because of a hit-and-run in which he was involved under frightening and questionable circumstances. In Sherman's mind, he would like the black boy who is killed to have been a gangster, but there is a good deal of uncertainty about this. It seems indeed that Sherman and his mistress may have panicked when confronted with black faces in a bad neighborhood, and the key force in this novel is indeed the racial tension underlying all human interaction in New York City, a city that seems to have been racially balkanized, with separate enclaves of whites, blacks, Puerto Ricans, Asians, and Jews, all competing for attention from the power structure, all fomenting some degree of conflict to gain that attention, and all afraid of the others. These tensions come together in the legal system, a system expected to sort these matters out but ill-equipped to do so in such a racially-charged atmosphere.
Of course, The System is not in decay solely because of race. It is in decay because it is overworked, antiquated in both its structural framework and in the physical facilities
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