The Just And The Unjust Read Online Free Page B

all, served its purpose when it scared Leming — and whatever the F.B.I, might have done to get it no longer mattered much, except perhaps to Howell.
    Even for Howell it could only amount to just one thing more. What Federal agents might have done to him would be nothing compared to the things he had done to himself, and the consequences of those things, during most of his twenty-eight years. His record showed that Howell had been at war with the law since he was a child; and of all wars, that is the one in which there really is no discharge. From the misery and poverty and, probably, hunger of his youth Howell graduated to prison life and prison food; and when he was let go, it was to a still worse regimen. Crime was his trade; so, to live, he had to tax his limited brain, strain his broken-down body, rack his ruined nerves, devising new crimes, new risks, new narrow escapes, new vigils of lying in wait or hiding-out. He had no idea of recreation outside depressing debaucheries for which he had no energy and from which he probably could get no pleasure — bad liquor; girls like Susie Smalley; adulterated cocaine borrowed from those who used it — and much of the time he must have been too tired and too sick. The liquor would knock him out, the cocaine nauseate him, that horrible young hag be no good to him. In the ceaseless rain, dragging along the concrete dam top chained to the deputy warden, Howell looked sick to death. Abner tried not to watch him.
    The grapplers brought up the body then.
    From the car window Abner could see it; a stir in the water a dozen yards behind the boat as the lines tightened. Something swam from the depths and was visible an instant, still under water; an indistinct shape in loose floating clothes, like a huge, tattered, long-dead fish. The corpse broke surface; but, being weighted, immediately it sank from sight as the grapplers rushed in the slack. Howell, who got a close look, doubled up, his right arm lifted a little by the chain of the handcuff. Heaving and retching, he vomited on his own shoes.
    Abner raised his cigarette to his mouth and filled his lungs with smoke. In the hundred windows of the mill, hands and faces crowded and danced with animated movement. The city police captain, who had joined them in the car to get out of the rain a while, said, 'Caught something that time! Look at the bastard!' He nodded toward Howell. 'He don't like it! They ought to make him pull it out himself!'
    3
     
    To John Costigan, Bunting said, 'How was that body clothed at that time?'
    Costigan considered the question a moment, passing his eyes over the paper in his hand. 'It was clothed in, well, a coat, a shirt, and grey, like-flannel trousers; and with a bag, a burlap, where the wire on the weights had been put, sir.'
    'And where was that?'
    'The feet. By the ankles, sir.'
    Bunting walked over to the folding table set up by Joe Jackman's desk. He said, 'At the time the body was raised, was the man alive or dead, Mr. Costigan?'
    'Dead, sir.'
    'Did you know the dead man?'
    'No, sir. I couldn't say that I did.'
    Bunting said, 'Mr. Costigan, I show you four pieces of iron that have been marked for identification as Commonwealth's exhibits one, two, three, and four, and ask you whether you have ever seen them before.'
    'Yes, sir, I have.'
    'Where?'
    'I saw those by the dam there, Fosher's Creek. They were tied around the body's feet — around the ankles of Frederick Zollicoffer, Zollicoffer's body.'
    In his seat beside Howell, Harry Wurts jerked his head up. Harry's fuzz of short reddish hair and cropped fragment of reddish moustache seemed both to bristle. His oval face shone, his somewhat slanting eyes slanted more. 'I move that be stricken!' he said. Judge Vredenburgh said, 'Yes. This body has not been identified.' Bunting said to Costigan, 'Around the ankles of this body which you saw raised from Fosher's Creek. Is that correct?'
    'Yes, sir,' Costigan said, blushing. 'We took them off this