Break and Enter

GUILTY. THE MAN’S AS GUILTY
as they come, Peter Scattergood argued to himself, nearly speaking out loud. He needed to get back to the courtroom but tried, even as he hurried along—a big, black-haired man in a dark, expensive overcoat—to look up at the sky, to catch a piece of pale lunchtime light bouncing around up there between all the new skyscrapers. There was no time to stop and stand. Peter moved faster through the crowds, cold air slipping under his wool scarf. Awaiting him was another appalling common case of sex murder—premeditated, first degree. No need to think about it. But because murder marked the outer limits of human depravity, reminding him that he stood at the opposite end of the continuum, there was a small pleasure in its contemplation, a certain grim comfort. And he’d take what comfort he could get, for lately it had been in short supply.

He turned the corner onto Market Street, bent red-faced into the January wind. A block east stood Philadelphia City Hall—six hundred rooms, thirty years to build, walls twenty-two feet thick, once the largest and tallest public building in America, the colossal statue of William Penn reaching five hundred and forty-eight feet above the ground. He’d first been awed by it as a schoolboy. The edifice stood before him in all its marble-scrolled splendor, gray from pollution, with pigeon shit dripped around the cornices and columns and window ledges, but still it was a godawful magnificent building and filled with the offices of
government; the Mayor and his entourage—corrupt bureaucratic pin-heads all, the ever-bickering City Council, the social services offices, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, the city property office, and jesus christ, of course, forty-nine courtrooms, and even, he had heard rumored (from Berger, who knew everything), a small janitor’s closet where you could get a blowjob any hour of the working day. A girl sat there on a wooden stool. Five minutes, thirty bucks. But lately City Hall bothered him. It was the many figures sculpted in stone on the outside, the lion gargoyles who grinned maniacally at him, the bearded old tyrant perched over a window lintel five stories up who watched below, and the marble-cheeked virgins who stared wistfully from the tops of porticoes. He told himself not to look at their stone faces.

Peter crossed at the green light, walked beneath the arch, and inside, past the Register of Wills office, toward the elevator to the fourth floor. He was working out of Courtroom 453 these days, and Judge Scarletti was not above scolding an assistant district attorney for being late to the afternoon session. He passed judges’ offices, jury rooms, and other doors open wide enough for him to glimpse fleets of tired secretaries and wooden, ceiling-high shelves stuffed with files brown with age. The halls were subterraneanly gloomy; silhouettes advanced through light and shadow, shadow and light. He nodded silent hellos to other attorneys, court officers, judges. At the elevator door stood a couple of cops reading the
Daily News
on the taxpayers’ time. On the fourth floor a group of jurors wearing yellow and blue “Juror” buttons bustled by, imperious in their fleeting importance. Somewhere a K-9 German shepherd barked. Peter hated the dogs; they were preternaturally huge and trained to terrify with crazy brown eyes and a quick bite. He passed detectives waiting to testify. Each was large, well-groomed, and overfed. They laughed amongst themselves. In City Hall, everybody knew everybody.

On the bench outside Courtroom 453 sat a man in his thirties sucking at a cigarette, the smoke lost in the dimness of the hallway. Long curly hair, motorcycle jacket, deep chest. A big man. Peter recognized him as one of the older brothers of Robinson, the defendant.

“Mister prosecutor,” the man grunted in a hoarse voice. He stood and sized up the vertical sweep of Peter’s Brooks Brothers gray
pinstripe, maroon tie, and crisp white shirt. They stood out of earshot of the two policemen at the courtroom door.

“What can I do for you?”

“You from Philly?” The man flicked his cigarette at the floor. “Just asking.”

“Born,” Peter said. “And raised.”

“How old are you?”

“Thirty-one.”

“Shit.
Punks sending up punks.” He stepped closer, quite fearlessly. “If my little bro’s found guilty, what will it be?”

“Life, probably life.”

“He’s a kid. You gotta go easy, man.”

“The jury will decide that, not me.”

“It’s
you
who keep saying how guilty he is.”

Peter remembered the murder victim, Judy Warren, and the hours spent consoling her family, swearing to her parents he’d put the killer away, explaining each step of the maddeningly slow legal process, from the charging to pretrial hearings to, finally, a jury trial. For months the family had been consumed by the monstrous energy of grief; the fine points of prosecutorial strategy meant nothing to them. The family wanted justice, the purge of their outrage. Judy’s severed left thumb had been found in her vagina.

“That’s what you wanted to tell me?” Peter replied in a cold voice.

The defendant’s brother stared at him, then smiled.

“No. I wanted to tell you to go fuck yourself.”

Peter pushed past him and was waved through the door by a cop with a metal detector wand. The familiar gloominess of the courtroom comforted him, with its faded carpeting, faulty lighting, and the wooden paneling on which hung grim portraits of long-dead judges. Gladys, the fat black court clerk, watched him make his way to the table and put down his briefcase.

“Mr. Scattergood, your wife called,” she said sternly, stacking her records. “She don’t seem happy with you.”

“You know something I don’t, Gladys?”

“Don’t mess with me, Mr. Scattergood. She’s a good woman.”

“She leave a number?”

“Yeah, she did.”

“Well, that’s a start.” He took the pink message slip from Gladys’s smooth black hand and folded it into his pocket. “And without a start in life, where are we, Gladys?”

She gave him a sober look. “You tell me, Mr. Scattergood.”

We’re dead,
he thought to himself. He fingered the slip, thought about calling. There was no time to worry about Janice now, no time to ponder what latest piece of his marriage had crumbled away. His chest was bothering him again, a dull pain right under the breastbone. The doctor said too much caffeine and
entirely
too much stress. It was chest wall pain; there was no need yet to run an EKG—he had the heart of an ox, and low cholesterol, too, thanks to Janice’s vegetarian meals.

Judge Scarletti came in and sat behind the bench with the obliviousness of a man boarding a bus. He fussed with a computer printout of cases, checked his watch, then looked up.

Two beefy sheriff’s deputies entered with the unhandcuffed defendant, William Biddle Robinson, who sat down next to Morgan, his counsel. Robinson was a brash young man who looked as if he had just stepped out of an American Express card commercial. But despite a staid wool suit and tie, Robinson was entirely unpredictable—perhaps it was his habit of smiling inappropriately and raising his eyebrows several times a minute. His parents owned a controlling interest in the holding corporation that owned one of the city’s private hospitals. Young William had murdered a girl whom he had seen romantically and then been dumped by. As cases went, it was typically horrific and had received little attention, perhaps because the murderer was from an outlying county and the girl, whose family shunned reporters, was lower-middle-class and without media-lustre. There had been some minor, obligatory attention to the case—page three of the B section of the
Inquirer,
the usual write-up in the
Daily News
—but basically not much, due also to the fact Philly was undergoing yet another periodic paroxysm of massive public scandal, with Common Pleas judges dropping regularly to corruption charges and organized-crime bosses being trapped by undercover operations. The swarming clot of cameras and reporters was down on the second floor reporting on this week’s story of the decade—the prosecution of one of the crime bosses, a gentleman
given to gold tie clips and tidy mob hits—and that was fine with Peter. Although this case was more gruesome than many, it would fall into the hopper of history with all the others. He was eager to get the trial done, in and out, no fuss. The roving, insatiable eye of the media—it could suck the energy out of a man—was just what Peter didn’t want now, not with the trouble he already had.

Actually the newspapers and television stations had missed a good story. The defendant was twenty-two, brilliantly articulate at times, disturbingly disoriented at others, with a preppy Main Line education—the local brand-name private schools. A graduate of Yale, with one year at Columbia in the MBA program. He’d been arrested with no fewer than eighteen credit cards in his wallet and wearing L. L. Bean duckboots, green wide-wale corduroys, and a button-down oxford shirt.

Through the interconnected world of Philadelphia’s private schools, clubs, and summer camps, Peter had known vaguely of the Robinson family for over a decade, even once been to their home. As was often the case, the crime by one member of the family reflected the reality of the rest of its members. The Robinsons lived on a huge, Revolutionary-era estate twenty miles out of the city in Chester County, with a long driveway that led to the thick stone walls and simple lines of the old mansion. A pool in the back—in which Peter had swum, the most modern of kitchens, old Kashmiri Oriental rugs on the wide, pegged floorboards, Chinese jade on the bookshelves in the study, an expanse of bedrooms above. The parents had, over the years, smiled into the society columnist’s photographer’s flashbulb, drinks in hand, dental work gleaming. Sad, polished wealth. Covert facelifts, the Devon Horse Show, the shingled old summer house tucked away in the dunes of Nantucket, the signed Ansel Adams hung in the foyer, the quarterly trust fund check from a Manhattan bank. Peter had known such people all his life. Their children sometimes went mad, despite fancy funny farms in New England at eighty thousand dollars a year, psychiatrists, etc. What was worse? To have all of life’s advantages and be a complete failure, or to have all of life’s disadvantages, fight like hell, and still be crushed by your circumstances? Robinson’s parents, shamed and angry, had made certain funds available for their son’s defense and then absented themselves from North America for an indefinite period.