The Murderers boh-6

by W. E. B Griffin

  “Barbara, this is Denny Coughlin,” Chief Coughlin said into the telephone. “I hate to bother you at home, but I have to speak to Greg.”

  Chief Wohl leaned forward from his white leather armchair, picked up a bottle of Bushmills Irish whiskey, and generously replenished the glass in front of Denny Coughlin.

  “Greg? Denny. Sorry to bother you at home with this, but I didn’t want to take the chance of missing you in the morning. We need you, the Commanding Officer of the Sixth, Sy Meyer, a plainclothesman of his named Palmerston, and a Sixth District uniform named Crater at Peter Wohl’s office at eight tomorrow morning.”

  “What’s going on, Denny?” Inspector Sawyer inquired, loudly enough so that Chief Wohl and his son could hear.

  “There was an incident,” Coughlin began, visibly uncomfortable with having to lie, “involving somebody who had Jerry Carlucci’s unlisted number. He wants a report from me by noon tomorrow. I figured Wohl’s office was the best place to get everybody together as quietly as possible.”

  “An incident? What kind of an incident?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t hear about it myself until I saw the Mayor tonight. I guess we’ll all find out tomorrow.” He paused. “Greg, I probably don’t have to tell you this, but don’t start your own investigation tonight, OK?”

  “Jesus Christ! I haven’t heard a goddamned thing.”

  “Don’t feel bad, neither did I. Eight o’clock, Greg.”

  “I’ll be there,” Inspector Sawyer said.

  “Good night, Greg.”

  “Good night, Denny.”

  Coughlin put the telephone back in its cradle and picked up his drink.

  “Why the hell is my conscience bothering me?” he asked.

  “It shouldn’t,” Chief Wohl said. “Not your conscience.”

  Officer Charles F. Crater, who lived with his wife Joanne and their two children (Angela, three, and Charles, Jr., eighteen months) in a row house at the 6200 block of Crafton Street in the Mayfair section of Philadelphia, was asleep at 7:15 a.m. when Corporal George T. Peterson of the Sixth District telephoned his home and asked to speak to him.

  Mrs. Crater told Corporal Peterson that her husband had worked the four-to-twelve tour and it had been after two when he got home.

  “I know, but something has come up, and I have to talk to him,” Corporal Peterson replied. “It’s important, Mrs. Crater.”

  Two minutes later, sleepy-eyed, dressed in a cotton bathrobe under which it could be seen that he had been sleeping in his underwear, Officer Crater picked up the telephone.

  “What’s up?” he asked.

  “Charley, do you know where Special Operations Headquarters is?”

  “Frankford and Castor?”

  “Right. Be there at eight o’clock. See the Sergeant.”

  “Jesus,” Crater said, looking at his watch. “It’s quarter after seven. What’s going on?”

  “Wait a minute,” Corporal Peterson said. “Charley, the Sergeant says to send a car for you. Be waiting when it gets there.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “Hold it a minute, Charley,” Corporal Peterson said.

  Sergeant Mario Delacroce came on the line.

  “Crater, you didn’t get this from me,” he said. “All I know is that we got a call from Central Division saying to have you at Special Operations at eight this morning. What I hear is that Special Operations has got some operation coming off on your beat, and they want to talk to you.”

  “What kind of an operation?”

  “Charley, Central Division don’t confide in me, they just tell me what they want done. There’ll be a car at your house in fifteen minutes. Be waiting for it. You want a little advice, put on a clean uniform and have a fresh shave.”

  “Right,” Charley Crater said.

  He put the telephone back in its cradle.

  “What was that all about?” Joanne Crater asked, concern in her voice.

  “Ah, those goddamned Special Operations hotshots are running some kind of operation on my beat, and they want to talk to me,” Charley said.

  “Talk to you about what?”

  “Who knows?” Charley said. “They think their shit don’t stink.”

  “I really wish you’d clean up your language, Charley.”

  “Sorry,” he said. “Honey, I got to catch a quick shave and get dressed. Have I got a fresh uniform?”

  “Yeah, there’s one I picked up yesterday.”

  As he went up the stairs to his bedroom, Officer Crater had a very unpleasant thought: Maybe it has something to do with…Nah, if it was something like that, I’d have been told, before I went off last night, to report to Internal Affairs.

  But what the hell does Special Operations want to ask me about?

  Nine months before, a building contractor from McKeesport, Pennsylvania, had telephoned the Eastern Pennsylvania Executive Escort Service, saying the service had been recommended to him by a client of the service. After first ascertaining that the building contractor did indeed know the client, and that he understood the price structure, Mrs. Osadchy dispatched to Room 517 of the Benjamin Franklin Hotel one of her associates, who happened to be an employee of the Philadelphia Savings Fund Society, whose husband had deserted her and their two children, and who worked on an irregular basis for the Eastern Pennsylvania Executive Escort Service to augment her income.

  When she reached the building contractor’s room, it was evident to her that he was very drunk, and when his behavior was unacceptably crude, she attempted to leave. The building contractor thereupon punched her in the face. She screamed, attracting the attention of the occupants of the adjacent room, who called hotel security.

  The on-duty hotel security officer, a former police officer, was contacted as he stood on the sidewalk, chatting with Officer Charles F. Crater, of the Sixth District, who was walking his beat.

  Officer Crater, ignoring the hotel security officer’s argument that he could deal with the situation alone, accompanied him to the building contractor’s room, where they found the building contractor somewhat aghast at the damage he had done to the face of the lady from the Eastern Pennsylvania Executive Escort Service, and the lady herself in the bathroom, trying to stanch the flow of blood from her mouth and nose, so that she could leave the premises without attracting horrified attention to herself.

  The lady did not look like what Officer Crater believed hookers should look like. She was weeping. She told Officer Crater that her name was Marianne Connelly, and that her husband had deserted her and their two children, and that she had to do this to put food in their mouths. He believed her. She told him that if anyone at the Philadelphia Savings Fund Society heard about this, she would be fired, and then she didn’t know what she would do. He believed her.

  The building contractor said that he didn’t know what had come over him, that he was a family man with children, and if this ever got back to McKeesport, he would lose his family and probably his business.

  The hotel security officer suggested to Officer Crater that no real good would come from arresting the building contractor, since there were no witnesses to the assault, and the lady from the Eastern Pennsylvania Executive Escort Service wouldn’t humiliate herself, and set herself up to surely get fired, by going to court to testify against him.

  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!” Offic
er 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 of 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.�
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  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.”