A Matter of Conviction

“Number six,” Fanny said, as if she were calling off a number in a Bingo game. She opened the doors for Hank, and he stepped into the corridor.

An attendant sat at the desk just inside the windows overlooking Centre Street and the parking lot across the way. The desk was lost in the marble reaches of the high-ceilinged corridor. The corridor ran like a dark tunnel toward the Homicide Bureau at the far end, windowless except for the patches of light near the two other elevator banks which divided its length into equal thirds. Inside the entrance corridor, marble gave way to walls of neuter paint, to illuminated severe glass plaques indicating public toilets, to small areas of artificial light spaced like sentinels along the long, dark corridor. Hank walked up the hall quickly. There was a cheerlessness to the corridor which sometimes depressed him. He did not like to think of the law as cold and forbidding. He considered it a human thing invented by humans for humans, and the corridor sometimes seemed like a heartless hallway to hell.

Dave Lipschitz, a detective first grade attached to the D.A.’s office, sat just inside the entrance doorway of the bureau.

“Hank,” he said in greeting, and Hank said, “Dave,” in reply and then turned right at the first doorway beyond the desk, passing a door marked “No Admittance,” and going directly to his office, the third one in the hallway, an exact copy of every other assistant D.A.’s office on the floor. A tiny waiting room was tacked to the front part of the office. Four straight-backed wooden chairs sat there playing a ghostly game of bridge. He passed through the waiting room and into the office proper, a twelve-by-fifteen rectangle with windows at the far end. His desk rested before the windows, a leather chair behind it. In one corner of the room was a coat rack. In the other corner was a metal filing cabinet. There were two wooden armchairs in front of the desk and facing it.

Hank took off his hat and hung it on one of the pegs. Then he opened both windows to let in the scant breeze rustling in the sun-drenched street outside. The windows in the Homicide Bureau were made of wire mesh sandwiched between two sheets of glass, and they were attached to the frame in such a manner that they could open outward no more than six inches. It was impossible to shatter them or to crash through them, and it was impossible to squeeze through the narrow wedge they presented when opened. Perhaps such extreme caution wasn’t really necessary. In the eight years Hank had worked for the bureau, he’d never known anyone to try a plunge. But the people with whom the bureau dealt were very often desperate, and suicide to some of them might have seemed preferable to death in the electric chair.

The opened windows did little to lower the temperature in the small cubicle. Hank took off his jacket and hung it over the back of his chair. Following a summertime routine broken only when he was expecting early-morning visitors, he pulled down his tie, unbuttoned his shirt collar and rolled up his sleeves. Then he sat down and pulled the phone closer, fully intending to dial the stenographic pool with a request for a typist. His hand hesitated. Instead, and quite impulsively, he dialed the reception desk.

“Yo?”

“Dave?”

“Yeah, who’s this?”

“Hank. Think you can call down for some coffee?”

“So early? What happened? Big night last night?”

“No. Just too hot a day. I want to ease into work instead of leaping in with both feet.”

“You go to trial with Tully tomorrow, don’t you?”

“Yes,” Hank said.

“You’re not worried about it, are you?”

“Not a bit.”

“I hear his lawyers are copping a second-degree plea.”

“Where’d you hear that?”

“Heh-heh, you think I’m a detective for nothing? Am I right?”

“You’re right,” Hank said.

“Sure. I’ll call down for the coffee. Cream and one sugar. Think I’ll have a cup myself while I’m at it.”

“Dave, would you just send it in when it arrives? You needn’t buzz me.”

“Roger,” Dave said, and he hung up.

Hank cradled the phone and sighed deeply. He should, he knew, call the pool for that typist. There was nothing pressing about that, however, and once his notes were retyped his day would settle into the dull routine of waiting for tomorrow and the trial. Nor would there be anything spectacular about the case. The defense attorneys, as Dave’s interoffice spy system had faithfully reported, were pleading guilty to Murder Two. In effect, the trial would be over before it began. Tomorrow, unless someone planted a bomb in the Criminal Courts Building, would be as uneventful as today promised to be, and probably just as hot. And after the Tully trial he would be assigned to a new case, and he would prepare it, and take it to trial, and either win or lose it for the people, and then wait for his next assignment, and his next, and his next, and his...