Free Suspended Sentences by Brian Garfield

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.”
    â€œOf 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.”
    â€œThen why wasn’t your case thrown out?”
    â€œThe experts went away without testifying.”
    Harris said, “I don’t understand.”
    â€œWell, 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.”
    â€œI’m not sure I’m keeping up with you.”
    The judge flashed his shrewd smile again. “They weren’t fakes, you see. That night we broke into the safe to photograph the books, my safecracker friend noted the combination down for me after he’d opened it. I had the combination. The night before we raided the place, I had two policemen roust the watchman again. They never took him farther than their car, which was parked just around the corner. He wasn’t out of sight of the safe for more than three minutes. But it was time enough for me to slip in and substitute our forgeries for the real books. Then, the next day, I planted the real ones in that front office desk. So you see we weren’t defrauding anybody. We came with a warrant and a subpoena. We found exactly what we were trying to find: Sterrick’s books. The real ones. And we presented them in evidence.”
    The judge lit a fresh cigar. “Of course Sterrick didn’t know how we’d done it. When he learned we were on our way with our warrant, he had the safe emptied and its contents removed to some secret hiding place — possibly over in another county, I have no idea. He didn’t realize, of course, that the ledgers and books he was so carefully hiding away were fakes, designed to resemble the real thing. We’d switched books on him, that’s all.”
    Harris grinned at him. “You old fox.”
    â€œWe played it absolutely straight, as far as the trial was concerned. We faked no evidence. We defrauded no one. But, at the same time, I’d broken half a dozen laws to nail this one. Now how would you judge the case, Jim? Ends justifying means? Or absolute moral justice?”
    Harris shook his head slowly. “I’m just not sure.”
    â€œTo tell you the truth — even after all these years — neither am I.”

SCRIMSHAW
    â€œ Scrimshaw” is, you should permit the immodesty, one of my favorites among these yarns. It was written where it is set — in the town of Lahaina and along the coast of Maui — and was provoked by a conversation with a waterfront scrimshaw shopkeeper who complained at length about the high cost of real ivory in the age of Endangered Species laws…. This story was filmed as a half-hour TV play and shown as an episode of the “Tales of the Unexpected” anthology series in 1981; the stars were Joan Hackett and Charles Kimbrough, and their performances were so good they — and John Houseman’s Hitchcockian introduction — nearly made up for the show’s questionable production values .
    She suggested liquid undulation: a lei-draped girl in a grass skirt under a windblown palm tree, her hands and hips expressive of the