Badge of Honour 06 - The Murderers

by W. E. B Griffin

Over breakfast, Matt told him.

  “This Atchison guy is very good,” he concluded. “Smart and tough. And his lawyer is good, too. Just when Milham was starting to get him, the lawyer—”

  “Who’s his lawyer?”

  “A guy named Sidney Margolis.”

  Tiny snorted. “I know who he is. A real sleazeball. My father told me he’s been reported to the bar association so often he’s got his own filing cabinet.”

  “He’s smart. He saw Milham was getting to Atchison, and said, ‘Interview over. My client is in great pain.’”

  “Was he?”

  “After Margolis told him he was, he was. And that was it.”

  “I wish I could have seen the interview,” Tiny said.

  “Milham is very good.”

  “You heard about his lady friend’s husband?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Do you think he had anything to do with it?”

  “No,” Matt said immediately.

  “Neither does my father,” Tiny said. “He said it’s two-to-one it’s something to do with Narcotics. Heading the long list of things I was absolutely forbidden to do when I came on the job was accept an assignment to Narcotics. He said those guys roll around on the pigsty floor so much, and there’s so much money floating around that he’s not surprised how many of them are dirty, but how many are straight.”

  “Charley and the Little Spic were undercover narcs, and so was Captain Pekach. They’re straight.”

  “The exceptions that prove the rule,” Tiny said. “So what do we do today?”

  “I don’t know what you’re going to do, but I’m going out to Chestnut Hill in half an hour. Jesus, I hate to face that! The funeral is this afternoon.”

  “You mean, we’re going to Chestnut Hill. I have heard my master’s voice, and it said I’m not to let you out of my sight.”

  “Family and intimate friends only,” Matt said. “I think it will be my family, the Detweilers, and the Nesbitts. And that’s it.”

  “So what do I tell Wohl, since the riffraff aren’t welcome?”

  “I’ll call him.”

  “Matt, I don’t mind feeling unwelcome. With a suntan like mine, you get pretty used to it. If I can help some way…”

  “You’d make a lousy situation worse, Tiny, but thanks,” Matt said. He got up from the table and started toward the telephone, then stopped. He touched Tiny’s shoulder, and Tiny looked up at him. “I appreciate that, pal,” Matt said.

  “Somehow saying I’m sorry about what happened doesn’t seem to be enough.”

  Matt picked up the telephone and dialed Wohl’s home number. When there was no answer, he called the headquarters of the Special Operations Division to see if, as he often did, Wohl had come to work early. When Wohl’s private line was not answered by the fifth ring, the call was automatically transferred to the line of the tour lieutenant.

  “Special Operations, Lieutenant Suffern.”

  “Matt Payne, sir. Have you got a location on the Inspector?”

  “Yeah. I got a number. Just a minute, Matt,” Lieutenant Suffern said, and then his voice changed: “Matt, I was sorry to hear…”

  “Thank you.”

  “If there’s anything I can do?”

  “I can’t think of a thing, but thank you. I appreciate the thought.”

  “Here it is,” Suffern said, “One-thirty A.M. this morning until further notice.” He then read Matt the telephone number at which Inspector Wohl could be reached.

  A look of mingled amusement and annoyance flickered across Matt’s face. The number he had been given was familiar to him. It was the one number in Greater Philadelphia where calling Inspector Wohl at this time would be a very bad idea indeed. It was that of the apartment of his sister, Amelia Payne, M.D., Ph.D.

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “When you feel up to it, Matt, we’ll go hoist a couple.”

  “Thank you,” Matt said. “I’d like to.”

  Matt hung up and turned to Tiny, a smile crossing his face at his own wit.

  “Wohl can’t be reached right now,” he said. “He’s at the doctor’s.”

  “So what do we do?”

  “When all else fails, tell the truth,” Matt said. “You go to the schoolhouse and when Wohl shows up you tell him I said ‘Thank you, but no thank you, I don’t want any company.’”

  “I don’t know, Matt,” Tiny said dubiously. “Wohl wasn’t making a suggestion. He told me to sit on you.”

  “Oh, shit,” Matt said, and dialed Amy’s number.

  “Dr. Payne is not available at this time,” her answering machine reported. “If you will leave your name and number, she will return your call as soon as possible. Please wait for the tone. Thank you.”

  “Amy, I know you’re there. I need to talk to Inspector Wohl.”

  A moment later, Wohl himself came on the line.

  “What is it, Matt?”

  “Tiny Lewis is here. Having him go with me to the Detweilers’ is not such a good idea. The funeral is family and intimate friends only.”

  “So your sister has been telling me,” Wohl said. “He’s there? Put him on the line.”

  Matt held the phone up, and Tiny rose massively from the table and took it.

  “Yes, sir?” he said.

  Tiny’s was the only side of the conversation Matt could hear, and he was curious when Tiny chuckled, a deep rumble, and said, “I would, too. That’d be something to see.”

  When he hung up, Matt asked, “What would be ‘something to see’?”

  “The Mayor’s face when somebody tells him he can’t get in. Wohl said he knows the Mayor’s going to the funeral.”

  “This one he may not get to go to,” Matt said. “My father said nobody’s been invited, period.”

  “Wohl also said I was to drive you out there, if you wanted, and then to keep myself available. I was going to do that anyway.”

  “You can take me over to the Parkway as soon as I get dressed. I’m going to drive my sister out there, in her car.”

  “Yeah, sure. But listen to what I said. You need me, you know where to find me.”

  Inspector Peter Wohl was examining the hole gouged in his cheek by Amy Payne’s dull razor—and from which an astonishing flow of blood was now escaping—when Amy appeared in the bathroom door.She was in her underwear. It was white, and what there was of it was mostly lace. He found the sight very appealing, and wondered if that was her everyday underwear, or whether she had worn it for him.

  That pleasant notion was immediately shattered by her tone of voice and the look on her face.

  “It’s for you,” she said. “Again. Does everyone in Philadelphia know you’re here?”

  “Sorry,” he said, and quickly tore off a square of toilet paper, pressed it to the wound, and went into her bedroom. He sat on the bed and grabbed the telephone.

  “Inspector Wohl.”

  “I’m sorry to trouble you, sir,” Jason Washington’s deep, mellifluous voice said.

  Washington’s the soul of discretion. When he got this number from the tour lieutenant—and with that memory of his, he probably knows whose number it is—unless it was important, he would have waited until I went to work.

  “No trouble. I’m just sitting here quietly bleeding to death. Good morning, Jason. What’s up?”

  “I just had an interesting call. An informant who has been reliable with what he’s given me—which hasn’t been much—in the past. He said the Inferno murders were a mob contract.”

  “Interesting. Did he give you a name?”

  “Frankie Foley.”

  “Never heard of him.”

  Amy sat on the bed beside him and put her hand on his cheek. It was a gesture of affection, but only by implication. She had a cotton swab dipped in some kind of antiseptic.

  She pulled the toilet paper bandage off and professionally swabbed his gouge.

  “Neither have I. And neither has Organized Crime or Intelligence.”

  “E
ven more interesting.”

  “What do you want me to do with it?”

  It was a moment before Wohl replied.

  “Give it to Homicide. And then see if you can make a connection to Cassandro.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Wohl had an unpleasant thought. There was a strong possibility that he would have to remind Washington that a new chain of command was in effect. Washington was used to reporting directly to him. He might not like having to go through Weisbach.

  “What did Weisbach say when you told him?”

  “He said he thought we better give it to Homicide, but to ask you first.”

  Thank God! Personnel conflict avoided.

  “Write this down, Jason. The true sign of another man’s intelligence is the degree to which he agrees with you.”

  Washington laughed.

  “I’ll be in touch,” he said, and hung up.

  “Who was that?” Amy asked.

  “Jason Washington.”

  “I thought so. How did he know you were here? What did you do, put an ad in the Bulletin? Who else knows where you spent the night?”

  “There is a very short list of people who have to know where I am all the time. The tour lieutenant knows where to find me. Since only Matt and Jason called, to answer your question two people have reason to suspect I spent the night here.”

  “God!”

  “There is a solution to the problem,” Peter said. “I could make an honest woman of you.”

  “Surely you jest,” she said after a moment’s pause.

  “I don’t know if I am or not,” Peter said. “You better not consider that a firm offer.”

  She stood up. “Now I’m sorry I fixed your face,” she said, and walked toward the bathroom.

  “Nice ass,” he called after her.

  She gave him the finger without turning and went into the bathroom, closing the door.

  Jesus, where did that “make an honest woman of you” crack come from?

  He stood up and started looking for his clothing.

  Lieutenant Foster H. Lewis, Sr., of the Ninth District, a very tall, well-muscled man, was sitting in a wicker armchair on the enclosed porch of his home reading the Philadelphia Bulletin when Officer Foster H. Lewis, Jr., of Special Operations, pushed the door open and walked in.Tiny, who knew his father was working the midnight-out tour, was surprised to see him. It was his father’s custom, when he came off the midnight-out tour, to take a shower and go to bed and get his eight hours’ sleep. And here he was, in an obviously fresh white shirt, immaculately shaven, looking as if he was about to go on duty.

  “I thought you were working the midnight-out,” Tiny said.

  “Good morning, son. How are you? I am fine, thank you for asking,” Lieutenant Lewis said dryly.

  “Sorry.”

  “I was supposed to fill in for Lieutenant Prater, who was ill,” Lieutenant Lewis said. “When I got to the office, he had experienced a miraculous recovery. And I thought you were working days.”

  “I’m working,” Tiny said, and gestured toward the car parked in the drive.

  “How can you be working and here?”

  “My orders, Lieutenant, sir, are to stay close to the radio, in case I’m needed.”

  “You needn’t be sarcastic, Foster, it was a reasonable question.”

  “Inspector Wohl told me to give Matt Payne some company,” Tiny said. “I wasn’t needed.”

  “What a tragedy!” Lieutenant Lewis said.

  “I thought I’d come see Mom,” Tiny said.

  “Since I would not be here, you mean?”

  “Pop, every time I see you, you jump all over me.”

  “I wasn’t aware of that.”

  “Just now,” Tiny said. “The implication that I’m screwing off being here.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “That’s what you meant.”

  “You are driving a departmental vehicle, presumably on duty, visiting your family.”

  “I’m doing what I’m ordered to do. Pop, I’m a pretty good cop! Inspector Wohl expects me to be available if he needs me. I don’t think he expected me to just sit in the car and wait for the radio to go off.”

  “You believe that, don’t you?”

  “Believe what?”

  “That you’re a pretty good cop.”

  “I’m not as good a cop as you are, but yeah, I’m a pretty good cop.”

  “I’m sure you will take offense when I say this, but you don’t know what being a police officer really means.”

  “You mean, I never worked in a district?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Come on, Pop. If Inspector Wohl thought I would learn anything riding around in a car, walking a beat, that’s what he’d have me doing.”

  “That sort of thing is beneath you, right?”

  “I think we better stop this before either one of us says something we’ll be sorry for,” Tiny said.

  Lieutenant Lewis looked at his son for a moment before replying.

  “I’m not saying that what you’re doing is not important, or that you don’t do it well.”

  “It is important—we’re going to put a dirty captain and a dirty lieutenant away—and I helped. Wohl and Washington wouldn’t have let me get close to that job if they didn’t think I could handle it.”

  “All I’m saying, Foster,” Lieutenant Lewis said, “is that I am concerned that you have no experience as a police officer on the street. You don’t even have any friends who are common, ordinary policemen, do you?”

  “I guess not,” Tiny said.

  “Would you indulge me if I asked you to do something?”

  “Within reason.”

  It came out more sarcastically, more disrespectfully than Tiny intended, and there was frost for a moment in his father’s eyes. But then apparently he decided to let it pass.

  “Did I understand you to say that, so long as you keep yourself available, you’re free to move about the city?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Go inside, say hello to your mother, tell her you’re coming to dinner tonight, and that we’re going for a ride. Police business.”

  “A ride? What police business?”

  “We’re going to the Thirty-ninth District. I have a friend there, a common ordinary policeman, who I want you to meet. You might even learn something from him.”

  Police Officer Woodrow Wilson Bailey, Sr., badge number 2554 of the Thirty-ninth District, who had twenty-four years on the job, twenty-two of it in the Thirty-ninth District, wanted only one thing from the Philadelphia Police Department. He wanted to make it to retirement, tell them where to mail his retirement checks, and go back home to Hartsville, South Carolina.Having done that, it was his devout hope that he would never have to put on a uniform, look at a gun, or see Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, ever again so long as the Good Lord saw fit to let him live.

  He thought of it as going back to Hartsville, although in fact he could never remember living there. He had been brought to Philadelphia from Hartsville at the age of three by his father, who had decided that as bad as things might be up north, with the depression and all, they couldn’t be any worse than being a sharecropper with a wife and child to feed on a hardscrabble farm in South Carolina.

  The first memory of a home that Officer Bailey had was of an attic room in a row house on Sydenham in North Philadelphia. There was a table in it, and two beds, one for Mamma Dear and Daddy, and one for him, and then when Charles David came along, for him and Charles David. There was an electric hot plate, and a galvanized bucket for water. The bathroom was one floor down, and shared with the three families who occupied the five rooms on the second floor.

  The room was provided to them by the charity of the Third Abyssinian Baptist Church, to which Officer Bailey and his family still belonged.

  He had vague memories of Daddy leaving the apartment in the morning to seek work as a laborer, and much more clear memories of Daddy leaving the room (and
later the two-room apartment on the second floor of another row house) carrying his shoe-shine box to walk downtown to station himself at the Market Street Station of the Pennsylvania Railroad to shine the shoes of the rich white folks who rode the train in from places with funny-sounding names like Bala Cynwyd and Glen Riddle.

  And he had memories of Hartsville from those times, too. Of going to see Granny Bailey and Granny Smythe back in Hartsville. Mamma Dear and Daddy had believed with the other members of the Third Abyssinian Baptist Church that if it was in the Bible, that was all there was to it, you did what it said, and you spent eternity with the Good Lord, or you didn’t, and you spent eternity in the fiery fires of Hell. It said in the Good Book that you were supposed to Honor Thy Mother and Thy Father, and that meant you went to see your mother and your father at least at Christmas, and more often if you could afford it, and affording it meant saving up to buy the bus tickets, and for a few little presents to take with you, even if that meant you didn’t get to drink Coca-Cola or go to the movies.

  Bailey had liked Hartsville even then, even if he now recognized that Granny Smythe’s “farm” was nothing more than a weathered shack without inside plumbing that sat on three acres she had been given in the will of old Mr. Smythe—probably because it wasn’t worth the powder to blow it away—whose father had bought Granny Smythe’s father at a slave auction in Beaufort.

  There were chickens on Granny Smythe’s farm, and a couple of dogs, and almost always a couple of pigs, and the whole place had seemed a much nicer place to live than in a row house in North Philadelphia.

  He had asked several times why they had to live in Philadelphia, and Daddy had told him that he didn’t expect him to understand, but that Philadelphia was a place where you could better yourself, get a good education, and make something of yourself.

  Bailey remembered being dropped off with Charles David at the Third Abyssinian Baptist Church by Mamma Dear, wearing a crisp white maid’s uniform, so he and Charles David could be cared for, and she could work and make some money and realize her and Daddy’s dream of buying a house that would be theirs, instead of paying rent.

  He remembered the beating Daddy had given him with a leather belt when he was in the fifth grade at the Dunbar Elementary School and the teacher had come by the house they were then renting and reported that he had not only been cutting school, but giving her talk-back in class, and running around with the wrong crowd.