The Murderers

by W. E. B Griffin

  Yeah, but somebody has to notify Helene, and who better than me?

  Jesus, I heard there was bad trouble between them. You don’t think…

  There was a Twenty-fifth District RPC at the curb, and as Pekach got out of his car, a Twenty-fifth District sergeant’s car pulled up beside him.

  “Good morning, sir,” the Sergeant said, saluting him. He was obviously surprised to see Pekach. “Sergeant Manning, Twenty-fifth District.”

  “I heard this on the radio,” Pekach said. “Jerry Kellog used to work for me in Narcotics. What’s going on?”

  “I seen him around,” Sergeant Manning said. “I didn’t know he was working Narcotics.”

  The front door of the house opened and a District uniform came out and walked up to them. And he too saluted and looked at Pekach curiously.

  “He’s in the kitchen, Sergeant,” he said.

  “Anything?”

  “No. When I got here—”

  “What brought you here?” Pekach interrupted.

  “He wasn’t answering his phone, sir. Somebody from Narcotics asked us to check on him.” Pekach nodded. “When I got here, the back door was open, and I looked in and saw him.”

  “You check the premises?” the Sergeant asked.

  “Yeah. Nobody was inside.”

  “You should have asked for backup,” the Sergeant said, in mild reprimand.

  “I’m going to have a look,” Pekach announced.

  Pekach went through the open front door. He found the body, lying on its face, between the kitchen and the “dining area,” which was the rear portion of the living room.

  Kellog was on his stomach, sprawled out. His head was in a large pool of blood, now dried nearly black. Pekach recognized him from his chin and mustache. The rest of his head was pretty well shattered.

  Somebody shot him, maybe more than once, in the back of his head. Probably more than once.

  What the hell happened here? Was Narcotics involved? Christ, it has to be.

  “Well,” Sergeant Manning said, coming up behind Pekach, “he didn’t do that to himself. I’m going to call it in to Homicide.”

  “I’ve got to get to a phone myself,” Pekach said, thinking out loud.

  “Sir?”

  No, I don’t. You’re not going to call Bob Talley and volunteer to go with him to tell Helene that Jerry’s dead.

  “I’m going to get out of everybody’s way. If Homicide wants a statement from me, they know where to find me.”

  “Yes, sir,” Sergeant Manning said.

  Dave Pekach turned and walked out of the house and got back in his car.

  TWO

  When the call came into the Homicide Unit of the Philadelphia Police Department from Police Radio that Officer Jerome H. Kellog had been found shot to death in his home in the Twenty-fifth District, Detective Joseph P. D’Amata was holding down the desk.

  D’Amata took down the information quickly, hung up, and then called, “We’ve got a job.”When there was no response, D’Amata looked around the room, which is on the second floor of the Roundhouse, its windows opening to the south and overlooking the parking lot behind the building. It was just about empty.

  “Where the hell is everybody?” D’Amata, a slightly built, natty, olive-skinned thirty-eight-year-old, wondered aloud.

  D’Amata walked across the room and stuck his head in the open door of Lieutenant Louis Natali’s office. Natali, who was also olive-skinned, dapper, and in his mid-thirties, looked something like D’Amata. He was with Sergeant Zachary Hobbs, a stocky, ruddy-faced forty-four-year-old. Both looked up from whatever they were doing on Natali’s desk.

  “We’ve got a job. In the Twenty-fifth. A cop. A plainclothes narc by the name of Kellog.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “Shot in the back of his head in his kitchen.”

  “And?” Natali asked, a hint of impatience in his voice.

  “Joe said his name was Kellog, Lieutenant,” Hobbs said delicately.

  “Kellog?” Natali asked. And then his memory made the connection. “Jesus Christ! Is there more?”

  D’Amata shook his head.

  There was a just-perceptible hesitation.

  “Where’s Milham?”

  Hobbs shrugged.

  “Lieutenant, there’s nobody out there but me,” D’Amata said.

  “Is Captain Quaire in his office?”

  “Yes, sir,” D’Amata said.

  “Hobbs, see if you can find out where Milham is,” Natali ordered. “You get out to the scene, Joe. Right now. We’ll get you some help.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Natali walked to Captain Henry C. Quaire’s office, where he found him at his desk, visibly deep in concentration.

  “Boss,” Natali said. It took a moment to get Quaire’s attention, but he finally looked up.

  “Sorry. What’s up, Lou?”

  “Radio just called in a homicide. In the Twenty-fifth. The victim is a police officer. Jerome H. Kellog. The name mean anything to you?”

  “He worked plainclothes in Narcotics?”

  Natali nodded. “He was found with at least one bullet wound to the head in his house.”

  “You don’t think…?”

  “I don’t know, Boss.”

  “We better do this one by the book, Lou.”

  “Yes, sir. D’Amata was holding down the desk. He’s on his way.” He gestured across the room to where D’Amata was taking his service revolver from a cabinet in a small file room. “And so am I.”

  “Give me a call when you get there,” Quaire ordered.

  “Yes, sir.”

  There were two Twenty-fifth District RPCs, a District van, a Twenty-fifth District sergeant’s, and a battered unmarked car D’Amata correctly guessed belonged to East Detectives in front of Kellog’s house when D’Amata turned onto West Luray Street.A Twenty-fifth District uniform waved him into a parking spot at the curb.

  Joe got out of his car and walked to the front door, where a detective D’Amata knew, Arnold Zigler from East Detectives, was talking to the District uniform guarding the door. Joe knew the uniform’s face but couldn’t recall his name. Zigler smiled in recognition.

  “Well, I see that East Detectives is already here, walking all over my evidence,” D’Amata said.

  “Screw you, Joe,” Zigler said.

  “What happened?”

  “What I hear is that when he didn’t show up at work, somebody in Narcotics called the Twenty-fifth, and they sent an RPC—Officer Hastings here—over to see if he overslept or something. The back door was open, so Hastings went in. He found him on the floor, and called it in.”

  “Hastings, you found the back door was open?”

  “Right.”

  Kellog’s row house was about in the middle of the block. D’Amata decided he could look at the back door from the inside, rather than walk to the end of the block and come in that way.

  D’Amata smiled at Officer Hastings, touched his arm, and went into the house.

  “Hey, Joe,” Sergeant Manning said. “How are you?”

  Again D’Amata recognized the face of the Sergeant but could not recall his name.

  “Underpaid and overworked,” D’Amata said with a smile. “How are you, pal?”

  “Underpaid, my ass!” the Sergeant snorted.

  D’Amata squatted by Kellog’s body long enough to determine that there were two entrance wounds in the back of his skull, then carefully stepped over it and the pool of blood around the head, and went into the kitchen.

  The kitchen door was open. There were signs of forced entry.

  Which might mean that someone had forced the door. Or might mean that someone who had a key to the house—an estranged wife, for example—wanted the police to think that someone had broken in.

  Without consciously doing so, he put We Know For Sure Fact #1 into his mental case file: Officer Jerome H. Kellog was intentionally killed, by someone who fired two shots into his skull at close range.


  He looked around the kitchen. The telephone, mounted on the wall, caught his eye. There were extra wires coming from the wall plate. He walked over for a closer look.

  The wires led to a cabinet above the sink.

  D’Amata took a pencil from his pocket and used it to pull on the cabinet latch. Inside the cabinet was a cassette tape recorder. He stood on his toes to get a better look. The door of the machine was open. There was no cassette inside. There was another machine beside the tape recorder, and a small carton that had once held an Economy-Pak of a half-dozen Radio Shack ninety-minute cassette tapes. It was empty.

  He couldn’t be sure, of course, and he didn’t want to touch it to get a better look until the Mobile Crime Lab guys went over it for prints, but he had a pretty good idea that the second machine was one of those clever gadgets you saw in Radio Shack and places like that that would turn the recorder on whenever the telephone was picked up.

  There were no tapes in the cabinet, nor, when he carefully opened the drawers of the lower cabinets, in any of them, either. He noticed that, instead of being plugged into a wall outlet, the tape recorder had been wired to it.

  Probably to make sure nobody knocked the plug out of the wall.

  But where the hell are the tapes?

  What the hell was on the tapes?

  “Joe?” a male voice called. “You in here?”

  “In the kitchen,” D’Amata replied.

  “Jesus, who did this?” the voice asked. There were hints of repugnance in the voice, which D’Amata now recognized as that of a civilian police photographer from the Mobile Crime Lab.

  “Somebody who didn’t like him,” D’Amata said.

  “What is that supposed to be, humor?”

  “There’s a tape recorder in the kitchen cabinet. I want some shots of that, and the cabinets,” D’Amata said. “And make sure they dust it for prints.”

  “Any other instructions, Detective?” the photographer, a very tall, very thin man, asked sarcastically.

  “What have I done, hurt your delicate feelings again?”

  “I do this for a living. Sometimes you forget that.”

  “And you wanted to be a concert pianist, right?”

  “Oh, fuck you, Joe,” the photographer said with a smile. “Get out of my way.”

  “Narcotics, Sergeant Dolan,” Dolan, a stocky, ruddy-faced man in his late forties, answered the telephone.“This is Captain Samuels, of the Twenty-fifth District. Is Captain Talley around? He doesn’t answer his phone.”

  “I think he’s probably in the can,” Sergeant Dolan said. “Just a second, here he comes.”

  Samuels heard Dolan call, “Captain, Captain Samuels for you on Three Six,” and then Captain Robert F. Talley, the Commanding Officer of the Narcotics Bureau, came on the line.

  “Hello, Fred. What can I do for you?”

  “I’ve got some bad news, and a problem, Bob,” Samuels said. “They just found Officer Jerome Kellog’s body in his house. He was shot in the head.”

  “Jesus Christ!” Talley said. “Self-inflicted?”

  Talley, like most good supervisors, knew a good deal about the personal lives of his men, often more than he would have preferred to know. He knew in the case of Officer Jerome Kellog that he was having trouble, serious trouble, with his wife. And his experience had taught him the unpleasant truth that policemen with problems they could not deal with often ate their revolvers.

  “No. Somebody shot him. Twice, from what I hear.”

  “Do we know who?”

  “No,” Samuels said. “Bob, you know the routine. He lived in my district.”

  Talley knew the routine. In the case of an officer killed on the job, the body was taken to a hospital. The Commanding Officer of the District where the dead officer lived drove to his home, informed his wife, or next of kin, that he had been injured, and drove her to the hospital.

  By the time they got there, the Commissioner, if he was in the City, or the senior of the Deputy Commissioners, and the Chief Inspector of his branch of the Police Department—and more often than not, the Mayor—would be there. And so would be, if it was at all possible to arrange it, the dead officer’s parish priest, or minister, or rabbi, and if not one of these, then the Departmental Chaplain of the appropriate faith. They would break the news to the widow or next of kin.

  “And you can’t find his wife?” Talley asked.

  “No. Bob, there’s some unpleasant gossip—”

  “All of it probably true,” Talley interrupted.

  “You’ve heard it?”

  “Yeah. Fred, where are you? In your office?”

  “Yeah. Bob, I know that you and Henry Quaire are pretty close—”

  Captain Henry Quaire was Commanding Officer of the Homicide Unit.

  “I’ll call him, Fred, and get back to you,” Talley said. He broke the connection with his finger, and started to dial a number. Then, sensing Sergeant Dolan’s eyes on him, quickly decided that telling him something of what he knew made more sense than keeping it to himself, and letting Dolan guess. Dolan had a big mouth and a wild imagination.

  “They just found Jerry Kellog shot to death in his house,” he said.

  “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!” Dolan said. “They know who did it?”

  “All I know is what I told you,” Talley said. “I’m going to call Captain Quaire and see what I can find out.”

  “You heard the talk?” Dolan asked.

  “Talk is cheap, Dolan,” Talley said shortly. He walked across the room to his office, closed the door, and dialed a number from memory.

  “Homicide, Sergeant Hobbs.”

  “Captain Talley, Sergeant. Let me talk to Captain Quaire. His private line is always busy.”

  “Sir, the Captain’s tied up at the moment. Maybe I could help you?”

  “I know what he’s tied up with, Hobbs. Tell him I need to talk to him.”

  “Captain, Chief Lowenstein’s in there with him.”

  “Tell him I’d like to talk to him,” Talley repeated.

  “Yes, sir. Hang on a minute, please.”

  Sergeant Hobbs walked through the outer office to the office of the Commanding Officer and knocked at it.

  The three men inside—Captain Henry Quaire, a stocky, balding man in his late forties; Chief Inspector of Detectives Matt Lowenstein, a stocky, barrel-chested man of fifty-five; and Lieutenant Louis Natali—all looked at him with annoyance.

  “It’s Captain Talley,” Sergeant Hobbs called, loud enough to be heard through the door.

  “I thought we might be hearing from him,” Chief Lowenstein said, then raised his voice loud enough to be heard by Hobbs. “On what, Hobbs?”

  “One Seven Seven, Chief,” Hobbs replied.

  Lowenstein turned one of the telephones on Quaire’s desk around so that he could read the extension numbers and pushed the button marked 177.

  “Chief Lowenstein, Talley. I guess you heard about Officer Kellog?”

  “Yes, sir. Captain Samuels of the Twenty-fifth called. He’s—”

  “Having trouble finding the Widow Kellog?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Detective Milham, who’s working a job, has been asked to come in to see Captain Quaire and myself to see if he might be able to shed light on that question. If he can, I will call Captain Samuels. And for your general fund of information, Detective Milham was not up for the Kellog job. Does that answer all the questions you might have?”

  Sergeant Harry McElroy, a wiry, sandy-haired thirty-eight-year-old, had been “temporarily” assigned as driver to Chief Matt Lowenstein three years before. He had then been a detective, assigned to East Detectives, and didn’t want the job. Like most detectives, he viewed the Chief of Detectives with a little fear. Lowenstein had a well-earned reputation for a quick temper, going strictly by the book, and an inability to suffer fools.The term “driver” wasn’t an accurate description of what a driver did. In military parlance, a driver was somewhere between an aide-de
-camp and a chief of staff. His function was to relieve his chief of details, sparing him for more important things.

  During Harry’s thirty-day temporary assignment, Lowenstein had done nothing to make Harry think he had made a favorable impression on him. He had been genuinely surprised when Lowenstein asked him how he felt about “sticking around, and not going back to East.”

  Since that possibility had never entered Harry’s mind, he could not—although he himself had a well-earned reputation for being able to think on his feet—think of any excuse he could offer Lowenstein to turn down the offer.

  Over the next eleven months, as he waited for his name to appear on the promotion list to sergeant—he had placed sixteenth on the exam, and was fairly sure the promotion would come through—he told himself that all he had to do was keep his nose clean and all would be well. He had come to believe that Lowenstein wasn’t really as much of a sonofabitch as most people thought, and when his promotion came through, he would be reassigned.

  He would, so to speak, while greatly feeling the threat of evil, have safely passed through the Valley of Death. And he knew that he had learned a hell of a lot from his close association with Lowenstein that he could have learned nowhere else.

  McElroy learned that his name had come up on a promotion list from Chief Lowenstein himself, the morning of the day the list would become public.

  “There’s a vacancy for sergeant in Major Crimes,” Lowenstein had added. “And they want you. But what I’ve been thinking is that you could learn more staying right where you are. Your decision.”

  That, too, had been totally unexpected, and by then he had come to know Lowenstein well enough to know that when he asked for a decision, Lowenstein wanted it right then, that moment.

  “Thank you, Chief,” Harry had said. “I’d like that.”

  McElroy now had his own reputation, not only as Lowenstein’s shadow, but for knowing how Chief Lowenstein thought, and what he was likely to do in any given situation.

  His telephone often rang with conversations that began, “Harry, how do you think the Chief would feel about…”

  He did, he came to understand, really have an insight into how Lowenstein thought, and what Lowenstein wanted.