Suspended Sentences

ENDS AND MEANS

“Ends and Means” is a story within a story; the interior story is an embellishment of alleged more or less actual events in my old home town, while the frame (outer) story reflects a self-questioning about moral contradictions that I’d undergone in the two years since a movie based on my novel DEATH WISH had been loosed.

The judge put his coffee down and pushed himself back in the reclining chair until its platform flipped up under his feet. Harris watched the old man read the script. Attentive, undistractible, the judge read slowly and didn’t look up when the telephone rang. It rang only twice; someone elsewhere in the house must have answered it.

Finally Judge Culver put the last page aside. “It’s a good yarn. But you already know that. Why bring it to me? I’m hardly a lit’ry critic.”

“You may find this hard to buy, knowing me, but it’s one of those times when I’m really not looking for a reassuring pat on the back. I want your judgment — there’s something about the story that bothers me.”

“If it bothers you then change it. You wrote it.”

“The thing is,” Harris said, “it’s to do with justice. That’s your department.”

“Justice is the concern of any writer of dramatic works.”

“Not in this sense. The whole story revolves around definitions of justice.”

“Yes,” the judge agreed.

“Well, look,” Harris said, “I’m not sure it isn’t too expedient. The resolution of the story. I liked it fine while I was working it out but in retrospect it strikes me there’s a moral cynicism in it — it’s a little too much like letting the ends justify the means. There’s no problem about getting it published. The question in my mind is whether I want it published. Whether possibly it says something I don’t want to say.” He sat back on the couch and crossed his legs and laced his fingers behind his head.

The judge had a sly smile that crinkled the lines around his eyes. “You wrote it. Don’t you know what it says?”

“I know what it says to me. I’d like to know what it says to you.”

“The detective catches the murderer but then lets him go because he feels it was justifiable homicide. It’s a sort of star-chamber acquittal.”

“My protagonist places himself above the law.”

“Yes,” the judge said. “But of course you’ve contrived unique circumstances in this story.”

“Does that matter? Do you think this kind of thing ought to be justified under any circumstance at all?”

“As I said, Jim, that’s your decision to make. You’re the writer.”

“All right. But I’d like your judgment.”

The judge had a weakness for long slender cigars. He had one going in his left hand; it had grown a tall ash. Now he tapped it off into the big glass ashtray by his elbow. “I’ve been on the bench quite a few years.” The abrupt change of subject bewildered Harris. “Municipal court, superior court, six years on the court of appeals. You may be asking the wrong man. If you want a cut-and-dried moral judgment you’d be better off asking a preacher. I’ve seen the law bent. Too many times. Not always to the detriment of justice, either. I agree with you that it’s morally disastrous to take the attitude that the ends justify the means. As a blanket principle, that is. But justice isn’t an abstract. It’s a guiding precept that ought to be adapted to the conditions of the individual case. I’ve bent the law a few times myself, you know. Even broken it. Flagrantly. When it served what I felt were the interests of justice.”

“You have?”

“I can’t criticize your script. The best I can offer is a parable. An anecdotal illustration. Shall I try?”

“I wish you would.”

“It’s a true story. The participants have mostly passed on to their rewards by now; in any case the statute of limitations ran out long ago so it can’t harm me — legally — to admit the part I played. At the time I had a hell of a tussle with my conscience. But I learned a great deal from it. Maybe I flatter myself, but I think it’s made me a better jurist.”

The old man drained his coffee, adjusted the cigar comfortably between thumb and fingers, and began his tale.

I was assistant district attorney at the time. Young, earnest, inflated with eager principles. And maybe a trifle ambitious. It was nineteen thirty-one, I think — give or take a year. I’m a bit vague on dates when I go back that far.

It was during Prohibition in any case. The Volstead Law had been around for more than a decade. Down here in the Southwest there’d grown up a well-established bootleg trade — some of it ’shine from back-country stills and downtown bathtub operations, but most of the hooch came in across the border from Mexico. It was big business. The illegality of it had caused the emergence of disciplined criminal mobs — the begi

The result was that even in a cowtown like Tucson we found ourselves up against a powerful underworld organization. Now the truth is we tended to wink at the bootleg trade, as you probably know. Nobody except a few overeager glory hunters had much interest in nailing whiskey peddlers. Most of us spent half our evenings patronizing speakeasies.

But the booze trade had brought the crooks out of the woodwork en masse. Our problem wasn’t booze, except indirectly. Our problem was the by-products of the trade. The constantly increasing economic and political power that the criminal mobs developed. We weren’t concerned, really, about so-called white slavery or gambling or the other victimless crimes. What alarmed the honest folks was the specter of a takeover of our society by the criminal element. They were buying politicians. They were extorting fortunes from the business community through their bald-faced protection rackets. You don’t need a long litany of their crimes — the point is, we were concerned, we didn’t want to see things get out of hand. Bootlegging was one thing. Giving the mobsters enough power to elect a governor was another thing entirely. These people had — have — no respect for rudimentary human rights, let alone laws. We had to fight them. We know it now; we knew it equally well then, as anyone who’s ever seen The Untouchables on television knows.

Down in Tucson our local crime czar was a fellow who went by the name of Irwin Sterrick. It wasn’t the name he’d been born with but never mind.

Sterrick ostensibly was a restaurateur. He owned three establishments — steak houses, you know the kind of place. Gin and bourbon in coffee cups, slot machines in the rest rooms. A cut up from speakeasies. He didn’t actually own any of the wholesale operations and he didn’t actually run the extortion rackets, but he was the key man in the setup. Within the criminal organization he’d worked his way up from bookkeeper to chief accountant to high factotum. It was a loose confederation — the “organized” in organized crime is a misnomer — but to the extent that there’s a single boss in any company, Sterrick fulfilled that function here. If an underling wanted to start a new operation he had to get clearance from Sterrick; usually he got his financing from Sterrick as well. Sterrick controlled the coffers. Major transactions went through his hands. It wasn’t his money, most of it, but nearly all of it passed through his office in one way or another. He kept the books.

We knew if we could nail Sterrick and get our hands on his books we could cripple the mob for quite a while. Sterrick was getting altogether too powerful and we had to stop him.

Naturally the federal officers were eager to nail him as well. They wanted to put him away on income-tax violations. But none of us had any success in our initial efforts. We knew he kept detailed books — even criminals have to have records so tthey can check up on one another and make sure nobody’s cheating — but when we subpoenaed them the books would mysteriously disappear ahead of the officers with their search warrants. It appeared there was no lawful way we could solve the problem.