Badge of Honour 06 - The Murderers

by W. E. B Griffin

  “Can’t complain, Tom. What’s up?”

  “Need a favor.”

  “Try me. All I can say is ‘no.’”

  “One of our guys, Jerry Kellog, you know him?”

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “He lives at 300 West Luray Street. He’s supposed to be here. Our Sergeant is shitting a brick. Could you send somebody over to his house and see if he’s there and wake him up and tell him to get his ass over here? I’ve been trying to call him. His phone is off the hook. I think he’s probably sleeping one off.”

  “Give me the address again and it’s done, and you owe me one.”

  A nearly new Buick turned off Seventh Street and into the parking lot at the rear of the Police Administration Building of the City of Philadelphia. The driver, Mr. Michael J. O’Hara, a wiry, curly-haired man in his late thirties, made a quick sweep through the parking lot, found no parking spot he considered convenient enough, pulled to the curb directly in front of the rear entrance to the building, and got out.A young police officer who had been on the job just over a year, and assigned to duty at the PAB three days before, intercepted Mr. O’Hara as he headed toward the door.

  “Excuse me, sir,” he said. “You can’t leave your car there.”

  Mr. O’Hara smiled at what he considered the young officer’s rather charming naivete.

  “It’s OK, son,” he said. “I’m Commissioner Czernich’s bookie.”

  “Excuse me?” the young officer said, not quite believing what he heard.

  “The Commissioner,” Mr. O’Hara went on, now enjoying himself, “put two bucks on a long shot. It paid a hundred ninety-eight eighty. When I come here to pay him off, he says I can park anywhere I want.”

  The young officer’s uneasiness was made worse by the appearance of Chief Inspector Heinrich “Heine” Matdorf, Chief of Training for the Philadelphia Police Department, whom the young officer remembered very clearly from his days at the Police Academy. It was the first time the young officer had ever seen him smile.

  “What did you tell him?” Chief Matdorf asked.

  “I told him I was Czernich’s bookie.”

  “Jesus Christ, Mickey!” Matdorf laughed, patting him on the back as he did so.

  As the young police officer had begun to suspect, the driver of the Buick was not a bookmaker. Mr. Michael J. “Mickey” O’Hara was in fact a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter employed by the Philadelphia Bulletin. There was little question in the minds of his peers—and absolutely none in his own mind—that he was the best police reporter between Boston and Washington, and possibly in an even larger geographical area.

  Mickey O’Hara extended his hand to Matdorf’s driver, a sergeant.

  “How are you, Mr. O’Hara?” the Sergeant asked, a respectful tone in his voice.

  “Heine,” O’Hara asked, “have you got enough pull around here to tell this fine young officer I can park here?”

  “The minute he goes inside,” Chief Matdorf instructed the young officer, “let the air out of his tires.”

  “Thanks a lot, Heine.”

  “What’s going on, Mickey?”

  “I hoped maybe you could tell me,” O’Hara said.

  “So far as I know, not much. There was nothing on the radio.”

  “I know,” O’Hara said.

  “Going in, Mickey?” Matdorf asked.

  “I got to pay off the Commissioner,” O’Hara said. “And I thought I might take a look at the Overnights.”

  The Overnights were reports from the various districts and other bureaucratic divisions of the Philadelphia Police Department of out-of-the-ordinary police activity overnight furnished to senior police officials for their general information.

  They were internal Police Department correspondence not made available to the public or the press. Mr. Michael J. O’Hara, as a civilian, and especially as a journalist, was not entitled to be privy to them.

  But Mickey O’Hara enjoyed a special relationship with the Police Department. He was not in their pocket, devoting his journalistic skills to puff pieces, but on the other hand, neither did he spend all of his time looking for stories that made the Department or its officers look bad. Most important, he could be trusted. If he was told something off the record, it stayed off the record.

  “Come on in, then,” Chief Matdorf said. “I’ll even buy you a cup of coffee.”

  He touched O’Hara’s arm and they started toward the rear door of the building. There is a front entrance, overlooking Metropolitan Hospital, but it is normally locked. The rear door opens onto a small foyer. Just inside is a uniformed police officer sitting behind a heavy plate-glass window controlling access to the building’s lobby with a solenoid switch.

  To the right is a corridor leading past the Bail Clerk’s Office and the Arraignment Room to the Holding Room. The Municipal Judge’s Court is a small, somewhat narrow room separated from the corridor by heavy glass. There are seats for spectators in the corridor. Farther to the right is the entrance to the Holding Room, in effect a holding prison, to which prisoners brought from the various police districts and initially locked up in cells in the basement are brought to be booked and to face a Municipal Court Judge, who sets bail. Those prisoners for whom bail is denied, or who can’t make it, are moved, males to the Detention Center, females to the House of Correction.

  When the corporal on duty behind the plate-glass window saw Chief Matdorf, he activated the solenoid, the lock buzzed, and Matdorf pushed the door open and waved O’Hara through it ahead of him into the lobby of the PAB, where the general civilian populace is not allowed.

  They walked toward the elevators, past the wall display of photographs of police officers who have been killed in the line of duty. As they approached the elevator, the door opened and discharged a half-dozen people, among them Chief Inspector Dennis V. Coughlin and Inspector Peter Wohl.

  “Hey, whaddaya say, Mickey?” Chief Coughlin greeted him with a smile, and offered his hand.

  “Hello, Mick,” Wohl said, as he offered his hand first to O’Hara and then to Chief Matdorf.

  Mickey O’Hara had not earned the admiration of his peers, or the Pulitzer Prize, by being wholly immune to the significance of body language.

  Despite that warm greeting, neither of these two is at all happy to see me. That means that something is going on that they would rather not tell me about just now. And what are the two of them doing together this early in the morning?

  “What’s up, Mickey?” Chief Coughlin asked.

  “I hoped maybe you would tell me.”

  Chief Coughlin shrugged, indicating nothing.

  Bullshit, Denny.

  “I thought I’d take a look at the Overnights,” O’Hara said.

  “They’re on my desk, Mick. Tell Veronica I said you could have a look,” Coughlin said.

  Veronica Casey was Coughlin’s secretary.

  “Thanks, Denny,” O’Hara said. “Good to see you. And you too, Peter.”

  They shook hands again. Chief Coughlin and Inspector Wohl walked out the rear entrance. Mickey got on the elevator with Chief Matdorf and his driver.

  “Jesus, I forgot something in the car,” O’Hara said, and got off the elevator.

  He went through the rear door in time to see Coughlin and Wohl walking with what he judged to be unusual speed toward their cars. He stayed just inside the door until they were both in their cars and moving, then went out and quickly got behind the wheel of his Buick and followed them out of the parking lot.

  Those two are going somewhere interesting together, somewhere they hope I won’t show up.

  He turned on all three of the shortwave receivers mounted under the dashboard. The receivers in Mickey O’Hara’s car were the best the Bulletin’s money could buy. They were each capable of being switched to receive any of the ten different frequencies utilized by the Police Department.

  One of these was the universal band (called the J-Band) to which every police vehicle had access. Each of Ph
iladelphia’s seven police divisions had its own radio frequency. An eighth frequency (the H-Band) was assigned for the exclusive use of investigative units (detectives’ cars, and those assigned to Narcotics, Intelligence, Organized Crime, etcetera). And since Mayor Jerry Carlucci had gotten all that lovely ACT Grant money from Congress, there was a new special band (the W-Band) for the exclusive use of Special Operations (including the Highway Patrol).

  Ordinary police cars were limited to the use of two bands, the Universal J Band, and either one of the division frequencies, or the H (Detective) Band.

  Mickey switched one of his radios to the J (Universal) Band, the second to the H (Detective) Band, and the third to the W (Special Operations) Band, a little smugly deciding that if anything interesting was happening, or if Wohl and Coughlin wanted to talk to each other, the odds were that it would come over one of the three.

  It quickly became clear that wherever the two of them were going, they were going together and in a hurry. Wohl stayed on Coughlin’s bumper as they drove through Center City and then out the Parkway and along the Schuylkill.

  Nothing of interest came over the radio, however, as they left Center City behind them, and an interesting thought destroyed some of Mickey’s good feeling that he had outwitted Denny Coughlin and Peter Wohl.

  It is entirely possible that those two bastards have decided to pull my chain. They saw me watch them leave the Roundhouse, and before I got into my car one or the other of them got on his radio and said, “If Mickey follows us, let’s take him on a tour of Greater Philadelphia.” They’re probably headed nowhere special at all, and after I follow them to hell and gone, they will pull into a diner someplace for a cup of coffee, and wait for me with a broad smile.

  He had just about decided this was a very good possibility when there was activity on the radio.

  “William One.”

  “William One,” Peter Wohl’s voice responded.

  “William Two requests a location.”

  Mickey knew that William Two was the call sign of Captain Mike Sabara, Wohl’s second-in-command.

  “Inform William Two I’m on my way to Chestnut Hill and I’ll phone him from there.”

  Damn, they got me! The two of them are headed for Dave Pekach’s girlfriend’s house. She’s having an engagement party the day after tomorrow. It has to be that. Why else would the two of them be going to Chestnut Hill at this time of the morning?

  Mickey turned off the Schuylkill Expressway onto the Roosevelt Boulevard extension.

  I’ll go get some breakfast at the Franklin Diner and then I’ll go home.

  He reached down and moved the switch on the third of his radio receivers from the Special Operations frequency so that it would receive the police communications of the East Division. He did this without thinking, in what was really a Pavlovian reflex, whenever he drove out of one police division into another.

  And there was something going on in the Twenty-fifth District.

  “Twenty-five Seventeen,” a voice said.

  “Twenty-five Seventeen,” a male police-radio operator responded immediately.

  “Give me a supervisor at this location. This is a Five Two Nine Two, an off-duty Three Six Nine.”

  Mickey knew police-radio shorthand as well as any police officer. A Five Two Nine Two, an off-duty Three Six Nine, meant the officer was reporting the discovery of a body, that of an off-duty cop.

  A “dead body,” even of a cop, was not necessarily front-page news, but Mickey’s ears perked up.

  “Twenty-five A,” the police radio operator called.

  “Twenty-five A,” the Twenty-fifth District sergeant on patrol responded. “What’s that location?”

  “300 West Luray Street.”

  “I got it,” Twenty-five A announced. “En route.”

  And then Mickey’s memory turned on.

  Mickey glanced in his rearview mirror, hit the brakes, made a tire-squealing U-turn, and headed for 300 West Luray Street.

  One of the unofficial perquisites of being the Commanding Officer of Highway Patrol was that of being picked up at your home and driven to work, normally a privilege accorded only to Chief Inspectors. A Highway car just seemed to be coincidentally in the neighborhood of the Commanding Officer every day at the time the Commanding Officer would be leaving for work. Captain David Pekach, however, normally chose to forgo this courtesy. He said that it would be inappropriate, especially since Inspector Peter Wohl, his superior, usually drove himself.While this was of course true, Captain Pekach had another reason for waiving the privilege of being picked up at home and driven to work, and then being driven home again when the day’s work was over. This was because it had been a rare night indeed, since he had met Miss Martha Peebles, that he had laid his weary head to rest on his own pillow in his small apartment.

  He believed that any police supervisor—and he was Commanding Officer of Highway, which made him a special sort of supervisor—should set an example in both his professional and personal life for his subordinates. The officers of Highway would not understand that his relationship with Martha was love of the most pure sort, and a relationship which he intended to dignify before God and man in holy matrimony in the very near future.

  He was painfully sensitive to the thoughts of his peers—the most cruel “joke” he had heard was that “the way to get rich was to have a dong like a mule and find yourself a thirty-five-year-old rich-as-hell virgin”—and if they, his friends, his fellow captains, were unable to understand what he and Martha shared, certainly he could not expect more from rank-and-file officers.

  Obviously, if he was picked up and dropped off every day at Martha’s house, there would be talk. So he drove himself. And it was nobody’s business but his own that he had arranged with the telephone company to have the number assigned to his apartment transferred to Martha’s house, so that if anyone called his apartment, he would get the call in Chestnut Hill.

  In just five weeks, he thought as he got into his assigned Highway Patrol car and backed it out of the five-car garage behind Martha’s house, the problem would be solved, and the deception no longer necessary. They would be married.

  They would already be married if they were both Catholic or, for that matter, both Episcopal. Both Martha and his mother had climbed up on a high horse about what was the one true faith. His mother said she would witness her son getting married in a heathen ceremony over her dead body, and Martha had said that she was sorry, she had promised her late father she would be married where he had married, and his father before him, in St. Mark’s Church in Center City Philadelphia.

  Her father would, she said, tears in her eyes, which really hurt Dave Pekach, turn over in his grave if she broke her word to him, and worse, were married according to the rules of the Church of Rome, which would have required her to promise any children of their union to be raised in the Roman Catholic faith.

  Extensive appeals through the channels of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, lasting months, had resulted in a compromise. After extensive negotiations, with the prospective groom being represented by Father Kaminski, his family’s parish priest, and the prospective bride by Brewster Cortland Payne II, Esq., the compromise had been reached in a ninety-second, first-person conversation between the Cardinal of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia and his good friend the Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Philadelphia, with enough time left over to schedule eighteen holes at Merion Golf Course and a steak supper the following Wednesday.

  It had been mutually agreed that the wedding would be an ecumenical service jointly conducted by the Episcopal Bishop and a Roman Catholic Monsignor, and the prospective bride would be required only to promise that she would raise any fruit of their union as “Christians.”

  Mother Pekach had been, not without difficulty, won over to the compromise by Father Kaminski, who reminded her what St. Paul had said about it being better to marry than to burn, and argued that if the Cardinal himself was going to send Monsignor O’Hallohan, the Ch
ancellor of the Archdiocese, himself, to St. Mark’s Church for the wedding, it really couldn’t be called a heathen ceremony in a heathen church.

  There would be a formal announcement of their engagement the day after tomorrow, at a party, with the wedding to follow a month later.

  Captain Pekach drove out the gates of the Peebles’ estate at 606 Glengarry Lane in Chestnut Hill, and tried to decide the best way to get from there to Frankford and Castor avenues at this time of the morning. He decided he would have a shot at going down North Broad, and then cutting over to Frankford. There was no good way to get from here to there.

  He reached under the dashboard without really thinking about it and turned on both of the radios with which his car, and those of half a dozen other Special Operations/Highway Patrol cars, were equipped.

  As he approached North Broad and Roosevelt Boulevard, the part of his brain which was subconsciously listening to the normal early-morning radio traffic was suddenly wide awake.

  “Give me a supervisor at this location. This is a Five Two Nine Two, an off-duty Three Six Nine.”

  “Twenty-five A,” the police radio operator called.

  “Twenty-five A,” the Twenty-fifth District sergeant on patrol responded. “What’s that location?”

  “300 West Luray Street.”

  300 West Luray Street? My God, that’s Jerry Kellog’s address. Jerry Kellog? Dead? Jesus, Mary and Joseph!

  “I got it,” Twenty-five A announced. “En route.”

  Without really being aware of what he was doing, Captain Pekach reached down and turned on the lights and siren and pushed the accelerator to the floor.

  It took him less than three minutes to reach 300 West Luray Street, but that was enough time for him to have second thoughts about his rushing to the scene.For one thing, it’s none of my business.

  But on the other hand, anything that happens anywhere in the City of Philadelphia is Highway’s business, and I’m the Highway Commander.

  That’s bullshit and you know it.

  But Jerry Kellog is one of my guys.