The Murderers

by W. E. B Griffin

  Mr. John Francis “Frankie” Foley checked his watch as he circled City Hall and headed west on Kennedy Boulevard. It was ten forty-five. He had told Mr. Gerald North “Gerry” Atchison “between quarter of eleven and eleven,” so he was right on time.Mr. Foley considered that a good omen. It was his experience that if things went right from the start, whatever you were doing would usually go right. If little things went wrong, like for example you busted a shoelace or spilled spaghetti sauce on your shirt, or the car wouldn’t start, whatever, so that you were a little late, you could almost count on the big things being fucked up, too.

  And he felt good about what he was going to do, too, calm, professional. He’d spent a good long time thinking the whole thing through, trying to figure out what, or who, could fuck up. His old man used to say, “No chain is stronger than its weakest link,” and say what you want to say about that nasty sonofabitch, he was right about that.

  And the weak link in this chain, Mr. Foley knew, was Mr. Gerry Atchison. For one thing, Frankie was pretty well convinced that he could trust Atchison about half as far as he could throw the slimy sonofabitch. I mean, what kind of a shitheel would offer somebody you just met a chance to fuck his wife, even if you were planning to get rid of her for business purposes?

  The first thing that Frankie thought of was that maybe what Atchison was planning on doing was letting him do the wife and the business partner, and then he would shoot Frankie. That would be the smart thing for him to do. He would have his wife and partner out of the way, and if the shooter was dead, too, with the fucking gun in his hand, Atchison could tell the cops that when he heard the shots in the basement office he went to investigate and shot the dirty sonofabitch who had shot his wife and his best friend and business partner. And with Frankie dead, not only couldn’t he—not that he would, of course—tell the cops what had really happened, but Atchison wouldn’t have to come up with the twenty-five hundred Frankie was due when he did the wife and the business partner.

  Frankie didn’t think Atchison would have the balls to do that, but the sonofabitch was certainly smart enough to figure out that he could do something like that. So he’d covered those angles, too. For one thing, the first thing he was going to do when he saw Atchison now was make sure that sonofabitch had the other twenty-five hundred ready, and the way he had asked for it, in used bills, nothing bigger than a twenty.

  If he didn’t have the dough ready, then he would know the fucker was trying to screw him. He really hoped that wouldn’t happen, he wanted this whole thing to happen, and if Atchison didn’t have the dough ready, he didn’t know what he’d do about it, except maybe smack the sonofabitch alongside his head with the .45.

  But Atchison could have the dough ready, Frankie reasoned, and still be planning to do him after he had done the wife and the partner. He had figured out the way to deal with the whole thing: first, make sure that he had the dough, and second, when he came back to do the contract, either make sure that Atchison didn’t have a gun, or, which is what most likely would happen, make sure that he always had the drop on Atchison.

  All he had to be was calm and professional.

  Frankie steered his five-year-old Buick convertible into the left lane, turned left off Kennedy Boulevard onto South Nineteenth Street, crossed Market Street, and then made another left turn into the parking lot at South Nineteenth and Ludlow Street. During the day, you had to pay to park there, but not at this time of night. There were only half a dozen cars in the place. He got out of the car, walked back to Market Street, and turned right.

  He caught a glimpse of himself reflected in a storefront window. He was pleased with what he saw. There was nothing about the way he was dressed (in a brown sports coat with an open-collared maroon sports shirt and light brown slacks) that made him look any different from anyone else walking up Market Street to have a couple of drinks and maybe try to get laid. No one would remember him because he was dressed flashy or anything like that.

  He pushed open the door to the Inferno Lounge and walked in. There were a couple of people at the bar, and in the back of the place he saw Atchison glad-handing a tableful of people.

  “Scotch, rocks,” Frankie said to the bartender as he slid onto a bar stool.

  The bartender served the drink, and when Frankie didn’t decorate the mahogany with a bill, said, “Would you mind settling the bill now, sir? I go off at eleven.”

  “You mean you’re closing at eleven?”

  “The guy who works eleven ’til closing isn’t coming in tonight. The boss, that’s him in the back, will fill in for him,” the bartender said.

  “Hell, you had me worried. The night’s just beginning,” Frankie said, and took a twenty—his last—from his wallet and laid it on the bar.

  So far, so good. Atchison said tonight was the late-night bartender’s night off.

  Frankie pushed a buck from his stack of change toward the bartender and then picked up his drink. There was a mirror behind the bar, but he couldn’t see Atchison in it, and he didn’t want to turn around and make it evident that he was looking for him.

  Frankie wondered where whatsername, the wife—Alicia—was, and the partner.

  I wonder if I should have fucked her. She’s not bad-looking.

  Goddamn it, you know better than that. That would have really been dumb.

  “What do you say, Frankie?” Gerry Atchison said, laying a hand on his shoulder. Frankie was a little startled; he hadn’t heard or sensed him coming up.

  “Gerry, how are you?”

  “I got something for you.”

  “I hoped you would. How’s the wife, Gerry?”

  Atchison gave him a funny look before replying, “Just fine, thanks. She’ll be here in a little while. She went somewhere with Tony.”

  Tony is the partner, Anthony J. Marcuzzi. What did he do, send her off to fuck the partner?

  “Tommy,” Gerry Atchison called to the bartender. “Stick around a couple of minutes, will you? I got a little business with Mr. Foley here.”

  There was nothing Tommy could do but fake a smile and say sure.

  Atchison started walking to the rear of the Inferno. Frankie followed him. They went down a narrow flight of stairs to the basement and then down a corridor to the office.

  Atchison closed and bolted the office door behind them, then went to a battered wooden desk, and unlocked the right-side lower drawer. He took from it a small corrugated paper box and laid it on the desk.

  He unwrapped dark red mechanic’s wiping towels, exposing three guns. One was a Colt .38 Special caliber revolver with a five-inch barrel. The second was what Frankie thought of as a cowboy gun. In this case it was a Spanish copy of a Colt Peacemaker, six-shot, single-action .44 Russian caliber revolver. The third was a Savage Model 1911 .32 ACP caliber semiautomatic.

  “There they are,” he announced.

  “Where’s the money?” Frankie asked.

  “In the desk. Same drawer.”

  “Let’s see it.”

  “You don’t trust me?” Atchison asked with a smile, to make like it was a joke.

  “Let’s see the money, Gerry,” Frankie said.

  He picked up the Colt and opened the cylinder and dumped the cartridges in his hand. Then he closed the cylinder and dry-snapped the revolver. The cylinder revolved the way it was supposed to.

  The noise of the dry snapping upset Gerry Atchison.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Making sure these things work.”

  “You didn’t have to do that. I checked them out.”

  Yeah, but you don’t know diddly-shit about guns. You just think you do.

  The Colt was to be the primary weapon. He would do both the wife and the partner with the Colt. The cowboy gun was the backup, in case something went wrong. Better safe than sorry, like they say. The Savage was to wound Atchison in the leg. Frankie would have rather shot him with the .38 Special Colt, but Atchison insisted on the smaller .32 ACP Savage.

  Atchi
son held out an envelope to Frankie.

  “You get this on delivery, you understand?”

  Frankie took the envelope and thumbed through the thick stack of bills.

  “You leave it in the desk,” Frankie ordered, handing the envelope back to Atchison. “If it’s there when I come back, I do it.”

  Frankie next checked the functioning of the .44 Russian cowboy six-shooter, and finally the .32 Savage automatic.

  He put them back in the corrugated paper box and folded the mechanic’s rags back over them.

  “I sort of wish you’d take those with you,” Atchison said. “What if somebody comes down here and maybe finds them?”

  “You see that don’t happen. I’m not going to wander around Center City with three guns.”

  Atchison looked like he was going to say something, but changed his mind.

  “I’ll show you the door,” he said.

  Frankie followed him out of the office and farther down the corridor to the rear of the building. There a shallow flight of stairs rose toward a steel double door.

  With Frankie watching carefully, Atchison removed a chain-and-padlock from the steel doors, then opened the left double door far enough to insert the padlock so that there would be room for Frankie’s fingers when he opened the door from the outside.

  “Be careful when you do that. You let the door slip, you’ll never get it open.”

  “I’m always careful, Gerry,” Frankie said.

  Atchison took the corrugated paper box with the pistols from Frankie and put it on the top stair, just below the steel door.

  He turned and sighed audibly. Then he smiled and put out his hand to Frankie.

  “Jesus!” Frankie said with contempt. “Make sure that envelope is where it’s supposed to be,” he said, then turned and walked purposefully down the narrow corridor toward the stairs.

  FIVE

  Detective Wallace H. Milham reported for duty in the Homicide Unit in the Roundhouse at midnight as his duty schedule called for. The alternative, he knew, was sitting around his apartment alone with a bottle of bourbon. Or sitting around in a bar somewhere, alone, which he thought would be an even dumber thing to do than getting plastered all by himself in his apartment.

  It had been a really lousy day.Wally told himself that he should have expected something lousy to happen—not something as lousy as this, but something—the other shoe to drop, so to speak, because things lately had been going so damned well. For eighteen months, things had really been lousy.

  In what he was perfectly willing to admit was about the dumbest thing Wally had ever done in his life, he had gotten involved with his wife Adelaide’s sister, Monica. Monica lived in Jersey, in Ocean City. Her husband was a short fat guy who sold insurance. Adelaide’s and Monica’s mother and dad owned a cottage close to the beach in Wildwood.

  Everybody in the family—Adelaide’s family; Wally was an only child—got to use the cottage. Adelaide had one other sister besides Monica, and two brothers. The Old Man—Adelaide’s father—wouldn’t take any money when anybody used it, which sort of bothered Wally, who liked to pay his own way and not be indebted to anybody. So when the place needed a paint job, he volunteered to do that. He told the Old Man that the way his schedule worked, there were often two or three days he had off in the middle of the week, when Adelaide was working in the library, and he would rather do something useful with that time than sit around the house watching the TV.

  Which was true. When he offered to paint the cottage in Wildwood, that was all he had in mind, pay his way. Monica didn’t come into his thinking at all.

  But Charles, Monica’s husband, got in the act. He said that if Wally was going to drive all the way over from Philly to do the labor, the least he could do was provide the materials. So he did. And Monica drove the paint down in their station wagon because Charles of course was at work.

  And he didn’t think about that either. The first two days he spent painting the cottage, he used up most of the paint that Charles had Monica drive down to give him, so he told Adelaide to call Monica to ask Charles if he wanted to provide more paint, or have Wally get it, in which case he would have to know where he’d gotten the first three gallons, so they could mix up some more that would match.

  Adelaide told him that Charles said that the paint would be there waiting for him the next time he went to Wildwood. It wasn’t, so he started painting with what was left, and just before noon Monica showed up with the paint, and said that Charles had told her to take him out to lunch, and not to take no for an answer, it was the least they could do for him.

  So they went out for lunch, and he was surprised when Monica tossed down three martinis, one after the other. He had never seen her take more than one drink at a time. And she started talking—women with a couple of drinks in them tend to do that—and she started out by saying that she was a little jealous of Adelaide because Adelaide was married to a man who had an exciting career, catching murderers, and Charles was a bore.

  In more ways than one, she said, if Wally took her meaning.

  And he told her that being a Homicide detective wasn’t as exciting as people who didn’t know thought it was, that most of it was pretty ordinary stuff, just asking questions until somebody came up with the answer.

  She said, yeah, but he got to meet interesting, exciting people, and she asked him if he ever met any exciting women, and he told her no, but she said he was just saying that, and she’d bet that if he told her the truth, he got to meet a lot of exciting women.

  That’s when he realized what was going on, and if he had had half the sense he was born with, he would have stopped it right there, but he’d had three martinis too.

  In her car on the way back to the Old Man’s cottage, she kept letting her hand fall on his leg, and ten minutes after they got back to the cottage, they were having at it in the Old Man’s and Grandma’s bed.

  Afterward, Monica told him she didn’t know what had come over her, it must have been the martinis, and they could never let anything like that happen again. But the way she stuck her tongue down his throat when she kissed him good-bye, he knew that was what she was saying, not what she meant.

  So far as he was concerned, that was it, the one time. It would be a long time before he ever let himself be alone with her again.

  Two weeks after that, at eleven o’clock in the morning, he had just gotten out of bed and made himself a cup of coffee when the doorbell at the house rang and there was Monica.

  She was in Philly to do some shopping, she said, and she thought she would take a chance and see if maybe Adelaide hadn’t gone to work at the library and they could go together.

  He told her no, Adelaide had gone to work, and wouldn’t be home until five, five-thirty.

  And she asked what about the kids, and he told her they were both at school and wouldn’t be home until quarter to four.

  And then she said that she just couldn’t get him out of her mind, and since he hadn’t called her or anything, she had come to see him.

  Three weeks after that, Adelaide walked in on them and caught them in her bed, right in the middle of doing it.

  The way Adelaide saw it, it was all his fault, and maybe, he thought, in a way it was. He had known what was going on.

  Adelaide said she hoped that he would at least have the decency to get a civilized divorce, so that nobody in her family knew that it was Monica he was taking advantage of, and ruin her life too. She said that she would hate to tell the children what an unmitigated immoral sonofabitch their father was, and hoped he wouldn’t make her.

  There was a clause in the divorce that said he had to pay a certain amount to her, in addition to child support, so that she could learn a trade or a profession. She decided she would go back to college and get a degree in library science, and get a better job than the one she had, which was “clerical assistant,” which meant that he would be giving her money for two years, maybe three. Or more. She was going only part time.

&n
bsp; And then she met Greg. Greg was a great big good-looking guy who sold trucks for a living, and who made a hell of a lot more money doing that than Wally had ever made, even in Homicide.

  Adelaide started to spend nights in Greg’s apartment whenever Wally had the kids over the weekend or she could get the Old Man and Grandma to take them. Wally knew that, because he sometimes drove by Greg’s apartment at midnight and saw her car, and then drove past again at three in the morning, and again at seven, and it was still there.

  But she wasn’t going to marry Greg, because the minute she married him, that was the end of her training for a new career at his expense. She as much as told him that, and let him know if he made any trouble for her about how she conducted her private affairs, she would have to tell the kids what a sonofabitch he was, seducing her own sister, caring only for himself and not for his family.

  And then Adelaide had really surprised him two and a half months before by calling him up—she sounded like she was half in the bag on the phone—and telling him she had just come back from Elkton, Maryland, where she and Greg had tied the knot.

  Which meant that he could stop paying for her career education and move out of the one-room apartment, which was all he could afford on what was left of his pay, into something at least decent.

  And then he went to Lieutenant Sackerman’s funeral, and met Helene. Jack Sackerman was an old-time Homicide detective, a good one. When Wally had first gone to Homicide, he had taken him under his wing and showed him how to operate. Wally thought that if it hadn’t been for Jack Sackerman, he probably never would have gotten to stay in Homicide.

  When Jack had started thinking about retirement, he knew he had to leave Homicide. Homicide detectives make good money, damned good money, because of all the overtime, but when they retire, they get the same retirement pay as any other detective, and that’s not much. So Jack had taken the examination for sergeant, and passed that, and they assigned him to Narcotics. Then he took the lieutenant’s examination, and passed that, and they kept him in Narcotics. He was getting ready for the captain’s examination when they discovered the cancer. And that, of course, was that.