Read Online Suspended Sentences by Brian Garfield - Free Book Online

what information we wanted. I asked him all sorts of random questions about Sterrick and various mob operations. Most of them he refused to answer. He pointed out that if he unloaded he’d be killed as soon as the mob found out. I just kept asking questions. He’d answer a few of the seemingly harmless ones. By that process I managed to get the information I wanted — without letting him know that it was what I’d been after.
    What I found out from him was the location of Sterrick’s books. The organization’s books.
    They were kept, as I’d suspected, in a safe. The safe, Mendes informed me, was in a real-estate office on North Stone Avenue. It was one of those outfits that handled insurance and realty. A legitimate front for the illegitimate operations. The outfit was in the name of one of Sterrick’s cousins. I suppose they actually did some insurance and realty work. But it was also where Sterrick did his bookkeeping. In the back room. They had two or three accountants who worked in that room full-time. At night they had a private watchman there. Mendes had seen the safe several times. It was a big sturdy Kessler box, far too heavy to be stolen. There was an electric alarm system and of course the safe was never left untended — when the accountants weren’t there, the watchman was.
    We put Mendes on ice. I didn’t want him leaking anything back to Sterrick. Later on, when the matter was concluded, we turned him loose as we’d agreed. He was picked up again a few months later and spent most of his life in prison on one charge or another.
    The state primary was coming up in June. This was April — we had about seven weeks. I had the accused forger brought up to the interrogation room. We had him cold on passing some very heavy paper — forged checks for thousands of dollars. It could have cost him several years if we’d prosecuted fully. He knew that — he was a practical fellow. He and I reached a mutually agreeable arrangement. In return for certain services he was to perform, he’d be turned loose in another state and no fugitive warrant would be issued. This of course wasn’t illegal; it was a decision on my part, morally and ethically questionable to be sure, but legal in the sense that a prosecutor has the right to decide whether or not to prosecute any given case. I didn’t acquit the forger of the charges against him; I simply decided not to prosecute them. If he ever returned to Tucson after we exiled him, he could be picked up and tried on the original charges.
    I then interviewed the accused safecracker, separately, and reached a similar agreement with him.
    I hadn’t broken the law. So far.
    The next step required connivance by the police department. I went to the deputy commissioner’s office and managed to secure his participation in the scheme without telling him what I had in mind.
    The watchman at the realty office worked a twelve-hour shift. We didn’t have minimum wage laws or security-guards’ unions in those days — it was the Depression, of course, and the man was lucky to have a job at all. He would arrive at the office at seven-thirty in the evening. The accountants and sometimes Sterrick himself would still be there at that hour; they left the accounting room normally about seven forty-five or eight o’clock, turning the place over to the watchman. He went home about seven-thirty or eight the following morning, as soon as the first shift of bookkeepers arrived for work to tote up the previous night’s receipts. The bookkeeping work wasn’t round-the-clock but it was a seven-days-a-week operation. Sterrick’s people didn’t take business holidays; they staggered their work days instead. Obviously that was necessary because so much criminal activity takes place at night and on weekends.
    The safe usually was locked and unattended, except for the watchman, through the night. The watchman