Death Sentence (8 page)

In the first hour the assembly-line procedure disposed of a half-dozen cases of varying degrees of gravity; he had no doubt that the rubber-stamp system had been preceded by back-room agreements between prosecution and defense; it was clear that the judge's boredom was justified: he gave the court's blessing to each prearranged plea, set sentencing dates in those cases that required them, and called for the next case. Only twice were motions for continuance filed by defense attorneys: cases in which evidently no bargain had been achieved.

Crubb was brought in at 11:45 and when Paul looked back he saw the middle-aged woman whose purse Crubb had snatched; she was sitting with a policeman—the young cop without his old Jew's disguise?—and Paul wondered how long they'd been sitting there; he hadn't noticed their arrival.

An overweight lawyer came out of a front pew and walked back to Crubb; there was a brief whispered conference. Crubb and the lawyer moved forward in the aisle, the lawyer doing most of the talking but Crubb's voice was louder. “Yeah but man what's goin' down now? Sure I know it's bad. Anything that's against the law is bad, ain't it? … Man you're a jive-ass, you don't care—what the hell do you care?”

The lawyer talked swiftly and intensely in a voice trained by long practice to reach no farther than his client's ears; Paul couldn't make out a word even though they were sidling past him at arm's length. It was easy enough to guess the gist of the lawyer's monologue. He settled in a front pew with Crubb and kept talking low and fast while the case before the court was decided and then it was Crubb's turn and he went through the gate and paused to look back across the room. His eyes were set very high in his badly pitted face. They were fixed for a moment with arrogant brutality on the middle-aged woman, his victim, the witness; then the lawyer took Crubb's elbow and steered him to the defense table and they stood waiting while the participants of the previous case put their papers together and left the table. Crubb collapsed into his chair and slid down in it until he was sitting on the back of his neck. The lawyer nodded to a man at the prosecution table who came across to him and after a moment the ritual phrase was addressed to the judge: “Arraignment and bail, your honor. Permission to approach the bench?”

The judge nodded.

The whispered tricorn conference at the bench was brief. The judge spoke by rote: “Trial is set for April fourteenth. The prisoner will be released on three hundred dollars bail. Prisoner will approach the bench, please.”

It took only a few seconds: the judge warned Crubb of the restrictions of bail and the penalties for jumping it. A bondsman came forward to post the bail. Crubb turned without a word and walked back to the defense table and sat down.

Paul made a show of looking at his watch; he got up then and went toward the door. Irene Evans looked up and he waved to her before he left the room.

He went outside to his car and sat in it. Crubb would turn up any moment, as soon as the papers were signed. Paul reached under the seat for his guns.

12

T
HE NUMBER
94 bus had a sickly green two-tone paint job. Paul put the car in drive and followed the bus north on California Avenue into the
barrio.
It reminded him of stretches of the Borough of Queens: commercial shabbiness and nondescript duplex houses. Strong winds buffeted and ripped the racing clouds; the temperature had been dropping all morning and the car radio trumpeted alarums of snow.

Crubb left the bus at Chicago Avenue and walked east on it, shoulders high, boots clicking angrily. Paul waited double-parked and gave him a one-block lead; then he let the car creep forward without feeding any gas. Traffic swished past him in the outside lane.

Friday night Crubb had muffed his hit and come up empty. He'd shown no fear in the courtroom, only a bored arrogance; the hearing and the setting of bail were a slap on the wrist and probably had annoyed and irritated Crubb but certainly they hadn't deterred him. The predator was still hungry.

Crubb entered a pizza café, moving purposefully—he wasn't merely looking for a place to eat. Paul waited in a bus stop. Within a few minutes Crubb reappeared with two companions. They looked like two of the men in the bunch Crubb had been with when Paul had first seen him in Old Town.

The three of them walked, bouncing heel-and-toe, to Western Avenue where they waited for the northbound bus and got aboard it.

He gave the bus several blocks' lead. When it discharged Crubb and his companions he had no trouble recognizing them at the distance; by the time he reached the corner they had walked a block into a neighborhood of small private houses and low brick apartment buildings. Paul glanced at them and drove a block farther along Western, then made the right turn and went two blocks and turned right again. When he parked in the middle of the block he saw the three men walk across the intersection in front of him. None of them looked his way. They had something in mind: they were looking for something, scanning the houses as they walked. Paul locked the car and walked to the corner and watched from there, staying next to the building where he could curl back out of sight if one of them looked over his shoulder.

Crubb was talking and the performance involved a great deal of body expression: his shoulders and arms and hands moved in great balletic patterns; with his friends he was a different creature from the prisoner in the courtroom. From a block away it was impossible to tell what he was talking about but his gestures expressed petulant complaint. Possibly he was expounding on the injustice of his arrest.

They passed a small apartment building without a glance; they were studying the detached houses across the road. One of the men passed something heavy from his coat pocket to Crubb—perhaps a tool, perhaps a weapon. Crubb pushed it under his tight leather coat and held it there, one hand inside the lapel.

Paul stayed where he was; it was as good a vantage point as any, at least until they went a block or two farther. There were no other pedestrians on the street; a plumber's van went by but when it was gone nothing else moved in the street except Crubb and his two friends.

They were looking at the garages, Paul discovered. Looking for an empty one?

Then as if on random impulse they turned the corner and went out of sight. Paul hurried down the street.

It began to snow: large slow flakes. Paul turned his collar up. When he reached the corner he walked straight across the intersection, merely glancing both ways as if to make sure there was no traffic. The three men were jive-walking down the sidewalk peering at garages; one of them glanced back and Paul quickly looked the other way and kept walking until he'd interposed the corner house between him and their line of sight. Then he doubled back and peered carefully around the edge of the house.

The two companions stopped and Crubb walked up a driveway and cupped both hands to look through a window into a closed two-car garage. He shook his head and rejoined the others and they moved on.

Paul was sure of it now. They were looking for an empty garage: a sign that no one was home.

They were walking away from him but he saw Crubb's head turn—an instinctive wariness toward the backtrail. Paul swiveled back out of sight before Crubb had a chance to see him. He gave it a few seconds and then reconnoi-. tered cautiously.

They had nearly reached the end of the block. Crubb poked a finger toward a house on the near side of the street; it was set back and Paul couldn't see it. All three of them crossed the street.

There was only one thing to do. He went back across the intersection, retracing his own path. None of them looked his way; they were intent on the house. From the south corner he could see the edge of it and the garage into which Crubb was peering. Crubb made a quick hand motion and all three men disappeared into the passage between houses; the third man paused to look both ways and Paul faded back. When he looked out again they were gone from sight. They'd be checking out the house before breaking into it.

Paul crossed the intersection a third time and turned left and walked toward the house, looking for a place to post himself and ambush them when they emerged with their loot. On his palms the cold dampness of fear was an old familiar companion.

13

¶
CHICAGO, DEC. 24TH
—Five men were shot to death yesterday in two separate incidents in Chicago, bringing to a boil the rapidly heating controversy over the disputed existence of a “vigilante” on the city's streets.

Early yesterday afternoon three separate residents of the Humboldt Park residential area telephoned police to report gunshots, bringing fast response by motorized patrolmen who discovered the bodies of three men in a passage beside the residence of Ernest Hamling, of 3046 West Hirsch Street. On and near the bodies were a cassette tape recorder, silverware, two cameras, a shotgun, a small battery-powered television set and other items identified as the personal property of Mr. and Mrs. Hamling, neither of whom was at home at the time of the shootings.

Announcement of the identities of the three dead men has been withheld by police pending further investigation and notification of relatives. It was revealed by a police spokesman, however, that one of the three men had been released on bail by the Cook County Criminal Court only that morning, pending trial on a charge of robbery and assault.

The three men were allegedly killed by bullets from a single .38 revolver which may have been the same weapon that has been credited with the deaths of five alleged criminals in recent days. Police ballistics laboratories have taken the bullets for analysis.

In a separate incident last night, two youths were shot to death on a South Side fire escape while allegedly escaping from an attempted burglary of the Lincoln-Washington Social Club. The youths, identified as Richard Hicks and John R. Davis, both 16, were found by the club manager, Sherman X, after several loud gunshots were heard; allegedly the youths had broken in through a rear window and had stolen the club's cashbox containing receipts from a benefit discotheque dance, and were shot while escaping down the outside fire stairs at the rear building. A police spokesman said, “We've analyzed the angle of entry of the bullets. They were fired up at the victims from the alley beneath.”

The bullets have been identified tentatively as having been fired by a .45 caliber automatic pistol. Interviewed in his Headquarters office this morning, Police Captain Victor Mastro, in charge of the “vigilante” investigation in the Homicide Division, pointed out that the two South Side youths were not killed by the same weapon which reportedly killed the other eight “vigilante” victims. “But,” Mastro said, “the modus operandi is very similar, you'd have to say. We can't rule out the possibility that the killer owns more than one gun.”

14

H
ER EYES FLASHED
angrily. She'd been waiting near the door; she stood up when Paul entered the courtroom. He was once again surprised by how diminutive she was: she hardly came up to his shoulder and he was not especially tall. She wore a light sweater with the sleeves pushed up casually above the elbows; a long plaid skirt that was mainly orange and yellow; she'd done something with her hair and it was softer and fuller around her face than it had been yesterday.