Authors: Colin Harrison
Berger, Peter had decided long ago, had been a smart-alecky, jitterbug shortstop know-it-all kind of boy. Pesky sharp nose, quick to argue, with an eagerly destructive intelligence. The years in the D.A.’s office had worked their wear, however. As Berger grimaced before the mirror, Peter could see that Berger’s face was shifting, dropping, the skin under the jaw heavier and thicker, the hair thinning to a sparse, unhappy bristle on top. In the seven years they had known each other, folds had appeared ever so subtly above Berger’s eyes, and his cheeks had become lower and heavier by the thickness of a new legal pad. With this change had come a deepening of character toward melancholic sarcasm—Berger no longer cared how smart he was, for his intelligence had only made him see things he wished he hadn’t.
“You have any idea what those operations cost?”
“I asked you if you flossed, motherfucker.”
“Never. Who has time for preventive maintenance?” Berger asked, lifting his high freckled forehead. “Hey, incidentally, Hoskins pulled an LBJ on me about two minutes ago. He came in and sat on the can and started giving me orders—”
“What did he say?”
Berger turned around, his face grave. He checked the door. “He said not to give you any help on the Whitlock murder.”
“What?”
“Maybe that means he
wants
me to help you. Maybe it means he doesn’t want me to, and is making it sound like he’s giving you a test to see if you can fly on your own. Maybe he’s trying to split us up.”
“You know what?” Peter said. “Fuck him.”
“Exactly. Anyway, have you heard from Janice?”
“Bergs, I’m getting worried. I don’t like this.”
“Get a lawyer. That’s all I can tell you.”
Peter stared into the urinal.
“You got to protect yourself,” Berger told him.
“I’m not convinced I need a lawyer yet.”
“That’s the problem, you need a dose of reality. Come on, I’ve got Tama in my office.” Berger waved at the door, and they headed down the hall. “Anyway, I shit thee not, buddy. A good divorce lawyer will help you work it out so you aren’t begging for change on your lunch break. You can be sure she’s got someone already and he’s telling her how to position herself for a fight. He has her writing down what your income has been, what the joint assets are. He’s going to come at you with all kinds of requests for paper. They want to know the number of hairs on your ass. These guys are merciless. Every tax return. Every check you’ve written for five years, and they’re going to get it, too. It doesn’t matter that no kids are involved, either. You two were married before you went to law school?”
“We married my last year.” During the ceremony, he had kept his eyes open a second longer than Janice before they kissed, and so he had seen the trust in her closed eyelids, the implicit hope in her pressed lips.
Berger’s office door was open and Peter shut it gently. Berger’s daughter was playing on the rug and had pulled out a couple of law books.
“Hi, Tama,” Peter said to the child.
“She supported you?” Berger went on, jabbing at him mechanically, thinking more like a lawyer than a friend.
“Some.”
“How much?”
“Don’t know.” He turned to the child. “Why’s she here?”
“My wife usually picks her up. We had a little—things are just a little hectic … Say hello to Mr. Scattergood,” Berger prompted his daughter.
“Hello,” she whispered, barely looking up from her toys. Peter wondered if the child’s hair had been brushed that morning.
“Well, I don’t think it looks very good,” Berger said.
“Past and future valuation of advanced professional degree as part of the settlement?” Peter responded absentmindedly. Tama was absolutely beautiful. How could such a beautiful child have been spawned by such a burn-out twitch like Berger? More to the point, how was it that beautiful children became wretched, burnt-out twitches? Peter was half in love with Tama. On the night she was born, Berger had called him from
the hospital, saying words he’d never forgotten: “We’re in the thick of it now.”
“Of course that’s what I mean,” Berger went on, pursuing the divorce issue.
“She wouldn’t do that, she has too much pride.”
“Hey—I love Janice, too. Don’t look at me like that, Peter.” Berger pulled out a pen. “This guy’s good.” He scribbled a number. “Doesn’t shit around—tells you what you’re up against. He handled my brother’s divorce. Give him a call.”
“We’ll see.” About matters of love, he didn’t trust Berger, whose own marriage had long been in famous tatters. Berger carried specially prepared business cards to use when he picked up secretaries in the Center City bars. On the reverse of the cards Berger had printed,
I FIND YOU VERY ATTRACTIVE.
He took the secretaries to the Hershey Hotel, always using the same room, if it was available.
“I suggest—Tama, don’t!” he yelled, then softly, apologetically, “Those are Daddy’s books …”
Tama dropped her head and was quiet.
“Lot of good-looking women around, pal,” Berger went on. “You should see—”
“I’ve seen them, all of them,” Peter said. “Bergs, I want to
find
my wife.”
“Yeah, wives…” Berger looked at his fingers, comparing the left hand to the right. He turned his palms up, examined them. His forehead glistened. “Things are very bad, Peter. Very. I’m, ah, thinking of—we’re having some definite money problems. It’s not that we’re wiped out—”
Peter didn’t answer. The other side of Berger, the side that swapped spit with women in public, also probably did a little recreational coke in his off time, just as Jones, the detective, had hinted. Maybe Berger was getting careless, making buys from people who had recognized him or who had sold that information to the cops. Peter had always half known, and in the last few months it was apparent Berger was beginning to drown. Should he say something? He loved Berger, as a confidante, a colleague, a fellow man of the world. He loved Berger’s many despicable traits, even. Other than a chronic sniffling, Berger didn’t show many symptoms. And there was no joy in looking for them—Berger was his
best friend. They had a balanced relationship; Berger was smarter, but needed Peter’s approval. As a lawyer, Berger was tops in the office. His in-court perfectionism was entirely unintentional, the by-product of a mind that worked like a man painting a white room white who never believes he has finished. And yet he was unlike so many of the attorneys in the office, especially Hoskins, who stormed and stammered and seemed to think that hours worked would
always
win out over brilliance. More than once, while all of them argued around the table in the two-hundred-year-old tavern behind the office, Berger occasionally let loose a remark that stopped Hoskins in his tracks like a spear hurled from across a room. Hoskins had an ego that functioned like an immune system; it flowed to any wound and absorbed and neutralized all alien information. Berger didn’t work that way. He was habitually at the office at six
A.M.
handling the most difficult and publicized cases, often being interviewed, eloquent in a tired and dispassionate way, impeccably dressed, the epitome of well-prepared calm in the courtroom, able to wriggle out of the constitutional snares set by the private-practice defense attorneys—many of them former prosecutors. He could face down the most recalcitrant of witnesses, fluster them into betraying themselves, surprising the truth from them like a bird flushed from concealing underbrush. Berger, more than anyone, had taught Peter his job.
“So what about Hoskins? You have anything specific to say to me about handling this case?”
“Don’t take it on Hoskins’s terms,” he continued in the same ruminative voice. “The pressure is too much. You think you can
manage
the pressure, but it adds up. You think you can handle it, that everything is under control. In fact, the more it’s out of control the more excited you get about keeping everything under control—you have to go faster and faster, you have to start really flying to keep up with everything. I found myself—don’t even get started, it gets to be—you get into it and then you’re in trouble—” Berger stared at Peter as if he were trying to speak without the liability of words. Tama had stopped playing and was watching the two men talk. “Just don’t make the mistakes I’ve made,” he went on. “Avoid the obvious fuck-ups.”
He didn’t call Berger’s divorce lawyer. Anyone Berger recommended would be wildly expensive and suggest aggressive techniques to squirrel
money away from Janice. Besides, he’d wash his own dirty linen privately. The Philadelphia Bar was notoriously cross-wired and incestuous, and above all, he was a private man.
Instead, he did the stupidest thing one could do when looking for a lawyer. In the Yellow Pages, he found a couple of divorce lawyers downtown and called Phil Mastrude, Counselor at Law, Practicing Primarily in Family Law and Domestic Relations, No Charge Initial Consultation, Fees Available on Request,
Compassionate Advice Humbly Offered.
The last, questionable line of advertising intrigued him. Either Mastrude was a nut, or saw his work as a lot more than filing divorce papers. Peter spoke with the secretary and made an appointment for the following day.
It was later now, nearly noon. He should be preparing for Robinson. Already he was second-guessing himself about talking to Vinnie. Meanwhile, the detectives were trying to trick Carothers into talking—discussing sports, offering cigarettes, saying it would be easier on him now, etc.—but he sat quietly in his chair, not talking, now on the official advice of his attorney, a Mr. Stein, who had called from Miami and told the D.A.’s office in a firm voice they had better have some concrete reason to bring a charge against his client or he would sputter indignation to the press. The police had up to ten hours to charge him. With the approved search warrant, police had quickly combed Carothers’s Philadelphia apartment and turned up nothing but a small bottle of gun oil under the kitchen sink. The gun oil tantalized the police—made them, Peter knew, cuss and look at one another in knowing frustration. Its existence, of course, proved nothing, and by itself was useless information. The neighbors questioned by the police said Carothers worked days as a furniture mover, came and went quietly, apparently didn’t spend all his nights in his apartment, and spoke to few people.
Then, as the day had worn on, Carothers had suddenly gotten angry and protested that he was innocent and in danger of losing his job by being detained.
“He’s fucking guilty,” the detective complained on the phone.
That was not necessarily true, Peter told himself. Like many cases, this one was marred with niggling inconsistencies: a double murder with different methods, and police who may have been slow to respond
to an emergency but who had identified and located a potential suspect within hours of the murder. All this information tended to strengthen the case for Carothers’s innocence, or rather, to be exact, his inability to be charged. And yet, Peter wondered, how could an hourly-wage moving company employee afford a high-priced private-practice lawyer who would fly immediately from his vacation to defend him?
A few minutes after one, Berger walked in, carrying a portable radio.
“Listen to this.” He turned the volume louder.
“… who has been questioned as a witness in the slaying of the young couple, admitted upon confrontation by a newspaper reporter that she was a heavy drinker, and was drunk last night. A short time ago, Ms. Douglas admitted to our reporter that having been inebriated may well have compromised her ability to recognize—”
The door exploded open.
“What the
fuck
is that? I say, what in the goddamned fucking world is that?”
Hoskins, chief terrorizer of them all, stood in the middle of the office listening to the radio, his eyes goggling around in anger, face red, feet planted wide like a catcher at home plate waiting to block a runner heading home.
“That,” Berger appraised, “is the end of that witness.”
“Off! Off!” Hoskins waved at the radio while he wrapped his fingers around Peter’s phone and dialed the detective unit that was handling the case. His stomach strained his shirt.
“This is Hoskins—yeah,
get
him for me. I don’t care if he’s—no, you don’t understand, I mean get him,
now.”
He looked at Peter. “What are
you
looking so relaxed for, buddy? This is your fish and he’s slipping off the goddamned—what?” He turned back to the phone. “Yes, I just heard it. Who? Donnell? Never heard of the bitch—”
“The
Inquirer
,” Peter said to Berger. “Short woman, reddish hair. The investigative sort.”
“The
Inquirer?”
Hoskins hollered. “Never heard of her, ever. It doesn’t matter … all right. Tell me, then.”
After a minute, Hoskins slammed the phone down.
“This reporter, Donnell, whatever her name is, found out who the witness was. Somebody down there told her the woman lived on the
same hall. All she did was return to the building! The simplest, easiest thing in the world. The apartment was sealed off, but not the
floor.
A radio reporter went with Donnell. This Wanda woman is dropped off by the detective and walks inside the building still smelling of booze. They never got her cleaned up. She
was
drunk last night. Donnell asks a question right in front of the policeman guarding the apartment door and the woman says, ‘Yeah, I suppose I could have made a mistake’—into the fucking microphone! Goddamn dumb-ass witnesses don’t have shit between their ears! Fucking reporters!”
“We got to let him go,” Peter said.
“All you have is a bimbo witness who admits to two reporters she was drunk,” Berger added.
Hoskins nodded and muttered as if he were biting off and eating their words as quickly as they could speak.
“We can’t hold him for no reason, not with this kind of attention,” Peter reasoned. “There are no outstanding warrants for him. It appears as if all he’s been doing for three years is working at a moving company. His boss says he’s a good worker and rarely misses a day. We haven’t yet found anybody who can connect him to the couple. For all we know, he goes to church regularly. The papers will paint it as a setup. It’ll look bad as hell that we arrested some guy just because some drunk woman thought she saw somebody in a hallway. As soon as this Stein guy steps off his plane in an hour and calls his office and finds out about the woman, he’s going to be on the phone demanding we release Carothers.”