He walked into the living room. Martha, in a dressing gown, was sitting on the couch. There was a coffee service on the coffee table. And a somewhat distraught-looking woman sitting in one of the armchairs, holding a coffee cup in her hands.
“Martha, I’m sorry to be so late. I was tied up.”
“That happens, doesn’t it?” Martha replied, the tone of her voice making it clear she thought he had been tied up by a slow-moving bartender.
“Good evening,” Jason said to the distraught-looking woman.
“More accurately, ‘good morning,’” Martha said. “Jason, this is Mrs. Kellog.”
“How do you do?” Jason said.
Kellog? As in Officer Kellog?
“I’m sorry to have come here like this,” Mrs. Kellog said. “But I just had to.”
“How may I help you, Mrs. Kellog?”
“Jerry Kellog was my husband,” she said.
That’s precisely what I feared. And what are you doing here, in my home?
“May I offer my condolences on your loss, Mrs. Kellog?”
“I didn’t have anything to do with him being killed,” she said. “And neither did Wally.”
Washington nodded sympathetically.
“Martha, I’m sure you’re tired,” he said.
“No. Not at all,” Martha said, smiling sweetly, letting Jason know that even if this was business he wasn’t going to dismiss her so lightly in her own home.
“Wally told me, not only Wally, but Lieutenant Sackerman, too, especially him, that you’re not only the best Homicide detective…”
“That was very gracious of Jack Sackerman,” Washington said, “we were friends for a long time.”
“…but the only cop you know is honest.”
“That’s very kind, but I cannot accept the blanket indictment of the rest of the Police Department,” Washington said. “I like to think we’re something like Ivory Soap: ninety-nine and forty-four one hundredths pure.”
Helene Kellog ignored him.
“That’s why I came to you,” she said. “I didn’t know where else to go.” She looked at him, took a deep breath, and went on: “Jerry was dirty. I know that. And-what happened to him-had something to do with that. They’re all dirty, the whole Five Squad is dirty.”
“Mrs. Kellog, when you were interviewed by detectives investigating the death of your husband, did you tell any of them what you just told me?”
She snorted.
“Of course not. They all acted like they think that I had something to do with it. Or that Wally did. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if they were in on it.”
“In on what?”
“Covering up. Maybe trying to pin it on Wally or me. Wally and me.”
“Does Detective Milham know that you’ve come to see me?”
“Of course not!”
“Why do you think anyone would want to ‘pin’ what happened to your husband on you? Or Detective Milham?”
“I just told you! To cover up. To protect themselves. They’re all dirty. The whole damned Five Squad is dirty! That’s probably why Jerry was killed. He never really wanted to get involved with that. They made him! And maybe he was going to tell somebody or do something.”
“By dirty, you mean you believe your husband was taking money from someone?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Did he tell you he was?”
“No. He wouldn’t talk about it at all.”
“Then how do you know?”
“He was getting the money from someplace.”
“What money?”
“All of the money. All of a sudden we’ve got lots of money. You’re a cop. You know how much a cop, even with overtime, makes.”
“And Jerry had large sums of money?”
“We- he — bought a condo at the shore, and there’s a boat. And he paid cash. He didn’t get that kind of money from the Police Department.”
“Did you ask him where the money came from?”
“He wouldn’t tell me. That’s when we started to have trouble, when he wouldn’t tell me.”
“Have you told anything about this to Detective Milham?”
“No.”
“May I ask why not?”
“Because if I did, he would have done something about it. He’s an honest cop.”
“Then wouldn’t he logically be the person to tell?”
“I didn’t want Jerry to go to jail,” she said. “And besides, what would it look like, coming from me? Me living with Wally. I’d look like a bitch of a wife trying to make trouble.”
“Did you come to me for advice, Mrs. Kellog?” Washington asked.
“For help. For advice.”
“If what you told me is true…”
“Of course it’s true!” she interrupted.
“…then the information you have should be placed in the hands of the people who can do something about it. I’m sure you know that we have an Internal Affairs Division…”
“If I thought I could trust Internal Affairs, I wouldn’t be here,” she said. “They’re all in on it.”
“Mrs. Kellog, I can understand why you’re upset, but believe me, you can trust Internal Affairs.”
At this moment, unfortunately, I’m not absolutely sure that’s true. And neither am I sure that what I so glibly said before, that the Department is ninety-nine and forty-four one hundredths percent pure is true, either.
She snorted.
“If I gave you the name of a staff inspector in Internal Affairs whom I can personally vouch for…”
Helene Kellog stood up.
“I guess I should have known better than to come here,” she said, on the edge of tears. “I’m sorry to have wasted your time.” She turned to Martha Washington. “Thank you.”
“Mrs. Kellog, there’s really nothing I can do to help you. I have nothing to do with either Homicide or Narcotics or Internal Affairs.”
“Like I said, I’m sorry I wasted your time,” she said. “That’s the way out, right?”
“I’ll see you to the door,” Washington said, and went with her.
At the door, she turned to him.
“Do me one favor, all right? Don’t tell Wally that I came to see you.”
“If you wish, Mrs. Kellog.”
She turned her back on him and walked down the corridor to the elevator.
Martha was waiting for him in the living room.
“I’m sorry about that, honey,” he said.
“I think she was telling the truth.”
“She believed what she was saying,” Jason said after a moment. “That is not always the same thing as the whole truth.”
“I felt sorry for her.”
“So did I.”
“But you’re not going to do anything about what she said?”
“I’ll do something about it,” he said.
“What?”
“I haven’t decided that yet. I don’t happen to think that Wally Milham had anything to do with her husband’s murder; he’s not the type. I saw him tonight, by the way. That’s where I was.”
“Excuse me?”
“I went to see Matt. We tried to go to the Rittenhouse Club for a drink, but it was closed, so we took a walk, and walked up on a double homicide. On Market Street. And we got involved in that. Wally Milham had the job.”
“You mean, you were involved in a shooting?”
“No. We got there after the fact.”
“What was so important that you had to see Matt at midnight?” Martha asked. “And be warned that ‘police business’ will not be an acceptable reply.”
He met her eyes, smiled, and shook his head.
“We’re conducting a surveillance. Earlier tonight, the microphone we had in place on a hotel window was dislodged. I learned from Tony Harris that Matt climbed out on a ledge thirteen floors up to replace the damned thing.”
“My God! At the Bellvue? When he was here, he was wearing a Bellvue maintenance uniform.”
Jason ignored the question.
“I wanted to bawl him out for that. And alone.”
“So you went to the bar at the Rittenhouse Club?”
“That was after I bawled him out.”
“After you bawled him out, you felt sorry for him?”
“I felt sorry for myself. I wanted a drink, and he didn’t have anything.”
“I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt,” Martha said, “and accept that story.”
“Thank you.”
“Do want something to eat? Coffee? Another drink?”
“If I told you what I really want, you’d accuse me of…”
“Oddly enough, I was thinking along those lines myself,” Martha said. “Why don’t you get one of those champagne splits from the fridge, while I turn off the lights.”
When Detective Wallace J. Milham walked into the Homicide Division, he saw Detective Matthew M. Payne sitting at an unoccupied desk reading the Daily News. When Payne saw him, he closed the newspaper and stood up.
Wally beckoned to him with his finger and led him into one of the interview rooms, remembering as he passed through the door that he had the previous morning given a statement of his own in the same goddamn room.
Milham sat down in the interviewee’s chair, a steel version of a captain’s chair, firmly bolted to the floor, with a pair of handcuffs locked to it through a hole in the seat.
He motioned for Payne to close the door.
Payne handed him two sheets of typewriter paper.
“I didn’t know how you wanted to handle this,” Payne said. “But I went ahead and typed out this.”
Milham read Matt’s synopsis of what had happened at the Inferno Lounge. It wasn’t up to Washington’s standards, but he was impressed with the clarity, organization, and completeness. And with the typing. There were no strike-overs.
Why the hell am I surprised? He works for Washington.
“What do you do for Washington?” he wondered aloud.
Payne looked uncomfortable.
“Whatever he tells me to do,” he said. “That wasn’t intended to be a flip answer.”
He doesn’t want to talk about what he does for Washington. That shouldn’t surprise me either. I don’t know what they’ve got Jason doing, but whatever it is, somebody thinks it’s more valuable to the Department than his working Homicide. And this guy works for him.
“Payne, I’m sorry I jumped on your ass at the Inferno. I had a really bad day yesterday, but I shouldn’t have taken it out on you.”
“No. I was out of line. You were right.”
There was a knock at the door. Wally pushed himself out of the steel captain’s chair and went to it and opened it.
A portly detective Matt recognized stood there.
“Mr. Atchison and his attorney, Mr. Sidney Margolis, are here,” he said formally, and then he recognized Matt. “Whaddayasay, Payne?”
Summers shrugged, a gesture Milham interpreted to mean Fuck you, too, and went out of the interview room.
“You know Summers?”
“The sonofabitch and another one named Kramer had me in here when I shot Stevens. The way they acted, I thought they were his big brothers.”
“When you did what? ‘Shot Stevens’?”
“Charles D. Stevens, a.k.a. Abu Ben Mohammed. He was one of the, quote, Arabs, unquote, on the Goldblatt Furniture job.”
“I remember that,” Wally said. “He tried to shoot his way out of an alley in North Philly when they went to pick him up?”
“Right.”
“And shot a cop, who then put three rounds in him? That was you?”
Matt nodded. “I took a ricochet off a wall.”
“I didn’t make the connection with you,” Wally said. And then, surprising himself, he added, “You hear about the plainclothes Narcotics guy getting shot?”
“Washington said something about it.”
“Summers had me in here earlier today. ‘What did you know about the death of Officer Jerome H. Kellog?’”
“I heard.”
“Kellog’s wife-they were separated-and I are pretty close. They had me in here. Sitting in that chair is a real bitch.”
“Yeah,” Matt agreed.
“And you took out the North Philly Serial Rapist, too, didn’t you?” Wally said, remembering.
Matt nodded.
Jesus, Wally thought, as long as I’ve been on the job, I’ve never once had to use my gun. And this kid has twice saved the City the price of a trial.
“If I give you Boy Scout’s Honor to keep my runaway mouth shut, could I hang around here?” Matt asked.
“Why would you want to do that?”
“Washington said you’re a damned good investigator. I’d like to see you work.”
Washington said that about me? I’ll be damned!
“Sure. Be my guest.”
“Where has, quote, the victim, unquote, been up to now?”
“Probably in the Hahnemann Hospital parking lot being told what not to say by his lawyer. Or deciding if it would be smarter to take the Fifth.”
“Wouldn’t he be? I had the feeling Jason Washington didn’t believe what he had to say.”
“Oh, this guy did it,” Milham responded matter-of-factly. “Or had it done. There’s not much question about that. Proving it is not going to be easy. He’s smart, and tough, and he’s got a good lawyer. But I think I’ll nail the sonofabitch.”
“Is that intuition on your part? Or Jason’s? Or did I miss something?”
“I don’t know about Washington. He sees things, senses things, that the rest of us miss. But what I saw was first of all a guy who didn’t seem all that upset to be sitting around across a desk from his wife, who had just had her brains blown out. And there’s his business partner on the floor, with bullet holes in him, too. I didn’t hear one word about ‘poor whatsisname.’ Did you?”
“Marcuzzi, Anthony J.” Matt furnished, shaking his head, no.
“‘Poor Tony, he was more than a business partner. We were very close friends. I loved him,’” Milham said mockingly.
Matt chuckled.
“On the way to Hahnemann Hospital,” Milham went on, “I guess he thought about that: ‘Jesus, I should remember that I’m supposed to be sorry as hell about this!’ He started crying in the wagon. He wasn’t all that bad, either. I almost felt sorry for him.”
“Do you think he knows that you suspect him?”
“I don’t know,” Milham replied thoughtfully. “Probably about now, yeah, I think he’s realized we haven’t swallowed his bullshit. There’s always something you forget when you set up something like this. I don’t know what the hell he forgot, not yet, but he knows. I’d say right about now, he’s getting worried.”
“What I wondered about…” Matt said. “When I got hit, it hurt like hell. He didn’t seem to be hurting much.”
“I was not surprised when the bullet they took out of him at Hahnemann,” Wally said, and dug in his pocket and came out with a plastic bag, handed it to Matt, then continued, “turned out to be a. 32. Or that he had been shot only once. Whoever shot the wife and the partner made damned sure they were dead.”
Matt examined the bullet and handed the plastic envelope back.
“And I won’t be surprised, judging by the damage they caused, when we get the bullets in the bodies from the Medical Examiner, if they are not. 32s. At least. 38s, maybe even. 45s, which do more damage. If I were a suspicious person, which is what the City pays me to be, I would wonder about that. How come the survivor has one small wound in the leg, and…”
“Yeah,” Matt said thoughtfully.
“I think it’s about time we ask them to come in,” Wally said. “You want to stick around, stick around.”
Milham got out of the captain’s chair and went to the door and opened it.
“Would you please come in, Mr. Atchison?” he asked politely.
A moment later, Atchison, his arm around the shoulder of a short, portl
y, balding man, appeared in the interview-room door.
“Feeling a little better, Mr. Atchison?” Wally asked.
“How the fuck do you think I feel?” Atchison said.
Margolis looked coldly, but without much curiosity, at Matt.
“Howareya?” he said.
Matt noticed that despite the hour-it was reasonable to presume that when Milham called him, he had been in bed-Margolis was freshly shaven and his hair carefully arranged in a manner he apparently thought best concealed his deeply receded hairline. His trousers were mussed, however, and did not match his jacket, and his white shirt was not fresh. He was not wearing a tie.
Margolis led Atchison to the captain’s chair and eased him down into it.
Matt saw that Atchison was wearing a fresh shirt and other-if not fresh-trousers. There were no bloodstains on the ones he was wearing.
“I object to having my client have to sit in that goddamned chair like you think he’s guilty of something. He just suffered a gunshot wound, for Christ’s sake!” Margolis said.
“We really don’t have anything more comfortable, Mr. Atchison,” Wally said. “But I’ll ask Detective Payne to get another chair in here so you can rest your leg on it. Would that be satisfactory?”
“It wouldn’t hurt. Let’s get this over, for God’s sake,” Atchison said. “My leg is starting to throb.”
“We’ll get through this as quickly as we can,” Matt heard Wally say as he went in search of another chair. “We appreciate your coming in here, Mr. Atchison.”
Matt found a straight-back chair and carried it into the interview room. He arranged it in front of the captain’s chair, and with a groan, Atchison lifted his leg up and rested it on it.
Matt glanced at Atchison. Atchison was examining him carefully, and Matt remembered what Wally had just said about “I think he’s realized we haven’t swallowed his bullshit.”
When Matt looked at Milham, Milham, with a nod of his head, told him to stand against the wall, behind Atchison in the captain’s chair.
A slight, gray-haired woman, carrying a stenographer’s notebook in one hand and a metal folding chair in the other, came into the room.
“This is Mrs. Carnelli,” Milham said. “A police stenographer. She’ll record this interview. Unless, of course, Mr. Atchison, you have an objection to that?”
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