Break and Enter (14 page)

“Yes.”

“Any questions in respect to how I would like this tragic affair handled?”

“No, none.”

“Thank you for your valuable time so early in the morning, Mr. Scattergood. Stay in touch.”

After a quick shower and breakfast, he looked at Cassandra, whose dark wool suit now hid her thinness.

“You understand I have to run out …” He tried to sound casual. “I appreciate you helping me this morning. Please pull the front door shut when you leave.”

“That’s okay.” She smiled, replacing the orange juice in the refrigerator that Janice had picked out. “I understand completely.”

“Something else, Cassandra. I’d appreciate it if you let me answer my own phone. More than appreciate it, I really do insist you not compromise me again like that.”

“You’re serious?”

He let his silence answer her, and while he was silent he noticed something. He had been letting the dishes pile up in the sink, and here
was Cassandra, standing in her eight-hundred-dollar outfit, still fresh from the day before, with her hands in sudsy warm water with bits of rotten vegetable floating in it. He glanced at his watch, thinking he did not want her to do his dishes for him; the act implied intimacy and cooperation and domesticity and all the things Janice had taken with her. Cassandra seemed to enjoy the washing—the
meaning
of it—and he almost asked her if she felt so comfortable as to do this, going to the trouble—he considered mentioning all this, but he remembered that a corpse lay in a room across town and that he had a responsibility to that corpse. He had better get moving. What was a sink of dishes compared to a Mayor’s wrath?

He pulled on his coat. Cassandra turned and smiled at him.

“Hope it goes well.”

“Yes.” His voice was inconclusive. Her eyes waited for something from him, some acknowledgment, and he knew himself to be a small-hearted, selfish bastard. In the sunlight, she looked haggard. He wanted to scream at her to leave, for her presence implied his failure. Instead, he shuffled over and planted a meager but passably affectionate kiss on her forehead.

“Busy today?” he inquired dutifully.

“The usual planning meeting. I give a presentation.”

He didn’t answer.

“Call me?” she said.

“Sure.”

OUTSIDE HIS HOUSE
paced a small woman in a blue winter coat. For a moment he thought it was Janice—and in that case they wouldn’t be able to go in the house; despite the fact that she had left him, Janice would explode if she found Cassandra inside. The woman turned at the sound of the door shutting—not Janice. She had been waiting for him. He pretended not to see her and walked up the street.

“Mr. Scattergood?” she called after him.

He hurried to his car, thinking that all he had to do was get in and shut the door. Soon the coffee would mask his exhaustion, compelling him toward whatever it was the day held.

“Excuse me!”

She caught up and he stood staring unhappily into two blue eyes magnified grotesquely by thick glasses and framed by curly red hair. How could he ever have thought she might be Janice?

“Nice house,” she said. “I love these old streets. The cobblestones and everything.”

“Thanks.”

“My name’s Karen Donnell.” She reached out a gloved hand he automatically shook. “With the
Inquirer
.”

“Don’t recognize you,” he said.

She pulled out an
Inquirer
ID.

“The city desk assigned me the Mayor’s nephew story. I’ll be following the case. The desk wants to do an investigative piece, use it as an opportunity to get behind the workings of the D.A.’s office, see the way a case progresses, really put the whole thing under a microscope and see how it’s done.”

“Oh.” Why, he wondered, would she tell him this? “Sort of a page-one feature?”

“Right,” she answered. “I need to ask you a couple of questions.” She produced a small voice-activated recorder and flicked it on. A red light appeared above the condenser microphone.

“Well, I really haven’t had time—I heard about it just an hour ago.” Backpedaling, thinking about what he’d already said, figuring how to say nothing more. “How’d you get my name, anyway?”

“Someone in the Mayor’s office mentioned you might be heading the case.”

Which meant events were now moving forward faster than he could keep abreast of them. The Mayor’s office was not going to let him breathe.

“I see. Look, honestly, I really don’t know much about the case yet.”

The reporter’s eyebrows flew up in interest. He distrusted her high level of energy. “Do you want me to say that the chief man is unable to provide the simplest details of the case? Is that what the taxpayers are getting for their money?”

Up to this moment he had been willing to give her the benefit of the doubt—most reporters were not so bad, just doing their job, all part of
the adversarial system that made America throb—but this was unfair at five forty-five in the morning. It was too early to be answering fish-bait questions intended to produce snappy J-school lead paragraphs.

“All right, shoot,” Peter said tiredly, setting down his briefcase and pushing his gloveless hands into the pockets of his coat, letting his mind glide away from the idiocy of the moment, instead, searching for distraction of any kind, enjoying the sound of the few long-dead sycamore leaves whisking along the cobblestones. The sound and the crisp air reminded him of the mornings when he walked to school, his hair still slightly wet from the shower his mother used to make him take each morning, the smell of milk and bananas on his breath, his bookbag in one hand and the square, secure lunch box in the other, the Thermos rattling a little as he walked. Blowing spumes of breath in the cold air. The many mornings of one’s life. He and Janice had stood in this same spot a thousand times, deciding when to call each other, dawdling before leaving, exchanging last-minute information about bills, work, money, the car, arguing, arguing about arguing, kissing to make up, believing with all their hearts that their lives were something beautiful.

“First,” the reporter asked, “can you tell me the circumstances of the murder?”

“I’ll tell you what I know, which is very little. We have a homicide of a young black male last night or early this morning in West Philadelphia. Apparently he is the nephew of the Mayor. A full investigation is under way.”

“Do you have a suspect in custody?”

“I have no comment at this time. Certainly the police will question all those involved with the case. You guys always get that info from your own sources over there anyway. But if you call my office in a couple of hours, I’ll be able to help you out.”

“What’s the suspect’s name?”

“If there is
in fact
a suspect at this time, I can have that for you at the appropriate time, long before your first copy deadline. Literally, Miss Donnell, I have just woken up.”

In addition to the tape recorder, she carried a reporter’s notepad and now paused to scribble something—what, he didn’t know, having said nothing important—and in the lull he reminded himself that he had
better deal with this and all reporters sensibly. Not let his irritation show. The reporter looked up, her lips precise instruments through which to mete out difficult questions. “Do you feel that a case of such public interest could be directed by an inexperienced prosecutor?”

“Of course not,” he snapped. “You get experience fast in the D.A.’s office. I’ve handled thousands of cases and a couple of hundred trials in my time.”

“Is the killing drug-related?”

“We don’t know.”

“I’ve been told crack was found on the murder scene.”

“I couldn’t say if that’s true.”

“Do you think drugs were the motive?”

“Again, no comment. We’re just beginning our investigation, miss. I’ve only known about—”

“Who found the body?” she persisted.

“I don’t know, but I’ll make sure you’re informed.”

“When will the medical examiner issue his report?”

“That depends on the length of the autopsy. Sometimes tissue tests have to be run that take extra time. We usually get a turnaround on a preliminary report in about a day. These questions are a bit general.”

The reporter shot her glance over his shoulder toward the house, as if she’d seen something in the window.

“Are you happily married?” she asked.

He looked at her. The reporter smiled blithely at him.

“What?”

“I asked you if you were happily married.” The corner of her mouth was turned up in coy aggressiveness.

“What kind of question is that?”

She began to open her mouth. He felt the coffee flick on in his brain—finally, a surge of energy.

“Oh,” she said, grinning, “I suppose it’s the kind of question—”

“No!
Don’t answer that, I will. Turn off that recorder!”

Surprisingly, she did. He moved closer to her.

“Now,
strictly
off the record, Miss Karen Donnell. I’ll tell you exactly what kind of question that is. It’s the kind of question that comes out of the mouth of a rookie reporter who comes to the city for the first time
and who, listening to the police scanner early in the morning—God knows why, since
normal
people aren’t up at five in the morning—plays some sort of lucky hunch or gets some backdoor information while talking on her car’s cellular telephone to somebody who knows somebody and who then decides to camp out on my doorstep and see if she can’t get a story before anyone else. What are you? Banished to the Main Line society beat as a rookie and impatient or something? I
know
the
Inquirer
newsroom is a shark nest, everyone trying to outwork everyone else to win this year’s Pulitzer. But I’ll tell you something else I know, lady. You don’t write investigative stories in one day—no, don’t protest.
Investigative
is the word you just used, Miss Donnell. It’s my job to remember what people say—I think you can appreciate
that,
since it’s your job, too. As for the city desk, the first news budget meeting doesn’t begin for hours. The national AP wire has just started to dump stories in your computer system. I guarantee you that if Japan buys General Motors, then not much else will appear on the front page. So that leaves me with the conclusion that your line about some front-page investigative feature is a bunch of small-town bluffing, though let me tell you one more thing before you get the hell out of here—and that is I
was
willing to give you the benefit of the doubt. After all, you are standing out here in the big bad cold. But the
tip-off,
the absolute
dead truth
came flying home to me when, after all your transgressions of professional journalistic conduct, which most everyone else on your paper seems to practice admirably enough, after all
that,
most of which I bet was just showing off, given what followed—after all
that,
you have the fucking
gall
to jab your way into my private business? What do you
care
whether I’m happily married? I’m not a celebrity, I’m not famous, I’m some average, private guy. And who the hell are you to ask, anyway? What are you, greedy? Not only does the early bird want the
worm
”—the reporter winced—“but she wants the page-one story, too. Suppose I were unhappily married and your question caused me genuine mental anguish? That would be terrific, wouldn’t it? You’re a great human being, and a super reporter, cultivating the confidence of your sources. Why, I’d say that you’re set for a brilliant career.”

She was nibbling her lip, refusing to react.

“Okay.” He was miserable now. “Just respect me and I’ll respect you. Call my office in a couple of hours and I’ll give you the straight stuff.”

He stared at her, waiting for a response.

“I’d heard about big-city prosecutors—” she recovered.

“Don’t mind me, Miss Donnell. I’m not myself.”

A LIGHT RAIN FELL
. In his own rarely used Ford, Peter drove west over the wet streets to West Philadelphia, replaying the conversation with the reporter, still angry but worrying that he had been unfairly virulent. He passed the massive Thirtieth Street train station, then skirted through the University of Pennsylvania, over to Baltimore Avenue. He’d spent seven years living in this part of the city during his undergraduate and law-school days. The houses were large, three-story professors’ homes, well-maintained Victorian structures, which then gave way to the student roominghouses, many badly needing paint and even basic repair, then farther west, the smaller homes of the slums, many of which had crumbling stoops, broken windows, rotting porches, and above all, the inescapable mark of deepening poverty. Out here the city didn’t even clean the streets.

He parked his car at the police barricade at Forty-fifth Street and Baltimore. A TV camera crew eating breakfast slumped in the open back of a transmitter van. Not far away, a clot of officers and detectives from the Eighteenth District huddled under the leafless branches at the door to the brick apartment house. He wouldn’t immediately be recognized, for as a trial attorney he usually had little contact with the local investigation of a case. The logic of Hoskins’s directive kicked in, however; seeing the crime scene might well be helpful if he needed to re-create it for a jury, and he could be present for any legal questions the detectives had. The car was warm and he sat there a moment more for pleasure, tasting Cassandra’s eggs and coffee in his mouth. There was no doubt, he decided, that she was a lonely woman fighting the demographics, scavenging affection where she could. He would have to find some humane way to let her know he didn’t want to see her again.

The policemen in their rain slickers milled about, lit cigarettes,
rocked on their feet. They had probably divided the area into sectors and now had teams looking for witnesses, poking through trash cans, scuffing for information he’d eventually decide was sufficient for a formal charge. The official police file would contain blue carbons of the police reports, with the defense attorney receiving the white copies. Through the windshield he watched a few gawkers slide up to the police and ask questions. The cops shrugged noncommittally. Peter dealt with cops all the time, reading their reports, preparing statements, checking testimony as to the way evidence was seized so it would be admissible in court, but he had never been able to know why cops did what they did, what they thought in the deep brain. Becoming a policeman was not quite the neighborhood patronage system it used to be, and selection procedures were monitored carefully. What fed them? The identity of the uniform? Service? Power? Gun-lust? He admired the resilience necessary to cruise a beat month after month, endure risk and scorn. They had a hard job. Each year the citizenry poorer, more dependent on city services and more violent. Under Rizzo, the cops were an invincible, if brutal, army. Now there weren’t enough of them to go around, and the city was cutting back again. In some neighborhoods, like Spanish Kensington, the cops no longer had credibility. Peter did not love cops but he respected them—they did what had to be done, that which no one in his right mind would do. And yet, so often they were stupid men, too, clumsy, unforgivably brutal. Every year they looked younger to him. In Philly, you still didn’t have to be a high-school graduate to be a policeman. Cops protected themselves and one another, and distrusted lawyers as a matter of policy. A small but steady percentage of cops were corrupt, got caught. He wondered if all versions of men were stupid at times. Ninety-three percent of all felonies were committed by men. Again and again, the biological imperative toward aggressiveness drove men—even men socialized to be peaceful—into stupid, violent behavior. Had Whitlock been that kind of man and lost?