“I’m going back to L.A. You want to ride?”
“For what?” she said, looking very sad.
“Hernandez didn’t get his money. He’s going to smell double-cross and maybe send guns to take out a little venganza on Eddie’s friends in and around the border.”
“To hell with it,” she said, gazing at her drink. “There’s no Eddie.”
I was on the highway in the middle of the desert, feeling better as I got farther north, when I thought of the. good comeback.
“There’s too damn many of them,” I should’ve said.
Petition for Justice
by Pauline C. Smith
He was one of the bad ones, sullen, frightened, hating me. He was going to die, condemned by a jury of his peers. He was bad, all right. Just how bad? But only a dead girl knew.
Mrs. Bruton was on duty at the neighborhood liquor store that night, it being the first Wednesday of the month, when Mr. Bruton attended the town council meeting. The block of small business buildings was dark except for the liquor store on the corner. Street lights on Main at the residential cross-streets were dim with mist.
At 10:30, an old car turned from Main onto Elm and parked at the curbing on the other side of the alley beyond the liquor store parking lot. The driver, a young man by the spring of his step, walked through the shadows of the empty parking lot and entered the liquor store by the front door.
Few cars traversed that section of Main Street that time of night. The two residential cross streets were clear except for the car parked on Elm and another driving down Sycamore on the dark side of the block, slowing as it approached the mouth of the alley. The closing click of a door at the back of the liquor store sounded, heard by nobody, and a darker shadow entered the alley shadows, seen by nobody, until the headlights of the car turning from Sycamore caught the man in their glare and momentarily halted him in stiff surprise. He ran then, arms hugged at his sides, yanked open the door of the parked car, tossed two bottles to the seat, switched on the ignition and zoomed up Elm.
The creeping headlights Watched him run and take off, then they blacked out near the end of the alleyway directly behind the liquor store.
The mist turned to light rain, dispersing the fog, and by eleven o’clock, the two residential streets were dark and empty as was the alley that connected them.
On Main Street, one car made a left and entered the parking lot at the side of the liquor store.
Mr. Bruton hurried out of the car and around it in the rain, sprinted for the front door, pushed it open and discovered his wife, face down, lying in her own blood.
At first, Tommy Tyler tried to brazen it out by being righteously indignant. “What do you mean I held up a liquor store?”
“That’s what we mean,” said the cops impassively.
“Find the dough then.” Tommy crossed his arms and leaned back on the bunk. “If I held up a liquor store, I got some bread. Okay, then, find it.”
“We will,” they promised.
“I been right here all the time.”
“Sure,” said the cops.
“So prove I been somewhere else.”
“We will,” assured the cops. “We’ll prove you were at this liquor store tonight. It’s where you got that liquor you’re drinking.”
“Prove it,” said Tommy.
“That’s easy,” said the cops. One picked up a bottle and looked at the label. “This is an imported Scotch whiskey, and there’s only one place in town sells the brand.”
“So what does that prove?” asked Tommy.
“It proves you were in Bruton’s Liquor Store on the corner of Main and Elm and shot Mrs. Bruton to death.”
Tommy Tyler suddenly remembered the two bright headlight eyes that had rounded the corner from Sycamore into the alley and held him captive for one lost moment in revealing glare.
It was on his parents back lot that Tommy Tyler had constructed the shack he lived in. Built of tag-ends of lumber and without a working plan, the shack personified Tommy’s design for living, without purpose and in solitude.
The police found the money taken from the cash register that Wednesday night without trouble, just as they knew they would. Tommy was not too bright either during the commission of his crimes or on covering his tracks after commitment. The $353 was readily discovered under one of the many loose floor boards of his shack, the bills folded and placed on the dirt.
The Tylers were nice and ineffectual people, so the police went easy on them. They walked from Tommy’s shack on the back of the lot, up to the house in front.
“We’re sorry,” they said, “but that’s the way it is,” displaying the money, explaining where the evidence had been found and how their son had been drinking further evidence only two hours after the body of his wife had been found by Mr. Bruton.
“This time,” explained the officer reluctantly, “I’m afraid Tommy will have to be tried by the adult court. This time it has to be that way.”
Mrs. Tyler cried, “Oh no,” and Mr. Tyler nodded sadly, his shoulders sagging.
Tommy Tyler was nineteen and in a spot. So he retreated, defensively uncommunicative on the subject of stealing the money and the Scotch, even of being in the vicinity of the liquor store, sullenly suggesting that both points be proved. As to the killings, however, he was vehemently verbal, proclaiming his innocence loudly.
“I never killed any old lady,” he shouted. “I never even had a gun. I never had a gun,” being a limp refutation, a kid like that, in trouble since he was old enough to find trouble.
“Okay then, where is it?” Tommy cried, “you gotta find the gun to prove it,” which held no water since you certainly did not have to find the weapon to prove a man guilty. Anyway, Tommy was always telling the police to prove it and the police were always proving it.
Before the trial, Mr. Bruton made only one comment, but he made it often and at length. “How would you like to find your wife dead when you came to pick her up?” and paused so his listeners could decide how they would like such a scene. “Shotgun, they say,” said Mr. Bruton. “My own kid’s got a shotgun, and believe me, I taught him how to shoot it and what to shoot it at. How would you like to find your kid’s mother shot with a shotgun and have to go home and tell your kid his mother was dead?” pausing again to allow his listeners to ponder such a problem.
“This kid of mine’s about the same age as that killer. He’s a good straight kid. Never had any trouble with him. Straight-A student out at that junior college. Studies at night, doesn’t go prowling around robbing and killing people. Imagine having to go home and tell my kid his mother got shot for a few hundred bucks and a couple of bottles of Scotch! It was rough, believe me. I’d rather be hung up by my heels than ever have to go through that again. The kid fell apart. He’s sensitive, see? He just fell apart, that’s all. His mother and him were like that,” at which point, Mr. Bruton held up his middle and forefinger, closely tight.
“The Bruton boy, Myron; never had any dates. Fact. He took his mother to everything. The games at junior college. Plays. Everything. He took his mother,” said Mr. Hergesheimer, retired and living on Sycamore Street, drafted now to keep the liquor store open during time of mourning. “Think what this does to Myron!”
Mr. Hergesheimer had many observations to make to the many customers who never before had patronized this liquor store, but did so now, since it was practically famous. “You see, the father kept the store open every night except on the first Wednesday of each month, when there was a council meeting, and then she did it. That left the mother alone most of the time, so Myron took her places. He just wanted to. You never saw a mother and son so close. It was beautiful, I tell you,” and Mr. Hergesheimer shook his head in awe at such beauty.