It was at this point that Officer Woodrow Wilson Bailey drew the line. This was a violation of the law that presented a clear and present danger to innocent persons.
Even trash had rights. It was not fair or just that they get somebody else’s rats. And not all the people on Woodrow’s beat were trash. There were a lot of folks who reminded Woodrow of Mamma Dear and Daddy, hardworking, Christian people who had worked all their lives to buy their own home, and when they’d finally finished, about the time they went on retirement, they found that the neighborhood’s having gone to hell meant they couldn’t sell their house for beans, and were stuck in the neighborhood with the trash.
It was, in Woodrow’s mind, a sin that trash should set fires that could burn down the houses next door, taking all the poor old folks had left in the world.
Woodrow did not think of it, as some people concerned with social justice certainly would, as taking the law into his own hands. He thought of it first as something that had to be done, and rationalized that he was providing a genuine service to the people he had sworn to protect.
He dealt with people who set fires in his own way, without getting the overworked criminal justice system involved. And over the last couple of years, the word had gone out on his beat that burning garbage was socially unacceptable conduct, and that doing so brought swift punishment.
Officer Bailey was thus surprised and angry when through the open window of RPC 3913, as he rode slowly down an alley behind Shedwick Street, his nostrils detected the peculiar smell of burning garbage.
He stopped the car, put his head out the window and sniffed, and then backed the car up.
There was smoke rising above the wooden fence separating the backyard of a row house from the alley.
He was less surprised when he searched his memory and came up with the identity of the occupant of the house. White trash, and a junkie. White trash born right here in Philadelphia. His name, Woodrow recalled, was James Howard Leslie. White Male, twenty-six, 150 pounds, five feet nine. He had been in and out of some kind of confinement since he was twelve. Lived with some brown-trash Puerto Rican woman. Not married to her. Three kids; none of them looked like they ever had a decent meal.
Now he had a mental image of him. Junkie type. Long, dirty hair, looked like he hadn’t had a bath-and probably hadn’t-in two weeks. Had a little scraggly beard on the point of his chin. Called himself “Speed.”
Officer Bailey got out of his car, taking his stick with him. There was a gate in the fence, held shut with a chain and a rusty lock. Woodrow put his stick in the chain and twisted. The chain and rusty lock held; the rotten wood of the fence crushed under the pressure and gave way.
Woodrow pulled the gate open and entered the backyard. His anger grew. The fire was coming from a pile of garbage against the fence. The fire would almost certainly set the fence on fire. He saw a rat scurry out from the pile.
Flames flickered on the garbage pile. There was an old tire on the pile. Once a tire caught fire, you could hardly put it out. Tires burned hot and hard and gave off thick smoke.
First things first; get the fire out.
There was a grease can with a Texaco sign on it. Woodrow picked it up. It was empty, but there was the smell of gasoline.
“Trash!” Woodrow muttered in angry contempt.
Speed had used gasoline to start the fire. That was dangerous.
Moving quickly, Woodrow went to a water spigot. He knew where to find it, even behind the trash. All these houses were alike, like they were stamped out with a cookie cutter.
He rinsed out the Texaco grease bucket twice, then filled it up with water.
It took six buckets of water to put the fire out, and Woodrow threw a seventh one on the garbage, to be sure. As he looked for a hint of smoke, he glanced at his shoes. The shoes he had shined with such care just two hours before were now covered with filth.
Then he went to the rear door of the residence and knocked on it. There was no response. Woodrow knocked again, and again there was no response. Woodrow gave the door a couple of good licks with his stick.
“Who the fuck is that?” a voice demanded in indignation.
“Speed, get your trashy ass out here!”
James Howard Leslie appeared behind the dirty glass of his kitchen door, and then opened it.
He did not seem particularly happy to see Officer Bailey, but neither did he seem at all concerned. He was wearing dirty blue jeans, a bead necklace, and nothing else.
“What’s happening?” Mr. Leslie inquired.
Officer Bailey lost his temper. He caught Mr. Leslie’s wrist and twisted it behind his back. Then he marched Mr. Leslie off his porch and to the smoldering pile of garbage, and manipulated Mr. Leslie’s body so that his nose was perhaps six inches from the garbage.
“That’s what’s happening, Speed,” Officer Bailey said.
“Man, you’re hurting me! What the fuck!”
“You trying to burn the neighborhood down, Speed? What’s the matter with you? You lost the sense you were born with?”
“What the fuck is the big deal? So I burned some garbage! So what the fuck?”
At this point in similar situations, it was normally Officer Bailey’s practice to first hurt the trash a little, either with a slap in the face or by jabbing them in the abdomen with his stick to get their attention. To further get their attention, he would then put handcuffs about their wrists and search them for weapons and illegal substances. Very often he encountered the latter, if only a few specks of spilled marijuana in their pockets.
Then he would explain in some detail what crimes they had committed, with special emphasis on the punishments provided by law. If he had found illegal substances on their persons, so much the better.
By then, the malefactor would be contrite. He did not want to go through the inconvenience he knew would be associated with an arrest: detention in the Thirty-ninth District, followed by transportation way the hell downtown to Central Lockup. And then several hours in Central Lockup before being arraigned before a magistrate.
The malefactors knew that the magistrate would probably release them on their own recognizance, and that if they actually got to trial they would walk, but it was a fucking pain in the ass to go through all that bullshit.
Officer Bailey would at some point shortly thereafter inform the trash there was a way to avoid all the inconvenience. They could make their backyard so clean they could eat off it. Get rid of all the garbage, right down to where there once had been grass. Get it all in plastic bags or something, and put it out on the street so the garbageman could take it off.
And keep it that way from now on, or Officer Bailey, who was going to check, would come down on their trashy asses like a ton of bricks, they could believe that.
Far more often than not, the malefactors would agree to this alternate solution of the problem at hand.
Mr. Leslie had, indeed, heard stories about the old black cop who had a hair up his ass about burning garbage, and had heard stories that if he caught you, he’d make you clean up the whole goddamned place or throw your ass in jail.
He was debating- Jesus Christ, I’m tired — whether it would be better to let the cop lock him up, or clean up the yard. It would take fucking forever to get all this shit out of here.
Mr. Leslie was not given the opportunity to make a choice.
Officer Bailey just spun him around and, guiding him with one hand on his arm and the other on his shoulder, led him to the cop car. He opened the door and guided Mr. Leslie to a seat in the rear.
Then he returned to the backyard, and the pile of garbage. He took a mechanical pencil from his pocket, squatted beside the garbage, and began to shove things aside. The first item he uncovered was a wedding picture.
He looked at it carefully.
“Lord almighty!” he said wonderingly.
He stirred the garbage a bit more. He was looking for the frame it was logical to assume would be with a photograph of what was suppos
ed to be the happiest moment of a man’s life. He could not find one.
He stopped stirring, and, still squatting, was motionless in thought for about thirty seconds.
Then he stood up and walked to Leslie’s house. He rapped on the door with his nightstick until the brown-trash Puerto Rican woman appeared.
She stared at him with contempt.
“ Telefono? ” Officer Bailey inquired.
The brown-trash woman just looked at him.
He looked over her shoulder, saw a telephone sitting on top of the refrigerator, pointed to it and repeated, “ Telefono.”
Her expression didn’t change, but she shrugged, which Officer Bailey decided could be interpreted to mean that she had given him permission to enter her home.
And now the phone won’t work. They won’t have paid that bill either.
There was a dial tone.
“Homicide, Detective Kramer.”
“Detective, this is Officer Woodrow W. Bailey, of the Thirty-ninth District.”
“What can I do for you, Bailey?”
“I’d like to talk to somebody working the job of that police officer, Kellog, who was murdered.”
“What have you got, Bailey?”
“You working the job, Detective?”
“The assigned detective’s not here. But I’m working it.”
“What I got may not be anything, but I thought it was worth telling you.”
“What have you got, Bailey?”
“A fellow named James Howard Leslie-he’s a junkie, done some time for burglary-was burning garbage in his backyard.”
“And?” Detective Kramer asked, somewhat impatiently.
“I put the fire out, and then I got a good look at what he was burning. I don’t know…”
“What, Bailey?”
“There was a photograph of Officer Kellog and his wife, on their wedding day, in his garbage.”
There was a moment’s silence, and then Detective Kramer asked, very carefully: “How do you know it was Officer Kellog?”
“There’s a sign on the wall behind him. ‘Good Luck Officer Kellog From the Seventeenth District.’ And I remembered his picture in the newspapers.”
“Where’s the picture now?”
“I left it there.”
“Where’s the guy…Leslie, you said?”
“In my car. I arrested him for setting an unlawful fire.”
“Where are you?”
“Behind his house. In the alley. The 1900 block of Sedgwick Street.”
“I’ll be there in ten minutes. Don’t let him out of your sight, don’t let anybody near where you found the picture, and don’t touch nothing you don’t have to.”
Bailey hung up the telephone, then called the Thirty-ninth District and asked for a supervisor to meet him at the scene.
“What have you got, Bailey?” the Corporal inquired.
“A garbage burner,” Bailey said, and hung up.
He nodded at Leslie’s Puerto Rican woman, then walked back through the yard to his car and got behind the wheel.
“Hey, Officer, what’s happening?” Mr. Leslie inquired, sliding forward with some difficulty on the seat to get closer to the fucking cop.
“You under arrest, Speed,” Officer Bailey replied. “For setting a fire in your backyard.”
“Oh, Jesus Christ, man! For burning some fucking garbage?”
“If I was you, I’d just sit there and close my mouth,” Officer Bailey replied.
As a general rule of thumb, unless the visitor to the Mayor’s office was someone really important (“really important” being defined as someone of the ilk of a United States Senator, the Governor of the State of Pennsylvania, or the Cardinal Archbishop of the Diocese of Philadelphia) Mrs. Annette Cossino, the Mayor’s secretary, would escort the visitor to the door of the Mayor’s office, push it open, and say, “The Mayor will see you now.”
The visitor would then be able to see the Mayor deep in concentration, dealing with some document of great importance laid out on his massive desk. After a moment or two, the Mayor would glance toward the door, look surprised and apologetic, and rise to his feet.
“Please excuse me,” he would say. “Sometimes…”
Visitors would rarely fail to be impressed with the fact that the Mayor was tearing himself from Something Important to receive them.
This afternoon, however, on learning that Chief Inspector Matt Lowenstein had asked for an appointment for himself and Inspector Peter Wohl, His Honor had decided to deviate from the normal routine.
While he could not be fairly accused of being paranoid, the threatened resignation of Chief Lowenstein had caused the Mayor to consider that he really had few friends, people he could really trust, and that Matt Lowenstein was just about at the head of that short list.
“When he comes in, Annette,” the Mayor ordered, “you let me know he’s here, and I’ll come out and get him.”
Such a gesture would, the Mayor believed, permit Chief Lowenstein to understand the high personal regard in which he was held. And Peter Wohl would certainly report the manner in which Lowenstein had been welcomed to the Mayor’s office to his father. The Mayor was perfectly willing to admit-at least to himself-that his rise through every rank to Commissioner of the Philadelphia Police Department-which, of course, had led to his seeking the mayoralty-would not have been possible had not Chief Inspector Augustus Wohl covered his ass in at least half a dozen really bad situations.
And when he thought about that, he realized that Inspector Peter Wohl was no longer a nice young cop, but getting to be a power in his own right. And that he could safely add him to the short list of people he could trust.
He was pleased with his decision to greet Lowenstein and Wohl in a special manner.
And was thus somewhat annoyed when he pulled the door to his office open, a warm smile on his face, his hand extended, and found that Chief Lowenstein was at Annette’s desk talking on the telephone.
Finally, Chief Lowenstein hung up and turned around.
“Sorry,” Lowenstein said.
“What the hell was that?” Carlucci asked, somewhat sharply.
“Henry Quaire,” Lowenstein said. “There may be a break in the Kellog murder.”
“What?” the Mayor asked.
He’s not being charming, Peter Wohl thought. When Lowenstein told him that, he went right back on the job. He’s a cop, and if there is one thing a cop hates worse than a murdered cop it’s a murdered cop with no doers in sight.
“A uniform in the Thirty-ninth working his beat came across a critter, junkie, petty criminal with a record six feet long, including burglaries, burning garbage in his backyard. In the garbage was Officer Kellog’s wedding picture. The uniform called Homicide.”
“There was mention of a wedding picture in the 49s,” Carlucci said. “In a silver frame.”
“Right,” Lowenstein said.
“Where else would he get a picture of Kellog?” Carlucci asked, thoughtfully rhetoric. “Have you got the frame?”
“Yeah. That’s why Quaire called me. We got a search warrant. They found not only a silver frame, but a dozen-thirteen, actually-tape cassettes. They were in the fire, but maybe Forensics can do something with them. If Mrs. Kellog can identify the frame, or there’s something on the tapes…”
“Where’s the critter?”
“Right now, he’s on his way from the Thirty-ninth to Homicide,” Lowenstein said.
“Who’s going to interview him?”
Lowenstein shrugged. “Detective D’Amata is the assigned detective.”
“Peter, do you have Jason Washington doing anything he can’t put off for a couple of hours?” the Mayor asked, innocently.
That is, Wohl noted mentally, the first time the Mayor has acknowledged my presence.
“You want to take it away from D’Amata?” Lowenstein asked.
“I’d like an arrest in that case,” Carlucci said. “If you think it would be a good idea to have Washin
gton talk to this critter, Matt, I’d go along with that.”
“Shit,” Lowenstein said. “You find Washington, Peter,” he ordered. “I’ll call Quaire.”
“Yes, sir,” Peter said.
“Only if you think it’s a good idea, Matt,” the Mayor said. “It was only a suggestion.”
“Yeah, right,” Lowenstein said, and walked back to Mrs. Annette Cossino’s desk and reached for one of the telephones.
“D’Amata will understand, Peter,” the Mayor said.
“Yes, sir,” Peter said. “I’m sure he will.”
“Annette,” the Mayor called. “Call the Thirty-ninth. Tell the Commanding Officer I want him and this uniform standing by to come here if I need them.”
“Yes, Mr. Mayor,” Mrs. Cossino said.
“Henry,” Lowenstein said into the telephone. “When they bring in the critter from the Thirty-ninth, handcuff him to a chair in an interview room and leave him there until Washington shows up. Wohl’s putting the arm out for him now. I think that’s the way to handle the interview, and the Mayor agrees.”
He hung the phone up and turned to face Carlucci.
“Are you pissed at me, Matt?” Carlucci, sounding genuinely concerned, asked.
“When am I not pissed at you?” Lowenstein said. “It goes with the territory.”
“You don’t think it was a good idea?”
“That’s the trouble. I think it was a very good idea,” Lowenstein said.
“Sergeant Washington is en route to the Roundhouse, Mr. Mayor,” Wohl repeated.
“Great!” Carlucci said enthusiastically. Then he smiled broadly. “Let’s do this all over.”
“What?” Lowenstein asked in confusion.
“Well, Chief Lowenstein,” Carlucci said, and grabbed Lowenstein’s hand and pumped it. “And Inspector Wohl! How good of you both to come see me! It’s always a pleasure to see two of the most valuable members of the Police Department here in my office. Come in and have a cup of coffee and tell me how I may be of assistance!”
Lowenstein shook his head in resignation.
“Jesus Christ!”
“What can I do for you, Chief?”
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