The Just And The Unjust (3 page)

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 presumption 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.

The grapplers brought up the body then.

From the car window Abner could see it; a stir in the water a dozen yards behind the boat as the lines tightened. Something swam from the depths and was visible an instant, still under water; an indistinct shape in loose floating clothes, like a huge, tattered, long-dead fish. The corpse broke surface; but, being weighted, immediately it sank from sight as the grapplers rushed in the slack. Howell, who got a close look, doubled up, his right arm lifted a little by the chain of the handcuff. Heaving and retching, he vomited on his own shoes.

Abner raised his cigarette to his mouth and filled his lungs with smoke. In the hundred windows of the mill, hands and faces crowded and danced with animated movement. The city police captain, who had joined them in the car to get out of the rain a while, said, 'Caught something that time! Look at the bastard!' He nodded toward Howell. 'He don't like it! They ought to make him pull it out himself!'

3

To John Costigan, Bunting said, 'How was that body clothed at that time?'

Costigan considered the question a moment, passing his eyes over the paper in his hand. 'It was clothed in, well, a coat, a shirt, and grey, like-flannel trousers; and with a bag, a burlap, where the wire on the weights had been put, sir.'

'And where was that?'

'The feet. By the ankles, sir.'

Bunting walked over to the folding table set up by Joe Jackman's desk. He said, 'At the time the body was raised, was the man alive or dead, Mr. Costigan?'

'Dead, sir.'

'Did you know the dead man?'

'No, sir. I couldn't say that I did.'

Bunting said, 'Mr. Costigan, I show you four pieces of iron that have been marked for identification as Commonwealth's exhibits one, two, three, and four, and ask you whether you have ever seen them before.'

'Yes, sir, I have.'

'Where?'

'I saw those by the dam there, Fosher's Creek. They were tied around the body's feet — around the ankles of Frederick Zollicoffer, Zollicoffer's body.'

In his seat beside Howell, Harry Wurts jerked his head up. Harry's fuzz of short reddish hair and cropped fragment of reddish moustache seemed both to bristle. His oval face shone, his somewhat slanting eyes slanted more. 'I move that be stricken!' he said. Judge Vredenburgh said, 'Yes. This body has not been identified.' Bunting said to Costigan, 'Around the ankles of this body which you saw raised from Fosher's Creek. Is that correct?'

'Yes, sir,' Costigan said, blushing. 'We took them off this body.'

'And what did you do with them?'

'Why,' said Costigan, 'we put them in the undertaker's truck of Philip Westbrook, of Twenty-seven North Court Street, of Childerstown.'

'And what did you do with this body that you had just raised?'

'That was likewise placed in that truck.'

'In the same truck with the irons?'

'Same truck. Yes, sir.'

'And where in Fosher's Creek, as nearly as you can fix it, was this body found?'

'Well,' Costigan said, 'I would say it was very near the centre below the bridge and very near the dam.' Bunting looked over and said, 'Mr. Wurts?'

'Yes,' said Harry Wurts, arising. 'I have a question or two.' Walking down toward the stand, Harry Wurts smiled with an air of unassuming blandness, of youthful ingenuousness. Since Harry was the same age as Abner, thirty-one, he could not and did not actually pretend to so much youth and ingenuousness; he put that on sardonically, with the plain, and astonishingly effective, intention of pointing up and somehow by the contrast exaggerating Bunting's dry exactness. There was not much Harry Wurts could do with Bunting's examination —as usual, a model. Dry and exact, except for Costigan's little slip, which was no fault of Bunting's, the whole thing was laid down precisely —just when, just where; the raised body, the identified weights wired to its ankles. There could be no fooling around about the corpus delicti. Harry would not do much with any of that; so Abner supposed that Harry was going to see what he could do with Bunting himself, or Bunting's witness.

Coming up close to the witness stand, Harry said, 'Just what do you mean by "very near," Mr. Costigan?'

'I mean, not far, sir,' Costigan said. Someone in the jury gave a snicker, and Harry Wurts smiled indulgently toward the sound. Harry said, 'An inch, a foot, a yard, a mile?'

'Five or six feet.'

'Five or six feet. From the dam?'

'From the dam.'

'And how far is this bridge from the dam?'

'Oh, not far. Say, a hundred feet above.'

'Then you would say this body, weighted with these irons here, had somehow floated or drifted a distance perhaps a little bit farther than from where you sit to the main door up there?'

Costigan said, 'I wouldn't positively know just how far that door is from where I sit, sir. The bridge is farther from the dam than that.'

Bunting said, 'We don't mind Mr. Wurts establishing the distance of the bridge from the dam, if he cares to; but I will offer an objection to the "floated or drifted". The Commonwealth will show in due course how the body came to be where it was, your Honour.'

'Very well,' Harry Wurts said. 'I will withdraw it. Let me ask instead, Mr. Costigan, if you have had much experience in the art or profession of body-grappling?'

'Objection said Bunting. 'He has shown that he had enough experience to grapple for this one. What is Mr. Wurts trying to get at, anyway?'