Break and Enter

by Colin Harrison

  “Yes, the boy brings it around.”

  “And why is that?”

  “Because that’s the door that’s easiest,” she said vaguely.

  “What’s so easy about it?”

  “Well, I’m there in the morning.”

  “Now then, you have told us about the remarkable security system the Robinson house has. I am certainly no expert on such systems, but I do know that generally speaking there is a control box or a numeric keyboard where the home-owner—or in this case the housekeeper—can turn the alarm on or off. For example, the alarm must be turned off before a window may be opened. Does that sound like your system?”

  “Yes.”

  Peter had priced a system for his own house last summer, what with the crack addicts getting bolder by the month, using hacksaws and hydraulic tire jacks to get through window bars. He had researched several options, even. But then he and Janice spent the money on a Caribbean vacation, hoping to get closer.

  “The alarm is on at all times?”

  “Yes.” The housekeeper kept her eyes downcast, toward Peter’s feet.

  “The company that installs these systems usually programs them. The electronics are very complicated. Is that the case with your system?”

  “Yes.”

  “Would it be a fair statement to say that once the installation was complete, it was not changed by you or anyone else in the household?”

  She nodded.

  “Let the record show that the witness nodded in an affirmative manner,” Peter directed toward Benita, the court reporter. “And, as the person who runs this household, is it true to the best of your knowledge that the company installing the service would keep a record of when and how that was done?”

  “Yes.”

  “The Robinsons would want a first-rate alarm service company that kept scrupulous records, is that true?”

  “They wanted the best, yes.”

  “Is it a correct statement to say that in order for you to go get that newspaper each morning you have to turn off the alarm?”

  “Yes.”

  “You turn off the system by punching in a password or a code?”

  The witness looked at the judge. “I don’t think I should tell the answers to these questions.”

  The judge leaned forward. “Don’t tell the court any special codes, but otherwise please answer all questions.”

  “All right,” she agreed. “Yes, you punch in a code.”

  “Just for the kitchen door or the whole system?”

  “I can do either.”

  “But you must do this to turn off the alarm?”

  “Yes.”

  “For any of the doors or any of the windows?”

  “Yes.”

  “And where is the control box?”

  “In the kitchen.”

  “Where?”

  “In one of the cabinets.”

  “In the kitchen proper?”

  “Yes.”

  “And this is the only way the alarm system is deactivated?”

  “Yes.”

  “So if someone comes in the kitchen door using a key, the alarm immediately goes off?”

  “No.”

  “And why is that?”

  “Because that door is set to wait a little bit so that you can get to the box and punch in the code.”

  “And how long does the timer wait? Five minutes?”

  “Oh no,” she said. “It’s only thirty seconds.”

  “Is this true for all the doors?” Peter followed quickly.

  “No, just that door.”

  “Then why and how in the world would William Robinson park his car next to the kitchen door, the door that he would know was the only door that would allow him to go in without making the alarm go off, and then walk fifty feet out of his way, come through the master entry in wet feet on a white rug usually used only for formal occasions, stop, see you and talk about this and that, without the alarm going off?”

  Mrs. McGuane glanced anxiously toward Robinson, and in this Peter nearly felt remorse for what he was forcing her to do.

  “Oh, maybe I made some silly mistake,” she blurted out, “but I know Billy was home that night.”

  Peter waited for this statement to dissolve harmlessly. It was plausible that the housekeeper genuinely believed in Robinson’s innocence or was, at some level, lying to herself, unable to accept his guilt. Billy Robinson was, after all, one of the children she never had. Addendum to a tragedy: a mother’s heart broken. Peter let the witness and the court pause silently for a moment. He liked the feeling he had. It was not smugness, but a better form of satisfaction. He had done his job well and it was about to pay off, for this was the sudden quiet moment, he knew from seven years’ experience, in which the jurors would find themselves realizing the defendant was guilty. He paused, drank some water from the glass next to the pitcher. The radiators clanked, the water cooler hummed. The three court officers, men and women who had heard it all, had returned to their self-involved rituals of time wasting: fondling their watches, cleaning lint off the cuffs of their blue nylon blazers, chewing gum. Peter ordered his points in his mind, making adjustments for the testimony he had just heard. He wished Janice were there to see him work. He seemed to have lost all her respect.

  “The mistake you have just alluded to appears to be in your whole story, Mrs. McGuane, and I’m going to point it out to you so that you may clarify yourself. From what I understand, the sons all sleep in a different part of the house, over the kitchen. They each drive all the cars. So you cannot tell which son is which by the sound of the car. The cars are usually parked next to the kitchen. You wanted the police to believe that you saw Billy come in that night and so you told them when they questioned you that you had seen him come in the front door. But there is no reason, by your own testimony, for him to do that. Why in the world would Billy Robinson park there, then walk fifty feet across wet grass or gravel, avoiding the kitchen door, which leads directly to his bedroom, and enter through the formal entry if the front-door alarm would go off? I submit that this version of events doesn’t make sense, not to me, Mrs. McGuane. There seems no reason to do that. Why would William Robinson, Billy Robinson, set off the alarm on purpose, especially if he knew you were resting comfortably in bed? Right? See what I’m getting at? You said it was a normal night. The kitchen-door alarm timer is set so that people can go in and out without setting off the alarm. It’s next to where the car was parked, by your own description. And for good reason. Either he goes in the front door and the alarm goes off, or he does what he always does, goes in the kitchen door, and the alarm doesn’t go off. Those are the only logical options, based on your testimony here this morning. And yet your version of the events doesn’t match either one of those. What really happened, I submit, is that he came in that night, sometime after you went to sleep, and he came in through the kitchen and out of habit punched in the code in the thirty seconds before the alarm went off. That seems to be the only possible chain of events, Mrs. McGuane. And since that is so, you cannot truthfully say exactly when William Robinson came in that night, whether at the time in question or an hour or two later. Wouldn’t you agree?”

  “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 tri
ed 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.

  Chapter Three