Badge of Honour 06 - The Murderers

by W. E. B Griffin

  Lieutenant Swann stood up and put out his hand.

  “Anytime, Jason. Nice to see you—again—Payne.”

  Goddamn it, he does remember.

  “It was much nicer to come in the front door all by myself,” Matt said.

  “Well, what the hell,” Lieutenant Swann said, laughing. “We all stub our toes once in a while. You seem to be on the straight and narrow now.”

  “I don’t know what that was all about,” Washington said, “but appearances, Johnny, can be deceiving.”

  320 Wilson Avenue, Media, Pennsylvania, was a two-story brick Colonial house sitting in a well-kept lawn on a tree-lined street. A cast-iron jockey on the lawn held a sign reading “320 Wilson, Atchison.” There was a black mourning wreath hanging on the door. Decalcomania on the small windows of the white door announced that the occupants had contributed to the Red Cross, United Way, Boy Scouts, and the Girl Scout Cookie Program. When Washington pushed the doorbell, they could hear chimes playing, “Be It Ever So Humble, There’s No Place Like Home.”A young black maid in a gray dress answered the door.

  “Mr. Atchison, please,” Jason said. “My name is Washington.”

  “Mr. Atchison’s not at home,” the maid said. The obvious lie made her obviously nervous.

  “Please tell Mr. Atchison that Sergeant Washington of the Philadelphia Police Department would be grateful for a few minutes of his time.”

  She closed the door in their faces. What seemed like a long time later, it reopened. Gerald North Atchison, wearing a crisp white shirt, no tie, slacks, and leaning on a cane, stood there.

  “Good afternoon, Mr. Atchison,” Washington said cordially. “Do you remember me?”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  “How’s the leg?” Washington asked.

  For answer, Atchison raised the cane and waved it.

  “You remember Detective Payne?”

  “Yeah, sure. How are you, Payne?”

  “Mr. Atchison.”

  “We really hate to disturb you at home, Mr. Atchison,” Washington said. “But we have a few questions.”

  “I was hoping you were here to tell me you got the bastards who did…”

  “We’re getting closer, Mr. Atchison. It’s getting to be a process of elimination. We think you can probably help us, if you can spare us a minute or two.”

  “Christ, I don’t know. My lawyer told me I wasn’t to answer any more questions if he wasn’t there.”

  “Sidney Margolis is protecting your interests, as he should. But we’re trying to keep this as informal as possible. To keep you from having to go to Mr. Margolis’s office, or ours.”

  “Yeah, I know. But…”

  “Let me suggest this, Mr. Atchison, to save us both time and inconvenience. I give you my word that if you find any of my questions are in any way inconvenient, if you have any doubt whatever that you shouldn’t answer them without Mr. Margolis’s advice, you simply say ‘Pass,’ and I will drop that question and any similar to it.”

  “Well, Sergeant, you put me on a spot. You know I want to cooperate, but Margolis said…”

  “The decision, of course, is yours. And I will understand no matter what you decide.”

  Atchison hesitated a moment and then swung the door open.

  “What the hell,” he said. “I want to be as helpful as I can. I want whoever did what they did to my wife and Tony Marcuzzi caught and fried.”

  “Thank you very much,” Washington said. “There’s just a few things that we’d like to ask your opinion about.”

  “Whatever I can do to help,” Atchison said. “Can I have the girl get you some coffee? Or something stronger?”

  “I don’t know about Matt here, but the detective in me tells me it’s very likely that a restaurateur would have some drinkable coffee in his house.”

  “I have some special from Brazil,” Atchison said. “Bean coffee. Dark roast. I grind it just before I brew it.”

  “I accept your kind invitation,” Washington said.

  “And so do I,” Matt said.

  “Let me show it to you,” Atchison said.

  They followed him into the kitchen and watched his coffee-brewing ritual.

  Washington, Matt thought, looked genuinely interested.

  Finally they returned to the living room.

  “Sit down,” Atchison said. “Let me know how I can help.”

  Washington sipped his coffee.

  “Very nice!”

  “I’m glad you like it,” Atchison said.

  “Mr. Atchison,” Washington began. “As a general rule of thumb, in cases like this, we’ve found that usually robbers will observe a place of business carefully before they act. And we’re working on the premise that whoever did this were professional criminals.”

  “They certainly seemed to know what they were doing,” Atchison agreed.

  “So it would therefore follow that they did, in fact, more than likely, decide to rob your place of business some time, days, weeks, before they actually committed the crime. That they (a) decided that your establishment was worth their time and the risk involved to rob; and (b) planned their robbery carefully.”

  “I can see what you mean,” Atchison said.

  “Would you say that it was common knowledge that you sometimes had large amounts of cash on the premises?”

  “I think most bars and restaurants do,” Atchison said. “They have to. A good customer wants to cash a check for a couple of hundred, even a thousand, you look foolish if you can’t accommodate him.”

  “I thought it would be something like that,” Washington said. “That’s helpful.”

  “And I never keep the cash in the register, either, I always keep it downstairs in the safe. You know that neighborhood, Sergeant, I don’t have to tell you. Sometimes, when there’s a busy night, I even take large amounts of cash out of the register and take it down and put it in the safe.”

  “In other words, you would say you take the precautions a prudent businessman would take under the circumstances.”

  “I think you could say that, yes.”

  “We’ve found, over the years—and I certainly hope you won’t take offense over the question—that in some cases, employees have a connection with robberies of this nature.”

  “I guess that would happen.”

  “Would you mind giving me your opinion of Thomas Melrose?” Washington asked. “He was, I believe, the bartender on duty that night?”

  “Tommy went off duty before those men came in,” Atchison replied, and then hesitated a moment before continuing: “I just can’t believe Tommy Melrose would be involved in anything like this.”

  “But he was aware that you frequently kept large amounts of cash in your office.”

  “Yes, I guess he was,” Atchison said reluctantly.

  “How long has Mr. Melrose been working for you?” Washington asked.

  “About nine months,” Atchison replied, after thinking about it.

  “He came well recommended?”

  “Oh, absolutely. You have to be very careful about hiring bartenders. An open cash drawer is quite a temptation.”

  “Do you think you still have his references? I presume you checked them.”

  “Oh, I checked them, all right. And I suppose they’re in a filing cabinet someplace.”

  “When you feel a little better, Mr. Atchison, do you think we could have a look at them?”

  “Certainly.”

  “Mr. Melrose said that business was slow the night of this incident.”

  “Yes, it was.”

  “He said there was, just before he went off duty, only one customer in the place; and that when that last customer left, you took over for him tending bar.”

  “That’s right. I did. You have to stay open in a bar like mine. Even if there’s no customers. There might be customers coming in after you closed, and the next time they wanted a late-evening drink, they’d remember you were closed and go someplace else.”

  “I
understand.”

  “The one customer who left just before you took over from Mr. Melrose: Do you remember him? I mean, was there anything about him? You don’t happen to remember his name?”

  Atchison appeared to be searching his memory. He shook his head and said, “Sorry.”

  Washington stood up. “Well, I hate to leave good company, and especially such fine coffee, but that’s all I have. Thank you for your time, Mr. Atchison.”

  “Have another before you go,” Atchison said. “One for the road.”

  “Thank you, no,” Washington said. “I think Mr. Melrose said the customer was named Frankie. Does that ring a bell, Mr. Atchison?”

  Atchison shook his head again. “No. Sorry.”

  “Probably not important,” Washington said. “I would have been surprised if you had remembered him, Mr. Atchison. Thank you again for your time.”

  He put his hand out.

  “Anything I can do to help, Sergeant,” Atchison said.

  “Cool customer,” Jason Washington said with neither condemnation nor admiration in his voice, making it a simple professional judgment.“You gave him two chances to remember Frankie Foley,” Matt said.

  “It will be interesting to see if Mr. Foley remembers Mr. Atchison,” Washington said, and then changed the subject: “Did your father really leave you in durance vile overnight?”

  “Swann told you, did he?”

  “Your father’s wisdom made quite an impression on Lieutenant Swann,” Washington said. “And you haven’t been behind bars since, have you?”

  “No,” Matt said, and then thought aloud: “Unless you want to count the time those Narcotics assholes hauled me off the night Tony the Zee got himself hit.”

  “I’m not sure you have considered the possibility that the Narcotics officers were simply doing their job.”

  “Taking great pleasure in what they were doing.”

  “Well, the tables have turned, haven’t they?” They thought they had a dirty cop. And now you’re going to see if it can be proved that they are dirty.”

  “Am I going to work on that?”

  “You and everybody else. Compared to coming up with something on the Narcotics Five Squad that will result in indictments, bringing Atchison before a grand jury will be fairly easy.”

  “How come?”

  “We have a crime scene on the Inferno job, and other evidence. We have two good suspects. I think we can get a motive without a great deal of effort. A good deal of shoe leather may be required, but it isn’t a question of if we will get Atchison, but when. So far as the Narcotics Five Squad is concerned, we don’t know what they have done, only that they have done it, and we don’t know what ‘it’ is, except the Widow Kellog’s definition of ‘it’ as dirty.”

  “You can’t get any specifics out of her?”

  “Not a one,” Washington replied. “But I believe she believes she is telling the truth that the whole squad is dirty. And to support that, they do own, without a mortgage, a condominium at the shore, and a boat. Their combined, honestly acquired, income is not enough to pay for those sorts of luxuries. And then we have the threatening telephone call.”

  “How do you think Five Squad heard she had talked to you?”

  “There’s no way that they could have. I think the simple explanation for that is that someone on Five Squad knew that Homicide would be talking to her, and they didn’t want her volunteering any information.”

  “And you think that’s why Kellog was killed?”

  “It looks to me as if there are two possibilities, one of which no one seems to have considered very much. That he was killed in connection with his honest labor as a Narcotics officer. He knew something—where are the tapes from his tape recorder?—and had to be silenced. And of course it is entirely possible that he was killed by someone on the Five Squad for the same reason. His wife had left him. He might have wanted her back bad enough…”

  “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.