“Yes.”
“Then the group may be coming apart,” Mastrude suggested.
“There’s no evidence of that.”
“He may want to confess.”
“I doubt that, too.”
“He may hate the group he’s with, he may hate what they make him do. This can happen even to men who feel themselves absolutely loyal. It’s surprising what we come to hate. And remember, your man may not even be aware of this.”
“Okay. But what if they put him up to it?”
“Then you have to figure out how strong he is and see if he’ll reveal himself anyway. You have to find your way into the man’s beliefs. I have to do that when I cross-examine my clients’ spouses sometimes. It can be nasty.”
“Yeah,” Peter said, thinking of what Mastrude could do to Janice.
“I was thinking about our conversation about the causes of tragedy,” Mastrude continued. “I was thinking that the very causes that make it occur also bring judgment. People crave the release of judgment, the end of their private guilt.”
“But this guy may be a totally amoral psycho,” responded Peter. “I have no indication that he has any desire for this kind of judgment. I think it’s something else.”
“Well, I can’t say, then,” Mastrude concluded. “I haven’t met the man and I need to do that in order to understand his motivations.”
“You understand my motivations?” Peter challenged.
“I was wrong about you,” Mastrude answered, “though not in the way you think. But I’ve got the answer, my friend. I believe very firmly that you need to see your wife again soon. I think that is the way this is going to be resolved. I think you need to see her and I think you need to see your own self—”
Peter had another call. “Wait a minute,” he said, switching lines. It was from the Mayor’s office.
“I’ve got an important call,” he told Mastrude.
“Remember what I said?” Mastrude asked.
Peter wondered if Geller was in the Mayor’s office that very minute.
“Remember?” Mastrude repeated.
“Go see Janice, get her back.”
“No,” Mastrude answered in discontent, “that wasn’t exactly it….”
There was no time for this chatter, and so Peter simply cut off Mastrude, switching to the Mayor.
“Yes, sir?”
The Mayor came on quickly: “Peter, I’m calling to get a new sense of how things are progressing in respect to the murder of my nephew. I’ve seen the papers.”
This was an outright command for information, lubricated by power into the smoothest of requests, and in it Peter understood that the Mayor’s early insistence that Peter only talk to the Mayor and not to other members of the deceased’s family meant that Peter had received no chance to probe them for the cause of the killing and perhaps trigger an emotional outburst of information. “Don’t forget Johnetta Henry,” he finally answered.
“Of course not. Bill Hoskins and I were talking just yesterday, and I was remarking to him that beyond what I read in the papers I haven’t much idea of what’s happening in the case. We’ve been quite busy, as you can imagine, trying to get some of our new job programs implemented, and I haven’t had an opportunity to call.”
“Yes—” Peter began.
“And Bill assured me you were running the investigation quite comprehensively at this point in time and that the case against this fellow, Wayman Carothers, was developing nicely,” the Mayor continued, as if he were describing a tropical plant grown in unnatural conditions. “Indeed, I might say Bill added that he expected your investigation was nearly complete.” Anger leaked into the Mayor’s tone. Maybe the man was standing there in his expensive wool suit, twisting the watch about his wrist and looking at Charlie Geller. “I understood there to be no other suspects, no other scenarios, Mr. Scattergood. I thought my information was good, do you understand? So this morning, when the paper—”
“There are still a number of things I’m—”
“Excuse me, I was talking. Now then, I’m assuming that little article is just journalistic speculation. Indeed, I must say that when I expressed to my sister this morning that we might have some kind of resolution to all of this, she seemed—”
“Mr. Mayor, what exactly do you wish to know?”
The line was silent at this direct inquiry.
“I was hoping”—now the voice had returned to its measured, for-public-consumption tone—“to get your estimation of the nature of the evidence against Carothers for these two vicious murders.”
“The murder of your nephew seems pretty straightforward, sir.” He wouldn’t mention the unusable confession in the private meeting with Carothers.
“And for Miss Henry?”
The Mayor had put the question to him, inside of two minutes, and Peter could feel the man’s power reaching at him through the telephone, cornering him with his hidden conclusions and off-the-record investigations, daring him to thwart the city’s highest official. How much did the Mayor know?
“Well,” Peter stalled, “our evidence is very limited in that respect, sir. There’s some question as to whether Carothers even killed Johnetta Henry.”
“That is interesting,” came the calm voice. “I was under the assumption from Bill that the evidence gathered thus far included both victims and excluded other participants. So you’re suggesting the newspaper article might be right and that perhaps Carothers and someone else together—”
“I’m not suggesting that last idea, no.”
With just the slightest irritation—a fist imperceptibly tighter—the voice of a man riding the edge of control: “Then what are you suggesting, Mr. Scattergood? Why are we playing guessing games? I have always disdained such psychological tactics. It appalls me to think that this is what we have come to. What is it, precisely, that you see here?”
But before Peter could say anything, a voice in the background apparently drew the Mayor away from the receiver. “Excuse me,” the political voice said, perhaps with masterful timing, perhaps having knowingly not forced Peter to answer, perhaps creating a last opportunity for Peter to change his mind, “but I have another pressing matter. You and I will discuss this later today or early tomorrow. I have several calls that have come through. In the meantime, I trust your investigation continues satisfactorily. I am interested in this new information. Please keep me up-to-date about this second-assailant theory of yours. I will be eager to know what new information has yielded this development.”
The phone clicked. Before Peter could evaluate whether he’d made a mistake—he had contradicted the Mayor and officially represented the office with Hoskins’s approval—there was a tentative knock on the door.
“Yeah, what?” he called.
Cheryl came in, followed by a short, strongly built man in his thirties with pomaded hair. He wore overalls and a thick jacket and moved with the rigid pride of one who has once been very badly injured, perhaps beaten to a whisper of his life. He did not limp or show any particular weakness, Peter noticed, but as Cheryl silently directed him to the chair facing Peter, he held his body with ready stiffness; it was a body that knew punishment and had been forced to conform to its damage. He did not take off his jacket.
“Thank you, miss,” Geller said in a hoarse voice. He wore no gold rings or a watch or any mark of status that would indicate one who might receive favors from the Mayor. He raised his face to look at Peter, silent and seemingly watchful from a great depth within himself. His eyes, which did not blink, lived in his face not as bright, moving windows to the soul but as an expressionless surface, like that of stone.Beneath the pressed, quiet lips arced the rough smile of a scar. This was the sad man, and Peter—despite his anxious exhaustion—sensed that the man was wholly unperturbed by Peter’s presence.
“Thank you for coming in on such short notice, Mr. Geller.”
“No problem.” Geller shrugged in a deep whisper.
Geller didn’t seem to re
cognize him, but of course the man would not communicate this, for it implicated him in the snatching of Tyler. Peter forced himself to breathe slowly and concentrate, a trick he’d learned at the foul line when the crowd was screaming for blood.
“I guess Cheryl called you.”
“She say you wanted to ask me somethin’.” Geller knitted his hands together and waited.
“About Johnetta Henry and Darryl Whitlock, yes.”
“Right,” Geller mumbled. “She said that.”
“Just a couple of routine questions. Frankly, we think we have a pretty good case against the suspect, Wayman Carothers,” Peter said, leaning forward and smiling in a manner suggestive of the notion that his own lust for Carothers’s conviction might be just the kind of blindness that would allow him to miss Geller’s guilt. “We have a pretty good case against him and so we’re just trying to ask some of the people who knew Johnetta a few questions, just more or less get the whole background picture. We have to get everything on the man, you understand?”
“Right,” Geller said.
“We appreciate your cooperation.”
“Right,” Geller agreed in a calm voice, neither sarcastic nor aggressive.
Peter looked at Geller, expecting him now to say something about how he knew that if he hadn’t come into the office, then he might be suspected for that very reason. Very often a suspect would insist with the obsessive energy of the guilty that he was coming in to get his name cleared.
“You’ve been associated with the Mayor a long time?”
“Almost ten years.”
“Now, I also understand that you do a little work for the Mayor, during his campaign and whatnot, drive him around. And Johnetta Henry did, too, right?”
“That’s right,” Geller said without expression.
“Since you were in contact with her, maybe you could tell me what her duties were and so on.”
Geller stared at him.
“What she did in the office, that kind of thing.”
“She talked to everybody on the phone,” Geller said, eyes moving little, the information coming from a mouth unlinked to the muscles of his face.
“Yes?” Peter responded after a moment, wondering if Geller had been told to stonewall all questions. “What else?”
“I think she did some, you know, accounting, where they took the political donations and counted them and put them in the safe.”
“She was pretty, wasn’t she?”
No answer.
“She popular with the men? You had a woman running around the office, a strong-minded, good-looking woman.”
“I didn’t care for her, if that’s what you’re askin’.”
“Okay.” He had to bring Geller to life, get him talking. “Tell me about when this was, what was happening.”
“This was a couple of years ago when he was gettin’ ready for the election. Gettin’ everybody together, you know.”
“Okay. What else? What else was going on?”
Geller stared. “Not too much, far as I remember.”
The man was not hostile or even actively concealing information. Peter’s questions simply hadn’t activated Geller’s personality. There had to be a way in, as Mastrude said, to expose the man’s beliefs.
“Are you religious, Mr. Geller?”
“I been thinkin’ about God a long time, Mr. Scattergood.”
“You believe that there is a right and a wrong?”
“Yes, I most certainly do.” Geller’s voice was more animated.
“Would you say that you have moral beliefs?”
“Yes,” Geller responded, his eyes now coming back to his face. A murderer, Peter reflected, might need to believe in redemption. “If I know somethin’ is right, then I will do it. We are all in great trouble, you know what I’m sayin’, and we must do the right thing.”
“You’ve worked for the Mayor a long time. You must believe in him, in his methods.”
“For a long time.” Geller closed his hands before him. “The Mayor is a very great man. The Mayor is a man who believes. He is a man who will help the people of this city, Mr. Scattergood. He believes we can have a great city, a city where people are good.”
“What have you been doing for him all this time?”
“Anything the man thinks is important, anything he asks—drivin’, runnin’ little jobs, anything.”
“Why so loyal?”
“That man has a vision, he has an understanding, you got that? Back when he was a councilman he had it and some of us saw it and we wanted to work with the man.”
“You grow up in the city?”
“Yeah, North Philly, here and there.”
“Good childhood?”
Geller stared at him, and the coldness passed again into his face.
“You’d rather not say?” Peter jabbed.
Geller’s lower lip tightened and pulled back from his teeth. The anger, thus, was very near, always.
“Why didn’t you like Johnetta Henry?” Peter said.
“ ‘Cause I didn’t think she was good for what we was tryin’ to do. She was a bad girl, just tryin’ to get some attention,” Geller blurted. “Here you got people who work twenty years to get where they’re goin’.”
“Was she still seeing Carothers when she was involved in the campaign?” Peter asked.
“Yes. And after she moved in with Darryl they was goin’ around Darryl’s back,” Geller said in a rigid voice, his eyes watering ever so slightly in concentration. The man was serious as death. “She was that kind of woman, always behind somebody’s back—she knew we knew and she didn’t care. That Carothers boy used to come over there while Darryl was away.”
This seemed unlikely to Peter, but he couldn’t be sure. After all, Carothers had possessed the key to the apartment. “What did they do?”
“What you expect?” Geller said.
“Why didn’t anybody tell Darryl she was cheating on him?”
“He wouldn’t’ve believed it.” Geller looked at Peter. “That boy trusted everybody.”
“You know him well?”
“Of course I did!”
“Didn’t the family care that their favorite son was in this situation? Didn’t the Mayor want her to marry into the family?”
Geller seemed to have some trouble coming up with an answer. If the family didn’t care for Johnetta, as Peter had been told, then that created a motive to scare or hurt her and get her out of Darryl’s life.
“You just told me that nobody would tell Darryl that Johnetta was cheating on him. Why would you know it and not him?”
“ ‘Cause I’m tied in there, I know everybody.”
“Did you care for Darryl?”
“I watched him grow, I saw what he was goin’ to be.” Geller’s hands opened now and grasped in frustration at the air before him. “I saw the wonder of that young man, and what he meant to the Mayor and his family—”
“You’re bitter?”
“Very bitter, Mr. Scattergood.”
“You blame it on Johnetta?” Peter shot across his desk.
Geller glared at him and Peter peered back, seeing that of course Geller blamed Johnetta, for without her there was no Carothers, the murderer of Darryl Whitlock. Geller must have seen with those same yellowed, watering eyes that he, too, and more directly, had caused Whitlock’s death.
The phone rang. Peter picked it up, expecting Berger. “Excuse me just a moment,” he said.
“This is Gerald Turner,” a harsh voice ran at him breathlessly. “Let me talk to Geller, now.”
“Who?”
“I understand that Mr. Charles Geller, one of our staff members, is over there, Mr. Scattergood.”
“I don’t know who that is,” Peter said, nodding at Geller that the call would be brief.
“He received a telephone call from your office not an hour ago. Don’t bullshit me.”
“Look,” Peter responded icily, “if your information is so good, you would know that I have just
come from my attorney’s office, where I have been negotiating the sad end of my marriage. Get out your Yellow Pages and look under lawyers and you’ll find one named Mastrude, specializing in divorces. That is what is on my mind, Mr.—” He almost said Turner’s name, which Geller undoubtedly knew. “Completely on my mind, not your own office difficulties. This is a big staff and I don’t know exactly what everybody is up to, but I’ll be happy to ask around when I get the chance.”
“Then tell your staff Geller is to call me as soon as he comes in,” Turner demanded. “Got that?”
“Fine,” Peter said.
“You and I need to understand some things,” Turner said in the same panicked voice. “The Mayor has decided that he is to be apprised of all developments in this case as soon as they occur. Do you understand? You are to report to me on a daily basis.”
“That is a remarkably unlikely arrangement. You have no jurisdiction in this case—”
“I do not understand your tone, Mr. Scattergood. We all desire the same outcome to these events, I trust.”
“I trust. I remind you that you have no ability to dictate—”
“Listen to me,” Turner growled. “Bill Hoskins will get it straight through your head if I can’t. Every witness, every lead, every bit of evidence. I want the whole file on my desk tomorrow morning.”
Turner hung up. Now Peter knew Turner had lost track of his unpredictable, true-believing executioner; Geller was operating on his own.
“You tell the Mayor you were here?” Peter asked.
“He trusts me,” Geller stated solemnly, raising his eyebrows.
“Okay,” Peter responded casually, “you were telling me about Johnetta Henry. Was she dating Carothers or Whitlock back before her son was born?”
“Well,” Geller said, “not Darryl yet, but she was spendin’ time with a few different men back then.”
“She got pregnant sometime back then, right?”
“Yes, she did,” Geller stated.
“What was it about her?”
The sad man nodded knowingly. “She had this way of playin’ with you, tryin’ to make you pay attention. But to my mind it just wasn’t right, it wasn’t right that she was messin’ up what so many people had tried to do.”
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