Schiller sat in the interrogation room, truly not the least bit anxious. This time, he really had just been passing by. He believed that the upright Commissioner Gordon would certainly clear his name—provided Gordon had not been angered to death by his words.
Clearly, Gordon was already fuming. But precisely because he was a law-abiding good man, there was indeed nothing he could do to Schiller. Schiller was only a suspect now, not a criminal. No matter how unprecedentedly suspicious he was, without a court trial, there was still room for acquittal, and he could not be treated as a criminal.
By now, Gordon had developed remarkably sharp instincts regarding all kinds of crimes in Gotham. He felt that Schiller had not committed this crime, but there was no explanation whatsoever for why he had appeared at the crime scene.
Surely he had not really gone there to work as a cleaner?
This raised a somewhat absurd question—if someone killed someone and failed to dispose of the crime scene, while a passing cleaner cleaned it up, was the cleaner guilty of a crime?
Under the common law system, this sort of conduct was usually charged under two offenses: one was "aiding and abetting a criminal," and the other was "tampering with a crime scene."
But in reality, both charges were difficult to establish. To charge someone with aiding and abetting a criminal, there was one prerequisite: the two had conspired in advance. For example, the murderer had hired the cleaner, or the two had plotted together and divided the work. If the accused could prove there had been no connection between them, such a charge could not be made.
The prerequisite for "tampering with a crime scene," meanwhile, was that the person had subjectively known it was a crime scene.