The Murderers boh-6

by W. E. B Griffin

  “Milham and Mrs. Kellog seem pretty tight; I don’t think she was going to go back to her husband.”

  “I noticed that,” Washington said. “But neither of us have any way of knowing what Kellog was thinking, perhaps irrationally. Losing your wife to another man is traumatic. If she left him because of what he was doing, or, more to the point, because of what it was doing to him, and thus to their relationship, it’s entirely possible that he thought by stopping what he was doing he might be able to get her back. Whatever was on those tapes that we can’t find might have been his insurance.”

  “Excuse me?” Matt interrupted. He was having trouble following Washington’s reasoning; the introduction of the missing tapes left him wholly confused.

  “I’m quitting, I’m through,” Washington said. “I’m not going to squeal, but just to keep anyone from getting any clever ideas, I have tapes of whatever that will wind up in the hands of Internal Affairs if anything happens to me.”

  “This is starting to sound like a cops show on television,” Matt said. “A very convoluted plot.”

  “Yes,” Washington said thoughtfully. “It does. And that bothers me.” He was silent for a moment, then changed the subject. “For a number of reasons, including not wanting Wally Milham to think I’m pushing him out of the way, I am not going with you when you chat with Mr. Foley.”

  “OK,” Matt said. “You going to tell me the other reasons?”

  “I’ll take you back to the Media police station,” Washington said, ignoring the question. “We will get Wally Milham on the telephone and decide where you are to meet. Then you can get in your car and meet him. Relay to him in appropriate detail the essence and the ambience of our conversation with Mr. Atchison.”

  “OK.”

  Officer Paul Thomas O’Mara, Inspector Wohl’s administrative assistant, knocked on Wohl’s office door, and then, without waiting for a reply, pushed it open.

  “Mr. Giacomo for Inspector Weisbach on Four,” he announced.

  Staff Inspector Michael Weisbach was sitting slumped on Wohl’s couch, his legs stretched out in front of him, balancing a cup of coffee on his chest.

  Wohl, behind his desk, picked up one of the telephones and punched a button.

  “Peter Wohl, Armando,” he said. “How are you? How odd that you should call. Mike and I were just talking about you. Here he is.”

  Weisbach smiled as he walked behind Wohl’s desk and took the telephone. They had not been talking about Giacomo. They had been discussing the time-consuming difficulty they would have in investigating the personal finances of the Narcotics Five Squad, and the inevitability that their interest would soon become known.

  “Hello, Armando,” Weisbach said. “What can I do for you?”

  He moved the receiver off his ear so that Wohl could hear the conversation.

  “I wanted you to know I haven’t forgotten our conversation at luncheon, Mike, and that I have already begun to accumulate some information-nothing yet that I’d feel comfortable about passing on to you-but I am beginning to hear some interesting things. I need some time, you’ll understand, to make certain that what I pass on to you is reliable.”

  “My heart is always warmed, Armando, when citizens such as yourself go out of their way to assist the police.”

  Wohl chuckled.

  “I consider it my civic duty,” Giacomo said.

  “Armando, perhaps I could save you some time, keep you from chasing a cat, so to speak, that’s already nearly in the bag. In our own plodding way, we have come up with a name. What I’m getting at, Armando, is that it would bother me if you came up with a name we already have, and you would still figure we owed you.”

  “What’s the name?”

  “Frankie Foley,” Weisbach said.

  “He wasn’t, between us, one of the names I heard. Frankie Foley?”

  “Frankie Foley.”

  “How interesting.”

  “Nice to talk to you, Armando,” Weisbach said. “I appreciate the call.”

  He hung up.

  “Why did you give him Foley’s name?” Wohl asked. “A question, not a criticism.”

  “By now, Foley probably knows we’re looking at him. If he told Giacomo, or the mob found out some other way, Italian blood being stronger than Irish water, they may have decided to give him to us to keep Cassandro out of jail.”

  “Michael, you are devious. I say that as a compliment.”

  “So maybe, with Foley taken off the table, Giacomo may come up with another name.”

  Frankie Foley waited impatiently, time card in hand, for his turn to punch out. He really hated Wanamaker’s, having to spend all day busting open crates, breaking his hump shoving furniture around, and for fucking peanuts.

  It would, he consoled himself, soon be over. He could tell Stan Wisznecki, his crew chief, to shove his job up his ass. He would go to work in the Inferno, get himself some decent threads with the money Atchison owed him, and wait for the next business opportunity to come along. And he wasn’t going to do the next hit for a lousy five thousand dollars. He’d ask for ten, maybe even more, depending on who he had to hit.

  Frankie had been a little disappointed with the attention, or lack of it, paid to the Inferno hit by the newspapers and TV. There had been almost nothing on the TV, and only a couple of stories in the newspapers.

  He had, the day after he’d made the Inferno hit, clipped out Michael J. O’Hara’s story about it from the Bulletin with the idea of keeping it, a souvenir, like of his first professional job.

  But after he’d cut it out he realized that might not be too smart. If the cops got his name somehow, and got a search warrant or something, and found it, it would be awkward explaining what he was doing with it.

  Not incriminating. What the fuck could they prove just because he’d cut a story out of the newspaper? He could tell them he’d cut it out because he drank in the Inferno. Shit, if they pressed him, he could say he cut it out because he had fucked Alicia Atchison.

  But it was smarter not to have it, so he had first crumpled up the clipping and tossed it in the toilet, and then, when he thought that the front page now had a hole in it where the story had been, tore off the whole front page and sliced it up with scissors and flushed the whole damn thing down the toilet. He really hated to throw the story away, but knew that it was the smart thing to do.

  And anyway, the word would get out who’d done the hit among the people who mattered. That was what mattered.

  He knew he’d done the right thing, not keeping the clipping, when Tim McCarthy, who ran Meagan’s Bar for his father-in-law, called him up and told him that a couple of cops had been in the bar, asking about him, and giving Tim some bullshit that one of them was a cousin from Conshohocken.

  What that meant, Frankie decided professionally, was that his name had come up somehow. That was to be expected. He drank at the Inferno, and he had been in there the night he’d made the hit. The cops probably had a list of two hundred people who drank in the Inferno. They probably got his name from the bartender. Which was the point. He was only one more name they would check out. And the bartender, if he had given the cops his name, would also have told them that he had left the Inferno long before the hit.

  The cops didn’t have a fucking thing to connect him with the hit, except Atchison, of course, and Atchison couldn’t say a fucking word. It would make him an accessible, or whatever the fuck they called it.

  He hadn’t been too upset, either, when Sonny Boyle had called him to tell him two detectives had been to see him about him. He had been sort of flattered to learn who they were. One of them was the cop that had caught up with the guy who shot the Highway Patrol captain, and the other detective was the guy who had shot the pervert in Northwest Philly who was cutting the teats off women. What that was, Frankie decided professionally, was that the ordinary cops and detectives was having trouble finding him. He didn’t have no record, for one thing, and the phone was in his mother’s name. So when the
ordinary cops couldn’t find him, the hotshots had started looking for him.

  Well, fuck the hotshots too. They would eventually find him-it would be kind of interesting to see how long finding him took-and they would ask him questions. Yeah, I was in the Inferno that night. I go in there all the time. I been talking to Mr. Atchison about maybe becoming his headwaiter. Where was I at midnight? I was home in bed. Ask my mother. No, I don’t have no idea who might have shot them two. Sorry.

  The dinge ahead of him in line finally figured out how to get his time card punched and Frankie stepped to the time clock, punched out, put the card in the rack, and walked out of the building.

  He had gone maybe thirty feet down the street when there was a guy walking on each side of him. The one on his right had a mustache, one of the thin kind you probably have to trim every day. The other one was much younger. He didn’t look much like a cop, more like a college kid.

  “Frank Foley?” the one with the mustache asked.

  “Who wants to know?”

  “We’re police officers,” the guy with the mustache said.

  “No shit? What do you want with me?”

  “You are Frank Foley?”

  “Yeah, I’m Frank Foley. You got a badge or something?”

  The guy with the mustache produced a badge.

  “I’m Detective Milham,” he said. “And this is Detective Payne.”

  Frankie took a second look at the kid.

  “You the guy who shot that pervert in North Philly? The one who was cutting up all them women?”

  “That’s him,” Milham said.

  “I’ll be goddamned,” Frankie said, putting out his hand. “I thought you’d be older. Let me shake your hand. It’s a real pleasure to meet you.”

  The kid looked uncomfortable.

  Modesty, Frankie decided.

  Frankie was genuinely pleased to meet Detective Payne.

  This guy is a real fucking detective, Frankie decided, somebody who had also shot somebody. Professionally. When you think about it, what it is is that we’re both professionals. We just work the other side of the street, is all.

  “Detective Payne,” Milham said, “was also involved in the gun battle with the Islamic Liberation Army. Do you remember that?”

  Payne looked at Milham with mingled surprise and annoyance.

  “The dinges that robbed Goldblatt’s?” Frankie asked. “That was you, too?”

  “That was him,” Milham said.

  “Mr. Foley, we’re investigating the shooting at the Inferno Lounge,” Matt said.

  “Wasn’t that a bitch?” Frankie replied. “Jesus, you don’t think I had anything to do with that, do you?”

  “We just have a few questions we’d like to ask,” Matt said.

  “Such as?”

  “Mr. Foley,” Wally Milham said, “would you be willing to come to Police Administration with us to make a statement?”

  “A statement about what?”

  “We’ve learned that you were in the Inferno Lounge that night.”

  “Yeah, I was. I stop in there from time to time. I guess I was there maybe an hour before what happened happened.”

  “Well, maybe you could help us. Would you be willing to come with us?” Wally asked.

  “How long would it take?”

  “Not long. We’d just like to get on record what you might have seen when you were there. It might help us to find the people who did it.”

  The smart thing for me to do is look like I’m willing to help. And what the fuck choice do I have?

  “Yeah, I guess I could go with you,” Frankie said.

  “We’ve got a car right over there, Mr. Foley,” Matt said. “And when we’re finished, we’ll see that you get wherever you want to go.”

  Frankie got in the backseat of the car and saw for himself that the story that went around that once you got in the backseat of a cop car, you couldn’t get out until they let you; that there was no handles in the backseat was bullshit. This was like a regular car; the handles worked.

  He got a little nervous when he saw the two detectives having a little talk before they got in themselves. They had their backs to him, and talked softly, and he didn’t hear what Detective Milham said to Detective Payne:

  “This asshole thinks you’re hot shit, Matt. Sometimes that means they’ll run off at the mouth. When we get to the Roundhouse, you interview the sonofabitch. Charm the bastard.”

  “You think he did it?”

  “This fucker is crazy. Let’s see what he has to say.”

  STATEMENT OF: John Francis “Frankie” Foley

  DATE AND TIME: 5:40 p.m. May 22, 1975

  PLACE: Homicide Division, Police Admin. Bldg. Room A.

  CONCERNING: Robbery/Homicide at Inferno Lounge

  IN PRESENCE OF: Det. Wallace J. Milham, Badge 626

  INTERROGATED BY: Det. Matthew M. Payne, Badge 701

  RECORDED BY: Mrs. Jo-Ellen Garcia-Romez, Clerk/typist

  I AM Detective Payne. This is Mrs. Garcia-Romez, who will be recording everything we say on the typewriter.

  We are questioning you concerning the murder homicide at the Inferno Lounge.

  We have a duty to explain to you and to warn you that you have the following legal rights:

  A. You have the right to remain silent and do not have to say anything at all.

  B. Anything you say can and will be used against you in Court.

  75-331D (Rev. 7/70) Page 1

  C. You have a right to talk to a lawyer of your own choice before we ask you any questions, and also to have a lawyer here with you while we ask questions.

  D. If you cannot afford to hire a lawyer, and you want one, we will see that you have a lawyer provided to you, free of charge, before we ask you any questions.

  E. If you are willing to give us a statement, you have a right to stop anytime you wish.

  1. Q. Do you understand that you have a right to keep quiet and do not have to say anything at all?

  A. Yeah. I understand.

  2. Q. Do you understand that anything you say can and will be used against you?

  A. Did I miss something? Am I arrested or something?

  3. Q. Do you want to remain silent?

  A. No.

  4. Q. Do you understand you have a right to talk to a lawyer before we ask you any questions?

  A. Yeah, but what you guys said was just that you wanted to talk to me.

  5. Q. Do you understand that if you cannot afford to hire a lawyer, and you want one, we will not ask you any questions until a lawyer is appointed for you free of charge?

  A. Yes, I do.

  6. Q. Do you want to talk to a lawyer at this time, or to have a lawyer with you while we ask you questions?

  A. I don’t have nothing to hide.

  7. Q. Are you willing to answer questions of your own free will, without force or fear, and without any threats and promises having been made to you?

  A. Yeah, yeah, get on with it.

  75-331D(Rev. 7/70) Page 2

  (Det. Milham) Frankie, to clear things up in your mind. That’s what they call the Miranda questions. Everybody we talk to gets the same questions.

  A: Am I arrested, for Christ’s sake, or not?

  (Det. Milham) You are not under arrest.

  A: You had me worried there for a minute.

  8. Q. For the record, Mr. Foley, state your name, city of residence, and employment.

  A. Frank Foley, Philadelphia. Right now, I work for Wanamaker’s.

  9. Q. Mr. Foley, were you in the Inferno Lounge the night there was a double murder there?

  A. Yeah, I was. Just before midnight.

  10. Q. What were you doing there?

  A. I stopped in for a drink. I drink there every once in a while.

  11. Q. That’s all? Just for a drink?

  A. I been talking with Atchison, the guy who owns it, about maybe going to work there as the headwaiter.

  12. Q. Does the Inferno have a headwaiter?


  A. Well, you know what I mean. I’d sort of keep an eye on things. That’s a pretty rough neighborhood, you know what I mean.

  13. Q. Oh, you mean sort of be the bouncer?

  A. They don’t like to use that word. But yeah, sort of a bouncer.

  14. Q. You have experience doing that sort of thing?

  A. Not really. But I was a Marine. I can take care of myself. Handle things. You know.

  15. Q. When you were in Inferno, the night of the shooting, did you talk to Mr. Atchison about your going to work for him?

  A. I guess we talked about it. When I came in, we went to his office for a drink. I don’t remember exactly what we talked about, but maybe we did. We been talking about it all along.

  16. Q. You went to his office? You didn’t drink at the bar?

  A. Mr. Atchison don’t like to buy people drinks at the bar. You know. So we went downstairs to his office.

  75-331D (Rev. 7/70) Page 3

  17. Q. Was Mrs. Atchison in the Inferno when you were there?

  A. No. He said she and Marcuzzi went somewheres.

  18. Q. You knew Mrs. Atchison?

  A. Yeah, you could put it that way. Nice-looking broad. Had a roving eye, you know what I mean?

  19. Q. You knew her pretty well, then?

  A. Not as well as I would have liked to.

  20. Q. Tell us exactly what you did when you went to the Inferno?

  A. Well, I went in, and had a drink at the bar, and then Atchison came over, and asked me to go to the office, and we had a drink down there. And then I left.

  21. Q. How long would you say you were in the Inferno?

  A. Thirty minutes, tops. Ten minutes, maybe, in the bar and then fifteen, twenty minutes down in his office.

  22. Q. We’ve heard that Mr. Atchison used to keep a lot of money in the office. That he used to make loans. You ever hear that?

  A. Yeah, sure. He did that. That was one of the reasons we was talking about me working for him. People sometimes don’t pay when they’re supposed to.

  23. Q. And you were going to help him collect his bad debts.

  A. Not only that. Just be around the place. Keep the peace. You know.

  24. Q. When you were in the Inferno, did you notice anything out of the ordinary?