Death Sentence (9 page)

“I'm not late, am I?”

“Actually you're early. No—it's not on your account I'm breathing fire. Let's go, shall we? I need a drink.”

He helped her into her coat and they went down the steps trying to avoid puddles and slushpiles left from last night's snowfall. She said, “I was supposed to try an aggravated assault and attempted murder case this morning. The bastard didn't show up.”

“Jumped bail?”

“That's right. Eight hundred dollars bail. I fought it at the hearing—it was ridiculously low.”

“Do they skip bail often?”

“Not so often that I'm used to it.”

He held the car door for her and then went around to get in. “Where to?”

“Do you like German food?”

He didn't, especially, but he said he did and she gave him directions; they put the car in a multistory garage in the Loop and walked to the Berghoff.

They ordered highballs and Paul lit her cigarette from a restaurant matchbook. When the drinks came they touched glasses. “Merry Christmas,” he said.

“Happy New Year.” She drank and shuddered theatrically. “Hoo boy.”

“A tough one?”

“Some of them bother you more than others,” she said. “This one was a fairly vicious little bastard. I hate to imagine what he's up to now.”

In the restaurant light she had a softer prettiness than he'd remarked yesterday. Her cheeks were high and freckled; she had a short nose and wide grey eyes. Her bones were prominent and she was curiously rangy—that was what made her seem much taller than she was.

She blew smoke through her nostrils. “I feel awkward. It's not a habit of mine, making dates with strangers. I did it on impulse, you know.”

He smiled to reassure her. “So did I.”

“Have you ever been to a psychiatrist?”

He was taken aback. “No.”

“Neither have I. I wonder what a shrink would say about my ‘motivations.' I've never had a loved one mugged. I've never even been burgled. But when I passed the bar exams I went straight into the DA's office and I've been there ever since. I've never been able to picture myself as anything except a prosecuting attorney. I never had the slightest urge to defend the downtrodden and support the underprivileged. It's strange because I don't think of myself as a redneck. I'm not politically right-wing at all. I don't know. Right now I'm in one of those agonizing reappraisals about the people I have to deal with every day. I've started asking myself whether there's any possibility of a society surviving without the things we think of as the old traditional civilized values. Personal dignity, respect for the law.”

She wanted a sympathetic ear; he didn't interrupt.

“I've never believed crime was an illness that could be cured by treatment. Maybe one day we'll be able to go into them surgically and program new personalities and send brand new good citizens out into the world. I'd rather not live to see that either. But in the meantime I keep hearing about rehabilitation and reform, and I don't believe a word of it. The law isn't
supposed
to rehabilitate people or reform them. You can't force people to behave themselves. You can only try to force them not to misbehave. That's what laws are for. The humanitarians have forced us into this illogic of reforms and rehabilitations, and all they've succeeded in doing is they've created an incredible increase in human suffering.”

“Crime isn't a disease to be treated,” Paul suggested. “It's an evil to be punished.”

“It's more than that,” she said. “It's not just an evil to be punished. It's an evil to be prevented.”

“By deterrence?”

“By getting them off the streets and keeping them off the streets.” She lit another cigarette, inhaled, coughed, recovered and said, “Protections keep expanding for the rights of the accused. What about the rights of society to be free from criminal molestations?”

She went on, “The ‘we're all guilty' approach used to mean something to me. You know: ‘As long as one man anywhere is not free,
I'm
not free.' It's a great argument for doing away with prisons. But it's no good.
I
haven't committed atrocities. I'm not guilty of the crimes I have to try in that courthouse. I've never mugged anyone. There's a difference between me and them—we're
not
all the same. And if we haven't got the confidence and courage to make these moral judgments and act on them, then we deserve every dismal thing that happens.

“These kids from the Legal Aid hang around our office talking high-minded idealism. They keep talking about the causes of crime. What causes? I've heard ten thousand. Families have broken down. Unemployment. The evaporation of religion. Violence on television. Welfare. Corruption in high places. Racism. Poverty. Abnormal genetic chromosomes. That marvelous word ‘alienation.' Permissive parents. The laws are too lax, or the laws are too severe—take your choice. Rootlessness, the breakdown of a sense of community, over-population, underachievement, drugs, too much money, too little money. Moral decay and disrespect. Pornography. What's the cause of crime? Every crime has its own causes. Every defendent I try has a marvelous excuse of some kind. But when the Nazis mobilize and arm themselves and invade your country, you don't ask why—you defend yourself and leave the causes to the historians.”

“Yes,” he murmured. He didn't dare say more.

“That's what I've believed for years,” she said. “It's what I still believe. But I've begun to wonder whether it matters a whole lot what I believe.”

“Why? Because you can't do much about things?”

“No. I do as much as I can. I suppose you could say I do more than most people do.”

“Then what's bothering you?”

“It's so accidental, isn't it. I could just as easily be one of those Legal Aids in the outer office. My best friend in law school took a job with the Civil Liberties Union.”

“It's like that line in the Western movies,” he said, echoing the words he'd said to Spalter. “You play the cards you've been dealt.”

“It depresses me to think maybe that's all it is. A chance turn of the cards. An accident, no more significant than a bet on a horse.” She put her glass down; she hadn't drunk much of the second one. “I feel as if I've lost something important. Should we get menus and order something?”

Later she said, “I'm sorry. I haven't been much help to either of us, have I.”

“I didn't know we were expected to give each other therapy.” He smiled. “You're good company, you know.”

“Actually I'm horrid today. I hope you'll forgive me—I don't usually behave so badly.”

He shook his head, denying it. “Do you have children?”

“No. I'm not married any more. I was for a while, but as they say it didn't work out. Maybe it was my fault. I'm not the homemaker sort.”

“I wasn't trying to pry.”

She put her knife and fork on her plate. “Why do you and I keep apologizing to each other?”

“Nerves.” He tried to smile. “I don't know about you. But I haven't done much—dating.” Well there'd been one woman in Arizona, very briefly.

He wanted to change the subject. “What are your plans for the evening?”

Amusement narrowed her eyes. “It's Christmas Eve,” she said, “and I thought you'd never ask.”

15

¶
CHICAGO, DEC. 26TH
—In a bizarre Christmas Day tragedy, a man who tried to rob Santa Claus was shot to death yesterday outside a church on Lake Shore Drive.

Witnesses leaving the First Methodist Church described the events. Claude Tunick, 54, dressed in a Santa Claus costume, was collecting donations on the sidewalk for a Methodist crippled children's fund. At 12:45 p.m. the noon Christmas Service inside the church came to an end, and the first worshipers to leave the building were in time to see a youth with a knife in his hand accost Mr. Tunick and wrest the cylindrical donations box away from him. Several of the witnesses ran down the church steps, trying to catch the thief or frighten him off.

Suddenly a shot was fired. Witnesses have been uncertain where it was fired from; most of them believe it was fired from a passing automobile which then sped away. The bullet struck Mr. Tunick's assailant, William O. Newton, 17, in the chest. Newton died less than twenty minutes later in an ambulance en route to city hospital.

A police spokesman said the death bullet had been fired from a .45 caliber automatic pistol. Ballistics technicians are comparing it with bullets of the same caliber which yesterday were reported as having killed two alleged burglars on the South Side.

“If the bullets match up,” the spokesman said, “we'll regard it as a strong indication that the vigilante is still in operation. He may have traded in his .38 revolver for a heavier .45.”

The vigilante—whose existence is still disputed in some official circles—has been accused of at least eight killings in Chicago in the past week, all of them involving the deaths of convicted or suspected felons. If the three .45 caliber homicides can be linked to the eight committed with a .38 caliber revolver, it will raise the vigilante's death toll to eleven.

Captain Victor Mastro, in a telephone interview last night, said, “Eleven homicides in a week isn't unusual for Chicago, unfortunately. Sometimes we have eleven in a single day. But if all of these have indeed been committed by one man, then it's not too strong a statement to say we've got a one-man murder wave on our hands. We're doing everything in our power to locate and arrest whoever is responsible for these killings, whether it's one man or half a dozen.”

Captain Mastro, of the Homicide Division, is in charge of the vigilante case. His closing remark may have been in reference to several heated statements made lately by members of civil rights organizations, religious leaders, spokesmen for community groups, and two members of the Chicago Crime Commission, one of whom, Vincent Rosselli, spoke up in a County Council meeting on Tuesday, demanding “an end to vigilante terrorism in the streets of Chicago.”

16

H
E MET HER
for cocktails at the Blackstone; she was at a table reading a newspaper. She was in her working clothes—the orange tweed suit he'd seen before. “How'd your exploring go today?”

“I did a couple of museums,” he said. “No point driving around in this blizzard.”

“Have you seen the papers?”

“Yes.”

She put a fingernail on the vigilante headline. “It's got the machine in a real uproar.”

“I imagine it would.” He contrived to make his voice casual. “Do you want another one of those?”

“Not just yet.”

He ordered scotch and water. The waitress repeated the words in a heavy French accent and went away wiggling the tail of her bunny costume.

“I spent half the day in the Museum of Science and Industry. You could get lost in that place.” He'd been looking for muggers in the dark corridors where they liked to prey on wandering teen-agers and old women.

“I keep wondering if it isn't one of our esteemed mayor's crazy stunts.”

“What's that?”

“The vigilante,” she said. “It could be a cop, you know.”

“I suppose it could be.”

“Or the whole thing might be a phony. Suppose it's something they've cooked up in the crime lab? The victims could have been shot by eleven different guns, for all we know—we've only got the crime lab's word for it that there are only two guns involved. Suppose every time they find a dead man with a criminal record, they pin it on the vigilante?”

“Why would they do that?”

“Mastro was in court today to testify in a case. He told me—”

“Who?”

“Vic Mastro. He's a police captain, they've put him in charge of the vigilante case.”

“Oh that's right,” he said vaguely. “I knew I'd seen the name somewhere.”