The Murderers

by W. E. B Griffin

  District Attorney Callis punched his intercom button and very politely asked his secretary to see if she could determine if Mr. Hormel was in the building, and if so, if he could spare a few minutes to come to his office.

  A faint smile flickered across Peter Wohl’s face. He was perfectly sure that Hormel had been ordered, probably far less courteously, to make himself available.

  “Harry,” Callis had almost certainly said, “don’t leave the office until you check with me. Lowenstein and Wohl are coming over with something on the Inferno murders. I’ll need you.”

  Or words to that effect: Mr. Harrison J. Hormel was an assistant district attorney. He had come to the District Attorney’s Office right after passing the bar examination twenty-odd years before and had stayed.

  Only a small number of bright young lawyers fresh from law school stayed on. Many of those who did were those who felt the need of a steady paycheck and were not at all sure they could earn a living in private practice. Hormel, in Peter’s opinion, was the exception to that rule of thumb. He was a very good lawyer, and a splendid courtroom performer. Juries trusted him. He could have had a far more lucrative legal career as a defense counsel.

  Peter had decided, years before, that Hormel had stayed on, rising to be (at least de facto) the best prosecutor in the DA’s Office because he took pride and satisfaction in putting evil people where they could do no more harm.

  And Peter knew that whether District Attorney Callis or Assistant District Attorney Hormel prosecuted Foley and Atchison would not be based on professional qualifications—Callis was not a fool, and was honest enough to admit that Hormel was the better prosecutor—but on Callis’s weighing of the odds on whether the case could be won or lost. If conviction looked certain, he would prosecute, and take the glory. If there was some doubt, Hormel would be assigned. It was to be hoped that his superior skill would triumph. If Foley and/or Atchison walked, the embarrassment would be Hormel’s, not Callis’s.

  Callis took his glasses, which, suspended around his neck on an elastic cord, had been resting on his chest, and adjusted them on his nose. Then he leaned forward on his desk and began to read, carefully, the report Lowenstein had given him.

  Assistant District Attorney Hormel entered Callis’s office while Callis was reading the report. He quietly greeted Lowenstein and Wohl, then stretched himself out in a leather armchair to the side of Callis’s desk.

  Wordlessly, Callis handed him the report, page by page, as he finished reading it. When he himself had finished reading it, he looked at Chief Inspector Lowenstein and made a gesture clearly indicating he was not awed by the report.

  Lowenstein handed him another sheaf of Xerox copies.

  “The 75–49s on the recovery of the murder weapons,” he said.

  Callis again placed his glasses on his nose and read the 75–49s carefully, again handing the pages as he finished them to Assistant District Attorney Hormel.

  As he read page four, he said: “Denny Coughlin was a witness to the recovery? What was he doing there?”

  “Chief Coughlin did not see fit to inform me of his reasons,” Lowenstein said. “Inspector Wohl suspects that he thought it would be nice to go yachting at that hour of the morning.”

  “Oh, shit, Matt.” Callis laughed.

  Callis finished reading the 75-49s, and then everybody waited for Hormel to finish.

  “There are some problems with this,” Hormel said.

  “Such as?”

  “What was this Special Operations detective doing surveilling Mr. Atchison?”

  “At the direction of the Commissioner, Detective Payne was detailed to Homicide to assist in the investigation,” Lowenstein said.

  “I’d love to know what that was all about,” Callis said, looking at Lowenstein. “Was that before or after you threatened to retire?”

  “Gossip does get around, doesn’t it?” Lowenstein said. “I didn’t threaten to retire. I considered retiring. I changed my mind. If you’re suggesting I in any way was unhappy with the detail of Detective Payne to Homicide, I was not. He is a very bright young man, as those 75–49s indicate.”

  “He was assigned to surveil Atchison?”

  “He was ordered to assist the assigned detective in whatever way the assigned detective felt would be helpful,” Lowenstein replied.

  “Presumably,” Hormel said, “there was coordination with the Media Police Department?”

  “That same afternoon, Detective Payne accompanied Sergeant Washington to interview Mr. Atchison at his home. That was coordinated with the Media Police Department.”

  “Jason’s back working Homicide? I hadn’t heard that,” Callis said.

  “Sergeant Washington and Detective Payne were the first police officers on the scene of the Inferno Lounge murders,” Lowenstein said. “Inspector Wohl was kind enough to make them both available to me to assist in the conduct of Homicide’s investigation of the murders.”

  Callis snorted.

  “‘Detective Payne,’” Hormel said, obviously playing the role of a defense attorney, “‘you look like a very young man. How long have you been a police officer? How long have you been a detective?’”

  “‘How long have you been assigned to Homicide?’” Callis picked up on Hormel’s role playing. “‘Oh, you’re not assigned to Homicide? Then you really had no previous experience in conducting a surveillance of a murder suspect? Is that what you’re telling me?’”

  “And then we get to re-direct,” Wohl said. “Our distinguished Assistant District Attorney—or perhaps the District Attorney himself—approaches the boy detective on the stand and asks, ‘Detective Payne, were you in any way involved in the apprehension of the so-called Northwest Serial Rapist? Oh, was that you who was forced to use deadly force to rescue Mrs. Naomi Schneider from the deadly clutches of that fiend?’”

  Callis chuckled.

  “Very good, Peter.”

  “‘And were you involved in any way, Detective Payne, in the apprehension of the persons subsequently convicted in the murders at Goldblatt’s Furniture Store? Oh, was that you who was in the deadly gun battle with one of the murderers? Mr. Atchison was not, then, the first murderer with whom you have dealt?’”

  “That could be turned against you. It could make him look like a cowboy,” Callis said.

  “The dark and stormy night is what bothers me,” Hormel said. “We have to convince the jury that the package Denny Coughlin saw them take from the river was the same package Atchison tossed in there. That’s a tenuous connection.”

  “The two South detectives saw the package being passed from Foley to Atchison,” Lowenstein said.

  “No, they didn’t,” Hormel argued. “There’s room for reasonable doubt about that. And it was a dark and stormy night. ‘How can you testify under oath, Detective Payne, that the package taken from the river by police divers was the package you saw Mr. Atchison carry out of Yock’s Diner? How can you testify under oath that, if the night was as dark as you have testified it was, and you were as far from Mr. Atchison as you say you were, that what he threw, if indeed he threw anything, into the river was that package? You couldn’t really see him, could you? You’re testifying to what you may honestly believe happened, but, honestly, you didn’t really see anything, did you?’”

  “Ah, come on, Harry!” Lowenstein protested.

  “I’m inclined to go with Harry,” Callis said. “This is weak.”

  Lowenstein stood up.

  “Always a pleasure to see you, Tom,” he said. “And you, too, Harry.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “To carry out my orders,” Lowenstein said. “I was instructed to show you what we have. Then I was instructed to arrest the sonsofbitches. Come on, Peter.”

  Wohl stood up and offered his hand to Harry Hormel.

  “Now, wait a minute,” Callis said. “I didn’t say it was no good. I said it was weak.”

  “It is,” Hormel agreed.

  “Harry,” the Dist
rict Attorney said. “You’ve gone into court with less then this, and won. Peter made a good point. All you have to do is convince the jury that these two were pursued by one of the brightest detectives on the force. A certified hero. If you handle that angle right, you can go for the death penalty and get it.”

  “It’s weak,” Harry Hormel repeated.

  “Let Harry know when you have them, Matt,” Callis said. “I’m sure he would like to be there when you confront them with the guns.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  For Frankie Foley, there had been a certain satisfying finality about his meeting with Gerry Atchison in the Yock’s Diner the previous night. He had received his final payment for the hit, and he’d gotten rid of the guns. The job was done.

  He presumed that Atchison would safely dispose of the weapons somewhere, probably throw them in the Delaware, or bury them in the woods when he was out playing weekend warrior with the National Guard. It didn’t matter.Frankie knew that once Atchison had taken the guns, and once he’d gotten out of the diner without anyone seeing them together, everything was going to be fine.

  Frankie personally thought that the bullshit Atchison insisted on going through, making him leave the guns in the garbage can in the toilet of the Yock’s Diner, and coming out, and then Atchison going in to get them, was some really silly bullshit. Atchison must have been watching spy movies on the TV or something.

  It would have made much more sense for them just to have met someplace, even in the parking lot of the Yock’s Diner, for Christ’s sake, swapped the dough for the guns, and gotten in their cars and driven away.

  On the other hand, which was why Frankie had gone along with the swapping-in-the-crapper bullshit, doing it that way had been safer than meeting him in a dark parking lot someplace.

  Frankie didn’t trust Atchison. He hadn’t trusted him in the Inferno when he’d done the job, and had taken steps to make sure that Atchison hadn’t hit him after he’d hit the wife and the partner, which would have been smart, which would have made it look like the dead guy on the floor had robbed the place and killed the partner and the wife, and Atchison was the fucking hero who had killed him.

  That “dead men tell no tales” wasn’t no bullshit. He was the only guy who could pin the job on Atchison, and Atchison knew it. If he was dead, Atchison could relax. The cops would look for-fucking-ever—or at least until something else came along—for the two robbers Atchison had made up and told the cops about.

  Frankie had considered that the reverse was also true, that if Atchison was dead, Atchison couldn’t get weak knees or something and tell the cops, “Frankie Foley is the guy who murdered my wife.” He considered hitting Atchison. It would be no trouble at all. He could have been waiting for him in the parking lot at the Yock’s Diner, put a couple of bullets into his head, and driven off and that would have been the end of it.

  Except that maybe it wouldn’t have really been the end of it. The cops would look like even bigger assholes if Atchison got hit and they couldn’t catch who had done him, either. The Ledger was already giving the cops a hard time about that. The cops would get all excited all over again, and maybe they’d get lucky.

  Frankie didn’t think Atchison would have the balls to try to kill him himself, otherwise he would have killed his wife and the partner by himself, right? And Atchison didn’t know no other professional hit men, or else he would have hired one of them to do the job, right?

  So the smart thing to do—the professional thing—was just stop right where he was. He had been paid to do a job, and he had done it, and got paid for it, and that should be the end of it. Go on to other things, right?

  If he did it that way, in a couple of weeks he could go to work in the Inferno, and tell Wanamaker’s what they could do with their fucking warehouse. The word would get out that he had done the job for Atchison, and sooner or later other jobs would come along.

  What he would have liked to have done was maybe catch an airplane and go to Las Vegas and see if he would have any luck gambling. Frankie had never been to Vegas, but he had heard there was a lot of pussy that hung around the tables, and that if they thought you were a high roller, they even sent pussy to your room. That would really be nice, go out there, win a lot of money at the crap tables, and get some pussy thrown in for good measure. But that would not have been professional. What he had to do, for a little while anyway, was play it cool.

  The cops might be watching him, and they might wonder how come he could afford to quit fucking Wanamaker’s, not to mention where he got the money to go to Vegas. In a couple of weeks, about the time he would go see Atchison and remind him about the maître d’ job, the cops would lose interest in the Inferno job, and in him. There would be other things for the cops to do.

  Neither was he, Frankie decided, going to start to spend the five grand he got right away, get a better car or something, or even some clothes. That would attract attention. When he was working at the Inferno, it would be different. If he turned up with some dough, he could explain it saying he’d won it gambling. Everybody knew that maître d’s were right in the middle of the action.

  Having decided all this, Frankie then concluded that there would be no real harm in going by Meagan’s Bar and having a couple of drinks, and maybe letting Tim McCarthy see that he was walking around with a couple, three, hundred-dollar bills snuggled up in his wallet. Not to mention letting Tim see that he was walking around not giving a tiny fuck that detectives were asking questions about him.

  And who knows, there just might be some bored wife in there looking for a little action from some real man. Tim, and if not Tim, then ol’ diarrhea mouth himself, Sonny Boyle, were talking about him to people, telling people not to let it get around, but that cops was asking about Frankie Foley. Tim and Sonny would be passing that word around, that was for damn sure, you could bet on it.

  Women like dangerous men. Frankie had read that someplace. He thought it was probably true.

  Frankie got home from Wanamaker’s warehouse a couple of minutes after six. He grabbed a quick shower, put on the two-tone jacket and a clean sports shirt, told his mother he’d catch supper some other place, he had business to do, and walked into Meagan’s Bar at ten minutes to seven.

  He really would have liked to have had a couple of shooters, maybe a jigger glass of Seagram’s-7 dropped into a draft Ortleib’s, but he thought better of it and ordered just the beer.

  Not that he was afraid of running off at the mouth or something, but rather that there maybe just might be some bored wife in there looking for a little action—you never could tell, he thought maybe he was on a roll—and if that happened, he didn’t want to be half shitfaced and ruin the opportunity.

  He paid for the Ortleib’s with one of the three hundred-dollar bills he’d put in his wallet, told Tim to have a little something with him, and when Tim made him his change, just left it there on the bar, like he didn’t give a shit about it, there was more where that come from.

  He was just about finished with the Ortleib’s, and looking for Tim to order another, when somebody yelled at Tim:

  “Hey, Tim, we need a couple of drinks down here. And give Frankie another of whatever he’s having.”

  At the end of the bar, where it right-angled to the wall by the door, were two guys. Guineas, they looked like, wearing shirts and ties and suits. That was strange, you didn’t see guineas that often in Meagan’s. The guineas had their bars and the Irish had theirs.

  But these guys had apparently been in here before. They knew Tim’s name, and Tim called back, “Johnnie Walker, right?” which meant he knew them well enough to remember what they drank.

  “Johnnie Black, if you got it,” one of the guineas called back. “And, what the hell, give Frankie one, too.”

  What the hell is this all about? Frankie wondered. What the hell, a couple of guineas playing big shot. They’re always doing that kind of shit. Something in their blood, maybe.

  Tim served the drinks, first to the guin
eas, and then carried another Ortleib’s and the bottle of Johnnie Walker and a shot glass to where Frankie sat.

  “You want a chaser with that, or what?” Tim asked as he filled the shot glass with scotch.

  “The beer’s fine,” Frankie said.

  He raised the shot glass to his lips and took a sip and looked at the guineas and waved his hand.

  One of the guineas came down the bar.

  “How are you, Frankie?” he said, putting out his hand. “The scotch all right? I didn’t think to ask did you like scotch.”

  “Fine. Thanks. Do I know you?”

  “I dunno. Do you? My name is Joey Fatalgio.”

  “Don’t think I’ve had the pleasure,” Frankie said.

  They shook hands.

  “I know who you are, of course,” Joey Fatalgio said, and winked.

  What the fuck is with the wink? This guy don’t look like no fag.

  “I come in here every once in a while,” Frankie said.

  “And maybe I seen you at the Inferno,” Fatalgio said. “Me and my brother—Dominic—that’s him down there, we go in there from time to time.”

  “Yeah, maybe I seen you in the Inferno,” Frankie said. “I hang out there sometimes. And I’m thinking of going to work there.”

  “Hey, Dominic!” Joey Fatalgio called to his brother. “Bring your glass down here and say hello to Frankie Foley.”

  Dominic hoisted himself off his stool and made his way down the bar.

  “Frankie, Dominic,” Joey made the introductions, “Dominic, Frankie.”

  “How the hell are you, Frankie?” Dominic said. “A pleasure to meet you.”

  “Likewise,” Frankie said.

  “Frankie was just telling me he’s thinking of going to work at the Inferno,” Joey said.

  “Going to work? The way I heard it, he already did the job at the Inferno,” Dominic said, and he winked at Frankie.

  Frankie felt a little nervous.

  There were guineas on the cops. Are these two cops?

  “Shut the fuck up, for Christ’s sake, Dominic,” Joey Fatalgio said. “What the fuck’s wrong with you?” He turned to Frankie. “You should excuse him, Frankie. Sometimes he gets stupid.”