Break and Enter

by Colin Harrison

  “Ready for a speech? Okay. A family and a wider community who had great hopes for what sounds like a talented boy is going to feel crushed and disturbed, vengeful. The black community doesn’t get that many kids like this. The man who committed the crime, as far as we know, has escaped prosecution for a similar crime in the past. This makes a family and a community extremely angry, and with complete justification, in my view. On a philosophical level, there has been an emotional and noticeable tear in a certain part of the social fabric. Somebody is going to carry the responsibility to publicly sew that tear up. He’ll have help, but the responsibility will be his.” It was going to be the case of his life—and he feared the pressure and the possibility of blowing it. “Would you want to be that person?”

  Cassandra had pulled a white silk blouse over her muscular shoulders. Now, again, she was the professional woman. And he the professional man. When the sun rises, the expertise clicks in and the moments of shadow and silence of the night disappear.

  “Peter, I think you’re really great, but it doesn’t sound to me—” she stopped. “Who am I to tell you how to run your life? It’s just that you mumbled your wife’s name last night before we finally went to sleep—” She smiled stiffly. “Don’t worry, it doesn’t bother me—I find it touching, though it makes me a little jealous, too. What I’m saying is that your house needs to be cleaned. You need food in the refrigerator—”

  The phone rang again. Cassandra shrugged. “I’ll be making breakfast.” She left the room.

  Peter picked up the phone, defeated by the truth of Cassandra’s words. His mood was foul.

  “Speak.”

  “Peter Scattergood?”

  “Yes.”

  “My name is Gerald Turner, aide to the Mayor. Do you have a minute so that he may talk with you?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  He was put on hold, and took the time to clear his throat. From downstairs came breakfast sounds. The sweat started to trickle down his armpits. He had glimpsed the Mayor in City Hall, heard a couple of speeches by him, and seen him on television myriad times. Successor to Wilson Goode, and as a former councilman, an excellent public speaker. A man who exuded power, even though he’d just taken office. Whereas Mayor Goode had left only a record of bumbling good intentions, the worst of course being the MOVE tragedy in which an entire city block was burned down by the police, the new Mayor was more magnetic a character, known for his constant schedule of appointments, moving always in a darkened limousine from this place to that—a business gathering in one of the new hotels, a renovated school building, a shelter for the homeless. He was hungry, he had said, to put the city back together. He was a man, he had told them—dabbing at the sweat on his brow—a man with ideals, a family man, someone who understood that the community must be healed. He and his wife, along with their four children, all in high school or college, attended church together each Sunday. He pledged to work with everyone—the police, the City Council, the private sector, the school board. While his rhetoric thus far had not translated into change, there was no doubt that the new Mayor was a man of action, given to appearing at impromptu press conferences outside City Hall, dressed always in expensive, conservative tailored suits, addressing reporters by name—the better to curry their favor, of course—and able to stare into the television cameras and whirring motor drives with impunity. Always he was attended by an entourage of handlers, not a few of whom looked as if they had been picked off the corner of 52nd and Market the previous day and given a new suit. Their presence gave the entrance of the Mayor to any event the sudden excitement of the appearance of a heavyweight prizefighter—the build of which the Mayor possessed, with the thick torso of Joe Frazier, another famous Philadelphian.

  It was no wonder Hoskins disliked the Mayor—Hoskins was one of those people who couldn’t quite believe that blacks had wrested so much political power from whites. Though the powerful businessmen and developers in the city were white, the governance of the city was controlled by blacks. Political corruption knew no race, of course, and thus continued to run through the local government like steam pipes in City Hall—everywhere, and where you least expected. The electorate, exhausted by betrayal, knew that the city could no longer pay for all its poor people and that each administration just gorged at the trough. The new mayor had come in promising change. He had eased through the Democratic primary and then narrowly beaten the Republican candidate, a business executive who happened to be rich and nominally Catholic, a man who needed to pull over thousands of Italian and Irish Democrat votes to win but whose Main Line aura had alienated them. Hoskins, through the D.A., had strong social connections to the defeated candidate. But, Peter knew, as power concentrated at the top, unofficial relationships thickened, across race and party. Hoskins would play it by the book, if only for his own advantage.

  “Hello?” a familiar voice said.

  “Mr. Mayor? I’m terribly sorry about your nephew, sir.”

  “Yes, uh, Mr. Scattergood. I appreciate your sentiments. It’s a tragedy, a family tragedy. His mother, my sister Lorraine, is in shock.”

  “We see that a lot, Mr. Mayor. The effect on the decedent’s family is devastating.” This was babbling, and he stopped.

  “I understand from Bill Hoskins that you’ll be handling the prosecution of the young man who allegedly murdered my nephew.”

  Careful wording, even for a confidential call.

  “Yes,” Peter said, not sure if he had heard a cold tone in the Mayor’s voice. “I understand we have a suspect. If he’s charged, if it’s a good case, I’ll handle the prosecution.”

  “I am glad of that,” the rich voice said. “I understand that you’re very proficient at what you do. I commend you for your service to the city and I want you to know you have my full personal support and that of my office. I will instruct one of my aides, Gerald Turner, to work out a communication scheme with you. It will not be necessary to work through your superiors. Just provide me, please, on an informal basis, with information on where your prosecution is going. I promise you I will not meddle, Mr. Scattergood. That is not my intent at all. It’s simply for psychological ease, if you understand. Frankly, if you can talk to me for a few minutes regularly, I may be able to alleviate some of the typical family pressure you may feel in cases such as this. Above all I have no desire to interfere.”

  “Sounds reasonable,” Peter agreed obligatorily.

  “I do wish to add one more thing, and it has nothing to do with any desire on my part to impugn your integrity. I must say it because you are an unknown quantity to me and I want to be sure to say it to whoever runs this case. I want no funny stuff, Mr. Scattergood. Bear in mind that I have said this from the absolute start of our relationship. I want this case to be clean going in and clean coming out. I’m a lawyer. I want the discovery process to be full, I want the evidence procedurally sound, all of it. If it does go to trial eventually, I don’t want the case leveraged in any way because the Mayor’s nephew has been murdered—” An emotional pause. “In the long run, that won’t help anybody. Run the thing by the book. Have your people run it by the book. Have them run their lives by the book if necessary, so we don’t scare up some half-connected scandal. The papers love half-connected scandals, you may have noticed. Don’t take any shortcuts. Is that understood?”

  “I understand.”

  “The other side of the coin is that I want you to do everything possible to make sure this Carothers, this suspect—or whoever did it—gets salted away for a proper long time.”

  “Right,” Peter said.

  “One more thing,” the Mayor said, the adjustable warmth coming back into his voice, the stern tone receding, “you understand, of course, that all communication between us is confidential, off the record, not to be alluded to when speaking to the press, not even to be mentioned to your colleagues. Our official communication will be on paper and through my aides.”

  “Yes.”

  “Any questions in respect
to how I would like this tragic affair handled?”

  “No, none.”

  “Thank you for your valuable time so early in the morning, Mr. Scattergood. Stay in touch.”

  After a quick shower and breakfast, he looked at Cassandra, whose dark wool suit now hid her thinness.

  “You understand I have to run out …” He tried to sound casual. “I appreciate you helping me this morning. Please pull the front door shut when you leave.”

  “That’s okay.” She smiled, replacing the orange juice in the refrigerator that Janice had picked out. “I understand completely.”

  “Something else, Cassandra. I’d appreciate it if you let me answer my own phone. More than appreciate it, I really do insist you not compromise me again like that.”

  “You’re serious?”

  He let his silence answer her, and while he was silent he noticed something. He had been letting the dishes pile up in the sink, and here was Cassandra, standing in her eight-hundred-dollar outfit, still fresh from the day before, with her hands in sudsy warm water with bits of rotten vegetable floating in it. He glanced at his watch, thinking he did not want her to do his dishes for him; the act implied intimacy and cooperation and domesticity and all the things Janice had taken with her. Cassandra seemed to enjoy the washing—the meaning of it—and he almost asked her if she felt so comfortable as to do this, going to the trouble—he considered mentioning all this, but he remembered that a corpse lay in a room across town and that he had a responsibility to that corpse. He had better get moving. What was a sink of dishes compared to a Mayor’s wrath?

  He pulled on his coat. Cassandra turned and smiled at him.

  “Hope it goes well.”

  “Yes.” His voice was inconclusive. Her eyes waited for something from him, some acknowledgment, and he knew himself to be a small-hearted, selfish bastard. In the sunlight, she looked haggard. He wanted to scream at her to leave, for her presence implied his failure. Instead, he shuffled over and planted a meager but passably affectionate kiss on her forehead.

  “Busy today?” he inquired dutifully.

  “The usual planning meeting. I give a presentation.”

  He didn’t answer.

  “Call me?” she said.

  “Sure.”

  OUTSIDE HIS HOUSE paced a small woman in a blue winter coat. For a moment he thought it was Janice—and in that case they wouldn’t be able to go in the house; despite the fact that she had left him, Janice would explode if she found Cassandra inside. The woman turned at the sound of the door shutting—not Janice. She had been waiting for him. He pretended not to see her and walked up the street.

  “Mr. Scattergood?” she called after him.

  He hurried to his car, thinking that all he had to do was get in and shut the door. Soon the coffee would mask his exhaustion, compelling him toward whatever it was the day held.

  “Excuse me!”

  She caught up and he stood staring unhappily into two blue eyes magnified grotesquely by thick glasses and framed by curly red hair. How could he ever have thought she might be Janice?

  “Nice house,” she said. “I love these old streets. The cobblestones and everything.”

  “Thanks.”

  “My name’s Karen Donnell.” She reached out a gloved hand he automatically shook. “With the Inquirer.”

  “Don’t recognize you,” he said.

  She pulled out an Inquirer ID.

  “The city desk assigned me the Mayor’s nephew story. I’ll be following the case. The desk wants to do an investigative piece, use it as an opportunity to get behind the workings of the D.A.’s office, see the way a case progresses, really put the whole thing under a microscope and see how it’s done.”

  “Oh.” Why, he wondered, would she tell him this? “Sort of a page-one feature?”

  “Right,” she answered. “I need to ask you a couple of questions.” She produced a small voice-activated recorder and flicked it on. A red light appeared above the condenser microphone.

  “Well, I really haven’t had time—I heard about it just an hour ago.” Backpedaling, thinking about what he’d already said, figuring how to say nothing more. “How’d you get my name, anyway?”

  “Someone in the Mayor’s office mentioned you might be heading the case.”

  Which meant events were now moving forward faster than he could keep abreast of them. The Mayor’s office was not going to let him breathe.

  “I see. Look, honestly, I really don’t know much about the case yet.”

  The reporter’s eyebrows flew up in interest. He distrusted her high level of energy. “Do you want me to say that the chief man is unable to provide the simplest details of the case? Is that what the taxpayers are getting for their money?”

  Up to this moment he had been willing to give her the benefit of the doubt—most reporters were not so bad, just doing their job, all part of the adversarial system that made America throb—but this was unfair at five forty-five in the morning. It was too early to be answering fish-bait questions intended to produce snappy J-school lead paragraphs.

  “All right, shoot,” Peter said tiredly, setting down his briefcase and pushing his gloveless hands into the pockets of his coat, letting his mind glide away from the idiocy of the moment, instead, searching for distraction of any kind, enjoying the sound of the few long-dead sycamore leaves whisking along the cobblestones. The sound and the crisp air reminded him of the mornings when he walked to school, his hair still slightly wet from the shower his mother used to make him take each morning, the smell of milk and bananas on his breath, his bookbag in one hand and the square, secure lunch box in the other, the Thermos rattling a little as he walked. Blowing spumes of breath in the cold air. The many mornings of one’s life. He and Janice had stood in this same spot a thousand times, deciding when to call each other, dawdling before leaving, exchanging last-minute information about bills, work, money, the car, arguing, arguing about arguing, kissing to make up, believing with all their hearts that their lives were something beautiful.

  “First,” the reporter asked, “can you tell me the circumstances of the murder?”

  “I’ll tell you what I know, which is very little. We have a homicide of a young black male last night or early this morning in West Philadelphia. Apparently he is the nephew of the Mayor. A full investigation is under way.”

  “Do you have a suspect in custody?”

  “I have no comment at this time. Certainly the police will question all those involved with the case. You guys always get that info from your own sources over there anyway. But if you call my office in a couple of hours, I’ll be able to help you out.”

  “What’s the suspect’s name?”

  “If there is in fact a suspect at this time, I can have that for you at the appropriate time, long before your first copy deadline. Literally, Miss Donnell, I have just woken up.”

  In addition to the tape recorder, she carried a reporter’s notepad and now paused to scribble something—what, he didn’t know, having said nothing important—and in the lull he reminded himself that he had better deal with this and all reporters sensibly. Not let his irritation show. The reporter looked up, her lips precise instruments through which to mete out difficult questions. “Do you feel that a case of such public interest could be directed by an inexperienced prosecutor?”

  “Of course not,” he snapped. “You get experience fast in the D.A.’s office. I’ve handled thousands of cases and a couple of hundred trials in my time.”

  “Is the killing drug-related?”

  “We don’t know.”

  “I’ve been told crack was found on the murder scene.”

  “I couldn’t say if that’s true.”

  “Do you think drugs were the motive?”

  “Again, no comment. We’re just beginning our investigation, miss. I’ve only known about—”

  “Who found the body?” she persisted.

  “I don’t know, but I’ll make sure you’re informed.”
r />   “When will the medical examiner issue his report?”

  “That depends on the length of the autopsy. Sometimes tissue tests have to be run that take extra time. We usually get a turnaround on a preliminary report in about a day. These questions are a bit general.”

  The reporter shot her glance over his shoulder toward the house, as if she’d seen something in the window.

  “Are you happily married?” she asked.

  He looked at her. The reporter smiled blithely at him.

  “What?”

  “I asked you if you were happily married.” The corner of her mouth was turned up in coy aggressiveness.

  “What kind of question is that?”

  She began to open her mouth. He felt the coffee flick on in his brain—finally, a surge of energy.

  “Oh,” she said, grinning, “I suppose it’s the kind of question—”

  “No! Don’t answer that, I will. Turn off that recorder!”

  Surprisingly, she did. He moved closer to her.

  “Now, strictly off the record, Miss Karen Donnell. I’ll tell you exactly what kind of question that is. It’s the kind of question that comes out of the mouth of a rookie reporter who comes to the city for the first time and who, listening to the police scanner early in the morning—God knows why, since normal people aren’t up at five in the morning—plays some sort of lucky hunch or gets some backdoor information while talking on her car’s cellular telephone to somebody who knows somebody and who then decides to camp out on my doorstep and see if she can’t get a story before anyone else. What are you? Banished to the Main Line society beat as a rookie and impatient or something? I know the Inquirer newsroom is a shark nest, everyone trying to outwork everyone else to win this year’s Pulitzer. But I’ll tell you something else I know, lady. You don’t write investigative stories in one day—no, don’t protest. Investigative is the word you just used, Miss Donnell. It’s my job to remember what people say—I think you can appreciate that, since it’s your job, too. As for the city desk, the first news budget meeting doesn’t begin for hours. The national AP wire has just started to dump stories in your computer system. I guarantee you that if Japan buys General Motors, then not much else will appear on the front page. So that leaves me with the conclusion that your line about some front-page investigative feature is a bunch of small-town bluffing, though let me tell you one more thing before you get the hell out of here—and that is I was willing to give you the benefit of the doubt. After all, you are standing out here in the big bad cold. But the tip-off, the absolute dead truth came flying home to me when, after all your transgressions of professional journalistic conduct, which most everyone else on your paper seems to practice admirably enough, after all that, most of which I bet was just showing off, given what followed—after all that, you have the fucking gall to jab your way into my private business? What do you care whether I’m happily married? I’m not a celebrity, I’m not famous, I’m some average, private guy. And who the hell are you to ask, anyway? What are you, greedy? Not only does the early bird want the worm”—the reporter winced—“but she wants the page-one story, too. Suppose I were unhappily married and your question caused me genuine mental anguish? That would be terrific, wouldn’t it? You’re a great human being, and a super reporter, cultivating the confidence of your sources. Why, I’d say that you’re set for a brilliant career.”