Gonzalo interrupted. “That’s twice now you’ve said you needed to be smart enough. Why smart enough? Persuasive enough, I can see; eloquent enough; unscrupulous enough; threatening enough. Why smart enough?”
Burry hesitated and rubbed his chin, as though wondering what to say. He decided apparently, and said, “The police have been after the burglary ring and, among others, they have consulted me. They had reason to think that some of the students at my school were involved and they wanted me to cooperate with them in finding the culprits. To be truthful, I wasn’t anxious to do this.”
“To squeal?” said Drake, stony-faced.
For a moment Burry stiffened with indignation. Then he relaxed. “You’re right. I don’t want to squeal, but that’s just a gut reaction. There’s more to it than that. As I told you, picking up the youngsters does not solve the problem, but it may manufacture hardened criminals. Were I to find some youngster I suspected of being involved, what I would hope to do would be to obtain the necessary information from him and turn over the information, not the youngster, to the police.”
Avalon said, “I don’t think you would get the necessary information by kindly persuasion, Mr. Burry. The police might have better arguments than you have.”
Trumbull slapped the table with the palm of his hand. “Jeff, that’s silly. Those kids are heroes if they resist the police and if any police officer tried to beat anything out of them, not only is any information he gets inadmissible as evidence, the policeman involved will be up on charges.”
“I call that hobbling the police to the cost of the honest citizen,” said Avalon.
“I call it forcing the police to a single standard of conduct and having them treat the poor, the ill-educated, the unpopular as circumspectly as they would treat those with money and lawyers,” said Trumbull.
“Why not enforce the single standard by treating the well-to-do criminal as roughly as the poor ones, then?” demanded Avalon.
Trumbull said, “Because they’re only suspected criminals. The state of actual criminality comes only after trial and judgment and until then the person in custody has all the rights and privileges of a free American, including decent treatment at the hands of the guardians of the very law that says so. Mr. Burry, I think your attitude is a good one.”
Burry said, “Thank you, but good or not, it didn’t work. What the police need is evidence. They have suspicions as to the identity of the ringleaders, the Fagins, but until they can catch them in action, surrounded by their stolen goods, they aren’t likely to be able to prove it. One of the difficulties appears to be that the criminals change their base of operation frequently, and are never in one place long enough to leave a clear trail. Of course, if we knew in advance where they would be, we would have a chance. And that is the kind of information the youngsters would have, for they have to know where to bring the loot.
“Without that— Well, the poorer sections of New York are an incredible rabbit warren which could swallow up an army of police searchers who would encounter frozen-faced inhabitants denying all knowledge of anything. From the pattern of the robberies, the police suspect that the scene of operations must be on Manhattan’s west side, somewhere between 80th Street and 125th Street; but that’s not much of a hint. — But I had my eye on John.”
“Why him?” asked Drake.
“Money,” snapped Burry. “It comes to that. We live in a society that measures all values by money, and that delivers unending pressures by advertising in every medium urging the possession of material things that can be had only for money. Sex standards are set by the beautiful people, and those can be met only with money. Well, then, if you don’t have money, what do you do? Devote your life to gaining those skills that will make money in the end. What if you firmly believe that the disadvantages you were born with will make it impossible for you to make money even if you gain those skills? You give up, perhaps, and get the money by the shortest route — and another youngster is lost both to himself and society.”
Drake said, “Yes, but this is true for many of the students at the school, I’m sure. Why John?”
“Of course, it’s true of many. That’s why the youngsters are so easily recruited. But I have been interested in John so that my eye has been on him and in recent months he has shown money.”
“In what way?” asked Rubin, who had been absently doodling dollar signs on his napkin.
“Better clothes, for one thing; an air of self-confidence for another. Something amounting almost to arrogance in his attitude toward girls. There’s no point in having money if you don’t show it, and I know the signs. I had no proof, of course, no real evidence, and I didn’t want to confront John with my suspicions if, by any chance, I happened to be wrong.
“Then last Monday I passed him in the hall, quite by accident, and he had a piece of paper in his hand. It seemed to me it had been handed to him. I had not been looking in his direction; it had been an impression out of the corner of my eye. I certainly didn’t see who had done the passing, for it was between periods and the halls were quite crowded. It’s good to be in the halls at unpredictable times, by the way. The possible presence of authority does impose some sense of discipline, however minimal.” Burry sighed, and smiled rather weakly.
Gonzalo said, “What about the paper?”
“I had no reason to think the paper had anything to do with the robberies, but it seemed unusual, and I have learned to respond at once to anything unusual. ‘What’s that paper you’re holding, John?’ I asked in what I hoped was a friendly tone.
“ ‘The paper, Mr. Burry?’ he asked, and my suspicions were aroused at once. To repeat a question is almost invariably a play for time. So I asked to see it; I held out my hand for it. By now the main flood of students had passed, though some turned for a quick look backward.”
Trumbull said, “Could you force him to hand over the paper? He has a right to his personal property, hasn’t he?”
Burry said, “I would not have used force, naturally, but within the school my powers to enforce discipline are, in theory, considerable. I might have suspended him from his classes for failure to comply and that would have been an unhappy position for John. He enjoyed his classes. In any case, he complied.
“He hesitated, said, ‘It’s just a piece of paper I picked up, Mr. Burry,’ glanced at it carelessly and handed it over, saying with an air of mocking virtue, ‘I was going to put it in a waste basket, Mr. Burry. You wouldn’t want the halls all littered.’
“I resisted the temptation to point out that one more piece of paper would have made no difference in the extent of litter and said, ‘I am pleased at your thoughtfulness. I’ll see to it that this is thrown away,’ and put it in my pocket without looking at it. I then asked him how he was doing with his schoolwork and he answered easily enough. He seemed in no way perturbed at my having the paper in my possession. I waited till I was back in my office before I looked at it and I must say I was disappointed. It was a typewritten sheet, Xeroxed, not very professionally done, and it urged students to demand decent educational facilities, a message I wholeheartedly agree with.
“But there was nothing conspiratorial about it — or at least I could see nothing as conspiratorial. I didn’t trust my own judgment in the matter, so I called the detective lieutenant who had approached me on the matter of the burglary ring. He visited me after hours, in plain clothes, of course, and I showed him the letter without telling him the name of the youngster from whom I had obtained it.”
Trumbull said, “Surely he asked the name?”
Burry said, “I told the story in such a way that no one youngster of whatever name was implicated.”