Break and Enter (12 page)

“Peter?” The voice came from the bedroom. He had no idea whose it was. He returned to the dark.

“I thought you’d disappeared,” Cassandra mused affectionately. “What were you
muttering
in there?”

“Hold out your hand.”

She did.

“It’s—” he began.

“No explanation needed.” She felt it with her fingertips. There was an appraising silence as she tested its size, then she gave an amused laugh. “It’ll do.”

He sat down on the bed.

“You mind if I smoke first?” she asked a minute later, using a tissue to wipe her hands.

“Go ahead.”

“It relaxes me.”

A match flared in the dark, brightening the gaunt edge of her cheekbone. Her eyes watched the tobacco brighten. He hated cigarette smoke.

“How much do you smoke?”

“Not enough to damage my health. Just now and then.”

“Right.”

“Now listen to me,” she said with grave amusement, wrapping a ropy arm around his chest, pulling him toward her,
“most
women, and I mean practically
all,
would never,
ever
do what I just did. Most would consider it a foul act.”

“Do you consider it a foul act?” he asked the pin light of her cigarette.

“Yes,” she exhaled. “But being alone is a whole lot worse.”

They began to move. He did not feel the surge of sexual curiosity one is supposed to feel when beginning an affair; instead, for the first time in his life, he experienced the sensation of holding one woman while fervently trying to trick himself into believing that it was another.

IT WAS LATER.
He rested his head on her breast, his cheek against her skin.

“I’m going to rub your back.” She blew in his ear. He had to admit she was more affectionate than Janice, for whom affection had become
a balance-of-trade commodity. He remembered sleeping side by side angrily, two people hating each other, lying quietly within themselves, feeling a vast distance of inches between them. Cassandra, on the other hand, seemed genuinely unselfish. First-time courtesy? He’d been out of circulation for a long time. What did he really know about the manners of the American sexual marketplace in the waning years of the twentieth century? He was only some poor slob whose wife had just left him. Cassandra’s hands moved across his shoulders, kneaded his spinal column. She rubbed his back, his rear, the moist, tufty no-man’s-land between his ass and balls, his hamstrings, the back of his knees, and his calves.

“Feels great.”

“Good.” The bedroom was dark.

“I’ll do it for you.”

“I’m happy. You just be.”

“You like being vice president of a bank?”

“There’re ten of us. It’s not quite the position it sounds, but it gives me things I need. How’s this?”

She pushed her thumbs into the deep muscle region of his rear.

“It’s. Terrific.”

She kissed his back and worked her fingers around his ribs.

“You able to determine people’s banking habits from all those automatic tellers?” he asked into the sheet.

“What machine they get their money from and what time, things like that.”

“Right.” Janice typically used the machine often, after work, or on Saturday mornings before she shopped. Maybe he could locate Janice by finding out where she was using her bank card.

“What’re you thinking?” she asked.

Nothing he was ready to tell her. “I’m trying to think up a joke about banking and sex. I’ve got the punch line but not the lead-in.”

“What’s the punch line?”

“Substantial penalties for early withdrawal.”

She grunted a laugh and rolled him on top of her.

“That’s pretty pathetic, Mr. Scattergood.”

“I agree.”

“What else, then?”

“I can hear your heart,” he said. “How fast does it go?” He listened.

“It goes ‘Uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh.’ ” “Listen again,” she told him. “I’ll slow it down.” He pressed his head close. He could feel her breathing and the heat of skin. In the dark, this was the whole world.

“You did it.” He lifted his head. Her hand moved from his shoulder to his neck. A slight pressure. “Now listen.”

This time her heart fluttered rapidly. Her body tensed and her skin warmed. His penis lifted in response. “Yes?” she said. “Yes.”

Her heart slowed and she pulled him toward her.

“How do you do that?”

She locked her arms around him happily.

“Practice.”

He drifted through a field of sleep until she spoke again. “Tell me something I don’t know,” she asked playfully. “What kind of thing?” “Oh, I don’t know.”

“All right. Inside you right now is a substance called prostatic acid phosphotase. Only men produce it. If we were in court and you wanted to prove—”

“That’s lovely.”

“What did you want to be told?”

“What your wife is like,” she responded suddenly.

He had forgotten Janice, if only for a moment.

“How did you know I was married?”

“Well, you happen to be wearing a wedding ring.”

“Yes I do, don’t I?”

“Also, it’s in your face. You’re used to being married, you don’t have the approach single men have. Married men can be very attractive—they’re trained.”

“Am I being patronized?”

“Not against your will,” she laughed.

He rolled over and she sat on him, his thick chest straddled by her slender legs. In the streetlight, he could see how skinny she truly was. Her breasts clung to a wall of ribs.

“You know,” he said, “in five hours, or whatever it is, I have to be back in court, and after this I’m not going to feel like it.”

“Yes?” She was rubbing his fingers.

“I mean in the morning, I’m going to wake up and just want to laze around, you know? Christ, who the hell wants to put on a suit and tie and march around a courtroom? It’s a hell of a way to make a living.”

“We could go out for breakfast somewhere,” she said, lying down. “I love croissants. And good coffee.”

He hadn’t answered her question about Janice and they both knew it. He lifted his knee into her crotch, enjoyed its warm moistness. She breathed in his arms. His eyeballs rolled back under their lids, and for a time he floated free of his own thoughts and lived in some warm, safe place defined by the edges of the bed. Then Cassandra’s hand touched his temple.

“Well?”

“What?”

“What’s she like? Is she attractive, smart?”

“I’m not ready to talk about her.”

“How long since you last saw her?”

This was too much. He opened his eyes. Before him rose one large inquiring eye, wide open, wide awake.

“What time is it?”

“Late. Early. Why? You going to kick me out?”

They lay there naked, aware of themselves.

“No,” he whispered, “of course not.”

And this was the truth. Part of his code was that as a man, he took care of women when they appeared to need it. It was probably patronizing, self-serving, and reductive of women—all the things Janice used to tell him—but it was his code, nonetheless. He found an old flannel shirt and some wool socks of his and insisted she put them on. Then he pulled up the covers and listened to her begin to sleep. The bedroom was dark but he moved easily. He felt solicitous of her. He was, however, he
decided, under no illusions that he had fallen in love or otherwise become attached to Cassandra. The grim, small truth of it was that they were two adults who had talked, coupled, and treated the other decently. There was something pathetic and lonely in all this, and as the minutes passed, his time with Cassandra flattened toward a minimal interaction. He would disengage himself tomorrow.

This decided, he picked up her clothes and folded them neatly and put them in the chair so that she would see them in the morning. He could hear her breathing evenly. Already unconscious. Had he meant so little to her? Or was she simply tired and at peace? He found his bathrobe and put it next to the clothes. His radio alarm was set to ring in three hours. Tomorrow
—today
—he was due back in court. He’d have to prepare in his office early in the morning. In the bathroom he pissed, enjoyed the slight burning pleasure that came with cleaning out the pipe. He put out a fresh towel and wiped spots of dried toothpaste from the mirror. Then he cleaned the toilet seat and checked the bath drain, where he found a dry matted circle of Janice’s and his hair. He dropped it into the toilet, where it floated like a tiny woven wreath.

He wandered the house, not daring to fall asleep next to Cassandra—sleep being more intimate than sex. If he closed his eyes, he’d slide down the chute of unconsciousness, unable to walk. Only a few hours remained till dawn and the morning and noise and rush and all the nonsense that he depended on to keep him from thinking. He went into his study and turned on every light. His ghost sat working at his desk, hands blurred like a drummer’s over a continuous white stream of paper. Paying bills. Trial notes. Internal office memos. Police reports. Peter’s eyes burned with supernatural alertness, waiting.

SOMEWHERE IN THE NIGHT’S EXHAUSTION
, he must have wandered back into the bedroom, for when the sound of the phone stabbed at his head, he was beneath the sheets in his underwear. That anyone was calling him now meant trouble, and instinctively he thought of Janice, that she might somehow need him. He reached toward the phone and encountered another body.

“Yes?” Cassandra spoke. “It’s very nice to speak to you, and no, you haven’t woken me. Here’s Peter.”

Cassandra held her hand over the receiver.

“You were so tired you
fell
on the bed about four.”

“Who—?” he whispered.

“It’s a Bill Hoskins—”

“My boss.”

“He thinks I’m your—”

Peter nodded, cutting her off. He took the phone. Cassandra lay next to him, her knees tucked up under his.

“Yeah?” he croaked.

“Peter!” Hoskins boomed. “I wish
my
wife was up this early in the morning.”

“Okay, I’m awake. What’s the story?”

“Just got a call from the trailer.”

The office maintained an office in a trailer by the Police Administration Building at Eighth and Race Streets. There, new A.D.A.’s rotated shifts, receiving information on crimes and arrests from the police.

“Peter,” Hoskins continued, “we got a young black guy named Darryl Whitlock dead in his apartment with blunt trauma head injuries in West Philly.”

“If the young blacks in this city stopped bumping each other off, we’d have very little business.” Peter felt Cassandra kissing his back. “Sounds pretty routine.”

“That’s what I knew you would say and that’s what you won’t say when I tell you three facts.”

Hoskins was a man who loved to present facts like a boy lining up toy soldiers: carefully, and in a row. Peter was never sure if Hoskins’s maniacal behavior was constitutional or a conscious strategy to put everyone on the defensive. He had obeyed Hoskins for so many years now, without trust.

“Make me curious enough to forget how sleepy I am.”

“Peter, remember Wayman Carothers?”

Cassandra was trying to roll him over. He resisted. “No. Yes, a couple of years ago? Some guy who beat a charge because the evidence was screwed up. That the guy who broke into a house and the owner resisted and he got angry and killed him?”

“Berger prosecuted the case—”

“It was a weak case, we never had enough. The guy had a hell of a temper.”

“Hang on a second, Peter,” Hoskins said.

Peter watched Cassandra get out of bed and pad into the bathroom. She had stretch marks on her breasts, tiny grooves colored slightly lighter than the rest of her skin. Had she ever been pregnant? How drunk had he been? Had she been up while he’d been asleep? Did she go through the house, his papers? It was terrible to be so paranoid, but hell, he was paid to be paranoid. He knew almost nothing about her, including her last name.

“All right—” Hoskins came back.

“So it’s Carothers, or might be,” Peter said, jotting down notes on a pad he kept by his bed. “How’d you get him so fast?”

“Got an ID from a neighbor. We had him in the mug books, and the cops have already picked him up for questioning,” Hoskins replied. “The second fact is that the newspapers know about the murder and that we have a suspect.”

“If the newspapers
care,
you better say who the victim is.”

“He’s the Mayor’s nephew.”

“Oh, fucking great.”

“Yeah, son of his sister who lives out on Baltimore Avenue in West Philadelphia. He had an apartment two blocks away. Lower-middle-class family, stable. Everybody loved him, a real prince. Want more? Straight-A student at Overbrook High, on full scholarship to Penn. He’d been accepted to Harvard Medical School. A smart kid who was going to be a doctor. Somehow got hooked up with Carothers. We think maybe Carothers cruises Penn, knows some of the people who deal to the kids. We don’t know how they knew each other. Maybe they didn’t know each other. Maybe Whitlock was buying from Carothers, which sort of tarnishes the image and makes it stickier for the Mayor, not that I care what people think about him. Maybe it was straight robbery. Everybody says Whitlock was clean. You’re going to have to dig into that, very tactfully. The papers are going to be very interested. The black community is very interested. I understand there’s been a call already from some of the black leaders offering ‘guidance,’ whatever the hell that is. The Mayor, for God’s sake, is going to be very fucking interested. He hasn’t been in office very long, so he’ll try to squeeze every advantage he can out of this.”

“Yeah, it’s a mess.”

“How’s your caseload?”

This was not a genuine question, just one of the hurdles of protocol. Hoskins, unsympathetic to the difficulties of life, was never interested in how hard someone was working. He had it figured both ways, too: If you weren’t working hard, you needed to be; if you were working hard, it was because you were stupidly missing something obvious, in which case you needed to work harder to find out what that thing was.

“Uh …” He had better remember what he was supposed to do that day. “I got final arguments in Robinson—”