He had performed the ritual several times and it hadn’t tempted anyone yet but he kept at it because he needed at least one more immediate target to convince the press of his existence.
When he reached the street a police cruiser was prowling by with its roof-bar of siren and lights and its lettered decals on the door. Paul counted his money again and then put the wallet in his coat pocket and turned the corner into a street lined with old frame houses streaked with watermarks.
Halfway down the block he stopped and patted his pockets as if he’d lost something. It gave him an excuse to turn a circle on his heels and search the sidewalk behind him. Down at the corner a thin jittery figure in a threadbare jacket stood restlessly: a youth bouncing on his arches like an athlete waiting to compete. Behind him a woman went across the street jerking a small wailing child by the hand.
A second youth appeared and joined the first.
Paul reached down and picked up an invisible object and put it in his pocket and walked on.
To his right a windowless clapboard wall had been decorated with spray-gun artwork. The houses beyond were dreary and lifeless. Chicago’s slums were spacious and airy by comparison with New York’s crowded high tenement buildings; the streets were wide, the buildings low. But the desolation had the same smell.
He kept the wallet in the same pocket as the gun for two reasons. If a mugger demanded his wallet he could produce the gun instead. But if a policeman went into that pocket Paul wanted him to find the $250 cash in the wallet.
The two kids watched him from the corner behind him: he saw their reflections in the rear window of a panel truck as he walked by it. They were all jerks and jitters: wired as if they’d been plugged into a wall outlet. Addicts? He had no way of diagnosing; maybe they were only natural mannerisms. But when he reached the end of the block and continued along the second block he had a chance, when looking both ways for traffic before crossing the street, to see the two kids out of the corner of his eye and they were following him at a discreet distance. His hands began to sweat: the familiar telltale.
He slowed the pace imperceptibly. His car was near the end of the block. A block farther along the empty street a traffic light blinked red, on and off. Daylight was draining out of the sky. He tasted the brass of fear on his tongue.
The two kids were running now. He heard them come.
8
¶ CHICAGO, DEC. 19TH—Two teen-age boys were shot to death on the South Side late yesterday, apparently by the same revolver that has killed three others on Chicago streets in the past 72 hours.
The boys, Ernesto Delgado, 16, and his brother Julio, 15, of 4415 W. 21st Place, were found dead on a Wolcott Avenue sidewalk at 5:10 p.m. yesterday by a passing Chicago police patrol car.
According to a preliminary examination by the police laboratory, the bullets that killed the Delgado brothers may have been fired by the same .38 revolver alleged to have been the weapon used in last night’s killing of James Washington, 26, on Lowe Avenue, and in the prior night’s homicides on North Mohawk, the victims of which were identified as Edward A. Smith, 23, and Leroy Thompson, 22.
Police Captain Victor Mastro this morning said, “We may have a ‘vigilante’ on our hands.”
Mastro spoke in reference to the recent spate of “vigilante” killings in New York City. They have been discussed widely by the national press and television.
The three adult homicide victims all had criminal records, Mastro said. And while juvenile records cannot be published, a police spokesman remarked that the Delgado brothers were alleged to have been heroin addicts. A neighbor, interviewed this morning, described the two boys as “violent and vicious kids.”
Captain Mastro stated that photographs of the bullets in all five cases have been sent to New York for comparison with those found in the bodies of the victims of the alleged “vigilante” killer in that city.
Chicago Police Chief John Colburn, asked to comment, said, “I’d rather not speculate at this point until we’ve got more facts to work on. At the moment we’ve assigned detectives to investigate these homicides and the connection, if any, between them. It’s too early to jump to conclusions.”
A “VIGILANTE” IN CHICAGO?
Commentary
by Michael Ludlow
Reports from the police blotter indicate that a “vigilante”-style executioner may be prowling the streets of Chicago, possibly inspired by the New York killings attributed to that city’s unidentified “vigilante.”
Whether or not such vigilantes exist, speculation and rumor have fostered a wave of emphasis on the “crime problem” which seems unprecedented even in this age of soaring crime rates and law-and-order politics.
Despite the nation’s unemployment, recession, inflation, revelations of political chicanery, crop failures, petroleum and energy crises, and all the other burdens our society has to bear—despite all these tribulations—every poll conducted in the past weeks has indicated emphatically that the “crime crisis” has become the number one concern of Americans, helped along clearly by New York’s (and Chicago’s?) “vigilante.”
It is a concern that is nearly unique, in that it is shared by members of every economic level, race, age group and region.
Obviously it is more than momentary hysteria. It may be true, as has been alleged, that the “vigilante” is a myth created either by New York’s police or by the news media; but the fact remains that crime in America has become a true crisis.
We can’t pretend it doesn’t exist and hope it will go away. Quibbling about the inaccuracies in the FBI’s recent Uniform Crime Report statistics will not change the fact that ordinary people are not safe on the streets, or even in their homes. If a citizen is so terrified that he refuses to leave his locked apartment, he has been deprived of his freedom. His civil liberties have been revoked just as surely as have those of the vigilante’s presumed victims.
Vigilantism is not an answer. We cannot solve the crime problem by increasing the number of murders.
But we must act.
It is time our institutions fulfilled the missions for which they were established. The inadequacy of police budgets, the alarming back-up of cases on the calendars of overcrowded criminal courts, the overwhelming prevalence of plea-bargaining in felony cases, and the revolving-door bail-bond situation that puts felons back on the streets within hours after their arrest—all these and other aspects of the police-judicial-penal systems are becoming recognized as intolerable weaknesses that threaten the very survival of our democracy’s structure of freedom and law.
Legal punishment, to deter, must be immediate and impartial. The only thing known to deter criminal acts is the reasonable certainty that they will be exposed and that prosecution, conviction and punishment will follow. Without that reasonable certainty we risk the rise of chaotic anarchy in the form of vigilantism—the citizenry taking the law into its own hands, mindlessly and individually. The “vigilante” is ample evidence that our institutions must act now—before it is too late.
9
FRIDAY EVENING it began to rain. Reflected neon colors melted and ran along the wet streets. Paul sat in his parked car and switched on the radio softly to have company. Under an awning a man with a square dark beard dressed in black coat and wide black hat was reading a newspaper, turning the pages left to right. Girls in shabby clothes paraded the boulevard under two-dollar umbrellas with a pretended indifference to the eyes that followed them; smudges of dirty illumination drifted across the bellies of the clouds.