Suspended Sentences (7 page)

At that time I had three cases awaiting trial. I mean I had a dozen or so but there were three that had some importance to this matter. One was a man named Mendes who'd had the bad fortune to be arrested with a pocketful of numbers-racket slips. He was a runner for Sterrick's mob. The other two were independent small-time crooks who'd been arrested on felony charges — one was a forger who'd been passing checks around town, the other was a minor-league safecracker who'd done a pretty good job of getting into one of our bank vaults but got tripped up by a silent alarm system — he was caught red-handed coming out of the bank with the loot.

Because of the threat we faced, and the autonomy I'd been given, I made a deliberate decision to bend the law. That's really the point of this little morality tale.

I took Mendes into an interrogation room and sweated him down. I made it clear, without putting it in so many words, that we might see our way clear to dropping the charges against him if he'd provide us with certain bits and pieces of information. I didn't tell him what information we wanted. I asked him all sorts of random questions about Sterrick and various mob operations. Most of them he refused to answer. He pointed out that if he unloaded he'd be killed as soon as the mob found out. I just kept asking questions. He'd answer a few of the seemingly harmless ones. By that process I managed to get the information I wanted — without letting him know that it was what I'd been after.

What I found out from him was the location of Sterrick's books. The organization's books.

They were kept, as I'd suspected, in a safe. The safe, Mendes informed me, was in a real-estate office on North Stone Avenue. It was one of those outfits that handled insurance and realty. A legitimate front for the illegitimate operations. The outfit was in the name of one of Sterrick's cousins. I suppose they actually did some insurance and realty work. But it was also where Sterrick did his bookkeeping. In the back room. They had two or three accountants who worked in that room full-time. At night they had a private watchman there. Mendes had seen the safe several times. It was a big sturdy Kessler box, far too heavy to be stolen. There was an electric alarm system and of course the safe was never left untended — when the accountants weren't there, the watchman was.

We put Mendes on ice. I didn't want him leaking anything back to Sterrick. Later on, when the matter was concluded, we turned him loose as we'd agreed. He was picked up again a few months later and spent most of his life in prison on one charge or another.

The state primary was coming up in June. This was April — we had about seven weeks. I had the accused forger brought up to the interrogation room. We had him cold on passing some very heavy paper — forged checks for thousands of dollars. It could have cost him several years if we'd prosecuted fully. He knew that — he was a practical fellow. He and I reached a mutually agreeable arrangement. In return for certain services he was to perform, he'd be turned loose in another state and no fugitive warrant would be issued. This of course wasn't illegal; it was a decision on my part, morally and ethically questionable to be sure, but legal in the sense that a prosecutor has the right to decide whether or not to prosecute any given case. I didn't acquit the forger of the charges against him; I simply decided not to prosecute them. If he ever returned to Tucson after we exiled him, he could be picked up and tried on the original charges.

I then interviewed the accused safecracker, separately, and reached a similar agreement with him.

I hadn't broken the law. So far.

The next step required connivance by the police department. I went to the deputy commissioner's office and managed to secure his participation in the scheme without telling him what I had in mind.

The watchman at the realty office worked a twelve-hour shift. We didn't have minimum wage laws or security-guards' unions in those days — it was the Depression, of course, and the man was lucky to have a job at all. He would arrive at the office at seven-thirty in the evening. The accountants and sometimes Sterrick himself would still be there at that hour; they left the accounting room normally about seven forty-five or eight o'clock, turning the place over to the watchman. He went home about seven-thirty or eight the following morning, as soon as the first shift of bookkeepers arrived for work to tote up the previous night's receipts. The bookkeeping work wasn't round-the-clock but it was a seven-days-a-week operation. Sterrick's people didn't take business holidays; they staggered their work days instead. Obviously that was necessary because so much criminal activity takes place at night and on weekends.

The safe usually was locked and unattended, except for the watchman, through the night. The watchman — a trusted young cousin of Sterrick's, not brilliant but very loyal and as tough as they make them — undoubtedly had instructions to destroy the contents of the safe if anyone arrived with a subpoena or warrant. Mendes had boasted to me about the security arrangements. In addition to the electrical alarm system there was a device, triggered by a switch on one of the desks, that was designed to release phosphor pellets inside the safe and ignite it. That would destroy the safe's contents instantly, of course. But clearly the watchman must have had instructions not to destroy the papers unless there was a clear danger of their being removed from the safe. It might not cripple Sterrick's business to have those facts and figures lost but certainly it would cause a colossal headache. That button wasn't to be pushed on any mere whim.

We were counting on that.

The watchman had a trivial criminal record. It was of no account but it made our next move more plausible.

I arranged for the release from jail of our friends the forger and the safecracker. Armed with a police revolver, I took them with me in my car to a dusty lot less than a block from the rear entrance of the realty office. From there we watched the place. It was about eight in the evening; by now the bookkeepers had gone home and the watchman was on duty inside.

A police car arrived and the two officers went to the back door and knocked. There was some dialogue between them and the watchman on the far side of the door — we couldn't hear it — but I saw one of the officers take out his revolver and bang on the door with it. Finally the door opened and the watchman appeared reluctantly. One of the officers spoke sharply, and I saw the watchman, half in anger and half in puzzlement, take out his wallet to show his identification. Then he made as if to back inside the building. Possibly he meant to go to the telephone to report that he was being arrested. But, according to our prearrangement, the officers didn't allow him to reach the phone. They took him in custody, handcuffed him and drove him away in their car. Leaving the back door of the office slightly ajar.

The watchman would be taken down to the jail and held incommunicado in a detention cell until six the next morning, when he would be turned loose with apologies — a mistaken arrest, the real culprit's been found, sorry for the trouble. That sort of thing.

In the meantime as soon as the police car disappeared, I and my two low-life cohorts entered the realty office and closed the door behind us. I had a gun and the two men knew it; they had no chance to run out on me. But we passed the time amiably enough — a curious admixture of types, as you can imagine.

First it was the safecracker's turn. He had to find the alarm system, disengage it by bridging the wires so that an interruption wouldn't set it off, then set to work on the safe itself. It had to be opened manually: no drilling, no explosives. Because I wanted no indications afterward that it had been tampered with.

It took him until well past midnight. The forger and I sat half-dazed with boredom because we weren't allowed to speak; the safecracker required absolute silence. He had a physician's stethoscope and an emery board — no other tools. He used the coarse board to file his fingertips at intervals while he worked with painstaking slowness twisting the safe's two combination dials. With the stethoscope pressed to the steel he listened for the fall of tumblers. For a while I was sure he wasn't going to get it open. But in the end it yielded. It had taken five hours.

Now the forger and I took the safecracker's place by the open safe. I went through the safe's thickly packed contents until I'd identified the items I sought: the organization's accounting books. I had quite a thrill of excitement just to lay eyes on those documents. They revealed, even to my untrained financial eye, an entire spectrum of information about the mob's methods and operations.

But we weren't there simply to give me a chance to gloat over Sterrick's secrets. It wasn't possible simply to steal the books. If I took them away with me, they'd be inadmissible in court. It's not enough to present evidence, of course; you've got to show how you obtained the evidence. In this case I had no warrant. I was trespassing, I'd committed the felony of breaking and entering, and if I made off with Sterrick's books I'd be guilty of theft as well.

No. I wasn't there to steal those books. I was there to photograph them.

The forger wielded the camera — it was his expertise. Page by page we photographed the ledgers and notebooks. It took hours.

I was sweating, examining my watch every few moments. The last page wasn't captured until after six o'clock; by then we knew the watchman had been released and was on his way back to the office. We packed up the scores of rolls of film we'd exposed. The forger took his last close look at the ledgers. He had to know exactly the style, make, color, and condition of the books so that we could purchase identical blank bindings in which he could perform his forgeries, based on our photographs. He had to remember the color of each ink used, all that sort of thing.

We left the office at ten minutes past six. I'm sure the watchman must have returned within minutes. Later we learned there'd been an intensive debriefing session. Sterrick and his men had grilled the watchman for several days. They examined the office and the safe with a fine-toothed comb. But finally they decided nothing had been disturbed. The watchman kept his job, and his arrest that night was chalked up as a simple case of mistaken identity.

It took our forger nearly the full seven weeks to complete his work; it was a monumental job. The man was physically and emotionally exhausted at the end. I felt he'd earned his freedom. He and the safecracker were taken under police escort by train to El Paso where they were given their freedom. I never saw or heard from either of them again. I hope they stayed out of trouble.

We made our move while the forger and the safecracker were still on the train; we wanted to take no chances on one of them phoning Sterrick with what he knew.

We had three days' grace before the primary elections. I wasn't sure it would be enough time to swing the primary, but it had to be tried. Without any attempt to maintain secrecy I went before the superior court bench with applications for a warrant to search the realty-insurance office and a subpoena for the books and record-ledgers of the Sterrick operations.

Naturally the word of our attack preceded us. By the time I arrived with my phalanx of detectives, the safe in the back room was empty except for a few props — insurance policies, land deeds, and so forth. All very innocent and aboveboard. Everyone in the office had been herded into the back room while the safe was being opened. I lingered briefly in the front room, then joined the others in back. I pointed out to the detective in charge that our warrant gave us the right to search the entire premises, not merely the safe; I instructed him to give the whole place a thorough toss.

A while later, to my loudly expressed amazement, a young officer discovered an entire set of criminal ledgers in the bottom two drawers of a salesmen's desk in the front room.

The rest of the story would strike you as both foregone and anticlimactic, I'm sure. We nailed Sterrick. We didn't have time to prevent Sterrick's man from being nominated in the gubernatorial primary but he was forced to resign from the race as a result of the revelations that came out in the trial evidence. A party caucus nominated another candidate — a reasonably honest one — and he was elected in due course; it was a one-party state in those days, of course.

Sterrick spent seventeen years in the state penitentiary and finally died there. And your obedient servant, the ambitious young assistant DA, went on to become county prosecuting attorney and then a judge.

Now the question is: was justice served?

Harris uncrossed his legs and sat up. “They must have suspected those books were forgeries.”

“Of course they did,” the judge said imperturbably. “The defense brought in a whole gaggle of experts to try and prove that the documents had been forged — that those weren't the handwriting of Sterrick and his bookkeepers.”

“Then why wasn't your case thrown out?”

“The experts went away without testifying.”

Harris said, “I don't understand.”

“Well, they determined that the books weren't forgeries. When they told that to the defense lawyers, the lawyers bundled them out of town as fast as possible. We had to bring in our own experts to testify to the legitimacy of the books. Naturally I'd have preferred to have the testimony of the defense experts but they'd skipped town too fast.”

“I'm not sure I'm keeping up with you.”

The judge flashed his shrewd smile again. “They weren't fakes, you see. That night we broke into the safe to photograph the books, my safecracker friend noted the combination down for me after he'd opened it. I had the combination. The night before we raided the place, I had two policemen roust the watchman again. They never took him farther than their car, which was parked just around the corner. He wasn't out of sight of the safe for more than three minutes. But it was time enough for me to slip in and substitute our forgeries for the real books. Then, the next day, I planted the
real
ones in that front office desk. So you see we weren't defrauding anybody. We came with a warrant and a subpoena. We found exactly what we were trying to find: Sterrick's books. The real ones. And we presented them in evidence.”