He sat behind his desk and stared glumly at the wall, drumming his fingers on the desk top, ready by this time to commit first-degree murder himself.
It was then that Albert Soames, that bright young bastard, strolled into the office with the transcripts under his arm. Hope you don’t mind, Hank, he’d said, just wanted to check them over myself since I was the one who went up to the precinct on the night of the murder, here they are, safe and sound, this looks like a fine case, I’ll bet you enjoy it, I can read the sentence for you now even before you begin, death in the electric chair, my friend, death in the electric chair.
Looking over the record of the questioning now, wondering what he could do to prevent the next hammer blow of fate from falling on this completely nutty morning, Hank was inclined to agree with Soames’s prediction.
The People were prosecuting for Murder One in the Morrez case, and first-degree murder carried with it a mandatory death penalty. The indictment requested by the bureau seemed fair to Hank. Murder One was either premeditated murder or murder committed during the enactment of a felony. In the case of the People versus Aposto, Reardon and Di Pace — and especially in the light of what they’d said on the night of their arrest — there was little doubt in Hank’s mind that the murder was premeditated. Nor did this appear to be a case wherein the thin line of technicality separated Murder One from Murder Two, a case wherein the premeditation consisted of having drawn a revolver twenty seconds before firing it.
These boys seemed to have gone into Spanish Harlem deliberately and coldly. They had not slain in the heat of passion with intent to inflict only grievous injury. They had come there, it appeared, prepared to kill, and maliciously, blindly, they had struck down the first likely victim. If ever the People had an open-and-shut case of murder in the first degree, this was it. Why, even the lieutenant in charge of the detective squad had ripped holes in Aposto’s and Reardon’s obvious lies.
Nodding to himself, Hank turned to the first page of the interrogation of Danny Di Pace and began reading it.
DI PACE: Is someone calling my mother?
LARSEN: That’s being taken care of.
DI PACE: What are they going to say to her?
LARSEN: What do you expect them to say?
DI PACE: I don’t know.
LARSEN: You killed a kid. You want them to tell her you’re a hero?
DI PACE: It was self-defense.
The telephone on his desk rang. Reluctantly, Hank put aside the transcript and reached for the phone, feeling an immediate sense of premonition. On this morning of all magnificent mornings, he would not be surprised to learn that the bank had foreclosed his mortgage, that the Hudson had flooded and swelled into his living room, and that...
“Henry Bell,” he said.
“Hank, this is Dave on the desk. There’s a woman out here. Says she wants to see you.”
“A woman?” The sense of premonition was stronger now. He found himself frowning.
“Yeah,” Dave said. “Okay to send her in?”
“What does she want to see me about?”
“The Morrez kill.”
“Who is she, Dave?”
“Says she’s Mrs. Di Pace.”
“Danny Di Pace’s mother?”
“Just a second.” Dave’s voice retreated from the phone. “You Danny Di Pace’s mother?” Hank heard him ask. The voice came back to the mouthpiece. “Yeah, that’s who she is, Hank.”
Hank sighed. “Well, I’d planned on seeing her anyway, so it might as well be now. Send her in.”
“Roger,” Dave said, and then he hung up.
Hank replaced the phone on its cradle. He was not looking forward to the woman’s entrance. In the preparation of his case, he’d have summoned her to the office once, and then only to ascertain facts of the boy’s background. Her unexpected arrival now rattled him. He hoped she would not cry. He hoped she would understand that he was the People’s attorney, hired by the citizens of New York County to defend their rights, and that he would defend those rights as vigorously as her son’s attorneys defended his. And yet he knew she would cry. He had never met her, but she was the boy’s mother. She would cry.
He took the typed sheets from his desk top and put them into a drawer. Then he sat back to wait for the mother of Danny Di Pace, hoping against hope that there would not be another scene to add to this day which had begun so badly.
She was younger than he’d expected. He realized that the moment she stepped into the small waiting room outside. She came toward the inner office then, and he saw her face completely for the first time, and he felt as if he’d been struck with something hard and solid, and he suddenly knew that all the events of last night and this morning had been building toward this one shattering practical joke. Shock followed instantly on the heels of recognition to render him completely speechless as he sat behind his desk.
Hesitantly, Mrs. Di Pace said, “Mr. Bell?” and her eyes met his, and then the recognition crossed her face, too, followed instantly by the same shock, a visible thing which knifed her brown eyes and then sent her jaw slack. She shook her head in disbelief and then asked, “Hank?” hesitantly, and then “Hank?” more firmly.
“Yes,” he said, and he wondered why this had to be and he knew with sudden intuition that he was being sucked into a whirlpool where drowning was a distinct possibility, where he must swim or drown, swim for his life...
“Are you... Mr. Bell?”
“Yes.”
“But I... Have you... have you changed your name? Is that it?”
“Yes. When I began practicing law,” he said. He had changed his name for many reasons, most of which were deeply rooted and unconscious and which he could not have explained rationally if he’d tried. He did not try to explain now. The change of name was a fait accompli, a legal decree reading “ORDERED, that upon compliance with all the provisions herein contained, the said petitioners shall, on and after the 8th day of February, 1948, be respectively known as and by the names of Henry Bell, Karin Bell, and Jennifer Bell, which they are authorized to assume and by no other names.”
“And you’re a district attorney?” she said.
“Yes.”
“And my son’s case is in your...”
“Sit down, Mary,” he said.
She sat, and he studied the face he had once known so very well, the face he had held in his youthful hands — Wait for me, wait for me — it was the same face, more tired perhaps, but the same face that had belonged to Mary O’Brien at nineteen, the brown eyes and the near-red hair, red with a burnished glow, the aristocratic nose, the sensual mouth, the utterly exotic mouth, he had kissed that mouth...
He had thought of this meeting many times. In the great American fantasy of star-crossed lovers meeting on wind-swept streets, he had imagined meeting Mary O’Brien again one day, and he had thought some of the old love they had known for each other would still be there, and perhaps their hands would touch briefly and they would sigh wistfully over a life together that had never been and never would be — and then once more part. And now, here was the meeting, and Mary O’Brien was the mother of Danny Di Pace, and he didn’t know what the hell to say to her.