“Who was she seeing?”
“Oh, well, it was a busy office, phone callin’ and so on, and she was messin’ around with Carothers and maybe some other people, you know. Far as I can actually remember, Darryl didn’t come into the picture until later. She got pregnant from Wayman Carothers and it was later she moved in with Darryl.”
But Carothers, Peter knew, was not the father of Tyler. He didn’t know how to respond; he’d use one of Janice’s counseling tricks, the nondirective response that repeated information.
“Other men?”
“Sure, you know.”
“Men in the Mayor’s group, the campaign people?”
“That girl, well, lotta them wanted her—”
“But who got her? The Mayor?”
Geller stared at Peter, then looked away, caught. “Everybody knew she started seein’ Darryl after she had that baby. It used to make me mad, you know? How everybody had worked so hard. You’re askin’ me, mister, if she fucked the Mayor. Now, I find that to be an insult. That’s an insult to a man I care about and know deeply. The Mayor and I go back a long way, so I’m not sayin’ what you want me to say, you understand? All I’m sayin’ is she and the Mayor, they was friendly and that she liked to laugh. Far as I’m concerned, she was just a distraction to the man. She might have wanted the man’s attention. I’m willin’ to say that. But after a couple of months it was pretty clear that gal was goin’ to have a baby, you know, and everybody heard how Carothers was the father but she didn’t want to see him no more maybe, and then there was no more jokin’ and huggin’ with nobody once she was pregnant—you see, Mr. Scattergood, what you don’t understand is that the Mayor is a man who respects the sanctity of life—and then one day after the baby come she walk into the office with Darryl and tell everybody she and Darryl were thinkin’ about gettin’ married, and then she got another job and never come into the office no more. After that nobody talk about Johnetta, and then after about a year everybody forgot about what she was doin’ and nobody knew where she went. And then she was livin’ with Darryl and nobody see her with her baby. Everybody be askin’ about where she put her baby, and of course her grandma had keeped it the whole time. So that’s all I can say, you know what I’m sayin’?”
It sounded like Johnetta had gotten pregnant by the Mayor and then sought the relationship with Darryl for protection from the Mayor’s disapproval. By fooling Carothers into presenting himself as the father of Tyler, she let the Mayor off the hook. Geller didn’t seem to know that the Mayor might be the father of Tyler. His devotion to the Mayor seemed to depend on such a blindness. Who knew what twisted rationale Geller had contrived for himself? The question was whether or not Geller had been working independently the night of the murder or whether he had been ordered by the Mayor to do something—maybe only to scare Johnetta Henry or maybe even to kill her. Upon reflection, Peter decided it was unlikely that the Mayor had asked Geller to kill Johnetta. By all accounts the Mayor was a decent man—though devious and power-hungry like any politician—and his message of compassion and city unity seemed too genuine to come from a man who could order a murder. What was certain was the fact that while alive, Johnetta Henry could destroy the Mayor in several ways, claiming perhaps truthfully that he was the father of her baby, or that his election was funded illegally. Perhaps he only expressed frustration with her, and Geller had heard. What was even more certain was that, even if he hadn’t ordered the murder, the Mayor had panicked and tried to cover it up.
“How come you’ve told me all this?” Peter asked.
Geller stared back at him and in this moment Peter saw that the man who had suffered innumerable beatings had no fear of arrest.
“Because I feel this great righteousness of what we are tryin’ to do. The Mayor is a very, very great man. He would not mind me tellin’ you these things, Mr. Scattergood. His mind is above these little questions that you and I are talkin’ about. He has a terrible sadness about losin’ Darryl. And anything I can do to help the man get past that is some-thin’ I’m goin’ to do. I don’t need to be asked to help the man. I don’t need people pointin’ out to me, ‘Oh, this would be a nice thing to do for the Mayor.’ He knows that his way is right and that I am only followin’ him. We have our way. This is our way. We are goin’ to overcome.”
“I see,” Peter responded in a respectful, considering voice—the same anesthetizing tone he used when listening patiently to the Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormons who came to the door in conservative coat and tie and politely tried to engage him in discussions of doctrine. He knew that he was nearly out of time, that he had to get Geller out of the building.
“Who killed Johnetta Henry?” Peter asked.
Geller’s hands closed.
“Somebody who decided that it was the right thing to do.”
Neither man spoke. Perhaps, Peter wondered, Geller had mumbled his pathological dogma even as he threatened Johnetta Henry, hurling his judgment of her danger to the Mayor at her, backing her into the bathroom, and, with the means of his thick, well-preserved body, bludgeoning and choking her until she conformed to his truth. Geller, Peter concluded, was deeply sick, the kind of a man who found a way to express his rage within a morality scheme, a man who justified murder with the highest of ideals. Most men who killed did so out of bravado, anger, jealousy, greed, and panic—the most petty, human motivations. There were the few men who planned murders with the exactitude of a gem cutter and the few whose understanding of reality had been destroyed—Robinson fit into that last description. And then—moving toward the most ominous and cruel—there were the men whose sexual happiness demanded a corpse. And last, perhaps, there were the men who, save for a fractured moral cosmology, seemed to have no reason to kill, whose interior lives had compressed the memory of ancient abuses into a dense stone of hatred. It was in this small unknowable space that these men existed much of the time, even while performing their day-to-day functions with plodding ability; these were the unredeemable wretches who decorated their prison cells with bizarre slogans and practiced private and unknowable rituals. In order to survive, they followed those who provided acceptance and interpreted society for them. They knew themselves to be not quite of this world, their rage to be a quiet, flat thing that only found its penultimate expression rarely, and that normal people did not have much use for such men as them, that the world condemned their behavior and had only suspicious compassion for them. These were the men who leave a cold hand over the heart and these were the men who see death—someone’s, maybe their own—as a possibility of each moment.
“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 4P.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—”
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