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Guilty As Charged
by
“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.”