It was Tuesday morning and it was warm. The Los Angeles Ledger offices were sticky; the air conditioning had gone out again. Outside, it was drizzling a thin, undetermined rain. The air on the street and the air inside the building were equally saturated, and the Ledger staff was wilting an hour after the day shift started.
In the newsroom, Robert Cloud could feel perspiration across the small of his back as he leaned forward at his desk to type. He was an ordinary-looking young man, ears slightly too large, hair in need of trimming. His only outstanding feature was his eyes, unusually brilliant for gray, and icily intense when he concentrated. His fingernails looked bad: chewed down to the quick; even the skin showed signs of having been bitten at occasionally.
Cloud typed rapidly, with four fingers. He was doing a story on an early-morning freeway collision; one driver had been killed. He was in the middle of the last line when a copyboy spoke to him over his left shoulder.
“Hoskins wants you in his office right away.”
“Mister Hoskins to you, kid,” Cloud said. “Wait a minute and you can take this.” He finished the last sentence, dragged the paper out of the machine, and handed it over his shoulder. “Better start showing a little respect for the day editor, or you won’t last long around here. Mr. Hoskins insists on proper respect; even his wife addresses him as Mister.”
“I’ll try to remember that,” the copyboy replied indifferently. He took a cigarette from Cloud’s pack on the desk and lighted it. “You want in for the World Series pool in the composing room?”
“No. Those guys in the composing room are a bunch of thieves; they grab off the good numbers ahead of time. How much is it?”
“Buck a number, pays off a hundred.”
Cloud fingered a dollar bill from his pocket and held it over his shoulder.
“Try to get me a decent number for a change, will you?”
The copyboy headed for the city desk with the story, and Cloud went toward the day editor’s frosted-glass office. Cloud had seen Lew Lach, the paper’s top feature writer, go into Hoskins’s office several minutes earlier and had not seen him come back out. So Cloud was in for some leg-work. That was always the way when you were new on a paper; you had to spend half your time birddogging news-hustlers like Lach: seasoned pros who would make news if they couldn’t find any. Cloud had been through the routine on three papers already in the five years since he finished school.
He tapped on the door. Inside, he found Hoskins pacing the floor, talking. Cloud could tell from the suspiciously attentive expression on Lach’s face that he was paying only token attention to the pearls of wisdom delivered by Hoskins. Quickly, while the day editor’s back was to him, Cloud eased into a chair next to Lach.
“So there’s this punk, see,” Hoskins was saying, “and he’s up on a dozen or so counts of armed robbery, kidnapping-with-bodily-harm, and sex perversion. That makes him an A-Number-One candidate for the little green gas chamber upstate. So what does he do? What does this punk do when he’s going on trial for a capital offense? He decides to conduct his own defense, that’s what he does.”
Hoskins turned and paced back toward them, appearing not to notice Cloud. As he walked and talked, he chewed juicily on a half-smoked cigar held professionally between his teeth. Cigars were the only thing in the world that anyone had ever heard Hoskins admit he liked.
“Now, I can’t blame him much for deciding to be his own lawyer. Right now there’s not an attorney in this town worth his weight in bullshit. Which is about all they use in courts nowadays,” he added, coming dangerously close to smiling at what he considered his sage humor. “There hasn’t been a good defense lawyer since Darrow and there hasn’t been a decent prosecutor since Dewey.” Hoskins paused and scratched his upper lip, skillfully avoiding the cigar.
“All right, so maybe this punk has got a good idea, after all. He’s got nine women on that jury, and everybody knows there’s nothing any goddamned dumber than a housewife pulling jury duty. Now personally, I don’t think they’re going to let this boy off the hook. He’s a four-time loser now, and if this was any other state except California, he’d already be doing life as an habitual. On top of that, he’s on trial in old Carl Lukey’s courtroom, and everybody knows Lukey is the state’s hanging judge.
“Still”—he took the cigar from his mouth and waved it in the air—“there’s always the chance that one of those dames in the jury box will wet her bloomers over this punk and talk the rest of them into an acquittal; so maybe he goes free. And that”—he jabbed a cigar at Lach—“is what we’re looking for.”
Hoskins sat down in his ancient swivel chair and leaned back precipitously. He extracted a large, ornate timepiece from his vest pocket.
“The jury has been out for about three hours now. They won’t reach a verdict until after lunch because the lunch is free. Hop over there and get a quick interview with the punk, just enough to size him up. Then wait for the jury to come in. If they spring him, see if you can pick out the one that wet her bloomers and get an exclusive that we can build up for a nice page one. If they don’t spring him, just put together about two-columns-by-a-half for the back of section one. Of course, if you see anything we can put a little whipped cream on, maybe we’ll throw in a short feature on Sunday. You got all that?”
“I’m not sure,” Lach said blandly. “Would you mind going over it again?”
“Get your ass moving,” Hoskins growled. He turned to jab his cigar at Cloud. “You. Go with him, give him a hand.”
“Let’s go, pal,” Lach said, walking out of the office. Cloud followed, not having spoken a word.
In the elevator, Lach said, “So what have you been doing lately, pal?”
“Nothing earthshaking. Piecing, mostly. Little rewrite here and there. Covered a wreck on the freeway this morning.”
“Bodies?”
“One.”
Cloud nodded. “Yeah.”
“Young? Built?”
“Yeah.” Cloud wished he hadn’t mentioned it. A couple of people in the newsroom had already told him about Lach’s interest in young, physically attractive dead women. There was even a story that Lach had paid another reporter two hundred dollars to let him take over his assignment to cover the Marilyn Monroe suicide, just so he could see the body.
“Get any pictures of the girl?” Lach asked.
“Yeah.”
“Maybe I’ll take a look at them when we get back.”
“Sure.” With Lew Lach it really didn’t fit. To look at him, you’d think he stepped right out of Front Page. He was small and Cagney-like, a seasoned war correspondent before Cloud was even born. He had gone ashore with the first wave at Normandy, had been aboard the observation plane when Nagasaki was devastated, and probably had seen as much combat as the average infantryman. And still, Cloud thought, he has a thing about looking at dead young women.
Downstairs, they checked out a car, then drove over to the Hall of Justice. Lach parked in the police lot, flipping the visor down to show the PRESS permit. It had begun to drizzle more strongly on the way over; now they hurried into the big gray building as the downpour started in earnest. Lach stopped at the jail office for passes to the top-floor detention room.
“Ever been here before?” he asked.
Cloud shook his head. “I’ve only been in L.A. a couple of months. I haven’t hit the courtroom circuit yet.”
Lach led him over to the jail elevator. “All defendants not out on bail are kept in one big tank up here when court’s not in session.”
They stepped off the elevator into a long, narrow area separated from a large jail dayroom by a floor-to-ceiling wire grille. Several visitors stood talking to inmates at various places along the grille. A guard sat on a high wooden stool at each end of the area. A third uniformed man occupied a small desk off to the side.
“Hiya, Oscar,” Lach said to the man at the desk, handing over their passes. “I saw your boy in that Notre Dame game last weekend. Looks like you’ve got an All-American in the family.”
“Takes after his old man,” the guard said, smiling. He glanced at an overhead clock and scribbled the time on their passes. “I wasn’t half bad myself, you know, back in the old days.”
“The kid’s already better than you ever were.”
“An insult I’ll gladly accept,” Oscar said soberly. He leaned over to a public-address amplifier on the wall. “Whitman, Weldon, to the grille!” he ordered, his voice blaring statically from two speakers in the dayroom.
“We’ll take Number Eight, Oscar,” Lach said, walking away.
“As if I didn’t know.”
Lach chuckled. Cloud followed him to the middle of the grille, where a large white eight was painted on the gray floor.
“Always take Number Eight if you can get it,” Lach told him. “There are fifteen spots, and eight is the farthest from the guards. Puts the guy on the other side more at ease.”
“Makes sense.” Cloud lighted a cigarette and looked around idly. Once again he heard Oscar speak commandingly into the public-address system.
“Whitman, Weldon, to the grille! Number Eight!”
Weldon Whitman was sitting in a corner of the big bullpen, sharing sections of a newspaper with two other prisoners, when he heard his name over the loudspeaker. The two men with him stopped reading at once and looked over at the grille. Whitman neither looked up nor moved.
“Who is it?” he asked after a moment.
“Two guys. One old, one young.”
“Fuzz?” said Whitman.
The prisoner studied the visitors clinically, then shook his head. “Not fuzz,” he ruled.
Weldon Whitman carefully folded his part of the newspaper and laid it aside. His mouth opened slightly as he turned casually and scrutinized the two men, considering whether to go over and talk to them. With his lips parted, Whitman appeared to be sneering; an illusion created by his nose, large and prominently hooked, which so overshadowed his upper lip that it accentuated a very slight, possibly unintentional smirk. As if to draw attention to both his nose and his smirk, Whitman’s thick black hair formed a severe widow’s peak that pointed like an arrow directly down to both of them. Overall, he had a tough, even sneaky look; but at the same time there was something about him, some very elusive quality, that quietly asked for sympathy. It may have been simply that, with his mouth open slightly, he seemed a shade dumbfounded—almost as if he needed someone’s guidance, someone’s protection. Anyone’s. Like a child sometimes needs an adult—any adult.
After a moment’s contemplation, Whitman stood up and walked toward the grille. He walked with a swagger that looked practiced, yet suited him. He was dressed for court: a cheap blue suit tight at the shoulders and too short in the sleeves, and a drugstore tie with too much green in it. Impassively, he stepped up to the Eight-spot.
“You Weldon Whitman?” Lew Lach asked.
“Yeah.”
Whitman’s voice was moderately deep, slightly hoarse, perhaps from his week of speaking in court. There was a hint of defiance in the single word he spoke.
“Lach and Cloud of the Ledger,” the older reporter said. “How about an interview?”
“Sure.” Weldon Whitman, smiling a half-smile, took out a cigarette and lighted it. “What do you want to know?”
“Well, to begin with, what do you think your chances are of getting off?”
“Not so hot,” Whitman answered frankly.
“Oh?” Lach raised his eyebrows. It was the first time he had ever known a defendant in a capital case to publicly take any position other than the adamant belief that justice would triumph and he would go free. Lach was caught off guard. “What makes you think that?” Lach asked.
“They’ve decided to railroad me, that’s why,” Whitman said.
“They?”
“The judge,” Whitman said, his lips tightening briefly. “And the D.A.”—he began counting them off on his fingers—“the witnesses, the city police, the county sheriff—”
Lach shot Cloud a quick look: Same old bullshit.
“You pleaded not guilty, right?” asked Lach.
“Right,” Whitman nodded. “I didn’t pull those jobs. The law is trying to clean up their unsolved-crimes file and they’re making me their patsy.”
“Sure,” Lach said. “What made you decide to represent yourself in court?”
“Simple. I don’t have money for a private attorney and I don’t trust the public defender’s office.”
“Well, that’s a switch,” Lach said lightly. “Most of the time you guys swear by the public defender’s office. Mind telling me why you don’t trust them?”
“Who pays the public defender’s salary?” Whitman asked.
“The county, naturally.”
“And who pays the district attorney’s salary?”
Lach nodded. “The county. Okay, I get the drift.”
“I thought you would,” said Weldon Whitman confidently.
Cloud, watching and listening closely, pursed his lips slightly. You couldn’t really blame Whitman for having a theory like that, he thought. He had heard accusations of collusion between the offices of the district attorney and the public defender.
“Okay, how about a little background info?” said Lach, taking out his pocket notebook. “How old are you?”
“Twenty-seven.”
“Married?”
“No. Not anymore. I was.”
“Where’s your ex?”
Whitman shook his head. “Forget it.”
“Sure,” said Lach. Cloud saw him write wife and underline it twice. If Whitman were acquitted and the case became front-page news, Lew Lach would find the ex-Mrs. Whitman wherever she was.
“You’ve done time, haven’t you?”
“Yeah. I’ve been the whole route. Chino, San Quentin, Folsom.”
Even Cloud, a newcomer to California, knew the route he meant. Chino was the honor farm for first-offenders, the nationally known prison without walls. San Quentin was a maximum-security prison for second-timers, and housed the state execution chamber and Death Row. Folsom was the big joint, the high walls, the last stop for long-termers and those so tough they had to be kept in almost perpetual solitary confinement.
Whitman had been the route, all right, Cloud thought. All in twenty-seven years, too. That might be some kind of record.
“On parole now?” Lach asked.
“Yeah.” Whitman dropped his cigarette to the floor and stepped on it.
“When did you get out?”
“The second week in May.”
Lach frowned. “The second week in May? You were picked up for this beef in June, weren’t you?”
“Yeah. June twenty-third.”
“For Christ’s sake,” Lach said incredulously, “you mean you were only out six weeks?”
Whitman nodded solemnly, his mouth tightening again as if silently cursing his luck.
“Well,” Lach shrugged, “that’s the breaks, I guess.”
Whitman looked at Lach intently but did not respond. Cloud glanced at the older reporter, thinking there were times when Lew Lach was just a little too insensitive to suit his taste.
“Is there anything else you want to know?” Whitman finally asked in a quiet voice.
“I guess not,” said Lach, flipping his notebook closed. “See you downstairs in court.”
As Lach started toward the elevator, Robert Cloud impulsively held back for a moment. Whitman paused too, as if he wanted to be the last to leave.
“How are you fixed for cigarettes?” Cloud said, a little awkwardly. “I could have some sent up.”
Whitman was as surprised at Cloud’s words as Cloud himself. At first his mouth just hung open in its characteristic way, and he stared at Cloud openly, unguarded, for the briefest instant; then his eyes narrowed slightly and Cloud knew he was scrutinizing him for a motive, a reason, for the offer.
“No strings,” Cloud said, embarrassed now. “I just thought—”
“Thanks anyway,” Whitman interrupted. “I’ve got enough.”
Cloud nodded. “Good luck downstairs,” he said. He turned and followed Lew Lach to the elevator.
Weldon Whitman walked away from the grille and headed back for his corner. One of the prisoners sitting in a group on the floor reached up and grabbed his sleeve.
“Hey, Whit,” he said, “we’re smuggling a cocksucker up from Tier Two tonight. He charges three bucks and you can pay in cash, cigarettes, or commissary chits. Interested?”
Whitman thought about it for a moment, then said, “Check with me later. I want to see how it goes this afternoon first.”
He walked on. If he got lucky this afternoon and beat the death rap, he might just celebrate by treating himself to a blow job.
If he got lucky.
Department Four of the Criminal Division of Superior Court reconvened at two o’clock. It was merely a technical reconvention, however, since Judge Carl V. Lukey remained in his chambers to await the pleasure of the jury.
The rest of Department Four’s staff were at their appointed positions: the court clerk shuffling papers at his desk, an elderly court reporter—wearing a hearing aid, which Cloud thought unusual—going over his notes at a small table near the witness stand, and the uniformed bailiff sitting at the end of the jury box, his chair tilted back, reading an afternoon paper. The prosecutor and his trial assistant lounged at one of the counsel tables, talking in quiet, idle undertones. A dozen or so spectators had wandered in and taken seats in the public section.
Whitman had been brought to a small lockup immediately behind the courtroom. He would remain there until a verdict was reached or until the jury was locked up for the night, in which case he would be returned to the county jail until court opened the following morning. The general consensus, however, was that the verdict would be reached sometime during midafternoon.
Lew Lach and Robert Cloud had entered the courtroom shortly after two o’clock and walked down the aisle to the front row left, marked PRESS ONLY. Cloud did not recognize any of the three already sitting in the row, but Lach apparently knew them all—or at least they knew Lach, for each of them waved or bobbed his head in acknowledgment of his arrival. He and Cloud took the two end seats, and Lach at once lighted a cigarette in complete indifference to several NO SMOKING signs. Cloud saw the bailiff glance at Lach and then resume reading his paper, apparently unconcerned.
“That’s G. Foster Klein,” Lach said confidentially to Cloud, indicating one of the men at the prosecutor’s counsel table. “He’s the D.A.’s hatchet man. He and old Judge Lukey keep about twenty of those thirty death cells occupied up at San Quentin.”
Cloud studied the man Lach had indicated. G. Foster Klein was short and stocky, the kind who looked short and stocky even sitting down. His hair was straight and black, almost slick. There was something crisp and sharp about him, an attitude of alertness and formidability. This was belied, but only slightly, by his rather pudgy cheeks, which looked as if they had the capacity, even the inclination, to become florid. This minor characteristic did not, however, detract at all from the imposing impression the man usually made: G. Foster Klein, chief prosecutor of the largest county in the state, a master of trial strategy and an expert in the complicated, often ambiguous field of criminal law.
“Why do you call him a hatchet man?” Cloud asked.
“Because in eighteen years of prosecuting killers, kidnappers, and rapists, he’s managed to get death sentences forty-one times. That’s a lot of bodies.” Lach nudged Cloud with his elbow. “Incidentally, for your own information, he’s also a publicity hog. Loves the press. Which makes him a good man to know.”
Cloud nodded. Then he turned his attention from Klein to a large chart on an easel facing the jury box. “What’s that thing?”
“Don’t know,” said Lach. “Looks like some kind of breakdown of the charges against the punk.”
“Think I’ll take a look.” Cloud pushed through the low swinging gate into the business side of the courtroom. “All right if I take a look at that chart over there?” he asked the bailiff.
“Go ahead. Long as you don’t move it.”
Cloud walked over to the chart. Several sheets of poster-board had been put together to form a surface perhaps six feet wide and four feet high. The lettering was hand drafted, very precise, starkly black. The words and sentences and the accusations they formed were bold and commanding, a harsh recapitulation of the charges made by the state against Weldon Whitman.
Cloud’s eyes moved slowly down the list. It read like a one-man crime wave. There were eight charges of armed robbery and one of attempted robbery; one burglary and one grand theft auto; one assault with a deadly weapon and one assault and battery; four counts of kidnapping, two sex-perversion charges, and one attempted rape.
Cloud shook his head. Weldon Whitman was accused of doing all that—in a single three-week period.
“Hard to believe, isn’t it?” said a pleasant, even voice. Cloud turned to see G. Foster Klein standing next to him.
“Almost too hard,” Cloud said. He held out his hand.
“Robert Cloud of the Ledger. You’re Mr. Klein, I believe.”
“Yes. I thought I noticed you in the press row earlier,” Klein said, shaking hands. “If you have any questions about the case, I’ll be happy to help you.”
“Did he really do all this?”
“He did it, all right. Come over here and let me show you something.” Klein led Cloud to his counsel table and picked up a thick, bound file. “This is the record of testimony given at the preliminary hearing in the case of the People of the State of California versus Weldon Carpenter Whitman. Let me recap it for you—”
G. Foster Klein began paging through the transcript.
“On a Saturday night early in June of this year, a lone gunman entered a Pasadena menswear shop and held it up for around eight hundred dollars. The proprietor later identified Whitman in a police lineup, identified a stolen sport coat Whitman was wearing when apprehended, and indentified the type of automatic pistol used in the robbery and found on Whitman at the time of his arrest.
“Ten days later, also in Pasadena, an automobile was stolen from a young housewife while she was shopping. That car was the vehicle Whitman was driving when he was captured by the police.
“Four nights after the car theft, a family consisting of husband, wife, and daughter were returning to their home, again in Pasadena, and had just driven their car into the driveway when they observed a burglar climbing out of their bedroom window. The burglar escaped but was later identified by the family as Whitman after they saw his picture in the newspaper.
“Less than nine hours after that incident, at about five o’clock the next morning, a man and a woman driving on a lonely stretch of highway up near Malibu were forced to the side of the road by a car with a red spotlight, which they assumed to be a police vehicle. As it turned out, it was a car being driven by a lone gunman; he had put red cellophane over the spotlight. The gunman robbed the people of eighty dollars. The driver of the car identified Whitman in a lineup, and identified the type of automobile and gun used in the holdup.”
Klein paused and glanced up to be sure Cloud was listening. Then he continued relentlessly, almost as if addressing a jury.
“Approximately sixteen hours later, between nine-thirty and ten o’clock that night, a man visiting here from the midwest was out with a woman on a date. They were parked up in the hills of Mulholland Drive, in the lovers’-lane section that looks down on the lights of Los Angeles, when a car, again with a red spotlight, pulled up behind them. They were approached by a person whom they first assumed to be a policeman, but who turned out to be a holdup man. The visitor was robbed of forty dollars. The woman with him was slapped across the face by the holdup man when he thought she was looking too closely at his appearance. Both victims identified Whitman in a lineup.
“Twenty-four hours later, at about nine-thirty the following night, a divorced woman named Doris Calder was on a date with a man she works with. They were parked at another section of Mulholland Drive. Similar events took place: the car with the red spotlight; an approach by a person they assumed to be a police officer. In this instance the gunman robbed the man of forty-five dollars, took his car keys so that he could not leave the scene, and forced Mrs. Calder to accompany him back to the car with the red spotlight. Once in the gunman’s car, the woman was robbed of six dollars which she had in her purse, and was then forced at gunpoint to commit a perverted sex act by copulating the gunman’s penis with her mouth. Both victims of this incident identified Weldon Whitman as the gunman.”
Again Klein paused to look up. He was satisfied that he still had Robert Cloud’s undivided attention.
“Around midnight of the following night,” he continued, “a similar incident occurred involving another man and woman parked on one of the lovers’ lanes. In this instance the man was robbed of twelve dollars. Whitman was also identified by this victim.
“Three nights later, also around midnight, a young college student and an eighteen-year-old high-school girl named Glory Ann Luza were returning from a dance and parked on still another of the lovers’ lanes off Mulholland. They were approached in the same manner by a solitary gunman who emerged from a car equipped with a red spotlight. Incidentally, by this time the newspapers and the police had dubbed him the Spotlight Bandit because of his method of operation. Now, in this particular Spotlight Bandit crime, there was only an attempted robbery, since neither the college boy or the girl had any money. Following the attempted robbery, the gunman then ordered the Luza girl into his car and drove away with her. He drove around with her for approximately a quarter of an hour, then parked on a deserted dirt road somewhere in the foothills. There he forced the girl, at gunpoint, to commit a perverted sex act by copulating his penis with her mouth. After that, he forced her to completely disrobe and get into the rear seat of the automobile. After disrobing himself, he attempted unsuccessfully to rape the girl. Although he wasn’t able to rape her, he did force the girl to participate in a sexual orgy lasting approximately two hours. After that, he drove her down out of the foothills and released her.” Klein looked up at Cloud and tapped the open page of the transcript with his finger. “Both the girl and her escort made positive identifications of Whitman in a police lineup.”
“He’s certainly been identified by enough people,” Cloud said.
“Want to hear how he was captured?” Klein asked.
“Sure.”
Klein thumbed through the pages to another part of the testimony. “On the evening after Glory Ann Luza’s ordeal up in the hills,” he said, “a lone gunman entered a small menswear store in Redondo Beach and ordered the proprietor and one male clerk into a back room. When the proprietor hesitated, the gunman struck him across the face with his gun. After taking their wallets and locking the two men in the back room, the gunman looted the store of two hundred dollars in cash and approximately five hundred dollars in merchandise.
“Whitman was captured about an hour after the clothing-store robbery, with the merchandise still in his possession. The car he was driving—the one stolen from the Pasadena housewife—was spotted by a police radio car. When they attempted to stop him, Whitman accelerated. The officers went after him. After a wild chase through the streets, the officers finally were forced to ram the stolen car in order to stop it. Whitman leaped from the car and they had to chase him on foot until they were able to forcibly subdue him. He fought like a wild man even after the officers got him handcuffed.”
Cloud shook his head thoughtfully. “Almost sounds like the guy’s crazy.”
“No. No, he’s not crazy. He’s a hardened, confirmed, incorrigible criminal. And a three-time loser on top of it.” Klein tapped the thick transcript again. “Incidently, the proprietor of that menswear store also identified Whitman in a police lineup.”
“What about the clerk?” Cloud asked.
“He wasn’t able to make a positive identification,” Klein said. “However, we had adequate circumstantial evidence in lieu of an identification: Whitman had the clerk’s wallet in his pocket at the time of his capture.” Klein picked up a partly filled glass of water and drank a swallow. “At any rate, that particular incident isn’t one that we’re emphasizing in this case. The two we’re concentrating on are the ones involving the Calder woman and the Luza girl. Those are the two that will send Whitman to the gas chamber.”
“I was wondering about that,” Cloud said. “I’m not too familiar with California law; I’ve only been in the state a couple of months. How can you ask for the death penalty without a murder?”
“The kidnapping statutes,” Klein explained. “The law states that when a person is kidnapped for the purpose of robbery, and as a result of that kidnapping suffers bodily injury of any kind, that it is a capital offense. Come over here, I’ll show you—” Klein led Cloud back to the big chart. “Right here,” he said, indicating the crime shown next to the name of Doris Calder. “He kidnapped this woman by forcing her to move at gunpoint from her companion’s car to his car; the kidnapping was for the purpose of robbery because he stole six dollars from her purse; and she suffered bodily injury by being forced to commit an unnatural sex act.” Klein leaned closer to him and lowered his voice. “Incidentally, that’s Mrs. Calder in the front row across from the press section.”
Cloud saw a shapely, rather hard-looking but not unattractive woman in her late thirties. She had bleached hair that on her was very becoming, and was wearing a dress that accentuated her wide shoulders and excellent breasts.
Turning back to the chart, Cloud saw that Klein’s finger was now next to the name of Glory Ann Luza.
“Here’s an even better example,” the prosecutor said. “The kidnapping is much clearer in this case, since he actually removed the girl from the scene and drove around for fifteen or twenty minutes. And although there was no actual robbery—the girl had no money with her—the crime was still begun for the purpose of robbery, and that’s all the statute requires. And, of course, the girl suffered the same bodily injury as the other victim: forced participation in a perverted sex act.”
Cloud nodded again. “What about the other two kidnapping charges? The recap shows four.”
“Yes, the other two are technical kidnaps,” Klein explained. He pointed to the last two names at the bottom of the chart: Edward Fields and George Roland. “The proprietor and the clerk in the Redondo Beach clothing store. The two men were moved at gunpoint from one room to another.”
“That’s stretching the law a bit thin, isn’t it?” Cloud asked pointedly.
“Perhaps,” Klein smiled. “But in a case like this, with a criminal as dangerous as Whitman, well, we feel that the end justifies the means. This is an extreme case, Mr. Cloud. The public must be protected from someone like Whitman.”
Before Cloud could comment further, the bailiff walked over to them. “Excuse me, Mr. Klein. Jury’s coming in.”
Suddenly, Cloud was standing by the chart all alone. G. Foster Klein was back at the counsel table speaking briskly to his assistant. The court clerk was clearing off his desk. The old court reporter with the hearing aid was clearing his stenotype machine. New spectators were filing into the courtroom and the bailiff was directing them to be seated quickly before the judge resumed the bench.
Robert Cloud returned to the press row to rejoin Lew Lach.
Silence descended upon the courtroom as its high priest, the Honorable Carl V. Lukey, judge presiding, resumed his place on the bench. A moment before, all eyes in the room had been on Weldon Whitman being brought in from the holding cell; now they turned to the slight wisp of a man known throughout the state as “the hanging judge.”
Carl Lukey was nearing seventy. His oval face was a mass of deep, dry wrinkles. His eyes, small, slitted, keenly piercing, beady, were made to seem more so by the enormity of his ears. The dome of his head, bullet-shaped, was sparsely covered by irregular lines of black hair combed straight back. As he seated himself at the bar of justice on this particular day, he was in his twenty-ninth year as a judge of the Superior Court. He was already a legend.
The judge’s eyes swept the courtroom. The spectators were quiet and attentive. Bailiff in position. Court recorder at the ready. Clerk standing by. Prosecution present. Defendant present. Everything as it should be; his domain was in order.
“Bring in the jury,” the judge ordered in a raspy but firm voice.
The jury filed into the jury box: nine women first, then three male jurors, one of whom took his place in the foreman’s chair. The judge, who had leaned his head back and stared at the ceiling while this shuffling of feet was going on, straightened when it subsided and silence returned. He faced the panel of twelve.
“Have you agreed upon a verdict, Mr. Foreman?” he asked.
“We have.” The foreman rose from his chair and handed the court clerk a sheaf of paper slips folded neatly and clipped together. The clerk took them to the bench and handed them up to Lukey.
Silence hovered heavily in the courtroom as the judge unclipped the slips and examined them one by one, in order, comparing them with his copy of the indictment. His expression did not alter in the slightest; it was an old, familiar routine to him. He had long since lost count of the number of men who had gone from his courtroom to eternity.
He handed the slips back to his clerk. “The clerk may read the verdicts as returned by the jury,” he said formally, settling back in his high leather chair.
“We, the jury,” intoned the clerk, “impaneled and sworn in the above entitled cause, do, upon our oaths, find the defendant, Weldon C. Whitman, guilty of robbery, a felony, as charged in Count One of the Indictment, and find it to be Robbery of the First Degree.”
Robert Cloud, from the nearby press row, saw Weldon Whitman’s shoulders drop.
“We, the jury … find the defendant, Weldon C. Whitman, guilty of grand larceny of an automobile, a felony, as charged in Count Two of the Indictment.”
Briefly, a moment of possible hope.
“We the jury … not guilty of burglary as charged in Count Three….”
But after that, only defeat.
“We the jury … guilty of robbery as charged in Count Four … Count Five … Count Six …”
Then, the ultimate blow.
“… guilty of kidnapping for the purpose of robbery, and find that the person so kidnapped did suffer bodily harm, and fix the defendant’s punishment at death.”
All that followed was anticlimactic: Sex perversion, guilty. Robbery, guilty. Assault and battery, guilty. Attempted robbery, guilty. Assault with a deadly weapon, guilty. Kidnapping again, guilty. Another death sentence.
“Now they can gas him twice,” Lew Lach whispered. Cloud glanced distastefully at him.
The clerk continued to read. Sex perversion again, guilty. Attempted rape, guilty. More counts of armed robbery, all guilty. Two more kidnapping charges, these the two technical ones; guilty with a recommendation of life imprisonment.
Then it was over. Almost before Cloud knew it, he was listening to Judge Lukey commend, thank, and discharge the jury, and set two weeks from that day as the date for the formal sentencing of the defendant. He ordered Weldon Whitman back into custody of the sheriff. Then he adjourned.
After Lukey left the bench and entered his chambers, the spectators began to disperse. Lach and Cloud stood up as a sheriff’s deputy led a handcuffed Weldon Whitman around the defendant’s counsel table. The prisoner passed within a few feet of the two reporters. Whitman glanced briefly at them but did not speak. Cloud felt a sudden strong desire to again say something to Whitman—anything, a word of some kind—but with Lach there he did not. Then Whitman was past them and being taken back to the depths behind the courtroom.
“Well, that’s it,” Lach said, lighting a cigarette and moving into the aisle. “A good afternoon shot. Could’ve got the whole story on the phone. Hoskins and his bright ideas about one of the jury broads wetting her bloomers. Shit!”
Cloud followed, saying nothing. As he started to turn up the aisle, he noticed Doris Calder step over to the railing and speak to G. Foster Klein, who bent his head toward her so that she could speak privately. She whispered to him for a moment. When she was finished, the dapper little prosecutor raised his head and smiled intimately at her. Doris Calder patted his hand briefly and walked away, her mature, excellent bottom moving nicely under its tight skirt. Klein, smiling, watched her walk all the way up the side aisle.
Cloud, frowning, watched Klein.