John Gardner - The Sunlight Dialogues

5

Clumly avoided the trial. There was no need for him there, though he usually went in cases like Boyle’s, to make sure there were no slip-ups. But Miller could handle it if anybody could. The jury might send Walter Boyle up to Attica on the strength of nothing more than Miller’s grin. Miller could win them like a child. He sat solemn-faced as a girl in church. His shoulders and chest and arms and legs were the kind that gave you confidence in American law enforcement, yet his eyes were mild: he would not maltreat your son when he broke a school window. And Boyle, on the other hand, looked so much like a thief that if you saw him in the movies, sneaking into a house, you’d have laughed. His eyes roved constantly, full of fear and suspicion and malice, and he sat with his head ducked, the hump on his back almost higher than the round, graying head. He wrung his fingers and sat with one toe on the other, and once in a while he would jerk, looking over his shoulder. When he was agitated, a tic came over him, a spasmodic smile of fright that went up his left cheek. All right. That was damn near all they had on him, that was the truth.

Always the grim fact remained that no one had seen what he did in the houses he knocked at and entered; it was impossible to prove that he had not stood just inside the partly opened door, waiting for some answer to his call. And impossible to prove that the money in his car was not his own.

“Circumstantial,” the defense would say. And would make his point with homely illustrations — the same illustrations he’d been inspired to use last time and the time before, it might be, but skillfully, feelingly presented, nonetheless, like comforting poems he’d committed to memory years ago. And Boyle would probably go free.

He hadn’t wanted to see it, so he’d stayed away. There was another reason, too. Miller had said this morning in Clumly’s office, in front of Kozlowski, “It’s all right here, Chief, the case against Benson. You sure you won’t change your mind?”

Clumly had taken the folder from him and had looked at it. More mere circumstance, that was true, but such a weight of it that it might wake up even Sam White. Correlations of Benson’s absences from home and burglaries in a neat semicircle around Buffalo. An old record of minor offenses by Benson, from the days of his apprenticeship. And three larceny arrests, no convictions, against Walter Boyle.

“You’ve been busy,” Clumly said.

Miller waited.

He shook his head. “It won’t stand up anyway, Miller. A good defense—”

“It might.”

“The answer’s no.”

“I could take it to the D.A. myself, you realize.”

“You could. It’s up to you.”

“For Christ’s sake, boss. Be reasonable.”

“No.” He flushed. “I don’t choose to be reasonable. I’m sick of it.”

Miller said, “They’ll eventually get your head for this.”

“Maybe,” he said.

“They’ll get you sure as hell.”

He grinned without humor, and his white face squeezed like a fist around his secret, his one way out. “Maybe,” he said again.

But when Miller left, Clumly did not feel sure of him. It might be he would take it to the D.A. Or it might be that even if Miller kept quiet, the D.A. would find some way to make him speak on the stand. Clumly himself had as much as told him last night on the phone that they had more on Boyle than they’d given him. And so he hadn’t wanted to watch.

When Miller went out, Kozlowski said, “What’s all that?”

“That’s the Future,” Clumly said. “It’s the next five hundred years.”

Kozlowski studied him.

Clumly said, looking at the floor, “Well, never mind.” And then: “We’re doing some shifting around, that’s what I called you for. You’re to work under Miller now. Cops-and-robbers stuff.”

“Yes sir.”

He seemed neither pleased nor displeased. A puzzling man. It was that, the bafflement that came of talking with a man without visible emotions, that urged Clumly on.

“Listen, I’ll tell you a story,” he said. “Five years ago we had a series of armed robberies. Crook named Roy-something, turned out. Over on the East Side. Negro fellow. Little Polish grocery stores, barbershops, beauty parlors run in one room of somebody’s house — that kind of thing. There was a drugstore down there, and we decided to stake it. Dirty little place, not making a dollar — same as all those little places, poor neighborhood, druggist not doing well enough to hire a helper or need one. You follow me? Well this drugstore had a little balcony along the wall over the front door, looked down on the counters full of the usual bottles with faded labels, displays of stale candy, toothbrushes, fillum, combs — you get the picture. We put a man up there in the balcony to wait. Well, we were lucky, it only took three days. Negro came in, pulled his gun on the druggist, and our man up there in the balcony shot him through the head. What you say to that?”

Kozlowski said nothing.

“It was absolutely legal, you know. Thief had a drawn gun. All right. So the cop shot him in the head.”

“A little extreme, maybe,” Kozlowski said. But he was thinking his own thoughts, not planning to argue it.

Clumly poked him in the chest. “You would’ve shot him in the leg, right?” He laughed scornfully. “You ever see how fast a crook can turn around and shoot? It’s adrenaline, they tell me. He goes in there and he’s scared — you ever try pulling a gun on a druggist? — scared as hell he is, all the juices pumping up in him till he’s not in control any more, got a demon in him: damn near can’t miss. It’s the fear in him, see? It’s taken over his body. Quick as a magician he can turn around and put a bullet between your eyes. That’s no lie, son. You saw the blood in there.” He pointed toward the hallway where Salvador had died. “You want to end up like that?”

“Ok,” Kozlowski said. “Maybe so.”

“I don’t say the kid was bad, the thief. I don’t say he deserved to die. Jesus no! It was terrible! But what if the cop had yelled and the gun had gone off in that boy’s hand and killed the druggist?” He waited, bent toward Kozlowski, and he could feel his face twitching.

At last Kozlowski said, “Ok. I see your point.” He ran his finger and thumb along his shoulder strap and thought about it. He’d reddened a little. He said, “Yeah, I guess it was right.” He was not exactly convinced, but convinced enough.

Clumly turned away abruptly to keep his twitching face from Kozlowski’s eyes. “Right!” he hissed. “You crazy bastard, the kid was only sixteen years old.”

Kozlowski said nothing.

Clumly said, “I fired that son of a bitch, Kozlowski. I shut down that man’s life.” (It was a lie.)

Clumly put his hat on. “Ok,” he said, “come with me.”

All right. Good to have company nevertheless. Face of reddish stone, impassive as a priest’s: yessir, nosir. I was righteous as you when I was young, Kozlowski. Believe it! Oh yes, they’re always full of virtue, the fatassed littlechinned young. A conspiracy of Nature, a mystery: three- and four-year-olds with that incredible in nocence — over there on the sidewalk, looking blue-eyed up at the cop car, smiling, waving with pleasure at the old fat cop with the green cigar: Hi, Mr. Policeman! Hi hi hi! Beautiful. Zap. Full of mysterious trust that fills the best of their parents and teachers with alarm, with grief for them because the world will change them, and with baffled shame because parents and teachers can’t hope to prevent it, and even the best must contribute to it in ways they will not recognize themselves. (Bill Tenny at the corner with his whistle between his teeth, loose, holding up a hand to let the children cross: grinning at them, talking with them — kids who later will grow sullen in the presence of a cop, or defiant, or obsequious-friendly. Observes his boss with the green cigar and comes erect, all dutiful cop, stretching out a distance between them by his change. A salute. ’Lo Bill. Good morning Chief. Transformed. What was the word? Changeling. So they too would come erect with years. Good morning Miss Brown. The squealing schoolyard transmogrified to the half-solemnity of the high-school lawn.) We watch the change and we mutter against it with pride. But the change will be incomplete, we think. They will be better than us. We look up at them out of our yellow-eyed, senile ignorance, reduced to wrinkled, toothless elders, smiling, waving at their brassy youth with pleasure like a kid’s: Hi hi. And join the conspiracy, from bafflement: yes: we’re the world, there’s no denying it: we’re old: and whatever it is that the world has done to them, it was us, we did it, whatever it was. So we fall to lies: Young people, harrump, you see what a mess the older generation has left you. Herkapf. Be stout of heart! Arise and do better! And they believe it, oh yes. They are going to do better! Who could believe what fools we were? They will tolerate us, as we tolerated our idiot fathers before us. Correct. And they will fix all this. Right. Well you’re mistaken, Kozlowski. All your reasons for righteousness will come down on your head like broken beams, and nevertheless you’ll go on, because that’s the law, son. That’s THE LAW.