Break and Enter (25 page)

Later—long after EMTs discovered and gingerly removed a loaded handgun from the deep pockets of his wool coat—a team of emergency-
room residents took out the slug from Carothers and concluded he had narrowly missed being paralyzed from the waist down. A second slug was found lodged in the thick slab of muscle that wrapped around his left thigh. Though painful, the wounds were essentially superficial.

On Carothers, the detective said, was found a small address book, which listed a number of women, but no relatives or friends. Nearly every woman contacted said, when she realized she was talking to the police, that she no longer was in touch with Carothers, and thank the Lord for that. Except a woman named Vicki. The police met with Vicki and found that she and Carothers shared a $350-a-month apartment different from the one they had searched when Carothers had been brought in for the Whitlock murder.

All this had happened that morning. When the police searched the second apartment, they found a semi-automatic AK-47 assault rifle, three more pistols, several hundred rounds of ammunition, assorted switchblades, eight thousand dollars’ worth of China White synthetic heroin—which suggested by its purity and packaging of blue tape and star label that it was from New York City—a crack pipe, several syringes still in their sterile wrappers, and an unopened, duty-labeled crate of whiskey stolen from a Philadelphia warehouse six months prior.

“Wait a minute,” Peter interrupted. “You said before he was wearing a wool coat?”

“Yeah.”

Carothers had originally been arrested in his mover’s uniform. But it occurred to Peter that he may have been more likely to be wearing a heavy wool coat the night of the murder—in fact, the drunken woman who had identified Carothers had said he was wearing such a coat.

“Were you actually at this new apartment?”

“Yeah.”

“Any other coats there? For cold weather?”

“Don’t remember.”

“See any bloodstains on the wool coat he was arrested in?”

“Sure, in the back where he got hit and—”

“I mean bloodstains elsewhere, a day or two old.”

“Don’t know.”

“Where, exactly, is the coat?”

“At the hospital, I guess.”

“All right,” Peter said. “Get him blood-typed and have them check out the stains on the coat, see if any match the Henry girl or Whitlock. And do it before the coat is lost or the stains decompose. What else?”

The detective continued to narrate. The fact that Carothers was obviously a bad character would normally reinforce the original suspicion that he was the killer of Whitlock and Johnetta Henry. But in this case the opposite was true, because the police had found a well-drawn road map showing the ways to exit a local 7-Eleven convenience store. Even the streets were labeled. This store, police knew, had been held up two nights prior—the night of the double-murder in West Philadelphia. The 7-Eleven store clerk was shown mug shots of Carothers and easily identified him as one of several perpetrators.

Forgetting for a moment the incidents of the previous night, it now seemed impossible that Carothers had knocked off a convenience store, then driven across town straight to West Philadelphia to murder a college student and his girlfriend. The new information explained why Carothers was mum about his whereabouts on the night of the double-murder. It showed that, despite all else, he was a man of prodigious energy, having pulled off armed robbery at night and reported to his moving job early in the morning, been briefly arrested, and then committed armed robbery
that same evening.
But the new information did not explain who had killed the West Philadelphia couple and why the finger had been suddenly pointed at Carothers in the first place.

Peter decided, within the midst of this shower of information, that there was one more thing he wanted to do before turning his energies to the case. He called Vinnie.

“Peter, you’re a busy man.”

“I need something else done, Vinnie. This one may involve a number of basketball games between the Sixers and the Knicks.”

“I’m reading you loud and clear.”

“I want you to get me some information on a John Apple, works as a carpenter in South Philly. Big man, white, about twenty-six. Just run a basic printout, police file, FBI, service record, whatever comes out, if anything.”

“This is risky, my friend.”

There was a knock on the door. Melissa, the office secretary, poked her head in.

“I’m sorry, Peter, there’s a man who demands to talk with you. I told him you’re on another line but—”

“No sweat, I’ll hold here.”

The door closed.

“Vinnie, I’m going to put you on hold for about a minute.”

Peter punched the buttons on his phone.

“This is Peter Scat—”

“Scattergood, this is Ronald Brackington, your wife’s lawyer,” a voice exploded at him. “I’d planned to give you a call later in the week, but circumstances have moved that up. I
can
file for a restraining order, Scattergood. Your wife comes home early and the painters say the
real-estate
man was here and she says there
is
no real-estate man, we finished the paperwork four
months
ago, and they describe him and she
knows
it’s you. Then I have a very distraught client on
my
hands and for
good
reason. You are
not
to harass her in any way.
No
phone calls,
no
contact—”

“I know what a restraining order is. It’s unnecessary.” Peter said this calmly. “Janice and I get along fine.”

“Look—whatever you’re up to, Scattergood, keep away from her. You’re a
public
official and I don’t have to, nor particularly
want
to, remind you that we can make it very embarrassing—”

“That won’t be necessary.” Peter switched lines.

“Vinnie?”

“Yeah, I was just saying it gets risky—”

“I know,” he responded quickly.

“Risky especially for
you.”

“I realize that.”

“If I find out where he is, should I make some calls?”

“No, no questions, just run a file, just keep it a piece of paper I can look at. Put it on the routine sheet, no special attention. Let me know when you have it.”

AN HOUR LATER
came the information, relayed in unmistakably bored tones by a police ballistics technician, that the unfired bullets in
Carothers’s gun used in the supermarket holdup were the same caliber and brand as the bullet retrieved by the medical examiner from Whitlock’s shoulder and brain. Furthermore—conclusively, the bore marks on the retrieved bullet matched a bullet that had been test-fired with the gun. Peter hung up and charged into the hallway.

“Who ordered the Carothers gun be test-fired?” he asked Melissa. “How was it done so quickly?”

She looked at him fearfully and it occurred to him that in the context of always-shifting information, it was the secretary who sometimes was in the privileged position, for she knew who called and when, who came and went.

“I think—you should ask Mr. Hoskins,” she protested.

“Well, of course I can and will do that, Melissa,” Peter snapped, “but since you are right here, I am wondering—”

“I ordered it done,” Hoskins said behind him, slipping a firm hand under Peter’s arm, guiding him into a private office.

“Why the hell didn’t you inform me, Bill? I’m running this investigation, on your orders! You tell me to go ahead, move with autonomy, and then you pull shit like this, dealing me out of the information loop.”

“Peter,” Hoskins said in a placating tone, “the word came in while you were out this morning. The gun was a caliber match and I told them to go ahead and get it checked out right away. They know how important this is and so the paperwork wasn’t a problem. I was going to tell you. You’ve been tied up a hell of a lot today, and frankly, I didn’t expect the report till tomorrow anyway. Can you fault any of that?” Hoskins stared at him, perhaps coldly, perhaps being reasonable. “You got a problem with that?”

“What do you think? Of course I do.”

“We’re a team here, Peter. Don’t forget it.”

He was torn between telling Hoskins to shove it up his wide-ride butt, or apologizing.

“All right.” Peter backed down.

Hoskins smiled and opened the door, throwing an arm around Peter’s shoulder. It felt good.

But not so good that right before five, after Hoskins had slipped away early, Peter asked Melissa if the Mayor’s office happened to have called during the day.

“Somebody named Gerald Turner, an aide to the Mayor,” she said as she clipped some papers together. “Twice.”

“Who took the calls?” Peter asked.

She looked up at him, and caught within the blue eye shadow and black mascara around her eyes was fear. “Mr. Hoskins took the calls.”

ANGRY, ANGRY WITH EVERYTHING
, doubly betrayed that day, he worked straight through dinner in his office until eleven that night, burning through the paperwork, checking in with detectives on other cases, dictating memos and letters, calling witnesses at home to remind them to be in court next week, leaving instructions for Melissa, absorbing a foot-high stack of case files. There was a small amount of refuge in simply doing the work. When he realized he was no longer thinking clearly, he stood up, grabbed his coat, took the elevator down to the street.
I did everything I could to please him and I liked doing it.
In Janice’s prim code, that was practically pornography, implying the steamiest, sweatiest, gone-to-the-devil-and-loving-every-second kind of fucking, the cosmic, obliterating fuck. He imagined her sucking away on big old John Apple, John Apple banging her from behind.

He could take the subway or walk. He decided to walk, and did so with the brisk pace of a man who, despite good parents, the many years of expensive education, the influence of a cultured, beautiful woman, despite all the civilizing institutions and experiences that he had been channeled through his whole life, knew that only physical activity eased his anger. It was the only acceptable outlet for the desire to punish and do violence and to murder, murder being the thing he wanted most of all to do now, take John Apple and, while explaining to him that nobody else could have Janice
ever,
beat the man senseless, truly beat the shit out of him long past the point that he had ceased begging for forgiveness, until the blood seeped from his ears and nose and mouth, until his ribs had splintered into slivers and pierced every internal organ, until his eyes had been gouged out by the rapid, repeated, and unhesitating jab of Peter’s thumbs, until he had ripped Apple’s heart from his chest, doing Robinson one better, and hold the warm, dripping, still-pumping and throbbing meat above his head, preferably in front of the entire
population of Philadelphia, do it in fucking Veteran’s Stadium for God’s sake, and take that lump of bloody muscle, shove it in his mouth, and eat it.

He walked for nearly an hour, then stopped in a bar, had a drink, ate a plateful of potato skins, started to lighten up, even cracking a smile at himself. He could be philosophical about Janice. Everybody got lonely. In a far-off way, the fact that she was lonely made him sad, and he could even work up a small amount of gladness that she was less lonely now. It was her right to do as she pleased. He certainly had gone running for comfort himself, hadn’t he? He had another drink and asked the waitress her name. She granted him a professional smile and gave him the tab.

Back on Delancey Street, the house felt tranquilized. He stepped over the mountain of mail piling up in the foyer, ignoring it. It was all junk, bills, or bad news. He clicked the lights in the hall and stairway, but they had burnt out in the past weeks. He didn’t have any new bulbs and was no longer shopping. Yet he continued to flick dead switches on the walls at night, expecting light. He turned down the heat and got in bed. His brother Bobby’s letter sat unopened on the night table. He tore it open.

When they were boys, Peter would stand in the doorway of his little brother’s bedroom. Bobby possessed the ability to make a room odorous just by sleeping in it, from a combination of sweat and old breath. Peter had always loved his brother’s smell; it was the smell of innocence, the benign stink of a boy’s forehead against his pillow. Peter would make a preparatory whoop and fall on top of his brother, crying, “Man Mountain McGhee goes for the takedown!” And his little brother would groan happily and pretend to be annoyed. Peter would agitate further, knuckling a fist into his brother’s ribs, making him writhe under the blankets. “McGhee is undefeated in four hundred and sixteen bouts!” And then Bobby would start to fight back. “But he may have taken on just a
little
too much …” His brother would be pulling his legs up, trying to establish position. “… the young upstart
claims
to have the strength of nine Titans!” Then the real battle would begin. Later, when he and Bobby were both in college, the ritual continued on vacations. Except now Peter would feel his brother’s larger shoulders and superior strength under the covers. Eventually his brother would say, “Lemme go, I gotta take a piss.” When Peter did not make a move, Bobby, who had grown to weigh almost 230 pounds, would throw Peter off in a great sudden release of stink from the blankets, staggering in his ratty underwear toward the hallway and bathroom, his hair a bird’s nest that when combed was the color of teak, his shoulders wide as a door. He loved Bobby for his uncomplicated goodness, a quality that back then Peter already sensed he would never have.