Break and Enter

by Colin Harrison

  The next day, soon after Peter was notified that he had been suspended immediately without pay, it was revealed that Detective Westerbeck had matched Geller’s fingerprints with those in the apartment and arrested him. Geller, it soon became apparent, had lost touch with reality and in a videotaped confession described the murder of Johnetta Henry. Inevitably, the television stations—which now gorged themselves on the scandal—soon got a copy of the tape and played it on the news.

  That night Peter dialed half a dozen hotels in Bermuda, hoping that Berger hadn’t made a pass at one of the hotel waitresses and caused a huge fight with his wife, resulting in their fleeing the island in crisis. Finally, listening past the low humming crackle of the phone lines, Peter had reached Berger and explained all that had happened.

  “It’s going to be hard to find a job,” Berger said.

  “You’ll find me one,” Peter answered. “Right?”

  Berger’s laugh came through the line.

  “What’s happening with Janice?” Berger asked.

  “Last night I found her in bed fucking some guy and I had a gun and just about blew them away.”

  “Yeah, right,” Berger said sarcastically.

  And the next day, even as Karen Donnell’s story hit the paper, quoting an unnamed Assistant District Attorney at length, the Mayor’s office announced the D.A.’s office was suppressing information that would disclose that Wayman Carothers committed both murders. The spokesman called for “full and immediate disclosure.” And then came the countercharges by the D.A.’s office, which had closed ranks and was set to wage bureaucratic war with the Mayor’s office. Hoskins started to appear on television making statements about the investigation. Peter’s name was never mentioned. The District Attorney, fresh from huddling with his media guru, decided after all that he had better jump back in front of the public eye, get a fresh scalp on the pole, so to speak, and catch the battle on the upswing.

  It was only a matter of time before the hounds of the media identified Peter as the source in Karen Donnell’s story and wanted to know if and why he had been suspended when in fact it was he who had turned up the crucial information. Then Peter found himself outside City Hall in the late afternoon, speaking from the wool warmth of his muffler and coat, spewing shadows of steam at the reporters and cameras, some of them from the networks, the bright glare making him feel he was looking into the sun, and he again recounted the story, carefully explaining how it was that a young black woman named Johnetta Henry, whose desires were typical—a safe life, hope for her child, and marriage to a promising young man—had been killed by a man who no longer was sane, a man who worshiped the leader whom the public had so recently elected, and how this tragedy was compounded by simple error on the part of the police and by the impulsive and sickening violence of Wayman Carothers, and how the Mayor and his allies had panicked and sought to suppress the truth.

  It was a grim and depressing story and the papers and the television stations spent weeks corroborating it, putting the Mayor in a desperate position, forcing him to backpedal and countercharge, saying that “this fellow Peter Scattergood” was a demented and desperate man, unstable with grief at the breakup of his marriage. Suddenly Peter’s association with Vinnie became known, and Vinnie’s unsavory activities surfaced in an undercover investigation—the Mayor’s power brokers had cut various deals with the party to turn up Vinnie, thereby sacrificing the fat man in the effort to discredit Peter. Vinnie’s sudden appearance spawned fresh inquiries into his activities and other scandals came to light, all of which tended to make Peter guiltier by association, especially when it came to be known that Vinnie had received a $25,000 kickback for his role as middleman in the purchase of a thousand defective police radios. That a young Hispanic policeman—a churchgoing father of four children—had recently been gravely injured while trying to call for backup on one of the faulty radios immediately was a heartbreakingly perfect twist of fate and sent Vinnie into a friendless hell. The charges about Vinnie created rumblings about state bar association disciplinary proceedings for Peter, and he received formal notice that a preliminary investigation was imminent.

  The fact that Peter had been in the midst of a disastrous marriage was endlessly fascinating to the newspapers, of course, because fractured love relationships seemed to be the theme running through the entire affair. And, relatedly, what everyone wished to know was the mind of the Mayor, for until the scandal it was generally agreed that he was a good man, a man who might lead the city with grace and passion. And what people wanted to know was whether in his heart he was still a good man and if it pained him to have hidden his fatherhood of Tyler Henry and if his wife forgave him or not. The newscasts showed the Mayor and his family grimly attending church each Sunday, with all comments about the case coming through the Mayor’s spokesmen and his attorneys. And had he loved Johnetta Henry or had he only felt great lust at the sight of her, the same body Peter had seen naked on the bed in the West Philadelphia apartment? No one knew these answers now, or if they did, then they were not forthcoming.

  The black community was undecided about the issue, half believing with understandable distrust that Scattergood and other white officials had framed the Mayor, others disgusted and angry that they had been betrayed so quickly. The Mayor’s office, trying anything it could to restore the public faith, also went after Hoskins, alleging that it was in fact he who had sought to cover up the facts of the murders while engaged in an open struggle for power in a city agency that was now adrift, due to the political aspirations of the D.A. But either these charges were too abstract or Hoskins had too many allies packed away in the Republican law firms of the city because the charges weren’t sticking. It was rumored that Hoskins would turn in his resignation and be asked to accept a lucrative job in one of the private firms in order to keep him out of harm’s way as the D.A. continued his bid for the Senate. Thus Hoskins would be kept busy at the luncheons in the downtown hotels, on the dinner circuit in the Rittenhouse Square townhouses, and at the weekend parties out on the Main Line. He had, it seemed, escaped public judgment.

  As for Carothers, he had been banished to the endless wait for his various trials, and no one believed that his cause merited public consideration. When the facts showed that Carothers was not the father of Tyler Henry, it became known through Stein, the defense attorney, that Carothers was despondent and uncooperative; the problem was that Carothers had loved Tyler and now, this too, his fatherhood, had been taken from him. Soon thereafter Carothers was involved in a prison fight in which one of his lungs was punctured. The man was lost, Peter knew, and could never come back.

  PETER LOOKED UP. The rows of empty meeting benches seemed gathered in silent contemplation of him and his sins. It had been in this very room that he and Janice had been married. He still hoped that he would get his ring back someday, wrapped in a tissue and mailed in a small package, but he assumed that Cassandra had not gone to the necessary trouble of retrieving it. She had not called him and when he had finally returned to his house, the shopping coupons—the phantom money—still lay on his kitchen table and floor.

  And neither had he seen Janice, despite the fact that their divorce now proceeded in a normal and almost dignified manner—Mastrude and her attorney arguing over nothing, conducting a calm and orderly transaction. Yet no matter what the inevitable fluttering of legal documents, the foreknown entry into the ledgers of the men and women no longer betrothed, the many decrees and judgments, always they would be linked in the most difficult of ways. After the charges about Peter’s arrangement with Vinnie surfaced, the press quickly found Janice, eager to see just what kind of woman a promising young prosecutor would wreck his career for. The Daily News photographer caught her off guard as she left work, and her alarmed and frozen expression had flitted across the newsstands one day just last week with the caption SHE WON’T TALK ABOUT SCANDAL beneath the photo. Janice had called him from her lawyer’s office to assure him that she would respect his privacy i
f he respected hers, and he wished to hear forgiveness in her voice. They both knew that he lived now at a very far remove from her, by his dangerous and inexcusable actions and by his position in the sprawling public crisis. She was no longer seeing Apple, she mentioned without being asked, and yet there was no hope in this for either of them, their passion long burnt out by torment, leaving only a residue of memory and an uncertain desire never to become strangers to each other.

  The light of the day had crossed the wide planks of the floor and in this reminder that time would push all events into the past, that stone was even now being melted by the rain, and that a man’s fate was a small thing, Peter rose and thrust his hands into his pockets, feeling the familiar and comforting shapes of coins and keys. He passed through the empty foyer of the meeting house and out the large heavy doors. The drops touched his head and face. Daffodils had pushed their green fingers up through the earth, and he recalled that his father’s seasonal labors were now just beginning. His mother was feeling better and would be able to help. Under the wet, budding trees near the gate he thought again of Janice, wishing with sudden great hope that she might be waiting for him in the car, holding a cup of coffee warm in her hands perhaps, knowing somehow that he was there. He would slip in and lean over and kiss her and smell the coffee on her lips and she would ask him to hold the cup as she started the ignition. He would check to see that they both had on their seat belts. In such a mundane act would be genuine and eternal redemption. But as Peter looked, it came to him that Janice was not there and that she would not be there in the future.

  And so, on that day in April, with the dark and old city besieged and in turmoil, Peter Scattergood walked, the wind flapping his long black coat as he found his way past the many places he knew, and it was somewhere in those hours—the first moments that he seemed to be himself again—that he suddenly remembered Tyler Henry, the small boy who knew almost nothing of what swirled around him, who only later in life would come to see that it was for him and for his doomed mother and her young lover, and for his powerful father, that a city of millions had stopped and taken pause, had examined the newspaper photographs of him, shaking their heads in amazement at the contrast between the boy’s innocence and the evil that had beset those who had brought him into the world. And, as Peter recalled as he walked out of the shadows of the Benjamin Franklin Bridge and turned toward Independence Mall, one of the television stations had found Tyler Henry one previous Sunday morning in the West Philadelphia church that he attended with his grandmother and where he sang in the choir, and for a moment the whole city again saw the black child in his pressed collar, neat tie, and red choir robe, his small and perfect mouth forming the words to the hymns, singing in a clear and high tone, his eyes lifted upward with the trust and hope that only a young life holds.

  Acknowledgments

  SEVERAL INDIVIDUALS HELPED ME gain access to the world of the Philadelphia prosecutor. Charles Gallagher, deputy for policy and planning in the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office, and Joseph Wolfson, a former Philadelphia Assistant District Attorney now in private practice with Morgan, Lewis, & Bockius, both shared with me their impressions and experiences. My conversations with these individuals did not involve specific, attributable identification of any living individuals, either attorneys, defendants, or political figures in Philadelphia. In fact, our discussions were predicated upon this limitation by these men and by myself. Similarly, although the lawyer protagonist of this novel has the surname of Scattergood, no relation to or characterization of any living person named Scattergood is meant or implied.

  Mr. Wolfson and Thomas Schindler, an Assistant District Attorney in the Chester County (Pennsylvania) District Attorney’s Office and a friend for more than twenty years, checked the manuscript for legal and procedural accuracy. Their corrections and suggestions were invaluable. Any and all errors should be attributed to the author, however. A nod of thanks goes also to the men and women of Philadelphia City Hall, official and distinctly unofficial, who shared with me information about the building and the courts.

  For several details about historical Philadelphia, I have depended on

  “Once Upon a Time,” an article by Stephanie Grauman Wolf, Ph.D., which appeared in Bryn Mawr Now.

  I wish to express my gratitude to James Michener and the Copernicus Society for their generous fellowship in support of the writing of this novel.

  Finally, I wish to thank David Groff, my editor, whose willingness to take on an unpublished writer was no less crucial than his energy and expertise in bringing forth this story.