Time Off for Murder (28 page)

  She watched the gray of morning dilute the black sky. And her fear grew as she watched and she said to herself: "The day's beginning. It won't be too hard for him to find me. He's clever. I'm a fool to be doing this alone…. It's vanity. It's plain stupidity. I should have told Johnny Reese…. Or Chris…. At least Johnny. If anything happens to me, Johnny should know. Otherwise they'll never get him…. If that telegram's delivered to my house, who'll take it? Oh silly, I will. I, myself. In a few hours, I'll be certain, one way or the other…. But I have this girl on my hands…. A millstone around my neck…. No, I'm the load around hers…. I'm risking her life as well as my own…. I've got to show some sense."

  She snapped on the light above the writing table. She wrote two letters, admonishing herself as she wrote: "I mustn't sound as though I'm afraid…. I must put down the facts…. Just the facts as I know them now…. And the others can go on."

  After she had sealed the letters and addressed them, one to Chris Whittaker at Blankfort's store, one to Johnny Reese, she felt relaxed, as though she had transferred a load. She went back to bed.

  When she opened her eyes again, thin, sharp rays of sunshine were stabbing the edges of the drawn window shades. Sophie, fully dressed, her hat and coat on, sat in the slipper chair.

  The hands of Mary's wrist watch pointed to ten o'clock. She leaped out of bed. "Why didn't you wake me?"

  "You sleep so good it is a shame to wake you up. Me, I sleep good too. It is the first time in my life I am in a hotel. Sleep in so-nice bed. We stay in this nice place?"

  "I should say not." Mary dashed into the shower, out again, and into her clothes. At breakfast in a neighborhood cafeteria, she gave Sophie the letters. "I'm going to be busy this morning," she said. "And you're to do two errands for me. First, you're to deliver this letter to Detective Reese at Headquarters. Don't be afraid to go there. He's very kind and pleasant. And then you're to go uptown to Blankfort's and take this other letter to Mister Whittaker and tell him I said he's to keep an eye on you till he hears from me. I'll probably be in touch with him by one o'clock. He'll take care of you till I come back."

  "You're so good to me, Miss Carner. Like Miss Knight was."

  "Like Miss Knight…. Why doesn't the girl stop comparing me to Phyllis?" Mary thought. "The comparison's getting on my nerves. Enough's enough."

  But to the girl she merely said: "Here's the key to my apartment, in case Mister Whittaker decides you're to go there. And here's carfare and money for anything you need today."

  "I'm making my arrangements," she thought. "The condemned woman wrote her farewell letters, disposed of her possessions, ate a hearty breakfast. I suppose I ought to begin to pray." She jerked her shoulders straight, spoke to herself sternly: "Carner, you're getting hysterical. There's nothing to be afraid of. You're going to the safest place in the world this morning. You're going to jail."

  At eleven o'clock she stepped from a bus at the angle of Sixth Avenue and Tenth Street. Her nose was powdered, her lips rouged, her hair meticulous under its careful hat. No one, looking at the poised, attractive young woman, could have guessed that she was so anxious, so tense, that she ached from head to foot.

  She crossed the street to a red-brick citadel, hurried up a short flight of steps, through the grim portals of Jefferson Market Court. She climbed a winding stone staircase and entered the dark-wood paneled, church-windowed room which is the notorious Women's Court of Manhattan - a court for women, which, oddly enough, concerns itself with only two forms of female misconduct: shoplifting and sex delinquency.

  The room was crowded. On rows of benches men and women hunched forward, avidly attentive to one of the most tragic of all the spectacles the metropolis affords. "Like the Roman circuses," Mary thought cynically. "Watching the martyrs fed to the lions."

  A woman sat in the judge's seat, a black-robed woman with a student's face and wise, calm eyes, looking down into the frightened faces of three scrawny girls.

  A pleasant faced attendant, in a brass-buttoned blue poplin frock, metal badge for corsage on her shoulder, opened a gate in a long rail for Mary. "Glad to see you, Miss Carner. I didn't know you'd any cases here this morning." The attendant flipped through a stack of folded documents in her hand. "Your Mister Whittaker was here yesterday with two."

  Mary said: "I'm not here on store business today. I've come to get a look at the docket. You don't by any chance remember the raid on Flo Gordon's place last fall, do you?"

  The court attendant smiled broadly. "I don't, eh? I'll never forget it. That was the biggest day we had all year. Place so full of reporters and photographers there wasn't room for the defendants. And Flo in silver fox."

  Mary said: "She was wearing mink when they found her on the beach yesterday."

  The clerk nodded. "I read about it in the papers. Good riddance to bad rubbish, I say. Probably some of the gang bumped her off." She bent down to whisper. "She was one of Nardello's women, you know. Oh, the Judge wants to speak to you. Say hello to her."

  Miss Carner stepped up on the dais and said "Hello."

  "I haven't seen you in some time, Miss Carner," the Judge said.

"You're busy enough without Blankfort's shoplifters."

  The Judge sighed. "Same old merry-go-round," she said. "This is the court of the revolving doors. They're brought in; we go through the motions of giving them a trial, sending them to prison, and in a few months they're back again." Her pleasant voice had a sharp note. "Reform? How can we expect them to - as long as low wages and drudgery are the only alternatives we offer them? And the poorest and stupidest are the ones we see here."

  "Except Flo Gordon."

  "Except Flo," the Judge agreed. "We don't get enough of the Flo Gordons. And when they are arrested, they've the funds to hire a good lawyer and the political connections to beat the rap. If we could only break down the structure of hypocrisy and corruption which protects vice and crime." She shrugged. "I'm asking too much. The most we can do here now is protect the innocent, see that the diseased are cured, and try to sift out and help those who really want to be rehabilitated. What brings you here today?"

  "You'll not believe it…Flo Gordon."

  "Really! She wasn't involved with any of the stores, was she?"

  "Not as far as I know. I'm interested in the records of her trial last October."

  "It's not my business to ask why you want it, but I assume it isn't idle curiosity." The Judge signaled an attendant. "Get Miss Carner the records she needs. Let her read them in my chambers. Lunch with me? I'll be off the bench at one."

  "I'm sorry," Mary said. "I'm afraid I'm going to be too busy today."

  After she had finished with the records, Miss Carner went around the corner. There, on Greenwich Street, she entered a magnificent modern skyscraper. The stainless steel decorations over its portico bore no legend save the street address. Its leaded windows had no bars. Nothing in its outward appearance bespoke a prison. Indeed, the high-ceilinged, tiled rotunda which she entered might have been a bank or hospital. Trim, white clad matrons moved briskly on their errands. Women attendants sat in steel trimmed glass cubicles, like cashiers' cages.

  Mary asked for Laverne Sullivan. As she waited for the switchboard operator to locate the prison psychologist, she glanced around the foyer. It was apparently a visiting time. The benches which lined the rotunda were filled with lolling men young men for the most part, negro and white, with hair slicked down, redolent of bay rum and unguents, wearing showy suits, nipped in at the waist, with sharp lapels, and gleaming yellow shoes. Mary's lips curled. She turned away, nauseated.

  Laverne opened a steel barred door. "This is a surprise, Mary. Come into my office."

  The halls were spotless and quiet and odorless. That was a remarkable thing. Here was a prison not only without the prison look but without the prison smell of human filth and futile disinfectant.

  The office of the prison psychologist was a bright room, with pink geraniums on the windowsill, gay Mexican pottery animals on the desk, and wicker chairs, cretonne cushioned. "This certainly doesn't look like a prison," Mary said.

  Laverne smiled. "It isn't all like this. But it isn't too much worse. We're not vindictive here. Sunlight and pleasant surroundings and a decent human approach are a lot better for straightening out people than dirt and darkness and cruelty. Of course we can't do all we'd like to do for them. The time's too short. Thirty days - or even ninety - to undo a lifetime's damage! Now, about Flo Gordon - " She reached into a desk drawer. "These are confidential records, you know. Though why you want Flo Gordon, now she's dead…"

  "I want Flo's record, and I want the other girls' - the girls from her place who were arrested at the same time." She read the names from a slip of paper.

  Laverne said: "I'll get them. You read Flo's while I find the others." She put a sheaf of papers before Miss Carner…. She said: "I don't think you'll get a great deal out of this because I couldn't get a great deal out of Flo. She was completely uncooperative. Now I look back on it, the whole bunch was uncooperative. (Here's Bessie Jackson. Here's Billie Montrose.) They seemed to be frightened to death, too scared to open their mouths. (Here's Evelyn La Rue.) I take a social history - family background, education. There's a pattern. You'd be amazed how many fit into that pattern. Low I.Q. Little education, large family, usually broken by divorce or death or drunkenness, no economic or emotional stability. I give a Binet. You don't want the technical details, do you? I thought not. (Here's Gloria Clark. I guess that's all.) I give the regulation psychologicals, to get the I.Q. and aptitudes. Our interest is chiefly to find out whether institutional care is indicated, and to learn the mental and emotional factors we have to deal with to accomplish rehabilitation."

  "What's this?"

  Laverne glanced down at the papers before Mary Carner. "That. It's a word association test. Not one of the essential tests. Supplementary. It often gives me information that I can't get any other way."

  Miss Carner's expression was frankly puzzled.

  Laverne took the papers from her. "These records are no good to a layman. Let me explain: Take Flo Gordon," she began. "These tests require a certain cooperation on the part of the girl. It's the interviewer's job to get that cooperation. I usually get it by explaining the purpose of the tests very simply, pointing out that they're for the girl's own good - to help her - and that they have no bearing on her punishment whatever. I try to put her at her ease. Sometimes offer her a cigarette. That didn't work with Flo at all. She sat there, in that very chair in which you're sitting and just sneered at me…. 'Come off with that stuff,' she said. 'You don't have to reform me. You don't have to tell me how intelligent I am. I'm smart enough. You don't have to help me. I got the best help in the world - in the bank.' I invited her to have a cigarette with me, and she laughed. 'That's sissy stuff,' she said. 'Give me a good cigar any time.' But she did, after a while, tell me something about herself. It came in a burst of bitterness after I had spoken to her about the reputation she had around town. 'What do they know about me? Do they know what kind of a person I am? Do they know what my life was? Do they know that in Europe where I come from ten people live on six cents a day, starving, rags, diseased? Do they know how I broke my back in a factory? How I stood up all day long - fourteen, sixteen hours a day - in a shop, saving every penny to send home to my family? Nobody was my friend, then, not even my bank book.' Now mind, these weren't her exact words - I wouldn't dare use the language she did - but it's close enough. She told me how well-dressed women used to come to her lingerie shop, buy the most expensive undergarments. It was from them she learned about another sort of business."

  "But about Rockey? About the men who run the rackets? What did she have to say about them?"

  "Not a word," Laverne answered. "She said: 'I'm taking a rap. I'm taking it and I don't like it. But thirty days ain't forever. And Flo Gordon's got to earn her living after it's over. So I'm keeping my trap shut.' I couldn't do a thing with her…. Now, here's her word association test - the free, spontaneous association of ideas. I read off a list of words and the other person responds with the word that comes spontaneously to her mind. If she hesitates over a word, that has often as much significance to us as a direct answer. Flo started to answer and then suddenly she banged her fist on the table and yelled: 'You can't trick me. You can't trap me.' And not another word out of her. Here. You can see what she did."

  On the sheet of paper Mary read a list of words, one after the other:

      White

      Home

      Work

      Food

      Woman

      Kill

      Friend

      Children

      Pleasure

      Wrong

      Fear

      Police

      Punishment

      People

      Hot

  "Some of the words are innocuous," Laverne explained. "Test words. To find out whether the person normally would give conventional answers. To 'White,' for instance, most people would automatically say 'Black.' To 'Hot,' they might say 'Cold' or 'Summer.' Flo started out easily enough, you see. She answered 'Black' to 'White'; 'Europe' to 'Home'; 'Hard' to 'Work'; 'Eat' to 'Food'; 'Man' to 'Woman'; but here - here's where she banged down. I said 'Kill.' And her answer flashed back: 'Girl friend.'"