Suspended Sentences (6 page)

“Three: you will fail to call the six perjuring witnesses. The trial will take its course on the basis of the truth, and we'll take our chances on getting an honest conviction.”

“Four: should you or Ron Owens disregard my warning, and should you bring forward your six witnesses to give false testimony, then certain things will begin to happen in this county. Ron Owens will find himself up to here in property-tax auditors and land reappraisals. He will find every application for a building permit held up for months, perhaps years. He will find his heavy construction equipment impounded by the County for violations of safety and pollution regulations. He will find his car ticketed incessantly for violations of vehicular codes, and he'll find his home, his office and other real property cited for every conceivable violation of the building codes. He will find himself and his executives subjected to an endless barrage of bureaucratic foul-ups, lost applications, misplaced documents — a nightmare of red tape, a systematic campaign of official harassment that will bring all his businesses to a total standstill and result in the across-the-board bankruptcy of every enterprise controlled by Ron Baylor Owens.”

“And one more thing,” I added in the same quiet voice. “It's conceivable that some fatal accident just might happen to befall me if I began to put such a campaign into action. You and Owens should be aware that this is a rural county and that my family is one of the oldest here. We've known one another for generations around here. Some of these old boys — friends of mine, I play poker and hunt deer with them — some of these gents can shoot a flea off a coon-dog's ear at six hundred yards. They're not above settling their grievances in the old-fashioned frontier manner. I'd like you and Owens to understand that if anything happens to me, it happens to Owens. I doubt it's much fun spending the hours wondering when to expect the bullet out of the darkness.”

I got up and left him then; I'd said all I had to say.

Part of it was a bluff. I don't number any killers among my friends. But Farquhart and Owens were city boys and they didn't know that for sure; we had a redneck reputation up our way.

The rest of it had been quite true. I was fully prepared to drown Owens' companies in bureaucratic obstructionism and it would have been perfectly legal to do so: if you actually enforce every ludicrous regulation in the law you can cripple anyone. The reason it hadn't already been done in Owens' case was that he'd been pouring a great deal of money into the economy of the county. Folks are willing to put up with all sorts of shenanigans if prosperity comes with them. But people up in Ocotillo County are still a bit old-fashioned: they don't condone willful murder as an acceptable way of doing business. I'd have had no trouble getting the cooperation of the other county officials.

Coercion is a two-way street. Owens and Farquhart were dealers in fear; I'd given them their own medicine.

Farquhart and his supporting battery of big-town attorneys put up a good defense but they didn't produce the six lying witnesses; Baker and Calhoun were convicted on the steadfast testimony of Larry Stowe and the evidence of bootprints and a few other tangibles left at the scene. The killers were sentenced to twenty-year-to-life terms in the State Penitentiary at Florence. Rumor has it that Ron Owens had to pay both of them enormous sums to ensure that they wouldn't implicate him in the murder. The presence of his Cadillac at the crime meant nothing; Owens simply gave out the story that he'd lent the car to the two cowboys but had no idea what they meant to do with it.

But Owens pulled out of the county with satisfying alacrity. It took him a while to liquidate his properties but by Christmas he was gone, his offices closed, his residence sold.

He wasn't really very tough. I'd been looking forward to squaring off against him but evidently he didn't enjoy playing a game against people who played harder than he did.

The law doesn't protect people unless people protect the law.

ENDS AND MEANS

“
Ends and Means” is a story within a story; the interior story is an embellishment of alleged more or less actual events in my old home town, while the frame (outer) story reflects a self-questioning about moral contradictions that I'd undergone in the two years since a movie based on my novel D
EATH
W
ISH
had been loosed
.

The judge put his coffee down and pushed himself back in the reclining chair until its platform flipped up under his feet. Harris watched the old man read the script. Attentive, undistractible, the judge read slowly and didn't look up when the telephone rang. It rang only twice; someone elsewhere in the house must have answered it.

Finally Judge Culver put the last page aside. “It's a good yarn. But you already know that. Why bring it to me? I'm hardly a lit'ry critic.”

“You may find this hard to buy, knowing me, but it's one of those times when I'm really not looking for a reassuring pat on the back. I want your judgment — there's something about the story that bothers me.”

“If it bothers you then change it. You wrote it.”

“The thing is,” Harris said, “it's to do with justice. That's your department.”

“Justice is the concern of any writer of dramatic works.”

“Not in this sense. The whole story revolves around definitions of justice.”

“Yes,” the judge agreed.

“Well, look,” Harris said, “I'm not sure it isn't too expedient. The resolution of the story. I liked it fine while I was working it out but in retrospect it strikes me there's a moral cynicism in it — it's a little too much like letting the ends justify the means. There's no problem about getting it published. The question in my mind is whether I want it published. Whether possibly it says something I don't want to say.” He sat back on the couch and crossed his legs and laced his fingers behind his head.

The judge had a sly smile that crinkled the lines around his eyes. “You wrote it. Don't you know what it says?”

“I know what it says to me. I'd like to know what it says to you.”

“The detective catches the murderer but then lets him go because he feels it was justifiable homicide. It's a sort of star-chamber acquittal.”

“My protagonist places himself above the law.”

“Yes,” the judge said. “But of course you've contrived unique circumstances in this story.”

“Does that matter? Do you think this kind of thing ought to be justified under any circumstance at all?”

“As I said, Jim, that's your decision to make. You're the writer.”

“All right. But I'd like your judgment.”

The judge had a weakness for long slender cigars. He had one going in his left hand; it had grown a tall ash. Now he tapped it off into the big glass ashtray by his elbow. “I've been on the bench quite a few years.” The abrupt change of subject bewildered Harris. “Municipal court, superior court, six years on the court of appeals. You may be asking the wrong man. If you want a cut-and-dried moral judgment you'd be better off asking a preacher. I've seen the law bent. Too many times. Not always to the detriment of justice, either. I agree with you that it's morally disastrous to take the attitude that the ends justify the means. As a blanket principle, that is. But justice isn't an abstract. It's a guiding precept that ought to be adapted to the conditions of the individual case. I've bent the law a few times myself, you know. Even broken it. Flagrantly. When it served what I felt were the interests of justice.”

“You have?”

“I can't criticize your script. The best I can offer is a parable. An anecdotal illustration. Shall I try?”

“I wish you would.”

“It's a true story. The participants have mostly passed on to their rewards by now; in any case the statute of limitations ran out long ago so it can't harm me — legally — to admit the part I played. At the time I had a hell of a tussle with my conscience. But I learned a great deal from it. Maybe I flatter myself, but I think it's made me a better jurist.”

The old man drained his coffee, adjusted the cigar comfortably between thumb and fingers, and began his tale.

I was assistant district attorney at the time. Young, earnest, inflated with eager principles. And maybe a trifle ambitious. It was nineteen thirty-one, I think — give or take a year. I'm a bit vague on dates when I go back that far.

It was during Prohibition in any case. The Volstead Law had been around for more than a decade. Down here in the Southwest there'd grown up a well-established bootleg trade — some of it 'shine from back-country stills and downtown bathtub operations, but most of the hooch came in across the border from Mexico. It was big business. The illegality of it had caused the emergence of disciplined criminal mobs — the beginnings of what we now call organized crime. There was an enormous industry in producing and distributing booze. In terms of the complexities and the quantity of distribution it was a far vaster operation than today's narcotic drug trade, because there were so many more customers. Half the population, at least.

The result was that even in a cowtown like Tucson we found ourselves up against a powerful underworld organization. Now the truth is we tended to wink at the bootleg trade, as you probably know. Nobody except a few overeager glory hunters had much interest in nailing whiskey peddlers. Most of us spent half our evenings patronizing speakeasies.

But the booze trade had brought the crooks out of the woodwork
en masse
. Our problem wasn't booze, except indirectly. Our problem was the by-products of the trade. The constantly increasing economic and political power that the criminal mobs developed. We weren't concerned, really, about so-called white slavery or gambling or the other victimless crimes. What alarmed the honest folks was the specter of a takeover of our society by the criminal element. They were buying politicians. They were extorting fortunes from the business community through their bald-faced protection rackets. You don't need a long litany of their crimes — the point is, we were concerned, we didn't want to see things get out of hand. Bootlegging was one thing. Giving the mobsters enough power to elect a governor was another thing entirely. These people had — have — no respect for rudimentary human rights, let alone laws. We had to fight them. We know it now; we knew it equally well then, as anyone who's ever seen
The Untouchables
on television knows.

Down in Tucson our local crime czar was a fellow who went by the name of Irwin Sterrick. It wasn't the name he'd been born with but never mind.

Sterrick ostensibly was a restaurateur. He owned three establishments — steak houses, you know the kind of place. Gin and bourbon in coffee cups, slot machines in the rest rooms. A cut up from speakeasies. He didn't actually own any of the wholesale operations and he didn't actually run the extortion rackets, but he was the key man in the setup. Within the criminal organization he'd worked his way up from bookkeeper to chief accountant to high factotum. It was a loose confederation — the “organized” in organized crime is a misnomer — but to the extent that there's a single boss in any company, Sterrick fulfilled that function here. If an underling wanted to start a new operation he had to get clearance from Sterrick; usually he got his financing from Sterrick as well. Sterrick controlled the coffers. Major transactions went through his hands. It wasn't
his
money, most of it, but nearly all of it passed through his office in one way or another. He kept the books.

We knew if we could nail Sterrick and get our hands on his books we could cripple the mob for quite a while. Sterrick was getting altogether too powerful and we had to stop him.

Naturally the federal officers were eager to nail him as well. They wanted to put him away on income-tax violations. But none of us had any success in our initial efforts. We knew he kept detailed books — even criminals have to have records so tthey can check up on one another and make sure nobody's cheating — but when we subpoenaed them the books would mysteriously disappear ahead of the officers with their search warrants. It appeared there was no lawful way we could solve the problem.

Things were heating up to a boil because there was a gubernatorial primary coming up. Sterrick's handpicked candidate had a pretty good chance of sewing up the nomination. If we allowed them to railroad their man into the governor's mansion in Phoenix, we knew we'd face a terrible situation. The state would have been thrown wide open to a massive criminal invasion.

The only way to stop it was to get Sterrick out of the way. Then the local political bosses who'd been in his pocket would be free to move in other directions.

We had a meeting in the courthouse. Carefully selected people — the deputy police commissioner, the district attorney, two assistants. I was one of them. And the mayor. None of us was under the thumb of Sterrick's machine. But we couldn't be sure of many other officials. We had a council of war. I won't bore you with the details but the upshot was that I was appointed a select committee-of-one to concentrate on the Sterrick issue. I was pretty much given carte blanche and I insisted that I be allowed to keep my operation secret until it produced results — I didn't want to have to turn in regular progress reports because a secret is only a secret as long as only one person knows it. I had a few ideas but I didn't want any risk of their getting back to Sterrick through his city hall contacts.

The practice of criminal law in the halls of justice is pretty much a give-and-take affair, as you know. If you want to get a conviction against one felon sometimes you have to grant immunity to another. It's not a system I've ever enjoyed working in but it's better than most of the alternatives. Plea bargaining was just as commonplace in those days as it is today. In return for a lighter sentence a criminal might agree to turn state's evidence. It really amounted to our only major source of information. The town's population was only about twenty thousand. The mobsters knew every cop on the force by sight. We could hardly infiltrate them with an undercover spy — they'd know him instantly. So we had to rely on criminal informants.