The Murderers

by W. E. B Griffin

  “My God! At the Bellvue? When he was here, he was wearing a Bellvue maintenance uniform.”

  Jason ignored the question.

  “I wanted to bawl him out for that. And alone.”

  “So you went to the bar at the Rittenhouse Club?”

  “That was after I bawled him out.”

  “After you bawled him out, you felt sorry for him?”

  “I felt sorry for myself. I wanted a drink, and he didn’t have anything.”

  “I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt,” Martha said, “and accept that story.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Do want something to eat? Coffee? Another drink?”

  “If I told you what I really want, you’d accuse me of…”

  “Oddly enough, I was thinking along those lines myself,” Martha said. “Why don’t you get one of those champagne splits from the fridge, while I turn off the lights.”

  When Detective Wallace J. Milham walked into the Homicide Division, he saw Detective Matthew M. Payne sitting at an unoccupied desk reading the Daily News. When Payne saw him, he closed the newspaper and stood up.Wally beckoned to him with his finger and led him into one of the interview rooms, remembering as he passed through the door that he had the previous morning given a statement of his own in the same goddamn room.

  Milham sat down in the interviewee’s chair, a steel version of a captain’s chair, firmly bolted to the floor, with a pair of handcuffs locked to it through a hole in the seat.

  He motioned for Payne to close the door.

  Payne handed him two sheets of typewriter paper.

  “I didn’t know how you wanted to handle this,” Payne said. “But I went ahead and typed out this.”

  Milham read Matt’s synopsis of what had happened at the Inferno Lounge. It wasn’t up to Washington’s standards, but he was impressed with the clarity, organization, and completeness. And with the typing. There were no strike-overs.

  Why the hell am I surprised? He works for Washington.

  “What do you do for Washington?” he wondered aloud.

  Payne looked uncomfortable.

  “Whatever he tells me to do,” he said. “That wasn’t intended to be a flip answer.”

  He doesn’t want to talk about what he does for Washington. That shouldn’t surprise me either. I don’t know what they’ve got Jason doing, but whatever it is, somebody thinks it’s more valuable to the Department than his working Homicide. And this guy works for him.

  “Payne, I’m sorry I jumped on your ass at the Inferno. I had a really bad day yesterday, but I shouldn’t have taken it out on you.”

  “No. I was out of line. You were right.”

  There was a knock at the door. Wally pushed himself out of the steel captain’s chair and went to it and opened it.

  A portly detective Matt recognized stood there.

  “Mr. Atchison and his attorney, Mr. Sidney Margolis, are here,” he said formally, and then he recognized Matt. “Whaddayasay, Payne?”

  Summers shrugged, a gesture Milham interpreted to mean Fuck you, too, and went out of the interview room.

  “You know Summers?”

  “The sonofabitch and another one named Kramer had me in here when I shot Stevens. The way they acted, I thought they were his big brothers.”

  “When you did what? ‘Shot Stevens’?”

  “Charles D. Stevens, a.k.a. Abu Ben Mohammed. He was one of the, quote, Arabs, unquote, on the Goldblatt Furniture job.”

  “I remember that,” Wally said. “He tried to shoot his way out of an alley in North Philly when they went to pick him up?”

  “Right.”

  “And shot a cop, who then put three rounds in him? That was you?”

  Matt nodded. “I took a ricochet off a wall.”

  “I didn’t make the connection with you,” Wally said. And then, surprising himself, he added, “You hear about the plainclothes Narcotics guy getting shot?”

  “Washington said something about it.”

  “Summers had me in here earlier today. ‘What did you know about the death of Officer Jerome H. Kellog?’”

  “I heard.”

  “Kellog’s wife—they were separated—and I are pretty close. They had me in here. Sitting in that chair is a real bitch.”

  “Yeah,” Matt agreed.

  “And you took out the North Philly Serial Rapist, too, didn’t you?” Wally said, remembering.

  Matt nodded.

  Jesus, Wally thought, as long as I’ve been on the job, I’ve never once had to use my gun. And this kid has twice saved the City the price of a trial.

  “If I give you Boy Scout’s Honor to keep my runaway mouth shut, could I hang around here?” Matt asked.

  “Why would you want to do that?”

  “Washington said you’re a damned good investigator. I’d like to see you work.”

  Washington said that about me? I’ll be damned!

  “Sure. Be my guest.”

  “Where has, quote, the victim, unquote, been up to now?”

  “Probably in the Hahnemann Hospital parking lot being told what not to say by his lawyer. Or deciding if it would be smarter to take the Fifth.”

  “Wouldn’t he be? I had the feeling Jason Washington didn’t believe what he had to say.”

  “Oh, this guy did it,” Milham responded matter-of-factly. “Or had it done. There’s not much question about that. Proving it is not going to be easy. He’s smart, and tough, and he’s got a good lawyer. But I think I’ll nail the sonofabitch.”

  “Is that intuition on your part? Or Jason’s? Or did I miss something?”

  “I don’t know about Washington. He sees things, senses things, that the rest of us miss. But what I saw was first of all a guy who didn’t seem all that upset to be sitting around across a desk from his wife, who had just had her brains blown out. And there’s his business partner on the floor, with bullet holes in him, too. I didn’t hear one word about ‘poor whatsisname.’ Did you?”

  “Marcuzzi, Anthony J.” Matt furnished, shaking his head, no.

  “‘Poor Tony, he was more than a business partner. We were very close friends. I loved him,’” Milham said mockingly.

  Matt chuckled.

  “On the way to Hahnemann Hospital,” Milham went on, “I guess he thought about that: ‘Jesus, I should remember that I’m supposed to be sorry as hell about this!’ He started crying in the wagon. He wasn’t all that bad, either. I almost felt sorry for him.”

  “Do you think he knows that you suspect him?”

  “I don’t know,” Milham replied thoughtfully. “Probably about now, yeah, I think he’s realized we haven’t swallowed his bullshit. There’s always something you forget when you set up something like this. I don’t know what the hell he forgot, not yet, but he knows. I’d say right about now, he’s getting worried.”

  “What I wondered about…” Matt said. “When I got hit, it hurt like hell. He didn’t seem to be hurting much.”

  “I was not surprised when the bullet they took out of him at Hahnemann,” Wally said, and dug in his pocket and came out with a plastic bag, handed it to Matt, then continued, “turned out to be a .32. Or that he had been shot only once. Whoever shot the wife and the partner made damned sure they were dead.”

  Matt examined the bullet and handed the plastic envelope back.

  “And I won’t be surprised, judging by the damage they caused, when we get the bullets in the bodies from the Medical Examiner, if they are not .32s. At least .38s, maybe even .45s, which do more damage. If I were a suspicious person, which is what the City pays me to be, I would wonder about that. How come the survivor has one small wound in the leg, and…”

  “Yeah,” Matt said thoughtfully.

  “I think it’s about time we ask them to come in,” Wally said. “You want to stick around, stick around.”

  Milham got out of the captain’s chair and went to the door and opened it.

  “Would you please come in, Mr. Atchis
on?” he asked politely.

  A moment later, Atchison, his arm around the shoulder of a short, portly, balding man, appeared in the interview-room door.

  “Feeling a little better, Mr. Atchison?” Wally asked.

  “How the fuck do you think I feel?” Atchison said.

  Margolis looked coldly, but without much curiosity, at Matt.

  “Howareya?” he said.

  Matt noticed that despite the hour—it was reasonable to presume that when Milham called him, he had been in bed—Margolis was freshly shaven and his hair carefully arranged in a manner he apparently thought best concealed his deeply receded hairline. His trousers were mussed, however, and did not match his jacket, and his white shirt was not fresh. He was not wearing a tie.

  Margolis led Atchison to the captain’s chair and eased him down into it.

  Matt saw that Atchison was wearing a fresh shirt and other—if not fresh—trousers. There were no bloodstains on the ones he was wearing.

  “I object to having my client have to sit in that goddamned chair like you think he’s guilty of something. He just suffered a gunshot wound, for Christ’s sake!” Margolis said.

  “We really don’t have anything more comfortable, Mr. Atchison,” Wally said. “But I’ll ask Detective Payne to get another chair in here so you can rest your leg on it. Would that be satisfactory?”

  “It wouldn’t hurt. Let’s get this over, for God’s sake,” Atchison said. “My leg is starting to throb.”

  “We’ll get through this as quickly as we can,” Matt heard Wally say as he went in search of another chair. “We appreciate your coming in here, Mr. Atchison.”

  Matt found a straight-back chair and carried it into the interview room. He arranged it in front of the captain’s chair, and with a groan, Atchison lifted his leg up and rested it on it.

  Matt glanced at Atchison. Atchison was examining him carefully, and Matt remembered what Wally had just said about “I think he’s realized we haven’t swallowed his bullshit.”

  When Matt looked at Milham, Milham, with a nod of his head, told him to stand against the wall, behind Atchison in the captain’s chair.

  A slight, gray-haired woman, carrying a stenographer’s notebook in one hand and a metal folding chair in the other, came into the room.

  “This is Mrs. Carnelli,” Milham said. “A police stenographer. She’ll record this interview. Unless, of course, Mr. Atchison, you have an objection to that?”

  Atchison looked at Margolis.

  “Let’s get on with it,” Margolis said.

  “Thank you,” Milham said. He waited to see that Mrs. Carnelli was ready for him, and then spoke, slightly raising his voice. “This is an interview conducted in the Homicide Unit May 20, at 2:30 A.M. of Mr. Gerald N. Atchison, by Detective Wallace J. Milham, badge 626, concerning the willfully caused deaths of Mrs. Alicia Atchison and Mr. Anthony Marcuzzi. Present are Mr. Sidney Margolis, Mr. Atchison’s attorney, and Detective Payne…first name and badge number, Payne?”

  “Matthew M. Payne, badge number 701,” Matt furnished.

  “Mr. Atchison, I am Detective Milham of the Homicide Unit,” Milham began. “We are questioning you concerning the willful deaths of Mrs. Alicia Atchison and Mr. Anthony Marcuzzi.”

  SEVEN

  Mrs. Martha Washington was not surprised, when she woke up, that her husband was not in bed beside her. They had been married for more than a quarter century and she was as accustomed to finding herself alone in bed—even after a romantic interlude—as she was to the witticisms regarding her married name. She didn’t like either worth a damn, but since there was nothing she could do about it, there was no sense in feeling sorry for herself.

  She was surprised, when she looked at her bedside clock, to see how early it was: twenty minutes past seven. She rarely woke that early. And then she had the explanation: the sound of a typewriter clattering in the living room. Her typewriter, an IBM Electric, brought home from the Washington Galleries, Inc., when IBM wouldn’t give her a decent trade-in when she’d bought new Selectrics.“Damn him!” she said.

  She pushed herself out of bed and, with a languorous, unintentionally somewhat erotic movement, pulled her nightgown over her head and tossed it onto the bed. Naked, showing a trim, firm figure that gave her, at forty-seven, nothing whatever to be unhappy about, she walked into the marble-walled bathroom and turned on the faucets in the glass-walled shower.

  When she came out of the shower, she toweled her short hair vigorously in front of the partially steamed-over mirror. She had large dark eyes, a sharp, somewhat hooked nose, and smooth, light brown skin. After Matt had made the crack that she looked like the women in the Egyptian bas-reliefs in the collection of the Philadelphia Art Museum, she had begun to consider that there might actually be something to it, if the blood of an Egyptian queen—or at least an Egyptian courtesan; some of the women in those bas-reliefs looked as though they knew the way to a man’s heart wasn’t really through his stomach—might really flow in her veins.

  She wrapped herself in a silk robe and went through the bedroom into the living room. Her red IBM Electric and a tiny tape recorder were on the plate-glass coffee table before the couch. Her husband, a thin earplug cord dangling from his ear, was sitting—somewhat uncomfortably, she thought—on the edge of the leather couch before it, his face showing deep concentration.

  She went to the ceiling-to-floor windows overlooking the Art Museum, the Schuylkill River, and the Parkway and threw a switch. With a muted hum, electric motors opened the curtains.

  “How many times have I asked you not to put things on the coffee table? Heavy things?”

  “How many times have I told you that I called and asked how much weight this will safely support?” her husband replied, completely unabashed.

  He was nearly dressed to go to work. All he would have to do to be prepared to face the world would be to put on his shoulder holster (on the coffee table beside the IBM Selectric) and his jacket (on the couch).

  “Am I allowed to ask what you’re doing?”

  “Ask? Yes. Am I going to tell you? No.”

  “You can make your own coffee.”

  “I already have, and if you are a good girl, you may have a cup.”

  “You wouldn’t like me if I was a good girl.”

  “That would depend on what you were good at,” he said. “And there are some things, my dear, at which you are very good indeed.”

  The typewriter continued to clatter during the exchange. She was fascinated with his ability to do two things, several things, at once. He was, she realized, listening to whatever was on the tapes, selecting what he wanted to type out, and talking to her, all at the same time.

  “I really hate to see you put the typewriter there,” Martha said.

  “Then don’t look,” he said, and leaving one hand to tap steadily at the keyboard, removed the earplug, took the telephone receiver from its cradle, and dialed a number from memory with the other. “Stay in bed.”

  She went into the kitchen and poured coffee.

  “Good morning, Inspector,” she heard him say. “I hope I didn’t wake you.”

  The Inspector, Martha felt, was probably Peter Wohl. Whatever Wohl replied, it caused her husband to chuckle, which came out a deep rumble.

  “I have something I think you ought to see and hear, and as soon as possible,” she heard her husband say. “What would be most convenient for you?”

  I wonder what that’s all about? What wouldn’t wait until he saw Wohl in his office?

  “This won’t take long, Peter,” Washington said.

  And then Martha intuited what this was all about. She walked to the kitchen door and looked at him.

  “I’ll be outside waiting for you,” Jason said. Then he dropped the telephone in its cradle.

  He looked up at her.

  “Did you tape-record that pathetic woman last night?”

  Jason didn’t reply.

  “You did,” Martha said, shock and disgust i
n her voice. “Jason, she came to you in confidence.”

  “She came to me looking for help. That’s what I’m trying to do.”

  “That’s not only illegal—and you’re an officer of the law—it’s disgusting! She wouldn’t have told you what she did if she knew you were recording it!”

  He looked at her a long moment.

  “I wanted to make sure I really understood what she said,” he said. “Watch!”

  He pushed the Erase button on the machine.

  “No tape, Martha,” he said. “I just wanted to make sure I had it all.”

  He stood up and started to put on his shoulder holster.

  She turned angrily and went back to the stove.

  He appeared in the kitchen door, now fully dressed. She recognized his jacket as a new one, a woolen tweed from Uruguay, of all places.

  “You ever hear about the ancient custom of killing the messenger who bears the bad news?” Jason replied. “Be kind to me, Martha.”

  “Don’t try to be clever. Whatever it is, Peter Wohl won’t blame you.”

  “I’m talking about the Mayor.”

  She met his eyes for a moment, turned away from him, and then back again, this time offering a mug of coffee.

  “Do you have time for this?” she asked. “Or is the drawing and quartering scheduled in the next five minutes?”

  “It’s not a hearty meal, but the condemned man is grateful nonetheless.”

  He took the coffee, took a sip, and then set it down.

  “What’s all this about?” Martha asked. “What that woman said last night? Dirty cops in Narcotics?”

  “We’re working on dirty cops elsewhere in the Department.”

  “I thought Internal Affairs was supposed to police the Police Department.”

  “They are.”

  She considered that a moment.

  “Oh, which explains why you and Peter are involved.”

  He nodded.

  “And now this. I think Mrs. Kellog was telling the truth. It will not make the Mayor’s day.”

  Martha shook her head.

  “Am I going to be honored with your company later today?” Martha asked. “At any time later today? Or maybe sometime this week?”