Break and Enter

by Colin Harrison

  Peter didn’t answer. The other side of Berger, the side that swapped spit with women in public, also probably did a little recreational coke in his off time, just as Jones, the detective, had hinted. Maybe Berger was getting careless, making buys from people who had recognized him or who had sold that information to the cops. Peter had always half known, and in the last few months it was apparent Berger was beginning to drown. Should he say something? He loved Berger, as a confidante, a colleague, a fellow man of the world. He loved Berger’s many despicable traits, even. Other than a chronic sniffling, Berger didn’t show many symptoms. And there was no joy in looking for them—Berger was his best friend. They had a balanced relationship; Berger was smarter, but needed Peter’s approval. As a lawyer, Berger was tops in the office. His in-court perfectionism was entirely unintentional, the by-product of a mind that worked like a man painting a white room white who never believes he has finished. And yet he was unlike so many of the attorneys in the office, especially Hoskins, who stormed and stammered and seemed to think that hours worked would always win out over brilliance. More than once, while all of them argued around the table in the two-hundred-year-old tavern behind the office, Berger occasionally let loose a remark that stopped Hoskins in his tracks like a spear hurled from across a room. Hoskins had an ego that functioned like an immune system; it flowed to any wound and absorbed and neutralized all alien information. Berger didn’t work that way. He was habitually at the office at six A.M. handling the most difficult and publicized cases, often being interviewed, eloquent in a tired and dispassionate way, impeccably dressed, the epitome of well-prepared calm in the courtroom, able to wriggle out of the constitutional snares set by the private-practice defense attorneys—many of them former prosecutors. He could face down the most recalcitrant of witnesses, fluster them into betraying themselves, surprising the truth from them like a bird flushed from concealing underbrush. Berger, more than anyone, had taught Peter his job.

  “So what about Hoskins? You have anything specific to say to me about handling this case?”

  “Don’t take it on Hoskins’s terms,” he continued in the same ruminative voice. “The pressure is too much. You think you can manage the pressure, but it adds up. You think you can handle it, that everything is under control. In fact, the more it’s out of control the more excited you get about keeping everything under control—you have to go faster and faster, you have to start really flying to keep up with everything. I found myself—don’t even get started, it gets to be—you get into it and then you’re in trouble—” Berger stared at Peter as if he were trying to speak without the liability of words. Tama had stopped playing and was watching the two men talk. “Just don’t make the mistakes I’ve made,” he went on. “Avoid the obvious fuck-ups.”

  He didn’t call Berger’s divorce lawyer. Anyone Berger recommended would be wildly expensive and suggest aggressive techniques to squirrel money away from Janice. Besides, he’d wash his own dirty linen privately. The Philadelphia Bar was notoriously cross-wired and incestuous, and above all, he was a private man.

  Instead, he did the stupidest thing one could do when looking for a lawyer. In the Yellow Pages, he found a couple of divorce lawyers downtown and called Phil Mastrude, Counselor at Law, Practicing Primarily in Family Law and Domestic Relations, No Charge Initial Consultation, Fees Available on Request, Compassionate Advice Humbly Offered. The last, questionable line of advertising intrigued him. Either Mastrude was a nut, or saw his work as a lot more than filing divorce papers. Peter spoke with the secretary and made an appointment for the following day.

  It was later now, nearly noon. He should be preparing for Robinson. Already he was second-guessing himself about talking to Vinnie. Meanwhile, the detectives were trying to trick Carothers into talking—discussing sports, offering cigarettes, saying it would be easier on him now, etc.—but he sat quietly in his chair, not talking, now on the official advice of his attorney, a Mr. Stein, who had called from Miami and told the D.A.’s office in a firm voice they had better have some concrete reason to bring a charge against his client or he would sputter indignation to the press. The police had up to ten hours to charge him. With the approved search warrant, police had quickly combed Carothers’s Philadelphia apartment and turned up nothing but a small bottle of gun oil under the kitchen sink. The gun oil tantalized the police—made them, Peter knew, cuss and look at one another in knowing frustration. Its existence, of course, proved nothing, and by itself was useless information. The neighbors questioned by the police said Carothers worked days as a furniture mover, came and went quietly, apparently didn’t spend all his nights in his apartment, and spoke to few people.

  Then, as the day had worn on, Carothers had suddenly gotten angry and protested that he was innocent and in danger of losing his job by being detained.

  “He’s fucking guilty,” the detective complained on the phone.

  That was not necessarily true, Peter told himself. Like many cases, this one was marred with niggling inconsistencies: a double murder with different methods, and police who may have been slow to respond to an emergency but who had identified and located a potential suspect within hours of the murder. All this information tended to strengthen the case for Carothers’s innocence, or rather, to be exact, his inability to be charged. And yet, Peter wondered, how could an hourly-wage moving company employee afford a high-priced private-practice lawyer who would fly immediately from his vacation to defend him?

  A few minutes after one, Berger walked in, carrying a portable radio.

  “Listen to this.” He turned the volume louder.

  “… who has been questioned as a witness in the slaying of the young couple, admitted upon confrontation by a newspaper reporter that she was a heavy drinker, and was drunk last night. A short time ago, Ms. Douglas admitted to our reporter that having been inebriated may well have compromised her ability to recognize—”

  The door exploded open.

  “What the fuck is that? I say, what in the goddamned fucking world is that?”

  Hoskins, chief terrorizer of them all, stood in the middle of the office listening to the radio, his eyes goggling around in anger, face red, feet planted wide like a catcher at home plate waiting to block a runner heading home.

  “That,” Berger appraised, “is the end of that witness.”

  “Off! Off!” Hoskins waved at the radio while he wrapped his fingers around Peter’s phone and dialed the detective unit that was handling the case. His stomach strained his shirt.

  “This is Hoskins—yeah, get him for me. I don’t care if he’s—no, you don’t understand, I mean get him, now.” He looked at Peter. “What are you looking so relaxed for, buddy? This is your fish and he’s slipping off the goddamned—what?” He turned back to the phone. “Yes, I just heard it. Who? Donnell? Never heard of the bitch—”

  “The Inquirer,” Peter said to Berger. “Short woman, reddish hair. The investigative sort.”

  “The Inquirer?” Hoskins hollered. “Never heard of her, ever. It doesn’t matter … all right. Tell me, then.”

  After a minute, Hoskins slammed the phone down.

  “This reporter, Donnell, whatever her name is, found out who the witness was. Somebody down there told her the woman lived on the same hall. All she did was return to the building! The simplest, easiest thing in the world. The apartment was sealed off, but not the floor. A radio reporter went with Donnell. This Wanda woman is dropped off by the detective and walks inside the building still smelling of booze. They never got her cleaned up. She was drunk last night. Donnell asks a question right in front of the policeman guarding the apartment door and the woman says, ‘Yeah, I suppose I could have made a mistake’—into the fucking microphone! Goddamn dumb-ass witnesses don’t have shit between their ears! Fucking reporters!”

  “We got to let him go,” Peter said.

  “All you have is a bimbo witness who admits to two reporters she was drunk,” Berger added.

  Hoskins nodded and
muttered as if he were biting off and eating their words as quickly as they could speak.

  “We can’t hold him for no reason, not with this kind of attention,” Peter reasoned. “There are no outstanding warrants for him. It appears as if all he’s been doing for three years is working at a moving company. His boss says he’s a good worker and rarely misses a day. We haven’t yet found anybody who can connect him to the couple. For all we know, he goes to church regularly. The papers will paint it as a setup. It’ll look bad as hell that we arrested some guy just because some drunk woman thought she saw somebody in a hallway. As soon as this Stein guy steps off his plane in an hour and calls his office and finds out about the woman, he’s going to be on the phone demanding we release Carothers.”

  “If only we could hold him another day,” Hoskins mused angrily, “just to see what would come out of his mouth. Under that cool mask is a guy who’s very upset. He’s our guy, he’s got a record as long as my dick.”

  “Not a long … record,” Berger observed.

  Hoskins shook his head, ignoring the joke, unhappy with the general configuration of the universe and his inability to change it. “The Mayor said to me when I told him we had Carothers that he was very pleased this thing looked so straightforward.”

  Hoskins stared abstractly toward the telephone, and for the life of him, Peter did not know what he was thinking or why he cared about the Mayor’s opinion. Within the political constellation of the city, they were enemies.

  “So what about the Mayor?” Peter countered. “You know what he told me this morning? He said run the whole thing by the book. If we charge some guy with no evidence, the Mayor’s going to look like a bully. He should know that. You ready to build a charge now on that woman’s statement and then find nothing else and then have wasted the time on the wrong guy?” Peter said. Everyone in the office understood such a course of action could publicly embarrass the D.A. “Besides, that’s not the point. We really don’t have enough.”

  Carothers was in custody but had not been formally charged. The police had no statements by the defendant, no eyewitness account, no physical evidence, and, of course, no statement by the victims. The only shred of connecting information had been discredited. Nothing linked Carothers to the scene, and under law he had only to wait ten hours in custody without being told by a magistrate what he was charged with before going free. He’d been taken in at five A.M. and thus, even fudging an hour, they had less than three hours to the deadline.

  “I fucking know he’s the guy,” said Hoskins.

  “Oh, how?” Berger asked.

  Hoskins stood up, agitated, looking like he needed to break something. “Look at my face! Am I smiling? No!” His bow tie appeared tighter than usual, and he pointed his round, fat forefingers like pistols at Peter’s face. “And you better be right, Peter. You had better be right. Sorry is no good in this town when you fuck up. Sorry doesn’t feed the cat.”

  THE REPORTERS HAD FOUND HIM. Competing for the slightest piece of information, they wanted to know more about one of the main players in the Whitlock case, and had found Peter at the very hour he was to finish up the Robinson trial. As soon as he had turned the corner on the fourth-floor hallway, someone had looked up and said “Over here” and the lights had snapped on blindingly and microphones were shoved toward him and the questions peppered him. He’d moved tight-lipped through about ten reporters, gotten into court, and finally, trying to finish a bad dream, they had moved to the closing arguments. His head pounded in exhaustion. He listened to Morgan finish up his rant about the confession and add to that the usual wind about circumstantial evidence and inconsistencies in testimony for the prosecution, then finish his summary with a hackneyed emotional guilt trip for the jury: “… and do you really wish to convict a man—remove his freedoms, the very thing this country is based on—because of what the prosecution purports to be evidence, when in fact…” It was boilerplate, and it was bad.

  Now Judge Scarletti nodded at him to begin his summation. Peter stood up and walked over to the jury, hands open before him like a preacher. A dumb trick, but it got their attention. He would speak for Judy Warren, who could not speak for herself, and his words would be the last the jury heard before the judge gave them the charge. Now he would impose a narrative on the testimony, remind them of what they had heard, and what they should remember. His words would clarify, simplify, and bring order so that the jury would apply common sense to what it had heard.

  “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, thank you for your careful consideration of all the evidence you’ve heard, evidence which I suggest shows beyond reasonable doubt that the defendant, Mr. William Robinson, did on August sixteenth of last year murder intentionally and knowingly Miss Judy Warren. Now, I want to reiterate”—he didn’t like the dull look he was getting from the old white-haired man, a retired barber who sat in the last row—“I want to review the important points of testimony for you, because, as I suggest you will see, this is a fairly simple case in which all the pieces fit together. That’s right—every piece fits every other piece. They show just when, where, and how Mr. Robinson killed his ex-girlfriend after being seized with anger. He was frenzied with jealousy.

  “Now then, the defense has chosen not to contend these facts directly. The defense, ladies and gentlemen, has offered to you what I suggest is an utterly improbable set of events. The defense”—the disgust in his voice was palpable now, he knew—“would have you believe that William Robinson was nowhere near Judy Warren last August sixteenth and that his confession is the result of mental illness and was elicited, planned, and coached by the police. The defense would have you believe that the confession is spurious, a hoax, a falsehood. The defense has brought in a couple of William Robinson’s old high-school pals to say he was with them early that night when they went drinking. They are his friends and they want to be loyal to him, so they’re telling a story they all agreed on. They testified he drove home that night. I want you to consider what kind of witnesses they were, and whether you can consider them as credible. Then the defendant’s housekeeper has said she heard him come in the house and that she spoke with him. Yesterday we saw that this testimony doesn’t hold water—she as much as admitted that herself.

  “Mr. William Robinson did not come to the stand and testify in this case. That’s okay. He doesn’t have to. He has the right of protection against self-incrimination. You may be tempted to infer from the fact that the defendant did not take the stand that he is guilty. You may say to yourself, ‘If he is innocent, then why didn’t he come forward and say so?’ ” He paused just long enough to make sure they asked themselves this question, because he wanted them to answer it themselves. “But that is not correct. It’s not the way our legal system operates. The defendant is presumed to be innocent, as you were told at the outset of this trial. However, I do wish for you to infer and decide from what you have heard, which I suggest is very conclusive evidence that William Robinson is guilty of murder. The defense’s testimony rests on vague, inconsistent statements, not on demonstrable fact. We’re looking for a true verdict, and what the defense has offered us just doesn’t fit what a reasonable man or woman would agree with. Okay. Why do I say that? Because we’ve got so many pieces of proof that add up to an actual trail. Even though we have a constitutionally sound, properly administered, full and complete confession dictated by the defendant and then signed by him in the presence of two police officers, we don’t need that evidence—we have enough physical evidence to convict Mr. Robinson. As I promised to present in my opening statement, we can track the defendant through the entire day. We have the Wawa food market receipt with the date and time on it, forty-one minutes before the approximate time of death of Judy Warren. This particular Wawa is about five minutes from where Judy lived. We have testimony from Mr. Keegan, the defendant’s co-worker at the stock brokerage, that Mr. Robinson was always talking about the victim, about her appearance, about how she looked in a halter top she wore because of the
hot weather. As Mr. Keegan described for us, Mr. Robinson was angered by the fact that Miss Warren was seeing another man. We have the friend of the victim, Miss Swick, who said that the victim told her that she believed Mr. Robinson had followed her home several times the previous week at five-thirty in the afternoon. There was testimony that Mr. Robinson was starting to harass the deceased, that he wouldn’t leave her alone. Miss Swick said she herself had seen the accused arguing with Miss Warren. Miss Swick was quite certain about that. As you saw, she was a little hazy about the time of day, but that’s understandable. This happened about six months ago. But as to her identification of the defendant, Miss Swick remained certain, on direct questioning, cross-examination, and on redirect.

  “We have the portion of Mr. Robinson’s left thumbprint on Judy Warren’s eyeglasses. His thumbprint somehow appears on her glasses. Were they still intimate enough that he would take off her glasses for her or would she let him hold her glasses? No. Miss Swick remembered the deceased being repelled by the sight of the defendant and not trusting him. The words she used, if I remember, according to Miss Swick, were ‘Actually, I think he’s a sleazy weirdo.’ She was no longer attracted to him. She wanted to avoid him. He scared her. So, again, I want you to ask yourselves, why in the world would a fingerprint of Mr. Robinson’s appear on Judy Warren’s glasses? The defense has tried to discredit the expertise of Captain Docherty of the mobile crime unit, who’s been with the Philadelphia Police Department for seventeen years and listed his certifications and continuing professional instruction at national forensic seminars on fingerprinting. Captain Docherty, you will remember, testified that the thumbprint on Judy Warren’s glasses, matched to a reasonable degree of scientific certainty the left thumb of the defendant. I’m talking about a pattern, ladies and gentlemen of the jury. A chain of evidence that links the dead body of Judy Warren to William Robinson. It’s very simple, there’s nothing tricky, nothing fancy about it, because Mr. Robinson did a very poor job of covering his tracks …”