“Have you ever sent any kids to the chair?”
“I’ve never tried a murder case involving boys of this age, no.”
“I see.” Barton paused. “Ever hear of a girl named Mary O’Brien, Mr. Bell?”
Hank hesitated a moment. Holmes caught his eye.
“Yes,” Hank said.
“I spoke to her yesterday. I understand you played footsie with her when you were both kids.”
“I think you’d better leave, Mr. Barton.”
“Is Mary O’Brien — now Mary Di Pace — the reason for your reluctance to...”
“Get out, Barton!”
“...prosecute this case the way the public wants it prosecuted?”
“You want me to throw you out, Barton?”
“It’d take a bigger man than you, Mr. District Attorney,” Barton said. He grinned. “I was leaving anyway. Don’t miss tomorrow’s paper. It’ll curl your hair.” He turned to Holmes. “So long, Sherlock,” he said, and he left the office.
“The son of a bitch,” Holmes said.
He went to see Mary that afternoon.
He called her from the office to say he was coming, and she said she would be out until three but that she would expect him then.
The street was sufferingly hot. No place in the world gets hotter than Harlem, he thought. Name a place and Harlem’s hotter because Harlem is a giant concrete coffin and nothing stirs in that coffin, there is no breath of air. In July and August...
In July...
He could remember a Fourth of July in Harlem. He had been eight years old at the time, and there had been no law forbidding the use of fireworks in those days. He had sat with his mother at the window of their sixth-floor apartment, overlooking the street, hearing the explosions of the firecrackers and the cherry bombs, watching the Roman candles erupt over the rooftops. The street was a bedlam of noise and excitement, boys igniting fuses and then running, tin cans leaping into the air with the force of contained explosion, girls shrieking. It had been a hot day, and even on the sixth floor there was no breeze. He had leaned out over the sill, watching the excitement in the street below. His father, in the parlor, was listening to the Yankee game.
At six o’clock, his mother discovered they were out of bread. His father, absorbed in the impending doom of a White Sox rally, would not budge from the radio.
“You go down, Henry,” his mother said. “I’ll watch you from the window.”
He took the money for the bread and ran down the steps. The grocery store — the only open one on the street — was three doors away. In the street, the noise and the excitement claimed him completely. His eyes wide, he walked to the grocery store, made his purchase and was starting back when the older boys surrounded him.
At first he thought it was a game. Then he saw that they were all holding burning pieces of clothesline in their hands, and then he realized they were touching the ropes to the fuses of firecrackers, and suddenly the explosions came, bursting at his feet, bursting in the air over his head, a medley of cacophony unleashed by the boys. He tried to escape the sound, fear rolling over him in engulfing shock waves, but the boys would not break the circle, would not let him out of the exploding circle of red and yellow, would not allow him to run away from the fear, the fire, the threat, the bombs, and he tried to yell but his voice was drowned out in the terrible roar of the explosions, the stink of the gunpowder, and far above him his mother’s voice yelling, “Henry! Get away from him! Henry!” while the firecrackers burst around him and he shrieked in silent terror.
His father sprang from the mouth of the tenement like a wild man, striking the nearest boy a blow that sent him sprawling to the pavement. He picked up his son and ran upstairs with him, and Hank clung to the loaf of bread in his arms, squeezing it to a pulp. Upstairs, his mother said, “I shouldn’t have sent him. You had to listen to your damn ball game! I knew he shouldn’t be on the streets today! I knew it! I shouldn’t have sent him.”
Hank’s father said, “He’s all right, he’s all right. They didn’t hurt him.”
And maybe they didn’t.
But he began stuttering on the day of the incident, and he did not stop stuttering until he was eleven years old, and even then not completely. All through adolescence, whenever anything upset him, the old stutter would come back, and he would remember again that Fourth of July in Harlem with the firecrackers exploding around him, the devils of hell at his feet, at his head, surrounding him.
He climbed the steps of the tenement in which Mary Di Pace lived. He found her apartment on the fourth floor. The catch for a milk-bottle lock hung limply from the outside of the door, and his first thought was, They still steal milk in Harlem. He smiled grimly. Men could develop satellites to spin in outer space, men could shoot rockets to the moon, devise intercontinental ballistic missiles which could destroy cities, and in Harlem — unless you put a wire loop on your door, a loop controlled from inside the apartment — they still stole your milk. Sighing, he knocked on the door.
“Hank?” her voice called.
“Yes.”
“Just a minute, please.”
He waited in the hallway. From somewhere in the building, he heard the voices of a man and woman raised in heated argument.
“So what do you do with the money?” the man wanted to know.
“What do you think I do with it? I buy rubies and furs, what the hell do you think? I buy gasoline for my Cadillac!”
“Don’t get smart, you stupid bitch! I give you forty dollars a week for the house. So where is it? Every Wednesday, you’re broke. What do you do with it? Eat it?”
“I keep a stable of Arabian ponies,” the woman said. “That costs money. I give cocktail parties for the ladies in the Social Register. What the hell do you think I do with all that money, all that big forty dollars?”
“I know what you do with it,” the man said. “You play the goddamn numbers. You think I don’t know?”
“Shut up, the windows are all open,” the woman said.
“The hell with the windows! Stop spending my money on the numbers!”
The door opened.
Mary smiled. “Hello, Hank,” she said. “Come in.”
She was wearing a tan linen suit, the jacket unbuttoned over a white blouse. A stray wisp of red hair curled alongside her cheek. He had the impression that she had just come into the apartment and removed her hat. Her eyes were tired, and the strain of the past few days showed in the weary set of her mouth. But he knew in an instant that she, like every woman he’d ever known, had come beyond the terror and hysteria of initial shock and then rebounded with amazing resiliency to face whatever lay ahead. There was in her eyes — and he knew the look because he had seen it often on Karin’s face — a combination of strength and dignity and determination. The look frightened him somewhat; it was the look worn by the tigress guarding the entrance to her den of cubs.
“Come in, Hank,” she said. “I just got back this minute. I was talking to Danny’s lawyers.” He stepped into the apartment. “No scenes this time,” she said. “I promise.”
He followed her through a short corridor past an open bathroom door and then into a living room furnished with a suite from one of the stores on Third Avenue. A television set rested on a table in one corner of the room. Drapes hung over the single window, which opened on the airshaft between the buildings. A fire escape was outside the window. From somewhere upstairs Hank could still hear the arguing couple, their voices echoing in the shaftway.
“Sit down, Hank,” Mary said. “It’s not too bad in here. We get a breeze through that window, and it crosses into the bedroom facing the street.”
“Thank you,” he said, and he sat on the sofa. They were awkwardly silent for a moment. Then he said, “You’ve got a nice apartment, Mary.”