'Your job aside,' said Armstead, 'do you want him to die in the electric chair?'

'Of course not. He doesn't deserve the chair. I'm not saying he's a good guy or that he's innocent by any means. If the witnesses were right, and he did what he did, then he's a maniac, totally insane, and was insane when he did it. We don't send the insane to the electric chair. I'm against that. It's not humane.'

'So you would like to see him go free?'

Tatum hedged his answer. 'I don't want to see him executed.'

'You'd do anything to prevent that?'

'As a matter of principle - yes.' Puzzlement had crept over Tatum's face. T don't understand you, Mr. Armstead. What are you leading up to?'

Armstead laid down his cigar. 'Simply this. You want to prevent Yinger's execution? I can help you prevent it. I can get him out of it.'

'Out of the electric chair?'

40.

'Out of prison,' Armstead said flatly.

Tatum's expression was one of total disbelief. 'Are you serious?'

'Very serious.'

'I repeat - the governor turned down the stay of execution. It's the chair, morning after next. There's no way out.'

'And I repeat - there is a way out.' Armstead was beginning to savor the game.

'What are you talking about?'

'I'll be happy to tell you in a minute.' He retrieved his cigar and relit it. 'Presuming I can get your client out of prison, would you let my reporter see him before that?'

Tatum nodded. 'Under those circ.u.mstances, yes. It could be arranged. No problem with the warden.

And I could persuade Yinger to cooperate.'

'You guarantee you could arrange it?'

'I could arrange it. But the deal you're offering is impossible. It simply makes no sense.'

Armstead became businesslike and brisk. 'It simply makes no sense if you don't know all the facts.'

Armstead dropped his voice. 'All right, Mr. Tatum, come closer and listen. The facts. You can convey everything to Sam Yinger - only to Yinger - otherwise it is confidential and could get us into trouble. All right, I want my reporter in - and you want your client out - and here is how we do it. There is a tunnel way down beneath Sam Yinger's cell.'

Lowering his voice even more, Armstead went on without interruption.

CHAPTER THREE.

Victoria Weston had been thrilled by the unexpected a.s.signment given her by Harry Dietz personally.

She had rented a new Chevrolet sedan, charged it to the Record, and obtained an intricate set of directions. She had been told that the eighty-mile drive from Manhattan to Green Haven prison would take her about two hours. Since her appointment to interview Sam Yinger had been arranged for three o'clock in the afternoon, she had left at noon to be certain that she would arrive on schedule.

Once she had attained the East River Drive, after pa.s.sing the United Nations Plaza, she had believed that she would have time to formulate her questions for Yinger. It had been a marvelous surprise, getting the interview, although it was a natural follow-up piece to her backgrounder - how could it possibly have been arranged? - and a chilling a.s.signment to talk to a real live person of flesh and blood who little more than a dozen hours later would be laid out on a slab, an unmoumed corpse.

But the drive proved to be too complicated for Victoria to be able to work out many questions.

Around the entrance to the Triborough Bridge, there was a confusing interchange, she had missed the turn onto the Major Deegan Expressway and had gotten badly lost in the Bronx, but eventually found herself on the New York Thruway. Finally she had taken the Taconic State Parkway that brought her to Interstate Highway 84 and the turnoff for the small hamlet of Stormville, located on State Highway 216. The countryside, with its undulating hills, had been beautiful. Suddenly the two-lane road had dipped, and the thick concrete wall of the prison had loomed before her. Off to 41 one side there appeared to be a farm, with green-garbed men, obviously prisoners, toiling in the fields. Straight ahead, beside the entrance, a metallic sign read: green haven correctional facility.

Leaving her car in the parking area outside the thirty-foot-high wall, Victoria had climbed the stairs near the main gate to the gla.s.s-enclosed reception room. There she had cooperated in the routine procedure of establishing her ident.i.ty, having her shoulder bag searched, going through the metal detector, and allowing her left hand to be stamped with invisible ink. After that she had descended a staircase that brought her to the grounds inside the prison wall.

Now, five minutes before her interview, she was ascending another flight of steps to the lobby of the Administration Building. There, escorted by a surly, hefty blue-shirted guard, she was led to one more security check, where a new guard took her left hand, examined the back of it under an ultraviolet light beam. Signaled on, she caught up with her personal guard, followed him through a dimly lit corridor, up one more stairway into the red-brick Hospital-Segregation Building. Striding beside her guard, she found herself led through a gate into what seemed to be one of the visiting rooms. She was directed to sit at a table bisected by an eye-level screen built to prevent a caller from pa.s.sing anything to a prisoner on the opposite side. As Victoria extracted her notepad and pen from her shoulder bag, she observed beyond the table the ominous presence of one more unsmiling guard, a sergeant, on a raised platform at a desk. Near him she detected a closed-circuit TV surveillance camera.

Victoria's escort guard was addressing her. 'Instructions are to sit you here instead of the Death Row visiting rooms. Guess it's because the bulletproof gla.s.s and hole make it too hard to talk through. The new visiting room is better.' He pointed to the sergeant up on the platform. 'He'll be keeping an eye on you and your pal, to see that you don't pa.s.s him anything or -' He made an evil grin.'- try to make love. The inmate's on his way.'

Five minutes later Sam Yinger was brought in and led to a chair across the table. Yinger, hands cuffed and shackled to a special belt at his waist, was flanked by two huge, grim guards. Yinger was smaller and blander in appearance than she had antic.i.p.ated. His thinning blond hair, watery eyes, undershot chin gave him the look of just another figure in a crowd. Outwardly he resembled an unsuccessful door-to-door salesman, not the callous murderer of seven human beings, six of them mere children.

Yet from his first words spoken after his uniformed chaperons stepped back, Victoria knew that she was dealing with a savagely angry man.

'You the broad I'm supposed to talk to?' he said, once seated.

'I'm Victoria Weston of the New York Record, and I was told you would be willing to give me an interview.'

'I'm not willing, just doing it as a favor to my lawyer,' Yinger snarled. T don't know why I'm here.

What in the f.u.c.k's in it for me? What good's doing an interview you'll never be able to read?'

'Maybe something will turn up before morning.'

's.h.i.t, you know nothing'll turn up. The governor was the only chance and he turned us down. I'm a dead man, good and dead.'

Victoria squirmed, uncertain as to how to proceed. She wanted in some way to justify her interview. 'Well, Mr. Yinger, to begin with, everyone has to die sometime - at least you'll have a 42 chance to justify yourself, speak your mind by speaking through me. You can let the world know how you feel - and your friends and relatives. Surely you have some friends and relatives out there?'

'Sister, I got n.o.body out there I give a d.a.m.n about.'

'Not a soul?'

'There's n.o.body I give a d.a.m.n about except Caroline, and she's dead.'

'Are you - are you sorry you shot her?'

Yinger did not reply.

Victoria swallowed. 'The children - what about the children...?'

'I had to,' he said, his voice suddenly reasonable.

'Had to? Why?'

'It was logical, that's why. They were eyewitnesses against me. What's the difference? They won't miss much.' He reflected. 'They didn't know what hit them.'

'I suppose not,' she muttered, weakly, busily writing her notes.

He watched her write awhile, and finally caught her eye. 'You know what, lady, let me tell you something. You can print it. You can tell them Sam Yinger said it. I don't mind dying. I'm just as glad I wasn't commuted to life. Imagine having to spend your whole G.o.ddam life, years and years of it, in this two-by-four concrete sewer. Dying is like going to sleep, sort of.

Before or after, you don't know what happens. Blink and you're out of it. Darkness. Big long sleep.

No dreams. No thinking. Nothing. Just rest. I'm not scared of that. You tell them Sam Yinger isn't scared one bit. How's that, lady?'

'It's a philosophy,' Victoria said, writing furiously.

'Yeah,' said Yinger. He thought for a moment. 'There are worse things than dying. There's living.'

He paused. 'My life was lousy.'

'Do you want to tell me about it?'

T don't know.' He picked his way through remembrances. No parents that he knew. Bleak orphanage years. In and out of several gangs. Handyman jobs. Night school to make something respectable of himself. Still no decent work. Scrounging, more handyman jobs. Something better with the city - truck driver for the garbage department. Only relaxation!, cheap midnight movies.

And women. Wh.o.r.es who gave you syph and clap. First grownup love was the schoolteacher, Caroline, and she double-crossed him, a wh.o.r.e like the rest with all her men. The b.i.t.c.h. He stopped. 'What the h.e.l.l,' he said.

'That's the past,' said Victoria. 'What about the present? What do you do with yourself in your cell?'

'Only two things to do. Watch TV and jerk off. The first's not as bad as they say, and the second doesn't give you pimples.' He appeared pleased that he had embarra.s.sed her. 'Anything more, miss?' he wanted to know.

'There's one more question - well, maybe a few more.'

'Go on.'

43.

T was wondering about this: how you look at life on the outside today. Is there anything you wish you could do out there?'

'Not a f.u.c.king thing, nothing. Not even s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g.' A grin. 'Not even s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g you.'

She tried to avoid reacting.

'Not a put-down,' he added quickly. 'You got nice t.i.ts. It's just, I got bigger things - like maybe the chair - on my mind.'

'So there's not a thing you want on the outside.'

Yinger was lost in thought. Victoria did not prod him. 'Yeah, there's... there's something.'

He fell silent again.

Her pen poised, she inquired, 'Do you want to speak about it?'

'One thing,' he said quietly. 'I'd like to get out to have revenge on people who treated me unfair in the trial. Especially one. I'm talking about the D.A. - what's his name?'

'You mean District Attorney Clark Van Dusen?'

'Yeah, him. Cheap-shot b.a.s.t.a.r.d. I never liked the way he talked about me to the jury - to the reporters after - even to the governor yesterday, when he put in his two bits against commuting.'

Yinger gnawed at his lip. 'Van Dusen, yeah. He said I deserved to be removed from society. He called me an animal, did you know that? An animal. I'd like to show him you can't treat another human being like that. It's the only-thing I'd like to be free for - to kill that p.r.i.c.k Van Dusen.'

Victoria concentrated on her writing, but her mind was boggled. Here was a man who had cold-bloodedly taken the lives of six children, put bullets into the heads and bodies of six innocent youngsters, yet his only grievance was that the district attorney had characterized him as an.

animal.

'Anything else?' Yinger was asking.

Victoria finished her writing, and busied herself thumbing through her notes. 'Let me see -' , At that instant a deep, booming voice intruded upon them, and Victoria jerked her head up, startled.

It was from the sergeant behind the raised desk at the end of the table. He was addressing Yinger.

'Hey, Sam, hate to b.u.t.t in on your tete-a-tete,' the sergeant called down, 'but you got another visitor waiting.'

'Bet it's the governor,' Yinger called back with a grin.

'You know who it is,' the sergeant said. 'Your attorney, George Tatum, he's waiting. Guess he's come to kiss you good-bye.' The guard pointed at Victoria. 'None of that's for your paper, ma'am.'

'Don't worry,' said Victoria, tucking her notes and pen into her purse.

'Old Tatum,' Yinger murmured. T was expecting him.'

The sergeant at the raised desk interrupted once more.

'And you and your mouthpiece, you speak English, I'm telling you.'

'f.u.c.k off,' Yinger said to the guard good-naturedly. Yinger saw the inquiry on Victoria's face.