Break and Enter

by Colin Harrison

  It didn’t work. Nelson disagreed with each question firmly, and Morgan began to look ridiculous. The detective, a tired man with no vanity, stank of credibility, and the questions came to an end.

  Morgan then began his defense, introducing witnesses who would try to prove that the defendant had an alibi. Morgan had assembled a group of Robinson’s local bar buddies who then grunted out various lies about spending much of the night drinking. One by one they seemed sullen and uncomfortable in the chair, dullards who could be bought. It was slow going, and, as was happening with frighteningly increasing frequency, Peter’s mind floated around the room. It was dangerous to do this, he could lose the thread of questioning, but he couldn’t help himself; the conversation with Janice was plowing him under. Perhaps he’d sounded foolish and pathetic to her. He was gripped these days—in court, in the office, anywhere—by the occasionally recurring worry that he might be a clown, a great glutinous-brained clown capable only of honking courtroom verbiage, who in the great scheme of things was as guilty and as doomed as those whom he sent to prison. Society had a way of spreading around responsibility. Laws and punishments and institutions were a thin overlay on the fact of ubiquitous guilt. And, in this brief, too-honest moment, he saw the court and clogged legal system as pathetic, absurd, and that he was, too. The ruffling of documents, the somber, pressed suit, the silk tie, the hours of preparation—it was very little, nothing really, and this depressed him, for without the accoutrements of the prosecutor, he was not even a clown but another cowering hairless monkey. His skeptical pal Berger saw this, but did the other lawyers on both sides? Didn’t the women attorneys realize how pompous they looked, strutting around in women’s business dress, spouting accusations? The men—getting fatter every year—enjoying the tightness of their pants and shirts, as if they would burst their armor with righteousness. He was tired of the legal scowl, that set of the jaw and eyebrows that carried with it an entire combative outlook.

  And yet, neurotic relativist that he was, every time he walked into court he felt pride—inflated by his own cheap ego, no doubt—that he was prosecuting the worst crime a human could commit. The Philadelphia District Attorney’s office handed down a murder charge with great reserve, and usually when the evidence was convincing beyond all reasonable doubt. To be a prosecutor was to have enormous power over the lives of individuals. To charge someone—even a nut like Robinson—with murder was grave business. Whether defendants were convicted or not, the murder charge changed their lives—if not in their own eyes, then in the eyes of those who knew them. Even the innocent were terrified by the power of the prosecutor’s office. The Philly D.A. would never sell out a murder case, never plea-bargain down to a major felony in return for dropping murder charges. Such an act would be blasphemous, destroy the victim’s family and police morale, and make a mockery of the public trust, which, all fashionable cynicism aside, was enormous, elemental. You have a fire and call the firemen; you expect them to show. Your daughter is murdered, you call the police, they catch the murderer; you expect that man to be put in prison, preferably for as long as possible. There was a precious covenant between the victim and the victim’s advocate in the courtroom confrontation of a murderer. It was a responsibility he humbly hoped he could uphold, it was a responsibility he cherished.

  LATER. TIME HAD PASSED and Peter could not remember his cross-examination of Morgan’s witnesses nor what his thoughts had been, except that those thoughts had circled back to Janice. He wanted to get out of his suit and felt sleepy in the dry, hot air of the courtroom. He would call Janice in the evening to find out where the hell she was hiding. Judy Warren’s father was watching him, and he worried suddenly that he’d missed something. From habit he scribbled notes on the pad while floating in and out of attention, relying on his instinct to follow the rhythm of drama, even a drama so worn and ritualized and predictable as a third-rate murder case. But the case was airtight. Morgan had nothing. The office had been scrupulous about the discovery procedures, not only because it was the law, but because the more you told the defense attorney about the stuff you were digging up on the defendant, the sooner he would angle toward a faster, potentially lenient resolution, usually a negotiated guilty plea. Morgan, who was now summarizing the defendant’s movements on the night of the murder, was going for complete acquittal; it was a real waste of city resources. Deputies, support personnel, court reporter, court officers, and judge; each case that went to trial cost the taxpayer hundreds of dollars an hour. Peter would have preferred someone who knew the courts, an ex-A.D.A. perhaps, who, in the face of the overwhelming evidence, would have pled guilty pragmatically and never taken the case to trial. On the other hand, it would be another conviction. Peter was thirty-six and three on homicide, one of those three lost on changed testimony, one on a runaway jury, and one on his own stupid evidentiary mistakes—not that he kept score, which, of course, he did, and not that he saw himself running for public office, which, of course, was always a possibility.

  Then—already—it was past five o’clock, and the judge told the jury not to discuss the case with anyone—no smart criminal lawyer ever assumed they all complied—and they filed out. The spectators stood up. The victim’s family, drained from hours in court, floated toward the exit, a day farther from the death of their Judy, a day closer, Peter hoped, to some sort of emotional release. Usually he chatted with the family about how things were progressing, but he was too tired now to talk with them. And felt guilty about it. He spread his papers on the table and searched for his calendar. It was under the black-and-white glossies of Judy Warren’s corpse.

  He rode the elevator down, pulling even further into himself, too tired and anxious about Janice to nod again to the detectives and cops in City Hall. Outside, he headed home, his loneliness made worse by the empty beauty of the dark office buildings with their random patterns of lighted windows high above the street. The new towers kept going up, sheathed in granite, glass, and metal. It used to be that by custom the immense statue of William Penn, the patron Quaker of Philadelphia, looked over all buildings in the city from atop the clock tower of City Hall. In a plain hat—his curling hair falling to his shoulders—waistcoat, knickers, and buckle shoes, Billy Penn could see everything in the city he founded and designed and loved. This was no longer true.

  THEIR TOWNHOUSE STOOD ON THE SOUTH SIDE of the two hundred block of Delancey. It was a narrow street, with two-and three- story brick homes, none newer than the early 1700s. Tourists who had tired of the Liberty Bell or Independence Mall often wandered down it, taking pictures, marveling at how well preserved the street was, how historical it felt. Peter had heard them on Sunday mornings, outside the window, reading the dates of the houses aloud, wishing they lived there. Janice had loved the shutters painted bright black, the worn granite steps, the iron railing and antique bootscrape set into the old brick sidewalk. And so had he, for this small, lovely street and their house on it had suggested an order and happiness, a certain classic domestic perfection. The area, the oldest in the city, contained some of its most expensive residential real estate. That he and Janice owned the house was testimony to their ability to work together. He had done all the restoration work, tearing up linoleum, sanding floors. They had been extremely lucky, buying just before the real-estate boom at a decent interest rate, but still sacrificing vacations, restaurants, and a car for several years to pay the mortgage, which was still sizable. Even now, on a combined salary of eighty-two thousand, they had more or less signed their life away on this house. But, oh, what satisfaction they had enjoyed, walking home from a movie or dinner down the quiet street, the soft light of gas lamps hinting that they had reached a point of near perfection, an aesthetic culmination of their desires—security, happiness.

  Inside, Peter sorted through the mail. Bar association stuff, a flier from the Pennsylvania District Attorney’s Association, the United Way, alumni mail from Penn, Visa and American Express bills, a mail-order catalog for Janice, a letter from B
obby, who had opted out of the East Coast mentality and become a geologist in Arizona. Married a beautiful woman, too. He set his brother’s letter aside for a time when he could enjoy it, and continued flipping through the stack. One of the hunger organizations had gotten his address. All of those outfits bought mailing lists—lawyers were supposed to have plenty of cash. They didn’t know about underpaid A.D.A.’s. He ripped the envelope open and read the computer-personalized appeal:

  Mr. Scattergood, your gift of $15 will feed a starving child in Bangladesh for a month. $30 will help two children. $74 will help an entire family. Please give today to help save lives!

  Next to this was a picture of a starving boy, maybe four years old. His head was huge, his arms like sticks and his belly swollen balloon-big. On the reverse, it said:

  A Race Against Death in Famine-Stricken Bangladesh …

  Almost fourteen million lives are threatened by drought.

  More than 720,000 could die from hunger and related diseases in the next sixty days.

  Please send whatever you can—now!

  He looked long at the photograph, wondered what it was like to starve to death, and resented the manipulation. He tore the return envelope in half and went through the rest of his mail. Should he put his coat back on and walk to South Street, maybe troll through a couple of bars, act the lonely fool with some cosmetically florid executive secretary?

  He called Janice at the new number and she answered.

  “How’s business?” he asked, searching for neutral territory.

  “We got three more women today. One was a police referral. So,” she sighed, “we’re full, but with two discharges tomorrow. A couple of the women were fighting over what their children could watch on television.”

  “Tiring.” His attempt at sympathy.

  “Yes. But we got the state grant renewed. I’m encouraged.”

  “All this other stuff between us is wearing you down.”

  “Yes,” she said dutifully, not allowing his sympathies to register. “Peter, I need some more money.”

  “I get it coming and going, don’t I?”

  “We agreed—”

  “I agreed to be coerced into agreeing that you can’t stand me.” This was nasty but felt good.

  “All you’re doing is proving I was right.”

  True. He was tired of her being right. He was even more tired of agreeing that she was right when in fact, in the mud of his soul, he believed he was right.

  “I’m sorry,” he said more kindly. “When shall we meet?”

  “I don’t want you to come to the apartment.” A pause. She had made some mistake. “No, we better meet.”

  “I’ll come over.” She had moved to one of the apartment complexes not far away. He hated them, big ugly towers that overlooked the Delaware River, products of poor 1960s urban planning that clashed entirely with the neighborhood of Revolutionary-era architecture. But the towers were near enough so he and Janice could visit and talk to each other during the separation, and far enough away that she felt autonomous.

  “Let’s meet in town,” she said. “Tomorrow.”

  “My office?” He knew Janice wouldn’t go for that. She’d been up to the seventh floor and remarked each time how dirty the place was, the coffee stains on the floor, the tiny cramped offices where the staff worked, the boxes of papers and files stacked in hallways and along office dividers due to lack of space and funding. Neither did she like the detectives walking around with pistols in shoulder holsters, belt holsters, ankle holsters, even stuffed into the back of their pants.

  “You know how much I hate your office,” she said.

  “So why don’t we meet in your apartment? I can bring some more of your stuff if you need it. I spend so much time downtown I feel like a subway rat.”

  “You, a rat?” she teased.

  “I said that so we would be able to agree that I was an evil, dirty, scummy rat of a guy and then you would see how agreeable I actually am.”

  “We can have breakfast, at that little place off Chestnut.”

  No apartment summit meeting. No fledgling pride at her new environment (the cost of which they were splitting, so it ran him an extra five hundred dollars a month), no intimate discussion about their problems with the possibility of a bedroom finale.

  “Peter?” Janice sounded exasperated. “Eight o’clock?”

  “Okay. Janice, why can’t we just—”

  “Because we can’t. I don’t want to go into it. You need to hear me. You’re more interested in your work than in me—”

  “That’s not true. Janice, the issue is—”

  “The issue is not my past, Peter. You’re so quick to make that the cause of our problems. You don’t love me,Peter. You think you love me,

  you feel love, but you don’t act it, you don’t do it. You promised me change and for a while I believed you. I don’t believe anymore. I know I have problems, but I think you have a lot of things to process.”

  Process. Fast food was processed, due application of law was, God knew, processed, but not love. Janice’s use of the word—entirely conscious and a professional trademark—was a way of keeping him at a distance.

  “It’s a matter of prioritizing what you care about, Peter,” she said, speaking as if she were talking to a four-year-old. “When you don’t want to talk and do things together, that’s emotional deprivation. If you want to work and be a hermit, fine. But I need—”

  “I thought you didn’t want to get into it.”

  “We’re better than this. Okay, see you tomorrow at eight. Bye.”

  She hung up.

  He stood there and let the words drift out the room, his mind attempting to figure out how Janice had evaded him. One thing about sticking your hands into everyone’s shit each day, you learn how people operate. Probably it was all part of dismantling a marriage: You begin to cultivate secrets, new regions of yourself, let old elements die off. He called the number at Janice’s apartment, hoping he was wrong. He wasn’t. A click, a whir, and the death tone of disconnection: “The number you have reached has been—”

  His wife, with whom he had last unhappily made love a month prior, had moved out of her new apartment and he didn’t know where she was.

  THE BAD TIME CAME when he was ready to sleep and set the alarm. Janice had always woken early and meditated downstairs and then awakened him. He was never good at waking, because he never got enough sleep. He set the radio to KYW-1060, all news. Janice hated all news. “How can you make love at night and then wake up to all news?” she used to ask him, back when they made love each night. “It’s too hard.”

  “Well, we’re hard people,” he had said.

  “You’re the one who’s hard.”

  He flicked off the light and swam through the sudden darkness to the bed. Under the covers, he felt a little more of eleven years’ worth of Janice leak out: the last year of college together, she at Penn on scholarship, he on the parental ticket, then living separately, then shacking up—his parents had been relaxed about it—then marriage in the three-hundred-year-old Quaker Meeting his family belonged to, saying their vows in the simple pale room with their friends silently watching. In the presence of God and these our friends I take thee Janice to be my wedded wife. He had been faithful, made a decent living, been a good lover. But he had overworked himself and been too tired on Sundays to go out for a picnic in Fairmount Park when she suggested it, and he had shown only a shabby interest in her struggle to define herself. He’d been noncommittal when she brought up children, not because he didn’t care, but because increasingly he’d felt like such a failure with her. Janice had looked to him for the elemental affirmation her parents had never given her. After all, he was the one from a good family, the life of privilege. He’d enjoyed advantages that made him believe his needs were not as significant as hers, which was a good thing, for she had been unable to reach beyond her own decimated family history. She had needed to feel loved and hadn’t found it. Not in him
, not in herself. He seemed only to torment her through his deficiencies; and so he had started to withdraw, dry up a little more each year. Janice was increasingly flush with the social-work jargon; sooner or later, he’d long hoped, she’d stop looking for issues in their marriage to “work on,” like a mechanic tinkering with an engine, and realize he was a regular, decent guy who loved her in a mundane, unconditional way. Was that so bad?