Break and Enter (19 page)

“If only we could hold him another day,” Hoskins mused angrily, “just to see what would come out of his mouth. Under that cool mask is a guy who’s very upset. He’s our guy, he’s got a record as long as my dick.”

“Not a long … record,” Berger observed.

Hoskins shook his head, ignoring the joke, unhappy with the general configuration of the universe and his inability to change it. “The Mayor said to me when I told him we had Carothers that he was
very pleased
this thing looked so straightforward.”

Hoskins stared abstractly toward the telephone, and for the life of him, Peter did not know what he was thinking or why he cared about the Mayor’s opinion. Within the political constellation of the city, they were enemies.

“So what about the Mayor?” Peter countered. “You know what he told me this morning? He said run the whole thing by the book. If we charge some guy with no evidence, the Mayor’s going to look like a bully. He should know that. You ready to build a charge
now
on that woman’s statement and then find nothing else and
then
have wasted the time on the wrong guy?” Peter said. Everyone in the office understood such a course of action could publicly embarrass the D.A. “Besides, that’s not the point. We really don’t have enough.”

Carothers was in custody but had not been formally charged. The police had no statements by the defendant, no eyewitness account, no physical evidence, and, of course, no statement by the victims. The only shred of connecting information had been discredited. Nothing linked Carothers to the scene, and under law he had only to wait ten hours in custody without being told by a magistrate what he was charged with before going free. He’d been taken in at five
A.M.
and thus, even fudging an hour, they had less than three hours to the deadline.

“I fucking
know
he’s the guy,” said Hoskins.

“Oh, how?” Berger asked.

Hoskins stood up, agitated, looking like he needed to break something. “Look at my face! Am I smiling? No!” His bow tie appeared tighter than usual, and he pointed his round, fat forefingers like pistols at Peter’s face. “And you better be right, Peter. You had better be right. Sorry is no good in this town when you fuck up. Sorry doesn’t feed the cat.”

THE REPORTERS HAD FOUND HIM
. Competing for the slightest piece of information, they wanted to know more about one of the main players in the Whitlock case, and had found Peter at the very hour he was to finish up the Robinson trial. As soon as he had turned the corner on the fourth-floor hallway, someone had looked up and said “Over here” and the lights had snapped on blindingly and microphones were shoved toward him and the questions peppered him. He’d moved tight-lipped through about ten reporters, gotten into court, and finally, trying to finish a bad dream, they had moved to the closing arguments. His head pounded in exhaustion. He listened to Morgan finish up his rant
about the confession and add to that the usual wind about circumstantial evidence and inconsistencies in testimony for the prosecution, then finish his summary with a hackneyed emotional guilt trip for the jury: “… and do you really wish to convict a man—remove his freedoms, the very thing this country is based on—because of what the prosecution
purports
to be evidence, when in fact…” It was boilerplate, and it was bad.

Now Judge Scarletti nodded at him to begin his summation. Peter stood up and walked over to the jury, hands open before him like a preacher. A dumb trick, but it got their attention. He would speak for Judy Warren, who could not speak for herself, and his words would be the last the jury heard before the judge gave them the charge. Now he would impose a narrative on the testimony, remind them of what they had heard, and what they should remember. His words would clarify, simplify, and bring order so that the jury would apply common sense to what it had heard.

“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, thank you for your careful consideration of all the evidence you’ve heard, evidence which I suggest shows beyond reasonable doubt that the defendant, Mr. William Robinson, did on August sixteenth of last year murder intentionally and knowingly Miss Judy Warren. Now, I want to reiterate”—he didn’t like the dull look he was getting from the old white-haired man, a retired barber who sat in the last row—“I want to review the important points of testimony for you, because, as I suggest you will see, this is a fairly simple case in which all the pieces fit together. That’s right—every piece fits every other piece. They show just when, where, and how Mr. Robinson killed his ex-girlfriend after being seized with anger. He was frenzied with jealousy.

“Now then, the defense has chosen not to contend these facts directly. The defense, ladies and gentlemen, has offered to you what I suggest is an utterly improbable set of events. The defense”—the disgust in his voice was palpable now, he knew—“would have you believe that William Robinson was nowhere near Judy Warren last August sixteenth and that his confession is the result of mental illness and was elicited, planned, and coached by the police. The defense would have you believe that the confession is spurious, a hoax, a falsehood. The defense has
brought in a couple of William Robinson’s old high-school pals to say he was with them early that night when they went drinking. They are his friends and they want to be loyal to him, so they’re telling a story they all agreed on. They testified he drove home that night. I want you to consider what kind of witnesses they were, and whether you can consider them as credible. Then the defendant’s housekeeper has said she heard him come in the house and that she spoke with him. Yesterday we saw that this testimony doesn’t hold water—she as much as admitted that herself.

“Mr. William Robinson did not come to the stand and testify in this case. That’s okay. He doesn’t have to. He has the right of protection against self-incrimination. You
may
be tempted to infer from the fact that the defendant did not take the stand that he is guilty. You may say to yourself, ‘If he is innocent, then why didn’t he come forward and say so?’ ” He paused just long enough to make sure they asked themselves this question, because he wanted them to answer it themselves. “But that is not correct. It’s not the way our legal system operates. The defendant is presumed to be innocent, as you were told at the outset of this trial. However, I do wish for you to infer and decide from what you
have
heard, which I suggest is very conclusive evidence that William Robinson is guilty of murder. The defense’s testimony rests on vague, inconsistent statements, not on demonstrable fact. We’re looking for a true verdict, and what the defense has offered us just doesn’t fit what a reasonable man or woman would agree with. Okay. Why do I say that? Because we’ve got so many pieces of proof that add up to an actual trail. Even though we have a constitutionally sound, properly administered, full and complete confession dictated by the defendant and then signed by him in the presence of two police officers, we don’t need that evidence—we have enough physical evidence to convict Mr. Robinson. As I promised to present in my opening statement, we can track the defendant through the entire day. We have the Wawa food market receipt with the date and time on it, forty-one minutes before the approximate time of death of Judy Warren. This particular Wawa is about five minutes from where Judy lived. We have testimony from Mr. Keegan, the defendant’s co-worker at the stock brokerage, that Mr. Robinson was always talking about the victim, about her appearance, about how she
looked in a halter top she wore because of the hot weather. As Mr. Keegan described for us, Mr. Robinson was angered by the fact that Miss Warren was seeing another man. We have the friend of the victim, Miss Swick, who said that the victim told her that she believed Mr. Robinson had followed her home several times the previous week at five-thirty in the afternoon. There was testimony that Mr. Robinson was starting to harass the deceased, that he wouldn’t leave her alone. Miss Swick said she herself had seen the accused arguing with Miss Warren. Miss Swick was quite certain about that. As you saw, she was a little hazy about the time of day, but that’s understandable. This happened about six months ago. But as to her identification of the defendant, Miss Swick remained certain, on direct questioning, cross-examination, and on redirect.

“We have the portion of Mr. Robinson’s left thumbprint on Judy Warren’s eyeglasses. His thumbprint
somehow
appears on her glasses. Were they still intimate enough that he would take off her glasses for her or would she let him hold her glasses? No. Miss Swick remembered the deceased being repelled by the sight of the defendant and not trusting him. The words she used, if I remember, according to Miss Swick, were ‘Actually, I think he’s a sleazy weirdo.’ She was no longer attracted to him. She wanted to avoid him. He scared her. So, again, I want you to ask yourselves, why in the world would a fingerprint of Mr. Robinson’s appear on Judy Warren’s glasses? The defense has tried to discredit the expertise of Captain Docherty of the mobile crime unit, who’s been with the Philadelphia Police Department for seventeen years and listed his certifications and continuing professional instruction at national forensic seminars on fingerprinting. Captain Docherty, you will remember, testified that the thumbprint on Judy Warren’s glasses, matched to a reasonable degree of scientific certainty the left thumb of the defendant. I’m talking about a pattern, ladies and gentlemen of the jury. A
chain
of evidence that links the dead body of Judy Warren to William Robinson. It’s very simple, there’s nothing tricky, nothing fancy about it, because Mr. Robinson did a very poor job of covering his tracks …”

He had to make sure the details stuck in their minds. Little red darts he lobbed through the dead courtroom air. Darts with suction cups that flattened smack on their eagerly solemn foreheads. Respect the juror but remember all the television he has watched. Make the event real, serve
up a little trauma with professional reserve, stir the citizen outrage at such a carefully planned attack. He reminded them that Robinson had first raped his victim and that he was a secretor, which was a certain physical type of male whose blood appeared in all bodily fluids, including semen. He reminded them of the testimony about the rape sample points—vulva, vagina, and cervix, where semen containing minute amounts of the same blood type as Robinson’s was found—and he reminded them of the hair cuts on the labia majora and minora and bruises on the thighs, both indications of force. This evidence, Peter admitted, contradicted Robinson’s bizarre, grandiose claim that he had put his penis into the girl’s warm heart. The jury had to envision the forced entry into the apartment, the attack and the rape, and then the stabbing; they had to see the knife cut into the poor girl’s belly, and look back now at the pointy-nosed defendant, look at his wiggy expression and arching eyebrows and know—and
feel
—that this rich punk greased this poor girl after stalking her for more than a week. Robinson had fallen in love with the maternal abundance of her breasts—from the lab photos you could see she was stacked—and her refusal to see him anymore drove him crazy. The jury had to know that he merited a life sentence, care of Gratersford State Prison. Twenty or thirty years to think about it real hard.

“… as expert medical testimony has shown, it was then the defendant took the larger of the knives …”

He was sure to remind them about the blood samples on the charred sofa that were an exact match to those found on the defendant’s corduroy pants. The evidence technicians loved figuring out stuff like that down to the chemical level. Peter couldn’t bring in the 439 porno magazines the police had found in Robinson’s closet or the animal-cruelty charge at sixteen—blowtorching a cat—or the twice-failed polygraph test. He brought in what he could, though, and made sure that the jury—especially the eight women—were sold. The room, he felt, was his. But he kept his tone even and the summation under thirty minutes.

“… confident,” he concluded, “that you will return a verdict of guilty to the charge of first-degree murder.”

Peter’s voice hung in the large room for a moment, and like at a Quaker Meeting—strangely enough—he recognized the gathered silence
of a group of people in profound contemplation of what they had just heard. Finally, Judge Scarletti cleared his throat and proceeded, asking the jury if any of them would be unable to deliberate on the sentence because of sickness or pressing need. No, everyone would be able to pass judgment. It was rare for a juror to quit at this point, having invested so much time. A verdict released the jurors’ tension, too. The judge asked the alternate jurors to leave the courtroom, and then gave his instructions to the jury, defining first-, second-, and third-degree murder. “You will have to de
cide,
based on your dis
cus
sion and inde
pen
dent judgment of the testimony of every witness you have heard,” he started, and droned on, speaking patiently while everyone in the courtroom knew the boy’s goose was cooked, “guilty as charged” practically dripping off the greasy lamp globes way up in the ceiling, where a veritable mausoleum of dead flies and moths revolved slowly in the dusty crochet work of a hundred spiders as the heat rose from the radiators clunking away in the corners of the courtroom.
Guilty.
The word dripped down each brass button of the court officers’ uniforms and flitted across the smug, shiny faces of the sheriff’s deputies, young men of little education who derived great sources of identity from a set of pumped-up arms, pressed blue uniforms, and polished black shoes. Yes, everybody knew. Peter could feel the sure verdict slip around the room like the ghost of the blowtorched cat nuzzling the jurors’ socks.

AT QUARTER TO FIVE
, Peter combed his hair, straightened his tie, checked to see that no remains of lunch clung to his teeth, splashed water onto his face in order to wake up, and prepared on an index card a short statement for the reporters and television cameras assembled in the D.A. press room. Some had followed him over from City Hall and seemed excited to be with him, acting as if they had found a new player to push into the media spotlight. He saw Hoskins conferring with Gerald Turner, the Mayor’s aide. Peter reminded himself to speak clearly, to look at the cameras, and to sweep his gaze from one side of the room to the other. He’d done it a few times before, the first time staring into those powerful TV lights like a scared animal frozen on a highway at night before a car. But now he delivered the announcement of Carothers’s
release coolly, calmly. It was a simple, quick matter, almost perfunctory. Hoskins stood at the back of the room nodding slowly. Peter glimpsed Karen Donnell. She smiled at him—guiltily? bitterly?—and resumed her note-taking. The press conference had been timed so that the television reporters had little time to ask further questions and just enough time to set up for a live report outside or to get videotape across town for editing before the local news broadcasts went on. The double-murder would compete with a subway derailment and the announcement that another city judge had been indicted. On the way out, Turner beckoned to Peter. He ignored the Mayor’s aide—what more could be said today? And besides, Turner was the worst kind of political operative, a moon eagerly reflecting the sun. He didn’t want to be involved.