Брайан Гарфилд - Suspended Sentences

“And one more thing,” I added in the same quiet voice. “It’s conceivable that some fatal accident just might happen to befall me if I began to put such a campaign into action. You and Owens should be aware that this is a rural county and that my family is one of the oldest here. We’ve known one another for generations around here. Some of these old boys — friends of mine, I play poker and hunt deer with them — some of these gents can shoot a flea off a coon-dog’s ear at six hundred yards. They’re not above settling their grievances in the old-fashioned frontier manner. I’d like you and Owens to understand that if anything happens to me, it happens to Owens. I doubt it’s much fun spending the hours wondering when to expect the bullet out of the darkness.”

I got up and left him then; I’d said all I had to say.

Part of it was a bluff. I don’t number any killers among my friends. But Farquhart and Owens were city boys and they didn’t know that for sure; we had a redneck reputation up our way.

The rest of it had been quite true. I was fully prepared to drown Owens’ companies in bureaucratic obstructionism and it would have been perfectly legal to do so: if you actually enforce every ludicrous regulation in the law you can cripple anyone. The reason it hadn’t already been done in Owens’ case was that he’d been pouring a great deal of money into the economy of the county. Folks are willing to put up with all sorts of shenanigans if prosperity comes with them. But people up in Ocotillo County are still a bit old-fashioned: they don’t condone willful murder as an acceptable way of doing business. I’d have had no trouble getting the cooperation of the other county officials.

Coercion is a two-way street. Owens and Farquhart were dealers in fear; I’d given them their own medicine.

Farquhart and his supporting battery of big-town attorneys put up a good defense but they didn’t produce the six lying witnesses; Baker and Calhoun were convicted on the steadfast testimony of Larry Stowe and the evidence of bootprints and a few other tangibles left at the scene. The killers were sentenced to twenty-year-to-life terms in the State Penitentiary at Florence. Rumor has it that Ron Owens had to pay both of them enormous sums to ensure that they wouldn’t implicate him in the murder. The presence of his Cadillac at the crime meant nothing; Owens simply gave out the story that he’d lent the car to the two cowboys but had no idea what they meant to do with it.

But Owens pulled out of the county with satisfying alacrity. It took him a while to liquidate his properties but by Christmas he was gone, his offices closed, his residence sold.

He wasn’t really very tough. I’d been looking forward to squaring off against him but evidently he didn’t enjoy playing a game against people who played harder than he did.

The law doesn’t protect people unless people protect the law.

“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 beginnings of what we now call organized crime. There was an enormous industry in producing and distributing booze. In terms of the complexities and the quantity of distribution it was a far vaster operation than today’s narcotic drug trade, because there were so many more customers. Half the population, at least.