Which Way to Die?

Which Way to Die?

Ellery Queen

MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM

1.

Corrigan had been held up in the Main Office squadroom by a laggard witness in an extortion case, so it was a quarter of six by the time he reached Maxie's Businessmen's Bar and Grill. A policeman's lot was not a happy one. Even a pint in a desk drawer was tabu at police headquarters. To relax over an after-hours drink he had to fight Manhattan traffic halfway across town.

He found Chuck Baer waiting at the bar. The redhead greeted him with a growl. “You said five-twenty, Tim.”

“I would have stepped on the gas if you were prettier,” Corrigan said to him. “I damn near stopped for a drink en route to brace myself for the sight of you.”

Baer grinned at the bartender. “Give my grandfather an Irish.”

They made an odd pair. Tim Corrigan was two inches under six feet, with the build of a greyhound. He moved fast and fluidly, like a boxer. His angular features were very nearly handsome, in spite of the black patch over the left eye he had left in Korea. The other eye was brown and direct and, at the moment, twinkling; it was capable of turning into an instant icicle, and it had chilled a great many hoodlums. Captain Corrigan was what his colleagues at the Main Office called a classy dresser; he wore smart Madison Avenue-type suits that strained his paychecks—one of his few excesses. He could have stepped out of an advertising agency.

Chuck Baer was nothing that Tim Corrigan was. His height was the same, but there the resemblance ended. He outweighed Corrigan by twenty-five pounds, not one ounce of which was fat, poly-unsaturated or otherwise. No one would ever accuse him of pleasing a mirror. He had the mashed and lumpy face of an oldtime wrestler, with thick swarthy skin, a big nose, and a heavy mouth and jaw. His blue eyes and red hair were Irish, in contrast to the rest of him, which said Slav. Corrigan could never get over the fact that his ugliness attracted women. He shambled around like a bear in an ill-fitting suit, and the women fell for him in herds.

During the Korean business they had been a team in the OSS—the Deadly Duo, as they were known to a usually unawed group—and they had ample reason for sentiment. The two had saved each other's lives half a dozen times during their service; it had been Baer who had carried Corrigan to an aid station when the shell fragment destroyed his eye. Neither had a lust for blood, but a job was a job, and their efficiency at it was legendary. Mustered out, Corrigan had been taken back by the Department in spite of his missing eye—a special case, and a tribute to the esteem in which he was held by the brass. Chuck Baer had opened a private detective agency. Their paths often crossed professionally; oftener socially.

“Can the Irish,” Corrigan said to the bartender. “Make it a gin and tonic.” Baer was drinking bourbon. The MOS man usually stuck to whisky, too, but it was an unseasonably warm day in May, and he wanted some frost in his glass.

“You know what?” Baer said, “Sundays should be changed by law to last for forty-eight hours. That way nobody would have to work on Mondays.”

“Then you'd beef about Tuesdays.”

Baer gave him an elbow in the rib. Corrigan flipped the sweat off his glass into Baer's eyes. They both grinned.

They sat drinking and chewing the fat amiably. It lasted until six o'clock, when the bartender switched the TV over the bar to the six o'clock news. At the newsman's first comment Corrigan and Baer stopped drinking to listen.

“The New York Court of Appeals today ordered the release from Sing Sing of life-termers Gerard Alstrom and Frank Grant. Invoking the recent Miranda decision of the United States Supreme Court, the Court of Appeals held that the confessions of the pair had not been admissible evidence because the defendants had not been informed of their rights of silence and to legal counsel at the time of their original interrogation by the police. In its decision the Court slammed the door on all possibility of a new trial by throwing out the conviction.”

Corrigan cursed. Baer said, “Shut up, will you?”

“I sent them up!”

“Let's get this.”

“Four years and one week ago today Gerard Alstrom and Frank Grant, then nineteen-year-old roommates at Columbia University, were convicted of the sex-and-thrill murder of coed Audrey Marsh. The sensational highlight of the trial was the admission of the boys' signed confessions, in which the defendants—both rated near-geniuses, with IQs in the one-eighties—stated that their sole motive in the murder had been to commit the perfect crime, as an ‘intellectual exercise.' After trying unsuccessfully to have the confessions barred on the ground that they were obtained by police coercion, the defense switched tactics and attempted to get a verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity. Found guilty of murder in the first degree, the youths were first sentenced to death. The sentences were commuted to life imprisonment when New York State abolished the death penalty. Three appeals were rejected by the State's high court prior to this fourth and finally successful one.

“Another sensation during the trial was the revelation that the beautiful eighteen-year-old victim's real name was Audrey Martello, and that she was the daughter of Joseph (Marty) Martello, alleged gang lord and officer in the Cosa Nostra. Presumably Miss Martello had enrolled at the University under a false name to avoid publicity.”

The newscaster went to another item and the bartender turned the sound down. A stout man near Corrigan and Baer gave the rest of the customers the benefit of a derisive snort.

“They were a hell of a lot safer in Sing Sing,” he announced. “Marty Martello ain't about to let his daughter's killers get off the rap. Five'll get you ten they're both found dead in an alley by next Sunday.”

A man in a loud sports jacket said, “And if Martello doesn't get them, Harry Barber will. There was a profile in
Sports Illustrated
last month said Harry's still carrying a torch for Martello's kid.”

Harry Barber, early Vietnam war hero, currently star halfback for the New York Cougars, had been engaged to Audrey Martello at the time of the murder. The comment brought back to Corrigan's memory the scene in the MOS squadroom when he had brought the handcuffed killers in. Harry Barber had been waiting there. With a roar like a gorilla the young athlete had sprung forward to grip their throats and beat their heads together like a pair of coconuts. At the time Barber had just made first-string halfback on the Columbia Lions and weighed a solid two-twenty. Three detectives had been unable to pull him loose. The handcuffed killers had both been unconscious when Corrigan, in desperation, knocked Barber cold with karate smashes alongside his bull neck.

Cynical comments about the release of Alstrom and Grant were running up and down the bar. There was general agreement with the stout man and the man in the loud jacket. The only differences that developed revolved about which would get to the released killers first, Martello or Harry Barber. The odds seemed to favor Martello, who had professionalism in such matters going for him.

“I wouldn't be in their shoes for all the Red Guards in China,” Chuck Baer said. “Not with those two after them.”

“Not just those two,” Corrigan grunted. “Alstrom and Grant have more than Martello and Barber to worry about. We got ten times the usual crank mail during the trial, threatening to kill them if they weren't convicted. I don't remember when public indignation in this town ran so high. Some kook may decide to burn them in the name of justice.”

“Poetic justice,” Baer said. “Those two killed that girl for kicks. If that isn't kooky I don't know what is.”

“You sound as if you'd like to do it yourself, Chuck.”

“Not a bad idea.”

“You don't mean that. I can't think of any two citizens this republic would be better off without, but I don't hold with lynch law.”

“This is better? Seeing them walk away free?”

“Yes, if lynch law is the alternative.”

Baer grinned all over his ugly face. “Saint Corrigan. I'd think, since it was your case, you'd be out for blood.”

“Regardless of personal feeling, I'm not about to sit by and see the administration of justice taken over by a hood like Martello and some schizo who thinks he's been hand-picked by the Almighty to even the score. I think the courts are dead wrong in this case, but I've got to back them up, Chuck. And, if it gets down to that, so do you.”

“In the words of the immortal Sam, include me out.”

“No, I mean it.”

“That's why you're on the city payroll and I bill clients. If you think I'll lose any sleep if they're found dead in an alley, you're nuts yourself.”

“I'm getting irritated with you,” Corrigan said. “If I thought you meant it I'd throw you through that bar mirror.”

“Man enough to try it?” Baer growled.

“Some day,” Corrigan mourned, and said, “Toss for the check?”

“I lose,” Baer said promptly, and tossed a bill on the bar.

He always did.

On Tuesday morning Corrigan picked up a paper from the newsboy on the corner outside headquarters. Upstairs in the MOS squadroom he opened the frosted-glass door with his name and rank on it and entered the bare ten-by-twelve cubby he called his office. It was furnished with a battered desk, a file cabinet, a couple of rickety chairs for visitors, and the grime of a generation. He sailed his hat onto one of the hooks of the clothestree, slumped behind his desk, and opened the paper.

The story on page one went into considerably more detail than the TV account. The two killers were not to be released until Friday because of some processing red tape. Reading between the lines, Corrigan knew that the real reason for the delay was to give the authorities time to plan adequate protection for the pair, probably at the insistence of the boys' lawyers.

Gerard Alstrom's lawyer was a man named Narwald, and Frank Grant's was his partner Fellows, of the highly-touted law firm of Narwald, Fellows, Norton and Finch. Narwald and Fellows were quoted as praising the Court of Appeals decision as a landmark ruling, and a judicial notice to the police that coercive tactics would no longer be tolerated by the courts of New York State.

John M. Alstrom, Gerard's father—the mother died shortly after her son's conviction; she had had a history of rheumatic heart disease—had nothing to say beyond expressing his happiness at his son's release. Mrs. Elizabeth Grant, widowed mother of Frank Grant, was quoted as reiterating her “unwavering faith” in the boys' innocence; she had never stopped clamoring about the “forced” confessions. It was noted in passing that young Frank's father, Leonard McGill Grant, had been John M. Alstrom's partner in the brokerage firm of Alstrom & Grant and had died of a cerebral hemorrhage the night his son and Gerard Alstrom had been arrested.

Interviewed by newsmen, Harry Barber had been characteristically frank. He doubted, the pro football star said, that Alstrom and Grant would live very long outside prison walls. Asked to elaborate, he was quoted as saying: “I'm not threatening anybody. I'm just saying some mentally unbalanced person may decide that justice got a raw deal when those two were let go. As far as I'm concerned, they'll get theirs in this world or the next. I'm betting it will be in this world.”