Break and Enter

by Colin Harrison

  We went downstairs, me first. I felt sort of sexy in my shorts. Don’t usually feel that way. John said he’d found something in the basement he wanted me to have a look at. We went downstairs and he took his flashlight over to a big stone oven built into the wall. He said that often the old houses had an oven in the basement. The chimney system was attached to the chimney of the fireplace above, in the living room, he said. In winter the heat of the oven would rise and warm the house above. In the summer, the basement was a cooler place to work. He made me lie down inside the oven and look up. He opened the flue and I could see a tiny square of daylight very high up. So it was a working oven. Then he told me to look at the back of the oven. I did. He removed two bricks from the oven wall by slipping a screwdriver between the cracks. You would never know the bricks lifted out. Behind the bricks were hinges. They were only a little rusty. He told me to push on the wall. I did and nothing happened. Then he pulled the flue lever next to the oven and told me to push again. I did. The wall swung back and there was a little dark room. You could fit maybe three people in there, all curled up. I asked how they could breathe and he said there was an air vent that went to the upstairs closet. He said the flue was a fail-safe system so that the wall could only be opened when no fire burned in the oven. No one would build a fire without checking the flue, and if they did build one with the flue shut, the fire would draw poorly, not burn, and fill the basement with smoke. Then somebody would open the flue. I said who in the world would build a fake back to an oven? “The Quakers who smuggled slaves,” he said. I told him that my former husband was a Quaker. John said he didn’t realize I was divorced. I said I’d been divorced a year. He said he didn’t mean to be asking such personal questions. Actually I didn’t mind letting him know I was sort of available. I don’t really think of myself that way. John asked me what my ex-husband did. I just said he worked in Center City. We got back to the oven—the neighborhood used to be a mercantile area and, of course, back in the early eighteen-hundreds, the city was run by the Quakers. I knew all this but didn’t say much. The neighborhood was close to the river and that’s where many of the merchants originally lived.

  Get to it, Janice, Peter thought, hating her for her need to recount every detail of what could only be a seduction, pained by and admiring of the earnestness and care with which she lived. He heard noises downstairs but kept reading.

  He said he’d recommend that he brick up behind the oven then, not brick up the trap wall but behind it. I said that was fine, keep the wall so we can look at it, but make sure the rats stay out.

  Later after all the workers had left, John knocked on the door. He had a bottle of wine and a bag of groceries and said he wanted to make dinner for us. Also he had brought a kerosene space heater and showed me how to use it. The house will be warmer now! He had gotten some fish and vegetables from the Italian market. So I said yes and we made dinner.

  I told myself I wanted nothing to do with any men for six months at least, maybe a year. Janice, a fool for love. John and I went to bed. On my crummy narrow mattress and it was the most romantic thing in the world, just the two of us and a bare room and the wineglasses on the wooden floor. I did everything I could to please him and I liked doing it. Afterward he slept on the floor next to me, using his pants as a pillow and with one arm draped over my back. I really didn’t sleep much. I think he’s about twenty-six. Younger. I lay there with one hand on my breast. The light came into the room about five o’clock. The walls lightened and the shadows moved over John’s back. He slept very still. Peter always plays basketball in his sleep. John lay there so peacefully, so beautifully. About six o’clock, John woke. We made a joke about the painters, how they would lose faith in me. He understood and slipped out before they came. My world is different now. Things change, spin forward, happen. I’m learning. I’m free—

  “Find what you needed?” a voice hollered up the stairs.

  Peter quickly tossed Janice’s journal back into the spot where he’d found it and darted into the bathroom. He flushed the toilet.

  “Yeah, they changed the float valve—the thing that cuts the water off,” said the painter he had spoken to earlier. He pretended to inspect the old porcelain toilet, and, leaning over, saw his face reflected in the water and read the words AMERICAN STANDARD.

  “Looks good,” Peter stalled, his universe rearranging itself inside his head. “Let me ask you about the carpenters. You’re around during the day. Are they overcharging?”

  The painter liked being asked a question of expertise.

  “Well, they could work harder, if you know what I’m saying. The foreman hangs around, could do more. But they’re doing a decent job. You see the floors downstairs yet?”

  He needed to escape.

  “Please show me,” he responded weakly, remembering to get his briefcase from Janice’s room, even stealing a last superstitious look at the bed as if it were a place somebody had died or where a terrible accident had occurred. They clumped downstairs and he inspected the tightness of the floor, heard how each board had been hammered in. He looked at his watch in front of the painter, and said he really had to see another property. He walked casually through the front door and fled.

  WHEN PETER RETURNED to the office, he had a stack of calls and fax reports waiting for him. “They got that guy,” a detective from North Philadelphia hollered on the phone. “That guy Carothers isn’t going anywhere now.” The information had come in sudden bits and pieces, and Peter stacked the reports on his desk in chronological order: Late the previous evening, a Kensington police stakeout team had observed four armed men knock over a supermarket. They waited in an old van parked forty feet from the store’s bright windows and watched the men drive up, get out, walk stiffly in, and draw shotguns on the surprised checkout tellers who were running their registers for the shift total. The police watched as the store manager was pistol-whipped before opening the store safe. As planned, the stakeout team called for backup, and three cruisers converged on the holdup team as they exited the store with the night’s cash receipts. The police ordered the men to halt. The men opened fire, blowing out the van’s windshield, and ran to their car, an ancient rust-eaten Lincoln that concealed a well-tuned V-8. The police returned fire, and one man was hit in the buttocks. He hobbled to the getaway car, was kicked aside by his compatriots, and fell to the ground when the car lurched away. The police followed the car, which overshot a turn and crashed against the brick corner of the local African Baptist church. The three men escaped on foot. Meanwhile the stakeout team summoned an ambulance and began attending to the wounded man lying on the oily parking lot. This man was Wayman Carothers, who only six hours before had been released from custody.

  Later—long after EMTs discovered and gingerly removed a loaded handgun from the deep pockets of his wool coat—a team of emergency- room residents took out the slug from Carothers and concluded he had narrowly missed being paralyzed from the waist down. A second slug was found lodged in the thick slab of muscle that wrapped around his left thigh. Though painful, the wounds were essentially superficial.

  On Carothers, the detective said, was found a small address book, which listed a number of women, but no relatives or friends. Nearly every woman contacted said, when she realized she was talking to the police, that she no longer was in touch with Carothers, and thank the Lord for that. Except a woman named Vicki. The police met with Vicki and found that she and Carothers shared a $350-a-month apartment different from the one they had searched when Carothers had been brought in for the Whitlock murder.

  All this had happened that morning. When the police searched the second apartment, they found a semi-automatic AK-47 assault rifle, three more pistols, several hundred rounds of ammunition, assorted switchblades, eight thousand dollars’ worth of China White synthetic heroin—which suggested by its purity and packaging of blue tape and star label that it was from New York City—a crack pipe, several syringes still in their sterile wrappers, and an unopened, duty-la
beled crate of whiskey stolen from a Philadelphia warehouse six months prior.

  “Wait a minute,” Peter interrupted. “You said before he was wearing a wool coat?”

  “Yeah.”

  Carothers had originally been arrested in his mover’s uniform. But it occurred to Peter that he may have been more likely to be wearing a heavy wool coat the night of the murder—in fact, the drunken woman who had identified Carothers had said he was wearing such a coat.

  “Were you actually at this new apartment?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Any other coats there? For cold weather?”

  “Don’t remember.”

  “See any bloodstains on the wool coat he was arrested in?”

  “Sure, in the back where he got hit and—”

  “I mean bloodstains elsewhere, a day or two old.”

  “Don’t know.”

  “Where, exactly, is the coat?”

  “At the hospital, I guess.”

  “All right,” Peter said. “Get him blood-typed and have them check out the stains on the coat, see if any match the Henry girl or Whitlock. And do it before the coat is lost or the stains decompose. What else?”

  The detective continued to narrate. The fact that Carothers was obviously a bad character would normally reinforce the original suspicion that he was the killer of Whitlock and Johnetta Henry. But in this case the opposite was true, because the police had found a well-drawn road map showing the ways to exit a local 7-Eleven convenience store. Even the streets were labeled. This store, police knew, had been held up two nights prior—the night of the double-murder in West Philadelphia. The 7-Eleven store clerk was shown mug shots of Carothers and easily identified him as one of several perpetrators.

  Forgetting for a moment the incidents of the previous night, it now seemed impossible that Carothers had knocked off a convenience store, then driven across town straight to West Philadelphia to murder a college student and his girlfriend. The new information explained why Carothers was mum about his whereabouts on the night of the double-murder. It showed that, despite all else, he was a man of prodigious energy, having pulled off armed robbery at night and reported to his moving job early in the morning, been briefly arrested, and then committed armed robbery that same evening. But the new information did not explain who had killed the West Philadelphia couple and why the finger had been suddenly pointed at Carothers in the first place.

  Peter decided, within the midst of this shower of information, that there was one more thing he wanted to do before turning his energies to the case. He called Vinnie.

  “Peter, you’re a busy man.”

  “I need something else done, Vinnie. This one may involve a number of basketball games between the Sixers and the Knicks.”

  “I’m reading you loud and clear.”

  “I want you to get me some information on a John Apple, works as a carpenter in South Philly. Big man, white, about twenty-six. Just run a basic printout, police file, FBI, service record, whatever comes out, if anything.”

  “This is risky, my friend.”

  There was a knock on the door. Melissa, the office secretary, poked her head in.

  “I’m sorry, Peter, there’s a man who demands to talk with you. I told him you’re on another line but—”

  “No sweat, I’ll hold here.”

  The door closed.

  “Vinnie, I’m going to put you on hold for about a minute.”

  Peter punched the buttons on his phone.

  “This is Peter Scat—”

  “Scattergood, this is Ronald Brackington, your wife’s lawyer,” a voice exploded at him. “I’d planned to give you a call later in the week, but circumstances have moved that up. I can file for a restraining order, Scattergood. Your wife comes home early and the painters say the real-estate man was here and she says there is no real-estate man, we finished the paperwork four months ago, and they describe him and she knows it’s you. Then I have a very distraught client on my hands and for good reason. You are not to harass her in any way. No phone calls, no contact—”

  “I know what a restraining order is. It’s unnecessary.” Peter said this calmly. “Janice and I get along fine.”

  “Look—whatever you’re up to, Scattergood, keep away from her. You’re a public official and I don’t have to, nor particularly want to, remind you that we can make it very embarrassing—”

  “That won’t be necessary.” Peter switched lines.

  “Vinnie?”

  “Yeah, I was just saying it gets risky—”

  “I know,” he responded quickly.

  “Risky especially for you.”

  “I realize that.”

  “If I find out where he is, should I make some calls?”

  “No, no questions, just run a file, just keep it a piece of paper I can look at. Put it on the routine sheet, no special attention. Let me know when you have it.”

  AN HOUR LATER came the information, relayed in unmistakably bored tones by a police ballistics technician, that the unfired bullets in Carothers’s gun used in the supermarket holdup were the same caliber and brand as the bullet retrieved by the medical examiner from Whitlock’s shoulder and brain. Furthermore—conclusively, the bore marks on the retrieved bullet matched a bullet that had been test-fired with the gun. Peter hung up and charged into the hallway.

  “Who ordered the Carothers gun be test-fired?” he asked Melissa. “How was it done so quickly?”

  She looked at him fearfully and it occurred to him that in the context of always-shifting information, it was the secretary who sometimes was in the privileged position, for she knew who called and when, who came and went.

  “I think—you should ask Mr. Hoskins,” she protested.

  “Well, of course I can and will do that, Melissa,” Peter snapped, “but since you are right here, I am wondering—”

  “I ordered it done,” Hoskins said behind him, slipping a firm hand under Peter’s arm, guiding him into a private office.

  “Why the hell didn’t you inform me, Bill? I’m running this investigation, on your orders! You tell me to go ahead, move with autonomy, and then you pull shit like this, dealing me out of the information loop.”

  “Peter,” Hoskins said in a placating tone, “the word came in while you were out this morning. The gun was a caliber match and I told them to go ahead and get it checked out right away. They know how important this is and so the paperwork wasn’t a problem. I was going to tell you. You’ve been tied up a hell of a lot today, and frankly, I didn’t expect the report till tomorrow anyway. Can you fault any of that?” Hoskins stared at him, perhaps coldly, perhaps being reasonable. “You got a problem with that?”

  “What do you think? Of course I do.”

  “We’re a team here, Peter. Don’t forget it.”

  He was torn between telling Hoskins to shove it up his wide-ride butt, or apologizing.

  “All right.” Peter backed down.

  Hoskins smiled and opened the door, throwing an arm around Peter’s shoulder. It felt good.

  But not so good that right before five, after Hoskins had slipped away early, Peter asked Melissa if the Mayor’s office happened to have called during the day.

  “Somebody named Gerald Turner, an aide to the Mayor,” she said as she clipped some papers together. “Twice.”

  “Who took the calls?” Peter asked.

  She looked up at him, and caught within the blue eye shadow and black mascara around her eyes was fear. “Mr. Hoskins took the calls.”

  ANGRY, ANGRY WITH EVERYTHING, doubly betrayed that day, he worked straight through dinner in his office until eleven that night, burning through the paperwork, checking in with detectives on other cases, dictating memos and letters, calling witnesses at home to remind them to be in court next week, leaving instructions for Melissa, absorbing a foot-high stack of case files. There was a small amount of refuge in simply doing the work. When he realized he was no longer thinking clearly, he stood up, grabbed his coat, too
k the elevator down to the street. I did everything I could to please him and I liked doing it. In Janice’s prim code, that was practically pornography, implying the steamiest, sweatiest, gone-to-the-devil-and-loving-every-second kind of fucking, the cosmic, obliterating fuck. He imagined her sucking away on big old John Apple, John Apple banging her from behind.

  He could take the subway or walk. He decided to walk, and did so with the brisk pace of a man who, despite good parents, the many years of expensive education, the influence of a cultured, beautiful woman, despite all the civilizing institutions and experiences that he had been channeled through his whole life, knew that only physical activity eased his anger. It was the only acceptable outlet for the desire to punish and do violence and to murder, murder being the thing he wanted most of all to do now, take John Apple and, while explaining to him that nobody else could have Janice ever, beat the man senseless, truly beat the shit out of him long past the point that he had ceased begging for forgiveness, until the blood seeped from his ears and nose and mouth, until his ribs had splintered into slivers and pierced every internal organ, until his eyes had been gouged out by the rapid, repeated, and unhesitating jab of Peter’s thumbs, until he had ripped Apple’s heart from his chest, doing Robinson one better, and hold the warm, dripping, still-pumping and throbbing meat above his head, preferably in front of the entire population of Philadelphia, do it in fucking Veteran’s Stadium for God’s sake, and take that lump of bloody muscle, shove it in his mouth, and eat it.