No Lesser Plea Read Online Free PDF Page A

found a foot and a half of siding with a rusted tenpenny nail sticking through it. He twisted the nail out of its hole, put it in his pocket, and shoved the slat into his belt under his shirt. He also picked up a small chunk of cinder block.
    That night, Mandeville was beaten again and forced to perform a sexual act upon the body of the boss kid. This gave him the opportunity to crawl under his blanket and sob, the sound of which provided a cover for what he was really doing, which was putting a needle point on his nail by rubbing it against the cinder block.
    Around three in the morning, Mandeville forced the nail back into the hole in the slat, and carrying the slat and the chunk of cinder block, padded over to where the big youth lay sleeping. By the moonlight filtering in through the wire-meshed window he carefully positioned the nail over the youth’s eye and drove it home with a powerful blow of the cinder block. Then he went back to bed.
    Things like this happen often at reformatories. The big kid had many enemies and the investigation was desultory, as Mandeville had calculated. Nobody bothered him for the rest of his stay. He also became a model prisoner. He was polite to the staff, attended lectures dutifully, and worked on his reading. He was employed in the library. Here he delved deeply into whatever books it possessed on the law and the workings of the criminal justice system. He read Crime and Punishment with great interest, as a text. He followed Raskolnikov’s rap at the beginning with approval, and was confused and annoyed when the dumb-ass turned himself in.
    Mandeville got out in eight months. On returning home, he found not the prodigal’s welcome he expected as his due, but a destroyed family. His father had died—of shame mostly—and his mother had withdrawn into an impenetrable melancholia. With his brothers away at college it fell to his sister to inform him that he need no longer consider himself a member of the Louis family. This was fine with Mandeville, but, he figured, they owed him something for not sticking by him in his hour of need. After all, what was a family for?
    In fact, he figured they owed him all the money in the house, his father’s gold watch and his mother’s tiny hoard of jewelry. His sister was foolish enough to try to stop him and got knocked down and kicked in the head a couple of times. There was enough to get him set up in the big city, which he reached in late 1965. The times and the man conspired—there has hardly ever been a better milieu to begin business as an armed robber than a large American city in the period between the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the resignation of Richard Nixon—“the sixties.” The citizens were rich and disinclined to divert from their private use the monies necessary to run a criminal justice system remotely adequate for the scale of the problem, a problem that stemmed from the vast increase in the number of unemployed young men and the disappearance from most big cities of anything for all those young men to do for an honest living.
    Then there was the guilt. The political movements of the time had taught the middle classes something about their complicity in injustice and brutality. Perhaps people who committed crimes were simply responding to irresistible social forces. Perhaps crime was a form of political protest. Look what we were doing in Vietnam… .
    Thus, as London at the end of the sixteenth century was a hot place to be a literary genius, and France at the end of the eighteenth century was a hot place to be a military genius, New York in the sixties was made for a murderous psychopath like young Mandeville Louis. He thrived.
    Even Louis himself understood this. As he swayed in his seat on the uptown Lexington Avenue local, with the murder weapons and the profits from his most recent crime on his person, he knew how slim his chances were of being caught, tried, and punished.
    Still, there was something wrong.