The Murderers

by W. E. B Griffin

  “I know what you should do. You should go back to bed and try this again. This time, get up with a smile, and with nothing in your heart but compassion for your overworked and underappreciated husband.”

  “We haven’t had any time together for weeks. And even when you’re here, you’re not. You’re working.”

  “I know. This will be over soon, Martha. And we’ll go to the shore for a couple of days.”

  “I’ve heard that before,” she said, but she went to him and kissed his cheek. “Get that stuff off my table. Put the damned typewriter back where you found it.”

  “Yes, Ma’am,” Jason said. He put the typewriter back where he had found it, in a small closet in the kitchen, and then, carrying the tape recorder, left the apartment, pausing only long enough to pat his wife on her rump.

  “Good morning, Jason,” Wohl said as Washington got into the front seat of Wohl’s car.“I’m sorry about this, but I really thought I should get this to you as soon as I could.”

  “What’s up?”

  “About midnight last night, Matt and I walked up on a double homicide on Market Street.”

  “Really? What in the world were you two doing walking on Market Street at midnight?”

  “For a quick answer, the bar at the Rittenhouse Club was closed.”

  “Tell me about the homicide.”

  “Two victims. What looks like large-caliber-bullet wounds to the cranium. One victim was the wife of one of the owners of the Inferno Lounge…”

  “I know where it is.”

  “And the other the partner. It was called in by the other partner, who suffered a small-caliber-bullet wound in what he says was an encounter with the doers, two vaguely described white males.”

  He didn’t call me here to tell me this. Why? Because he thinks that it wasn’t an armed robbery, that the husband was the doer? And the Homicide detective is accepting the husband’s story?

  “We got there right after a Ninth District wagon responded to the call. Chief Lowenstein also came to the scene, and then got me alone. He knows what’s going on.”

  I knew that he wouldn’t have bothered me if it wasn’t important!

  “His finding out was inevitable. How much did you have to tell him?”

  “Not much. He knows the names. Most of them. I told him I couldn’t talk about it. The only time he really leaned on me was to ask how much time he had.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “Quote, not much, unquote.”

  “That’s true, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, sir. Peter, I told him that we didn’t have the conversation, that if we had it, I would have to report it.”

  “Is that what you’re doing?”

  “That’s up to you, Peter. I’ll play it any way you want me to.”

  “I like Matt Lowenstein. There has been absolutely nothing to suggest he’s done anything wrong. What purpose would it serve to go to Carlucci with this?”

  “You heard what the Mayor said, Peter. If anyone came to you or me asking—asking anything—about the investigation, he wanted to know about it.”

  “The call is yours, Jason. Was Chief Lowenstein—what word am I looking for?—pissed that you wouldn’t tell him anything?”

  “No. He seemed to understand he was putting me on a spot.”

  “My gut reaction, repeating the call is yours, is that you didn’t talk to Chief Lowenstein about anything but the double homicide.”

  “OK. That’s it. We didn’t have this conversation, either.”

  “What conversation?” Wohl asked, with exaggerated innocence.

  “I’m not through, I’m afraid,” Washington said.

  “What else?” Wohl asked tiredly as he pulled the door shut again.

  “Chief Lowenstein got rid of Matt, so that he could talk to me, by sending him to the crime scene—the victims were in a downstairs office—with Henry Quaire when Quaire came to the scene. I don’t know what happened between Matt and Milham, but Milham pulled the rule book on him and insisted on getting Matt’s statement that night—God, that’s something else I have to do this morning, get my statement to Homicide—so Matt went to the Roundhouse, and I went home, and when I got there the Widow Kellog was there.”

  “The widow of the undercover Narcotics guy?”

  Washington nodded.

  “Who was found with two bullets in his head in his house. Detective Milham’s close friend’s estranged husband.”

  “She was at your place?” Wohl asked, surprised.

  “Right. And she is convicted that her husband’s death is connected with drugs…”

  “You don’t think Milham had anything to do with it, do you?”

  “No. I don’t think so. But the Widow Kellog thinks it was done by somebody in Narcotics, because they—they being the Five Squad—are all dirty.”

  “The Narcotics Five Squad, according to Dave Pekach, are knights in shining armor, waging the good war against controlled substances. A lot of esprit de corps, which I gather means they think they’re better than other cops, including the other four Narcotics squads. In other words, a bunch of hotshots who do big buys, make raids, take doors, that sort of thing. They’re supposed to be pretty effective. It’s hard to believe that any of them would be dirty, much less kill one of their own.”

  “That’s what the lady is saying.”

  “You believe her?”

  “She said there’s all kinds of money floating around. She said she, she and her husband, bought a house at the shore and paid cash for it.”

  “That could be checked out, it would seem to me, without much trouble. Did she tell Homicide about this? Or anybody else?”

  “No. She thinks everybody’s dirty.”

  “What did you tell her?”

  “I told her I knew a staff inspector I knew was honest, and she should go to him; that I would set it up.”

  “And she doesn’t want to go to him?”

  “No,” Washington said. “Absolutely out of the question.”

  “You believe her?”

  “I think she’s telling the truth. My question is, what do we do with this?”

  “If you take it to Internal Affairs…” Wohl said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Let me read this,” Wohl said, opening the envelope.

  Wohl grunted twice while reading the three sheets of paper the envelope contained, then stuffed them back into the envelope.

  “This has to go to the Mayor,” he said. “As soon as you can get it to him. And then I think you had better have a long talk with Captain Pekach about the Narcotics Five Squad.”

  Washington nodded.

  “Can I tell him I’m doing so at your orders?”

  “Everything you do is at my orders. Dave Pekach knows that. Are you getting paranoid, Jason?”

  “Simply because one is paranoid doesn’t mean that people aren’t really saying terrible things about one behind one’s back,” Washington said sonorously.

  Wohl laughed.

  “No cop likes the guy who asks the wrong questions about other cops. Me included. I especially hate being the guy who asks the questions,” Washington said.

  “I know,” Wohl said sympathetically. “Please don’t tell me there’s more, Jason.”

  “That’s enough for one morning, wouldn’t you say?”

  At five minutes to eight, Sergeant Jason Washington drove into the parking lot of what had been built in 1892 at Frankford and Castor avenues as the Frankford Grammar School, and was now the headquarters of the Special Operations Division of the Philadelphia Police Department.He pulled into a parking spot near the front entrance of the building marked with a sign reading INSPECTORS. He regarded this as his personal parking space. While he was sure that there were a number of sergeants and lieutenants annoyed that he parked his car where it should not be, and who almost certainly had complained, officially or unofficially about it, nothing had been said to him.

  There was a certain military-chain-of-command—l
ike structure in the Special Operations Division. Only one’s immediate superior was privileged to point out to one the errors of one’s ways. In Jason Washington’s case, his immediate superior was the head man, Inspector Peter Wohl, the Commanding Officer of Special Operations. Peter Wohl knew where he parked his car and had said nothing to him. That was, Jason had decided, permission to park by inference.

  Sergeant Jason Washington and Inspector Peter Wohl had a unique relationship, which went back to the time Detective Wohl had been assigned to Homicide and been placed under the mentorship of Detective Washington. At that time, Jason Washington—who was not burdened, as his wife often said, with crippling modesty—had decided that Wohl possessed not only an intelligence almost equal to his, but also an innate skill to find the anomalies in a given situation—which was really what investigation was all about, finding what didn’t fit—that came astonishingly close to his own extraordinary abilities in that regard.

  Washington had predicted that not only would Detective Wohl remain in Homicide (many detectives assigned to Homicide did not quite cut the mustard and were reassigned to other duties) but he would have a long and distinguished career there.

  Homicide detectives were the elite members of the Detective Bureau. For many people, Jason Washington among them, service as a Homicide detective represented the most challenging and satisfying career in the Police Department, and the thought of going elsewhere was absurd.

  Detective Wohl had not remained in Homicide. He had taken the sergeant’s examination, and then, with astonishing rapidity, became the youngest sergeant ever to serve in the Highway Patrol; a lieutenant; the youngest captain ever; and then the youngest staff inspector ever.

  And then Special Operations had come along.

  It had been formed several years before, it was generally, and essentially correctly, believed as a response to criticism of the Police Department—and by implication, of the Mayor—by the Philadelphia Ledger, one of the city’s four major newspapers.

  Mr. Arthur J. Nelson, Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer of the Daye-Nelson Corporation, which owned the Ledger and twelve other newspapers, had never been an admirer of the Hon. Jerry Carlucci, and both the Ledger and the Daye-Nelson Corporation’s Philadelphia television and radio stations (WGHA-TV, Channel Seven; WGHA-FM 100.2 MHz; and WGHA-AM, 770 KC) had opposed him in the mayoral election.

  The dislike by Mr. Nelson of Mayor Carlucci had been considerably exacerbated when Mr. Nelson’s only son, Jerome Stanley Nelson, had been found murdered—literally butchered—in his luxurious apartment in a renovated Revolutionary War—era building on Society Hill.

  Considering the political ramifications of the case, no one had been at all surprised when the job had been given to Detective Jason Washington, who had quickly determined the prime suspect in the case to be Mr. Jerome Nelson’s live-in companion, a twenty-five-year-old black homosexual who called himself “Pierre St. Maury.”

  When this information had been released to the press by Homicide Unit Lieutenant Edward M. DelRaye—who shortly afterward was transferred out of Homicide, for what his superiors regarded as monumentally bad judgment—it had been published in the Inquirer, the Bulletin, and the Daily News, Philadelphia’s other major newspapers, and elsewhere.

  Mrs. Arthur J. Nelson suffered a nervous breakdown, which Mr. Nelson attributed as much to the shame and humiliation caused her by the publication of their son’s lifestyle as by his death. And if the police had only had the common decency to keep the sordid facts to themselves, rather than feed them to the competition in vindictive retribution for his support of the Mayor’s opponent in the mayoral election, of course this would not have happened.

  Almost immediately, the Ledger’s reporters had begun to examine every aspect of the operation of the Philadelphia Police Department with a very critical eye, and on its editorial page there began a series of editorials—many of them, it was suspected, written by Mr. Nelson himself—that called the public’s attention to the Department’s many failings.

  The Highway Patrol, a special unit within the Department, were often referred to as “Carlucci’s Commandos,” for example, and in one memorable editorial, making reference to the leather puttees worn by Highway Patrolmen since its inception, when the unit was equipped with motorcycles, they became “Philadelphia’s Jackbooted Gestapo.”

  A splendid opportunity for journalistic criticism of the Police Department presented itself to Mr. Nelson and his employees at this time with the appearance of a sexual psychopath whose practice it was to abduct single young women, transport them to remote areas in his van, and there perform various imaginatively obscene sexual acts on their bodies. The Department experienced some difficulty in apprehending this gentleman, who had been quickly dubbed “the Northwest Philadelphia Serial Rapist.”

  The Ledger, sparing no expense in their efforts to keep the public informed, turned up a rather well-known psychiatrist who said that there was no question in his mind that inevitably the Northwest Philadelphia Serial Rapist would go beyond humiliation of his victims, moving into murder and perhaps even dismemberment.

  A lengthy interview with this distinguished practitioner of the healing arts was published in the Ledger’s Sunday supplement magazine, under a large banner headline asking, “Why Are Our Police Doing Nothing?”

  The Monday after the Sunday supplement article appeared, Police Commissioner Taddeus Czernich summoned to the Commissioner’s Conference Room in the Police Administration Building the three deputy commissioners and six of the dozen chief inspectors. There he announced a reorganization of certain units within the Police Department. There would be a new unit, called Special Operations Division. It would report directly to the Deputy Commissioner for Operations. It would deal, as the name suggested, with special situations. Its first task would be to apprehend the Northwest Philadelphia Serial Rapist. Special Operations would be commanded by Staff Inspector Peter Wohl, who would be transferred from the Staff Investigation Bureau of the Internal Affairs Division.

  That was the first anomaly. Staff inspectors, who ranked between captains and inspectors in the departmental hierarchy, were regarded as sort of super-detectives whose superior investigative skills qualified them to investigate the most complex, most delicate situations that came up, but they did not serve in positions of command.

  Staff Inspector Peter Wohl had recently received some very flattering press attention—except, of course, in the Ledger—following his investigation of (and the subsequent conviction of) Superior Court Judge Moses Findermann for various offenses against both the law and judicial ethics.

  And Highway Patrol, Commissioner Czernich announced, would be transferred from the bureaucratic command of the Traffic Division and placed under Special Operations. As would other elements and individuals from within the Department as needed to accomplish the mission of the Special Operations Division.

  Among those to be immediately transferred, Commissioner Czernich announced, would be newly promoted Captain David Pekach of the Narcotics Bureau. He would replace Captain Michael J. Sabara, the present Highway Patrol Commander, who would become Staff Inspector Wohl’s deputy.

  In response to the question “What the hell is that all about?” posed by Chief Inspector Matt Lowenstein of the Detective Division, Commissioner Czernich replied:

  “Because the Mayor says he thinks Mike Sabara looks like a concentration camp guard and Pekach looks like a Polish altar boy. He’s thinking public image, OK?”

  There were chuckles. Captain Sabara, a gentle, kindly man who taught Sunday school, did indeed have a menacing appearance. Captain Pekach, who until his recent promotion had spent a good deal of time working the streets in filthy clothing, a scraggly beard, and pigtail, would, indeed, shaved, bathed, and shorn, resemble the Polish altar boy he had once been.

  Chief Lowenstein had laughed.

  “Don’t laugh too quick, Matt,” Commissioner Czernich said. “Peter Wohl can have any of your people he th
inks he needs for as long as he thinks he needs them. And I know he thinks Jason Washington is the one guy who can catch the rapist.”

  Lowenstein’s smile had vanished.

  The assignment of any detective outside the Detective Bureau was another anomaly, just as extraordinary as the assignment of a staff inspector as a commanding officer. Lowenstein looked as if he was going to complain over the loss to Special Operations of Detective Jason Washington, whom he—and just about everyone else—considered to be the best Homicide detective, but he said nothing. There was no use in complaining to Commissioner Czernich. This whole business was not Czernich’s brainstorm, but the Mayor’s, and Lowenstein had known the Mayor long enough to know that complaining to him would be pissing in the wind.

  The next day, Detective Washington and his partner, Detective Tony Harris, over their bluntly expressed objections, had been “temporarily” transferred to Special Operations for the express purpose of stopping the Northwest Serial Rapist.

  They had never been returned to Homicide.

  Peter Wohl had treated both of them well. There was as much overtime, without question, as they had in Homicide. They were now actually, if not officially, on a five-day-a-week day shift, from whenever they wanted to come in the morning to whenever they decided to take off in the afternoon.

  They were each provided with a new unmarked car for their sole use. New unmarked cars usually went to inspectors and up, and were passed down to lesser ranks. Wohl had implied—and Washington knew at the time he had done so that he believed—that the investigations they would be assigned to perform would be important, interesting, and challenging.

  That hadn’t come to pass. It could be argued, of course, that bringing down police officers who were taking money from the Mafia in exchange for not enforcing the law was important. And certainly, if challenging meant difficult, this was a challenging investigation. But there was something about investigating brother police officers—vastly compounded when it revealed the hands of at least a captain and a lieutenant were indeed covered with filth—that Washington found distasteful.