What harm would there be, the hotel security officer argued, if they settled this bad situation right here and now? The building contractor would give the lady from the Eastern Pennsylvania Executive Escort Service money, enough not only to pay for her medical bills and the damage to her clothing, but to compensate her for what the sonofabitch had done to her.
The sonofabitch produced a wallet stuffed with large-denomination bills to demonstrate his willingness to go along with this solution to the problem.
“Give it all to her,” Officer Crater ordered.
“I got to keep out a few bucks, for Christ’s sake!”
“Give it all to her, you sonofabitch!” Officer Crater ordered angrily, and watched as the building contractor gave the lady from the Eastern Pennsylvania Executive Escort Service all the money in his wallet. Then he turned to the hotel security officer. “You’ll see that she gets out of here and home all right, right?”
“Absolutely.”
Officer Crater then turned and left the room.
The lady from the Eastern Pennsylvania Executive Escort Service went home and telephoned Mrs. Osadchy to report what had happened.
“How much did he give you, Marianne?”
“Six hundred bucks.”
“You keep it, and I promise you, this will never happen again.”
Mrs. Osadchy also reported the incident to Mr. Cassandro, who considered the situation a moment and then said, “I think, since the cop was so nice, that we ought to show our appreciation. Give the broad a couple of hundred and tell her to give it to the cop.”
“I already told Marianne she could keep the dough she got from the john.”
“Then you give her the money for the cop, Harriet. Consider it an investment. Trust me. Do it.”
Two days later, while Officer Crater was walking his beat, the lady from the Philadelphia Savings Fund Society who moonlighted at the Eastern Pennsylvania Executive Escort Service approached him.
“I want to thank you for the other night,” she said. “I really appreciate it.”
“Aaaaaah,” Officer Crater said, somewhat embarrassed.
“No, I really mean it,” she said. “I really appreciate what you did for me.”
“Forget it,” Officer Crater said.
The lady handed him what looked like a greeting card.
“What’s this?” Officer Crater asked.
“It’s a thank-you card. I got it at Hallmark.”
“You didn’t have to do that,” Officer Crater said. “All I was trying to do was make the best of a bad situation.”
“You’re sweet,” the lady said. “What did you say your name was?”
“Crater.”
“I mean your first name.”
“Charley,” Officer Crater replied.
“Mine’s Marianne,” she said. “Thanks again, Charley.” She kissed Officer Crater on the cheek and walked away.
Officer Crater stuffed the Hallmark thank-you card in his pocket and resumed walking his beat. When he got home, he took another look at it. Inside the card were four crisp fifty-dollar bills.
“Jesus Christ!” Officer Crater said. He went to the bathroom and tore the thank-you card in little pieces and flushed the pieces down the toilet. His wife, he knew, would never understand. The two hundred he folded up and put in the little pocket in his wallet which, before he got married, he had used to hold a condom.
The next time he saw her, he told himself, he would give the money back to her. There was no point in making a big deal of the money; telling his sergeant about it would mean having to tell him what he had done in the first place.
A week after that, before he saw the lady again, he had a couple of drinks too many after work in Dave’s Bar, at Third Street and Fairmount Avenue, with Officer William C. Palmerston, whom he had worked with in the Sixth District before Palmerston had been transferred to Vice.
He told him, out of school, about the thank-you card with the two hundred bucks in it, and that he intended to return it to the hooker the next time he saw her.
“Don’t be a goddamned fool,” Palmerston said. “Keep it.”
“You’re kidding, right?”
“It’s not like she bribed you, is it? All you did was what you thought was the right thing to do in that situation, right? I mean, you didn’t catch her doing something wrong, right? You didn’t say, ‘For two hundred bucks, I’ll let you go,’ did you?”
“No, of course not.”
“You did her a favor, she appreciated it. Keep the money.”
“You’d keep it?”
Officer Palmerston, in reply, extended his hand, palm upward, to Officer Crater.
“Try me.”
“All right, goddamn you, Bill, I will,” Officer Crater said, and took two of the fifties from the condom pocket in his wallet and laid them in Officer Palmerston’s palm. Officer Palmerston stuffed the bills in his shirt pocket, then called for another round.
“I’ll pay,” Officer Palmerston said, and laid one of the fifties on the bar.
The next time, several days later, Officer Crater saw the lady from the Eastern Pennsylvania Executive Escort Service he could not, of course, give her the two hundred back, since he’d given half of it to Officer Palmerston.
She came up to him right after he started walking his beat, where he was standing on the corner of Ninth and Chestnut streets.
“Hi, Charley,” she said. “How are you?”
“Hi,” he replied, thinking again that Marianne didn’t really look like a hooker.
“You ever get a break?” she asked. “For a cup of coffee or something?”
“Sure.”
“I was about to have a cup of coffee. I’ll buy,” the lady said.
He seemed hesitant, and she saw this.
“Charley, all I’m offering is a cup of coffee,” she said. “Come on.”
Why not? Officer Crater reasoned. I mean, what the hell is wrong with drinking a cup of coffee with her?
They had coffee and a couple of doughnuts in a luncheonette. He never could remember afterward what they had talked about until Marianne suddenly looked at her watch and said she had to go. And offered her hand for him to shake, and he took it, and there was something in her hand.
“The lady I work for says thank you, too,” Marianne said, and was gone before he could say anything else, or even look at what she had left in his hand.
When he finally looked, it was a neatly folded, crisp one-hundred-dollar bill.
“Jesus Christ!” he said aloud, before quickly putting the bill in his trousers pocket.
When he got off work that night, he went to Dave’s Bar before going home, in the hope that he would run into Bill Palmerston.
Palmerston was already in Dave’s Bar when he got there, and when he bought Palmerston a drink, he paid for it with the hundred-dollar bill.
Palmerston looked at the bill and then at Crater.
“Where’d you get that?”
“The same place I got the fifties,” Crater said.
“Lucky you.”
Palmerston watched as the bartender made change, and when he had gone, looked at Crater and asked, “Don’t tell me your conscience is bothering you again?”
“A little,” Officer Crater confessed.
Officer Palmerston reached toward the stack of bills on the bar and carefully pulled two twenties and a ten from it.
“Feel better?” he asked.
“Jesus, Bill, I don’t like this.”
“Don’t be a damned fool,” Palmerston said. “It’s not like you’re doing something wrong.” Then Palmerston had a second thought. “Anybody see her give this to you?”
Crater shook his head.
“Then don’t worry about it,” Palmerston said. “Nobody’s getting hurt. But I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. I’m going to ask around.”
“Ask around about what?”
“I wonder why this lady is being so nice to you. It sure isn’t because of the size o
f your cock. If I come up with something, I’ll let you know.”
Two weeks later, as Officer Crater was walking his beat, an unmarked car pulled to the curb beside him.
“Get in the back, Charley,” Officer Palmerston, who was in the front passenger seat beside the driver, said.
Charley got in the backseat.
“This is Lieutenant Meyer,” Palmerston said.
“How are you, Crater?”
“How do you do, sir?”
“I work for the Lieutenant, Charley,” Palmerston said.
“Oh, yeah?”
“Bill tells me you’re an all-right guy, Crater. Not too smart, but the kind of a guy you can trust.”
Palmerston laughed.
“He also told me about your lady friend, the one you helped out, the one who’s been showing her gratitude to you.”
For a fleeting moment, Charley was very afraid that Bill Palmerston had turned him in for taking the hundred dollars from Marianne every week. But that passed. The Lieutenant wouldn’t be talking the way he was if he was going to arrest him or anything like that.
“That’s what I meant about you not being too smart, Charley,” Lieutenant Meyer said.
“Sir?”
“You really don’t know much about your lady friend’s business, do you?”
“No, sir.”
“Well, let me tell you what I found out after Bill came to me. What Bill and I found out. Your friend works for a woman named Harriet Osadchy. Her sheet shows three busts for prostitution here, and she has a sheet in Hazleton—you know where Hazleton is, Charley?”
“Out west someplace, in the coal regions.”
“Right. Anyway, this Osadchy woman has a sheet as long as you are tall in Hazleton, mostly prostitution, some controlled-substance busts, all nol-prossed, even a couple of drunk and disorderlies. But she’s smart. You got to give her that, right, Bill?”
“Yes, sir,” Officer Palmerston said.
“We didn’t even have a line on this Eastern Pennsylvania Executive Escort Service until you brought it to Bill’s attention.”
“The what?”
“The Eastern Pennsylvania Executive Escort Service. That’s what she calls her operation.”
“Oh.”
“But like I was saying, now we have a line on her. She’s got maybe twenty, twenty-five, maybe more hookers working for her. It’s a high-class operation. The minimum price is a hundred dollars. That’s for one hour.”
“Damn!”
“Bill had a talk with your friend Marianne. She said the split is sixty-forty. For her forty percent, Harriet makes the appointments for the girls, and takes care of what has to be taken care of.”
“Excuse me?”
“Her girls know that when they knock on some hotel door, they’re not going to find some weirdo inside, or a cop, and that they’ll get their money. They even take one of those credit card machines with them, in case—and you’d be surprised how often this happens—the john can put the girl on his expense account as secretarial services, or a rental car, or something like that.”
“I didn’t know they could use credit cards,” Officer Crater confessed.
“There’s a lot you don’t know,” Lieutenant Meyer said. “You got any idea how much money is involved here?”
“Not really. You said a hundred an hour.”
“Right. Sometimes they stay more than an hour. Sometimes the john wants something more than a straight fuck. That costs more, of course. But the low side would be that a girl would work three johns a night. Let’s say Harriet has twenty girls working. That’s three times a hundred bucks times twenty girls.”
“Six thousand dollars,” Officer Crater said wonderingly.
“Right. Times seven nights a week. That’s forty-two thousand gross. Harriet’s share of that would come to almost seventeen thousand a week. It’s a money machine. Now out of that, she has to pay her expenses. Three, four telephones. The rent on a little apartment she has on Cherry Street where the phones are. She has a couple of lawyers on retainer, and a couple of doctors who make sure the girls are clean, and she takes care of the people in the hotels who could make trouble for her. And then I’m sure she has some arrangement with the mob. Usually that’s ten percent.”
“With the mob? What for?”
“To be left alone. Years ago, the mob ran whorehouses. The Chinese still have a couple running. We keep shutting them down and they keep opening them up, but the mob found out that whorehouses are really more trouble than they’re worth, so they went out of that business. Why the hell not, if they can take, like I said, ten percent of Harriet’s forty-two thousand a week for doing nothing more than putting the word out on the street that Harriet is a friend of theirs? A freelance hooker can almost expect to get robbed, but even a really dumb sleazeball thug knows better than to mess with anyone who is a friend of the mob.”
Officer Crater grunted.
“OK. So let’s talk about where we fit in here,” Meyer said. “The first thing you have to understand is that prostitution has been around a long time—they don’t call it ‘the oldest profession’ for nothing—and there’s absolutely no way to stop it. All we can do is control it. What the citizens don’t want is hookers approaching people on the street, or in a bar. The citizens don’t want disease. They don’t want to see young girls—or, for that matter, young boys—involved. For the obvious reasons. And I think we do a pretty job of giving the citizens what they want.
“What the citizens also want, and I don’t think most people understand this, or if they do, don’t want to admit it, is somebody like Harriet Osadchy. The johns pay their money, they get what they want, they don’t get a disease, they don’t get robbed, nobody gets hurt, and nobody finds out that they’re not getting what they should be getting at home.”
“Yeah,” Officer Crater said. “I see what you mean.”
“And the Harriet Osadchys of this world don’t give the police any trouble, either. They do their thing, and they do it clean, and we have the time to do what we’re hired to do, protect the people. We close down the whorehouses, we keep the hookers from working the streets and the bars, we keep the people from getting a disease or robbed, or black-mailed, all those things.”
“I see what you mean.”
“So now we get back to you, and your friend Marianne. You did the right thing by her and the guy who beat her up. I mean, what good would it have done if you had run him in? Your friend Marianne would not have testified against him anyway, and he made it right by her by giving her a lot of money, right?”
“I think she would have really lost her job if the PSFS heard about that,” Officer Crater said.
“Sure she would have,” Lieutenant Meyer agreed. “And her john would have gotten in trouble with his wife, a lot of people would have been hurt, and you solved the problem all around. I would have done exactly the same thing myself.”
“I thought it was the right thing to do,” Officer Crater said.
“OK. So what happened next? Marianne told Harriet what happened, and Harriet knew that it would have been a real pain in the ass, really hurt her business, if you had gone strictly by the book and hauled either one of them in. So she was grateful, right, and she told Marianne to slip you a couple of hundred bucks right off, and a hundred a week regular after that. A little two-hundred-dollar present to say thank you for not running Marianne in, and a regular little hundred-dollar-a-week present just to remind you that being a good guy, doing what’s right, sometimes gets you a little extra money. Nothing wrong with that, right?”
“Not the way you put it,” Officer Crater said. “It bothered—”
“Wrong, you stupid shit!” Lieutenant Meyer snarled.
“Excuse me?”
“I explained to you, Crater, that Harriet Osadchy is personally pocketing at least seventeen thousand, seventeen thousand tax-free, by the way, each and every week, and you really pull her fucking chestnuts out of the fire, really save her ass, really sav
e her big bucks, and she throws a lousy two hundred bucks at you? And figures she’s buying you for a hundred a week? That’s fucking insulting, Crater, can’t you see that?”
Officer Crater did not reply.
“She’s paying, as her cost of doing business, and happy to do it, some lawyer maybe a thousand a week, and some doctor another thousand, and slipping the mob probably ten percent of however the fuck much she takes in, and she slips you a lousy, what, a total of maybe five hundred, and you’re not insulted?”
“I guess I never really thought about it,” Officer Crater confessed.
“Right. You’re goddamned right you didn’t think about it,” Meyer said.
“I don’t know what you want me to say, Lieutenant,” Crater said.
“You don’t say anything, that’s what I want you to say. We’ll all be better off if you never open your mouth again. I will tell you what’s going to happen, Crater. Your friend Marianne, the next time you see her, is going to give you another envelope. This one will have a thousand dollars in it. You will take two hundred for your trouble and give the rest to Bill. And every week the same goddamned thing. Am I getting through to you?”
“What do I have to do?”
“I already told you. Keep your mouth shut. That’s all. And remember, if you’re as stupid as I’m beginning to think you are, that if you start thinking about maybe going to Internal Affairs or something, it’d be your word against mine and Bill’s. Not only would we deny this conversation ever took place, but Internal Affairs would have your ass for not coming to them the first time your friend Marianne gave you money.”
Lieutenant Meyer took his arm off the back of the seat and faced forward and turned the ignition.
“Tell whatsisname he’d better get out of the car now, Bill,” he said. “Unless he wants to go with us.”
Staff Inspector Mike Weisbach turned off Frankford Avenue onto Castor and then drove into the parking lot of the Special Operations Division. He saw a parking slot against the wall of the turn-of-the-century school building marked RESERVED FOR INSPECTORS and steered his unmarked Plymouth into it.I usually go on the job looking forward to what the day will bring, he thought as he got out of the car, but today is different; today, I suspect, I am not going to like at all what the day will bring, and I don’t mean because I’m not used to getting up before seven o’clock to go to work.
The Murderers Page 20