“It’s just another murder, Ephraim. We prosecute hundreds of murder cases each—”
“It’s not just another murder, and don’t you think that for a minute. It’s damn important. I want you to prosecute it, and the Boss wants you to prosecute it, and I’m not going to reassign it unless you can give me a better reason than you’ve given me so far.”
“All right,” Hank said, sighing. “I know the mother of one of the boys. Di Pace.”
“She’s a friend of yours?”
“No, not exactly. I knew her when I was a kid — before I went into the Army.”
“How well did you know her?”
“We were going steady, Ephraim.”
“Mmm. I see,” Holmes said.
“I asked her to wait for me when I went away. I got a Dear John while I was overseas. I never saw her again until this morning.”
“This all happened how long ago?”
“About fifteen years, I guess.”
“That’s a long time ago, Hank.”
“Yes, but the defense might use it, and it might weaken our case.”
“I don’t see how.”
“Suppose they put Mary on the stand? Suppose she claims she jilted me in 1943 and that petty revenge is the People’s motive in pushing for the death penalty?”
“How well did you know her, Hank?”
“I told you. We were—”
“Did you go to bed with her?”
“No. Nothing like that.”
“Might she perjure herself along those lines?”
“To save her son? She might do or say anything.”
“I still don’t think it’ll hurt us. Either way.”
“I wish I could agree with you.”
“Let me explain this case a little, Hank. You said it was just another murder, and I told you it wasn’t. Would you like to know why?”
“Yes, I would.”
“Okay. To begin with, this whole damn juvenile-delinquency thing is giving the city a fat pain in the foot. Everybody’s screaming about it, the cops, the schools, the judges, the press, the grand juries, the whole town’s suddenly full of experts who’ve just discovered that two per cent or more of the nation’s kids wind up before the courts each year. And do you know what they’re all screaming? ‘Let’s get tough! Expel the troublemakers from the schools! Fine the parents! Impose curfews! Give them stiff jail sentences! Stop the murderers! Show them we mean business!’
“God knows, they all mean business and they’re all in the same business, but they’re like a bunch of corporation vice-presidents who can’t seem to decide on the best way to sell their line. Maybe they’ll never decide, but that’s not our problem. I’m only telling you this to illustrate the first pressure being put on this office. We’re being urged in a thousand and one indirect ways to use these killers as examples. We’re being pressured to send them to the electric chair so that others will take heed of the terrible sword of justice.”
“Ephraim, this office has never buckled under to—”
“That’s number one, Hank, and only the beginning, and I think you’ll see in a minute why this is an important case requiring the best legal mind on our staff. Number two is the tolerance groups. Now, the kid who was killed was Puerto Rican. The Puerto Rican people in this city are probably the most oppressed people in the world, the new scapegoats, the new whipping posts for a neurotic society. Whenever a Puerto Rican commits a crime, the newspapers have a field day, playing on an undeniably existing prejudice to form a ready-made villain. I don’t want to go into the psychological relation of crime to minority groups. I just want to say this. This time, the victim is a Puerto Rican. And the tolerance groups have all piled on the band wagon demanding equal justice — and reasonably, I feel — for the dead Rafael Morrez. In short, we’re not only being asked to get tough, we’re being asked to get tough indiscriminately, to show that we’ll take no nonsense from any killer, white, black, brown or tan. We’re being asked to show that justice is not only terrible, it is also fair.”
“I see what you’re driving at,” Hank said. “I still think any other person on the staff—”
“And lastly, there is what the sob sisters would call the human-interest angle. We’re prosecuting this case in the interests of the people of this county. And do you know what the people see? The people see three strapping killers striding into a quiet street and stabbing to death a blind boy. A blind boy, Hank! Don’t you see the outrage here? Don’t you see the affront to decency? How can the streets be safe for anyone if a blind person, protected and sheltered by the unwritten laws of humanity ever since the beginning of time, can be brutally attacked and killed?”
“I see,” Hank said.
“Do you? Then you must also see that it’s essential for this office to prosecute this case with all the talent and energy it can muster. You’re our boy, Hank, and we’re going for the death penalty.”
“I still think—”
“No. Your request is officially refused. For God’s sake, Hank, a lot more than three boys is going on trial here. This office is going on trial.” Holmes paused. “And,” he said, “if you want to look at it in another light, maybe the whole damn city is going on trial.”
He stood on the deck of the ferry, and on his right he could see the high span, beautiful in its ugliness, of the Queensboro Bridge. Dead ahead, squatting on the water like a giant half-submerged whale, was Welfare Island. In the Youth House Annex there, a fifteen-year-old boy named Danny Di Pace was being held, awaiting trial for murder. They had not taken him to the Twelfth Street building because too many escapes, legend held, were successfully executed there.
A cool breeze blew off the East River, caressing the back of his neck, dissipating the dull heat of midsummer. Far off in the distance, pristine and cool, a delicate tracery against the shrieking raw blue of the sky, was the Triboro Bridge. He could remember when the bridge was being built. He could remember walking in the excavation site on 125th Street, a fourteen-year-old boy picking his way among the cinder block and concrete, the steel supporting rods, the freshly turned earth. The summer of 1934, and a young boy who visualized the bridge as a gateway to the treasures of the world. If you could cross that bridge, he had thought, you could get out of Harlem. There was purpose to the bridge, and meaning, and he had decided on that day, with the bulldozers and the steam shovels noisily pushing the land around him, that one day he would leave Harlem — and he would never return.
He did not know whether or not he hated the neighborhood.
But he had recognized with the clear vision of the very young that there were better things to be had from life. And he meant to have them.
One of those better things, he thought later, was Mary O’Brien.
He did not meet her until he was seventeen. Born into an Italian family, possessing a grandfather who — even on the brink of war with the Axis powers — proclaimed Italy as the cultural leader of the world and touted Mussolini as the savior of the Italian people, Hank had found it difficult at first to believe that he could fall in love with an Irish girl. Hadn’t he been told repeatedly by members of his family that the Irish were all drunkards? Hadn’t he been told by brothers of his street fraternity that all Irish girls were fast girls? Hadn’t most of the street fights taken place between the Italians and the Irish? How then could he possibly fall in love with a girl who was as Irish as her red hair?
She was fifteen when he met her. She didn’t wear lipstick then. He dated her on and off for a year before she allowed him to kiss her. Her mouth was a wondrous thing. He had kissed girls before, but he had never known the sweetness of a woman’s mouth until the day he kissed Mary O’Brien. And from that day on, he loved her.