The Murderers

by W. E. B Griffin

  Martinez took the headset and held one of the phones to his ear. He listened for nearly a minute, then handed it back.

  “Payne really went out on that ledge to put it back?”

  “‘Neither heat nor rain…’” Tiny began to recite, stopping when there was another knock at the door.

  Martinez opened it.

  Detective Matthew M. Payne stood there. He was a tall, lithe twenty-five-year-old with dark, thick hair and intelligent eyes, wearing the gray cotton shirt and trousers work uniform of the hotel-maintenance staff.

  “What do you say, Hay-zus?” Payne said. “Strangely enough, I’m delighted to see you.”

  Martinez didn’t respond.

  “Is it working?” Payne asked Tiny Lewis. Lewis nodded.

  “Tony, now that Detective Martinez is here,” Payne said, “and the goddamned microphone is back where it’s supposed to be, can I take off?”

  Harris did not respond directly. He looked at Tiny Lewis.

  “Anything on what you have so far?”

  “You mean in addition to the grunts, wheezes, and other sighs of passion? No. No names were mentioned, and the subject of money never came up.”

  “Washington will want to hear them anyway,” Harris said, and turned to Payne. “You take the tapes to Washington, and you can take off. Let Martinez know where you are.”

  “OK, it’s a deal.”

  “Going out on that ledge was dumb,” Harris said.

  “The Lieutenant’s inamorata knocked the microphone off,” Payne replied. “No ledge, no tape.”

  “The Lieutenant’s what?” Tiny asked.

  “I believe the word is defined as ‘doxy, paramour, lover,’” Payne said.

  “In other words, ‘hooker’?”

  “A hooker, by definition, does it for money,” Payne said. “We can’t even bust this one for that. No money has changed hands. The last I heard, accepting free samples of available merchandise is not against the law. When you think about it, for all we know, it was true love at first sight between the Lieutenant and the inamorata.”

  Harris laughed.

  “Get out of here, Payne,” Harris said. “You want to take off, Tiny, I’ll stick around until the other guy—what the hell is his name?—gets here.”

  “Pederson,” Martinez furnished. “Pederson with a d.”

  “I’ll wait. I find this all fascinating.”

  “You’re a dirty young man, Tiny,” Payne said. “I’m off.”

  FOUR

  At just about the same time—9:35 P.M.—Detective Matthew M. Payne left the Bellvue-Stratford Hotel by the rear service entrance and walked quickly, almost trotted, up Walnut Street toward his apartment on Rittenhouse Square, Mr. John Francis “Frankie” Foley walked, almost swaggered, into the Reading Terminal Market four blocks away at Twelfth and Market streets.

  Mr. Foley was also twenty-five years of age, but at six feet one inch tall and 189 pounds, was perceptibly larger than Detective Payne. Mr. Foley was wearing a two-toned jacket (reddish plaid body, dark blue sleeves and collar) and a blue sports shirt with the collar open and neatly arranged over the collar of his jacket.Mr. Foley walked purposefully through the Market, appreciatively sniffing the smells from the various food counters, until he reached the counter of Max’s Cheese Steaks. Waiting for him there, sitting on a high, backless stool, facing a draft beer, a plate of french-fried potatoes, and one of Max’s almost-famous cheese steak sandwiches, was Mr. Gerald North “Gerry” Atchison, who was forty-two, five feet eight inches tall, and weighed 187 pounds.

  Mr. Atchison, who thought of himself as a businessman and restaurateur—he owned and operated the Inferno Lounge in the 1900 block of Market Street—and believed that appearances were important, was wearing a dark blue double-breasted suit, a crisp white shirt, a finely figured silk necktie, and well-polished black wing-tip shoes.

  Both gentlemen were armed, Mr. Atchison with a Colt Cobra .38 Special caliber revolver, carried in a belt holster, and Mr. Foley with a .45 ACP caliber Colt Model 1911A1 semiautomatic pistol that he carried in the waistband of his trousers at the small of his back. Mr. Atchison was legally armed, having obtained from the Sheriff of Delaware County, Pennsylvania, where he maintained his home, a license to carry a concealed weapon for the purpose of personal protection.

  Mr. Atchison had told the Chief of Police that he often left his place of business late at night carrying large sums of cash and was concerned with the possibility of being robbed. The Chief of Police knew that the 1900 block of Market Street was an unsavory neighborhood and that Mr. Atchison was not only a law-abiding citizen, but a captain in the Pennsylvania Air National Guard, in which he was himself an officer, and granted the license to carry.

  It is extremely difficult in Philadelphia for any private citizen to get a license to carry a concealed weapon, but Philadelphia honors concealed-weapons permits issued by other police jurisdictions. Mr. Atchison, therefore, was in violation of no law for having his pistol.

  Mr. Foley, on the other hand, did not have a license to carry a concealed weapon. He had applied for one, with the notion that all the cops could say was “no,” in which case he would be no worse off than he already was. And for a while, it looked as if he might actually get the detective to give him one. The detective he had talked to when he went to fill out the application forms had a USMC Semper Fi! decalcomania affixed to his desk and Frankie had told him he’d been in the Crotch himself, and they talked about Parris Island and Quantico and 29 Palms, and the detective said he wasn’t promising anything because permits were goddamned hard to get approved—but maybe something could be worked out. He told Frankie to bring in his DD-214, showing his weapons qualifications, so a copy of that could be attached to the application; that might help.

  Frankie explained that while he would be happy to bring in his Form DD-214, which showed that he had qualified as Expert with the .45, there was a small problem. A fag had come on to him in a slop chute at 29 Palms, and he had kicked the shit out of him, and what his Form DD-214 said about the character of his release from service was “Bad Conduct,” which was not as bad as “Dishonorable,” but wasn’t like “Honorable” either.

  Frankie could tell from the way the detective’s attitude had changed when he told him he’d gotten a “Bad Conduct” discharge from the Crotch that bringing in his DD-214 would be a waste of fucking time, so he never went back.

  He was, therefore, by the act of carrying a concealed firearm, in violation of Section 6106 of the Crimes Code of Pennsylvania, and Sections 907 (Possession of Instrument of Crime), and 908 (Possession of Offensive Weapon) of the Uniform Firearms Act, each of which is a misdemeanor of the first degree punishable by imprisonment of not more than five years and/or a fine of not more than $10,000.

  Mr. Foley was not concerned with the possible ramifications of being arrested for carrying a concealed weapon. Primarily, he accepted the folklore of the streets of Philadelphia that on your first bust you got a walk, unless your first bust was for something like raping a nun. The prisons were crowded, and judges commonly gave first offenders a talking-to and a second chance, rather than put them behind bars. Frankie had never been arrested for anything more serious than several traffic violations, once for shoplifting, and once for drunk and disorderly.

  And even if that were not the case, he trusted Mr. Atchison, who did carry a gun, about as far as he could throw the sonofabitch—what kind of a shitheel would hire somebody to kill his own wife?—and he was not going to be around him anywhere at night without something to protect himself.

  More important, the purpose of their meeting was to finalize the details of the verbal contract they had made between themselves, the very planning of which, not to mention the execution, was a far more serious violation of the Crimes Code of Pennsylvania than carrying a gun without a permit.

  In exchange for five thousand dollars, half to be paid now at Max’s, and the other half when the job was done, Mr. Foley had agreed to “eliminate
” Mrs. Alicia Atchison, Mr. Atchison’s twenty-five-year-old wife, who Mr. Atchison said had been unfaithful to him, and Mr. Anthony J. Marcuzzi, fifty-two, Mr. Atchison’s business partner, who, Mr. Atchison said, had been stealing from him.

  Frankie wasn’t sure whether Marcuzzi had really been stealing from the Inferno—it was more likely that Atchison just wanted him out of the way. Maybe he was stealing from Marcuzzi, and was afraid Marcuzzi was catching on—but he was sure that his wife’s fucking around on him wasn’t the reason Atchison wanted her taken care of. Atchison had another broad Frankie knew about, another young one, and probably he figured that since he was having Marcuzzi taken care of, he might as well get rid of them both at once. Or maybe he thought it would look more convincing if she got knocked off when Marcuzzi got it. Or maybe there was insurance on her or something.

  But whatever his reasons, it wasn’t because he was really pissed off that she had let somebody get into her pants. Two weeks after Frankie had met Gerry Atchison, before Atchison had talked to him about taking care of his wife and Marcuzzi, he had just about come right out and said that if Frankie wanted to fuck Alicia, that was all right with him.

  Frankie had been tempted—Alicia wasn’t at all bad-looking, nice boobs and legs—but had decided against it, as it wasn’t professional. He didn’t want to get involved with somebody he was going to take out.

  On his part, Mr. Foley had not been entirely truthful with Mr. Atchison, either. He was not, as he had led Mr. Atchison, and others, to believe, an experienced hit man who accepted contracts from the mob in Philadelphia (and elsewhere, like New York and Las Vegas) that for one reason or another they would rather not handle themselves.

  This job, in fact, would be his first.

  It was, as he thought of it, putting his foot on the ladder to a successful criminal career. He’d given it a lot of thought when they’d thrown him out of the Crotch. There was a lot of money to be made as a professional criminal. The trouble was, you had to start out doing stupid things like breaking in someplace, or stealing a truck. If you got caught, you spent a long time in jail. And even if you didn’t get caught, unless you had the right connections, you didn’t get shit—a dime on the dollar, if you were lucky—for what you stole.

  You had to get on the inside, and to do that, you needed a reputation. The most prestigious member of the professional criminal community, Frankie had concluded, was the guy who everybody knew took people out. Nobody fucked with a hit man. So clearly the thing to do was become a hit man, and the way to do that was obviously to hit somebody.

  The problem there was to find somebody who wanted somebody hit and was willing to give you the job. Frankie was proud of the way he had handled that. He knew a guy, Sonny Boyle, from the neighborhood, since they were kids. Sonny was now running numbers; only on the edges of doing something important, but he knew the important people.

  Frankie picked up their friendship again, hanging out in bars with him, and not telling Sonny what he was doing to pay the rent, which was working in the John Wanamaker’s warehouse, loading furniture on trucks. He let it out to Sonny that he had been kicked out of the Crotch for killing a guy—actually it had been because they caught him stealing from wall lockers—and when Sonny asked what he was doing told him he was in business, and nothing else.

  And then the next time he had seen in the newspapers that the mob had popped somebody—the cops found a body out by the airport with .22 holes in his temples—he went to Sonny Boyle and told him he needed a big favor, and when Sonny asked him what, he told Sonny that if the cops or anybody else asked, they had been together from ten at night until at least three o’clock in the morning, and that they hadn’t gone anywhere near the airport during that time.

  And when Sonny had asked what he’d been doing, he told Sonny he didn’t want to know, and that if he would give him an alibi, he would owe him a big one.

  That got the word spreading—Sonny had diarrhea of the mouth, and always had, which is what Frankie had counted on—and then he did exactly the same thing the next time the mob shot somebody, and there was one of them “police report they believe the murder had a connection to organized crime” crime stories by Mickey O’Hara in the Bulletin; he went to Sonny and told him he needed an alibi.

  Three weeks after that happened, Sonny took him to the Inferno Lounge and said there was somebody there, the guy who owned it, Gerry Atchison, that he wanted him to meet.

  He’d known right off, from the way Atchison charmed him and bought him drinks, shit, even as much as told him he could have a shot at fucking his wife, that Sonny had been telling Atchison about his pal the hit man and that Atchison had swallowed it whole.

  There were to be other compensations for taking the contract in addition to the agreed-upon five thousand dollars. Frankie would become sort of a mixture of headwaiter and bouncer at the Inferno Lounge. The money wasn’t great, not much more than he was getting from Wanamaker’s, but he told Atchison that he was looking for a job like that, not for the money, but so he could tell the cops, when they asked, that he had an honest job.

  That would be nice too. He could quit the fucking Wanamaker’s warehouse job and be available, where people could find him. Frankie Foley was sure that when the word spread around, as he knew it would, that he’d done a contract on Atchison’s wife and Marcuzzi, his professional services would be in demand.

  Mr. Foley slid onto the backless high stool next to Mr. Atchison. Atchison seemed slightly startled to see him.

  “You got something that belongs to me, Gerry?” Frankie Foley asked Gerry Atchison, whereupon Mr. Atchison handed Mr. Foley a sealed, white, business-size envelope, which Mr. Foley then put into the lower left of the four pockets on his two-tone jacket.

  “We got everything straight, right?” Mr. Atchison inquired, somewhat nervously.

  Mr. Foley nodded.

  Mr. Atchison did not regard the nod as entirely satisfactory. He looked around to see that the counterman was wholly occupied trying to look down the dress of a peroxide blonde, and then leaned close to Frankie.

  “You will come in for a drink just before eleven,” he said softly. “I’ll show you where you can find the ordnance. Then you will leave. Then, just after midnight, you will walk down Market, and look in the little window in the door, like you’re wondering why the Inferno’s closed. If all you see is me, then you’ll know I sent Marcuzzi downstairs to count the cash, and her down to watch him, and that I left the back door open.”

  “We been over this twenty times,” Mr. Foley said, getting off the stool. “What you should be worried about is whether you can count to twenty-five hundred. Twice.”

  “Jesus, Frankie!” Mr. Atchison indignantly protested the insinuation that he might try to shortchange someone in a business transaction.

  “And you lay off the booze from right now. Not so much as another beer, understand?” Mr. Foley said, and walked away from Max’s Cheese Steaks.

  Mr. Paulo Cassandro, who was thirty-six years of age, six feet one inches tall, and weighed 185 pounds, and was President of Classic Livery, Inc., had dined at the Ristorante Alfredo, one of the better restaurants in Center City Philadelphia, with Mr. Vincenzo Savarese, a well-known Philadelphia businessman, who was sixty-four, five feet eight inches tall and weighed 152 pounds.Mr. Savarese had a number of business interests, including participation in both Ristorante Alfredo and Classic Livery, Inc. His name, however, did not appear anywhere in the corporate documents of either, or for that matter in perhaps ninety percent of his other participations. Rather, almost all of Mr. Savarese’s business participations were understandings between men of honor.

  Over a very nice veal Marsala, Mr. Cassandro told Mr. Savarese that he had a small problem, one that he thought he should bring to Mr. Savarese for his counsel. Mr. Cassandro said that he had just learned from a business associate, Mrs. Harriet Osadchy, that an agreement that had been made between Mrs. Osadchy and a certain police officer and his associates was no longer cons
idered by the police officer to be adequate.

  “As I recall that agreement,” Mr. Savarese said, thoughtfully, “it was more than generous.”

  “Yes, it was,” Mr. Cassandro said, and went on: “He said that his expenses have risen, and he needs more money.”

  Mr. Savarese shook his head, took a sip of Asti Fumante from a very nice crystal glass, and waited for Mr. Cassandro to continue.

  “Mrs. Osadchy feels, and I agree with her, that not only is a deal a deal, but if we increase the amount agreed upon, it will only feed the bastard’s appetite.”

  Mr. Cassandro was immediately sorry. Mr. Savarese was a refined gentleman of the old school and was offended by profanity and vulgarity.

  “Excuse me,” Mr. Cassandro said.

  Mr. Savarese waved his hand in acceptance of the apology for the breach of good manners.

  “It would be, so to speak, the nose of the camel under the flap of the tent?” Mr. Savarese asked with a chuckle.

  Mr. Cassandro smiled at Mr. Savarese to register his appreciation of Mr. Savarese’s wit.

  “How would you like me to handle this, Mr. S?”

  “If at all possible,” Mr. Savarese replied, “I don’t want to terminate the arrangement. I think of it as an annuity. If it is not disturbed, it will continue to be reasonably profitable for all concerned. I will leave how to deal with this problem to your judgment.”

  “I’ll have a word with him,” Mr. Cassandro said. “And reason with him.”

  “Soon,” Mr. Savarese said.

  “Tonight, if possible. If not tonight, then tomorrow.”

  “Good,” Mr. Savarese said.

  Mr. Cassandro was fully conversant not only with the terms of the arrangement but with its history.

  Mrs. Harriet Osadchy, a statuesque thirty-four-year-old blonde of Estonian heritage, had come to Philadelphia from Hazleton, in the Pennsylvania coal region, four years before, in the correct belief that the practice of her profession would be more lucrative in Philadelphia. Both a decrease in the demand for anthracite coal and increasing mechanization of what mines were still in operation had substantially reduced the work force and consequently the disposable income available in the region.