The jury looked better, to Max Epstein, than the original jury had looked to Ben Raymond. The first had been an all-white jury. The present one impaneled six white men, three white women, an elderly black man, an elderly black woman and a young black man.

Scott built his prosecution upon Violet Vance’s identification of the white getaway car, then expanded the case in order to oppose what he termed “the threat of the event-shaping Madison Avenue boys,” as he designated New York City’s media people who had conducted a campaign of contempt for the New Jersey judiciary, the New Jersey police and, in general, the civilization of New Jersey for many months. He made racial fear a motive of the murders.

Oritano permitted Scott to list all the actors, writers, filmmakers, publishers, studio executives and advertisers who had served on Calhoun’s New York City committee. Scott’s strongest weapon was the backlash aroused in New Jersey by the New York media.

“As much as I would like to say that the killings did not happen out of revenge,” Scott contended, “revenge was the reason they happened all the same.”

Max Epstein possessed a disdainful personality and he played it directly into Scott’s hands. He kept his back to the jury except for brief occasions when he glanced over his shoulder, as much as to say: “schmucks. ’’Scott sat back and watched Epstein destroying his own case.

Neither Scott nor Epstein were aware that Nick Iello had recanted his recantation. Therefore Scott fought to keep him off the stand and Epstein fought to keep him on.

De Vivani had it in hand, and he waited his moment. While he waited he sat and watched the lawyers going at one another like two boxers unaware that each is wearing the other’s trunks.

De Vivani cared no more for the prosecution lawyers than he did for the New York Jews of the defense. Personally, he liked Calhoun and respected him; but he had no respect for lawyers at all. He sat at the back of the courtroom listening to Scott pleading, in the jury’s absence, to keep the recantation off the stand.

“This man has revealed himself to be a perjuror,” Scott was advising the judge. “Whether Iello had been lying in his original identification of Calhoun or whether he had been lying in his recantation, makes no difference. The man is a liar under oath, and if he is permitted to take this stand it will be a mockery of the jury system.”

“The credibility of the witness is not the basis, under law, by which identification might be withheld from a jury,” Judge Oritano ruled. “The only relevant issue here is whether there have been improper suggestions from the police. This witness’s constitutional right to due process has not therefore been violated.”

Iello would be permitted to testify.

Epstein, with Iello’s recantation in hand, was quietly jubilant. The case, he sensed, was as good as over and he whispered something to Calhoun. “For the first time since this trial began,” the press took note, “Calhoun smiled.”

Once, while Epstein was giving the judge a long, circuitous argument, Oritano rose and walked off the bench into his chambers.

“Judge!” Epstein called after him. “Judge! I don’t like it when you walk off in the middle of a sentence!”

“Too bad,” everyone in the courtroom heard Oritano’s rumble from somewhere offstage. “Too, too damned bad.”

“Was it a two-inch or a five-inch taillight?” Epstein demanded to know of Violet Vance, as if implying that any witness not carrying a tape measure at 2 A.M. must be guilty of complicity.

The witness had been uncertain in her original identification. “It was like the same car,” she had testified.

“I don’t know, Mr. Epstein,” she now answered, “all I know is that the car I seen leaving and the car I seen returning was the same car.” And burst into tears. “I didn’t do anything, Mr. Epstein.”

She had done more than she realized. She had greatly strengthened the prosecution’s charge that it was the same car. Epstein had frightened her into so stating.

Out of the jury’s presence, Scott then requested that the court allow him to introduce an unprecedented motive: racial revenge. When Oritano permitted Scott to use it, Epstein charged Oritano openly with “turning this trial into a racial nightmare.”

Scott objected and was sustained. De Vivani covered his mouth with his right hand. Epstein repeated the charge. De Vivani covered his mouth with his left hand. Scott objected again and was again sustained. De Vivani bowed his head forward and appeared to be choking. Epstein persisted.

“Sit down Mr. Epstein,” the judge finally instructed him in a bored tone, “sit down.”

There was no mistaking the threat behind the instruction. Epstein went to his table waggling his head in personal outrage.

“Don’t waggle your head, Mr. Epstein,” the judge cautioned him.

Epstein sat down and ruffled his papers angrily.

“Don’t ruffle your papers, Mr. Epstein.”

De Vivani rose and conducted a one-minute check, from a standing position, upon Max Epstein. He did not waggle. Neither did he ruffle.

The trial was not a racial nightmare. There was simply no way of keeping race out of the jury’s consciousness. Four whites and one black had been murdered, or had died, since June 17, 1966. One white man had gone to prison for killing a black. A black man was now, for the second time, on trial for his life for the killings of three whites. To conduct such a trial without racial feeling was not humanly possible.

The boredom of the trial was suddenly relieved by the appearance of two clowns.

One was a twenty-eight-year-old New Jerseyan named Joe Hauser. Hauser wore pants of royal blue, a light blue-and-white plaid jacket and a navy-blue lattice tie. He had dressed for the occasion and was obviously enormously pleased with himself. He knew that he had the admiration of everyone in court through his mere appearance. He put one leg up as though inviting viewers to admire the beauty of his knee.

The other looked like something left over from Haight-Ashbury. He wore his hair long, had a single earring and wore a sheepskin and hadn’t shaved for days. His name was Sigorski.

“I never put a word into Nick Iello’s mouth,” Hauser assured the court the moment he got on the witness stand, before being asked anything.

“What is your trade, Mr. Hauser?” Epstein asked him.

“Furniture dealer.”

“What is your relationship to Mr. Iello?”

“We planned to make a film. I was his agent. One of his agents. The other was Sigorski.”

“Who was Sigorski?”

“Iello’s other agent.”

“I mean, what was his trade?”

Hauser grinned as at some private joke. “Sigorski? That bum never worked a day in his life.”

“Since your own trade is that of dealing in furniture, and Mr. Sigorski is unemployed, how did you plan to make a film?”

“I can sell a chair without knowing how to make a chair, can’t I? Fact is we were going to do a book too. I don’t how to write a book either. It don’t mean I can’t run a tape recorder though.”

“You made tapes then?”

“Hours of them.”

“With Mr. Iello?”

“Iello is from the basement. Every tape he’s telling us a different story.”

“With so many versions of the story,” Epstein asked him, “what made you think you’d found the true one?”

“With so many versions,” Hauser replied complacently, “one of them was bound to be the truth.”

Iello’s jacket strained across his chest when he mounted the witness chair. He was chewing gum or candy.

“Do you remember being involved in other crimes, Mr. Iello,” Scott began on him, “before your involvement in the present one?”

“It’s possible,” Iello conceded carelessly, “I don’t recall at the moment. If I did, I wasn’t arrested.”

“You’ve never been arrested, Mr. Iello?”

“Of course I’ve been arrested. Many times. I’m a thief. I’m a professional thief. I make my living as a thief. When I get caught I go to jail. I serve my time, whatever they hand out. When I get out I go back to thieving. Thieving is my trade. I thought you meant was I arrested in connection with the present case. I’ve never been arrested in relation to the present case, all I meant.”

“Then it is safe to say that there are hundreds of crimes for which you have never been arrested?”

“I object,” Epstein interrupted. “Is Mr. Scott merely playing to the audience now? Is he trying to entertain us at the witness’s expense? Does Mr. Scott want, seriously, to try this case or not? The question he is putting to the witness is ridiculous, your honor.”

“The question is objectionable,” the judge agreed. “If Mr. Scott chooses to waste our good time, as well as his own, with such questions, I’ll permit him. You do have proof, Mr. Scott, that this witness has committed hundreds of crimes for which he has never been arrested?”

“Your honor, have you listened to the tapes he made with his agents? The material in any one of them is staggering—staggering. …

De Vivani, at the rear of the courtroom, closed his eyes at the farce being conducted up front. The sight of a state’s attorney trying to trap a witness, whom he regarded as having turned hostile, but one who would, shortly, switch to Scotts own side, gave the detective a pang of secret pleasure.

“Will you answer my question?” Scott persisted.

“You’ll have to repeat it. I forgot it.”

“Are there not hundreds of crimes you have committed for which, sir, you have never been arrested?”

“Objection,” Epstein protested. “How is this relevant, your honor? We are now asking Mr. Iello if he wishes to incriminate himself in crimes totally unconnected with the one which this trial is about.”

“I’m not going to permit him to go beyond that night,” Oritano assured Epstein.

“He said ‘hundreds of crimes,’ sir,” Epstein reminded the court. “Is Mr. Scott talking about hundreds of crimes committed on the night of June sixteenth, nineteen sixty-six; or crimes committed on other nights? I ask the counsel to be specific. This is a court of law, not a cocktail bar for exchange of hearsay.”

“Counsel for the witness is agreed,” Oritano agreed good-naturedly, “that we should use our sound and good judgment in attempting to save time.”

“Do you remember,” Scott still addressed Iello, “saying that, on the night in question, you were all fucked up,’ to use your own phrase?”

“I wasn’t messed up on alcohol or on pills, if that’s what you mean,” Iello replied.

“You were not so messed up that you did not realize it would be an excellent opportunity to rob a cash register?”

“Mister Scott,” Iello said wearily, shifting his body in the witness chair, “over and over I have admitted your charge and I admit it again. Yes, yes, yes, I took money from the register of the Melody Bar and Grill. I ran down the street with it. I handed it to Dexter Baxter. I ran back to the tavern. I called the telephone operator. I waited for the cops. I went to the station.”

“I see that, after all, you don’t have memory problems,” Scott complimented the witness.

“My memory is perfectly clear. It was very quiet in the bar. There was broken glass, a beer bottle smashed on the floor. There was a man slumped over the bar like sleeping. There was another man flopping around with the blood on his face. There was a woman lying on the floor. The man with the blood on his face began mumbling.”

“You told Assemblyman Rawlings you had seen a colored male,” Scott asked, “wearing shades and a sports jacket, five foot eight inches in height, did you not?”

“I did not swear everything exactly true to Rawlings. I had a reason for saying whatever it was I said to him at that time. Joe Hauser was right outside, we had rehearsed what I was going to say to Rawlings. I was looking to get even with Hudson County at that time. I had these two guys on my back who wanted a book. Some of the things I said to Rawlings were complete lies. They were said to make an exciting book.”

“Who were these two guys?”

“Hauser and Sigorski. I was working for them at the time and they suggested a book. They said the actual story they couldn’t do anything with. They sent a letter to some guy Truman Capote. He was a writer, they were looking for a writer to write it.”

Oritano swung about toward the witness, supporting his cheek upon his palm. This might be the first time, his attitude suggested, that he had had before him a witness who not merely identified himself as a liar and a thief, but proclaimed it. Iello revealed not the faintest trace of embarrassment.

“Mr. Hauser made you say those things?” Scott asked.

“I can’t say anyone made me,” Iello answered, “I could say we discussed them. Hauser said, ‘If you get in there and tell them what actually happened, forget it. Do the right thing and we got a good story we can sell to anybody.’ All the tapes were rehearsed with Hauser and Sigorski. It was why on the tape I said I never seen Calhoun. That made a better story, Hauser said, more mysterious-like.”

“But that part was true—that you never saw Calhoun,” Epstein asked.

“What was true? That I never seen Calhoun? Calhoun was in the white car when he passed me. Just like I told it to Lieutenant De Vivani. And when they brought the car back Calhoun was still in it.”

“I don’t understand what you’re trying to say,” Epstein protested. “Your failure to identify Calhoun, as you swore in your recantation …”

“Mr. Epstein, I just got through explaining: that was bunk. Pure bunk. The recantation was Joe Hauser’s idea, for the book. ‘Tell Kerrigan you were lying when you originally identified Calhoun,’ Hauser told me, ‘think of the publicity in that! And it’ll make you look good, too.’ Then I thought to myself: Look what it will make them stupid cops look like. Them that promised me so much then left me hanging …”

“You don’t seriously expect us to believe what you’re telling us now, Mr. Iello?”

“Objection,” Scott switched fast to the witness’ side.

“I don’t give a good goddamn whether you believe me or not, Mr. Epstein,” Iello assured the defense. “You asked me so I told you, that’s all.”

“Your recantation,” Scott put in almost breathlessly, “is then a complete falsehood?”

“Look,” Iello replied with the note of utter weariness returning to his voice, “look, we had a contract, they were supposedly my agents and they were in contact with different people in New York. They went over but I didn’t. I didn’t want to go way over there.

“What Hauser had in mind was to start a big argument going on the tapes calling De Vivani every name in the book—it ain’t hard to get De Vivani hot you know—and then putting weight on him with that recantation play. Hauser said, ‘Good, now if we can get Newark involved in this, we get all the free publicity and who the hell cares who goes free or who doesn’t go free, we got a good book to sell. We got the story, them guys in New York got nothing, they got to come to us.’

“That was how it started out. Then Sigorski comes to me and says, ‘What do we need Hauser for? We drop him and me and you split fifty-fifty.’ I said, ‘Okay by me.’ Then Hauser comes to me and says, ‘What do we need that stupid Polack for? We drop him and you and me split fifty-fifty.’ I says, ‘Okay by me.’

“Then they get together and decide the one they really don’t need is me. So they go over to New York with the tapes and come back with so much money they’d bought new money clips. The day Hauser declared hisself bankrupt in New Jersey, he was shopping for a new Lincoln in New York and Sigorski was pricing a twelve-room house in Montauk. No, I don’t know where they got it but I’m sure they never used a gun.”

“Have you no shame, Mr. Iello?” Epstein asked the witness.

Iello chewed leisurely, studying the lawyer. After a while he shifted the wad in his cheek and asked quietly, “Do you really want me to answer that?”

Epstein evaded the challenge. “Sir,” he asked, “are you trying to tell us that your recantation, which you swore on oath to be true, was actually false?”

“Actually and absolutely, Mr. Epstein. There was not one line of truth in that recantation. The first story I told Lieutenant De Vivani was true.”

Epstein, pale as ashes, started circling the courtroom and waggling his head. Everyone watched him wondering where he thought he was going. He himself didn’t know. Judge Oritano watched him with a flicker of sympathy. De Vivani watched with no sympathy at all. Finally Epstein turned back to the witness.

“Mr. Iello, did you apply for a reward of twelve thousand dollars for your identification of Ruby Calhoun?”

“I forgot about that years ago.”

“Why were you applying for it then in nineteen seventy-four?”

“To rattle Hudson County’s cage. I felt Hudson County had gave me the shaft. I was having a lot of problems. I was sick at the time. I came out of a hospital. These two guys kept telling me we can get quite a few dollars. You yourself were even calling me.”

“Did you not swear, before Investigator Kerrigan, in an affidavit on October first, nineteen seventy-four?”

“I was lying.”

“You swore to this story in order to further your financial possibilities—is that what you’re telling us now?”

“Now you’ve got it.”

“No, mister, I have not got it,” Epstein’s voice reflected his rising anger. “You will now explain the statement you just made, to the effect that your recantation, the one sworn and notarized before Mr. Kerrigan, is untrue. If I’m not asking too much.”

“Not at all. Don’t mind at all. I’ve had people after me, ever since that first trial, to get me to recant. One person after another, a newspaperman, a TV producer, a state investigator. Once three came in on me at once, when I was locked in the Bergen County jail. Kerrigan was one of them. I was ill and despondent. The newspaper dude offered me a job on his paper if I would recant. It would mean a lot to him, personally, he said, if I would. When I got out I’d go to see him and he’d take good care of me. ‘Between you and me, Berwyn,’ I told him, ‘the man who committed those murders was Ruby Calhoun.’ You know what he said? He said, ‘Jesus Christ, Nick, don’t ever let anyone hear you say that.’

“The TV producer promised me a thousand bucks for a documentary about the murders. Then Kerrigan put it to me, ‘You need money, Nick?’ Who doesn’t need money? ‘What do you mean by “money”?’ ‘I can’t put it on you in here,’ he tells me, ‘but I can open an account for you to draw on as soon as you get out.’”

“Your honor,” Scott came to life at last, “these men—this reporter, this producer, this investigator—are the worst kind of lying opportunists. They think that by labeling themselves ‘liberals’ they gain immunity from the law. This recantation of Iello’s was worked up at WNIT and calculated to get as high a rating as Kojak. Trial-by-television, your honor: Calhoun would be exonerated without benefit of jury. Rather, the viewing public would be his jury. Thumbs up, thumbs down.

“What are our courts of law for, your honor? Leave us bring men to trial by media. Leave the public decide innocence or guilt. If a man is found guilty he can then be executed under TV lights, in prime time! Think of the sponsors ready to pay big money for that! If he is innocent he can sign a film contract and perform in nightclubs.

“Your honor, I can understand why Mr. Iello would be tempted by the opportunity offered him by the New York media to be a TV hero, a man of stricken conscience finally redeemed by testifying for the man against whom he had once testified falsely. Barbra Streisand would be fine as the feminine lead. Carol Burnett would be even better.

“Your honor, this producer, this reporter, this investigator seek nothing but their own aggrandizement and their own enrichment. They manufacture news and sell to the highest bidder. They pervert justice. Before this trial is over each and every one of them is going to be subpoenaed.”

The crowded courtroom, until now in complete support of Calhoun, was shaken. In the uneasy silence that followed Scott’s address, one could feel the sand shifting under the feet of the defense.

More than sand was shifting beneath Epstein’s feet. With Iello’s repudiation of his recantation, his whole case began collapsing.

He had been cordial to Dovie-Jean Dawkins but had not considered her testimony vital to Calhoun’s defense. Now, that suddenly, she was all he had.

And he had no idea how to find her. And find her fast.

Hardee Haloways, watching him from a corner of the corridor, read Epstein’s anxiety when he was talking to Jennifer. He saw Jennifer shaking her head, No.

Hardee approached her after Epstein had left her. Yes, he had been asking for Dovie-Jean but she had not been able to help him. “All I could tell him was I suppose she was in New York,” Jennifer informed Hardee. “She came out one weekend but she didn’t say where she was staying. Or what she was doing.”

“I know what she was doing,” Hardee decided. “Did she come alone?”

“No, she was with a little friend. A Chinese woman. I forget her name.” “Thank you,” Hardee told her, and walked away.

Hardee Haloways drove his half-brother out to his new suburban home. Hardee had married and was as proud of his bride as he was of his new Peugeot. He’d sold the Paradise and was doing well in his law practice.

After his wife had served drinks, and Hardee had tapped the ash out of his cigar, he studied Red a long minute.

“How’s the girl making out?” he asked at last.

“It’s what I come to see you about, Hardee,” Red told Hardee miserably. “I don’t know where she is. She took a powder last week. Well, a week and a half. Two weeks say.”

No use, Red thought, going into that scene with Moonigan in the areaway.

“What does the trial look like to you, Edward?” Hardee sounded Red out.

“It looked pretty good, by the papers, yesterday,” was as far as Red would commit himself.

“What do you think happens if Calhoun beats the state?”

“He goes free is all I know.”

Hardee offered him the box of panatelas. Red declined. Hardee lit one himself, blew out smoke and came to a decision.

“What a lousy pimp you are, Edward.”

“Pimping isn’t my trade, Hardee,” Red assured his half-brother. “I’m a bartender.”

“It looks to me, Edward,” Hardee answered with a smile, “like Calhoun is going to beat the state. Which means that there’s going to be a warrant out, triple homicide, for a crazy nigger who used to be a sparring partner of Calhoun’s.”

“It might be your ass too, Hardee.”

“Never, Edward. I am no way involved. I have a solid alibi for that night. You have not. Do you think you still beat the lie test, Red?”

Red shrugged. Hardee gave him the answer.

“No way. Neither did Calhoun. If that girl gets on the stand, Red, Calhoun will beat the state. Or don’t you think she’ll testify for Calhoun?”

“I see,” Red acknowledged, “I see what you mean. She’d take the stand for Calhoun all right. She said she would, way back.”

“Would she take the stand for you?”

Again the shrug.

“Would she take the stand for you?”

“If she took the stand for Ruby, how could she take the stand for me?”

“Now, you’re beginning to see your situation, my dear brother.”

Fortune Foo came down the stairwell of Playmates of Paris at four A.M. with a small umbrella folded beneath her arm. Facing the morning fog, she hesitated as to whether she should open the umbrella for the short walk to the bus. “Good morning, baby,” a black man’s voice greeted her, but she could not make out his face. She kept the umbrella closed but held its point in the direction of the voice. One funny move and he’d get it.

“Let me talk to you, baby.”

She made no reply and he fell in at her side. The lights of Fifth Avenue, bemooned by mist, glowed hopefully ahead. A car wheeled to the curb, a big figure emerged and the black man’s voice said, “Easy, Moon. Take it easy. Nobody gets hurt.”

Fortune jabbed at the big figure, saw it leap back and cry out in pain. Then the umbrella was wrenched from her and she was in the rear seat of the big car with the big man holding her fast and the one with the black voice at the wheel.

“Nobody going to get hurt, baby,” the driver reassured her, and in the shadowy light she saw a trickle of blood down the big one’s face where she’d caught him with the umbrella.

At Washington Square they wheeled to the curb and the driver turned about to face her. The big hand across her mouth moved to the nape of her neck. It felt as if it could snap the neck like a rabbit’s.

“You got the wrong party, fellows,” Fortune assured them without permitting a hint of fear into her voice.

“All we want is my old lady’s address,” the black man told her, “Dovie-Jean. She’s living with you. Nobody gets hurt.”

“If nobody gets hurt,” Fortune asked, “what is this big ape holding me by the neck for?”

The hand on the back of her neck eased slightly.

“Address, baby?”

No reply.

Mott Street was starting to lighten. It is a narrow, dingy street whose unswept litter is less noticeable under the bright glow of its commercial evening than now, when all the lights were out and all the tourists gone. Great trucks bearing Italian names were making early-morning deliveries of seafood. The neon of the Jade Room, Chinatown’s only topless bar, had been darkened. The driver pulled to the curb on Mulberry and Mott.

In the growing light she saw that the trickle of blood on the big one’s cheek had dried. He tossed her handbag to the driver. A slip from her dry-cleaner’s was all he needed: 22 Doyers Street.

Not a cop in sight.

The dark and narrow doorway to 22 Doyers looked ominous to Fortune. She got out of the car only when the big one got his arm about her waist and had put her handbag back in her hand.

Red went up the stairwell before Fortune. Behind her came the big blond. At the first landing Red looked back and told the big man, “You wait there, Moon. I’ll handle her.”

Fortune paused then, but the big man shoved her ahead. He was not the waiting kind.

There were two doors to every flight. On the third flight the driver—she could now see he was a redheaded black man—read her name on a small metal panel. For some reason he did not knock at the door, but scratched at it, like a cat, with his fingernails.

Dovie-Jean, in a blue bathrobe, opened the door, then tried to shut it, but Red had his foot in.

“They made me, honey!” Fortune called to Dovie-Jean. “They made me!” Then Red was inside and Fortune was after him, with the big blond pushing in heavily and closing the door quietly behind him.

Dovie-Jean sat on the bed’s edge trying to make sense of this early-morning visit. The only one who fitted the scene was Fortune. What, in God’s name, had Red brought along the Bear for? Her fear of this man was so great she could not, even now, look at him as he went prowling about the room, lifting small objects here and there and setting them down.

Fortune sat in a corner of the divan, her umbrella still in her hand. It was not the redheaded driver on whom she kept her eye, but the big blond.

“Say what you’re doing here, Red,” she heard Dovie-Jean tell the redhead, “then get the hell out. This is my home. I don’t want you in it. I don’t have to tell you why.”

Red sat in an armchair looking like a schoolboy being reproached by a teacher.

“You’re my old lady, Dovie-Jean, I want you back.”

The big blond turned slowly, eyeing first Red then Dovie-Jean. He did not have to ask, “Your old lady?”His expression was incredulous. At last he turned to the liquor cabinet, took a long drink straight from the bottle and put the bottle back. When he turned he made a sudden lunge at Fortune’s umbrella, then drew back grinning. She had had it half-raised.

“It don’t matter what you want, Tiger,” Dovie-Jean assured Red, “if you want to play white, that’s all right. If you want to play black, all right too. But you can’t play it both ways. Not with me, you can’t. I’m a nigger woman, mister. I always been. I always will be. You want to pass, pass. But pass me by.”

The big blond took another drink. Fortune kept the umbrella in hand. He turned toward Red.

“I gave you the benefit of the doubt, mister. Now you got me locked into a deal with a nigger and a chink. How am I supposed to handle a deal like that?”

“You got no deal with me, Tarzan,” Fortune assured him, “you muscled me here, you muscled me upstairs, and now you’re hanging on as though you’d been invited. Where’s the deal in that?”

“I’ll leave when I think it’s time to leave,” Moon replied, seating himself with the bottle.

“Here it is Easter again,” he announced solemnly, “and all of you, whoever you are, sit around here looking like the wrath of God. I took a scratch in the face and a kick in the balls from this little chink, and I still look better than all of you.”

All three looked at him without the faintest understanding.

“I said Easter is here again,” Moonigan persisted, “so here come the Easter creeps.”

“Easter creeps?” Fortune asked.

“Its what I said. The creeps who write the governor, this time every year, how it’s time to abandon capital punishment. Don’t you creeps even read the papers? You did, you’d know what I was talking about. Easter creeps I call them because every Easter they come creeping out of the wallpaper. They write the governor. What would have become of Our Lord had capital punishment not been the style then? How could the Son of God become the Son of Man? Do you realize what a blessing capital punishment has been to man?”

“This bird is bonkers, Fortune,” Dovie-Jean told her friend, “I’ve heard him come on before. The sonofabitch has eaten so much cunt he can’t get it up naturally anymore. He needs medical attention.”

Words that should not have been spoken, Dovie-Jean knew, as soon as she had spoken them.

The big man put the bottle down slowly and rose, slowly, toward her. Fortune, on her feet, felt the umbrella broken in her hands while he shoved her to one side. Red rose, apprehensively. “Nobody gets hurt, Moon, nobody gets …” One big hand sent him stumbling backward. Dovie-Jean rose before him and held her hands to her breast as though protectively. She caught a curious odor, heavy and sweet as if from some far-gone time.

Even when she felt his great hand holding the nape of her neck she kept her hands to her breast. Red put his arm tentatively against Moon’s. Fortune rose, her broken umbrella in her hands, and for the first time she felt afraid.

“She didn’t mean anything, mister,” she began, and it was as though she felt that big hand upon her own nape. She caught the flash of the blow without seeing it. Dovie-Jean saw a white hen flutter up, up and up but she never saw it come down. When Moon stepped back she fell forward and for a moment an appalling stillness rose in the little room. The girl lay entangled in her blue bathrobe with her head held loosely to one side.

Moon looked down. He had not meant to hit that hard.

Then he saw, and turned slowly toward the door. He did not close it. Fortune went to the window and began screaming, “They’re killing a woman here!” into the empty night.

Red, ashen-white, stood looking down. Dimly behind him he heard heavy steps moving down the stair. But he could not follow. He knew what he saw.

Then Fortune’s scream aroused him and he turned, went slowly to the door and went down, in the early morning light, like a man walking in darkness.

The police found him huddled against the building’s wall and lifted him to his feet, mistaking him for a drunk.

In that black-and-white throng outside the courtroom, only guards and matrons looked like people who still believed in the triple murder charge against Ruby Calhoun. Even the journalists, so long aloof from commitment, had swung to support of the defense.

A hope (as yet too dear to speak aloud) was in the very air. Everyone was hoping for acquittal.

“It’ll be a Christmas verdict,” strangers kept assuring Floyd Calhoun, meaning that the state of New Jersey was going to give him his son back for Christmas. Floyd looked grateful, yet not believing.

The jury had been out since noon. It was now six P.M. By the time the jury got back from dinner it would be eight o’clock. By ten the judge would send them back to their hotel. The possibility of acquittal appeared to be growing by the hour.

Floyd Calhoun was not a man who danced easily or lightly. In his upbringing, dancing had been sinful. Yet, in the restaurant, before the jury had come in, Floyd rose quietly from the table and began dancing, to a jukebox’s tune, solemnly, with himself:

Night and day

the juke box sang,

You are the one …

It was slow, heavy-footed old man’s dance,

Only you beneath the moon

And under the sun …

Floyd was five inches taller than his son and forty pounds heavier. In all his seventy years he had had nothing to dance about. Now he had.

And he danced his solemn joy out about the room, his eyes closed and hands extended, palms turned upward as if accepting some divine gift.

Nobody laughed at the old man. Everyone caught his immense dignity. It was a dance that might have been named: Dance of an old man’s joy upon the release from prison of his son.

He returned to his table and sat down as though unaware that he had done anything unusual, or even that he had been watched, in hushed astonishment, by everyone in the room.

“I had a strange dream once,” he told Barney Kerrigan, “during Ruby’s first trial. I dreamed I was an American soldier. I was in uniform and I had a gun. We were firing at some enemy. The enemy kept firing at us.

“We were fighting across a plain. I put my gun down and started walking toward the enemy lines. Who the enemy was I have no idea.

“‘Don’t harm a hair of his head,’ I heard an enemy officer command, and the firing stopped. I reached the enemy lines.

“‘What are you doing here?’ the same officer’s voice asked me, ‘Why did you leave your own lines?’

“‘I don’t belong there anymore,’ was all I was able to tell him.

“‘Lie in the ditch,’ the voice commanded me. I lay down in a shallow trench. The firing began again over my head. Again the firing stopped.

“‘Go back to your own lines,’ the enemy officer’s voice ordered me. Behind me his voice repeated, ‘Don’t harm a hair of his head.’

“‘They aren’t going to electrocute Ruby,’ I told my wife when I woke up, ‘he’s going to come home in time. I don’t know when. In time.’”

Wooden barriers, the kind used to block off streets, had been set up in the lobby. Twenty-two Hudson County sheriffs officers circled the inside of the courtroom.

When the jury filed in they seemed to be walking on eggs, eyes downcast.

Calhoun rose to face them slowly.

A short, stout matron of sixty, the jury forewoman, rose and read the jury’s verdict in a voice only just audible:

“Ruby Calhoun: for the murder of Donald Leonard, we find you guilty as charged.

“Ruby Calhoun: for the murder of Nicholas Vincio, we find you guilty as charged.

“Ruby Calhoun: for the murder of Helen Shane, we find you guilty as charged.”

For one long moment there was nothing, nothing at all.

Just a group of people, in seats, looking at a smaller group in the jury box.

Then a small crippled wind, like a wind off some old half-sunken grave, began limping soundlessly about the courtroom. A young white girl began sobbing hysterically and a matron cautioned her to control herself. A black woman, beside the girl, put an arm about her. The girl regained control yet continued weeping softly.

Max Epstein rose to ask the judge to take his client’s excellent prison record into consideration when resentencing him. He then asked whether sentencing could be postponed long enough to let Calhoun spend Christmas with his family; but the judge shook his head, No.

Somebody leaned across the rail dividing the courtroom and handed Calhoun a Christmas stocking, red and white, filled with nobody knew what.

Then he stood, straight and expressionless, while cops took the ridiculous Christmas stocking from him and began stripping him of his personal possessions publicly. Everybody stared helplessly and reluctantly at this demonstration of the state reducing a man to a number.

Floyd Calhoun handed him a couple of bills as the police turned the number around and marched it out.

Judge Oritano congratulated the jury upon the “trauma,” as he termed it, that they had endured. He congratulated them also upon voting their consciences. He was proud of them, individually and as a group.

“We’ve come a long way in ten years in race relations in this town,” Humphrey Scott assured the press. “We didn’t try for an all-white jury. We had three blacks who didn’t vote their color. People are proud here of the fact that black and white have now come to trust one another in Jersey City. The celebrities never bothered to acquire the facts. And it’s going to be a cold day in hell,” he added with his voice rising, “before Madison Avenue hucksters try to take down an honest cop again.”

“Another kangaroo court,” was how Floyd Calhoun saw it, and added bitterly. “You can’t fight them on their grounds.” He was, obviously, not among those blacks, observed by the state’s attorney, who had come, through Calhoun’s trial, to love and trust all whites.

“Iello,” Scott continued, “was just part of the case. The defense could have expressed reasonable doubt without attacking the police. They could have said certain officers had been mistaken instead of charging them with conspiracy to frame a suspect. The American jury system, to my judgment, is the greatest instrument of justice in creation. The contest between the Madison Avenue hustlers and the American jury system was no contest.”

“After twenty-seven months of being castigated and maligned by the New York media,” Vincent de Vivani agreed, “it is indeed a grand relief to be absolved by our jury system.”

“Of course I feel bad, very bad,” Max Epstein acknowledged. “It doesn’t look like anything in America has changed. It is still too easy to make people feel that blacks will kill whites for race. Apparently the jury didn’t hear it the way we heard it. It was numbed by Iello’s lies. It accepted a perjuror’s word even though the man himself admitted to have lied, under oath, at every opportunity given him.”

“It’s like walking around in a circular tunnel, around and around,” was Calhoun’s reaction. You think you’ve come to the end and you find yourself right back where you started.”

“He wanted a new trial and a new trial was what he got,” was how the governor let it be known that he would no longer consider Calhoun for clemency.

Security at the New Jersey state prison is both too loose and too tight. When Kerrigan entered the main gate, a guard asked him casually, “You got a gun or knife?” He could have been holding two grenades, five shivs and a police special, but he said No and passed on.

There were half a dozen women and children in the visitors’ room waiting to see husbands, brothers or sons. One guard was supervising; he had one ear bent above a small transistor. Kerrigan got tired of waiting, went to the door and found it locked.

Locked! The women smiled knowingly; they’d known it had been locked. Kerrigan thought: What do you know, I’m doing time on an unspecified charge.

He went to the soft-drink machine and put in a quarter. No drink. The quarter was returned. He repeated it in another slot. The quarter came back. On his third try there was no drink and the quarter was not returned. He turned to the guard, a burly young buck with a beard.

“I lost two bits in the machine,” Kerrigan told him.

The guard continued to lean across the thin, faint music but made no reply. No sign he had understood. Kerrigan repeated the information.

No reply and no expression. The man wasn’t, apparently, deaf. Kerrigan came up closer and repeated himself, “I lost two bits in the machine.”

Kerrigan saw the women smiling and understood at last. He was telling Kerrigan that the machine was no business of his, the guard’s. He was telling him that no man, woman or child was any business of his. His business, the man was telling Kerrigan, was with himself, and with himself alone. And that was his only business. He was never going to get involved, he was determined, with anything, or anybody, for any reason, outside of himself. Living was a matter of keeping yourself shut up tight within yourself.

Kerrigan had observed many people playing it safe. But this safe? Of walking around dead years before the funeral?

Kerrigan turned away from the machine that had stolen his quarter with the realization that these dummy-uppers, wearing the uniforms of security guards, were as fully prisoners of the establishment as were the prisoners.

He was carrying a book and also a magazine report on the second trial he wanted to give Calhoun. When the visitors’ door was unlocked he told the clerk at the visitors’ window, “I’d like to leave these for Calhoun.”

“You can’t.”

“Can’t?”

“Can’t.”

“No?”

“No.”

“Might I ask why not?”

“Because what you have to do with books is mail them.”

“I see. What about this?”

Kerrigan showed him the magazine. Consultation was now required.

A decision was at last handed down.

“Yes. You can take it. You can show it to Calhoun. Calhoun can read it in front of you. But he can’t keep it to read by himself.”

“I’ll mail it with the book.”

Kerrigan was then escorted to a dining room where guards were being served lunch in cafeteria style. A restaurant-sized coffee urn stood beside their table, with cream, sugar and paper cups at hand.

“Do you mind,” Kerrigan asked courteously, “if I help myself to the coffee?”

“No,” a guard told him firmly, “you can’t.”

“Can’t?”

“Can’t.”

“Might I ask why not?”

“Because the coffee is just for security guards,” one explained.

“If I pay for it, can I have a cup?”

“No.”

“No?”

“No.”

“Water,” one of them told Kerrigan.

“Water what?”

“You can have water. That’s all.”

Kerrigan helped himself to a cup of water, shaking his head sadly. He couldn’t quite believe that any one group of men could get this tight up.

Kerrigan had read that Calhoun was now living, without contact with either prisoners or guards, in a small one-man cell, and living by night. He had become estranged from his wife and daughter. They no longer visited him. Nor did any of the media celebrities who had once borne witness for him. He subsisted on canned foods, brought to him once a month by some devoted fan, so he no longer had to leave his cell.

He was waiting, looking owlish, when Kerrigan returned from the water cooler. Kerrigan filled him in on the dummy-uppers but Calhoun didn’t think it funny. He didn’t laugh.

“I live with that, Kerrigan.” He explained, “They’re crazy as Dick’s hatband. This is an insane asylum where the patients have taken over the administration. Prisoners, after all, are forced to live here. The guards prefer spending their lives between walls. Who is crazier? If every prisoner were set free tomorrow, there would be guards who would want to remain. They would be afraid of the risks they would have to take in the outside world. It’s why we don’t call the P.B.A. the Police Benefit Association. We call it the League of Frightened Men.”

Losing his second trial had left Calhoun undismayed, Kerrigan perceived. The appeal he now planned to file would be upon the contention that Iello had disqualified himself, as a witness, before the trial.

His problem was money. The trial transcripts, which the defense would have to have to write the appeal, cost ten thousand dollars. Calhoun didn’t own a nickel. Every dollar contributed to his defense had been appropriated by Adeline Kelsey.

“She must have cleared a hundred thousand,” Calhoun conjectured, yet without apparent bitterness. He’d declared himself indigent in hope of having the county put up the ten thousand for the transcripts.

“For sure, Iello didn’t do you much good,” Kerrigan acknowledged, “and Epstein looked like he was patterning himself after a TV soap opera. But the who lost you case was yourself.”

“How?”

“Because, after nearly ten years of proclaiming your innocence, you fail to take the stand and tell the jury, ‘I never shot those people in the Melody Bar and Grill.’ Had you done so, it may well have made all the difference. Whose idea was it not to testily? Yours? Or Epstein’s?”

“Epstein begged me to take the stand. I refused.”

“I don’t understand you, Ruby.”

“They had witnesses backed up, for one thing and another, for two decades back. They would have hit me with everything.”

“So let them hit you with everything. Then you turn to the jury, admitting all charges, and tell them, I am not the man who should be standing trial. The fact is, Calhoun, I can’t understand how you could not take the stand. When you think of the people who have borne witness for you, who have invested belief in you, you had no choice except to bear witness for yourself.”

Calhoun merely sat studying Kerrigan.

“Look at the position you put me in,” Kerrigan added. “Scott wanted me on the defensive, and that was where I was. ‘Where are receipts for the money you handled for Calhoun? Was this recorded on your income tax, Mr. Kerrigan?’ He put me into the light of a man seeking money and personal glory and nothing more. If you had taken the stand, you could have given me support, but you didn’t. You could have explained that Kerrigan handled your money for you because you had nobody else you could trust. But you didn’t. You sat there while Scott kicked my ass, threatened me with subpoenas. I just don’t understand you, Ruby.”

Calhoun studied Kerrigan a long moment.

“If I had to do it all over again,” he finally decided, “I’d do it the same way.”

Kerrigan looked like he could not believe what he had just heard.

“You would do it the same way,” he repeated, trying to grasp it, “and you’re now eligible for parole in nineteen hundred and ninety-eight. And you would do it the same way?”

Calhoun looked away as though Kerrigan were no longer there.

“Lord,” Kerrigan heard him say as he rose, as though he were praying. “Lord, I don’t ask you to move mountains. Just give me the strength to climb this one.”

Kerrigan left without shaking hands.

The madman stood naked before his window bars, wondering at the midnight moon.

He did not see the midnight moon, no more than the moon saw him. He saw an image of a black girl’s face, eyes wide but pupils rolling.

His hair had turned snow white.

Now a man in his forties, yet his face had become that of one in his twenties. No lines of anxiety across his forehead, nor lines of worry about the mouth.

His mouth, indeed, was held in a childlike half-smile, lips partly parted. The eyes no longer held the shadow of depression.

There was nothing left to depress.

He returned to his bed, switched on his light and sat looking, for a long while, at the calendar on his wall. The days had been marked off, day by day, above the colored photograph of a brown cow in a green field.

Finally, having ascertained the date beyond all doubt, he turned off the light, and slept.

Slept, yet had no dreams.

In the morning he washed and dressed himself carefully, then sat in his armchair in his stocking-feet, waiting for his attendant.

When the attendant arrived he greeted Red with a hearty, “Good morning, Edward!”

If spoken to harshly, tears might come into Red’s eyes. If spoken to softly, he smiled faintly.

The attendant waited for him to put on his tennis shoes, which took a couple of minutes more than it would have taken another man, because the knots had to be tied so carefully. Then Red stood up and they walked slowly toward the Coffee Cup, a small building in which vending machines stood against the walls, where paperback books, newspapers and magazines were sold, and where there were tables and chairs for patients.

The attendant brought Red a copy of the New York Times. Red scrutinized the date to be sure it was not yesterday’s edition. With the paper folded beneath his arm, he stood before the coffee machine with the attendant beside him.

There was black coffee with sugar, black without, coffee with cream but no sugar and coffee with cream and sugar. The attendant always gave Red time to choose. He was paid by Hardee to give small services, beyond those of his regular duties, to Red. He waited now for Red to point to his choice. Then he put in the coin, Red picked up his cup, his paper still under his arm, and moved to an empty table. If no table were empty he would drink standing against the wall. If he was joined by another patient, he would rise slowly, say “excuse me” and finish his coffee standing.

Once, seeing a group of people approaching, he drew to one side and waited for them to pass.

“What’s the matter, Edward?”

“They might hurt me.”

“Nobody is going to hurt you.”

“If they want to, they can.”

The attendant would leave him at the Coffee Cup for half an hour, while he tended to other patients. Red preferred the table under the radio and the attendant knew the station Red preferred. It was a local station that played old-time popular tunes all day. No rock and no classic. Sometimes Red would hum to the music above him:

Nights are long since you went away

My buddy

My buddy.

Or:

Make my bed and light the light

I’ll arrive late tonight…

One morning a little aging man, in his late sixties, approached Red’s table. He was dressed neatly in a white shirt, dark bow tie, dark trousers carefully creased, but without socks or shoes. Red started to rise when the old man sat down, but the old man stayed him, with a sly expression.

“I don’t have to be here,” the old man informed him, “I committed myself.”

Red nodded.

“Because of the niggers. I committed myself to get away from the niggers.”

“How about you?” the old man asked.

“I wanted to get away from niggers too.”

“You always did.”

“I always did?”

“Don’t you remember when you used to take the mike and pretend to be Eddie Arnold, Red?”

A faint memory fled through Red’s mind.

“Oh, yes.” He stood up and began moving his mouth to the tune being played from above:

Don’t the moon look lonesome

Shinin’ through the trees …

“Sing it like you used to Red,” the old man encouraged him.

But the song faded, the memory gave out, the mime’s mouth ceased to move and he sat down, a faint blush spreading into his cheeks as he stared into his paper cup.

The little old man smiled as though he had won some secret prize and left in his bare feet, shuffling cheerfully among the mad and the half-mad and out the door.

Red waited for his attendant without opening his paper. He did not open it until he was back in his small room and the attendant had closed the door behind him. Then he checked the paper’s date, once again, with the calendar on the wall.

He spread the paper’s section out on his bed and sat in his armchair before them. He began stripping the business section first, into long, neat strips, When it was done he gathered the strips and put them into the waste basket. He took a drink of water then, and began on the sports section, and again put it carefully into the waste basket. And took another glass of water.

It was slow work, because each page had to be stripped neatly and scissors were not allowed. When he had finished the metropolitan section there remained only the news. This was the biggest section and it was almost noon before he had it done.

Once the attendant stood outside the door and listened. When he had heard the sound of tearing paper he had opened the door and asked courteously, “Excuse me, Edward, but is there some purpose in tearing the paper into strips like that?”

Red looked up and gave him a grave smile.

“Of course. They fit better into the waste basket this way,” and returned to his meticulous task.

“That’s the sanest thing been said around here in years,” the attendant’s supervisor commented when Red’s curious explanation had been reported to her.

Everything is different yet everything is the same.

The tavern that once was the Melody Bar and Grill is now the Aquarius Lounge.

The changes have been great. There had been no change at all.

The pool table remains in the middle of the room; but the players now are black. Budweiser ads still border the walls but the handsome young marrieds in them are, again, black.

The jukebox has forgotten the songs of the sixties. Now it plays “The Games That Daddies Play” and “Don’t Break the Heart That Loves You.”

“Isn’t this the place that got into the papers some years back?” Kerrigan asked, sitting at the bar waiting for a beer.

The bartender was a black woman who had read Frantz Fanon.

“Maybe it is. Then again maybe it isn’t,” she replied, concealing her hostility beneath the guise of courtesy “We don’t know anything about this place when it was a white bar. I’m sure I couldn’t tell you.”

“I heard there was a triple homicide in here.”

“Mister,” the woman came close to her white customer, “I don’t know what you’re after but you won’t find it here.”

“I just thought … ”

“When you finish your drink, mister, feel free to leave.”

A young black man, cue in hand, was holding the door open for Kerrigan.

Kerrigan grinned at him, smiled at the bartender and took his time finishing his drink. He gave the youth holding the door a broad wink as he passed him into the street.

“Thanks, buddy.”

All, all is changed. All, all is the same.

The sound of a revolver’s blast was faded across the years. The people who heard it are dead, jailed or gone mad. The old faces fade; new faces take their place.

All, all is changed.

And everything remains the same.