Guilty As Charged

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Title:     Guilty As Charged
Author: Irvin S. Cobb [More Titles by Cobb]

The Jew, I take it, is essentially temperamental, whereas the Irishman is by nature sentimental; so that in the long run both of them may reach the same results by varying mental routes. This, however, has nothing to do with the story I am telling here, except inferentially.

It was trial day at headquarters. To be exact, it was the tail end of trial day at headquarters. The mills of the police gods, which grind not so slowly but ofttimes exceeding fine, were about done with their grinding; and as the last of the grist came through the hopper, the last of the afternoon sunlight came sifting in through the windows at the west, thin and pale as skim milk. One after another the culprits, patrolmen mainly, had been arraigned on charges preferred by a superior officer, who was usually a lieutenant or a captain, but once in a while an inspector, full-breasted and gold-banded, like a fat blue bumblebee. In due turn each offender had made his defense; those who were lying about it did their lying, as a rule, glibly and easily and with a certain bogus frankness very pleasing to see. Contrary to a general opinion, the Father of Lies is often quite good to his children. But those who were telling the truth were frequently shamefaced and mumbling of speech, making poor impressions.

In due turn, also, each man had been convicted or had been acquitted, yet all--the proven innocent and the adjudged guilty alike--had undergone punishment, since they all had to sit and listen to lectures on police discipline and police manners from the trial deputy. It was perhaps as well for the peace and good order of the community that the public did not attend these seances. Those classes now that are the most thoroughly and most personally governed--the pushcart pedlers, with the permanent cringing droops in their alien backs; the sinful small boys, who play baseball in the streets against the statutes made and provided; the broken old wrecks, who ambush the prosperous passer-by in the shadows of dark corners, begging for money with which to keep body and soul together--it was just as well perhaps that none of them was admitted there to see these large, firm, stern men in uniform wriggling on the punishment chair, fumbling at their buttons, explaining, whining, even begging for mercy under the lashing flail of Third Deputy Commissioner Donohue's sleety judgments.

"The only time old Donny warms up is when he's got a grudge against you," a wit of headquarters--Larry Magee by name--had said once as he came forth from the ordeal, brushing imaginary hailstones off his shoulders. "It's always snowing hard in his soul!"

Unlike most icy-tempered men, though, Third Deputy Commissioner Donohue was addicted to speech. Dearly he loved to hear the sound of his own voice. Give to Donohue a congenial topic, such as some one's official or personal shortcomings, and a congenial audience, and he excelled mightily in saw-edged oratory, rolling his r's until the tortured consonants fairly lay on their backs and begged for mercy.

This, however, would have to be said for Deputy Commissioner Donohue--he was a hard one to fool. Himself a grayed ex-private of the force, who had climbed from the ranks step by step through slow and devious stages, he was coldly aware of every trick and device of the delinquent policeman. A new and particularly ingenious subterfuge, one that tasted of the fresh paint, might win his begrudged admiration--his gray flints of eyes would strike off sparks of grim appreciation; but then, nearly always, as though to discourage originality even in lying, he would plaster on the penalty--and the lecture--twice as thick. Wherefore, because of all these things, the newspaper men at headquarters viewed this elderly disciplinarian with mixed professional emotions. Presiding over a trial day, he made abundant copy for them, which was very good; but if the case were an important one he often prolonged it until they missed getting the result into their final editions, which, if you know anything about final editions, was very, very bad.

It was so on this particular afternoon. Here it was nearly dusk. The windows toward the east showed merely as opaque patches set against a wall of thickening gloom, and the third deputy commissioner had started in at two-thirty and was not done yet. Sparse and bony, he crouched forward on the edge of his chair, with his lean head drawn down between his leaner shoulders and his stiff stubble of hair erect on his scalp, and he looked, perching there, like a broody but vigilant old crested cormorant upon a barren rock.

Except for one lone figure of misery, the anxious bench below him was by now empty. Most of the witnesses were gone and most of the spectators, and all the newspaper men but two. He whetted a lean and crooked forefinger like a talon on the edge of the docket book, turned the page and called the last case, being the case of Patrolman James J. Rogan. Patrolman Rogan was a short horse and soon curried. For being on such and such a day, at such and such an hour, off his post, where he belonged, and in a saloon where he did not belong, sitting down, with his blouse unfastened and his belt unbuckled; and for having no better excuse, or no worse one, than the ancient tale of a sudden attack of faintness causing him to make his way into the nearest place where he might recover himself--that it happened to be a family liquor store was, he protested, a sheer accident--Patrolman Rogan was required to pay five days' pay and, moreover, to listen to divers remarks in which he heard himself likened to several things, none of them of a complimentary character.

Properly crushed and shrunken, the culprit departed thence with his uniform bagged and wrinkling upon his diminished form, and the third deputy commissioner, well pleased, on the whole, with his day's hunting, prepared to adjourn. The two lone reporters got up and made for the door, intending to telephone in to their two shops the grand total and final summary of old Donohue's bag of game.

They were at the door, in a little press of departing witnesses and late defendants, when behind them a word in Donohue's hard-rolled official accents made them halt and turn round. The veteran had picked up from his desk a sheet of paper and was squinting up his hedgy, thick eyebrows in an effort to read what was written there.

"Wan more case to be heard," he announced. "Keep order there, you men at the door! The case of Lieutenant Isidore Weil"--he grated the name out lingeringly--"charged with--with----" He broke off, peering about him for some one to scold. "Couldn't you be makin' a light here, some of you! I can't see to make out these here charges and specifications."

Some one bestirred himself and many lights popped on, chasing the shadows back into the far corners. Outside in the hall a policeman doing duty as a bailiff called the name of Lieutenant Isidore Weil, thrice repeated.

"Gee! Have they landed that slick kike at last?" said La Farge, the older of the reporters, half to himself. "Say, you know, that tickles me! I've been looking this long time for something like this to be coming off." Like most old headquarters reporters, La Farge had his deep-seated prejudices. To judge by his present expression, this was a very deep-seated one, amounting, you might say, to a constitutional infirmity with La Farge.

"Who's Weil and what's he done?" inquired Rogers. Rogers was a young reporter.

"I don't know yet--the charge must be newly filed, I guess," said La Farge, answering the last question first. "But I hope they nail him! I don't like him--never did. He's too fresh. He's too smart--one of those self-educated East Side Yiddishers, you know. Used to be a court interpreter down at Essex Market--knows about steen languages. And he--here he comes now."

Weil passed them, going into the trial room--a short, squarely built man with oily black hair above a dark, round face. Instantly you knew him for one of the effusive Semitic type; every angle and turn of his outward aspect testified frankly of his breed and his sort. And at sight of him entering you could almost see the gorge of Deputy Commissioner Donohue's race antagonism rising inside of him. His gray hackles stiffened and his thick-set eyebrows bristled outward like bits of frosted privet. Again he began whetting his forefinger on the leather back of the closed docket book. It was generally a bad sign for somebody when Donohue whetted his forefinger like that, and La Farge would have delighted to note it. But La Farge's appraising eyes were upon the accused.

"Listen!" he said under his breath to Rogers. "I think they must have the goods on Mister Wisenheimer at last. Usually he's the cockiest person round this building. Now take a look at him."

Indeed, there was a visible air of self-abasement about Lieutenant Weil as he crossed the wide chamber. It was a thing hard to define in words; yet undeniably there was a diffidence and a reluctance manifest in him, as though a sense of guilt wrestled with the man's natural conceit and assurance.

"Rogers," said La Farge, "let's hustle out and 'phone in what we've got and then come back right away. If this fellow's going to get the harpoon stuck into him I want to be on hand when he starts bleeding."

Only a few of the dwindled crowd turned back to hear the beginning of the case, whatever it might be, against the Jew. The rest scattered through the corridors, heading mainly for the exits, so that the two newspaper men had company as they hurried toward the main door, making for their offices across the street. When they came back the long cross halls were almost deserted; it had taken them a little longer to finish the job of telephoning than they had figured. At the door of the trial room stood one bulky blue figure. It was the acting bailiff.

"How far along have they got?" asked La Farge as the policeman made way for them to pass in.

"Captain Meagher is the first witness," said the policeman. "He's the one that's makin' the charge."

"What is the charge?" put in Rogers.

"At this distance I couldn't make out--Cap Meagher, he mumbles so," confessed the doorkeeper. "Somethin' about misuse of police property, I take it to be."

"Aha!" gloated La Farge in his gratification. "Come on, Rogers--I don't want to miss any of this."

It was plain, however, that they had missed something; for, to judge by his attitude, Captain Meagher was quite through with his testimony. He still sat in the witness chair alongside the deputy commissioner's desk; but he was silent and he stared vacantly at vacancy. Captain Meagher was known in the department as a man incredibly honest and unbelievably dull. He had no more imagination than one of his own reports. He had a long, sad face, like a tired workhorse's, and heavy black eyebrows that curved high in the middle and arched downward at each end--circumflexes accenting the incurable stupidity of his expression. His black mustache drooped the same way, too, in the design of an inverted magnet. Larry Magee had coined one of his best whimsies on the subject of the shape of the captain's mustache.

"No wonder," he said, "old Meagher never has any luck--he wears his horseshoe upside down on his face!"

Just as the two reporters, re-entering, took their seats the trial deputy spoke.

"Is that all, Captain Meagher?" he asked sonorously.

"That's all," said Meagher.

"I note," went on Donohue, glancing about him, "that the accused does not appear to be represented by counsel."

A man on trial at headquarters has the right to hire a lawyer to defend him.

"No, sir," spoke up Weil briskly. "I've got no lawyer, commissioner." His speech was the elaborated and painfully emphasized English of the self-taught East Sider. It carried in it just the bare suggestion of the racial lisp, and it made an acute contrast to the menacing Hibernian purr of Donohue's heavier voice. "I kind of thought I'd conduct my own case myself."

Donohue merely grunted.

"Do you desire, Lieutenant Weil, for to ask Captain Meagher any questions?" he demanded.

Weil shook his oily head of hair.

"No, sir. I wouldn't wish to ask the captain anything."

"Are there any other witnesses?" inquired Donohue next.

There was no answer. Plainly there were no other witnesses.

"Lieutenant Weil, do you desire for to say something in your own behalf?" queried the deputy commissioner.

"I think I'd like to," answered Weil.

He stood to be sworn, took the chair Meagher vacated and sat facing the room, appearing--so La Farge thought--more shamefaced and abashed than ever.

"Now, then," commanded Donohue impressively, "what statement, if any, have you to make, Lieutenant Weil, touchin' on this here charge preferred by your superior officer?"

Weil cleared his throat. Rogers figured that this bespoke embarrassment; but, to the biased understanding of the hostile La Farge, there was something falsely theatrical even in the way Weil cleared his throat.

"Once a grandstander always a grandstander!" he muttered derisively.

"What did you say?" whispered Rogers.

"Nothing," replied La Farge--"just thinking out loud. Listen to what Foxy Issy has to say for himself."

"Well, sir, commissioner," began the accused, "this here thing happens last Thursday, just as Captain Meagher is telling you." He had slipped already into the policeman's trick of detailing a past event in the present tense.

"It's late in the afternoon--round five o'clock I guess--and I'm downstairs in the Detective Bureau alone."

"Alone, you say?" broke in Donohue, emphasizing the word as though the admission scored a point against the man on trial.

"Yes, sir, I'm alone. It happens that everybody else is out and I'm in temporary charge, as you might say. It's getting along toward dark when Patrolman Morgan, who's on duty out in the hall, comes in and says to me there's a woman outside who can't talk English and he can't make out what she wants. So I tells him to bring her in. She comes in. Right away I see she's a Ginney--an Italian," he corrected himself hurriedly. "She's got a child with her--a little boy about two years old."

"Describe this here woman!" ordered Donohue, who loved to drag in details at a trial, not so much for the sake of the details themselves as to show his skill as a cross-examiner.

"Well, sir," complied Weil, "I should say she's about twenty-five years old. It's hard to tell about those Italian women, but I should say she's about twenty-five--or maybe twenty-six. She's got no figure at all and she's dressed poor. But she's got a pretty face--big brown eyes and----"

"That will do," interrupted the deputy commissioner--"that will do for that. I take it you're not qualifyin' here for a beauty expert, Lieutenant Weil!" he added with elaborate sarcasm.

"You asked me about her looks, sir," parried Weil defensively, "and I'm just trying to tell you."

"Proceed! Proceed!" bade Donohue, rumbling his consonants.

"Yes, sir. Well, in regard to this woman: She's talking so fast I can't figure out at first what she's trying to tell me. It's Italian she's talking--or I should say the kind of Italian they talk in parts of Sicily. After a little I begin to see what she's driving at. It seems she's the wife of one Antonio Terranova and her name is Maria Terranova. And after I get her straightened out and going slow she tells me her story."

"Is this here story got a bearin' on the charges pendin'?"

"I think it has. Yes, sir; it helps to explain what happens. As near as I can make out she comes from some small town down round Messina somewhere, and the way she tells it to me, her husband leaves there not long after they're married and comes over here to New York to get work, and when he gets enough money saved up ahead he's going to send back for her. That's near about three years ago. So she stays behind waiting for him, and in about four months after he leaves the baby is born--the same baby that she brings in here to headquarters with her last Thursday. She says neither one of them thinks it'll be long before he can save up money for her passage, but it seems like he has the bad luck. He's sick for a while after he lands, and then when he gets a job in a construction gang the padrone takes the most of what he makes. And just about the time he gets a little saved up some other Ginney--Italian--in the construction camp steals it off of him.

"So he's up against it, and after a while he gets desperate. So he joins in with a Black Hander gang--amateurs operating up in the Bronx--and the very first trick he helps turn he does well by it. His share is near about a hundred dollars, and he sends her the best part of it to bring her and the baby over. She don't know at the time, though, how he raises all this money--so she tells me. And I think, at that, she's telling the truth--she ain't got sense enough to lie, I think. Anyway it sounds truthful to me--the way she tells it to me here last Thursday night."

"Proceed!" prompted Donohue testily.

"So she takes this here money and buys herself a steerage ticket and comes over here with the baby. That, as near as I can figure out, is about three months ago. She's not seen this husband of hers for going on three years--of course the baby's never seen him. And she figures he'll be at the dock to meet her. But he's not there. But his cousin is there--another Italian from the same town. He gets her through Ellis Island somehow and he takes her up to where he's living--up in the Bronx--and tells her the reason her husband ain't there to meet her. The reason is, he's at Sing Sing, doing four years.

"It seems that after he's sent her this passage money the husband gets to thinking Black Handing is a pretty soft way to make a living, especially compared to day laboring, and he tries to raise a stake single-handed. He writes a Black Hand letter to an Italian grocer he knows has got money laid by, only the grocer is foxy and goes to the Tremont Avenue Station and shows the letter. They rig up a plant and this here Antonio Terranova walks into it. He's caught with the marked bills on him. So just the week before she lands he takes a plea in General Sessions and the judge gives him four years. When she gets to where she's telling me that part of it she starts crying.

"Well, anyway, that's the situation--him up there at Sing Sing doing his four years and her down here in New York with the kid on her hands. And she don't ever see him again, either, because in about three or four weeks--something like that--he's working with a gang in the rock quarry across the river, where they're building the new cell house, and a chunk of slate falls down and kills him and two others."

"Right here and now," interrupted the third deputy commissioner, "I want to know what's all this here stuff got to do with these here charges and specifications?"

"Just a minute, please. I'm coming to that right away, commissioner," protested the accused lieutenant with a sort of glib nervous agility; yet for all of his promising, he paused for a little bit before he continued. And this pause, brief enough as it was, gave the listening La Farge time to discover, with a small inward jar of surprise, that somehow, some way, he was beginning to lose some of his acrid antagonism for Weil; that, by mental processes which as yet he could not exactly resolve into their proper constituents, it was beginning to dribble away from him. And realization came to him, almost with a shock, that the man on the stand was telling the truth. Truth or not, though, the narrative thus far had been commonplace enough--people at headquarters hear the like of it often; and as a seasoned police reporter La Farge's emotions by now should be coated over with a calloused shell inches deep and hard as horn. Trying with half his mind to figure out what it was that had quickened these emotions, he listened all the harder as Weil went on.

"So this here big chunk of rock or slate or whatever it was falls on him and the two others and kills them. Not knowing where to send the body, they bury it up there at Sing Sing, and she never sees him again, living or dead. But here just a few days ago it seems she picks up, from overhearing some of the other Italians talking, that we've got such a thing as a Rogues' Gallery down here at headquarters and that her husband's picture is liable to be in it. So that's why she's here. She's found her way here somehow and she asks me won't I"--he caught himself--"won't the police please give her her husband's picture out of the gallery."

"And for why did she want that?" rumbled Donohue.

"That's what I asks her myself. It seems she's got no shame about it at all. She tells me she wants to hang on to it until she can get the money to have it enlarged into a big picture, and then she's going to keep it--till the bambino--that's Italian for baby, commissioner, you know--till the baby grows up, so he can see what his dead father looked like."

Now of a sudden La Farge knew--or thought he knew--why his interest had stirred in him a minute before. Instinctively his reporter's sixth sense had scented a good news story before the real point of the story had come out, even. A curious little silence had fallen on the half-lighted, almost empty big room. Only the voice of Weil broke this silence:

"Of course, commissioner, I tries to explain to her what the circumstances are. I tells her that, in the first place, on account of the mayor's orders about cutting down the gallery having gone into effect, it's an even bet her husband's picture ain't there anyhow--that it's most likely been destroyed; and in the second place, even if it is there, I tells her I've got no right to be giving it to her without an order from somebody higher up. But either she can't understand or she won't. I guess my being in uniform makes her think I'm running the whole department, and she won't seem to listen to what I says.

"She cries and she carries on worse than ever, and begs and begs me to give it to her. I guess you know how excitable those Italian women can be, especially when they are Sicilians. Anyhow, commissioner, after a lot of that sort of thing I tells her to wait where she is for a minute. I leaves her and I goes across into the Bertillon room, where the pictures are, and I looks up this here Antonio Terranova. I forget his number now and I don't know how it is he comes to be overlooked when we're cleaning out the gallery; but he's there all right, full face and side view, with his gallery number in big white figures on his chest. And, commissioner, he's a pretty tolerable tough-looking Ginney." The witness checked an inclination to grin. "I takes a slant at his picture, and I can't make up my own mind which way he'll look the worst enlarged into a crayon portrait--full face or side view. I can still hear her crying outside the door. She's crying harder than ever.

"I puts the picture back, and I goes out to where she is and tries to argue with her. It's no use. She goes down on her knees and holds the baby up, and tells me it ain't for her sake she's asking this--it's for the bambino. And she calls on a lot of Italian saints that I never even heard the names of some of them before--and so on, like that. It's pretty tough.

"She's such a stupid, ignorant thing you can't help from feeling sorry for her--nobody could." He hesitated a moment as though seeking for words of explanation and extenuation that were not in his regular vocabulary. "I got kids of my own, commissioner," he said suddenly, and stopped dead short for a moment. "I'm no Italian, but I got kids of my own!" he repeated, as though the fact constituted a defense.

"Well, well--what happened then?" The deputy commissioner's frosty voice seemed to have frozen so hard it had a crack in it. And now then the Semitic face of Weil twisted into a grin that was more than shamefaced--it was downright sheepish.

"Why, then," he said, "when I comes back out of the Bertillon room the second time she goes back down on her knees again and she says to me--of course she ain't expected to know what my religion is--maybe that explains it, commissioner--she says to me that all her life--every morning and every night--she's going to pray to the Blessed Virgin for me. That's what she says anyway. So I just lets it go at that."

He halted as though he were through.

"Then do I understand that, without an order from any superior authority, you gave this here woman certain property belonging to the Police Department?" Old Donohue's voice was gruffer than common, even. He whetted his talon forefinger on the desk top.

"Yes, sir," owned up the Jew. "There's nobody there but just us two. And I don't know how Captain Meagher comes to find the picture is gone and that it was me took it--but it's true, commissioner. She goes away kissing it and holding it to the breast of her clothes--that Rogues' Gallery picture! Yes, sir; I gives it to her."

The third deputy commissioner's gold-banded right arm was shoved out, with all the lean fingers upon the hand at the far end of it widely extended. He spoke, and something in his throat--a hard lump perhaps--husked his brogue and made his r's roll out like dice.

"Lieutenant Weil," he said, "I congratulate you! You're guilty!"

[The end]
Irvin S. Cobb's short story: Guilty As Charged

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