The Just And The Unjust Page 2

  Joe Jackman, the stenographer, snapped on his green-shaded light. He picked up successively and examined several stylos, chose one, and held it poised. Joe was a tall, spare man with a grave expression that would have become a minister of the gospel. In the course of the last six or seven years more than ten million words had been pronounced from the witness stand a yard or so above his left shoulder and bent head. To get every one down, it was necessary for him to form the habit of listening to the sound, not the sense. While others sat back, free to decide what was important and worth hearing and what was not, free to speculate on the speaker's meaning and motive, to recall what had been said before and to anticipate what might be said next, Joe Jackman, with an intent dedication of mind, simply wrote. It was not a job for a casual man, and Joe, though he smiled cheerfully and, meeting Abner's eye, even made a face, took serious views of life.

  While John Costigan walked to the stand, there was another stir. At the long table to the right, the one used by members of the bar waiting to come before the Court, sat four men from city newspapers, Maynard Longstreet, editor and owner of the Examiner, and Adelaide Maurer, who was the local correspondent of a press association. They all shifted and stretched, rousing themselves, moving their folded copy paper, laying out their pencils. One of the city reporters, craning across two others, addressed Maynard Longstreet, probably asking him how to spell Costigan.

  Judge Vredenburgh looked sharply down at his table. By the set of the Judge's mouth and the hard dimpling of his chin and cheeks, it could be seen that the presence of visiting reporters irked him. Maynard Longstreet had good reason to be there — it was right for the local paper to report proceedings. Adelaide Maurer was a nice girl, divorced from a worthless husband and doing what she could to earn a living. The others were present with the intention to manufacture and print sensational rubbish prejudicial to the dignity of the law; and Judge Vredenburgh would have been glad to send them about their business. Since this could not very well be done, at least while they behaved themselves, he turned his gaze critically on the full courtroom.

  The spectators, stirring, shifted feet, cleared throats, exchanged whispers in a swell of sound like the rote of surf. Judge Vredenburgh frowned and said loudly, 'want everyone's attention, please!'

  Nick Dowdy, leaving his Bible on the rail, dodged back to his seat under the bench, lifted his mallet, and struck the block twice. A hush fell on the sloping tiers. John Costigan stood still at the steps to the witness stand. The newspaper writers became motionless, looking at their pencils.

  Judge Vredenburgh said, 'This is a case of importance, and a large public attendance is proper. However, it is not easy to hear in this courtroom; and with so many people present, it will be impossible unless everybody is perfectly quiet. There will be no whispering, and no moving around, please. The tipstaffs will have to see to this.' He bent his formidable gaze on them for a moment, his mouth grumpy but his eyes not unpleasant, so that those who could not hear would understand anyway.

  Martin Bunting stood silent with an easy, dry expression, his convex profile to the jury, his eyes sharp and level on John Costigan by the steps. Bunting lifted a hand and stroked the close-cropped grey hair at the back of his head, watching the Judge, who finally gave him a nod. John Costigan moved again, mounting the steps. He put his hand on the Bible, cocked an ear to Nick Dowdy, nodded, and sat down. Nick, sidling past Joe Jackman, blinked at the bench and said, 'John Costigan sworn.'

  Bunting said, 'Where do you live, Mr. Costigan?'

  'Cherry Hill Road, Harfield Township, sir.' Costigan's blunt-featured, ruddy face was composed and attentive. He took care to talk into the microphone set in the rail of the stand; and, in mechanical reproduction, his voice dropped distinctly from the loudspeaker in the corner above the jury.

  Bunting said, 'What is your position?'

  Bunting could not be in much doubt about that, since, as district attorney, he had appointed John to it; but they looked at each other formally, and Costigan said, 'County detective, sir.'

  'Were you near Milltown in this county on the tenth of May of this year?'

  'Yes, sir.'

  'Where?'

  'At the Childerstown Pike bridge, the state road over Fosher's Creek.'

  'What were you doing at that place at that time?'

  'I was grappling for a body.'

  Costigan's voice was level and his face impassive. Costigan's lips closed calmly after the word 'body'; and a second's deep silence fell while the jury took it in.

  The twelve jurors, and the spare sitting with them in case one of them became sick or died, had hardly given the case they were hearing a thought until now. They had all been busy affecting intelligent attention and easy dignity. Since not one of them, in so novel and prominent a position, actually felt either, their postures, though varied by their various ideas of intelligence and ease, were one in being stiff and self-conscious. Though different, as their ways of conveying attentiveness and dignity were different, their expressions were the same in being all solemnly silly.

  Costigan's word jarred them; and, jarred, they let their affectations slip. In the front row, Genevieve Shute's middle-aged face quivered as she swallowed twice. Old man Daniels twitched his long upper lip and explored his ear suddenly with his finger. The foreman, Louis Blandy — a short, stout man who owned the Childerstown Bakery —stole a glance at the defendants seated with counsel at the second table. He then looked at Bunting, puffed out his lips, pulled in his chin. His look said that he had been prepared to hear something like this.

  Bunting said to Costigan, 'Did you succeed in raising a body from Fosher's Creek at that time and place?'

  'We did, sir.'

  'At about what time of day, Mr. Costigan?'

  'About noon, sir. That is, about eleven-fifty-five a.m.'

  'And you were in charge of the persons engaged in grappling for this body?'

  'Yes, sir. I was.'

  'And you were present while it was being done?'

  'I was present.'

  'And you saw a body raised from the creek?'

  'I did, sir.'

  Abner, who had also seen the body raised, admired John Costigan's air of modest achievement. The state highway crossed Fosher's Creek above the mill dam where the water was eighteen or twenty feet deep. Because the county line was fixed at the middle of the Creek, and it had not been certain just where the body would be found, the party included a city police captain from a suburban precinct and a couple of homicide squad men, who were glad to leave the dirty work to Costigan. It was raining hard and a steady patter of drops on the pond could be heard against the low rush of water pouring out the spillway under the old brick walls of the mill. Officers of the state motor police blew their whistles incessantly while they waved on cars that tried to stop on the bridge to see what was happening. The mill employees were more fortunate. Their faces crowded every window. That morning not much work could have been done in the mill.

  Bunting had driven over with Abner in Abner's car, and they ran it down in a grove of trees whose buds were just breaking into a haze of light green foliage at the end of the dam across the water from the mill. In the parked car they sat and smoked while the rowboat went back and forth. First the grapplers brought up the frame of an old kerosene stove, and then an automobile tyre. The city police on top of the dam included at least one humorist, who called out when the tyre came into the boat, 'Can't keep that, bud! Got to throw the little ones back!'

  On the dam top, too, was Stanley Howell in the custody of a deputy warden of the state penitentiary. Howell had been given a policeman's raincoat, but he wore his own checked cap, limp with rain. He kept indicating further to the left. 'He made forlorn, awkward gestures, throwing his left hand out, for his right hand was not free. He was joined by his right wrist to the deputy warden, and the two of them, in identical black rubberized coats, formed a double monstrosity; Siamese twins, obliged to do everything together. Under the sodden cap, Howell's pal
e face was frail and wasted and marked like a martyr's with long-endured suffering. Bunting, Abner knew, had been displeased with Howell's appearance. Looking at Howell, a jury might feel some doubt about the confession that the Federal Bureau of Investigation agents got from him. Howell looked as though he had been having a bad time.

  This was only the truth. Abner had pieced together most of the story of what happened to Frederick Zollicoffer's kidnappers after they killed him. You could say that they seemed to be out of luck; and as a matter of fact their luck was so fantastically bad that another age surely would have been awed by Retributive Justice's celerity and precision. The night of the killing they had all left the bungalow where Zollicoffer was held and returned to the house where Howell and Susie Smalley had been living before the enterprise was undertaken. They were there about a week, probably arguing about whether to lie low or to attempt some other job. There were some conversations during this period to be put in evidence, but the only definite action appeared to be an attempt to steal another car. They had already stolen one car, the car in which Zollicoffer had been murdered; and Abner supposed they thought it prudent to get rid of this. He could not do more than suppose, because their plans never seemed to follow any logical pattern. If they rose at times to a sort of shrewdness, without intermission they fell to the most staggering stupidities. Only they themselves could know what they thought they were doing.

  The attempt to steal the second car was a failure; they were frightened off. Indeed, they seemed to have been frightened so badly that they must have decided to scatter. Robert Basso drove away the other car, the car in which Zollicoffer had been murdered, and abandoned it. That was when Robert Basso's luck ran out. He got rid of the car by leaving it in a country lane. It was long past midnight, and he could be sure nobody saw him. His next move was to walk back to the state highway and boldly try to thumb a ride. By a chance that could be only one in a hundred the first car he signalled, or at any rate, the first car that stopped, turned out to be the state police motor patrol. The two officers in the car asked Basso what he wanted.

  Though armed police could never have been a welcome sight to Basso, he was probably able to tell himself that he was still all right. He did not happen to know that there was a state law against thumbing rides. It was rarely or never enforced because it was impractical to enforce it, but it existed, and the officers certainly didn't expect anyone to ask them to help violate it. Probably they did not realize that the dark and the glare of headlights had kept Basso from seeing that the car was the patrol car. They thought he must have stopped them because there had been a breakdown or accident and he needed help. They asked him where his car was.

  The car, which had been on the teletype as stolen, was the last thing Basso wanted to show them; and, anyway, his story was that he was hitchhiking. If he had been a different sort of person, the police might have warned him that he was breaking the law, and driven on, or even given him a lift to the nearest town. On Basso they probably saw those indescribable little signs which mark, if not a criminal type, a man who has been in trouble with the law. Abner could imagine their expressions hardening as they listened to Basso trying to explain how he came to be hitchhiking there at that time of night, until one of them jerked his head and said, 'Get in, Joe! Down to the clubhouse!' They had a charge they could hold him on until the next day. The next day the stolen car was found, so they sent in Basso's fingerprints and continued to hold him.

  Meanwhile Bailey, who had undoubtedly directed the kidnapping and managed the killing of Frederick Zollicoffer, ran into bad luck, too. Bailey went to New York and several days after his arrival he heard a knock on the door of the Bronx apartment in which he was hiding out. When he asked who was there, the answer was, 'Police'. If Bailey had waited a moment, he would have found out that the patrolman had come to tell the people in the next apartment that a dog, by its licence number belonging to them, had been found running loose and taken to the police station. He had knocked on the wrong door.

  Bailey did not wait. He jumped to the conclusion, perhaps not without justification, since Howell and Basso and possibly Roy Leming were the only people in the world who knew where he was, that one of them had betrayed him. He tiptoed through the apartment, got out a back window on to a fire escape, and, presumably, slipped, for he fell three stories to the paving of the areaway. He was taken, fatally injured, to a hospital. What had happened was plain to the police. They did not know who Bailey was, or why he wanted to get away; but they thought it worth while to try and find out. Two detectives waited by his bed in case he recovered consciousness. When Bailey did recover consciousness, he recognized his attendants for what they were and told them, befuddled by pain and drugs, and also by his idea that one of his friends had, as he said, split on him, that he knew why they were after him.

  It then became merely a matter of keeping Bailey alive, and at least semiconscious, and making him think that they already knew all about it. What the detectives took down was rambling, incoherent, and as evidence dubious; but they got places and names. Before Bailey died that night, it was all on the wires; Roy Leming had been arrested; Basso had been located, still in custody on the stolen car charge; and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which had been on the trail of Frederick Zollicoffer and his narcotics business for months, either by an informal arrangement with the local police or by getting there first, picked Howell out of hiding and took him to headquarters to have a talk with him.

  This was where Howell's luck ran out. From the professional standpoint the F.B.I. (Federal Bureau of Investigation) agents cared very little whether Howell had killed Zollicoffer—whoever killed him saved them a good deal of trouble. But they knew that Howell had been involved with Zollicoffer and the drug traffic, and they meant to eliminate him, too. They wanted to turn over to state authorities a case that would take care of Howell. They knew what the case was, but they needed a few details to clinch it. It was no good Howell's saying he didn't know anything. They knew he knew. Neither Bunting nor Abner would be likely to imagine that under such circumstances agents experienced with men like Howell would rely altogether on friendly chats, reproachful appeals, or the pangs of Howell's conscience to make him admit his guilt. Howell, once he was out of the hands of the F.B.I., had his own story to tell about that; but, whether extorted from him or not, there was good reason to believe that he told his questioners, or tormenters, as the case might be, the truth. Roy Leming gave the good reason after he had read a copy of Howell's confession.

  Up to that point Leming made the routine denial of everything. After Leming read the confession, his counsel, a city lawyer named Servadei of a notorious shyster firm, told Bunting that his client had concluded to make a clean breast of it, plead guilty, and offer to testify for the Commonwealth against Howell and Basso.'

  This was the best possible news; but Bunting distrusted Servadei. The reputation of Servadei's law firm and the respect criminals felt for it did not come from advising clients to plead guilty or turn state's evidence. Abner, present at the conference, was impressed and, in a way — for Servadei probably considered them just hicks — proud, to see Bunting handle it. Bunting said dryly that the indictment he sought would be murder. The Commonwealth expected to have no trouble in showing that it was first-degree murder. Since the law presumed second-degree murder, that was all Leming could plead guilty to. The Commonwealth already had all the evidence it needed. Why should Leming be let off? In short, no.

  Servadei said it was just in a way of speaking. Leming was not asking to be let off. If a severance could be granted, Leming would throw himself on the mercy of the Court and testify in the interests of justice. Servadei said that, frankly, he was persuaded that his client was guilty. He, Servadei, did not make a practice of defending guilty men; it was better for everyone if they pleaded guilty. All Servadei wanted to see done was justice; and moreover, he believed that it had been held that where a defendant pleaded guilty to an indictment for murder, the presumpti
on was that the crime was murder in the first degree.

  Bunting answered that such a presumption might have been held to exist once. He would let them know about the possibility of a severance. He would have to talk to the Judge. Leming, on his oath, was naturally expected to testify to the truth. If he wanted to testify as Commonwealth's witness, the Court usually considered that a point to be taken into consideration. He, Bunting, did not know what the Court would do in this case. Servadei and his client would have to take their chances. Servadei said that he understood perfectly; but he did not feel able to advise his client to adopt such a course if there was no severance. A man on trial was not, if Mr. Bunting would excuse him, expected to testify to the truth where the truth incriminated him. He could refuse to answer without prejudice.

  This delicate exchange of threats and promises naturally ended in Leming being granted a severance and accepted as a witness for the Commonwealth. With Leming testifying, Howell's confession lost much of its importance — it had, in fact, without ever coming in evidence at all, served its purpose when it scared Leming — and whatever the F.B.I, might have done to get it no longer mattered much, except perhaps to Howell.

  Even for Howell it could only amount to just one thing more. What Federal agents might have done to him would be nothing compared to the things he had done to himself, and the consequences of those things, during most of his twenty-eight years. His record showed that Howell had been at war with the law since he was a child; and of all wars, that is the one in which there really is no discharge. From the misery and poverty and, probably, hunger of his youth Howell graduated to prison life and prison food; and when he was let go, it was to a still worse regimen. Crime was his trade; so, to live, he had to tax his limited brain, strain his broken-down body, rack his ruined nerves, devising new crimes, new risks, new narrow escapes, new vigils of lying in wait or hiding-out. He had no idea of recreation outside depressing debaucheries for which he had no energy and from which he probably could get no pleasure — bad liquor; girls like Susie Smalley; adulterated cocaine borrowed from those who used it — and much of the time he must have been too tired and too sick. The liquor would knock him out, the cocaine nauseate him, that horrible young hag be no good to him. In the ceaseless rain, dragging along the concrete dam top chained to the deputy warden, Howell looked sick to death. Abner tried not to watch him.