Velco purred, “Me, I like to do everything the big way. The great big way. So, you ask me to lend you a couple of hundred dollars, instead, I bring you this — as a gift. Here, baby — a thousand-dollar bill.”
Velco’s words burst and echoed in Joe Carlin’s brain. A thousand-dollar bill. Not the two hundred bucks Velco should have brought, the two hundred bucks that would have taken Carlin to Pennsylvania and the farm where he could get well. No! Velco had to big-dog it with a thousand-dollar bill!
Carlin heard himself yell, a choking, sobbing scream that seemed to rip at his throat, a shriek that turned somehow into a swelling crimson bubble within his head, and broke against his skull in a tearing burst of pain. He plunged forward and drove the steak knife into Velco’s broad back. From the corner of his eye, he saw the girl as she ran, screaming hysterically, out of the apartment door. Then he twisted the knife loose and buried the long blade in Velco’s body again.
He was still crouched near Velco’s corpse when the police came. He flung himself at them, but the knife was deep in Velco’s back, and there was nothing in Carlin’s hand but a torn and bloody fragment of a thousand-dollar bill.
He ran straight at the cop who shouted at him to halt. The cop shouted again, and then, when Carlin came screaming on, the cop fired straight into Carlin’s writhing face.
Mugger Murder
by Richard Deming
It was difficult to understand the police interest in the case. There s nothing illegal about killing a thief who attacks you.
I was surprised to see Sergeant Nels Parker in the Coroner’s Court audience, for homicide detectives spend too much of their time there on official business to develop any morbid curiosity about cases not assigned to them. I was in the audience myself, of course, but as a police reporter this was my regular beat on Friday mornings, and after five years of similar Friday mornings, nothing but the continued necessity of making a living could have gotten me within miles of the place.
When I spotted him two rows ahead of me, I moved up and slid into the vacant seat next to him.
“Busman’s holiday, Sergeant?” I asked.
His long face turned and he cocked one dull eye at me. For so many years Nels had practiced looking dull in order to throw homicide witnesses off guard, the expression had become habitual.
“How are you, Sam?” he said.
“You haven’t got a case today, have you?” I persisted.
His head gave a small shake and he turned his eyes front again. Since he seemed to have no desire to explain his presence, I let the matter drop. But as the only inquest scheduled was on the body of a Joseph Garcia, age twenty-one and of no known address, I at least knew what case interested him.
The first witness was a patrolman named Donald Lutz, a thick bodied and round faced young fellow who looked as though he, like the dead man, was no more than twenty-one.
In response to the deputy coroner’s request to describe the circumstances of Joseph Garcia’s death as he knew them, the youthful patrolman said, “Well, it was Wednesday... night before last... about eleven thirty, and I was walking my beat along Broadway just south of Market. As I passed this alley mouth, I heard a scuffling sound in the alley and flashed my light down it. I saw these two guys struggling, one with a hammerlock on the other guy’s head, and just as my light touched them, the guy with the hammerlock gave a hard twist, the other guy went sort of limp, and the first guy let him drop to the alley floor. I moved in with my night stick ready, but the guy stood still and made no move either to run or come at me. He just stood there with his hands at his sides and said, ‘Officer, this man tried to rob me.’
“I told him to stand back, and knelt to look at the man lying down. Near as I could tell, he was dead, but in the dark with just a flashlight I couldn’t be sure, and I didn’t want to take a chance on him waking up and running away while I went to the nearest call box. So I stayed right there and used my stick on the concrete to bring the cop from the next beat. That was Patrolman George Mason.
“Mason went to call for a patrol car and a doctor while I staved with the two guys. That’s about all I know about things except when the doctor got there, he said the guy lying down was dead.”
The deputy coroner said, “And the dead man was later identified as Joseph Garcia?”
Patrolman Lutz nodded. “Yes, sir.”
“And the man Garcia was struggling with. Will you identify him, please?”
The policeman pointed his finger at a short, plump man of about fifty seated in a chair apart from the audience and within a few feet of where the jury was lined up along the left wall. He was a quietly dressed man with a bland, faintly vacuous smile and an appearance of softness about him until you examined him closely. Then you suspected that a good deal of his plumpness was muscle rather than fat, and you noticed his shoulders were unnaturally wide.
“That’s him there,” the young patrolman said. “Robert Hummel.”
Just in front of the platform containing the deputy coroner’s bench was a long table, one end pointing toward the platform and the other end toward the audience. On the right side of this table, seated side-wise to it with his back to the audience, sat the assistant circuit attorney in charge of the case. On its left side sat Marcus Prout, one of St. Louis’s most prominent criminal lawyers.
Now the assistant C.A. said, “Patrolman Lutz, I understand Robert Hummel had in his possession a .38 caliber pistol at the time of the incident you just described. Is that right?”
“Well, not exactly in his possession, sir. It was lying in the alley nearby, where he’d dropped it. It turned out he had a permit to carry it.”
Marcus Prout put in, “Officer, was there any other weapon in sight?”
“Yes, sir. An open clasp knife lay in the alley. This was later established as belonging to the deceased. Robert Hummel claimed Garcia drew it on him, he in turn drew his gun to defend himself, and ordered the deceased to drop the knife. However, the deceased continued to come at him. Hummel said he didn’t want to shoot the man, so he used the gun to knock the knife from Garcia’s hand, then dropped the gun and grappled with him.”
The lawyer asked, “Was there any mark on the deceased’s wrist to support that statement?”
“The post mortem report notes a bruise,” the deputy coroner interrupted, and glanced over at the jury.
Marcus Prout rose from his chair and strolled toward the patrolman. “Officer, did the deceased... this Joseph Garcia... have a police record?”
“Yes, sir. One arrest and a suspended sentence for mugging.”
“Mugging is a slang term for robbery with force, isn’t it?”
“Yes, sir. Generally without a weapon. You get a guy around the neck from behind and go through his pockets with your free hand. There’s other methods classified as mugging, but that’s the way Garcia did it the time he was convicted.”
The lawyer said, “Did you draw any inference from the fact that Robert Hummel, with a gun against a knife, used the gun merely to disarm his opponent and then grappled with him with his bare hands?”
The policeman said, “I don’t exactly know what you mean.”
“I mean, did it not occur to you as obvious Robert Hummel’s statement that he did not wish to shoot his opponent was true, and that he went out of his way to avoid seriously injuring Garcia, when under the circumstances he would have been fully justified in shooting the man through the heart? And that Garcia’s subsequent death in spite of Mr. Hummel’s precaution must have been an accident resulting from Robert Hummel exerting more strength than he intended in the excitement of the moment?”