I arranged for the release from jail of our friends the forger and the safecracker. Armed with a police revolver, I took them with me in my car to a dusty lot less than a block from the rear entrance of the realty office. From there we watched the place. It was about eight in the evening; by now the bookkeepers had gone home and the watchman was on duty inside.
A police car arrived and the two officers went to the back door and knocked. There was some dialogue between them and the watchman on the far side of the door — we couldn’t hear it — but I saw one of the officers take out his revolver and bang on the door with it. Finally the door opened and the watchman appeared reluctantly. One of the officers spoke sharply, and I saw the watchman, half in anger and half in puzzlement, take out his wallet to show his identification. Then he made as if to back inside the building. Possibly he meant to go to the telephone to report that he was being arrested. But, according to our prearrangement, the officers didn’t allow him to reach the phone. They took him in custody, handcuffed him and drove him away in their car. Leaving the back door of the office slightly ajar.
The watchman would be taken down to the jail and held incommunicado in a detention cell until six the next morning, when he would be turned loose with apologies — a mistaken arrest, the real culprit’s been found, sorry for the trouble. That sort of thing.
In the meantime as soon as the police car disappeared, I and my two low-life cohorts entered the realty office and closed the door behind us. I had a gun and the two men knew it; they had no chance to run out on me. But we passed the time amiably enough — a curious admixture of types, as you can imagine.
First it was the safecracker’s turn. He had to find the alarm system, disengage it by bridging the wires so that an interruption wouldn’t set it off, then set to work on the safe itself. It had to be opened manually: no drilling, no explosives. Because I wanted no indications afterward that it had been tampered with.
It took him until well past midnight. The forger and I sat half-dazed with boredom because we weren’t allowed to speak; the safecracker required absolute silence. He had a physician’s stethoscope and an emery board — no other tools. He used the coarse board to file his fingertips at intervals while he worked with painstaking slowness twisting the safe’s two combination dials. With the stethoscope pressed to the steel he listened for the fall of tumblers. For a while I was sure he wasn’t going to get it open. But in the end it yielded. It had taken five hours.
Now the forger and I took the safecracker’s place by the open safe. I went through the safe’s thickly packed contents until I’d identified the items I sought: the organization’s accounting books. I had quite a thrill of excitement just to lay eyes on those documents. They revealed, even to my untrained financial eye, an entire spectrum of information about the mob’s methods and operations.
But we weren’t there simply to give me a chance to gloat over Sterrick’s secrets. It wasn’t possible simply to steal the books. If I took them away with me, they’d be inadmissible in court. It’s not enough to present evidence, of course; you’ve got to show how you obtained the evidence. In this case I had no warrant. I was trespassing, I’d committed the felony of breaking and entering, and if I made off with Sterrick’s books I’d be guilty of theft as well.
No. I wasn’t there to steal those books. I was there to photograph them.
The forger wielded the camera — it was his expertise. Page by page we photographed the ledgers and notebooks. It took hours.
I was sweating, examining my watch every few moments. The last page wasn’t captured until after six o’clock; by then we knew the watchman had been released and was on his way back to the office. We packed up the scores of rolls of film we’d exposed. The forger took his last close look at the ledgers. He had to know exactly the style, make, color, and condition of the books so that we could purchase identical blank bindings in which he could perform his forgeries, based on our photographs. He had to remember the color of each ink used, all that sort of thing.
We left the office at ten minutes past six. I’m sure the watchman must have returned within minutes. Later we learned there’d been an intensive debriefing session. Sterrick and his men had grilled the watchman for several days. They examined the office and the safe with a fine-toothed comb. But finally they decided nothing had been disturbed. The watchman kept his job, and his arrest that night was chalked up as a simple case of mistaken identity.
It took our forger nearly the full seven weeks to complete his work; it was a monumental job. The man was physically and emotionally exhausted at the end. I felt he’d earned his freedom. He and the safecracker were taken under police escort by train to El Paso where they were given their freedom. I never saw or heard from either of them again. I hope they stayed out of trouble.
We made our move while the forger and the safecracker were still on the train; we wanted to take no chances on one of them phoning Sterrick with what he knew.
We had three days’ grace before the primary elections. I wasn’t sure it would be enough time to swing the primary, but it had to be tried. Without any attempt to maintain secrecy I went before the superior court bench with applications for a warrant to search the realty-insurance office and a subpoena for the books and record-ledgers of the Sterrick operations.
Naturally the word of our attack preceded us. By the time I arrived with my phalanx of detectives, the safe in the back room was empty except for a few props — insurance policies, land deeds, and so forth. All very innocent and aboveboard. Everyone in the office had been herded into the back room while the safe was being opened. I lingered briefly in the front room, then joined the others in back. I pointed out to the detective in charge that our warrant gave us the right to search the entire premises, not merely the safe; I instructed him to give the whole place a thorough toss.
A while later, to my loudly expressed amazement, a young officer discovered an entire set of criminal ledgers in the bottom two drawers of a salesmen’s desk in the front room.
The rest of the story would strike you as both foregone and anticlimactic, I’m sure. We nailed Sterrick. We didn’t have time to prevent Sterrick’s man from being nominated in the gubernatorial primary but he was forced to resign from the race as a result of the revelations that came out in the trial evidence. A party caucus nominated another candidate — a reasonably honest one — and he was elected in due course; it was a one-party state in those days, of course.
Sterrick spent seventeen years in the state penitentiary and finally died there. And your obedient servant, the ambitious young assistant DA, went on to become county prosecuting attorney and then a judge.
Now the question is: was justice served?
Harris uncrossed his legs and sat up. “They must have suspected those books were forgeries.”
“Of course they did,” the judge said imperturbably. “The defense brought in a whole gaggle of experts to try and prove that the documents had been forged — that those weren’t the handwriting of Sterrick and his bookkeepers.”
“Then why wasn’t your case thrown out?”
“The experts went away without testifying.”
Harris said, “I don’t understand.”
“Well, they determined that the books weren’t forgeries. When they told that to the defense lawyers, the lawyers bundled them out of town as fast as possible. We had to bring in our own experts to testify to the legitimacy of the books. Naturally I’d have preferred to have the testimony of the defense experts but they’d skipped town too fast.”