Irvin Cobb - Local Color

Felix Looms, the well-known author, disappeared – or, rather, he went away – on or about June fifteenth, four years ago. He told his friends, his landlady and his publisher – he had no immediate family – he felt run down and debilitated and he meant to go away for a good long stay. He might try the Orient; then again perhaps he would go to the South Seas. When he came back, which might be in a year or two years or even three, he expected to bring with him the material for a longer and better book than any he had written. Meantime he wanted to cut loose, as he put it, from everything. He intended, he said, to write no letters while he was gone and he expected to receive none.

He gave a power of attorney to a lawyer with whom he had occasional dealings, left in bank a modest balance to meet any small forgotten bills that might turn up after his departure, surrendered his bachelor apartments in the Rubens Studio Building, paid off his housekeeper, said good-bye to a few persons, wrote explanatory notes to a few more; and then quietly – as he did everything in this life – he vanished.

Nobody particularly missed him, for he was not a famous author or even a popular one; he was merely well known as a writer of tales dealing in the main with crime and criminals and criminology. People that liked his writings said he was a realist, who gave promise of bigger things. People that did not like his writings said he was a half-baked socialist. One somewhat overcritical reviewer, who had a bad liver and a bitter pen, once compared him to an ambitious but immature hen pullet, laying many eggs but all soft-shelled and all of them deficient in yolk.

Personally Felix Looms was a short, slender, dark man, approaching forty, who wore thick glasses and coats that invariably were too long in the sleeves. In company he was self-effacing; in a crowd he was entirely lost, if you know what I mean. He did not know many people and was intimate with none of those he did know. Quite naturally his departure for parts unknown left his own little literary puddle unrippled.

Looms went away and he did not come back. His publisher never heard from him again; nor did his lawyer nor the manager of the warehouse where he had stored his heavier belongings. When three years had passed, and still no word came from him, his acquaintances thought – such of them as gave him a thought – that he must have died somewhere out in one of the back corners of the East. He did die too; but it was not in the East. He died within a block and a half of the club of his lawyer and not more than a quarter of a mile from the town house of his publisher. However, that detail, which is inconsequential, will come up later.

At about seven-forty-five on the evening of June seventeenth, four years ago, Patrolman Matthew Clabby was on duty – fixed post duty – at the corner of Thirty-fourth Street and Second Avenue. According to the report made by him at the time to his immediate superior and subsequently repeated by him under oath before the grand jury and still later at the trial, his attention was attracted – to use the common formula – by a disturbance occurring on a crosstown trolley car, eastward bound, which had halted just west of the corner.

Patrolman Clabby boarded the car to find a small, shabby man endeavouring to break away from a larger and better-dressed man, who held him fast by the collar. In reply to the officer’s questions the large man stated that he had detected the small one in the act of picking his pocket. He had waited, he said, until the other lifted his watch and chain and then had seized him and held him fast and called for help. At least three citizens, passengers on the car, confirmed the main points of the accuser’s story. For added proof there were the watch and chain. They were in the thief’s side coat pocket. With his own large firm hands Patrolman Clabby fished them out from there and confiscated them for purposes of evidence. As for the prisoner, he said nothing at all.

The policeman totted down in his little book the names and addresses of the eyewitnesses. This done, he took the small man and led him off afoot to the East Thirty-fifth Street Station, the owner of the watch going along to make a formal charge. Before the desk in the station house this latter person said he was named Hartigan – Charles Edward Hartigan, a private detective by occupation; and he repeated his account of the robbery, with amplifications. The pickpocket gave his name as James Williams and his age as thirty-eight, but declined to tell where he lived, what occupation he followed, or what excuse he had for angling after other people’s personal property on a crosstown car.

At this juncture Clabby grabbed one of his prisoner’s hands and ran a finger over its inner surface, seeking for callosities of the palm; then he nodded meaningly to the desk lieutenant.

“I guess he’s a dip all right, Loot,” said Clabby; “the inside of his hand is as soft as a baby’s.”

“Take him back!” said the lieutenant briefly.

Before obeying, Clabby faced the man about and searched him, the search revealing a small amount of money but no objects that might serve for the prisoner’s better identification. So, handling James Williams as casually and impersonally as though he were merely a rather unwieldy parcel, Clabby propelled him rearward along a passageway and turned him over to a turnkey, who turned him into a cell and left him there – though not very long. Within an hour he was taken in a patrol wagon to the night court, sitting at Jefferson Market, where an irritable magistrate held him, on the strength of a short affidavit by Clabby, to await the action of the grand jury.

Thereafter for a period James Williams, so far as the processes of justice were concerned, ceased to be a regular human being and became a small and inconspicuous grain in the whirring hopper of the law. He was as one pepper-corn in a crowded bin – one atom among a multitude of similar atoms. Yet the law from time to time took due cognisance of this mote’s existence.

For example, on the morning of the eighteenth a closed van conveyed him to the Tombs. For further example, an assistant district attorney, in about a month, introduced Clabby and Hartigan before the July grand jury. It took the grand jury something less than five minutes to vote an indictment charging James Williams with grand larceny; and ten days later it took a judge of General Sessions something less than three-quarters of an hour to try the said Williams.

The proceedings in this regard were entirely perfunctory. The defendant at the bar had no attorney. Accordingly the judge assigned to the task of representing him a fledgling graduate of the law school. Hartigan testified; Clabby testified; two eyewitnesses, a bricklayer and a bookkeeper, testified – all for the state. The prisoner could produce no witnesses in his own behalf and he declined to take the stand himself, which considerably simplified matters.

Red and stuttering with stage fright, the downy young law-school graduate made a brief plea for his client on the ground that no proof had been offered to show his client had a previous criminal record. Perfunctorily the young assistant district attorney summed up. In a perfunctory way the judge charged the jury; and the jury filed out, and – presumably in a perfunctory fashion also – took a ballot and were back in less than no time at all with a verdict of guilty.

James Williams, being ordered to stand up, stood up; being ordered to furnish his pedigree for the record, he refused to do so; being regarded, therefore, as a person who undoubtedly had a great deal to conceal, he was denied the measure of mercy that frequently is bestowed on first offenders. His Honour gave him an indeterminate sentence of not less than three years at hard labour in state prison, and one of the evening newspapers gave him three lines in the appropriate ratio of one line for each year. In three days more James Williams was at Sing Sing, wearing among other things a plain grey suit, a close hair-cut and a number, learning how to make shoes.