The Murderers boh-6

by W. E. B Griffin

  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 in 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?”

  “I know what you should do. You should go back to bed and try this again. This time, get up with a smile, and with nothing in your heart but compassion for your overworked and underappreciated husband.”

 
“We haven’t had any time together for weeks. And even when you’re here, you’re not. You’re working.”

  “I know. This will be over soon, Martha. And we’ll go to the shore for a couple of days.”

  “I’ve heard that before,” she said, but she went to him and kissed his cheek. “Get that stuff off my table. Put the damned typewriter back where you found it.”

  “Yes, Ma’am,” Jason said. He put the typewriter back where he had found it, in a small closet in the kitchen, and then, carrying the tape recorder, left the apartment, pausing only long enough to pat his wife on her rump.

  “Good morning, Jason,” Wohl said as Washington got into the front seat of Wohl’s car.

  “I’m sorry about this, but I really thought I should get this to you as soon as I could.”

  “What’s up?”

  “About midnight last night, Matt and I walked up on a double homicide on Market Street.”

  “Really? What in the world were you two doing walking on Market Street at midnight?”

  “For a quick answer, the bar at the Rittenhouse Club was closed.”

  “Tell me about the homicide.”

  “Two victims. What looks like large-caliber-bullet wounds to the cranium. One victim was the wife of one of the owners of the Inferno Lounge…”

  “I know where it is.”

  “And the other the partner. It was called in by the other partner, who suffered a small-caliber-bullet wound in what he says was an encounter with the doers, two vaguely described white males.”

  He didn’t call me here to tell me this. Why? Because he thinks that it wasn’t an armed robbery, that the husband was the doer? And the Homicide detective is accepting the husband’s story?

  “We got there right after a Ninth District wagon responded to the call. Chief Lowenstein also came to the scene, and then got me alone. He knows what’s going on.”

  I knew that he wouldn’t have bothered me if it wasn’t important!

  “His finding out was inevitable. How much did you have to tell him?”

  “Not much. He knows the names. Most of them. I told him I couldn’t talk about it. The only time he really leaned on me was to ask how much time he had.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “Quote, not much, unquote.”

  “That’s true, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, sir. Peter, I told him that we didn’t have the conversation, that if we had it, I would have to report it.”

  “Is that what you’re doing?”

  “That’s up to you, Peter. I’ll play it any way you want me to.”

  “I like Matt Lowenstein. There has been absolutely nothing to suggest he’s done anything wrong. What purpose would it serve to go to Carlucci with this?”

  “You heard what the Mayor said, Peter. If anyone came to you or me asking-asking anything — about the investigation, he wanted to know about it.”

  “The call is yours, Jason. Was Chief Lowenstein-what word am I looking for? — pissed that you wouldn’t tell him anything?”

  “No. He seemed to understand he was putting me on a spot.”

  “My gut reaction, repeating the call is yours, is that you didn’t talk to Chief Lowenstein about anything but the double homicide.”

  “OK. That’s it. We didn’t have this conversation, either.”

  “What conversation?” Wohl asked, with exaggerated innocence.

  “I’m not through, I’m afraid,” Washington said.

  “What else?” Wohl asked tiredly as he pulled the door shut again.

  “Chief Lowenstein got rid of Matt, so that he could talk to me, by sending him to the crime scene-the victims were in a downstairs office-with Henry Quaire when Quaire came to the scene. I don’t know what happened between Matt and Milham, but Milham pulled the rule book on him and insisted on getting Matt’s statement that night-God, that’s something else I have to do this morning, get my statement to Homicide-so Matt went to the Roundhouse, and I went home, and when I got there the Widow Kellog was there.”

  “The widow of the undercover Narcotics guy?”

  Washington nodded.

  “Who was found with two bullets in his head in his house. Detective Milham’s close friend’s estranged husband.”

  “She was at your place?” Wohl asked, surprised.

  “Right. And she is convicted that her husband’s death is connected with drugs…”

  “You don’t think Milham had anything to do with it, do you?”

  “No. I don’t think so. But the Widow Kellog thinks it was done by somebody in Narcotics, because they-they being the Five Squad-are all dirty.”

  “The Narcotics Five Squad, according to Dave Pekach, are knights in shining armor, waging the good war against controlled substances. A lot of esprit de corps, which I gather means they think they’re better than other cops, including the other four Narcotics squads. In other words, a bunch of hotshots who do big buys, make raids, take doors, that sort of thing. They’re supposed to be pretty effective. It’s hard to believe that any of them would be dirty, much less kill one of their own.”

  “That’s what the lady is saying.”

  “You believe her?”

  “She said there’s all kinds of money floating around. She said she, she and her husband, bought a house at the shore and paid cash for it.”

  “That could be checked out, it would seem to me, without much trouble. Did she tell Homicide about this? Or anybody else?”

  “No. She thinks everybody’s dirty.”

  “What did you tell her?”

  “I told her I knew a staff inspector I knew was honest, and she should go to him; that I would set it up.”

  “And she doesn’t want to go to him?”

  “No,” Washington said. “Absolutely out of the question.”

  “You believe her?”

  “I think she’s telling the truth. My question is, what do we do with this?”

  “If you take it to Internal Affairs…” Wohl said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Let me read this,” Wohl said, opening the envelope.

  Wohl grunted twice while reading the three sheets of paper the envelope contained, then stuffed them back into the envelope.

  “This has to go to the Mayor,” he said. “As soon as you can get it to him. And then I think you had better have a long talk with Captain Pekach about the Narcotics Five Squad.”

  Washington nodded.

  “Can I tell him I’m doing so at your orders?”

  “Everything you do is at my orders. Dave Pekach knows that. Are you getting paranoid, Jason?”

  “Simply because one is paranoid doesn’t mean that people aren’t really saying terrible things about one behind one’s back,” Washington said sonorously.

  Wohl laughed.

  “No cop likes the guy who asks the wrong questions about other cops. Me included. I especially hate being the guy who asks the questions,” Washington said.

  “I know,” Wohl said sympathetically. “Please don’t tell me there’s more, Jason.”

  “That’s enough for one morning, wouldn’t you say?”

  At five minutes to eight, Sergeant Jason Washington drove into the parking lot of what had been built in 1892 at Frankford and Castor avenues as the Frankford Grammar School, and was now the headquarters of the Special Operations Division of the Philadelphia Police Department.

  He pulled into a parking spot near the front entrance of the building marked with a sign reading INSPECTORS. He regarded this as his personal parking space. While he was sure that there were a number of sergeants and lieutenants annoyed that he parked his car where it should not be, and who almost certainly had complained, officially or unofficially about it, nothing had been said to him.

  There was a certain military-chain-of-command-like structure in the Special Operations Division. Only one’s immediate superior was privileged to point out to one the errors of one’s ways. In Jason Washington’s case, his immediate superior was the head man, Ins
pector Peter Wohl, the Commanding Officer of Special Operations. Peter Wohl knew where he parked his car and had said nothing to him. That was, Jason had decided, permission to park by inference.

  Sergeant Jason Washington and Inspector Peter Wohl had a unique relationship, which went back to the time Detective Wohl had been assigned to Homicide and been placed under the mentorship of Detective Washington. At that time, Jason Washington-who was not burdened, as his wife often said, with crippling modesty-had decided that Wohl possessed not only an intelligence almost equal to his, but also an innate skill to find the anomalies in a given situation-which was really what investigation was all about, finding what didn’t fit-that came astonishingly close to his own extraordinary abilities in that regard.

  Washington had predicted that not only would Detective Wohl remain in Homicide (many detectives assigned to Homicide did not quite cut the mustard and were reassigned to other duties) but he would have a long and distinguished career there.

  Homicide detectives were the elite members of the Detective Bureau. For many people, Jason Washington among them, service as a Homicide detective represented the most challenging and satisfying career in the Police Department, and the thought of going elsewhere was absurd.

  Detective Wohl had not remained in Homicide. He had taken the sergeant’s examination, and then, with astonishing rapidity, became the youngest sergeant ever to serve in the Highway Patrol; a lieutenant; the youngest captain ever; and then the youngest staff inspector ever.

  And then Special Operations had come along.

  It had been formed several years before, it was generally, and essentially correctly, believed as a response to criticism of the Police Department-and by implication, of the Mayor-by the Philadelphia Ledger, one of the city’s four major newspapers.

  Mr. Arthur J. Nelson, Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer of the Daye-Nelson Corporation, which owned the Ledger and twelve other newspapers, had never been an admirer of the Hon. Jerry Carlucci, and both the Ledger and the Daye-Nelson Corporation’s Philadelphia television and radio stations (WGHA-TV, Channel Seven; WGHA-FM 100.2 MHz; and WGHA-AM, 770 KC) had opposed him in the mayoral election.

  The dislike by Mr. Nelson of Mayor Carlucci had been considerably exacerbated when Mr. Nelson’s only son, Jerome Stanley Nelson, had been found murdered-literally butchered-in his luxurious apartment in a renovated Revolutionary War-era building on Society Hill.