Authors: Colin Harrison
“My wife’s expectin’ me,” Geller uttered, breaking the silence. “So I had better—”
“I’ve got one more question,” Peter interrupted.
Geller stood up, zipped his coat, and waited.
“If you don’t mind, how’d you get that scar on your chin?”
Geller’s face hinted at a smile for the first time. “My wife and I had a little misunderstanding about ten years ago. She handy with the razor. This was back before I was doin’ much.”
“Same wife?” Peter asked with true curiosity.
“Same wife.” Geller nodded. “We all right now.”
AN HOUR LATER,
with Hoskins still not around, an elderly couple walked in.
“Hey, hello, Mr. and Mrs. Warren.”
“We come to pay our respects, Mr. Scattergood,” said Mrs. Warren, the mother of the girl Billy Robinson had murdered. They were a couple in their fifties who appeared older. “We know you’re a busy man, so we won’t stay more than just a minute.” Mr. Warren, who looked like a coat hung on a stick, quietly squeezed his gloves, unable to make eye contact.
“After the trial we was just so relieved that I didn’t get a proper chance to say to you … See, it’s
unnatural
to lose your child, Mr. Scattergood. It’s unnatural and it makes you sick. You wish you died. Because your time is closer, see? My husband, he ain’t the same, Mr. Scattergood. I don’t know if he’ll ever get over it. We felt you found something for us, Mr. Scattergood,” the wife said, seeing her husband’s discomfort. His eyes burned brightly but uselessly. “I can’t exactly tell you … what I mean. You found it and now we—” She stammered, blinked, then caught herself. “You never think something like this is going to happen—”
The door opened, and in stepped Hoskins. For a short man, he looked huge, his yellow suspenders tight against the pressed cotton wall of his chest, his neck pinching out from his collar.
“I’m going to have to interrupt this meeting,” he announced.
“Oh, I’m terribly sorry.” Mrs. Warren blinked. “We’ll go, I’m sorry.”
“Wait,” Peter commanded. “Wait right where you are.” He turned to Hoskins.
“These people, Bill, are Mr. and Mrs. Warren, whose daughter Judy was murdered last August. You remember we convicted her murderer last week, and the Warrens are here to pay their respects to the office.”
Hoskins looked quickly at the couple, turned back.
“We need to talk,” he said to Peter. “Very soon. About where you were last night and what the hell you’ve been saying to the Mayor.”
“Why don’t we set a time?”
Hoskins stared at him, evaluating his face, he knew.
“Ten minutes.”
“That’s fine.”
“I’ll meet you here. Ten minutes.”
Hoskins left the door open.
“Sorry for the interruption,” Peter said. “Can you hold on just a minute? I do want to talk to you. Just sit tight.”
Peter called Westerbeck, the young detective out in West Philadelphia who had been at the murder scene.
“Was it you or Jonesy who interviewed the bread truck delivery man?” Peter asked.
“Who wants to know?”
“I do.”
“Jonesy talked with the guy.”
“Why didn’t I get the report?”
“He said the guy didn’t know anything, that it wasn’t worth typing up.”
Westerbeck, Peter hoped, only wanted one thing: to solve the murders and win the respect of his peers.
“Remember that you got a couple of prints off of the bathroom mirror that you couldn’t identify?” Peter asked the detective.
“Yeah, but we got Carothers.”
“Only for one body, Mr. Westerbeck.”
“Maybe,” the detective said irritably. “So?”
“I know what you think of me, but I’m going to do you a favor.”
“I don’t usually let assholes do me favors, Counselor.”
“What’s the problem, Westerbeck? You seem like the kind of guy who—”
“The word on you is that you brought Carothers in and nobody else got to talk to him. Is that how you expect people to help you out?”
Peter ignored this. “There’s a guy named Geller.” He gave the address. “Why not pick him up and get a print? No big deal. If the print matches—”
“C’mon.”
“If you need a reason and if you’re not afraid Geller will disappear, then run down the driver of the delivery truck that’s on that route and ask this guy what he saw on the night of the murder and put Geller in a lineup and see if the driver can identify him. See for yourself.”
There followed a silence during which Westerbeck realized he’d been handed an immense gift.
“You mentioned this to anybody else?”
“No. It’s yours.”
“Right.”
The detective hung up.
“We’ll just say good-bye, Mr. Scattergood,” Mrs. Warren said. She looked toward her husband, who sat twisting his gloves. The man remained speechless, and though he did not cry, his eyes watered like the lip of a dam, as if he suffered a constant grief that overflowed from time to time.
“It was a terrible shock to him, he’s not the same after it happened,” Mrs. Warren told Peter again. She leaned forward. “He blames himself. He thinks that if we raised her differently she wouldn’t have fallen in with this boy….”
Mr. Warren moaned and shook his head.
“You got flowers, Peter.” Melissa stepped in with a big package.
“They just come?”
“Just now.” She looked in the wrapping. “They’re sort of ugly, actually.”
He opened the card.
Get Well Soon!
exclaimed the printed lettering. Inside was a many-folded note in Berger’s handwriting, which he read as Mrs. Warren began talking again.
Peter—
By now you know Hoskins dumped me last night. I had no chance, I was working late and there was a knock on the door and Hoskins was there with a cop and a German shepherd. I had a small stash in my pocket and the dog found it in about five seconds, practically pawed my leg off. I don’t expect you to be sympathetic and if you were, I’d be pissed off, because it meant you were going fucking soft. By the time you read this I’ll be at Philly International booked to Bermuda. My wife and I are going to be there for a week and see where we stand.
But this is the other thing—Hoskins sent the dog and cop away (at least he didn’t fucking arrest me) and told me I was finished and that I had an hour to clean out. He left and said he’d be back in one hour. So I wondered how I could use the hour best—nothing more could happen to me. I tried Hoskins’s office; it was locked. I know you’re in a jam, buddy, and I was trying to think of some way to help. I know you’ve dealt me out of the information and that’s okay. You sensed I was due for a fall and you were right. So now Hoskins can’t bully much out of me. You’re getting smarter. So I was thinking about this and just poking around, and then I saw Melissa’s message book. You know, she tears off the white slip, but keeps the yellow carbon, and she usually has about three days’ worth of carbons so she knows who’s called, and I went through her book and counted four calls from the Mayor’s office to Hoskins, and the last message said, “Car will pick you up at 4
P.M
.”That was yesterday. There’s too much contact going on there, Peter—they’re working something out, and getting rid of me was the first step. They’re scared, I think, starting to shake the tree
.
My advice to you—this is the best goddamn advice I got, Peter—is stop fucking overanalyzing the situation and make your move
now.
Bergs
P.S. I put the spare can of racquetballs back in your office.
“… and so anyway, we been over it and over it, Mr. Scattergood. We thought we raised that girl right. We thought we knew her. But we didn’t.
She ran off with this boy because she didn’t have the values we thought we had gave her. She wanted the money and the thrills and this is what she got. I hate to say it, but that’s what happened.”
The couple stood to leave.
“You’re busy, Mr. Scattergood,” Mrs. Warren finished. “We just came in to let you know we appreciate—It’s not easy, we could all see that. We all feel you’re a good man helping people, all of us.”
He murmured a vague thanks, and before they were out the door picked up the phone and dialed the
Inquirer
city desk and asked for Miss Karen Donnell. This would be the enormous breach that put him in direct conflict with Hoskins. But perhaps the editors there could save him and Carothers, and not let the Mayor protect Johnetta Henry’s murderer.
Of course they put him on hold, the earpiece clicking every few seconds. Hoskins, in the hallway and talking to one of the new young A.D.A.’s, saw he was on the phone. What momentary consideration stopped the man from entering Peter’s office? He’d have to say each sentence with absolute precision, since Donnell would transcribe his words onto her screen as quickly as he said them.
But this was not the place to make the call, not with Hoskins in earshot. He would have to get out of the office. Perhaps a minute remained of his ten—not enough time to take his coat, schmooze casually with the secretaries, and wait for the elevator. Hoskins would call downstairs before he reached the first floor.
“Yes?” someone answered. “This is Karen Donnell.”
“One moment, please,” Peter said. Hoskins was still hovering outside his door with bulky impatience.
“Yes,” Peter continued in a quiet voice. “This is the D.A.’s office.”
“Is that Mr. Scattergood?”
He ignored the question. “I have Bill Hoskins, Chief of Homicide, on the line for you, Ms. Donnell. He is prepared to make available to you important new information on the Whitlock and Henry murders. Please hold.”
Peter rang Hoskins’s number and Melissa answered.
“Important call for Bill.”
The secretary rang Hoskins’s phone and he reflexively lumbered the fifteen feet back to his office and picked it up. Ms. Donnell, Peter knew,
would quickly ask many questions and keep Hoskins tied up for a few minutes while he was caught on the defensive. And that was all Peter needed. He took the entire Carothers file and left.
IN HIS HASTE
he’d forgotten his hat, and it was another killer winter night in the making, the sun starting to die, air freezing. Where would he go tonight? His house was the most obvious place anyone would look for him, including Vinnie. He retrieved the gun from the car and slipped it quickly into his coat pocket. He jammed the thick file into the wheel well of the spare tire. Back on the street, he dialed the
Inquirer
from an open phone booth. He got the metro desk.
“Karen Donnell, please.”
“She just left,” a voice responded. “She’ll be back later.”
“Okay. I need to talk to somebody …”
“Who? We’re all on deadline here.”
“This is an anonymous source,” he muttered in a low voice, feeling stupid and stagy about his words. He looked down the street. The Mayor could have somebody following him
now.
All he had to say, he knew, was his name and title, just whisper it, and the half-attention of the editor on the other end would change. And things would never be the same.
“Yes? We have anonymous sources with all kinds of stories all over the place, pal.”
“I’ve got, uh, a big story. It concerns the murder—”
“What? Who is this? Look, I’m on
deadline
.”
“This is for real. About the two murders. The girl was killed by someone else. Somebody—” How unclearly he was thinking! His mind grinding words out in broken sentences. “—and they know about this and maybe have somebody in the police running the investigation there. It’s all inside, see. There’s enough proof—”
“Okay, okay,” came the voice, “slow down here. Before this goes any further, I gotta have some kind of identification, some kind of verification. Who is this? Wait a minute.” The phone was put down. Peter heard the clacking of computer keys, phones trilling in the background. “What case are we talking about, who got murdered?
We’re going to have to verify these charges.” More clacking. “Shit, I’m on a
terrible
deadline here, maybe if you could give me more to go on.”
He took a breath, deep enough to expel several sentences.
“See, the Mayor is—”
He couldn’t say it. Not yet, not before he told Janice and explained it all to her, laid it out at her feet and showed her the pressure he had been under. Made her understand! Once he went to the press, he’d be caught in a wave of controversy without a chance to talk to her. If they spoke first, she would be able to see the whole catastrophe unfold from the inside, feel for him. He could wait a few hours to tell the press. What could happen in a few hours?
“Yeah, bud, still got that story for me?” came the editor’s impatient voice.
“Oh,
yes,”
Peter crooned, finding the voice of a lunatic. “The Mayor and I own the same bird, called Smiley the Bird, and Smiley can talk to anybody, and I asked Smiley to ask—”
The editor groaned and hung up. Peter left the booth. He walked five steps, spun on his heel, and looked behind him. Two men walked in the same direction. Had he imagined a problem? He would stay on foot. It was an odd feeling to have the solemn weight of the gun in his pocket. He’d get rid of it, but where? He couldn’t just throw it in a trash can. He crossed Chestnut Street and reversed direction, slipping through the revolving doors of John Wanamaker’s, past mannequins and women with impossibly bright faces—faces the color of hard candies—past thin, faggy men trying to entice passersby with skin bronzers and facial scrubs and colognes and all other manner of junk, watches, shirts, shoes, past the perfume counter where he had once bought a Christmas gift for Janice, and then outside to Market Street, where the XXX-rated peep shows had been pushed back a block or two by the urban renewal sweeping toward the river. The old buildings were being rehabbed, the great Reading Railroad Terminal, the huge columned facade of the Lit Brothers store. Big dollars, big deals, young guys making serious money. This time of day, Billy Penn was just a dark silhouette in a knee-length coat and flat-brim hat, the eyes hidden and the grave
cold lips shadowed in judgment. And somewhere directly beneath Penn’s immense cold feet, where the window lights shone in the darkness, the Mayor sat now in his plush suite of offices, pondering his own fate.