Break and Enter

by Colin Harrison

  “Who thought that?”

  “Fuck, man, the Mayor’s people, and who that be exactly I don’t know. He got all kind of people. They all over and you don’t mess with them. I just wish I—” Carothers made a fist. But he didn’t have the conviction to continue with the threat.

  “Evidently Darryl was very much in love with her.”

  “Yes he was, and I don’t blame him. She an angel, you know what I mean? I got nothin’ against him, man. Nothin’ personal. In fact, the man got my respect all along. But when I hear him comin’ in maybe a half hour later I didn’t think of that. No I didn’t. All I could think of was that he the reason she dead. He shoulda protected her, called off his people. It’s on him, see. He was in the kitchen and I waited a few minutes. Then I just walked in and gave it to him, I couldn’t take it. He never knew what hit him, man. So yeah, I did it. I didn’t think about it ahead of time. I didn’t plan to kill nobody. I just got so fucked up from what happened and seein’ her like that, so angry with everythin’ and unfair—how unfair it was and how she never had a chance and the same people preachin’ about the black man coming up and jobs and no discrimination and all that shit nobody really believes is going to happen—they the same people who did this. They was too good for her, and I just—”

  “Three shots?”

  “Yeah. Twice across the room and then in the head.”

  Peter remembered the gun salesman: You point it and pull the trigger again and again until the problem is gone! Like most methods, guns were a messy way to kill, assuming you wanted to get away with the crime. A gun sent particles of powder all over the place, including on the person who fired, and left a bullet that could be matched to the barrel, as in Carothers’s own case. Knife and other instrument stabbings were trickier, but usually the forensic pathologist could count the wounds, determine the type of weapon, and often the angle, height, and pattern of the attack. And even if the attacker was right-or left-handed. Carothers, of course, had never thought about this. Nobody did. They just pulled the trigger. That was the awful beauty of guns. You don’t touch the victim. A tiny muscle in your finger contracts and across the room someone’s head explodes.

  “What time was this, exactly?”

  “Maybe three-thirty.”

  Peter glanced at his papers. This time was within fifteen minutes of the medical examiner’s assessment of the time of Whitlock’s death, based on the temperature of the body and the degree of uncompleted digestion of the food in his stomach.

  “What was he doing when you shot him?”

  “Eating.”

  “What, what was he eating?” Peter asked, remembering that Vinnie knew of this.

  “Sandwich, maybe. How the fuck am I supposed to remember shit like that?”

  Peter glanced at Stein. Attitude problem here, Counselor.

  “Wayman, Mr. Scattergood has agreed to listen to us. He doesn’t need to do us a favor.”

  “Yeah, I know. I’m sorry, man. This thing—that guy, he all right, he doin’ it, you know—doin’ the college thing, gonna make it, so yeah, it was too bad. But you had to know Johnetta, man. You had to know her.”

  “What else?”

  “He was just standin’ there in his underwear. He had undressed, wearin’ some designer shit, the colored kind.”

  “Okay. What time was it, now, after you shot him?”

  “About a minute later, I wasn’t gonna stick around.”

  “But you picked up the shells. You had the presence of mind to do that.”

  “Yeah, I did.”

  “How’d you leave?”

  “I knew the gun was loud, so I opened the kitchen window. There’s a fire ladder. You stand on the ledge and you reach it and then you’re on the roof and across the back, and you come down on the fire escape on the next building.”

  “How’d you know?”

  “I didn’t, man, I just opened the window and it was there.” Carothers waved his hands. “If it wasn’t there, I would have gone some other way.”

  Silence, and anxiety. In the restaurant, Hoskins was signing the charge-card receipt, making sure to shred the carbon paper.

  “Is there anything else, anything at all, you might know that could help us find the person who killed Johnetta?”

  “Nuh. She and I tight on the phone, you know, but I don’t know those people over in West Philly she runnin’ with. Never met nobody, never saw nobody. Just a lot of the Mayor’s people.”

  Peter nodded to Stein.

  “Okay. I’m interested. We’ll talk, see what we can do. Maybe we’ll get a statement from you. Give me a couple of days.” He jerked a finger to the door. “Now try to get out of here in about two minutes.”

  IN CITY HALL THREE HOURS LATER, after a preliminary proceeding for another case, Peter pulled his papers together. The courtroom door opened and Berger came in, all smiles.

  “Hey, there you are, I gotta tell you something.” Berger waved at the legal case on the floor. “Talk to Stein yet?”

  “He hasn’t called,” Peter lied.

  “He will,” Berger asserted. “Anyway, listen to this, this is great. This sums up the whole place. I was in recess for the bench trial I’m doing. Down the hall is some bullshit rape case where the girl traded sex for coke and then decided it had been against her will, the usual stuff. The defendant is this guy from Upper Providence, big insurance guy. The guy is outraged and will not bargain, and so on and so on, so he’s here in court finally, and like an asshole, doesn’t want a regular defense attorney. He hires a big-firm partner who hasn’t been in a courtroom in about thirty years. Maybe the guy did some defense work a long time ago, I don’t know. I saw the guy earlier in the day, not your regular City Hall attorney, his suit must have cost a couple of thousand. He’s maybe sixty, gray hair, very distinguished, everybody’s idea of a, uh, barrister, you know? So it’s the recess and I happened to be following him down the hall. I can tell by the way he’s walking he doesn’t like being here.”

  “Right,” Peter said, watching Berger move his face.

  “So we’re both headed to the men’s room. The big one on the southwest corner. We go in and the guy steps up to the urinal. He’s taking his time—you know how old guys always take longer to piss? So I notice that there’s somebody in the toilet stall, there’s clothes on the floor. I hear all this splashing in the toilet. It’s some guy, you know? Some bum. He’s drunk, he’s singing to himself. So just as this old barrister is about to piss—you can see he knows it’s finally coming—the other guy comes out of the stall. He’s totally naked with lather about an inch deep all over him. Looks like a skinny abominable snowman or something, and he stumbles over to the guy and scares the hell out of him. ‘I got soap in mah eyes, can ya help me?’ That’s what he’s saying. He keeps coming and he’s all drunk and the other guy says, ‘Stay away from me, sir,’ and the drunk guy just keeps coming and fucking falls all over the other guy and knocks him down and there’s piss and soap all over everything, and the older guy is down under the urinal with all the fucking pubic hair and cigarettes and old piss.”

  Berger smiled so hard that his skin shone, looked ready to tear, even. He was sweating, and a vein snaked its way over his eyebrow. He sniffed once or twice, and then he looked up at Peter, his eyes wide.

  “I’m going to make it, Peter. I’m fine, I’m going to make it.”

  “Bergs—”

  “No, no. I know what you’re thinking, but I’m in control, great control. You should have seen me in there, I was great, really on top of the whole thing, just flipping the witnesses over, getting them to say what I needed, bing-bing-bing, just getting through it really fast.” Berger’s smile was huge, his eyebrows arcing madly up—his face a living mask.

  “Peter, hey, hey! I forgot something. My wife saw Janice yesterday, having lunch at that place off Rittenhouse Square.”

  “Where?”

  “That place, that little expensive place. Where all the waiters are real waiters, not college ki
ds.”

  “Who was she with? A man or a woman?”

  “I forget, maybe I didn’t ask her.”

  “Oh, come on, Bergs, you know how important this is to me, you know what I’m going through, and you didn’t ask? Where’s your wife now? I want to call her.”

  Berger put his hand up.

  “Wait a minute there, big guy, you don’t need to call Stephanie. It was an honest mistake. I’ve got many, many, many things I’m dealing with, so just hold off there, all right, just re-lax, okay?”

  Peter stared at Berger, angry. He had confided in Berger as he confided in no one, and Berger had missed a chance to help him. If it was a woman, he could relax; that meant Janice was probably doing business, meeting with a foundation officer perhaps. Or an old friend. If it was a man, then that could be the same thing of course, but maybe it wasn’t,maybe it was John Apple. But it couldn’t be John Apple. He was a carpenter who spent the day in work clothes, who couldn’t afford some fancy place. If it was a man, it was another man, perhaps some older guy who made big bucks.

  “I really wish you could remember if it was a man, Bergs.”

  “Sorry. Hey, really.”

  “Right,” Peter said with a small mouth. “Really.”

  “Hey. Come on.” The big smile again. “No big deal.”

  “What the fuck is happening to you, Bergs?” Peter looked hard into Berger’s eyes and thought about grabbing his friend by the neck. Instead he just walked away.

  THE DAY WAS LIMPING GRAYLY toward its end, and finally he remembered what he had forgotten. He slipped inside a phone booth at the end of the hall. The light didn’t work, but that was fine; he didn’t want to see anybody he knew. In the half-darkness, he inserted coins into the slot and called his broker.

  “Saul? Peter Scattergood. I want to sell IBM today, now.”

  “The market closed already, you know that,” came back a voice. “But, Peter, hey, you haven’t held it long enough. They have some great new stuff coming out in a couple of weeks. We’re expecting a great quarter.”

  “I don’t care,” he responded. “I do, but not that much. Sell it tomorrow, all of it. I’ll at least come out even. When can I get a check?”

  “Well, the credit to your account—”

  “A check, when can I be issued—”

  “Five business days,” Saul answered. “But tell you what, if you really want to sell off the IBM,” Saul continued, “let me get you into something with a little higher dividend, something you’re going to feel happy with in the short term. We got some great cyclical stocks paying up around eight percent, so we could turn the IBM around into that, or split some off into a money market, what do you say?”

  The broker was trying to work out a double commission, with a sell and buy order, as well as keep Peter’s capital on his books. Fuck him—did he think Peter was an idiot?

  “Saul, I want to cash out, not churn the portfolio. Do you have any sort of in-house deal whereby you buy client’s stocks immediately for them and resell on the next day the exchange is open?”

  “Why should we?” came Saul’s irritated voice. “So we could watch the stock drop? We’d eat the loss.”

  “Not if you agreed to buy at the next day’s price or lower.”

  “Theoretically, I suppose—”

  “And pay me a reasonable portion up front.”

  “Sounds nice, Peter, but you’re forgetting that legally we can only buy IBM stock through the New York Stock Exchange—”

  “You don’t deal in cash, of course.”

  “Of course not, Peter. Sometimes we do presell orders, which can involve a credit line, but your customer account is not—not of a sufficient, uh—”

  “You mean I’m not rich, and so I don’t get any special treatment?” Peter exploded. “Is that what you’re stumbling over yourself to tell me, Saul, even though I’ve been a loyal customer for five years? Well, hell’s bells, Saul, maybe I should take my tiny little mouse-shit portfolio elsewhere.”

  “Peter, I gotta tell you—my hands are tied on this, chained behind my back.” Saul’s voice slowed to patient, patronizing reasonableness, the voice of a man trying to preserve a profit. “What you got is the national office in New York has delineated certain guidelines we follow, a particular set of privileges for each, uh, level of portfolio, and—”

  Peter hung up. There was no time to listen to Saul’s backpedaling. Five business days was an infinity, what with the weekend. He was due to see Vinnie the next morning. What could he do, assuming he took Vinnie at his word? He couldn’t get to the police, for a variety of reasons. He couldn’t go to the FBI or the Justice Department—there couldn’t be any scandal, any official information. The Police Department was a sieve of information, and Vinnie worked there, knew people. Who could say what people Vinnie was connected to? The man knew about Darryl Whitlock’s peanut-butter sandwich, which meant he could know just about anything.

  Besides, Peter couldn’t tell anyone, for what he had done was wrong. Any official action would require an investigation into his own doings.At the best, he could only cut some kind of deal for immunity. That ran into other problems, like being wired, providing grand-jury testimony, and so on—an ever-deepening morass of problems, all of which, when publicized, would absolutely finish him, not only in the office of the D.A. but in Philadelphia, even in the state. Every scandal was delicious, as long as you weren’t involved. Calling Vinnie had been a momentary, unfortunate indiscretion, but nothing more, really. Yet others wouldn’t see it that way. The cleaner you are, the more the dirt shows. No, by all means he had to avoid any kind of scandal. There were a lot of people out there who would lick their chops to see a promising A.D.A. go up in smoke—a definite career builder for the right person. Sells newspapers, too. He could be disbarred. And he could lose forever any chance he had with Janice.

  No, he reasoned, it was better he deal with Vinnie quietly and try to minimize the situation. Keep the lid on, make the payment, string along the situation until he could work it out. If he went into private practice, he was a much less interesting target, especially if he and Janice moved, say, out of the city to a nice country house. Defuse the problem that way. Hell, he had bar exam reciprocity in Washington, D.C., and a couple of other states—they could move if necessary. Vinnie would see he no longer had much leverage over Peter—that was a good plan, wasn’t it? He clasped his hands tightly. He’d finesse the problem.

  So the next step was cash. There was nothing at home he could sell on such short notice. High-tech stuff like stereos and televisions went for a fraction of their original purchase price when sold secondhand. He owned no gold jewelry other than his wedding ring. His parents had money, but they were now the last people in the world he wanted to ask—besides, they didn’t keep much cash around the house. A check from them would take several days to clear. Janice herself probably had some of her parents’ money stuck in an account somewhere, but of course he couldn’t ask her to pay blackmail on his behalf. She would think his life was becoming totally unraveled and it would confirm her decision about leaving him.

  Few people, even the very wealthy, could put their hands on ten thousand dollars cash in a matter of hours. He could borrow a few thousand on his credit cards, but he needed a bank to do that. He looked at his watch—quarter to five. The bank closed at three, and the automatic teller machine wouldn’t let him take out more than five hundred dollars in any twenty-four-hour period. Maybe he could overdraw the account in some way—take the remaining money out with the machine card, and then write a check and cash it at one of the check-cashing operations. But they only cashed paychecks and government checks and Social Security—otherwise, every drunk in the city would cash personal checks. He could go over to the specialized loan sharks who worked the courts, but someone might recognize him; besides, he didn’t have any bail papers. There were other guys, who charged ten percent vigorish a week, but he didn’t know exactly who they were, and besides, if he dealt with them, t
hey could blackmail him, too.

  Berger spent every dime he made keeping his little girl in the most correct private nursery school in the city, keeping his wife happy, and keeping his nose full of junk. Peter needed someone else, a discreet friend.

  In the booth, next to I LOVE PUERTO RICAN COCK etched in the wall, a dirty, well-thumbed phone book hung chained to the underside of the phone, and he flipped to the B section. He dialed the main office of Cassandra’s bank, not knowing how he would begin the conversation, or if he even dared. The operator transferred him to her division and a secretary answered.

  “I need to speak with Ms. uh—Cassandra, the Vice President.”

  “I’m sorry, she’s in a meeting, sir. May I take a message?”

  “It’s a matter of importance.”

  “I’m sorry, but she is—”

  “Miss!” Peter barked. “I am with the District Attorney’s office of the City of Philadelphia. This is an urgent matter, extremely important, and it supersedes whatever meeting she is in. Do you understand?”

  This got results.

  “Peter? I really didn’t expect to hear from you.”

  “Yeah, well, I was pretty angry, wasn’t I?”

  “I’m glad you called.”

  “Why? I was a complete asshole the other day.”

  “I don’t hold grudges, Peter. Just tell me what you need.”

  “I’m in a jam, and I’m wondering if you as a bank officer can facilitate an overdraft for me this afternoon. Quickly.”

  “I don’t—what’s the problem?”

  “Between you and me, I need ten thousand dollars cash tomorrow morning. For a personal problem.”

  “Oh.” Then, in a cold voice: “Is it your wife?”

  “No. She has nothing to do with this.”