“From this kid who stopped you and gave you dirty looks and pulled a knife and came at you?” Gunnison said. “That’s who you had to protect yourselves from, right?”
“Yeah, that’s right,” Reardon said.
“Do you know who this kid was?”
“Never saw him in my life. We were just out for a little stroll. What the hell, who expected to get japped?”
“Get what?” the stenographer asked.
“Japped,” Gunnison said. “Ambushed. This kid ambushed you, right?”
“Sure. He stops us with a blade in his fist. Man, we didn’t want to get killed, so we fought back. Naturally, we fought back. Anybody would.”
“And you killed him.”
“I don’t know whether we killed him or not. But whatever happened, it was self-defense.”
“Sure,” Gunnison said. “That’s easy to see.”
“Sure,” Reardon agreed.
“The boy’s name was Rafael Morrez, did you know that?”
“No,” Reardon said.
“No,” Aposto said.
“You didn’t know him until you had the fight, right?”
“Right.”
“And he stopped you, and gave you dirty looks, and warned you about walking on his street, and pulled a knife and came at you, right? That’s your story, right?”
“Right,” Reardon said.
“And you didn’t know him until he stopped you tonight, is that also right?”
“That’s right.”
“That’s pretty obvious,” Gunnison said.
“What do you mean?” Reardon asked.
“Rafael Morrez was blind,” Gunnison said.
They took three sets of fingerprints from each boy, one to be forwarded to the Federal Bureau of Investigation in Washington, another to be sent to the New York State Bureau of Criminal Investigation, and the third copy to be sent to the city’s own B.C.I. that night, so that fingerprint information would be ready and waiting at Centre Street before lineup the next day. They made out two arrest cards for each of the boys, and then they took them down to the desk in the precinct muster room and formally booked them.
In the blotter, the desk lieutenant wrote down the names of the three boys, their addresses and the time of day. The desk lieutenant also entered the time of the accident, and the name of the detective assigned to the case, and the case number, and he wrote “arrested and charged with homicide in that the defendant did in concert with others apprehended and arrested herewith commit the crime aforesaid.”
The record listed Detective Lieutenant Richard Gunnison and Assistant District Attorney Albert R. Soames as present at the time of the entry. The boys were searched and their property was confiscated, put in separate envelopes and listed in the record.
The entries in the blotter all ended with the identical three words: “...and to cell.”
On Friday afternoon of that week, the assistant district attorneys assigned to the Homicide Bureau met in the chief’s office. Leisurely, they reviewed for their colleagues the various cases they had handled that week. Albert Soames reviewed the Morrez homicide. The men then voted that they would ask the Indictments Bureau to prepare an indictment for first-degree murder.
They did not seem to harbor any doubt that the grand jury would decide that a crime had been committed and that it was reasonable to assume the defendants had committed it.
The man assigned to the prosecution of the case was Henry Bell.
Three
Monday was starting wrong.
Or, he supposed, perhaps Sunday night had ended wrong. In any case, and in whatever sequence, this was going to be one of those days which — unless something positive were done about it immediately — would rapidly succumb to the battering combination of error and circumstance. Sitting behind the desk in his small office, the sheaf of transcripts finally, finally, finally before him, Hank tried to reconstruct the events which, like elements of a sorcerer’s evil brew, had united to overboil in chaos.
The first of these elements had been the party last night at the Bentons’. Sunday night was no damn good for parties anyway, since all of the men drank too much in an effort to obliterate what was coming on the morrow, and all the women tried too desperately to maintain a weekend glamour which would instantly evaporate at the first ring of the Monday morning alarm. Add to this particular Sunday night party the fact that Charlie Cooke had got really drunk, absolutely stoned beyond the reaches of civilized inebriation, stinko, blotto, blind drunk, and that Alice Benton had begun wailing about a legendary beating her husband had administered to her some eight years ago, which memory had apparently been evoked by Charlie’s supine position in the middle of the living room, and the pall of the usual Sunday night get-togethers assumed titanic proportions which drove every guest (except the unconscious Charlie Cooke) home long before midnight.
Back in their own house, Hank and Karin had discussed the party over a nightcap. The more they talked about it, the more horrible it seemed until finally, in an attempt to blot out the events of the evening, they’d gone to bed and sought the cleansing solace of love-making. This, as it turned out, was another mistake. Neither of them was in a particularly loving frame of mind, and the harder they drove themselves toward a passion they did not feel, the sharper became the memory of the very real images they were trying to eradicate. Whatever pleasure they derived from their forced mating that night was instantly counteracted by the knowledge that it had been a truly loveless act designed to soften the impact of an evening spent with people who seemed totally devoid of love. They had fought lovelessness with more lovelessness, however mechanically precise, enjoyable only in its precision, but totally unsatisfactory otherwise. Exhausted, beginning to feel the flat aftermath of their hard drinking and their coldly manic intercourse, they had drifted off into restless, dissatisfied sleep.
The alarm clock rang at seven-thirty, as it did every morning. This gave Hank forty-five minutes in which to wash, shave, dress and eat before leaving the house at eight-fifteen. This morning, however, this morning which was starting wrong after a night that had ended wrong, there was a difference. There had apparently been an interruption of electrical service sometime during the night. The power had been off for close to a half hour. When the electric alarm clock began buzzing at seven-thirty, it was really seven-fifty-eight. Hank did not make the discovery until twenty minutes later when he tuned in the kitchen radio to see what the weather would be like that day. When he heard the correct time, he left his breakfast and rushed into the bathroom to shave, opening a welt on his cheek and cursing the Bentons and their lousy party, his wife and her frigid love-making, the goddamn inefficient electric company, and even the radio station which had finally apprised him of the truth. He stormed out of the house wanting to know why Jennie wasn’t awake yet, sprinted all the way to the subway station, and did not arrive at the office until almost ten o’clock. Once there, he discovered that everything that had gone before (and by this time he was beginning to relent the poxes he’d levied on those nice Bentons, his passionate wife, the excellent service of the electric company and the public-mindedness of the radio station) had only been preludes to the true catastrophe waiting at the office.
On Friday afternoon, after the Rafael Morrez case had been assigned to him, he had accepted transcripts of the boys’ interrogation as recorded by the stenographer on the night of the slaying, taken them to his office and put them into his top desk drawer. This morning, this glorious fouled-up morning, the transcripts were gone. It was ten-fifteen, and the weather seemed determined to break all previous records set for heat, and the goddamn transcripts of the police interrogation were gone. He began searching the office. By ten-thirty, he was soaked with perspiration and ready to force open one of the suicideproof windows and leap to the pavement below. He called the building’s custodian and tried to find out whether or not a cleaning woman had inadvertently dumped the typed sheets into a wastepaper basket. He called the stenographic pool and asked whether or not some harebrained typist had picked them up of her own initiative. He buzzed Dave Lipschitz and asked if anyone had been snooping around his office that morning. He searched the office a second time, and then a third time. It was eleven o’clock.