The Murderers

by W. E. B Griffin

  TWENTY

  Inspector Peter Wohl was visibly disturbed when he opened the door to his apartment and found Detective Payne standing there.

  “What the hell do you want? Are you drunk, or what?”“Atchison threw something I’ll bet is guns in the river,” Matt said.

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “In Chester,” Matt said. “I followed him.”

  “You did what? What the hell gave you the idea you had that authority?”

  “He met Frankie, Frankie gave him a package, and Atchison threw it in the river in Chester.”

  “I’ll want to hear all about this, Detective Payne, but not here, and not when you’re obviously shitfaced. I’ll see you in my office at eight o’clock.”

  The door slammed in Detective Payne’s face. He waited a moment and then started down the stairs. He was halfway down when light told him the door had reopened. He looked over his shoulder.

  Amelia Payne, Ph.D., M.D., attired in a terry-cloth bathrobe, stood at the head of the stairs.

  “Matt, what happened to you?”

  You may be his lady love, but first of all, you are my big sister, who takes care of her little brother.

  “Are you drunk?” Amy asked, more in sympathy than moral outrage.

  “Not yet.”

  “Well, come in here,” Amy said. “What does ‘not yet’ mean?”

  “I mean that getting drunk right now seems like a splendid idea, one that I will pursue with enthusiasm, once I have a bath.”

  “What is that stuff on you?” Wohl demanded, in curiosity, not sympathy.

  “I don’t think I want to find out.”

  “Come up here,” Amy ordered.

  She is now in her healer-of-mankind role.

  Matt climbed the stairs.

  “It’s all over you!” Amy announced.

  “I’ve noticed.”

  She wiped a finger, professionally, across his forehead.

  “There’s irritation. It’s a caustic of some sort. You need a long hot bath.”

  “If he’s coming in here,” Inspector Wohl said, resigned to the inevitable, “he’s going to take his clothes off first.”

  Fifteen minutes later, attired in the robe Amy had been wearing when she appeared at the top of the steps, Detective Payne entered Inspector Wohl’s living room. Inspector Wohl and Dr. Payne were now fully clothed.

  “I am under instructions to apologize for accusing you of being drunk,” Wohl said. “You want a beer?”

  “I’d love a beer,” Matt said.

  Wohl walked into his kitchen, returned with a bottle of Ortleib’s, and handed it to Matt.

  “I am under further instructions to question you kindly, having been reminded that you are undoubtedly in a condition of grief shock,” Wohl said. “So why don’t we start at the beginning?”

  “I don’t like your sarcasm, Peter,” Amy said. “Look at his face and hands! He’s been burned! Have you got any sort of an antiseptic lotion?”

  “Listerine?” Wohl asked. “Where did you get that stuff on you, anyway?”

  “No, not Listerine, stupid!”

  “On a pier, or near a pier, near the old refineries in Chester,” Matt said.

  “Where you had followed, you said, Mr. Atchison?”

  “That will have to wait until I do something about his face and hands,” Amy said. “I probably should take him to an emergency room.”

  “I’m all right,” Matt said.

  “You must have something around here,” Amy said to Peter Wohl.

  “Look in the medicine cabinet,” Wohl said. “You were telling me you followed Atchison? And I was asking you where the hell you got the idea—”

  “Stop it, Peter,” Amy ordered. “For God’s sake, what’s the matter with you?”

  She glowered at him, then marched into the bedroom. Thirty seconds later she was back, triumphantly displaying a tube of medicine.

  “This will do,” she said. “Why didn’t you tell me you had it?”

  “I don’t even know what it is,” Wohl said.

  Amy daubed the ointment on Matt’s face, then rubbed it in on his hands.

  “Give me that, I’ve got a nasty scratch on my leg,” Matt said.

  Wohl looked.

  “I’m just dying to learn where you’ve been besides on a pier in Chester,” he said sweetly.

  “I got these in the bushes outside the Yock’s Diner on Fifty-Seventh and Chestnut. That’s where I saw Atchison and Foley.”

  “You have been a busy little junior Sherlock Holmes, haven’t you?”

  “Peter, for Christ’s sake, at least hear me out!”

  Wohl glared at him.

  “OK. Fair enough. We’re back at square one. Start at the beginning.”

  Ten minutes later, Wohl dialed a number from memory.

  “Tony, I hate to call you at this hour, but this is important. Go out to South Detectives. I’ll call out there and tell them you’re coming. I want you to get a statement from two detectives. One of them is named Cronin, and the other’s name is Chesley. The first thing you say to them is to keep their mouths shut about what happened tonight at the Yock’s Diner on Fifty-Seventh and Chestnut. If they spread the story around the squad room, it’ll be public knowledge in the morning. Then I want you to question them, separately, about what went on at the Yock’s Diner. Payne was there, he followed Atchison there. Frankie Foley was there. Frankie arrived with a package. Atchison left with the package. Payne thinks Atchison gave Foley an envelope, and he thinks there was money in the envelope. Atchison then went to the riverfront in Chester and threw a package in the river. Payne suspects the package contained guns. What I want from the detectives are the facts, not what they think or surmise, something they can testify to in court without getting blown out of the witness chair by Atchison’s lawyer.”

  Detective Tony Harris asked a question, during which Inspector Wohl glanced at Detective Payne. Detective Payne’s face bore, in addition to a glistening layer of medicated ointment, a look of smug vindication. Inspector Wohl, tempering the gesture with a smile, extended his right hand toward Detective Payne, the palm upward, all but the center finger folded inward.

  Detective Payne was not cowed.

  “When you’re right, you’re right,” he said.

  Inspector Wohl returned his attention to the telephone.

  “I know a couple of people in the Chester Police Department,” he said. “I’m going to call them, and then Payne and I are coming out there. Payne says he can find the pier; he marked the site with an old bumper. I’m going to ask the Chester cops to guard the site until we can get our divers out there at first light. What I’m hoping, Tony, is that Sherlock Holmes, Junior, got lucky again. I think he may have. Call me when you’re finished. I don’t care what time it is.”

  He put the phone back in the cradle.

  “What we have, hotshot,” he said, turning to Matt, “is a lot of ifs. If the package does contain firearms. If those firearms can be ballistically connected with the weapons used in the Inferno. If we can tie the guns to either Atchison or Foley.”

  “If all else fails, we can shake the two of them up,” Matt argued. “What were they doing together in the Yock’s Diner? What did the package Foley gave him contain?”

  Wohl could think of no counterargument.

  “And when we find your pier, I will drop you off at your family’s home in Wallingford,” he said.

  “He can’t go to Wallingford at this hour, looking like that,” Amy announced. “Mother and Dad have gone through enough in the last couple of days without him showing up looking like that.”

  “And you can’t go to your apartment, either, can you, with Milham’s girlfriend there? That leaves here, doesn’t it?” Wohl asked.

  “I could go to a hotel.”

  “No he—” Amy began. Wohl held up his hand to interrupt her. To Matt’s surprise, she stopped.

  “If this thing works out, I may have to forgive you
for a large assortment of sins, but I will not forgive you, Matt, for this.”

  He gestured around the apartment. Amy took his meaning, and blushed.

  Detective Payne smiled.

  “Chastity, goodness, and mercy shall follow you all the days of your lives,” he paraphrased piously.

  “Why, you little sonofabitch!” Amelia Payne, Ph.D., M.D., said.

  The Philadelphia Marine Police Unit occupies part of a municipal pier on the Delaware River just south of the Benjamin Franklin Bridge.When Detective Payne arrived at ten minutes to seven, at the wheel of his Porsche, which shuddered alarmingly whenever he exceeded thirty miles per hour, and looking both as if he had fallen asleep on the beach and was suffering from terminal sunburn, and as if his clothing had shrunken (he was wearing a complete ensemble borrowed from Inspector Peter Wohl, who was two inches shorter and twenty-five pounds lighter than he was, there having been no time for him to get his own clothing), the parking lot was crowded with personal and official vehicles.

  There were two Mobile Crime Laboratory vans, and a similar-size van bearing the insignia of the Marine Police Unit; two radio patrol cars; two unmarked cars (one of which he recognized as belonging to Wally Milham); a green Oldsmobile 98 coupe (which he knew to be the personal automobile of Chief Inspector Dennis V. Coughlin); a police car bearing the insignia of the Chester Police Department; and an assortment of personal automobiles.

  That Denny Coughlin was driving his own car, rather than being in his official car chauffeured by Sergeant Francis Holloran, made it clear to Matt that he was present in his role of Loving Uncle in Fact, rather than as a senior member of the Philadelphia police hierarchy.

  Chief Coughlin and Detective Milham were standing on the pier. Coughlin waved him over.

  “What the hell did you do to your face, Matty?” he asked, his gruffness not quite masking his concern.

  “It’s not as bad as it looks,” Matt said.

  “Amy said it’ll be gone in a couple of days,” Coughlin said, his tone making it clear that he had serious doubts about the accuracy of the diagnosis.

  “They’re ready for us,” Milham said, and gestured over the side of the pier. Matt looked down. There was a forty-foot boat down there, festooned with flood- and spotlights, a collection of radio antennae, a radar antenna, and what looked like a standard RPC bubble gum machine.

  The rear deck was crowded with diving equipment and people, including a neatly uniformed sergeant of the Chester Police Department. His dapper appearance contrasted strongly with the appearance of officers of the Marine Police Unit, who had reported for duty prepared to go to work, which meant that their badges were pinned to work clothing.

  There was a lieutenant (presumably the Marine Police Unit commander) standing by the wheel, and a sergeant actually at the boat’s controls.

  Matt followed Milham down a flight of stairs onto a floating pier and then jumped aboard the boat after him.

  “Chief,” the Inspector called up to Coughlin. “Would you like to ride along with us, sir?”

  It was a pro forma question, asked because lieutenants generally recognize the wisdom of being very courteous under any circumstances to chief inspectors. The expected response would normally have been, “No, thank you. But thank you for asking.”

  Chief Coughlin looked at his watch, looked thoughtful, then said, “What the hell, there’s nothing on my desk that won’t wait a couple of hours.”

  He then quickly came down the flight of stairs onto the floating pier and jumped onto the boat.

  “Don’t let me get in your way, Lieutenant,” he called, then went to the Chester police sergeant. “I’m Chief Coughlin,” he said, offering his hand. “We appreciate your courtesy, and especially you coming in here like this.”

  “Anything we can do to help,” the Sergeant said. “I thought I might make it easier to find the site.”

  “We appreciate it,” Coughlin said.

  The diesel engines roared, and the boat moved away from the pier and headed downstream. To his left, Matt could see the Nesfoods International complex on the Camden shore, and to his right, on Society Hill, he thought he could make out the apartment of Mr. and Mrs. Chadwick T. Nesbitt IV.

  I wonder what Vice President Nesbitt is doing at this hour of the morning? Trying to come up with some clever way to sell another ten billion cans of chicken soup?

  Matt watched as Denny Coughlin made his way among the other police officers and technicians. Matt was impressed, but not particularly surprised, that Coughlin knew most of their names. Somewhat unkindly, knowing that it would offend Coughlin if he knew what he was thinking, Matt thought he was working the crowd of cops just about as effectively as Jerry Carlucci worked a crowd of voters.

  Then the Sergeant from the Chester Police Department embarrassed him.

  “You’re Detective Payne, right?”

  “Right,” Matt said, shaking the Sergeant’s hand. “Nice to meet you.”

  “I don’t mean to put down what you did. It was good work,” the Sergeant said. “But you know what I was just thinking?”

  Matt smiled and shook his head.

  “I was thinking it must be nice to work for a police department where there’s enough money to surveil somebody like this guy Atchison. We just don’t have the dough to pay for twenty-four-hour surveillance, even on a murder job. How many officers did you have on the detail?”

  “I really don’t know,” Matt said.

  That is far from the truth. I know precisely how many. Zero. And the surveillance of Mr. Atchison will cost the Philadelphia Police Department zero dollars, because it was not only not authorized, but as Peter pointed out with some emphasis, another manifestation of what’s wrong with me; that I am an undisciplined hotshot who goes charging off in all directions without thinking.

  The cost of whatever it’s going to cost to fix the Porsche, and I don’t like to think how much that’s going to be, plus the cost of a new jacket, shirts, pants, necktie, and loafers, is going to be borne personally by Detective Matt Payne. I don’t even dare to put in for overtime.

  It didn’t take as long to reach the pier along the Chester waterfront as Matt expected it would.

  And finding the pier was easy. There was a Chester police car sitting on it, and it could be seen a half-mile away.

  Thirty minutes after the Marine Police Unit boat tied up to the pier, a police diver, wearing a diving helmet, bobbed to the surface with a package. It was a white plastic garbage bag, wrapped in duct tape.

  “That it, Matty?” Denny Coughlin asked.

  “That looks like what I saw Atchison carry out of the Yock’s Diner.”

  “Good job, Matty.”

  Unless, of course, it contains something like the records of the loan-shark operation Atchison was operating, and not guns.

  A police photographer recorded the diver in the water, the package on the deck, and then as a laboratory technician carefully cut the duct tape away. Inside the plastic garbage bag was a paper bag. Inside the paper bag, wrapped in mechanic’s wiping cloths, were three guns. A large revolver, which a ballistics technician identified for another technician to write down as a .44–40 single-action six-shot revolver, of Spanish manufacture, a .38 Special Caliber six-shot Colt revolver, and a Savage .32 ACP semiautomatic pistol.

  Officer Woodrow Wilson Bailey, Sr., woke to the smell of brewing coffee and fried ham. It pleased him. He didn’t complain or feel sorry for himself most days that he didn’t get to eat breakfast with Joellen and Woodrow Junior. Policing was a twenty-four-hour-a-day job, and everybody had to take their fair turn working the four-to-midnight tours, and the midnight-to-eight-in-the-morning tours. And truth to tell, he sort of liked the last-out tour; there was something he liked about cruising around the deserted streets, say, at half past three or four, when all the punks had finally decided to go to bed.But it was nice when he was working the day shift, and could sit down at the kitchen table and have breakfast with Joellen and Woodrow Junior. Havi
ng breakfast like that every day was one of the things Woodrow looked forward to, when he got his time in and went home to Hartsville.

  He got out of bed and took a quick shower and a careful shave, then put on his terry-cloth bathrobe and went down to the kitchen. He really hated it when he dribbled coffee or egg or redeye gravy or something on a clean uniform shirt and had to change it, so he ate in his bathrobe. All you had to do if you made a pig of yourself on your bathrobe was throw it in the washing machine. Joellen knew he took pride in the way he looked in his uniform, and always had one clean and pressed waiting for him. That was a lot of work, and Woodrow knew it, and made a genuine effort not to get his uniform dirty, so that what Joellen did for him would not be wasted.

  “I was about to come see if you were going to take breakfast with us,” Joellen said when he walked in the kitchen.

  “I could smell that cooking,” Woodrow said. “It would wake a dead man.”

  Joellen smiled and kissed him.

  “Good morning, son.”

  “Good morning, sir,” Woodrow Junior said. He was wearing a white shirt and a blue sweater and a necktie. He was a junior at Cardinal Dougherty High School, and they had a dress code there. More important, they taught Christian morals, even if they weren’t Protestant Christians. It would have been nicer if Third Abyssinian had a church-run school that Woodrow Junior could have gone to, but they didn’t.

  And he certainly couldn’t have sent Woodrow Junior to a public high school. The corridors of the public schools, Woodrow sometimes thought, were not a bit better than the corners of the neighborhood. You could buy anything in there, and it was no place to send your child unless you didn’t care what was going to happen to him, what he would see, what punks would give him trouble.

  Woodrow thought it was a truly Christian act on the part of the Catholics to let Protestant Baptist boys like Woodrow into their schools. And there were a lot of them. There was a charge, of course, but in Woodrow’s case it was reduced because Joellen went over there every day and helped out in the cafeteria for free.