Authors: Colin Harrison
“Shit, that’s easy.”
“Isn’t this a special case—”
“Berger’s somewhere the hell out in Harrisburg.”
“Right.”
“Besides, his concentration isn’t good these days. I saw him sucking face with some—”
Cassandra returned, wet, a towel around her, another wrapped around her wet hair. She kneeled next to the bed and kissed his belly. He grunted, trying to respond to everybody at once.
“Right. He won’t be happy about it. But you’re at a point now to take something like this on. You got a wife who’s awake in the morning. Good. Very good. How old’re you, Peter?”
“Thirty-one last fall.” Maybe Hoskins was on his side, after all. Now Cassandra had him in her mouth.
“Perfect. This case is at just the goddamn right time for you. It’s a job for a guy who’s got iron-fist control. This is a total-concentration, no-screw-up operation. This comes out right and so will you, fucking guaranteed. I had pressure already to put one of the other guys on it, make a more politically appropriate selection, but I say fuck ‘em, let’s go with the best iron-fist control we have. That’s you. We gotta hit the ground fast. I’m officially assigning you the case and you should be goddamn glad to have the opportunity. Get the other work done—do it, do it well, but concentrate on Whitlock. This is the main dish now.”
Peter was still too sleepy to pretend to be gung-ho. He wondered if by some freak of nature Cassandra had been impregnated by him last night. She was teasing him now, flicking with her tongue.
“You’re ready?” Hoskins asked.
“Yes.” He’d let Cassandra pay for the abortion, assuming the pro-life people hadn’t bombed every clinic yet. He didn’t have any extra cash right now, and besides, how could he be sure it was his?
“No distractions?”
“No,” he grunted. Cassandra was working on him in earnest.
“You’ll be dealing with the Philadelphia media, not the odd court reporter. The police will of course handle the basic announcements this morning,” Hoskins barked, “then you’ll take questions as the
investigation progresses and you develop your case.” Hoskins went on to say that the District Attorney, a tidy man who enjoyed a fine reputation despite the fact that coke traffic had tripled during his tenure, would be taking a low profile on the case, largely because he was too busy planning a run for the U.S. Senate and had already blocked out a heavy schedule during the next month for early fund-raising appearances around the state, plugging into the closed-door Washington connections. Furthermore, Peter knew, the District Attorney, an elected official, was a Republican; there weren’t many more votes to be won in the city that had just elected a Democratic Mayor over a candidate the D.A. had endorsed, even though that endorsement had been lukewarm and delivered only out of loyalty to the Republican Party bosses whose support he needed later. The D.A. already had a record to run on, and was expected to have a strong chance at the Senate. He needed big money more than he needed a prominent trial. Additionally, if the D.A. went high profile on the case, then it might become politicized, a focus of rant by the new Mayor, whom insiders considered occasionally unpredictable. If the case went smoothly, the Mayor might not like the suffering of his family to benefit a political enemy’s reputation—by removing himself, the D.A. removed the office’s political lightning rod. Peter knew the D.A. couldn’t afford to get mired in a stupid battle with the Mayor. Frankly, the man was distracted, and had probably dumped the mess into Hoskins’s lap.
“So,” Hoskins was saying, “you can expect extra pressure. Also, the Mayor will probably speak to you in a general way, offer his support and confidence—”
“He might be a good man beneath all that charisma.”
Hoskins had expressed no liking of this Mayor, but of course he’d do a very professional job, if only to further his man-eater reputation.
“You’re all go on this? Ready to run with it?”
“Yeah.” He pictured Cassandra’s mouth. Her wet hair lay against his skin. “Got it.”
“Good,” Hoskins concluded. “Stop by my office this morning and get the paperwork. All right—wait a minute! I almost forgot! I want you to get out to the crime scene right away—”
“What?”
“I know we don’t usually do this, but the Mayor’s
nephew
doesn’t get beaten to death every day. Just go out there, have a look. Don’t let the detectives hassle you. It’ll piss them off a little, scare them—whatever, make sure they do a decent job. Might help later on. I want our office to have as strong a position as possible.”
“What’s—what’s the condition of things out there?”
“They’re taking their time. They haven’t even—”
“What I’m asking about, to be honest,” breathed Peter, “is whether the body will still be there.”
“Yes, I think it may be.”
Peter scrawled down the address, replaced the phone, and fell back into bed. Cassandra pulled and urged and finished him. She disappeared for a minute into the bathroom, then reappeared, wrapped in his bathrobe. She sat on the edge of the bed and pulled a comb through her wet hair, combing it in shiny, perfect rows.
“Well?” she asked.
“Uh, well,
that
was great,” he breathed.
“No.” She smiled. “The call.”
“Another terrible murder has been committed.” Peter caught his breath. “And the
entire
city of Philadelphia is going to know about it in approximately three hours. The crime itself is not unusual, but the victim is.” It would be, he knew, on the front page of the late city editions of the
Inquirer
and the
Daily News.
Repeated on WCAU and KYW, the allnews stations, every fifteen minutes, most of the day. On the hourly newscast of the music stations, the noon news, the five-thirty news, the six o’clock news, and the eleven o’clock news on all three local television affiliates. It would be in the black community churches on Sunday. The Mayor will be on television talking about it, synthesizing it into his political position on crime … He realized he smelled of wine and was too tired to suck in his belly as he stood up and retrieved his underwear.
“Ready for a speech? Okay. A family and a wider community who had great hopes for what sounds like a talented boy is going to feel crushed and disturbed, vengeful. The black community doesn’t
get
that many kids like this. The man who committed the crime, as far as we know, has escaped prosecution for a similar crime in the past. This makes a family and a community extremely angry, and with complete
justification, in my view. On a philosophical level, there has been an emotional and noticeable tear in a certain part of the social fabric. Somebody is going to carry the responsibility to publicly sew that tear up. He’ll have help, but the
responsibility
will be his.” It was going to be the case of his life—and he feared the pressure and the possibility of blowing it. “Would you want to be that person?”
Cassandra had pulled a white silk blouse over her muscular shoulders. Now, again, she was the professional woman. And he the professional man. When the sun rises, the expertise clicks in and the moments of shadow and silence of the night disappear.
“Peter, I think you’re really great, but it doesn’t sound to me—” she stopped. “Who am I to tell you how to run your life? It’s just that you mumbled your wife’s name last night before we finally went to sleep—” She smiled stiffly. “Don’t worry, it doesn’t bother me—I find it touching, though it makes me a little jealous, too. What I’m saying is that your house needs to be cleaned. You need
food
in the refrigerator—”
The phone rang again. Cassandra shrugged. “I’ll be making breakfast.” She left the room.
Peter picked up the phone, defeated by the truth of Cassandra’s words. His mood was foul.
“Speak.”
“Peter Scattergood?”
“Yes.”
“My name is Gerald Turner, aide to the Mayor. Do you have a minute so that he may talk with you?”
“Yes, of course.”
He was put on hold, and took the time to clear his throat. From downstairs came breakfast sounds. The sweat started to trickle down his armpits. He had glimpsed the Mayor in City Hall, heard a couple of speeches by him, and seen him on television myriad times. Successor to Wilson Goode, and as a former councilman, an excellent public speaker. A man who exuded power, even though he’d just taken office. Whereas Mayor Goode had left only a record of bumbling good intentions, the worst of course being the MOVE tragedy in which an entire city block was burned down by the police, the new Mayor was more magnetic a character, known for his constant schedule of appointments, moving
always in a darkened limousine from this place to that—a business gathering in one of the new hotels, a renovated school building, a shelter for the homeless. He was hungry, he had said, to put the city back together. He was a man, he had told them—dabbing at the sweat on his brow—a man with ideals, a family man, someone who understood that the community must be
healed.
He and his wife, along with their four children, all in high school or college, attended church together each Sunday. He pledged to work with everyone—the police, the City Council, the private sector, the school board. While his rhetoric thus far had not translated into change, there was no doubt that the new Mayor was a man of action, given to appearing at impromptu press conferences outside City Hall, dressed always in expensive, conservative tailored suits, addressing reporters by name—the better to curry their favor, of course—and able to stare into the television cameras and whirring motor drives with impunity. Always he was attended by an entourage of handlers, not a few of whom looked as if they had been picked off the corner of 52nd and Market the previous day and given a new suit. Their presence gave the entrance of the Mayor to any event the sudden excitement of the appearance of a heavyweight prizefighter—the build of which the Mayor possessed, with the thick torso of Joe Frazier, another famous Philadelphian.
It was no wonder Hoskins disliked the Mayor—Hoskins was one of those people who couldn’t quite believe that blacks had wrested so much political power from whites. Though the powerful businessmen and developers in the city were white, the governance of the city was controlled by blacks. Political corruption knew no race, of course, and thus continued to run through the local government like steam pipes in City Hall—everywhere, and where you least expected. The electorate, exhausted by betrayal, knew that the city could no longer pay for all its poor people and that each administration just gorged at the trough. The new mayor had come in promising change. He had eased through the Democratic primary and then narrowly beaten the Republican candidate, a business executive who happened to be rich and nominally Catholic, a man who needed to pull over thousands of Italian and Irish Democrat votes to win but whose Main Line aura had alienated them. Hoskins, through the D.A., had strong social connections to the defeated
candidate. But, Peter knew, as power concentrated at the top, unofficial relationships thickened, across race and party. Hoskins would play it by the book, if only for his own advantage.
“Hello?” a familiar voice said.
“Mr. Mayor? I’m terribly sorry about your nephew, sir.”
“Yes, uh, Mr. Scattergood. I appreciate your sentiments. It’s a tragedy, a family tragedy. His mother, my sister Lorraine, is in shock.”
“We see that a lot, Mr. Mayor. The effect on the decedent’s family is devastating.” This was babbling, and he stopped.
“I understand from Bill Hoskins that you’ll be handling the prosecution of the young man who allegedly murdered my nephew.”
Careful wording, even for a confidential call.
“Yes,” Peter said, not sure if he had heard a cold tone in the Mayor’s voice. “I understand we have a suspect. If he’s charged, if it’s a good case, I’ll handle the prosecution.”
“I am glad of that,” the rich voice said. “I understand that you’re very proficient at what you do. I commend you for your service to the city and I want you to know you have my full personal support and that of my office. I will instruct one of my aides, Gerald Turner, to work out a communication scheme with you. It will not be necessary to work through your superiors. Just provide me, please, on an informal basis, with information on where your prosecution is going. I promise you I will not meddle, Mr. Scattergood. That is not my intent at all. It’s simply for psychological ease, if you understand. Frankly, if you can talk to me for a few minutes regularly, I may be able to alleviate some of the typical family pressure you may feel in cases such as this. Above all I have no desire to interfere.”
“Sounds reasonable,” Peter agreed obligatorily.
“I do wish to add one more thing, and it has nothing to do with any desire on my part to impugn your integrity. I must say it because you are an unknown quantity to me and I want to be sure to say it to whoever runs this case. I want no funny stuff, Mr. Scattergood. Bear in mind that I have said this from the absolute start of our relationship.
I want this case to be clean going in and clean coming out.
I’m a lawyer. I want the discovery process to be full, I want the evidence procedurally sound, all of it. If it does go to trial eventually, I don’t want the case leveraged in
any way because the Mayor’s nephew has been murdered—” An emotional pause. “In the long run, that won’t help anybody. Run the thing by the book. Have your people run it by the book. Have them run their
lives
by the book if necessary, so we don’t scare up some half-connected scandal. The papers love half-connected scandals, you may have noticed. Don’t take any shortcuts. Is that understood?”
“I understand.”
“The other side of the coin is that I want you to do everything possible to make sure this Carothers, this suspect—or whoever did it—gets salted away for a proper long time.”
“Right,” Peter said.
“One more thing,” the Mayor said, the adjustable warmth coming back into his voice, the stern tone receding, “you understand, of course, that all communication between us is confidential, off the record, not to be alluded to when speaking to the press, not even to be mentioned to your colleagues. Our official communication will be on paper and through my aides.”