Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, Vol. 32, No. 2, January 1973

Petition for Justice by Pauline C. Smith

He was one of the bad ones, sullen, frightened, hating me. He was going to die, condemned by a jury of his peers. He was bad, all right. Just how bad? But only a dead girl knew.

Mrs. Bruton was on duty at the neighborhood liquor store that night, it being the first Wednesday of the month, when Mr. Bruton attended the town council meeting. The block of small business buildings was dark except for the liquor store on the corner. Street lights on Main at the residential cross-streets were dim with mist.

At 10:30, an old car turned from Main onto Elm and parked at the curbing on the other side of the alley beyond the liquor store parking lot. The driver, a young man by the spring of his step, walked through the shadows of the empty parking lot and entered the liquor store by the front door.

Few cars traversed that section of Main Street that time of night. The two residential cross streets were clear except for the car parked on Elm and another driving down Sycamore on the dark side of the block, slowing as it approached the mouth of the alley. The closing click of a door at the back of the liquor store sounded, heard by nobody, and a darker shadow entered the alley shadows, seen by nobody, until the headlights of the car turning from Sycamore caught the man in their glare and momentarily halted him in stiff surprise. He ran then, arms hugged at his sides, yanked open the door of the parked car, tossed two bottles to the seat, switched on the ignition and zoomed up Elm.

The creeping headlights Watched him run and take off, then they blacked out near the end of the alleyway directly behind the liquor store.

The mist turned to light rain, dispersing the fog, and by eleven o’clock, the two residential streets were dark and empty as was the alley that connected them.

On Main Street, one car made a left and entered the parking lot at the side of the liquor store.

Mr. Bruton hurried out of the car and around it in the rain, sprinted for the front door, pushed it open and discovered his wife, face down, lying in her own blood.

At first, Tommy Tyler tried to brazen it out by being righteously indignant. “What do you mean I held up a liquor store?”

“That’s what we mean,” said the cops impassively.

“Find the dough then.” Tommy crossed his arms and leaned back on the bunk. “If I held up a liquor store, I got some bread. Okay, then, find it.”

“We will,” they promised.

“I been right here all the time.”

“Sure,” said the cops.

“So prove I been somewhere else.”

“We will,” assured the cops. “We’ll prove you were at this liquor store tonight. It’s where you got that liquor you’re drinking.”

“Prove it,” said Tommy.

“That’s easy,” said the cops. One picked up a bottle and looked at the label. “This is an imported Scotch whiskey, and there’s only one place in town sells the brand.”

“So what does that prove?” asked Tommy.

“It proves you were in Bruton’s Liquor Store on the corner of Main and Elm and shot Mrs. Bruton to death.”

Tommy Tyler suddenly remembered the two bright headlight eyes that had rounded the corner from Sycamore into the alley and held him captive for one lost moment in revealing glare.

It was on his parents back lot that Tommy Tyler had constructed the shack he lived in. Built of tag-ends of lumber and without a working plan, the shack personified Tommy’s design for living, without purpose and in solitude.

The police found the money taken from the cash register that Wednesday night without trouble, just as they knew they would. Tommy was not too bright either during the commission of his crimes or on covering his tracks after commitment. The $353 was readily discovered under one of the many loose floor boards of his shack, the bills folded and placed on the dirt.

The Tylers were nice and ineffectual people, so the police went easy on them. They walked from Tommy’s shack on the back of the lot, up to the house in front.

“We’re sorry,” they said, “but that’s the way it is,” displaying the money, explaining where the evidence had been found and how their son had been drinking further evidence only two hours after the body of his wife had been found by Mr. Bruton.

“This time,” explained the officer reluctantly, “I’m afraid Tommy will have to be tried by the adult court. This time it has to be that way.”

Mrs. Tyler cried, “Oh no,” and Mr. Tyler nodded sadly, his shoulders sagging.

Tommy Tyler was nineteen and in a spot. So he retreated, defensively uncommunicative on the subject of stealing the money and the Scotch, even of being in the vicinity of the liquor store, sullenly suggesting that both points be proved. As to the killings, however, he was vehemently verbal, proclaiming his innocence loudly.

“I never killed any old lady,” he shouted. “I never even had a gun. I never had a gun,” being a limp refutation, a kid like that, in trouble since he was old enough to find trouble.

“Okay then, where is it?” Tommy cried, “you gotta find the gun to prove it,” which held no water since you certainly did not have to find the weapon to prove a man guilty. Anyway, Tommy was always telling the police to prove it and the police were always proving it.

Before the trial, Mr. Bruton made only one comment, but he made it often and at length. “How would you like to find your wife dead when you came to pick her up?” and paused so his listeners could decide how they would like such a scene. “Shotgun, they say,” said Mr. Bruton. “My own kid’s got a shotgun, and believe me, I taught him how to shoot it and what to shoot it at. How would you like to find your kid’s mother shot with a shotgun and have to go home and tell your kid his mother was dead?” pausing again to allow his listeners to ponder such a problem.

“This kid of mine’s about the same age as that killer. He’s a good straight kid. Never had any trouble with him. Straight-A student out at that junior college. Studies at night, doesn’t go prowling around robbing and killing people. Imagine having to go home and tell my kid his mother got shot for a few hundred bucks and a couple of bottles of Scotch! It was rough, believe me. I’d rather be hung up by my heels than ever have to go through that again. The kid fell apart. He’s sensitive, see? He just fell apart, that’s all. His mother and him were like that,” at which point, Mr. Bruton held up his middle and forefinger, closely tight.

“The Bruton boy, Myron; never had any dates. Fact. He took his mother to everything. The games at junior college. Plays. Everything. He took his mother,” said Mr. Hergesheimer, retired and living on Sycamore Street, drafted now to keep the liquor store open during time of mourning. “Think what this does to Myron!”

Mr. Hergesheimer had many observations to make to the many customers who never before had patronized this liquor store, but did so now, since it was practically famous. “You see, the father kept the store open every night except on the first Wednesday of each month, when there was a council meeting, and then she did it. That left the mother alone most of the time, so Myron took her places. He just wanted to. You never saw a mother and son so close. It was beautiful, I tell you,” and Mr. Hergesheimer shook his head in awe at such beauty.

Mr. Polk, who lived on Elm, and swore he heard the getaway car that night, spent all his free hours in the liquor store listening to Mr. Hergesheimer, and when he could get a word in edgewise, he swore again that he had heard the getaway car, believing it, finally, he had sworn it to be the truth so many times.

“I sure heard that getaway car,” said Mr. Polk, “and you know I wasn’t, surprised when it was the Tyler kid! He’s been asking for it for years, out of one scrape and into another. This time, he’ll get it good. This time they won’t sit him down in juvenile hall and give him a talking to.”

“That rotten kid,” said Mr. Hergesheimer. “He really ruined the Bruton boy’s life.”

“They won’t rap him on the wrist with a vacation at that boys’ camp, either,” said Mr. Polk. “No siree, this time he’ll get the works.”

The Tylers saw their son twice a week in the visiting room of the jail, facing him sadly and helplessly on one side of the separating table while Tommy sat withdrawn on the other. The conversation, twice each week, was uniformly the same, sterile and succinct, the father’s offered in droop-shouldered submission, “How are you, son?” to receive a noncommittal okay. “Are they treating you all right?” with the same expressionless reply — the mother’s tense and protestive, “You look thin, Tommy,” raising her hands against his frozen silence, palms out as if to protect her sagging breasts. “Are you getting enough to eat?” covering herself with the same gesture at Tommy’s scornful “sure.”

They had hired the best defense counsel they could afford and, as usual, having done for their son all that they could do, they waited, submissively tense, for what would happen next.

The defense counsel, turned off by the kid as people were always turned off, tried harder, hoping to make up by extra effort what he could not offer in understanding.

“Now, Tommy,” he said, “tell me all about it.”

“What’s to tell?” said Tommy.

“How you went to the liquor store that night.”

“Prove I did,” he said.

“It’s already been proved,” said the attorney patiently. “The money was found.”

“Prove it was from that liquor store,” said Tommy, his eyes blank.

“There was the Scotch. The only store in town sells that brand.”

“So prove I didn’t buy it. From that liquor store. Before.” Tommy swung his legs off his cell bunk and sat on the edge of it. “You gotta prove all that before you can even say I killed that old lady, and you can’t prove a thing because no one saw me there,” said Tommy, staring just beyond the attorney, hopeful that whoever belonged to the headlights that swung into the alley that night didn’t know what he was looking at, or couldn’t put two and two together or just wanted to stay out of it. Without a witness to place him at the scene of the crime, Tommy reassured himself in frightened despair, nobody could prove anything for sure, and without proof he wouldn’t be indicted for murder.

But he was.

Defense counsel, fed to the eyebrows by this uncooperative client, requested a change of venue, which was rejected. He knew he would be unable to get an unbiased jury, and he knew he had no case, so when it came to court in late winter, the trial was short and the jury verdict immediately unanimous. Tommy Tyler was sentenced to death.

“Oh no,” cried Mrs. Tyler and Mr. Tyler’s shoulders drooped low.

Mr. Hergesheimer, who still worked part time at the liquor store with Mr. Bruton so tied up with attending the trial and all, was not surprised.

“It’s no more than he deserves,” he declared, “killing that poor boy’s mother.”

“Do you know his father says he won’t even talk about her he’s so broken up? Just goes around like a lost soul.”

“Too bad,” said Mr. Polk, less interested in the bereaved than in the bereaver, “they say he won’t be executed. How many are there on death row now? And how long has it been since one of them’s been executed? But he should be. The way they mollycoddle killers these days is a crime.”

Mr. Bruton added an addendum to his usual comment. It was, “Well, I say an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, like the Bible, you know. So I can’t say I’m not pleased with the verdict. But it won’t bring my boy’s mother back to him. He really doted on her, too much maybe. He don’t eat, don’t sleep. You know where he goes? Out to the cemetery and sits there.”

When the Tommy Tyler case was denied an appeal, defense counsel was not surprised and prepared to try again, using once more community bias, rephrased, as cause for retrial, desperately needing something new, and what new evidence could he dredge up? What new angle to offer the State Supreme Court? Nothing, he thought, greatly distressed, not about his client but the Tyler parents, so helpless, so resigned, hopelessly driving one hundred fifty miles to the prison once a month to see their son, the stranger, and listen to his short replies to questions that were only a repetition of those asked in the city and county jails.

“Are you all right?” and “How are they treating you?” “Do you have enough to eat?” with dooped shoulders and protective hands.

To the attorney, the father | timorously quoted, “He says they didn’t prove anything.” The attorney assured Mr. Tyler that it had all been proved, the stolen money which was found, the liquor placing him at the scene of the crime — and as far as the shotgun that had done the killing, that was circumstantial, becoming evidential when added to the other proofs.

“Well, I don’t know,” said the father, believing his son had never owned a gun of any kind, but not sure, not sure of anything about Tommy, and dropped his shoulders in resignation.

It was eleven visits and eleven months later that the father again ventured, “He says there wasn’t a witness to him being there.”

“There didn’t have to be a witness,” explained the attorney patiently. “The found money and the liquor bottles were the witnesses. You know that.”

“Yes, I know that,” the father agreed, “but Tommy says that since whoever drove into the alley that night didn’t say anything, that made no witnesses, and if there weren’t any witnesses, nothing was proved.”

“There rarely are witnesses to a major crime,” patiently explained the attorney, smiling gently. “So he admitted at last that he was in the alley that night — now there is an admission...” and caught himself up. “Who drove into the alley and when?”

The father did not know. All he knew was that his son was sullen and bitter, and occasionally spoke more than a word or two in his bitterness.

“I’ll go see him,” promised the attorney and the mother said, “Oh no,” realizing the futility of seeing her son, and the father drooped his shoulders, convinced that such a trip would be fruitless.

The kid was the same. He turned the attorney off.

“You admitted to your folks you were in that alley,” he said.

“Prove it,” said Tommy.

“It’s been proved,” said the attorney. “There was a witness who saw you there.”

“Nobody said so.”

“You said so. You said there was a car. When did you see the car?”

“You can’t prove I saw one. You can’t prove I was in that alley.”

“The man in the car can,” said the attorney.

“He saw me?”

“Look, if he was in the alley and his headlights were on, he saw you. Right?”

“But lie doesn’t know it was me. He has to prove it was me.”

The attorney wanted to throttle the kid.

“You went in the front door. We know that,” he said. “The back door was locked. Spring lock. It could only be opened by a key from the outside. So you went in the front and you came out the back. It must have been then, when you came out with the money and the liquor, running down the alley and the car turned in...” the attorney paused to picture a map of the Elm crossing alongside the liquor store, and the Sycamore intersection a block down at the mouth of the alley.

“So it had to be then,” said the attorney, “after you’d got in the liquor store, probably with your hand in your pocket, finger pointing, saying, punk-like, ‘I got a gun here, give me your dough,’ or ‘your bread’ or whatever, pointing your finger at that poor scared woman too frozen to reach for the liquor store gun that was lying right there on the shelf under the cash register, loaded and ready, opened the cash register and let you have it, the liquor too, that you reached for just because it was handy...”

“Prove it,” said Tommy, and the attorney thought what-the-hell, the-kid-doesn’t-even-know-I’m-trying-to-help-him.

“How about someone not wanting to admit he was in that alley and saw you running away from the liquor store? Why would the witness not want to come forward? What has he got to hide?”

“Prove it,” said Tommy, knowing only that this attorney was bearing down on a witness and a witness meant they could prove stuff, and if they proved he was there that night, for sure, with someone saying it right out and all, they could prove the money and the liquor — and even the shooting without a gun, then where would he be? And he looked around in desolation at where he already was, in the closet-sized visiting room of the prison death row.

“Now, how about that someone having a key to the spring lock?” said the attorney. “And how about him not wanting to admit he was in that alley and saw you running away from the liquor, store? Why would the witness not want to come forward, unless he had something to hide.”

“Prove it,” said Tommy, not wanting a witness, any witness, to the fact that he was even there.

“Oh, hell,” said the attorney, sick to, his guts with this dumb kid and his one-track mind that didn’t know a loophole when he saw one, but feeling great sorrow for the parents who’d had to put up with him for almost twenty-one years now.

“Okay,” said the attorney, “I’ll prove it.”

Not knowing how, after a year and a half, he could prove who belonged to a pair of headlights, or even if it was important to know, but with his new and successful request for a retrial, the attorney convinced himself that Tommy was guilty of robbery only, not of murder.

When the Supreme Court ruling was. given, and the reversal was splashed all over the county newspaper on the first Wednesday of April, the town council alerted.

The business of the school crossing guards was being discussed when the chairman asked of the council members and the few attending civic-minded spectators if anyone had anything further to say, and Mr. Bruton jumped up, shouting, “You damn betcha.” He unfurled the evening paper to reveal the headline, TOMMY TYLER TO HAVE NEW TRIAL, and the discussion quickly deserted the crossing guards to center, hysterically, on the injustice, the gross stupidity and permissiveness of lawmakers in allowing that bastard killer another day in court.

Mr. Bruton’s passion was infectious and everyone in the City Hall council room that night was feverishly eager to stop the wheels of misdirected justice.

“A petition,” someone called out, and the suggestion was met with a mob-like acceptance. “Yes, a petition.” For the first time, the council stayed in session until long after eleven o’clock, it actually being almost midnight by the time the document was properly worded and plans made for its typing, duplication and distribution.

The Tylers were first confronted by one of the petitions tacked above the vegetable bin of their favorite grocery store. “We, the undersigned, are fully convinced that the Justices of the State Supreme Court did act ‘positively wrong’ in granting a retrial to Tommy Tyler and we do petition said Court to reverse its ruling,” they read. Mrs. Tyler whispered, “Oh no,” and raised quivering hands before her breast, Mr. Tyler’s shoulders sagged as they turned from the paper and its many signatures, even running along the sides in the margins.

Importantly busy, Mr. Bruton carried petitions to householders, explaining that he was the husband of the woman this mad dog killed, father of the son who had lost his mother... “I presume you are a mother, Madam, ah yes, I see the bicycle in the driveway, the basketball net on the front of the garage. Mother and son, a beautiful sight,” and he described the close relationship of his own son with his mother before they were so ruthlessly torn asunder. “Took his mother everywhere. She was his best girl. His best pal too, he even took her with him up in the hills to shoot rabbits. Yes,” Mr. Bruton shook his head sadly. “It was beautiful. When my boy lost his mother, he lost everything. Doesn’t care any more. Doesn’t go anyplace. Quit school — he even put his shotgun away, probably because she was killed with one...” and Mr. Bruton got another signature.

He obtained on an average of a hundred individual signatures a day, so occupied that he again enlisted Mr. Hergesheimer’s help in the liquor store.

“That rotten kid,” Mr. Hergesheimer told Mr. Polk, who dropped in after work, “here he made a mess of the boy by killing his mother and how they’re going to give him a new trial. Probably let him go free next time...”

“Probably pat him on the head, give him a new gun and tell him to go out and do it again,” suggested Mr. Polk. “Think Bruton’s got a chance with that petition of his?”

“I hope so,” said Mr. Hergesheimer, and pointed at a copy scotch taped to the counter. “We’ve filled up three of them right here.”

“Bruton’s sure working on it, isn’t he?”

“Sure is, and he’s got the whole town behind him.”

Along with a re-hash of the first trial, the newspaper listed a daily count of petitioners objecting to a second. Mr. Bruton, interviewed, stated in print that he would personally carry the petitions to the State Capitol as soon as the number reached 30,000. “And, by God,” the newspaper quote him as saying, “we’ll see if that bastard gets free to kill another good boy’s mother.”

The attorney was busy visiting Tommy on death row and getting the same “prove it” answers to every question asked until he was on the verge of executing the prisoner with his own two bare hands to save the State and petitioners the trouble.

He talked to Mr. and Mrs. Tyler who were resigned to their son’s present fate, resigned to a new trial, resigned also to a reversal should the petitioners win. The attorney felt alone as he drove down Main, up Sycamore to the alley and turned, his headlights brightening the alley to Elm. He made this small journey many nights and at different times from ten, having had no help from Tommy as to time, to eleven, the time at which Mr. Bruton had discovered his wife. The alley was always deserted, but had a thief emerged from the back door of the liquor store, the attorney would have seen the shadow of him. He parked once behind the liquor store and tried the door. It was locked.

He would have recognized Mr. Bruton from his constant attendance at the trial more than a year and a half ago, so it was not Mr. Bruton who stood behind the counter that late afternoon the attorney walked in and purchased a few items. He glanced at the. petition scotch taped to the counter.

“How is it going?” he asked.

“Good,” said Mr. Hergesheimer. “That’s the fifth one we’ve got filled up here.”

“Mr. Bruton’s working hard on it. Right?”

“Sure he is.”

“Wants this kid to get what’s coming to him?”

“Why not? Look what he did to his family. The boy, Myron’s the boy’s name, he’s a lost soul since his mother got killed. Took it hard,” and Mr. Hergesheimer told the story again as he had told it so often to whoever would listen, pointing out the position of the body, assisted by Mr. Polk, who on his way home to Elm Street, stopped in at the liquor store to add his imaginative recollection of hearing the get-away car that night. “It zoomed,” he said, “made an awful racket and I thought then whoever’s in that car is running away from something. And, sure enough, he was running away from murder.”

Mr. Hergesheimer said, “I’m standing right on the spot where Bruton found his wife. Right here, with the liquor store gun, loaded, laying on the shelf above her head, so that punk of a kid must have walked in right behind his shotgun and froze her in her tracks—”

“Who knows?” said the attorney mildly. “It might have been like that. She also might have frozen at the threat of a gun by an unarmed goon. It’s possible too that later, when the killer came through the back door—” the attorney glanced that way at a door inset not more than two feet so that anyone who stepped through could be seen from any position at the counter — “she saw and recognized who had entered, and so did not reach for the gun, not because she was frozen with terror, but because she knew and trusted him and did not realize she needed to defend herself until he brought out the shotgun and killed her dead.”

Mr. Hergesheimer looked confused and said, “Huh?” Mr. Polk offered his memory of the get-away car. “Oh, come on,” Mr. Hergesheimer said as if he suspected the customer of being one of those liberal softies always crying over criminals and excusing them for their crimes, “you’re being real far out. The kid came in the front door, got the money and the liquor, then got trigger-happy and blasted away, and flew out the back door.”

“I heard the getaway car,” interrupted Mr. Polk.

“How could anyone come in the back door without a key? The only people who had keys to that back door were the Brutons.”

“Yes,” said the attorney. “Bruton and the son.”

“Hey,” said Hergesheimer, “you trying to accuse Bruton of killing his wife? Why, he was at the council meeting and the boy was home studying — that’s what Mr. Bruton said. He said when he went home to tell Myron what had happened, there he was, studying.”

The attorney laughed easily. “I was only theorizing,” he said. “After all, with this new trial coming up, people wonder and suppose things.”

“You don’t have to wonder about the Brutons,” said Mr. Hergesheimer with conviction. “Why, Mr. Bruton! There’s no finer man ever lived! Practically worked himself to death in this liquor store to provide for his family. He was here all the time except for those first Wednesdays of the month when he went to council meeting. And the son, well now, Myron was the kind of son any man’d want, studied hard and got good grades. Wonderful to his mother. Took her every place. You wouldn’t catch him with a girl. He dated his mother. Fine boy, real fine boy. That’s all changed now after she got killed. You wouldn’t know him. Dropped out of college. Doesn’t do anything because everything he did he did with his mother, Mr. Bruton said. Like playing cards and chess and going places. Even target practice and shooting rabbits—” and a muscle jumped in the attorney’s jaw.

“But no more. Not even that. Mr. Bruton told me he found the shotgun in the back of the boy’s closet, wrapped up, he said, in one of his mother’s dresses. Now, that’s pitiful, the boy grieving that way.”

“Isn’t it though?” said the attorney thoughtfully.

“Spends a lot of his time out at the cemetery just sitting there by her grave.”

“I heard the getaway car just as clear,” said Mr. Polk.

The attorney picked up his purchases and turned from the counter.

“How about signing the petition?” asked Mr. Hergesheimer.

The attorney turned back.

“No,” he said. “I want a new trial for that boy on death row. I am his attorney.”

Mr. Hergesheimer watched him out the door, and then said softly, “Hey, what was he doing?” and Mr. Polk’s imaginative memory became so faulty that he wondered if, after all, he wasn’t watching television the night of the murder, with the sound turned high as he always watched television, every night.

By the time Mr. Bruton had collected 30,238 signatures and had taken off for the State Capitol, surrounded at the airport by civic-minded well-wishers and tight-lipped crime-busters, counsel for the defense had obtained a court order to search for and examine a shotgun in the Bruton home which, when found, was wrapped in one of Mrs. Bruton’s dresses just as Mr. Hergesheimer had said it would be.

“What else could I do?” asked Myron, once the slugs from the shotgun were discovered to be identical with the slugs in Mrs. Bruton’s body, a statement that baffled the police but not the psychiatrists. “She was my mother.”

“So this is a whole new ball game,” patiently explained the attorney to his client. “You will be charged now with robbery only.”

“Prove it,” sneered Tommy Tyler.

His parents were confused.

“You mean,” ventured Mr. Tyler, “that there will be a new trial even after all those names on all those petitions in all those stores?” His shoulders sagged with the weight of more trouble. “Oh no,” quavered Mrs. Tyler, protecting her breasts.

Mr. Hergesheimer continued to tend the liquor store that was doing a land office business. Mr. Polk still dropped in after work.

“The Bruton boy,” said Mr. Hergesheimer, “that Myron. He always seemed so great,” and shook his head in bewilderment. “Do you think,” he asked, leaning over the counter whose shiny top was slightly marred by the dull and sticky squares left by scotch tape, “Do you think Mr. Bruton knocked himself out with those petitions to keep that poor kid from a retrial simply because he knew, all along, that his son had killed his mother?”

Mr. Polk considered the question, remembering his own hallucinatory recollection, and said, “No. He didn’t know. And that was the pity.”