Break and Enter (9 page)

“I…” She paused.

“I am asking you whether you agree with what I have just said or whether, instead, you can explain the contradictions in your testimony here this morning.”

“Well, Billy…” Again she stopped, and again she began to cry, this time in uneven gasps, ugly and sad. “Billy …”

“We must have truth here,” Peter continued. “A young girl has been
brutally
murdered, and this is a court of law. I ask you once more, Mrs. McGuane, I ask you before the good ladies and gentlemen of this courtroom, who have taken time away from their regular lives to attend to this serious matter. Can you explain why your testimony conflicts with itself?”

She was unable to speak, and lowered her smudged and blurry eyes. No one in the courtroom despised her for her lies, for they all knew she had only tried to protect a boy she had raised. She glanced worriedly at the members of the jury. They stared back. In the tired, eternal gloom of the courtroom sat a woman whose testimony would convict the young man she had loved like a son. There was no mistaking her private agony, but he could not worry about that. He need worry only about destroying her.

“Can you explain your testimony?” he asked sharply.

Mrs. McGuane shook her head.

“No explanation? Should this court disregard what you have said?”

She was silent.

“Your testimony was only a story from the beginning, right?”

She made no response.

“No more questions, Your Honor.”

IT WAS HIS INTENTION
to slip quickly, peaceably, out of City Hall for lunch, but suddenly here was the short, thick body and florid face of Hoskins, Chief of Homicide, standing at the elevator door on the third floor. Peter nodded silently at his boss, a man of undependable friendliness who favored bow ties and had once been a promising pianist, according to rumor. Nothing important was ever openly discussed in the elevators of City Hall, and those who rode in the tight boxes—cops, detectives, lawyers, witnesses, family members—invariably stared intently at the floor buttons, the ceiling, or their shoes. Hoskins was no exception, and tipped his eyes downward over his stomach to inspect his polished wingtips in satisfaction. Hoskins, Peter knew, prided himself on knowing everything about the cases within his responsibility, but that was of course impossible, and so he had to
appear
to know everything by badgering each of his subordinates into spewing progress reports at any moment. And yet, during trial-planning meetings, it was always clear that Hoskins was a brilliant if ruthless schemer. If you questioned his strategy, you were probably wrong. A tale still went around about Hoskins’s early days as a prosecutor. In a rape case a defendant took the stand to testify on his own behalf, hoping to clear his name before the court, which included his family, all devout Roman Catholics. Hoskins shamed and bullied the man into admitting his guilt, and, suddenly weeping great remorse, the defendant bolted toward a courtroom window that opened onto City Hall’s inner court four stories down. He dived headfirst through the window to his death. Peter had never been able to forget this about Hoskins. Now the elevator opened at the first floor and the two men stood to the side of the doors.

“How’s Robinson?” Hoskins demanded, looking up at Peter and inspecting him for doubt.

“This morning, it went pretty—”

“Just make sure that housekeeper doesn’t bullshit everybody.” Hoskins grimaced in disgust. “You go hard on her, got it?”

“I have already,” Peter said dully. Hoskins frightened him, but not so much that Peter couldn’t hide his fear.

“Good, then. That’s what we planned. You worn out?” Hoskins jabbed him with a steely forefinger, as if testing a piano key. “Where’s the fire?”

“Inside my chest,” he said. “Roaring like hell.”

“Good.” Hoskins nodded affectionately. “Keep it there.”

Peter walked out of the east arch of City Hall, past the polished black sedans the Mayor and other high officials used. It was easy to remember the point of Hoskins’s finger: A man such as Hoskins was quite obviously kept at a boil by the power he held, and though Peter had once admired his boss’s drive, he had come to fear its intensity, the bullish righteousness of the maestro that could overshoot its mark and abuse power. No one got power who didn’t want it, and no one kept it without undermining others’ attempts to steal it. Hoskins himself always appeared to be a man just barely held in check, and Peter had seen that it was
not
the common good that Hoskins burned so brightly for; it was, instead, the steady accretion of privilege and influence. And, over the years, Hoskins hid this desire with greater care, displaying an ever-shifting paternal affection for his young prosecutors, graciousness toward reporters, and a restrained public identity. But at the same time he sought the next handshake, the next connection that might pull him forward. Hoskins would never be a politician—he was too gruff and looked bad on television—but as an operative, he had a future. Ten years older than Peter, Hoskins had fattened into and then past that golden moment when one stood ready to run for elective office and so he had been forced to buy a tuxedo and learn to grin and guffaw his way through all the right dinner parties, schmooze and booze with all the other schmoozy people, pretending he loved his wife, a tiny, rather frumpy woman with an uneasy smile and too much lipstick who was obviously incarcerated within the personality of her husband. Hoskins, Peter reflected, was a man who believed—or wished to believe—that in the conquest of ever-higher positions lay adulation. The man had become
a choke-point for others’ destinies. If you admired him, and if he knew it, you swore your allegiance to his abusive leadership. If not, you tried to get your work done and keep your head low, and not become a chess piece in Hoskins’s master-level skirmishes with the public defender’s office, the U.S. Attorney, the local political machines, the Mayor, the media, the civil-rights organizations, and the black community.

At the other end of the spectrum was Berger, the skeptic, who felt no fear when Hoskins tossed around threats, who prosecuted in a detached, analytical way, seeking to do a professional job but realizing the powerlessness of being so powerful, seeing power as relative, fleeting, and often illusory. Whatever altruism Berger had was kept behind a glib detachment from the petty strivings of men. Essentially, being a prosecutor confirmed Berger’s worst suspicions about everyone, including himself.

Peter ate a sandwich in a luncheonette on the crummy section of Market Street, having no lunch appointment that day and having forsworn the trendy lunch places, where the attractive professional women would remind him that he hadn’t had sex in a long time—weeks. He thought about slipping into one of the porn theaters tucked into the crumbling brick buildings behind the Reading Terminal Market—duck past all the other lunchtime perverts in suits and ties, and maybe even enjoy beating off inside the little booth, which is what they were designed for, while on the screen some guy fucked a girl in the mouth. The guilt would be worth it, would burn off some of the tension for a few hours, but there was always the chance he’d run into somebody he knew. There were services you could call up and a girl would come over and have sex, but that held little interest—the girls were probably pathetic and ugly and drug addicts, and he’d end up feeling sorry for them and ask them their life stories. Besides, he wasn’t so desperate as to screw a whore. So, instead, he read the paper, turning first to the sports section. The Sixers had lost three in a row and their star, Charles Barkley, was petulant and critical. Peter missed Dr. J. When the Doctor retired, the whole city lost some grace. The newspaper headlines floated across his view of the moment: Ragged street people were fighting over the steam vents, a sixteen-year-old crack dealer had been shot in the head at the corner of Eighth and Butler. Was it really so different from the time
when the Irish were the city’s poor, living eight to a room, working in the Baldwin locomotive works or in dress factories, children trapped inside the steam-driven looms, the grandmothers scavenging for coal? He was mumbling again, nearly aloud. Through the luncheonette window, Philadelphia was a hellscape of ashy snow and frozen trash, and spring seemed an unlikely prospect. The noon sky was pale, with an early evening on its way, and he couldn’t remember the time of his racquetball appointment after work. A worm of pain twisted in his chest. It was for this that he had put in years shuffling through thousands of plea-bargained cases, scheduling witnesses, battling against continuations, cutting deals with defense attorneys who believed him to be cruel-hearted. He wished for some kind of deliverance, a brain balm that would make him forget that Janice hated him and that before him stretched a never-ending array of murder cases. The twenty-odd lawyers in the homicide trial unit handled almost five hundred cases a year. Maybe if an interesting case came along, he’d stick it out awhile. There was always other work—insurance-claim work or politics or some other carnivorous art. Lots of young prosecutors got fed up with the jammed, corrupt court system, dumped their ideals in the river, and skipped out to the private firms to pull down an easy one hundred thousand. But he was too tired to consider changing jobs now. He’d just ride everything out, just juke and float and cut past the pressures like the new, young guard of the Sixers moved toward the basket past lumbering seven-footers. No problem,
no problem.

AND HOURS LATER,
thousands of words later, he was done for the day, having argued with and contradicted and undermined the defense’s witnesses and convinced everybody that Robinson was guilty. For his part, the defendant had stared at Peter the whole afternoon, and there had been a moment when Peter had realized that Robinson was not thinking about the case, but about Peter—examining him with that same rabid intelligence, searching for a point of recognition. When the defendant was taken away, he saluted his prosecutor knowingly.

Now Peter sat in his chair, pushing his papers together, waiting to be released until the next day, which would bring the closing arguments.

The courtroom emptied, and he knew as the hallway sounds echoed within that he was waiting for something. Dusky snow began to fall. The building got cold at night. Benita was quietly marking her paper tape. After eight hours of work she still looked fresh, and it took little imagination to picture giving her a quick pop. Ask her to lean over. She folded the tape and wrapped a rubber band around each stack. The tape was used to repeat testimony to the court but was actually a backup record. She flipped the cassette from her machine and slipped that and the tape into her briefcase. Tonight, he knew, she would put the cassette into her computer system, which would read the magnetic coding on it and screen up a rough transcription that she would correct.

Meanwhile, he was due to walk to the club for an hour of racquetball. Did he want to go, since Berger couldn’t make it? He watched Benita. She was maybe twenty-two, twenty-three. He wondered if she played racquetball, but was afraid to ask.

PETER PAUSED OUTSIDE
in the cold, piss-stenched shadows of the City Hall arches. Office workers hurried toward the subways and commuter trains, and nearby, handcuffed defendants drained out of the courtrooms and through a special door into the gray Philadelphia Prisons Transport bus. They were the lucky ones. The bus went to the county prison, which housed convicts whose minimum sentence was less than twelve months. The small van parked not far away would head out to the state prison, where the long-timers and lifers were sent. An emaciated black man in a ragged coat appeared, and Peter shrank back, sick of being harassed for money wherever he walked in the city. Nevertheless, perhaps more from guilt than from true concern, he reached for his pocket. The man was compulsively flipping a nickel.

“Hey, yo! What’s it going to be?”

“What?” Peter snapped.

The man’s face was wildly animated as he waited for the coin to fall. Rheumy eyes and rotted teeth.

“What’ll it be?” he demanded again. “What will happen?”

“I don’t know.”

The man laughed wickedly, tossing his head back, then yanked a bottle of Thunderbird from within his coat and gummed the lip of the bottle. He flipped the coin again.

Peter escaped, unwilling to join anybody’s madness. Usually he enjoyed the walk to the club, the night air against his cheeks, the muffled warmth of his wool coat and winter suit, but now he covered the long blocks quickly, ignoring the massive silhouette of City Hall looming behind his back.

The freezing air eddied out of his coat and gloves while he stood in the club’s chrome-and-mirror elevator. A couple of muscle mutts—the grossly overdeveloped men who hung out all day at the club—stood around the lobby pretending they were not displaying themselves. What are they compensating for? he wondered. Little dicks? Little minds? Were they just scared, adding flesh in a flesh-eating world?

The mirrors on the four sides of the weight room reflected an infinity of men and women pumping away on gleaming weight machines. Janice still had her membership. He wondered if she had stopped working out there in order to avoid him. It seemed likely. On one of the machines you sat and opened your legs quite wide, then squeezed them shut. He’d heard a couple of women laughingly call it the Yes/No Machine. These were the hard-driving professional women who hung out at the gym, subsuming and converting sexual hunger into sleekness and muscle. Yes—open. No—shut. It had been too long since he’d had any Yes, and jerking off was the same as shaving—a necessary habit to remove stuff the body kept producing. Next door, the aerobics class. Gaudily dressed women and a few very slender men jumped, kicked, and gyrated. No Janice there, either, just a crowd of panting, sweat-drenched women, all of whom wore shimmering leotards and tights. Some were legitimately gorgeous. Each year such women looked younger to him, receding from view. It had been ten years since he ceased being younger than centerfold models, though of course the fourteen-year-old in him lived on, alive as ever, acutely sensitive to the ink smell and thick-paged feel of a new
Playboy,
a world of airbrushed fantasy made new each month. His typical piggy male lust had been subjected to the most stringently purifying feminist inquisitions over the years, and had emerged unscathed. Amazing how men continued their resistance and women their complicity: pornography, advertising, clothes, movies, breast implant surgery—entire subsections of the national economy and culture were based on the male desire for the perfect tit.