The Murderers

by W. E. B Griffin

  Charles David, who was now a welder at the Navy Shipyard, still told that story, said that he got through high school because he had been there when Daddy had taken a strap to Woodrow for cutting school and sassing the teacher at Dunbar, and he was smart enough to learn by vicarious experience.

  Woodrow had graduated from Dunbar Elementary School and gone on to graduate from William Penn High School. By then, Daddy had gone from shining shoes inside the Market Street Station to shining them in a barbershop on South Ninth Street, and finally to shining them in the gents’ room of the Rittenhouse Club on Rittenhouse Square. He was on salary then, paid to be in the gents’ room from just before lunch until maybe nine o’clock at night, shining anybody who climbed up on the chair’s shoes for free. It was part of what you got being a member of the Rittenhouse Club, getting your shoes shined for free.

  The members weren’t supposed to pay the shoe-shine boy, but, Daddy had told him, maybe about one in four would hand him a quarter or fifty cents anyway, and at Christmas, about three or four of the members whose shoes he had shined all year would wish him “Merry Christmas” and slip him some folding money. Usually it was ten or twenty dollars, but sometimes more. The first one-hundred-dollar bill Woodrow had ever seen in his life one of the Rittenhouse gentlemen had given to his father at Christmas.

  That hundred dollars, and just about everything else Daddy and Mamma Dear could scrape together (what was left, in other words, after they’d given the Good Lord’s Tithe to the Third Abyssinian Baptist Church, and after they’d put money away to go home to Hartsville at Christmas and maybe to go home for a funeral or a wedding or something like that), had gone into coming up with the money for the down payment on the house, and then paying the house off.

  The house was another reason Woodrow really hated Philadelphia. Daddy and Mamma Dear had worked their hearts out, done without, to pay for the thing, and they had just about paid it off when the neighborhood had started to go to hell.

  Woodrow did not like to curse, but hell was the only word that fit, and he knew the Good Lord would not think he was being blasphemous.

  Trash moved in. Black trash and white trash. Drinkers and adulterers and blasphemers, people who took no pride in the neighborhood or themselves.

  It had been bad when Woodrow had finished William Penn High School and was looking for work, it was worse when, at twenty-two, he’d applied for a job on the cops, and it had grown worse ever since. He spent his first two years in the Twenty-second District, learning how to be a cop, and then they had transferred him—they’d asked him first how he would feel about it, to give the devil his due—to the Thirty-ninth District which was then about thirty percent black (they said “Negro” in those days, but it meant the same thing as ‘nigger’ and everybody knew it) and getting blacker.

  “You live there, Woodrow,” Lieutenant Grogarty, a red-faced Irishman, had asked him. “How would you feel about working there, with your people?”

  At the time, truth to tell, Woodrow had thought it would be a pretty good idea. He had still thought then—he was only two years out of the Academy and didn’t know better—that a police officer could be a force for good, that a good Christian man could help people.

  He thought that one of the problems was that most cops were white men, and colored folks naturally resented that. He thought that maybe it would be different if a colored police officer were handling things.

  He’d been wrong about that. His being colored hadn’t made a bit of difference. The people he had to deal with didn’t care if he was black or yellow or green. He was The Man. He was the badge. He was the guy who was going to put them in jail. They hated him. Worse, he hadn’t been able to help anyone that he could tell. Unless arresting some punk after he’d hit some old lady in the back of her head, and stolen her groceries and rent money and spent it on loose women, whiskey, or worse could be considered helping.

  He had been bitter when he’d finally faced the truth about this, even considered quitting the cops, finding some other job. He didn’t know what other kind of job he could get—all he’d ever done after high school before he came on the cops was work unskilled labor jobs—but he thought there had to be something.

  He had had a long talk about it with the Pastor Emeritus of the Third Abyssinian Baptist Church, Rev. Dr. Joshua Steele—that fine old gentleman and servant of the Good Lord was still alive then, eat up with cancer but not willing to quit—and Dr. Steele had told him that all the Bible said was that if you prayed, the Good Lord would point out a Christian man’s path to him. Nothing was said about that path being easy.

  “You ask the Good Lord, Woodrow, if He has other plans for you, and if so, what. If He wants you to do something else, Woodrow, He’ll let you know. You’ll know, boy. In your heart, you’ll know.”

  Woodrow, after prayerful consideration, had decided that if the Good Lord wanted him to do something else, he would have let him know. And since he didn’t get a sign or anything, it was logical to conclude that the Lord was perfectly happy having him do what he was doing.

  Which wasn’t so strange, he came to decide. While he wasn’t able to change things much, or help a lot of people, every once in a while he was able to do something for somebody.

  And maybe locking up punks who were beating up and robbing old people was really helping. If they were in jail, they at least weren’t robbing and beating up on people.

  Three months later, Woodrow met Joellen, who had come up from Georgia right after she finished high school. He never told her—she might have laughed at him—but he took meeting her as a sign from the Good Lord that he had done the right thing. Joellen was like a present from the Good Lord. And so was Woodrow Wilson Bailey, Jr., when he come along twenty months later.

  The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. Woodrow didn’t know if he could have handled Mamma Dear and Daddy being taken into heaven within four months of each other if it hadn’t been for Joellen, and with her already starting to show what the Good Lord was giving them: Woodrow Wilson, Junior.

  That meant two more trips back home to Hartsville. Mamma Dear had told Daddy in the hospital that she had been paying all along for a burial policy, sixty-five cents a week for twenty years and more, that he didn’t know about, and that she wanted him to spend the money to send her back to Hartsville and bury her beside her Mamma, Granny Smythe. She didn’t want to be buried in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, beside strangers.

  Four months after they buried Mamma Dear, Woodrow buried Daddy beside her. That was really when Woodrow decided he was going to come home to Hartsville, and when he told Joellen what he had decided, she said that was fine with her, she didn’t like living up north anyhow.

  There was no work he could get in Hartsville that paid anything like what he was making on the cops, and they didn’t even know what a pension for colored people was in Hartsville, so that meant he had to stay on the cops, put in his time, and then retire to Hartsville.

  That had been a long time ago, and at the time he’d thought he could sell the house that Mamma Dear and Daddy had sacrificed so much for, and maybe buy a little farm in Hartsville. Let somebody else work it on shares, not work it himself.

  That hadn’t turned out. With the trash moving into the neighborhood, you couldn’t sell the place at hardly any price today. But he and Joellen had been able to save some money, and with his police pension, it was going to be all right when they went home to Hartsville.

  Several times in the last couple of years, he had been offered different jobs in the Thirty-ninth District. Once the Captain had asked him if he wanted to help the Corporal, be what they called a “trainee” (which sounded like some kid, but wasn’t) with the administration, but he told him no thank you, I’d just as soon just work my beat than be inside all day. Another time, another two times, they’d asked him did he want to do something called “Community Relations.”

  “We want people to start thinking about the police as being their friends, Woodrow,” a lieutenant
had told him, a colored lieutenant. “And with your position in the community, your being a deacon at Third Abyssinian Baptist Church, for example, we think you’re just the man to help us.”

  He told the Lieutenant, “Thank you, sir, for thinking about me, but I’m not interested in anything like that, I don’t think I’d be any good at it.”

  What Woodrow thought he was good at was what he did, what he wanted to do until he got his time in and could go home to Hartsville, South Carolina. He worked his beat. He protected old people from getting hit in the head and having their grocery money stolen by some punk. He looked for new faces standing around on corners and talked to them, and told them he didn’t like funny cigarettes or worse sold on his beat and that he had a good memory for faces.

  The punks on the street corner could call him Old Oreo, or Uncle Tom, or whatever they liked, and it didn’t bother him much, because he knew he was straight with the Good Lord and that was all that mattered. The Bible said all there was to say about bearing false witness against your neighbor. And also because he knew what else the punks who called him names told the new punks: “Don’t cross that mean old nigger, he’ll catch you alone when there’s nobody around and slap you up aside of the head with his club or his gun and knock you into the middle of next week.”

  He liked to walk his beat. You could see much more of what was going on just ambling down the street than you could from inside an RPC. A lot of police officers hated to get out of their cars, but Woodrow was just the opposite. He liked to walk, say hello to people, be seen, see things he wouldn’t have been able to see driving a car.

  Officer Bailey was not surprised to get the call telling him to meet the Sergeant, but when he got there, he was surprised to see Lieutenant Foster H. Lewis, Sr., standing by the car, talking to the Sergeant.He and Lewis went back together a long time. He was a good man, in Bailey’s opinion. God-fearing, honest, hardworking. But Bailey was a little worried when he saw him. Lewis was assigned to the Ninth District.

  What’s he doing here?

  Maybe he’s been sent to talk me into taking one of those special jobs in Community Relations the Lieutenant had talked to me about and I turned down.

  When the Sergeant saw Bailey coming, he shook Lieutenant Lewis’s hand, got back in his car, and drove off. Lieutenant Lewis stood in the middle of the street and waited for Bailey to drive up.

  “How are you, Woodrow?” Lieutenant Lewis said, offering his hand.

  “Pretty good, Lieutenant. How’s yourself?”

  “We were riding around—” Lieutenant Lewis said, interrupting himself to point at the new car parked at the curb. Woodrow saw that it was an unmarked car, the kind inspectors and the like got, and that a black man was behind the wheel.

  “—and we had some time, and I thought maybe we could have a cup of coffee or something.”

  “I can always find time to take a cup of coffee with you,” Woodrow said. “Right over there’s as good a place as any. At least it’s clean.”

  “The Sergeant said it would be all right if you put yourself out of service for half an hour.”

  “I’ll park this,” Woodrow said.

  When he came back from parking the car, he recognized the man driving the car.

  “This your boy, isn’t it, Foster? He wasn’t nearly so big the last time I saw him.”

  “How do you do, sir?” Tiny said politely.

  “Well, I’ll be. I recognized him from his picture in the paper. When they arrested those dirty cops.”

  They went in the small neighborhood restaurant. An obese woman brought coffee to the table for all of them.

  “Miss Kathy, this is Lieutenant Foster, and his boy,” Woodrow said. “We go back a long way.”

  “Way back,” Lieutenant Lewis agreed. “When I graduated from the Academy Officer Bailey sort of took me under his wing.”

  “Is that so?” the woman said, and walked away.

  “When Foster here finished the Academy, they sent him right to Special Operations, put him in plain clothes, and gave him a car,” Lieutenant Lewis said. “Things have changed, eh, Woodrow?”

  “You like what you’re doing, boy?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I was thinking the other day that if I had to do it all over again, I wouldn’t,” Bailey said.

  Lieutenant Lewis laughed.

  “You don’t mean that, Woodrow,” he said.

  “Yes, I do mean it. Don’t take this the wrong way, boy, but I’m glad I’m not starting out. I don’t think I could take another twenty-some years walking this beat.”

  “I was telling Foster that walking a beat is what the police are all about,” Lieutenant Lewis said.

  “Well, then, the country’s in trouble,” Bailey said. “Because we’re losing, Foster, and you know it. Things get a little worse every day, and there doesn’t seem to be anything that anybody can do about it.”

  “What I was trying to get across to Foster was that there’s no substitute for the experience an officer like yourself gets,” Lieutenant Lewis said.

  “Well, maybe you’re right, but the only thing my experience does is make me tired. Time was, I used to think I could clean up a place. Now I know better. All I’m doing is slowing down how fast it’s getting worse. And I only get to slow it down a little on good days.”

  Lieutenant Lewis laughed politely.

  “I was thinking, Woodrow,” he said, “that since Foster hasn’t had any experience on the streets, that maybe you’d be good enough to let him ride around with you once in a while. You know, show him the tricks of the trade.”

  “Good Lord,” Officer Bailey laughed, “why would he want to do that?”

  Lieutenant Lewis glanced at his son. He saw that it was only with a great effort that Officer Foster H. Lewis, Jr., was able to keep his face straight, not let it show what he was thinking.

  “My father is right, Mr. Bailey,” Tiny said. “I could probably learn a lot from you.”

  That response surprised and then delighted Lieutenant Lewis, but the delight was short-lived:

  “The only thing you could learn by riding around with me,” Officer Bailey said, “is that Satan’s having his way, and if you have half the brains you were born with, you already know that.”

  Officer Lewis looked at his watch.

  “Is there a phone around here, Mr. Bailey? I’ve got to check in.”

  “There’s a pay phone outside,” Bailey said. “But most likely somebody ripped the handset off for the fun of it. You go see Miss Kathy, and tell her I said to let you use hers.”

  “Thank you,” Tiny said.

  When he was out of earshot, Officer Bailey nodded approvingly.

  “Nice boy, Foster,” he said. “You should be proud of him.”

  “I am,” Lieutenant Lewis said.

  Men in light blue uniforms, suggesting State Police uniforms, with shoulder patches reading “Nesfoods International Security,” stood at the gates of the Detweiler estate. They were armed, Matt noticed, with chrome-plated Smith & Wesson .357 caliber revolvers, and their Sam Browne belts held rows of shining cartridges.“Anyone trying to shoot their way in here’s going to have his hands full,” Matt said softly as he slowed and lowered the window of Amy’s station wagon.

  “You really have a strange sense of humor,” Amy said, and leaned over him to speak to the security man.

  “I’m Dr. Payne,” Amy said, “and this is my brother.”

  One of the two men consulted a clipboard.

  “Yes, Ma’am, you’re on the list,” the security man said, and the left of the tall wrought-iron gates began to open inward.

  Matt raised the window.

  “And you’re back on Peter’s list, too, I see,” Matt said.

  “Matt, I understand that you’re under a terrible strain,” Amy said tolerantly, either the understanding psychiatrist or the sympathetic older sister, or both, “but please try to control your mouth. Things are going to be difficult enough in here.”


  “I wonder how long it’s going to be before Mother Detweiler decides that if I had only been reasonable, reasonable defined as resigning from the Police Department and taking my rightful position in society, Penny wouldn’t have stuck that needle in her arm, and that this whole thing is my fault.”

  “That’s to be expected,” Amy said. “The important thing is that you don’t accept that line of reasoning.”

  “In other words, she’s already started down that road?”

  “What did you expect?” Amy said. “She, and Uncle Dick, have to find someone to blame.”

  “Give me a straight answer, Doc. I don’t feel I’m responsible. What does that make me?”

  “Is that your emotional reaction, as opposed to a logical conclusion you’ve come to?”

  “How about both?”

  “Straight answer: You’re probably still in emotional shock. Have you wept?”

  “I haven’t had time to,” Matt said. “I didn’t get to bed until about three.”

  “More people showed up at your apartment?” Amy said, annoyance in her voice.

  “No, I went to the bar where the Homicide detectives hang out with Jason Washington. He was trying to make me palatable to them.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “When I go back on the job, I’m going to spend some time in Homicide.”

  “What’s all that about?”

  “It’s a long story. What I will ostensibly be doing is working on the Inferno job.”

  “What’s the ‘Inferno job’?”

  “Washington and I walked up on a double homicide on Market Street, in a gin mill called the Inferno Lounge.”

  “The bar owner? They killed his wife? I heard something on the radio.”

  “The wife and business partner had their brains blown out. The husband suffered a .32 flesh wound to the leg.”

  “Is there something significant in that?” Amy asked.

  “Let us say the version of the incident related by the not-so-bereaved husband is not regarded as being wholly true,” Matt said.