A Death in Belmont by Sebastian Junger Page B

thought it was a toy. Smith allegedly pulled the trigger, but the pistol failed to fire, whereupon Smith slapped her across the face and continued pulling the trigger. Wright could hear the mechanism going click, click, click . Wright rushed to the window to wave for help, but she couldn’t get anyone’s attention, so she told Roy that she was going to go in back to get her dog. Unable to get the gun to fire and probably too drunk to keep Sally Wright from getting her dog—if indeed she even had one—Roy fled out the front door and walked several blocks home to his apartment in West 122nd Street.
    He must finally have gotten the gun to work, because police responded to a report of shots fired in the hallway of the building, and Roy was arrested outside his apartment with the gun in his right-hand coat pocket. He was taken back to the Twenty-eighthPrecinct House in Harlem, where he was booked for illegal possession of a weapon, carrying a concealed weapon and first-and second-degree assault. Roy admitted to firing shots into his friends’ apartment—an indiscretion that he attributed to too much alcohol—but he denied any involvement in the assault at the shoe store. Sally Wright positively identified Smith, however, and a ballistics expert found one live round in his revolver that had been dented by the gun’s firing mechanism. Someone tried to fire that round, in other words, but it failed to go off. Bullets recovered from the apartment door were also examined, and a handwritten sentence at the bottom of the arrest file notes, “Ballistics supposed to have reported that [the bullets] were fired from defendant’s gun.”
    On the face of it, if one believes the arrest report, Roy tried to kill someone and was prevented only by bad ammunition in a cheap gun. By all rights Sally Wright should have been dead with a bullet hole in her forehead. There were some odd things about the crime, though. First of all there was no explanation—and no legal reason—for why Roy was not charged with attempted murder. He put a gun to a woman’s head and pulled the trigger; the fact that it didn’t fire had no bearing whatsoever on his intention to take a human life. Second, there was no explanation for why the ballistics results were added to the crime report in longhand and couched in such uncertain terms. (Eight years later Roy’s criminal records in Massachusetts stated, inexplicably, that the gun he used in the New York assault was made of wood.)
    To confuse matters still further, Roy told police that he had two children and a wife named Dorothy, and that he had served in the army continuously since 1947. Both were straight-out lies and probably just an attempt to elicit the sympathy of the court; they didn’t. Roy pleaded guilty to second-degree assault, and the Courtof General Sessions sentenced Roy to one-to-six years in Sing Sing. He served almost his full sentance before being released on parole and returning to his apartment and his old job at Bailey Green. He managed to avoid the attention of the authorities for almost a year before surfacing in Boston, where he had been thrown into the Billerica House of Corrections for ten days for “threatening” behavior. Now Roy was living in Roxbury—Boston’s version of Harlem—and working a variety of jobs, including as a cleaning man in a candy store and as a “lube man” at an auto shop. He was making sixty-five dollars a week and living from apartment to apartment, possibly because his utilities and back rent kept catching up with him.
    He was also starting to show up more and more frequently on police blotters, though some of the crimes—a 1958 arrest for adultery that could have gotten him three years in prison—more reflected the times than the man. The adultery charge cost him only twenty-five dollars, but still, Roy Smith was clearly a man not fully in control of his life. Shortly