Break and Enter

by Colin Harrison

  She was nibbling her lip, refusing to react.

  “Okay.” He was miserable now. “Just respect me and I’ll respect you. Call my office in a couple of hours and I’ll give you the straight stuff.”

  He stared at her, waiting for a response.

  “I’d heard about big-city prosecutors—” she recovered.

  “Don’t mind me, Miss Donnell. I’m not myself.”

  A LIGHT RAIN FELL. In his own rarely used Ford, Peter drove west over the wet streets to West Philadelphia, replaying the conversation with the reporter, still angry but worrying that he had been unfairly virulent. He passed the massive Thirtieth Street train station, then skirted through the University of Pennsylvania, over to Baltimore Avenue. He’d spent seven years living in this part of the city during his undergraduate and law-school days. The houses were large, three-story professors’ homes, well-maintained Victorian structures, which then gave way to the student roominghouses, many badly needing paint and even basic repair, then farther west, the smaller homes of the slums, many of which had crumbling stoops, broken windows, rotting porches, and above all, the inescapable mark of deepening poverty. Out here the city didn’t even clean the streets.

  He parked his car at the police barricade at Forty-fifth Street and Baltimore. A TV camera crew eating breakfast slumped in the open back of a transmitter van. Not far away, a clot of officers and detectives from the Eighteenth District huddled under the leafless branches at the door to the brick apartment house. He wouldn’t immediately be recognized, for as a trial attorney he usually had little contact with the local investigation of a case. The logic of Hoskins’s directive kicked in, however; seeing the crime scene might well be helpful if he needed to re-create it for a jury, and he could be present for any legal questions the detectives had. The car was warm and he sat there a moment more for pleasure, tasting Cassandra’s eggs and coffee in his mouth. There was no doubt, he decided, that she was a lonely woman fighting the demographics, scavenging affection where she could. He would have to find some humane way to let her know he didn’t want to see her again.

  The policemen in their rain slickers milled about, lit cigarettes, rocked on their feet. They had probably divided the area into sectors and now had teams looking for witnesses, poking through trash cans, scuffing for information he’d eventually decide was sufficient for a formal charge. The official police file would contain blue carbons of the police reports, with the defense attorney receiving the white copies. Through the windshield he watched a few gawkers slide up to the police and ask questions. The cops shrugged noncommittally. Peter dealt with cops all the time, reading their reports, preparing statements, checking testimony as to the way evidence was seized so it would be admissible in court, but he had never been able to know why cops did what they did, what they thought in the deep brain. Becoming a policeman was not quite the neighborhood patronage system it used to be, and selection procedures were monitored carefully. What fed them? The identity of the uniform? Service? Power? Gun-lust? He admired the resilience necessary to cruise a beat month after month, endure risk and scorn. They had a hard job. Each year the citizenry poorer, more dependent on city services and more violent. Under Rizzo, the cops were an invincible, if brutal, army. Now there weren’t enough of them to go around, and the city was cutting back again. In some neighborhoods, like Spanish Kensington, the cops no longer had credibility. Peter did not love cops but he respected them—they did what had to be done, that which no one in his right mind would do. And yet, so often they were stupid men, too, clumsy, unforgivably brutal. Every year they looked younger to him. In Philly, you still didn’t have to be a high-school graduate to be a policeman. Cops protected themselves and one another, and distrusted lawyers as a matter of policy. A small but steady percentage of cops were corrupt, got caught. He wondered if all versions of men were stupid at times. Ninety-three percent of all felonies were committed by men. Again and again, the biological imperative toward aggressiveness drove men—even men socialized to be peaceful—into stupid, violent behavior. Had Whitlock been that kind of man and lost?

  He locked his car and walked over to the barricade and showed identification. A cop thumbed him through the door, past several reporters and two heavy black women who were crying and asking to be allowed in. The apartment house was a thirty-unit job, five stories high, each apartment renting for about three hundred a month. The elevator was broken. He walked up the staircase, the treads slippery from policemen tramping up and down it in the rainy hours since the murder had been discovered.

  At the landing on the third floor he followed the scratchy sound of a portable police radio down a dim hallway and into an apartment foyer. The dispatcher’s voice was garbled, punctuated by blasts of static; the city radio transmitter network was riddled with dead spots, and many of the police radios were worn out. Inside the apartment, two detectives sat on a sofa. A policeman stood inside the doorway.

  “Yeah, who are you?”

  “Scattergood, from the D.A.’s office.”

  “We know what we’re doing here.”

  “Is that in doubt?” He pushed through, saw that he was lucky. He knew one of the detectives, Harold Jones, an older man who once had a bullet pass through his ear. He liked to show the dime-sized scar as proof of luck. The other detective, a slick-haired young man, was making notes. Labeled plastic evidence bags lay on the couch.

  “Hey there, Mr. Peter Scattergood.” Jones looked up. “We don’t usually have the pleasure of the presence of a representative of the D.A.’s office.”

  “I know you’re overjoyed, Harold.”

  “Berger’s not on this?”

  “No. I got called in. What do we got here?” Peter nodded hello at the younger detective.

  “We’re almost done here. The lab guys been through and got prints and fibers,” Jones began. “They’re taking pictures now.” He jerked his thumb toward the hallway. “Be done in a minute.”

  “Find much?”

  “Not a thing.”

  “No drugs?” Peter started looking around the room.

  “We had a dog up here earlier, and nothing in the apartment.”

  He didn’t want to see a dead body and was happy to wait.

  “Has the place been cleaned up?”

  “Same as when we got here,” the younger man said. “They just finished vacuuming.”

  “Who was here when you arrived?” Peter asked.

  “Patrolmen Phillips and Axsom. They’re downstairs.”

  “What’d they have?”

  “Neighbor called from upstairs, heard a fight.”

  “What’d he see?”

  “She—never saw nobody—”

  “So who saw this guy Carothers?”

  “Somebody else, a woman emptying her trash in the trash chute—she’s down at headquarters being questioned. The lady upstairs who heard the fight, she called nine-one-one, and when the car got here, she insisted they follow it up.”

  “How’d they get in?”

  “They called for backup and broke it down,” the younger detective said. “Fucking cheap door. The door was locked. It’ll be in the report.”

  “Good,” Peter shot back, feeling tired at this sudden petty antagonism. “Glad to hear it.” Sooner or later the young detective would learn that it paid to humor the D.A.’s office. But there was no point in returning the hostility; it was smarter to bring the young detective around to his side. “Say, I didn’t catch your name.”

  “Al Westerbeck.”

  “Al, what kind of weapon do you think it was?”

  The detective scowled, Peter saw. Hell, he too had done a lot of dramatic scowling in his first few years.

  “Whitlock was shot a couple of times. We don’t have a weapon or shells—”

  “Hoskins said he’d been beaten.”

  “No, the girl was.”

  “The girl?” Peter exploded. “Hoskins didn’t mention a girl. And he said the boy was beaten to death.”

  The dete
ctive sucked in his cheeks and shrugged in judgment. “Hoskins’s information is old.”

  The police photography team bustled down the hallway carrying their aluminum camera cases.

  “We’re done.” One of the men nodded.

  “Let’s have a look,” Jones said.

  The three men walked into the kitchen, where a slender young black man in bikini underwear lay on his side on a linoleum floor. He had been shot in the head and, where bullets had entered his skull, a glutinous, dull-red mass had congealed. Inside, thought Peter as he kneeled to look more carefully, had been an authentically superior mind. Another bullet had struck him in the shoulder blade. The boy had voided his bowels as he expired.

  “What did the neighbor hear again?” Peter asked. “Exactly.”

  Westerbeck checked his notepad. “A girl screaming and some gunshots.”

  “One of them women outside said this was a pretty smart kid,” Jones said.

  Peter worried stupidly that the body was cold without clothes on. The limbs were already waxen; the boy’s fingers were straight and beginning to stiffen. His glasses had been dragged under his face and now rested beneath his mouth. Blood had stained the lenses red. He’d bled the way a healthy young man with a good heart would be expected to bleed. Blood had in fact flowed copiously on the floor, following the cracks and slight cant of the linoleum tiles. The edge of the flow had congealed with dust and floor dirt. A neatly constructed peanut butter and jelly sandwich with one bite gone lay on the floor next to Whitlock’s head. Blood had seeped into the crust of the bread. Whitlock’s eyes were open with a look of undiverted attention to the food six inches before his face.

  “Burns,” Peter observed with forced detachment.

  “Yeah, but only from one shot,” Westerbeck confirmed.

  “We got a powder pattern over by the bedroom door. I think the perp got him in the shoulder first, the head second from across the room, then gave him the last one close. That’s why we got burns on only one head-entry point. Like I said, the perp picked up the shells.”

  “The boy left the library at midnight, but didn’t get here until early this morning,” Jones began to narrate. “This is his apartment, but the girl basically lived here, too. We’re only about ten blocks from campus….”

  Peter stared at the sweet beauty of the boy’s body, trying to will him back to life. The boy had known he was to die for only several seconds at most and, thankfully, hadn’t suffered.

  “Where are the kid’s clothes?” he asked.

  Westerbeck pointed at a folded shirt and pants on a kitchen chair and a pair of shoes set beside it.

  “He took them off here in the kitchen. There’s a house key on top,next to his watch and wallet. The wallet has eighty-six dollars in it, so robbery wasn’t the motive. My guess is he came in late, undressed in the kitchen so he didn’t wake the girl, got hungry and made a sandwich—”

  “Then he got it,” Peter interrupted. “Boom.”

  A double homicide was big trouble; it created more pressure, and ran into the issue of the death penalty, which ran into a grab bag of related issues. It worried him that neither Hoskins nor the Mayor knew about the girl. How could they not know?

  “But it’s cold in here,” he said. “Why would he take his clothes off in a cold kitchen?”

  “I hadn’t thought of that,” Westerbeck admitted.

  “It probably means the window wasn’t open at the time,” Peter said, feeling he was observing the obvious. “Where’s the girl?”

  The men walked into the bedroom, where a beautiful black girl lay on the bed. The covers were pulled up to her chin and her eyes were shut. Peter noticed how long her lashes were.

  “Something blunt and in the bathroom, where she was hiding,” Westerbeck reported. “Pretty sure at this point.”

  Peter turned his head toward the bathroom. The door was marred by a broken latch and a long, almost casual swipe of blood on the white paint. On the bathroom floor were pink stretch leotards and aerobics shoes.

  “The perp kicked in the bathroom door and got her on the head and put her here, maybe after she died,” Westerbeck reported earnestly. “The blood pattern in the bed is a seep. I don’t think she was pumping it out of the back of her head. No thrashing pattern of blood on the sheets, no convulsions. Her face and eyelids are stiff and so are her limbs, so my guess is she died up to an hour before Whitlock.”

  Peter noticed on the floor a jump rope and exercise leg weights that attached at the ankle.

  “The guy busted that lock and dragged her out’s my guess. They didn’t trash the room. Her name is Johnetta Henry.”

  There was something interesting in all this, some illogical nugget.

  “Jonesy, you said the neighbor heard yelling, or something,” Peter said. “A fight. And the responding officers showed up and kicked down the door. But it’s obvious Whitlock was surprised. And the girl dead an hour before—”

  He stopped talking, looked at the two men. They were watching him intently.

  “What?” Jones challenged.

  “Not sure,” Peter lied, not knowing why, except that the detective seemed defensive. This was no time to create ill will by second-guessing the police. “Guess the perp waited and knew Whitlock would be home.”

  “Right,” Westerbeck said.

  “Course, that doesn’t explain why the murders were committed differently, does it?”

  No word came from the detectives.

  “A man,” Peter mused pointedly, despite his efforts to be diplomatic, “who has a gun will use it in favor of anything else, all other things being equal. A man who has no gun will use whatever he has. Got an answer to that, Westerbeck?”

  “He killed her in a fight and didn’t think he’d been heard, then he waited for the boy. Killed him with the gun and left. Pretty simple to me.”

  Ah, simplicity. For him, a charged word. It was one of the Quaker values, instilled in Peter his whole childhood: Live a simple, peaceful life that is socially useful. How few people actually did that. Peter stared absentmindedly at the girl’s face. He half desired to bend over and gently, reverently, kiss her cheek as a benediction from the quick to the dead. He wondered if he was going insane, concluded that might be true, and forced himself to consider the information at hand: The neighbor heard the girl’s screams, Jones had said, then called the police. The girl had died up to an hour before Whitlock had been shot to death—and Whitlock was dead when the police broke in. Therefore gunshots had been sounded after the police had been called. And the neighbor, Westerbeck had just said, had also heard shots before calling the police. There was a logical fallacy in this account—the caller could not have done both these things unless two calls had been made before the police had come. That would explain why the neighbor insisted the officer break down the door. In fact, it was unlikely the police would break down the door on the basis of anything less; they hated to deal with domestic fights and would rather let the minor skirmishes resolve themselves. What was apparent, based on the evidence the detectives had unwittingly divulged, was that the police took around an hour to show up—a fantastic, unbelievable amount of time—and in that period, the Mayor’s nephew got his. Did the two police detectives realize all this?

  “You said the neighbor mentioned gunshots in her call, right?” he asked casually.

  “I said that, right.”

  “There was a second nine-one-one.”

  “Why?” Westerbeck said.

  He wasn’t going to be able to keep his mouth shut. “This is your specialty, guys, not mine. But you might as well listen up. Here are the order of events. First, you got a girl’s screams, which are heard by the neighbor and results in, two, the call to the police. When the police finally show up after the sound of gunshots, they find the girl who was screaming dead for an hour—based on rigor mortis—and a boy dead of gunshots minutes prior. The girl died first, after the call but before shots had been fired, then shots were fired, which resulted in another call
to the police and then they showed up.”

  The other men were silent and maybe angry.

  Peter said, “Where’s the neighbor who saw the guy, Jonesy?”

  “Like I said, she’s down at Eighth and Race. She made the ID and gave them a statement.”

  If the death of the Mayor’s nephew could be associated with a slow police response time, then there was a perverse spin to this whole thing already. But he wasn’t ready to make any conclusions. The 911 operator routed calls to a dispatcher while a computer assigned the call a priority value of zero to six. Fives and sixes were often never answered, and in the worst spots of the city the police sometimes let street fights—threes and fours—continue without response in order to avoid injury and hassle.