A Matter of Conviction

The word had gone around that afternoon, passed from lip to lip, mouth to mouth, “The stuff is on, the stuff is on,” and now they came down the street, three tall boys walking rapidly and without fear as they passed el-liberated Third Avenue, and then Lexington Avenue, walking more cautiously as they approached Park, cutting through one of the arches supporting the overhead New York Central tracks and then bursting into the mouth of the street like alien hand-grenade explosions. Their combat boots hit the pavement in regulated chaos, their fists were bunched, there was in each a high-riding excitement which threatened to blow off the tops of their skulls and dissipate their generated anger. The tallest of the three pulled a knife, and the blade glittered in the paling light, and then there were three knives, the silent performers in a vaudeville pantomime, and a young girl shouted in Spanish, “Mira! Cuidado!” and one of the boys yelled, “Shut up, you spic whore!” and a boy sitting on one of the stoops turned his head toward the sound of unaccented English and then suddenly rose.

“There’s one of them!” a voice said, and another voice yelled, “Get him!”

The boy lifted a blank face. A blade flashed, penetrated, flesh ripped in silent protest as the knife gashed upward from the gut. And now the other knives descended, tearing and slashing until the boy fell like an assassin-surrounded Caesar, crumpling to the pavement. The knives withdrew. Blood spattered like early rain to the sidewalk. From the opposite end of the street four boys began running toward the intruders.

“Go, go!” a voice shouted, and the three ran, crossing under the railroad tracks on Park Avenue, running, running, and suddenly it was raining.

The rain drummed relentlessly on the figure balled against the stone of the stoop, diluting the rich red blood that ran from his open belly, washing the blood into the gutter that traversed the long street.

The boy was dead even before the squad car picked up his attackers not four city blocks away.

Detective Lieutenant Richard Gunnison was a tall thin man with stringy blond hair and slate-gray eyes. He had suffered a bad case of acne as a youth, with the result that his face was now pitted with holes of various minuscule sizes. His complexion made it difficult for him to shave without cutting himself, and the various healing slashes on his chin and cheeks gave him the appearance of an undernourished German who’d been on the losing end of a duel.

The lieutenant was in charge of the Twenty-seventh Detective Squad of the Harlem precinct through which the long street ran. His jurisdiction actually ended on Fifth Avenue — ended, to be more exact, at the white line which ran up the middle of Fifth Avenue through Spanish Harlem. The lieutenant had eighteen men on his squad, and he was fond of calling Harlem “the sinkhole of corruption,” a phrase he had heard somewhere and which he’d used since with all the battering power of a non sequitur. The lieutenant was not a very learned man. He had picked up Crime and Punishment once because he thought it might give him an insight into his job, and then had laid it down after a week of laborious and tortured reading with the renewed certainty that nobody — but nobody — could tell him anything he didn’t already know about crime and punishment. The best teacher any man could ever have was Harlem itself, and Gunnison had been working in Harlem for twenty-four years. He knew everything there was to know about this sinkhole of corruption; he had seen it all and smelled it all and touched it all.

The three boys who stood before him now in the squad room were no different — no better, no worse — than the hundreds of criminals he had seen in his twenty-four years of service. Youth was not, to Lieutenant Gunnison, an argument for leniency. A punk was a punk — and a young punk was only an old punk with less experience. Standing before the three boys, his powerful hands on his hips, the butt of a .38 police special protruding from the shoulder holster strapped to his chest, Gunnison was only annoyed because he’d been dragged back to the squad room from his home and his after-dinner newspaper. The boys had been brought into the station house by the arresting officer, who had stopped at the desk only long enough to record the boys’ names with the desk lieutenant and then proceeded upstairs to the Detective Division and the squad room, which ran the length of the building’s upper story. He had informed Detective First Grade Michael Larsen that a homicide had been committed, and Larsen — the official catcher on the three-man detective team which was handling the squad room on the 6 P.M. to 8 A.M. shift — had immediately called the lieutenant at home before calling the district attorney’s office.