Break and Enter

by Colin Harrison

  But, as if he were reading Peter’s mind and wished to discredit the D.A.’s office, Jones muttered quietly, “Berger’s into the junk, ain’t he? That why he’s not here?”

  “Berger’s in Harrisburg. He’ll be back in the city around lunchtime. That is why he’s not here.”

  Peter examined the girl’s sunken eye sockets and the tautness of the skin around her temples and cheekbones. He looked around the room.

  “What do you think here?”

  “I say the perp got out the kitchen window, up the fire escape, over to the next building.”

  “How do you know?” Peter asked. “That still doesn’t answer the question why Whitlock took his clothes off in a cold kitchen. Unless the window was closed by the perp when he came inside, and reopened when he fled.”

  “Right.”

  “Maybe—that assumes the perp came in the window in the first place, which could be wrong. Get somebody to rebuild that front door and figure out how the lock was constructed. See if it locked with a key from the outside or if it pulled shut locked or opened with a credit card through the crack.”

  “Right.” Jones scribbled a note to himself. “You should see her body, and I’m not being a sicko, either.”

  He reached over and pulled back the sheets. The girl was naked and slender. Except for the matted red wool of her head wound, her body was untouched and possessed a supple, holy stillness. Her arms lay at her side, as if she were sleeping with no anxiety at being vulnerable, or peacefully submitting to an examination, which of course she was. Peter ran a fingernail over her stomach, feeling the lack of subcutaneous fat and the tight corrugation of muscle. Her breasts were flat knobs of nipple, her navel a tight slit. He knew, without seeing it, that she had a terrific ass. And he knew what a pig he was for thinking about such a thing, too.

  Now he took one finger and deferentially pulled up her lip, bending close to examine her teeth. They were perfect.

  “Any signs of rape?” he asked.

  “None, but the lab will tell us for sure. I think she must have been into the junk to get that thin,” the detective said.

  “That all you think about, who’s into the junk?” Peter responded. “This girl was in great condition. Find out if she belonged to an exercise club, dance class, something like that.”

  Peter looked at her face. Lividity—the gravitational movement of body fluids to the lowest-lying portions of the corpse—had set in, but she retained much of the color of life. So often black women had such beautiful skin, even black women in their fifties, better than white women twenty years younger. He covered the body and for the first time looked around the room carefully. Preppy clothes, the boy’s biology, chemistry, and anatomy textbooks in the shelves. A VCR, dozens of trashy rock-video cassettes next to it. Near that, carefully labeled notebooks and Polaroids of some spongy stuff probably taken through a microscope. In the closet were Air Jordans, L. L. Bean duckshoes, Gucci loafers. America: A person no longer lived a lifestyle, but bought it. He tried to piece it together. Where did the money come from? Why was the girl cowering in the bathroom? The dead couple had a future, were on their way up. Who would want to kill them? Who would dare?

  “Did the crime unit get any kind of blood pattern?” he asked. “Flecks, drops?”

  “You’re going to have to check that with them.”

  “So you think he went up the fire escape?” Peter said.

  “I think that’s the way he came in, too.”

  “Why?” he asked.

  “ ‘Cause the front door was locked.”

  “Maybe the perp came in peaceably and she locked it after him or he locked it himself after closing the door. Or locked it on the way out,” Westerbeck suggested.

  “That doesn’t explain why she was in the bathroom.”

  “They had a fight and she ran into the bathroom.”

  “Or she suddenly heard him come in and locked both doors. I think that’s it. She wouldn’t have locked it if she knew he had the key—she would have fled. Which means he slipped the lock or came in through the window. Also,” Jones reasoned further, “if she knew he had the key and if she was in trouble, she wouldn’t stay here. She could have left through the window, too.”

  “Right, so if the door couldn’t be slipped, then he had a stolen key or came in through the window,” said Peter, thinking out loud, at the same time vaguely tired at all of this circular logic necessary to play out every possible scenario. “If she did lock the two doors and hide in there, why didn’t she have clothes on and why wouldn’t she call the police? Maybe she did call and we don’t know it. The girl’s the secret to this. I noticed the phone has a long cord. Get whoever knows this apartment, her mother or somebody, to tell us where she usually kept the phone. This girl’s neat as a pin. She’s the kind to put the phone back in the same place after using it. See if the phone was always pulled into the bedroom like this.”

  The detectives weren’t used to taking orders from an A.D.A. They just scowled and didn’t speak.

  “Did somebody check under the fire escape?” Peter asked. “Why couldn’t he have gone down?”

  “It’s rusted shut. It would be something like a thirty-foot drop.”

  “So then we know he didn’t begin his entry with the fire escape.”

  “Some of those black guys can jump pretty high,” Jones cracked.

  Peter ignored this. “What’s above it?”

  “The ladder leads right up to the rooftop,” Westerbeck said. “And there are a couple of other buildings he could have gone down.”

  “All right.”

  Despite a little bungled logic, the detectives knew, of course, what they were doing. They could continue without him. He wanted to leave, anyway. He didn’t like standing around with dead bodies.

  “What’s wrong?” Jones asked.

  “I don’t like standing around with dead bodies.”

  “You’re an office man, what do you expect?”

  “Keep in touch, Harold.”

  “Yeah.”

  “One more thing, okay?” Peter stood up, looked at the girl again. He’d see her many times again in the photographs taken that morning.

  “Yeah, what?” Jones answered.

  “If Berger’s got his problems—and who the hell really knows what they are, anyway—the whole world doesn’t need to know about them, what do you say?”

  “I was talking confidentially, but I hear you.”

  “People have problems,” he said, getting his coat from the living room. He looked at his watch: almost eight A.M. “Myself included.”

  “Tell me about it,” Jones said, lighting a cigarette. “You’re fucking golden in this city.”

  BACK IN HIS CAR, Peter heard the radio newscaster announce in somber, thrilled tones the death of the Mayor’s nephew. He drove east on Baltimore, back to Center City. The death of the boy was the second leading story, just behind the new trouble in the Middle East. In the short run, it was a hot story. In the long run, almost nobody would care, because something else, some new happy disaster that sold newspapers and justified advertising rates, would come along. The grand design, the deep trends, the stuff that really mattered—well, he’d long since realized he was going to live without really knowing what was happening in the time and place of his life. History had a way of clarifying the essence of foolishness, and no one liked to believe themselves to be a fool.

  He turned the radio off and parked behind the D.A.’s office at 1300 Chestnut. Inside the front doors, the detective on desk duty waved him through to the elevators. The homicide unit offices were on the seventh floor; the coffee-stained carpeting and hallways lined high with boxes of files belied the tremendous power hidden within the messy cubicles where the attorneys worked.

  Cassandra had called him, and this surprised him, for certainly he had not expected to hear from her so soon. Didn’t she have some meeting to attend? That she had called was a bad sign—it meant she had not reasonably considered the kind of day he w
as having. Cassandra represented a temporary weakness, a mistake he had made, and he told himself he would not make it again. He wanted to remember the sex as mediocre, which in fact it probably had been, given they didn’t know each other, but what lingered unwanted in his mind was the absolute, animal pleasure of lying in bed with another warm body.

  He sat at his desk fiddling with the papers and the stained Styrofoam coffee cups from the day before, missing Janice and staring vacantly into space, half knowing he was living now in the moment that came each morning at work before he lost himself, forgot who the hell he was, and plunged into the day, only to reemerge late in the afternoon a day older, a day more permanently tired. Seven hours ago he had been humping a strange woman. Two hours ago he had talked to the Mayor of the fifth-largest city in America. An hour ago he had stared at a dead woman’s face. Ten minutes ago he was eating a doughnut with commuters just in off the trains, snapping their Wall Street Journals as they turned the pages.

  The phone rang, and a detective identified himself.

  “We got Carothers.”

  “I know,” Peter asked. “You got an ID and ran him in.”

  “Going to work.”

  “As he showed up for work?”

  “Yeah. The paperwork should be on your desk in maybe an hour.”

  “You guys are working fast for a change,” Peter said.

  “Well, we got a call from the Mayor’s office saying they wanted this done by the book. In my book,” the detective complained, “that means he wants no fuckola bullshit screw-ups, so we did the paper right away.”

  “You prepared a warrant for Carothers’s place?”

  “That’s what I was callin’ you for, yeah.”

  Peter heard the details and gave agreement on the search warrant. With the form approved by the on-duty judge, the police would search Carothers’s belongings that morning.

  Outside, the traffic rose, the city rumbled into full motion, hundreds of thousands of cars streaming in from the expressway, drivers listening to morning drive programs on the radio. He stood at his seventh-floor window to watch the people hurrying along Thirteenth Street; there was no solace in his similarly infinitesimal position. He did not mind being one small, limited man, but it galled him to think that there were others who were living his exact life, give or take a few specifics, in Philadelphia and other cities all over America. Other promising young white men with good conventional educations who rose in the morning and put on a suit and went to work and lived. The pre-work scene this morning had been an aberration. A million men like him bought USA Today because of the good sports section, shaved their faces five mornings a week at the same time, knew at any moment exactly how many women they had slept with, and what their total worth was, could identify the local news station by the lead-in music on the telecast, knew by heart every door between their bedrooms and their offices. Men who as teenagers had measured their erect penises and occasionally wondered if it had grown any longer or shorter since then, who had read some of the great texts—Peter had once read every essay by Ralph Waldo Emerson—and had forgotten nearly everything that was in them, who all thought it would be great someday to take a couple of months and drive around America in a camper, who had started to watch their waistlines with morbid curiosity, who finally understood by dint of repetition of experience who their fathers were and what they had suffered, who didn’t read the Op-Ed pages as carefully as they would have liked, who didn’t know their world geography well, who guiltily thought racist thoughts from time to time, and who had never experienced any true form of material hardship or known few people who actually had, and who were not yet afraid of death.

  Would he ever do something that was great, something that was in any way memorable? Would he live his life and when he died, the surface of time would close over him as if, for all purposes, he had never lived? No wonder people had children; a child was proof one had existed. Even these very thoughts, he knew, were hopelessly typical, the expectable thoughts had by other men. Perhaps his entire mind was largely similar to those of other men. For three years he had been trained to think in the conventional structures of the law. Grinding away in the law library, outlining cases, walking into his constitutional law class absolutely ready, confident that the professor could grill him and he would be able to respond perfectly. Nothing but pathetic vanity. He’d been serviceable in constitutional law, a dullard in tax law, a wizard in criminal law.

  By the third year, after a summer internship, he’d known he wanted to work for the District Attorney’s office. He still had his framed letter of appointment in a closet somewhere, and remained glad he hadn’t taken a regular private-practice job. While other freshly minted J.D.s were sitting in some twenty-fifth-floor law firm library, he’d been slugging it out with public defenders, sleaze-bag defense attorneys, the full palette of criminal personalities, judges on the take. He had worked with some great lawyers, too; top pros, like Berger. It was one of the few decisions of which he was proud. Janice had been proud of him, too, though in retrospect she may have wished he had gone into a big firm. The work would have been just as hard, the hours as long, but the emotional roughage almost negligible. If he had gone corporate, he would be making deep into the six figures. Could he have bought off some of Janice’s unhappiness? Probably. He could have taken her on great trips, hired someone to come in and clean twice a week. But he would have achieved—he was certain of this, knowing his own weaknesses—the state of being a walking, talking dead man, deader than he was even now. He saw such men every day around town, their lives inescapably rooted in the transmission of wealth from others to themselves. They rotted invisibly from within, for their work had little to do with actual life. He hated them, and for some of the wrong reasons. They knew they were stuck in a system and had decided to get as fat as possible off of it; this did not seem entirely undesirable. They looked down on attorneys like him, who in their eyes did what amounted to unpaid dirty work. Of course, all other things being equal, in court none of them had enough experience to carry his briefcase. He hated them because of their greed and he hated them because, unlike him, they seemed to be absolutely safe.

  So, Peter decided, kicking his feet onto his desk, wishing he could get away from the office, he was going to take a risk, like taking a good foul in basketball—it could hurt you but the potential cost was worth the potential gain. Janice’s absence was driving him toward some sort of action, wasn’t it? He was pissed off, wasn’t he? Yes. And unable to see this whole unhappy episode as anything other than a stage of the marriage, from which they would emerge intact? Yes. He made sure his door was shut, then flipped through his Rolodex to V. He dialed and walked the phone to the window.

  “Yeah.”

  “Vinnie, this is Peter Scattergood.”

  “Peter. It’s been a long time,” coughed a hoarse voice. “How’s the hangman business?”

  “A thrill a minute.”

  “I understand you guys been busy this morning. What can I do for you?”

  Vinnie got right to the important question, with no time for falsely sentimental chitchat about shared boyhoods when there was business to attend to. As an Italian from South Philadelphia with forty years of family connections, Vinnie understood the city differently than Peter, had grown up in ward politics, and often knew at least remotely the men of Sicilian descent in good suits who from time to time were found dead in the back of new black Cadillacs. It was no accident he was situated in the police radio room. Vinnie’s father had made enough money in the construction business to allow the family to spurn the Catholic schools and send their four boys to Penn Charter to get prepped for college, which Vinnie had decided he hadn’t needed, much to his father’s anger. Vinnie and Peter had traded off at the forward position for three years. Vinnie, a terrible shooter, would clog the lane with his thick, hairy trunk and foul unmercifully—a knee in the balls, a sudden elbow in the gut, and a look the other way. Vinnie had tired out the sleek black wizard shooters the
other Inter-Academic League private schools imported on scholarship like contraband from selected Philadelphia neighborhoods to beef up otherwise lily-white squads. Then Peter would come in, start setting picks, passing, hitting short bank shots. He had never much liked Vinnie but had always been compelled by his frank dishonesty, been amazed at the way he cut practices, cheated in scrimmages, claimed he had butt-fucked the coach’s wife. By age seventeen, Vinnie was covertly arranging abortions for the knocked-up girlfriends of classmates. He and Vinnie saw each other at the alumni basketball game every couple of years.

  “I need to find a car, Vinnie.”

  “Right. Say, I’m gonna be eating a late breakfast, Peter. Let me give you my deli number.”

  Peter waited five minutes while Vinnie left his office and, presumably, went to a public phone. Then he dialed.

  “Vinnie?”

  “Peter.”

  “You sound pretty paranoid.”

  “The phones are bad in my office. In my whole fucking department. An FBI guy is screwing a secretary down the hall. She doesn’t know we know, but we know.”

  “I’m looking for a car.”

  “Some cars are hard to find. We got over a million vehicles registered in the greater metropolitan area. Plus junk plus stolen plus chopshop.”

  “I need it quickly and quietly.” He hoped Vinnie was not taping the conversation to blackmail him later. “All I want is a pattern. Where it’s parked and when.”

  “I can get it put on the teletype to the precincts,” Vinnie responded.

  “At each roll call, the men on patrol will be reminded it’s one of the cars they’re looking for. One out of many, you understand? That’s all I can guarantee.”

  Peter stood at his window. On the corner below, a SEPTA bus tapped the rear of a taxi. He told Vinnie the license number.

  “What’s it look like?”

  “An ‘eighty-eight Subaru wagon. Yellow, light yellow. Scratch along the right side.” Janice was a good driver, but somebody had nailed her in the Acme parking lot. “There’s a green NOW sticker on the bumper.”