He pushed the lever into neutral and let the car roll forward silently; he was leaning forward, peering past the brick corner as the vacant lot came in sight.
The two denim-cased boys stood in the shadows. The little girls cowered against the bricks, cornered and terrified.
The tall boy—the driver—flicked his hand out as if snapping his fingers. But Paul saw the glint of the knife blade as it flipped open.
The younger boy moved forward, deliberately ominous, grinning with a sadistic show of teeth: dramatizing his brutality. He bent, reached for the hem of the larger girl’s coat and yanked it upwards, holding the hem in his fist and pressing the girl back against the wall. She wore white socks halfway up her thighs and dusky white underwear. The boy reached for the elastic.
Paul steadied his aim. The boys were intent on their victims: they noticed nothing except the flesh beneath them. The boy with the knife moved closer to the smaller girl and held her throat with his free hand, pinioning her, choking off her attempt to scream. The other boy ripped the panties off the older girl. He was still holding her coat and skirt bunched up against her chin.
Something made Paul lower the sights a fraction before he fired.
The first bullet took the younger boy in the back of the knee.
The Centennial leveled again across the car silclass="underline" Paul was leaning across the seat, firing through the open passenger window, his wrist balanced on the metal. The taller boy was turning, disoriented: the bullet had slammed his friend against him, upsetting his balance, and Paul shot him as he turned: the soft-nose punctured his calf and by the way the boy’s leg twisted it was evident it had smashed the bones.
Both of them fell, broken-legged.
The little girls flattened themselves in terror against the brick; their round eyes swiveled toward Paul.
On the ground the taller boy crawled in a circle of pain like a half-crushed beetle. His partner seemed stuporous; his mouth hung slack and he hardly moved.
In a sudden burst the older girl grabbed the younger one by the elbow and dragged her away. An instant later they were both running in panic, back across the empty lot toward the farther street, leaving their schoolbooks abandoned in the snow.
Paul rolled up the window and straightened in the seat. He made a tight U-turn.
30
“CHILDRESS will eat you alive if you give him a chance,” Harry Chisum said.
“I’ve been forewarned.” Paul caught Irene’s sudden smile. “Anyhow I’m sure it won’t be boring.”
“It’s a dynamic firm,” the old man agreed. “Well then. More coffee, everyone.” He poured from a silver decanter; his aged hand shook a bit. The dining room was like the rest of the house: a relic. Probably nothing in it except the wiring had changed in fifty years. It was a frame house without pretension but it had been built in a time when there had been leisure for elegance of a kind; there was comfort in its solidity, in the heavy darkness of old woods and furniture built for relaxing.
Irene looked at her wrist watch. She’d checked the time frequently in the past quarter hour. “I’m not being rude, Harry, but I don’t want to miss that program.”
“You keep saying you want to see a program. I never knew you to be a television addict.”
“It’s the Cavender interview. He’s going to be grilling Vic Mastro. I want to see what our famous cop has to say.”
“What time does it begin?”
“Nine.”
“Then there’s plenty of time. Stop looking at your watch every half minute.”
Around the house a frigid gale shook the windows. A wood fire burned on the hearth. Chisum measured out cognac and passed the goblets around; then he led the way into his parlor and seated Irene in an easy chair facing the television set. It was an antique console, a bulky block of walnut with a small screen set into it and a pair of tarnished rabbit ears perched on top.
Irene made a gesture toward Paul, lifting her glass an inch; he warmed to her private signals—he nodded and smiled before he tasted the brandy.
Chisum eased himself slowly into a wooden rocker. “How many did you have to turn loose this week?”
She was very dry: “It was a short week. We only inflicted half the usual dose on the public.”
“Something’s got your dander up, my dear.”
“Gehler sentenced one of my prosecutions to a six-months suspended. The man’s got an incredible record—he’s been up the river as many times as an anxious salmon, and this was an open-and-shut burglary. Red handed. But Gehler let him off with an SS.”
“It’s one of the things we’ve got to do, isn’t it?” Chisum said. “Take the discretionary power to set sentences out of the hands of the judges. It’s no good having one judge who regards robberies by poor people as legitimate readjustments of economic inequities, while another judge treats every crime as a grave threat to the stability of the society. To the one, any sentence is too heavy; to the other, most sentences are too light. How can we expect anything like ‘equal justice for all’ under those circumstances?”
The fire made a good smell. Paul relaxed on the leather couch: it was old leather, deep red gone almost black, the crow’s-feet of age creased into it. An office couch—likely it had come out of the professor’s law office when he’d retired. Chisum had run a vigorous criminal practice, he’d learned, before turning to writing and teaching. He’d been a prominent defense attorney for several years. Paul had been keenly surprised by that revelation. Now Chisum glanced at him and resumed the subject:
“You’re still baffled, aren’t you.”
“I confess I am. You don’t make noises like a civil libertarian.”
“I’m not. I believe in discipline. It’s the mortar that holds society together. Without discipline there’s chaos.” He smiled gently at Irene. “There was a time when this young lady thought me a fascist.”
Paul said, “How do you reconcile that with your record as a criminal lawyer?”
“Easily. I believe that for all its grievous faults, there’s no better juridical system than the adversary process where both sides are allowed to present their cases with the greatest vigor. There are dangers in it—chiefly the danger that the better of the two lawyers may win the case regardless of its justice—but in spite of those risks, I don’t know of any system in all history that’s proved better. If a fact is in dispute, you can only arrive at the truth by a vigorous examination of both sides of the story. That’s what our system was designed to do, and when it works properly it’s a splendid example of human achievement.”
“When it works properly,” Irene echoed, not without sarcasm.
“Every case brought before a criminal court deserves an intense prosecution,” Chisum said. “But it also deserves the best possible defense. Defense attorneys, after all, are officers of the court, the same as prosecutors and judges. They’re all components of one system, and the purpose of that system is to arrive at the truth of each case. If you don’t have first-rate defense lawyers you may as well not have a trial at all.”
“Forgive me if I’m impertinent,” Paul said, “but that sounds to me a lot like the kind of rationalization you hear from big-time shysters when they try to explain away the fact that they’re on some mobster’s payroll.”
“The argument’s a valid one, no matter who uses it in his own defense,” Chisum said. “It breaks down, of course, in cases where the mobster’s lawyer is himself a member of the mob and a party to its illegal acts. That kind of syndicate mouthpiece is common enough, I’m afraid, but his existence shouldn’t be used to try and discredit the whole fraternity.”