Men In Blue

by W. E. B Griffin

  “You think he’s the doer?”

  “That’s where I am now,” Harris said. “The rent-a-cops told me that he spent the night here a lot; drove Nelson’s car—cars—and probably had a key. There are no signs of forcible entry. And there’s a burglar alarm. One of Nelson’s cars is missing. A Jaguar, by the way, Inspector,” Harris said, a naughty look in his eyes. “I put the Jag in NCIC.”

  The FBI’s National Crime Information Center operated a massive computer listing details of crimes nationwide. If the Jaguar was found somewhere, or even stopped for a traffic violation, the information that it was connected with a crime in Philadelphia would be immediately available to the police officers involved.

  “Screw you, Tony,” Wohl said, and laughed.

  “A new one,” Harris went on. “An ‘XJ6’?”

  “Four-door sedan,” Wohl furnished. “A work of art. Twenty-five, thirty thousand dollars.”

  Harris’s face registered surprise at the price.

  “Police radio is broadcasting the description every half hour,” he went on. “I also ordered a subsector search. Nelson’s other car is a Ford Fairlane convertible. That’s in the garage.”

  “Lover’s quarrel?” Wohl asked.

  Harris held both palms upward in front of him, and made a gesture, like a scale in balance.

  “Maybe,” he said. “That would explain what he did to the victim. I think we have the weapons. They used one of those Chinese knives, you know, looks like a cleaver, but sharp as a razor?”

  Wohl nodded.

  “And another knife, a regular one, a butcher knife with a bone handle, which is probably what he used to stab him.”

  “You said ‘maybe,’ Tony,” Wohl said.

  “I’m just guessing, Inspector,” Harris said.

  “Go ahead,” Wohl said.

  “There was a lot of stuff stolen, or I think so. There’s no jewelry to speak of in the apartment. . . some ordinary cuff links, tie clasps, but nothing worth any money. The victim wore rings, they’re gone, we know that. No money in the wallet, or anywhere else that anybody could find. He probably had a watch, or watches, and there’s none in there. And there was marks on the bedside table, probably a portable TV, that’s gone.”

  “Leading up to what?”

  “When two homosexuals get into something like this, they usually don’t steal anything, too. I mean, not the boyfriend. They work off the anger and run. So maybe it wasn’t the boyfriend.”

  “Or the boyfriend might be a cold-blooded sonofa-bitch,” Wohl said.

  “Yeah,” Harris said, and made the balancing gestures again. “We got people looking for Mr. St. Maury,” he went on. “And for the Jaguar. We’re trying to find if he had any jewelry that was good enough to be insured, which would give us a description. Captain Quaire said you were going to see his father?”

  “I’m going there as soon as I leave here,” Wohl said. “I’ll ask.”

  “I’d like to talk to him, too,” Harris said.

  “I think I’d better see him alone,” Wohl thought out loud. “I’ll tell him you’ll want to see him. Maybe he can come up with some kind of a list of jewelry, expensive stuff in the apartment.”

  “You’ll get the list?”

  “No. I’ll ask him to get it for you. This is your job, Tony. I’m not going to stick my nose in where it doesn’t belong.”

  Harris nodded.

  “But I would like to look around the apartment,” Wohl said. “So when I see him, I’ll know what I’m talking about.”

  “Sure,” Harris said. He started toward the door. “I’m really sorry, Inspector, about sitting on your car.”

  “Forget it,” Wohl said.

  ELEVEN

  The building housing the Philadelphia Ledger and the studios of WGHA-TV and WGHA-FM was on Market Street, near the Thirtieth Street Station, and built, Wohl recalled as he drove up to it, about the same time. It wasn’t quite the marble Greek palace the Thirtieth Street Station was, but it was a large and imposing building.

  He had been in it once before, as a freshman at St. Joseph’s Prep, on a field trip. As he walked up to the entrance, he remembered that very clearly, a busload of boisterous boys, horsing around, getting whacked with a finger behind the ear by the priests when their decorum didn’t meet the standards of Young Catholic Gentlemen.

  There was a rent-a-cop standing by the revolving door, a receptionist behind a marble counter in the marble-floored lobby, and two more rent-a-cops standing behind her.

  Wohl gave her his business card. It carried the seal of the City of Philadelphia in the upper left-hand corner, the legend POLICE DEPARTMENT CITY OF PHILADELPHIA in the lower left, and in the center his name, and below that, in slightly smaller letters, STAFF INSPECTOR. In the lower right-hand corner, it said INTERNAL SECURITY DIVISION FRANKLIN SQUARE and listed two telephone numbers.

  It was an impressive card, and usually opened doors to wherever he wanted to go very quickly.

  It made absolutely no impression on the receptionist in the Ledger Building.

  “Do you have an appointment with Mr. Nelson, sir?” she asked, with massive condescension.

  “I believe Mr. Nelson expects me,” Wohl said.

  She smiled thinly at him and dialed a number.

  “There’s a Mr. Wohl at Reception who says Mr. Nelson expects him.”

  There was a pause, then a reply, and she hung up the telephone.

  “I’m sorry, sir, but you don’t seem to be on Mr. Nelson’s appointment schedule,” the receptionist said. “He’s a very busy man, as I’m sure—”

  “Call whoever that was back and tell her Inspector Wohl, of the police department,” Peter Wohl interrupted her.

  She thought that over a moment, and finally shrugged and dialed the phone again.

  This time, there was a longer pause before she hung up. She took a clipboard from a drawer, and a plastic-coated “Visitor” badge.

  “Sign on the first blank line, please,” she said, and turned to one of the rent-a-cops. “Take this gentleman to the tenth floor, please.”

  There was another entrance foyer when the elevator door was opened, behind a massive mahogany desk, and for a moment, Wohl thought he was going to have to go through the whole routine again, but a door opened, and a well-dressed, slim, gray-haired woman came through it and smiled at him.

  “I’m Mr. Nelson’s secretary, Inspector,” she said. “Will you come this way, please?”

  The rent-a-cop slipped into a chair beside the elevator door.

  “I’m sorry about that downstairs,” the woman said, smiling at him over her shoulder. “I think maybe you should have told her you were from the police.”

  “No problem,” Peter said. It would accomplish nothing to tell her he’d given her his card with that information all over it.

  Arthur J. Nelson’s outer office, his secretary’s office, was furnished with gleaming antiques, a Persian carpet, an oil portrait of President Theodore Roosevelt, and a startlingly lifelike stuffed carcass of a tiger, very skillfully mounted, so that, snarling, it appeared ready to pounce.

  “He’ll be with you just as soon as he can,” his secretary said. “May I offer you a cup of coffee?”

  “Thank you, no,” Peter said, and then his mouth ran away with him. “I like your pussycat.”

  “Mr. Nelson took that when he was just out of college,” she said, and pointed to a framed photograph on the wall. Wohl went and looked at it. It was of a young man, in sweat-soaked khakis, cradling his rifle in his arm, and resting his foot on a dead tiger, presumably the one now stuffed and mounted.

  “Bengal,” the secretary said. “That’s a Bengal tiger.”

  “Very impressive,” Wohl said.

  He examined the tiger, idly curious about how they actually mounted and stuffed something like this.

  What’s inside? A wooden frame? A wire one? A plaster casting? Is that red tongue the real thing, preserved somehow? Or what?

  Then he walked acr
oss the room and looked through the curtained windows. He could see the roof of Thirtieth Street Station, its classic Greek lines from that angle diluted somewhat by air-conditioning machinery and a surprising forest of radio antennae. He could see the Schuylkill River, with the expressway on this side and the boat houses on the far bank.

  The left of the paneled double doors to Arthur J. Nelson’s office opened, and four men filed out. They all seemed determined to smile, Wohl thought idly, and then he thought they had probably just had their asses eaten out.

  A handsome man wearing a blue blazer and gray trousers appeared in the door. He was much older, of course, than the young man in the tiger photograph, and heavier, and there was now a perfectly trimmed, snow-white mustache on his lip, but Wohl had no doubt that it was Arthur J. Nelson.

  Formidable, Wohl thought.

  Arthur J. Nelson studied Wohl for a moment, carefully.

  “Sorry to keep you waiting, Inspector,” he said. “Won’t you please come in?”

  He waited at the door for Wohl and put out his hand. It was firm.

  “Thank you for seeing me, Mr. Nelson,” Wohl said. “May I offer my condolences?”

  “Yes, you can, and that’s very kind of you,” Nelson said, as he led Wohl into his office. “But frankly, what I would prefer is a report that you found proof positive who the animal was who killed my son, and that he resisted arrest and is no longer among the living.”

  Wohl was taken momentarily aback.

  What the hell. Any father would feel that way. This man is accustomed to saying exactly what he’s thinking.

  “I’m about to have a drink,” Nelson said. “Will you join me? Or is that against the rules?”

  “I’d like a drink,” Peter said. “Thank you.”

  “I drink single-malt scotch with a touch of water,” Nelson said. “But there is, of course, anything else.”

  “That would be fine, sir,” Peter said.

  Nelson went to a bar set into the bookcases lining one wall of his office. Peter looked around the room. A second wall was glass, offering the same view of the Schuylkill he had seen outside. The other walls were covered with mounted animal heads and photographs of Arthur J. Nelson with various distinguished and/or famous people, including the sitting president of the United States. There was one of Nelson with the governor of Pennsylvania, but not, Peter noticed, one of His Honor the Mayor Carlucci.

  Nelson crossed the room to where Peter stood and handed him a squat, octagonal crystal glass. There was no ice.

  “Some people don’t like it,” Nelson said. “Take a sip. If you don’t like it, say so.”

  Wohl sipped. It was heavy, but pleasant.

  “Very nice,” he said. “I like it. Thank you.”

  “I was shooting stag in Scotland, what, ten years ago. The gillie drank it. I asked him, and he told me about it. Now I have them ship it to me. All the scotch you get here, you know, is a blend.”

  “It’s nice,” Peter said.

  “Here’s to vigilante justice, Inspector,” Nelson said.

  “I’m not sure I can drink to that, sir,” Peter said.

  “You can’t, but I can,” Nelson said. “I didn’t mean to put you on a spot.”

  “If I wasn’t here officially,” Peter said, “maybe I would.”

  “If you had lost your only son, Inspector, like I lost mine, you certainly would. When something like this happens, terms like ‘justice’ and ‘due process’ seem abstract. What you want is vengeance.”

  “I was about to say I know how you feel,” Peter said. “But of course, I don’t. I can’t. All I can say is that we’ll do everything humanly possible to find whoever took your son’s life.”

  “If I ask a straight question, will I get a straight answer?”

  “I’ll try, sir.”

  “How do you cops handle it psychologically when you do catch somebody you know is guilty of doing something horrible, obscene, unhuman like this, only to see him walk out of a courtroom a free man because of some minor point of law, or some bleeding heart on the bench?”

  “The whole thing is a system, sir,” Peter said, after a moment. “The police, catching the doer, the perpetrator, are only part of the system. We do the best we can. It’s not our fault when another part of the system fails to do what it should.”

  “I have every confidence that you.’11 find whoever it was who hacked my son to death,” Nelson said. “And then we both know what will happen. It will, after a long while, get into a courtroom, where some asshole of a lawyer will try every trick in the business to get him off. And if he doesn’t, if the jury finds him guilty, and the judge has the balls to sentence him to the electric chair, he’ll appeal, for ten years or so, and the odds are some yellow-livered sonofabitch of a governor will commute his sentence to life. I’m sure you know what it costs to keep a man in jail. About twice what it costs to send a kid to an Ivy League college. The taxpayers will provide this animal with three meals a day, and a warm place to sleep for the rest of his life.”

  Wohl didn’t reply. Nelson drained his drink and walked to the bar to make another, then returned.

  “Have you ever been involved in the arrest of someone who did something really terrible, something like what happened to my son?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And were you tempted to put a .38 between his eyes right then and there, to save the taxpayers the cost of a trial, and/or lifelong imprisonment?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Why not?”

  “Straight answer?” Peter asked. Nelson nodded. “I could say because you realize that you would lower yourself to his level,” Peter said, “but the truth is that you don’t do it because it would cost you. They investigate all shootings, and—”

  “Vigilante justice,” Nelson interrupted, raising his glass. “Right now, it seems like a splendid idea to me.”

  He is not suggesting that I go out and shoot whoever killed his son. He is in shock, as well as grief, and as a newspaperman, he knows the way the system works, and now that he !$ going to be involved with the system himself, doesn’t like it at all.

  “It gets out of hand almost immediately,” Peter said.

  “Yes, of course,” Nelson said. “Please excuse me, Inspector, for subjecting you to this. I probably should not have come to work, in my mental condition. But the alternative was sitting at home, looking out the window ...”

  “I understand perfectly, sir,” Peter said.

  “Have there been any developments?” Nelson asked.

  “I came here directly from Stockton Place,” Peter said, “where I spoke to the detective to whom the case has been assigned—”

  “I thought it had been assigned to you,” Nelson interrupted.

  “No, sir,” Peter said. “Detective Harris of the Homicide Division has been assigned to the case.”

  “Then what’s your role in this? Ted Czernick led me to believe that you would be in charge.”

  “Commissioner Czernick has asked me to keep him advised, to keep you advised, and to make sure that Detective Harris has all the assistance he asks for,” Wohl said.

  “I was pleased,” Nelson interrupted again. “I checked you out. You’re in Internal Security, that sounds important whatever it means, and you’re the man who caught the Honorable Mr. Housing Director Weaver and that Friend of Labor, J. Francis Donleavy, with both of their hands in the municipal cookie jar. And now you’re telling me you’re not on the case . . .”

  “Sir, what it means is that Commissioner Czernick assigned the best available Homicide detective to the case. That’s a special skill, sir. Harris is better equipped than I am to conduct the investigation—”

  “That’s why he’s a detective, right, and you’re an inspector?”

  “And then the commissioner called me in and told me to drop whatever else I was doing, so that I could keep both you and him advised of developments, and so that I could provide Detective Harris with whatever help he needs,” Wohl plunged o
n doggedly.

  Arthur J. Nelson looked at Wohl suspiciously for a moment.

  “I had the other idea,” he said, finally. “All right, so what has Mr. Harris come up with so far?”

  “Harris believes that a number of valuables have been stolen from the apartment, Mr. Nelson.”

  “He figured that out himself, did he?” Nelson said, angrily sarcastic. “What other reason could there possibly be than a robbery? My son came home and found his apartment being burglarized, and the burglar killed him. All I can say is that, thank God, his girl friend wasn’t with him. Or she would be dead, too.”

  Girlfriend? Jesus!

  “Detective Harris, who will want to talk to you himself, Mr. Nelson, asked me if you could come up with a list of valuables, jewelry, that sort of thing, that were in the apartment.”

  “I’ll have my secretary get in touch with the insurance company,” Nelson said. “There must be an inventory around someplace.”

  “Your son’s car, one of them, the Jaguar, is missing from the garage.”

  “Well, by now, it’s either on a boat to Mexico, or gone through a dismantler’s,” Nelson snapped. “All you’re going to find is the license plate, if you find that.”

  “Sometimes we get lucky,” Peter said. “We’re looking for it, of course, here and all up and down the Eastern Seaboard.”

  “I suppose you’ve asked his girl friend? It’s unlikely, but possible that she might have it. Or for that matter, that it might be in the dealer’s garage.”

  “You mentioned his girl friend a moment ago, Mr. Nelson,” Wohl said, carefully, suspecting he was on thin ice. “Can you give me her name?”

  “Dutton, Louise Dutton,” Nelson said. “You are aware that she found Jerry? That she went into his bedroom, and found him like that?”

  “I wasn’t aware of a relationship between them, Mr. Nelson,” Peter said. “But I do know that Miss Dutton does not have Mr. Nelson’s car.”

  “Miss Dutton is a prominent television personality,” Nelson said. “It would not be good for her public image were it to become widely know that she and her gentleman friend lived in the same apartment building. I would have thought, however, that you would have been able to put two and two together.”