Break and Enter (40 page)

Peter waited. He was a good eight inches taller than the other man, and wished not to frighten him.

“Excuse me,” he said when the man returned. “Sir?”

“Ain’t got time for drunks.” The man brushed by him.

“Wait!” Peter called. “I’m not what I seem.”

He explained who he was, what he wanted. Did he remember that particular night exactly a week ago?

“Yeah, but I already told the police what I knew, just after it all happened,” the man said doubtfully.

“They asked you?”

“Sure. A detective asked me what I seen and when I was here.”

Whoever had been sure that Peter never saw the report knew he couldn’t know of the existence of each and every potential witness.

“So, what did you say?”

“Ah, geez.” The man shook his head. “I told them I deliver, all the little stores early in the morning. It’s a five-hour run. Most of the stores, they open around seven.”

“Usually pretty quiet?”

“I like it that way, Mr…. Scattergood, you say your name was? No traffic. See, I drove an eighteen-wheeler for twenty years, Philly to Chicago, via New York, round trip twice a week. Load up medical supplies to New York, then men’s suits to Chicago—”

“Okay,” Peter interrupted, “that was a while back. But what about that night? Remember what you told the police?”

“Probably, but not in this cold.”

They climbed into the truck, and the man reached for a Thermos of coffee under his seat.

“Got the best goddamned heater in the city.”

“Okay.”

“I drive this route three days a week and my other route two.”

Peter saw he would have to take his time. The man was a loner with an itch to talk and in no hurry to say his piece.

“See, bread prices are based partially on delivery. That’s why your cheapest bread is in a bakery, because it don’t have to be delivered. But it’s harder and harder to make a profit, these little mom-and-pop places. It’s all money, everything’s money. So the bigger companies deliver. Every time you go to these little stores, like the one here”—he thumbed his hand backward—“you pay more because of they have to take delivery more often, they don’t have the storage space, and because they don’t do the same volume. I drive the truck this route here every Sunday, Tuesday, and Friday—”

“The night I was asking about was a Wednesday.”

“That’s right, it was,” the man continued, pausing to sip his coffee. “I start my route on Tuesday at eleven and I don’t get here until Wednesday morning. The only thing I remember that night was some guy parked in my parking spot, which is actually illegal. I always park in the same spot,
all the legal spots are taken. Everyone’s home, what’re ya gonna do? Some guy was parked there, that’s all I remember.”

“When was this?”

“About now, quarter of three.”

“He was parked.”

“His engine was running. Right now where we’re sitting.”

“What happened?”

“Nothing.”

“All right, anything else about that night?”

“Wait a minute, I’m still telling it. I went around the block once, thinking he was going to pull out at any minute. When I came back he was still there. I double-parked and tapped the horn quietly. I had six racks and I didn’t feel like making three long trips. Then—”

“Racks of bread like tonight?”

“Exactly the same, all of them.”

“How did you hurt your left arm?”

The driver stared at him, mouth cocked to one side.

“Shit, man, that’s scary. How did you know that?”

“Just now you carried two pallets with your right arm,” Peter explained. “That means you should be able to carry at least three, maybe four, with both arms. Which means you could easily carry six pallets in two trips, not three.”

“You got my vote, buddy.” The driver shook his head. “Yeah, some guy slashed me bad one night, truck stop just over the Indiana line. Coming from Ohio.” He pulled back his sleeve to show the scar on the inside of the elbow. “Guy had a ponytail a foot long. Got all the tendons. He took my truck. The county clinic sewed it up, but what’re ya gonna do? Couldn’t drive, couldn’t barely make a fist.”

“That’s why you deliver bread—it’s light.”

“I made good money with my rig. Got to have both hands. Hated to give it up.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Yeah, well.”

They sat a minute, looking at the snow.

“Tell me what happened after you saw the guy parked in your place, after you honked,” Peter said.

“Nothing happened, so I got out and went up to the window of the car.”

“What’d he say?”

“He said he was moving on in a little while.”

“What did he look like?”

“Some black guy.”

“Could you see his face?”

“Easy. I have night vision, after all these years.”

“What’d his face look like?”

“Not much, heavy.”

“Heavy?”

“Sad. He looked like a sad guy.”

Peter stared up at the window, remembered Johnetta’s still body, the tight, attractive slit of her belly button. Had the man who snatched the baby boy also killed her?

“In his thirties maybe?” Peter finally asked.

“Yes.”

“Built well, strong?”

“Didn’t see.”

“Anything else?” Peter pressed.

“It was mostly his face. Just looking at me, and sad. The bottom part under the eyes were droopy. And some kind of bad scar on his chin.”

“Curved like the letter C?”

“Yeah—right. You must know him.”

“You told the detective all this?”

“Just like I’m telling you.”

“Okay, then what?”

“He looked like he meant it, like he wasn’t going to discuss it no more, you know what I’m saying? I had plenty of time, so I got back in the truck with my heater and waited. I could have carried the bread a little further, but that would leave the truck blocking the street while I was taking the bread around. So I just sat. He went in and came out maybe ten minutes later and drove off. I pulled in, did the delivery, and left.”

“Did he
run
out of the building?”

“No, he just walked out, just like anybody.”

“You see another guy hurry into the building a few minutes later, tall skinny black guy?”

“No.”

“What’s your name?”

“You don’t need it, do you? Call me the bread man. Here.” He reached back and handed Peter a package of fresh sticky buns. “I gotta go.”

BACK IN THE CAR,
he ate his breakfast bun listening to the radio croon rock songs so old nobody under thirty knew them any longer. Everything Carothers had said so far appeared to be true. Peter tried to see it all from his point of view. Carothers must have thought about Johnetta and Tyler, the child they brought into the world. Surely, he had stood in the hospital room, looking into Johnetta’s face as she held their child. Seen the wrinkled eyes and the clutching chubby fingers working at Johnetta’s gown. The hope of it all! The immense hope that springs from the most evanescent of emotions! Certainly Peter understood that. And yet, never married, together only a short while, before circumstances—what? boredom, fights, lovers, family, crime, drugs—had pulled them apart. Peter started the car and pulled out, picturing Wayman moving others’ furniture—happy family rituals repeated each week before his eyes. The big three-bedroom apartments overlooking Rittenhouse Square, the mansions in Chestnut Hill, the estates on the Main Line.
Please take that into the bedroom. Thank you!… Oh! Those boxes are the china—careful!
A big quiet black man watching this, nodding to the aerobicized blonde who tells him this, seeing the children examining the big moving truck.

He must have wondered about his child, his
boy!
The tiny body that had come, in part, from his. Even a killer can be moved by the sight of a baby’s toes, no? How had Carothers felt as he saw Johnetta dead before him? Wouldn’t he, Peter, have killed anyone if he thought, even for a second, that person threatened Janice? Wasn’t it just basic human nature? Of course—idiotic to expect otherwise. A man like Carothers would have cursed himself for not being present to protect Johnetta! She had
called
him! And what was he doing?
Knocking off a supermarket with three low-life, coked-up motherfuckers.
Carothers must have thought some of these things—who wouldn’t? Who wouldn’t question the way things had turned out, sought to know why? Peter drove on, vaguely heading back the way he had come. Carothers, he saw, was begging now.
He had suffered enough, in his way, and deserved every sliced corner of law coming to him.

The sad man, Peter saw, had probably killed Johnetta and then snatched Tyler, the baby boy, in an effort to get Johnetta’s grandmother to keep quiet. According to the grandmother, it was Whitlock’s family—the Mayor’s family—who wanted Johnetta out of the picture. The sad man was tied in somehow—close enough to be picked as the one to either threaten or kill Johnetta, close enough again to be assigned to keep an eye on Mrs. Banks, the grandmother. But what did Johnetta Henry know? What knowledge was worth her life?

The police—or one or two people in the department, someone who the Mayor no doubt controlled through the Police Commissioner—had made only two seemingly small mistakes. The first, if in fact it was planned, was letting just a little too much time pass before sending a car to respond to the neighbor’s first call—an oversight that resulted in Whitlock’s death at the hands of Carothers. The second mistake was not reporting the interview with the truck driver, which by its absence became conspicuous. The driver’s account corroborated Carothers’s account and presented an alternative scenario and suspect—of course, it had needed to be purged. And it was probably just a couple of paragraphs. Among other definitions, the Police Department was a huge bureaucracy, one that often lost documents, evidence, and information. The police, at the street level, were not likely to wish to protect the Mayor. Most cops, by far, were not corrupt. It was dazzlingly simple—all that was necessary was that one detective be told or paid not to file a one-page account of the interview with the delivery driver.

Strengthening the reported version was the woman who had seen Carothers while emptying her trash. Somebody had spotted her usefulness and whisked her down to the Roundhouse hoping she could identify a suspect from the books. That she actually did so correctly was amazing. That she happened to be drunk was bad luck for whoever was pulling the strings. Carothers then had to be released. That Carothers was stupid enough to then go out and stage armed robbery seemed ludicrous—luck had capriciously cut back and forth between the two sides. Once Carothers was back in custody, and with more evidence found, the police could blamelessly cease looking for other suspects.

Of course, neither Carothers nor Stein had any idea of the significance of the delivery truck. Nor did they know about the sad man. And because Peter did not officially know about the truck and the driver’s recollection, then that fact never became part of the official record Stein would probe to build a defense. If Carothers hadn’t blurted out what seemed to him an extraneous aggravation, Peter could not have connected the sad man to the night of the homicides.

Where had Hoskins come in? he wondered. The irony in all this was that that man didn’t give a pea-sized shit about the death of Whitlock but had apparently used his death to attach himself to the Mayor. Hoskins, who each day seemed to metamorphose further into a dense, evil bullet of a man, would fight Carothers every step of the way, twist every angle, tweak his own mother’s nose with his meaty fingers if it would bleed evidence that supported a conviction and his own career.

Driving aimlessly across the city, it occurred to Peter that Hoskins had selected him for exactly the opposite reasons as he had told him the morning of the murders. The praise and encouragement! How could Hoskins
not
have noticed that Peter had been in trouble these last few months? The occasional lapses, having to depend on Berger from time to time, the problems at home? The man was not stupid, and he had been in the game far longer than Peter.

Hoskins made his decision thinking he had the killer in hand. If he hadn’t known about Johnetta Henry at the time he’d called Peter early that morning, then that might be proof that he himself hadn’t gotten the whole story, at least not initially. But Hoskins had made a mistake: He’d never complained angrily about the fact that he’d been informed of only one homicide, not two. Such an oversight usually sent him into a rage. But he’d been complacent about that fact, never bringing it up. That suggested he did not want to emphasize the differences between the homicides, did not want Peter thinking that they had different causes. Was it possible Hoskins felt Peter’s attention would be scant and hoped that he would groove on the media attention that came with quickly having a suspect, and
not
do a thorough job,
not
dig behind the facade of facts the police provided him? Is this why Berger hadn’t been chosen? It was conceivable Hoskins was way ahead of all of them—somehow making sure Berger was in Harrisburg the morning of the murder, putting heat on
Berger all along, maybe even planting the comment on coke-snorting by the detective at the murder scene. But that would mean that he’d known the murders were coming and that was impossible, since Carothers had acted spontaneously. It was more likely that Hoskins had been called by the Mayor in the early hours after the murders, and had seen an opportunity in Berger’s absence and Peter’s unsettled state.

Figuring backward and forward, getting caught in knots of logic and speculation, Peter circled past City Hall and down Market and over to Delancey. He wouldn’t be able, he realized, to deduce everything that had happened. His house was dark and Cassandra’s car gone. A night such as this was no big deal to her; she would find other men, he supposed. He would let his membership at the club expire and never see her again. As for the ring, that was, he supposed, lost. Unless she had somehow regurgitated it in a soupy puddle of vomit, an unlikely effort.

ACROSS FROM HIS HOUSE,
he saw two men sitting in a car. Dark shapes behind the windshield, almost invisible.