W.E.B Griffin - The Murderers

Officer Crater stuffed the Hallmark thank-you card in his pocket and resumed walking his beat. When he got home, he took another look at it. Inside the card were four crisp fifty-dollar bills.

“Jesus Christ!” Officer Crater said. He went to the bathroom and tore the thank-you card in little pieces and flushed the pieces down the toilet. His wife, he knew, would never understand. The two hundred he folded up and put in the little pocket in his wallet which, before he got married, he had used to hold a condom.

The next time he saw her, he told himself, he would give the money back to her. There was no point in making a big deal of the money; telling his sergeant about it would mean having to tell him what he had done in the first place.

A week after that, before he saw the lady again, he had a couple of drinks too many after work in Dave’s Bar, at Third Street and Fairmount Avenue, with Officer William C. Palmerston, whom he had worked with in the Sixth District before Palmerston had been transferred to Vice.

He told him, out of school, about the thank-you card with the two hundred bucks in it, and that he intended to return it to the hooker the next time he saw her.

“Don’t be a goddamned fool,” Palmerston said. “Keep it.”

“You’re kidding, right?”

“It’s not like she bribed you, is it? All you did was what you thought was the right thing to do in that situation, right? I mean, you didn’t catch her doing something wrong, right? You didn’t say, ‘For two hundred bucks, I’ll let you go,’ did you?”

“No, of course not.”

“You did her a favor, she appreciated it. Keep the money.”

“You’d keep it?”

Officer Palmerston, in reply, extended his hand, palm upward, to Officer Crater.

“Try me.”

“All right, goddamn you, Bill, I will,” Officer Crater said, and took two of the fifties from the condom pocket in his wallet and laid them in Officer Palmerston’s palm. Officer Palmerston stuffed the bills in his shirt pocket, then called for another round.

“I’ll pay,” Officer Palmerston said, and laid one of the fifties on the bar.

The next time, several days later, Officer Crater saw the lady from the Eastern Pennsylvania Executive Escort Service he could not, of course, give her the two hundred back, since he’d given half of it to Officer Palmerston.

She came up to him right after he started walking his beat, where he was standing on the corner of Ninth and Chestnut streets.

“Hi, Charley,” she said. “How are you?”

“Hi,” he replied, thinking again that Marianne didn’t really look like a hooker.

“You ever get a break?” she asked. “For a cup of coffee or something?”

“Sure.”

“I was about to have a cup of coffee. I’ll buy,” the lady said.

He seemed hesitant, and she saw this.

“Charley, all I’m offering is a cup of coffee,” she said. “Come on.”

Why not? Officer Crater reasoned. I mean, what the hell is wrong with drinking a cup of coffee with her?

They had coffee and a couple of doughnuts in a luncheonette. He never could remember afterward what they had talked about until Marianne suddenly looked at her watch and said she had to go. And offered her hand for him to shake, and he took it, and there was something in her hand.

“The lady I work for says thank you, too,” Marianne said, and was gone before he could say anything else, or even look at what she had left in his hand.

When he finally looked, it was a neatly folded, crisp one-hundred-dollar bill.

“Jesus Christ!” he said aloud, before quickly putting the bill in his trousers pocket.

When he got off work that night, he went to Dave’s Bar before going home, in the hope that he would run into Bill Palmerston.

Palmerston was already in Dave’s Bar when he got there, and when he bought Palmerston a drink, he paid for it with the hundred-dollar bill.

Palmerston looked at the bill and then at Crater.

“Where’d you get that?”

“The same place I got the fifties,” Crater said.

“Lucky you.”

Palmerston watched as the bartender made change, and when he had gone, looked at Crater and asked, “Don’t tell me your conscience is bothering you again?”

“A little,” Officer Crater confessed.

Officer Palmerston reached toward the stack of bills on the bar and carefully pulled two twenties and a ten from it.

“Feel better?” he asked.

“Jesus, Bill, I don’t like this.”

“Don’t be a damned fool,” Palmerston said. “It’s not like you’re doing something wrong.” Then Palmerston had a second thought. “Anybody see her give this to you?”

Crater shook his head.

“Then don’t worry about it,” Palmerston said. “Nobody’s getting hurt. But I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. I’m going to ask around.”

“Ask around about what?”

“I wonder why this lady is being so nice to you. It sure isn’t because of the size of your cock. If I come up with something, I’ll let you know.”

Two weeks later, as Officer Crater was walking his beat, an unmarked car pulled to the curb beside him.

“Get in the back, Charley,” Officer Palmerston, who was in the front passenger seat beside the driver, said.

Charley got in the backseat.

“This is Lieutenant Meyer,” Palmerston said.

“How are you, Crater?”

“How do you do, sir?”

“I work for the Lieutenant, Charley,” Palmerston said.

“Oh, yeah?”

“Bill tells me you’re an all-right guy, Crater. Not too smart, but the kind of a guy you can trust.”

Palmerston laughed.

“He also told me about your lady friend, the one you helped out, the one who’s been showing her gratitude to you.”

For a fleeting moment, Charley was very afraid that Bill Palmerston had turned him in for taking the hundred dollars from Marianne every week. But that passed. The Lieutenant wouldn’t be talking the way he was if he was going to arrest him or anything like that.

“That’s what I meant about you not being too smart, Charley,” Lieutenant Meyer said.

“Sir?”

“You really don’t know much about your lady friend’s business, do you?”

“No, sir.”

“Well, let me tell you what I found out after Bill came to me. What Bill and I found out. Your friend works for a woman named Harriet Osadchy. Her sheet shows three busts for prostitution here, and she has a sheet in Hazleton-you know where Hazleton is, Charley?”

“Out west someplace, in the coal regions.”

“Right. Anyway, this Osadchy woman has a sheet as long as you are tall in Hazleton, mostly prostitution, some controlled-substance busts, all nol-prossed, even a couple of drunk and disorderlies. But she’s smart. You got to give her that, right, Bill?”

“Yes, sir,” Officer Palmerston said.

“We didn’t even have a line on this Eastern Pennsylvania Executive Escort Service until you brought it to Bill’s attention.”

“The what?”

“The Eastern Pennsylvania Executive Escort Service. That’s what she calls her operation.”

“Oh.”

“But like I was saying, now we have a line on her. She’s got maybe twenty, twenty-five, maybe more hookers working for her. It’s a high-class operation. The minimum price is a hundred dollars. That’s for one hour.”

“Damn!”

“Bill had a talk with your friend Marianne. She said the split is sixty-forty. For her forty percent, Harriet makes the appointments for the girls, and takes care of what has to be taken care of.”

“Excuse me?”

“Her girls know that when they knock on some hotel door, they’re not going to find some weirdo inside, or a cop, and that they’ll get their money. They even take one of those credit card machines with them, in case-and you’d be surprised how often this happens-the john can put the girl on his expense account as secretarial services, or a rental car, or something like that.”