W.E.B Griffin: The Murderers

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 Philadelphia’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.