“I couldn’t help overhearing. You’re on the district attorney’s staff?”
“Yes, but if it’s about a case pending before this court I can’t …”
“It’s not. I’m only a spectator.”
Her face changed: it made clear her opinion of the morbid curious.
“My name’s Paul Benjamin. My wife and daughter were killed by muggers. It makes you take an interest in the criminal justice system.”
“I’m very sorry.”
“I guess I’ve spent most of my life like everybody else—badly ignorant of law and crime. I suppose I’m looking for some sort of answers. I’m sorry, I’m not making too much sense….”
She twisted and reached over the back of the bench, offering her hand. “I’m Irene Evans.” Her handshake was quick and firm. “When did it happen?”
“Oh it was quite a while ago now, in New York.”
“You’re just visiting Chicago then?”
“No, I’ve moved out here. I—couldn’t stay there.”
“You’ve picked a strange place to move to. We’ve got a worse crime problem than New York’s.”
“You go where the jobs are, I guess.”
The judge climbed to the bench; the court stenographer settled behind his machine; lawyers arranged themselves and at the back a prisoner was brought into the room. Irene Evans said, “I have to go to work. Are you free for lunch?”
“I have an appointment. Perhaps tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow’s Christmas Eve.” She was gathering her papers. “Still, court will be in session. I’ve got one case to try in the morning. Perhaps if you’d like to meet me here at half past twelve tomorrow …?”
“Thanks very much. I know it’s an imposition.”
“No. It may give me a chance to think out some questions I’ve been putting off for too long. You may have done me a favor, you see.” She stood up: she wasn’t as tall as he’d thought. “Tomorrow lunch, then. I’ll look forward to it.” She smiled and went toward the rail and he noticed she wore no rings. A lonely woman, he thought.
The defendant and his attorney settled behind a table and Irene Evans took her place at the prosecution’s post while one of her fellow assistant DA’s crossed to the defense side; there was a murmured conference there and the defense attorney spoke to the judge: “Permission to approach the bench?”
The judge was covering a yawn; he nodded his head and the two attorneys approached and the judge cocked his head to listen to their low voices.
The case was dispatched in moments: an arrangement had been reached, the defense attorney shook his client’s hand and returned to the back bench to dismiss his witnesses—the fat woman and the henpecked man. Defendant and officer left the courtroom and another accused entered the room in a policeman’s custody. Paul watched the cases parade through the courtroom but his attention drifted; occasionally his attention swiveled to Irene Evans and once from her table she looked at him and smiled a bit.
In the first hour the assembly-line procedure disposed of a half-dozen cases of varying degrees of gravity; he had no doubt that the rubber-stamp system had been preceded by back-room agreements between prosecution and defense; it was clear that the judge’s boredom was justified: he gave the court’s blessing to each prearranged plea, set sentencing dates in those cases that required them, and called for the next case. Only twice were motions for continuance filed by defense attorneys: cases in which evidently no bargain had been achieved.
Crubb was brought in at 11:45 and when Paul looked back he saw the middle-aged woman whose purse Crubb had snatched; she was sitting with a policeman—the young cop without his old Jew’s disguise?—and Paul wondered how long they’d been sitting there; he hadn’t noticed their arrival.
An overweight lawyer came out of a front pew and walked back to Crubb; there was a brief whispered conference. Crubb and the lawyer moved forward in the aisle, the lawyer doing most of the talking but Crubb’s voice was louder. “Yeah but man what’s goin’ down now? Sure I know it’s bad. Anything that’s against the law is bad, ain’t it? … Man you’re a jive-ass, you don’t care—what the hell do you care?”
The lawyer talked swiftly and intensely in a voice trained by long practice to reach no farther than his client’s ears; Paul couldn’t make out a word even though they were sidling past him at arm’s length. It was easy enough to guess the gist of the lawyer’s monologue. He settled in a front pew with Crubb and kept talking low and fast while the case before the court was decided and then it was Crubb’s turn and he went through the gate and paused to look back across the room. His eyes were set very high in his badly pitted face. They were fixed for a moment with arrogant brutality on the middle-aged woman, his victim, the witness; then the lawyer took Crubb’s elbow and steered him to the defense table and they stood waiting while the participants of the previous case put their papers together and left the table. Crubb collapsed into his chair and slid down in it until he was sitting on the back of his neck. The lawyer nodded to a man at the prosecution table who came across to him and after a moment the ritual phrase was addressed to the judge: “Arraignment and bail, your honor. Permission to approach the bench?”
The judge nodded.
The whispered tricorn conference at the bench was brief. The judge spoke by rote: “Trial is set for April fourteenth. The prisoner will be released on three hundred dollars bail. Prisoner will approach the bench, please.”
It took only a few seconds: the judge warned Crubb of the restrictions of bail and the penalties for jumping it. A bondsman came forward to post the bail. Crubb turned without a word and walked back to the defense table and sat down.
Paul made a show of looking at his watch; he got up then and went toward the door. Irene Evans looked up and he waved to her before he left the room.
He went outside to his car and sat in it. Crubb would turn up any moment, as soon as the papers were signed. Paul reached under the seat for his guns.
12
THE NUMBER 94 bus had a sickly green two-tone paint job. Paul put the car in drive and followed the bus north on California Avenue into the barrio. It reminded him of stretches of the Borough of Queens: commercial shabbiness and nondescript duplex houses. Strong winds buffeted and ripped the racing clouds; the temperature had been dropping all morning and the car radio trumpeted alarums of snow.
Crubb left the bus at Chicago Avenue and walked east on it, shoulders high, boots clicking angrily. Paul waited double-parked and gave him a one-block lead; then he let the car creep forward without feeding any gas. Traffic swished past him in the outside lane.
Friday night Crubb had muffed his hit and come up empty. He’d shown no fear in the courtroom, only a bored arrogance; the hearing and the setting of bail were a slap on the wrist and probably had annoyed and irritated Crubb but certainly they hadn’t deterred him. The predator was still hungry.
Crubb entered a pizza café, moving purposefully—he wasn’t merely looking for a place to eat. Paul waited in a bus stop. Within a few minutes Crubb reappeared with two companions. They looked like two of the men in the bunch Crubb had been with when Paul had first seen him in Old Town.
The three of them walked, bouncing heel-and-toe, to Western Avenue where they waited for the northbound bus and got aboard it.
He gave the bus several blocks’ lead. When it discharged Crubb and his companions he had no trouble recognizing them at the distance; by the time he reached the corner they had walked a block into a neighborhood of small private houses and low brick apartment buildings. Paul glanced at them and drove a block farther along Western, then made the right turn and went two blocks and turned right again. When he parked in the middle of the block he saw the three men walk across the intersection in front of him. None of them looked his way. They had something in mind: they were looking for something, scanning the houses as they walked. Paul locked the car and walked to the corner and watched from there, staying next to the building where he could curl back out of sight if one of them looked over his shoulder.