A Matter of Conviction

What the hell’s the matter with me this morning? he wondered. I’m behaving like a man who’s tired of tightening bolts on an assembly line. The truth is that I’m as happy with my work as any man has a right to be. I’m a competent lawyer who isn’t looking for headlines or screaming recognition. I have no political ambitions, and I work in the district attorney’s office not because I’m a dedicated slob but because I suppose I like the idea of representing the people of this county. So what’s wrong this morning?

He swung his chair around to face the windows and the shimmering blue sky beyond.

There’s nothing wrong with this morning but that sky, he thought. It’s a heat sky. It forces a man to think of sailboats and beaches.

Smiling, he swung his chair back to the desk and picked up the telephone receiver. Then, without hesitation, he dialed the stenographic pool and requested a typist. He began rereading his notes before her arrival, making small changes on the first few pages. As he read on, he realized he was making major revisions. He glanced at his wrist watch. It was ten o’clock and the typist had still not arrived. He called the pool again and asked for a stenographer instead. Suddenly there seemed a hundred things to be done before the trial tomorrow, and he wondered if he could complete them all before five o’clock.

He did not leave the building until six that evening.

By that time, the sky had already begun to turn gray with menace.

Two

It looked as if it might rain.

The July heat had been building in the city all day long, mounting in blast-furnace intensity. Now, at seven-thirty, ominously dark clouds hung on the horizon, bringing with them a false cloak of blackness, an imitation night without stars. The magnificent New York skyline spread across the sham night in bold knife-edged silhouette. Lights had been turned on in defense against the approaching storm and window slits pierced the silhouette like open yellow wounds. There was the distant rumble of thunder across the river in New Jersey. Feeble streaks of lightning crossed the sky like erratic tracer shells searching for a nonexistent target.

When the rain came, it would sweep across the Hudson to lash the Riverside Drive apartment buildings with their doormen and elevator operators, with their obscenities scrawled on the foyer walls of what had once been the aristocracy of dwellings. The rain would continue eastward, driving unchecked through colored Harlem and then Spanish Harlem, racing for the opposite shore of the island and the East River, washing in passing the streets of Italian Harlem.

In Italian Harlem, they sat on the front stoops and talked about the Yankees and the turncoat Giants and Dodgers. The women wore flowered housedresses and the men wore short-sleeved sport shirts. The D.S.C. trucks had been through earlier that afternoon, sprinkling the street with water. But the sun had attacked the asphalt again like a searing blow torch, bringing back the suffocating heat of the street. The sun was gone now, but the heat remained, and the people sipped at cans of beer beaded with cool moisture, and they glanced skyward and wished the rain would hurry. Before the rain, there would be a cool wind that rushed through the street, catching at newspapers, lifting skirts. Before the rain, there would be the sweet pure smell of what was coming, the scent of refreshing cleanliness.

Before the rain, a murder would be committed.

The street was long.

It ran clear across the island of Manhattan, starting at the East River, running westward with the precision of a shishkebob skewer. Hanging on that skewer, one modulating into the other so that all geographical boundaries were lost in the polytypic overlap, were Italians, Puerto Ricans and Negroes. It was a long, long street, piercing the island at its heart, rushing with geometric inevitability toward the rain clouds banked over the Hudson River.

The three came down the street.