W.E.B Griffin - The Murderers

“No. He seemed to understand he was putting me on a spot.”

“My gut reaction, repeating the call is yours, is that you didn’t talk to Chief Lowenstein about anything but the double homicide.”

“OK. That’s it. We didn’t have this conversation, either.”

“What conversation?” Wohl asked, with exaggerated innocence.

“I’m not through, I’m afraid,” Washington said.

“What else?” Wohl asked tiredly as he pulled the door shut again.

“Chief Lowenstein got rid of Matt, so that he could talk to me, by sending him to the crime scene-the victims were in a downstairs office-with Henry Quaire when Quaire came to the scene. I don’t know what happened between Matt and Milham, but Milham pulled the rule book on him and insisted on getting Matt’s statement that night-God, that’s something else I have to do this morning, get my statement to Homicide-so Matt went to the Roundhouse, and I went home, and when I got there the Widow Kellog was there.”

“The widow of the undercover Narcotics guy?”

Washington nodded.

“Who was found with two bullets in his head in his house. Detective Milham’s close friend’s estranged husband.”

“She was at your place?” Wohl asked, surprised.

“Right. And she is convicted that her husband’s death is connected with drugs…”

“You don’t think Milham had anything to do with it, do you?”

“No. I don’t think so. But the Widow Kellog thinks it was done by somebody in Narcotics, because they-they being the Five Squad-are all dirty.”

“The Narcotics Five Squad, according to Dave Pekach, are knights in shining armor, waging the good war against controlled substances. A lot of esprit de corps, which I gather means they think they’re better than other cops, including the other four Narcotics squads. In other words, a bunch of hotshots who do big buys, make raids, take doors, that sort of thing. They’re supposed to be pretty effective. It’s hard to believe that any of them would be dirty, much less kill one of their own.”

“That’s what the lady is saying.”

“You believe her?”

“She said there’s all kinds of money floating around. She said she, she and her husband, bought a house at the shore and paid cash for it.”

“That could be checked out, it would seem to me, without much trouble. Did she tell Homicide about this? Or anybody else?”

“No. She thinks everybody’s dirty.”

“What did you tell her?”

“I told her I knew a staff inspector I knew was honest, and she should go to him; that I would set it up.”

“And she doesn’t want to go to him?”

“No,” Washington said. “Absolutely out of the question.”

“You believe her?”

“I think she’s telling the truth. My question is, what do we do with this?”

“If you take it to Internal Affairs…” Wohl said.

“Yeah.”

“Let me read this,” Wohl said, opening the envelope.

Wohl grunted twice while reading the three sheets of paper the envelope contained, then stuffed them back into the envelope.

“This has to go to the Mayor,” he said. “As soon as you can get it to him. And then I think you had better have a long talk with Captain Pekach about the Narcotics Five Squad.”

Washington nodded.

“Can I tell him I’m doing so at your orders?”

“Everything you do is at my orders. Dave Pekach knows that. Are you getting paranoid, Jason?”

“Simply because one is paranoid doesn’t mean that people aren’t really saying terrible things about one behind one’s back,” Washington said sonorously.

Wohl laughed.

“No cop likes the guy who asks the wrong questions about other cops. Me included. I especially hate being the guy who asks the questions,” Washington said.

“I know,” Wohl said sympathetically. “Please don’t tell me there’s more, Jason.”

“That’s enough for one morning, wouldn’t you say?”

At five minutes to eight, Sergeant Jason Washington drove into the parking lot of what had been built in 1892 at Frankford and Castor avenues as the Frankford Grammar School, and was now the headquarters of the Special Operations Division of the Philadelphia Police Department.

He pulled into a parking spot near the front entrance of the building marked with a sign reading INSPECTORS. He regarded this as his personal parking space. While he was sure that there were a number of sergeants and lieutenants annoyed that he parked his car where it should not be, and who almost certainly had complained, officially or unofficially about it, nothing had been said to him.

There was a certain military-chain-of-command-like structure in the Special Operations Division. Only one’s immediate superior was privileged to point out to one the errors of one’s ways. In Jason Washington’s case, his immediate superior was the head man, Inspector Peter Wohl, the Commanding Officer of Special Operations. Peter Wohl knew where he parked his car and had said nothing to him. That was, Jason had decided, permission to park by inference.

Sergeant Jason Washington and Inspector Peter Wohl had a unique relationship, which went back to the time Detective Wohl had been assigned to Homicide and been placed under the mentorship of Detective Washington. At that time, Jason Washington-who was not burdened, as his wife often said, with crippling modesty-had decided that Wohl possessed not only an intelligence almost equal to his, but also an innate skill to find the anomalies in a given situation-which was really what investigation was all about, finding what didn’t fit-that came astonishingly close to his own extraordinary abilities in that regard.

Washington had predicted that not only would Detective Wohl remain in Homicide (many detectives assigned to Homicide did not quite cut the mustard and were reassigned to other duties) but he would have a long and distinguished career there.

Homicide detectives were the elite members of the Detective Bureau. For many people, Jason Washington among them, service as a Homicide detective represented the most challenging and satisfying career in the Police Department, and the thought of going elsewhere was absurd.

Detective Wohl had not remained in Homicide. He had taken the sergeant’s examination, and then, with astonishing rapidity, became the youngest sergeant ever to serve in the Highway Patrol; a lieutenant; the youngest captain ever; and then the youngest staff inspector ever.

And then Special Operations had come along.

It had been formed several years before, it was generally, and essentially correctly, believed as a response to criticism of the Police Department-and by implication, of the Mayor-by the Philadelphia Ledger, one of the city’s four major newspapers.

Mr. Arthur J. Nelson, Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer of the Daye-Nelson Corporation, which owned the Ledger and twelve other newspapers, had never been an admirer of the Hon. Jerry Carlucci, and both the Ledger and the Daye-Nelson Corporation’s Philadelphia television and radio stations (WGHA-TV, Channel Seven; WGHA-FM 100.2 MHz; and WGHA-AM, 770 KC) had opposed him in the mayoral election.

The dislike by Mr. Nelson of Mayor Carlucci had been considerably exacerbated when Mr. Nelson’s only son, Jerome Stanley Nelson, had been found murdered-literally butchered-in his luxurious apartment in a renovated Revolutionary War-era building on Society Hill.

Considering the political ramifications of the case, no one had been at all surprised when the job had been given to Detective Jason Washington, who had quickly determined the prime suspect in the case to be Mr. Jerome Nelson’s live-in companion, a twenty-five-year-old black homosexual who called himself “Pierre St. Maury.”