overwhelming prevalence of plea-bargaining in felony cases, and the revolving-door bail-bond situation that puts felons back on the streets within hours after their arrest—all these and other aspects of the police-judicial-penal systems are becoming recognized as intolerable weaknesses that threaten the very survival of our democracy's structure of freedom and law.

Legal punishment, to deter, must be immediate and impartial. The only thing known to deter criminal acts is the reasonable certainty that they will be exposed and that prosecution, conviction and punishment will follow. Without that reasonable certainty we risk the rise of chaotic anarchy in the form of vigilantism—the citizenry taking the law into its own hands, mindlessly and individually. The “vigilante” is ample evidence that our institutions must act now—before it is too late.

9

F
RIDAY EVENING
it began to rain. Reflected neon colors melted and ran along the wet streets. Paul sat in his parked car and switched on the radio softly to have company. Under an awning a man with a square dark beard dressed in black coat and wide black hat was reading a newspaper, turning the pages left to right. Girls in shabby clothes paraded the boulevard under two-dollar umbrellas with a pretended indifference to the eyes that followed them; smudges of dirty illumination drifted across the bellies of the clouds.

Old Town: night life, drunks, tourists, night-blooming girls. Someone came out of a cocktail lounge near the car and a gust of hard rock music blew across the pavement, loud enough to reach Paul's ears despite his closed car windows and the muttering radio. There was a busy singles' club and next door to it a spiritual adviser (Palms Read). The bearded Jew licked his thumb and turned a page of his newspaper. Raindrops glistened, caught in his beard.

Two youths stopped to gaze at the photos under the marquee of a “Topless-Live-Girls” emporium across the street; the youths moved on into the rain, a bit marble-eyed or perhaps it was only the way the lights reflected from their eyes. At the corner they stopped under a hooded whip-lamp on a silvered stalk; their clothes were pasted against them and they must have had rain inside their shoes but they didn't seem to mind. They talked and one of them shrugged and then they moved on.

Paul was watching the drunks emerge from the clubs because those were the obvious marks. He'd seen two couples stagger out of the singles' club but they'd got into a car parked directly across the street. A drunk had come out of the topless joint but he'd been collected by a taxi which evidently had been summoned by phone.

There was a counter food place on the near corner and he could almost smell the vapors of the frying fat; people drifted in and out of the place but one group had taken possession of part of the counter shortly after Paul arrived and they were still there: toughs, the night crazies. He could see them through the smoke-stained plate glass. They'd have been loitering on the street but for the rain. They wore the uniforms of their kind—leather, tight trousers, boots with high heels, the hats tipped far to one side.

After a while one man separated himself from that group and moved into the doorway to look up and down at the street. His face seemed to be covered with sores or the pits of some old disease.

A couple had left the hard rock club. The man with the pitted face watched them unfurl their umbrella and hurry away. Paul watched all of them, his attention returning time after time to the man in the doorway. But the tough didn't move, not even when a tall heavy black man approached the place and had to squeeze past him to get inside.

The old Jew turned another page. Paul wondered what he was waiting for. A friend?

The man with the pitted face stepped out of the doorway after a long time. He crossed to stand under the marquee of the topless club, his hat obscuring the “Go-Go” lettering beside the doors. He lit a cigarette. The light was very low; the cigarette described a red arc in the dimness as it came away from his lips and dimmed.

Paul felt the stir of his blood. He had become sensitive to the subtle recognition signs of the predators. He'd heard it said that in Africa a herd of game antelope might allow a lion to prowl very close by without taking alarm because somehow they could sense whether or not the lion was hungry and if it wasn't hungry it was not to be regarded as a threat. Paul might have passed the man with the pitted face and not given him a thought at another time; but tonight the man was hungry and Paul knew it.

He'd known it the other night—the two men on the stoop near the Irish bar: he'd known they'd come after him.

He knew it the same way with this one. He turned, deciding which bar to go into: he'd follow the same drill, do the drunk act, draw the man with the pitted face after him.

He settled on the singles' bar and got out of the car, locking it behind him, crossing the sidewalk quickly and pausing under the shelter of the awning. He glanced across the street, but the man wasn't watching him—the man's whole attention was fixed on a woman walking wearily past him under an umbrella: a middle-aged woman with a handbag carelessly pendulant from her crooked elbow. Reasonably expensive clothes: a businesswoman perhaps. There were enclaves of fashionable housing in the neighborhood: perhaps she was on her way home after a long day's work keeping the shop open in the Christmas rush.

She wasn't drunk but she dragged her feet, very tired; she turned the corner and went out of sight into a side street and that was when the man with the pitted face made his move. The cigarette dropped into a puddle and the man walked swiftly toward the corner.

Paul turned his collar up against the rain and went across the street, sprinting to dodge a passing car, jumping up on the curb fast enough to avoid being splashed by the tires of the next one.

The man with the pitted face had followed the woman around the corner. Paul approached the corner quickly, pushing both hands into his coat pockets, and made the turn as if it were his own neighborhood and he knew the way home.

The woman was a half block distant. An elderly man approached her.

Paul stopped briefly: there was no sign of the man with the pitted face.

He heard the elderly man speak to the woman with the dignified courtesy of inebriation: “Would you like a drink, madam?”

The woman shook her head and walked past him; the man smiled wistfully and continued toward Paul.

Paul went by him, moving more quickly in the woman's wake: he was looking for the shadow which shouldn't be there.

He overtook the woman. No sign of another presence anywhere; had the elderly drunk scared the predator away?

He went past the slow-moving woman and strode on, nearly a block. Here it was quite dark: the street light at the corner had burned out. It was an unusually narrow street and it had a bad feel.

Paul went up a six-step flight into the covered entrance of a house. He stopped there in complete darkness and turned to look back.