Break and Enter

by Colin Harrison

  “C’mon,” Cassandra demanded. “Do it.”

  He turned toward the window. Impossibly, the snow was still falling. They all would be buried soon. He turned back. She moved beneath the covers and had him in her mouth. Her hand pushed his chest down and he hated his own lust, saw it for what it was, small and distracting. But what she was doing was very expert—all the nerves were attended to, around and down, and flickered over and stroked. He clutched the bedposts with both hands. This is what men over the centuries craved and were stupid for. He shut his eyes. Then Cassandra came up from the covers, keeping him in her hand, tightly.

  “Let me see your ring,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “Let me see it.” She squeezed him. “You can trust me.”

  He pulled it off with a humoring sigh and held it up. She snatched it with her other hand and put the gold circle against her mouth and slipped the red tip of her tongue through it. She knelt over his groin and pushed the tip of him against the ring.

  “Give it back now,” he called uneasily.

  Cassandra smiled. He lunged for the ring. She put it in her mouth, and with a quick, forceful nod of her head, swallowed it.

  He grabbed her mouth, jammed his fingers in. She bit them, laughing. Instantly, he understood her game: He was supposed to be filled with hate for her and in doing so give her the fucking of a lifetime. Well, maybe that would happen, maybe it just would. He pulled her out of bed violently and lifted her upside down by the legs into the air, his waist against her head. His body was suddenly sweaty, shaking, and he had forgotten he was this strong. She laughed more and took the opportunity to lick his penis mockingly.

  “Throw it up!” he demanded. “Throw up that fucking ring.” He tossed her back on the bed, pinning her with one arm.

  “C’mon, Peter, come here,” Cassandra sang archly. Her gaunt face leered up at him, teeth large. He did hate her now and, with the pressed lips of someone who must complete some wretched task—the removal of a long-dead animal, perhaps—he pressed his hand against her neck.

  “C’mon,” she growled wildly, using her last breath. She grabbed his head and pulled him forward and their teeth cracked painfully. He hovered above her, silently, still erect, his hand heavily at her neck. She didn’t struggle, and instead pulled him into her, keeping her hand on him, grinding him around. He removed his hand from her neck and started to move with her. It neither hurt nor felt good, and his eyes moved toward the window.

  The snow fell gently, begged at the windowpanes. The plow trucks would be out, traffic snarled. And in this he remembered the words he had heard earlier that day, somewhere lost to him hours before. Carothers had driven to the apartment house. How frustrating it must have been to try to park with a delivery truck blocking the entry to the parking lot. Cassandra was scratching his back with her left hand, urging him to moan, shiver, or otherwise display awareness of her, but the image of a delivery truck parked outside the apartment house intrigued him infinitely more. A truck, a driver, somebody who knew the streets. Cassandra tilted her pelvis forward and lifted her knees up around his ribs and was sucking and licking at his chest, and he knew instinctively that he was driving very deep into her. The truck had probably been on a routine stop. Why hadn’t it been mentioned in the police report? The neighborhood patrol cars would know every delivery truck in their sector. The police always asked questions of delivery men, gas-meter readers, mail carriers—anybody who routinely passed through a scene could notice something different. Now Cassandra rolled them over, her on top. Should the truck have been there? If yes, perhaps the driver remembered something. Or perhaps the truck itself was related to the homicide. The truck was there, Carothers parked, and found the body still warm, he’d said. The absence of a report indicated either oversight or purposeful omission. Peter wished he remembered if there was a back staircase. Carothers might have been coming up while the killer of Johnetta was going down the back of the building. A man in a truck might tell him who was coming or going in the minutes before Carothers arrived.

  He glanced at the clock: nearly two. Carothers had seen the truck before three. There was enough time to dress and drive across town. Like a seven-foot center going for a jam to the hoop while harassed by a pesky guard, he flicked Cassandra away from him, stood, and yanked on some clothes.

  “Hey!” Cassandra yelled. She saw he was leaving. “Goddamn you!”

  Downstairs, he found his coat and hat and car keys. In the kitchen he paused and thought about taking the money just to be sure. He ripped open the unmarked envelope. Inside was a stack of grocery store coupons—breakfast cereal, cookies, dish soap, nothing more. He tossed them into the air and the colored paper fluttered to the kitchen floor. He considered going back upstairs and doing something unmentionable to Cassandra. It seemed only just. But he couldn’t waste the time.

  THIRTY MINUTES LATER, Peter stood outside the apartment house, checking his watch, staring at the windows on the fourth floor, and enjoying the dead calm. The windows above him were dark, indicated nothing more than their existence. He had prosecuted cases where bodies had been found in burned-out warehouses in the Northeast, in the rail yards of West Philly, in the elevator of a parking garage, in the backseat of a trolley, in the washroom of the national headquarters of an insurance firm. But those were the exceptions; most murdered people lost their lives in their homes or in the street. It was the intimate spaces that were most vulnerable to moments of rage or greed or jealousy: hallways in apartment buildings, bedrooms, stairwells, front stoops, places people knew, places so intimate people forgot themselves. The window above led not only into the bedroom but into a set of lives that now included his. That he had told no one of all he had discovered made him feel like an accomplice, part of a chain of guilt, and this compelled him; something more—he knew not what—lay at the end of it.

  The cold air burned the inside of his nostrils. He spewed great shadows of steam and watched the occasional car pass, worrying he’d made a mistake, but convinced, somehow, that he hadn’t. He thought again of Janice and the heater. She seemed always to get cold easily and she would love the radiating warmth, the bright hiss of the flame. He moved his feet, paced.

  Then headlights turned the corner—a delivery truck, slowing as it neared him. He slipped out of the lights. The truck slowed, then stopped before the neighborhood grocery next to the apartment building. The driver parked, keeping his engine on, and disappeared for a moment within the truck. He emerged carrying two large flat pallets of what could only be bread, given that they were light enough that the man held them with one arm. He wore baggy pants and a thick jacket, and carried the pallets around the back of the building, probably, Peter thought, to drop them off inside a delivery door to which he had a key. The truck was red, green, and white—Italian bread.

  Peter waited. He was a good eight inches taller than the other man, and wished not to frighten him.

  “Excuse me,” he said when the man returned. “Sir?”

  “Ain’t got time for drunks.” The man brushed by him.

  “Wait!” Peter called. “I’m not what I seem.”

  He explained who he was, what he wanted. Did he remember that particular night exactly a week ago?

  “Yeah, but I already told the police what I knew, just after it all happened,” the man said doubtfully.

  “They asked you?”

  “Sure. A detective asked me what I seen and when I was here.”

  Whoever had been sure that Peter never saw the report knew he couldn’t know of the existence of each and every potential witness.

  “So, what did you say?”

  “Ah, geez.” The man shook his head. “I told them I deliver, all the little stores early in the morning. It’s a five-hour run. Most of the stores, they open around seven.”

  “Usually pretty quiet?”

  “I like it that way, Mr…. Scattergood, you say your name was? No traffic. See, I drove an eighteen-wheeler for twenty years, Philly to Chicago
, via New York, round trip twice a week. Load up medical supplies to New York, then men’s suits to Chicago—”

  “Okay,” Peter interrupted, “that was a while back. But what about that night? Remember what you told the police?”

  “Probably, but not in this cold.”

  They climbed into the truck, and the man reached for a Thermos of coffee under his seat.

  “Got the best goddamned heater in the city.”

  “Okay.”

  “I drive this route three days a week and my other route two.”

  Peter saw he would have to take his time. The man was a loner with an itch to talk and in no hurry to say his piece.

  “See, bread prices are based partially on delivery. That’s why your cheapest bread is in a bakery, because it don’t have to be delivered. But it’s harder and harder to make a profit, these little mom-and-pop places. It’s all money, everything’s money. So the bigger companies deliver. Every time you go to these little stores, like the one here”—he thumbed his hand backward—“you pay more because of they have to take delivery more often, they don’t have the storage space, and because they don’t do the same volume. I drive the truck this route here every Sunday, Tuesday, and Friday—”

  “The night I was asking about was a Wednesday.”

  “That’s right, it was,” the man continued, pausing to sip his coffee. “I start my route on Tuesday at eleven and I don’t get here until Wednesday morning. The only thing I remember that night was some guy parked in my parking spot, which is actually illegal. I always park in the same spot,all the legal spots are taken. Everyone’s home, what’re ya gonna do? Some guy was parked there, that’s all I remember.”

  “When was this?”

  “About now, quarter of three.”

  “He was parked.”

  “His engine was running. Right now where we’re sitting.”

  “What happened?”

  “Nothing.”

  “All right, anything else about that night?”

  “Wait a minute, I’m still telling it. I went around the block once, thinking he was going to pull out at any minute. When I came back he was still there. I double-parked and tapped the horn quietly. I had six racks and I didn’t feel like making three long trips. Then—”

  “Racks of bread like tonight?”

  “Exactly the same, all of them.”

  “How did you hurt your left arm?”

  The driver stared at him, mouth cocked to one side.

  “Shit, man, that’s scary. How did you know that?”

  “Just now you carried two pallets with your right arm,” Peter explained. “That means you should be able to carry at least three, maybe four, with both arms. Which means you could easily carry six pallets in two trips, not three.”

  “You got my vote, buddy.” The driver shook his head. “Yeah, some guy slashed me bad one night, truck stop just over the Indiana line. Coming from Ohio.” He pulled back his sleeve to show the scar on the inside of the elbow. “Guy had a ponytail a foot long. Got all the tendons. He took my truck. The county clinic sewed it up, but what’re ya gonna do? Couldn’t drive, couldn’t barely make a fist.”

  “That’s why you deliver bread—it’s light.”

  “I made good money with my rig. Got to have both hands. Hated to give it up.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Yeah, well.”

  They sat a minute, looking at the snow.

  “Tell me what happened after you saw the guy parked in your place, after you honked,” Peter said.

  “Nothing happened, so I got out and went up to the window of the car.”

  “What’d he say?”

  “He said he was moving on in a little while.”

  “What did he look like?”

  “Some black guy.”

  “Could you see his face?”

  “Easy. I have night vision, after all these years.”

  “What’d his face look like?”

  “Not much, heavy.”

  “Heavy?”

  “Sad. He looked like a sad guy.”

  Peter stared up at the window, remembered Johnetta’s still body, the tight, attractive slit of her belly button. Had the man who snatched the baby boy also killed her?

  “In his thirties maybe?” Peter finally asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Built well, strong?”

  “Didn’t see.”

  “Anything else?” Peter pressed.

  “It was mostly his face. Just looking at me, and sad. The bottom part under the eyes were droopy. And some kind of bad scar on his chin.”

  “Curved like the letter C?”

  “Yeah—right. You must know him.”

  “You told the detective all this?”

  “Just like I’m telling you.”

  “Okay, then what?”

  “He looked like he meant it, like he wasn’t going to discuss it no more, you know what I’m saying? I had plenty of time, so I got back in the truck with my heater and waited. I could have carried the bread a little further, but that would leave the truck blocking the street while I was taking the bread around. So I just sat. He went in and came out maybe ten minutes later and drove off. I pulled in, did the delivery, and left.”

  “Did he run out of the building?”

  “No, he just walked out, just like anybody.”

  “You see another guy hurry into the building a few minutes later, tall skinny black guy?”

  “No.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “You don’t need it, do you? Call me the bread man. Here.” He reached back and handed Peter a package of fresh sticky buns. “I gotta go.”

  BACK IN THE CAR, he ate his breakfast bun listening to the radio croon rock songs so old nobody under thirty knew them any longer. Everything Carothers had said so far appeared to be true. Peter tried to see it all from his point of view. Carothers must have thought about Johnetta and Tyler, the child they brought into the world. Surely, he had stood in the hospital room, looking into Johnetta’s face as she held their child. Seen the wrinkled eyes and the clutching chubby fingers working at Johnetta’s gown. The hope of it all! The immense hope that springs from the most evanescent of emotions! Certainly Peter understood that. And yet, never married, together only a short while, before circumstances—what? boredom, fights, lovers, family, crime, drugs—had pulled them apart. Peter started the car and pulled out, picturing Wayman moving others’ furniture—happy family rituals repeated each week before his eyes. The big three-bedroom apartments overlooking Rittenhouse Square, the mansions in Chestnut Hill, the estates on the Main Line. Please take that into the bedroom. Thank you!… Oh! Those boxes are the china—careful! A big quiet black man watching this, nodding to the aerobicized blonde who tells him this, seeing the children examining the big moving truck.

  He must have wondered about his child, his boy! The tiny body that had come, in part, from his. Even a killer can be moved by the sight of a baby’s toes, no? How had Carothers felt as he saw Johnetta dead before him? Wouldn’t he, Peter, have killed anyone if he thought, even for a second, that person threatened Janice? Wasn’t it just basic human nature? Of course—idiotic to expect otherwise. A man like Carothers would have cursed himself for not being present to protect Johnetta! She had called him! And what was he doing? Knocking off a supermarket with three low-life, coked-up motherfuckers. Carothers must have thought some of these things—who wouldn’t? Who wouldn’t question the way things had turned out, sought to know why? Peter drove on, vaguely heading back the way he had come. Carothers, he saw, was begging now.He had suffered enough, in his way, and deserved every sliced corner of law coming to him.

  The sad man, Peter saw, had probably killed Johnetta and then snatched Tyler, the baby boy, in an effort to get Johnetta’s grandmother to keep quiet. According to the grandmother, it was Whitlock’s family—the Mayor’s family—who wanted Johnetta out of the picture. The sad man was tied in somehow—close enough to be picked as the one
to either threaten or kill Johnetta, close enough again to be assigned to keep an eye on Mrs. Banks, the grandmother. But what did Johnetta Henry know? What knowledge was worth her life?

  The police—or one or two people in the department, someone who the Mayor no doubt controlled through the Police Commissioner—had made only two seemingly small mistakes. The first, if in fact it was planned, was letting just a little too much time pass before sending a car to respond to the neighbor’s first call—an oversight that resulted in Whitlock’s death at the hands of Carothers. The second mistake was not reporting the interview with the truck driver, which by its absence became conspicuous. The driver’s account corroborated Carothers’s account and presented an alternative scenario and suspect—of course, it had needed to be purged. And it was probably just a couple of paragraphs. Among other definitions, the Police Department was a huge bureaucracy, one that often lost documents, evidence, and information. The police, at the street level, were not likely to wish to protect the Mayor. Most cops, by far, were not corrupt. It was dazzlingly simple—all that was necessary was that one detective be told or paid not to file a one-page account of the interview with the delivery driver.

  Strengthening the reported version was the woman who had seen Carothers while emptying her trash. Somebody had spotted her usefulness and whisked her down to the Roundhouse hoping she could identify a suspect from the books. That she actually did so correctly was amazing. That she happened to be drunk was bad luck for whoever was pulling the strings. Carothers then had to be released. That Carothers was stupid enough to then go out and stage armed robbery seemed ludicrous—luck had capriciously cut back and forth between the two sides. Once Carothers was back in custody, and with more evidence found, the police could blamelessly cease looking for other suspects.

  Of course, neither Carothers nor Stein had any idea of the significance of the delivery truck. Nor did they know about the sad man. And because Peter did not officially know about the truck and the driver’s recollection, then that fact never became part of the official record Stein would probe to build a defense. If Carothers hadn’t blurted out what seemed to him an extraneous aggravation, Peter could not have connected the sad man to the night of the homicides.