W.E.B Griffin - The Murderers

The cost of whatever it’s going to cost to fix the Porsche, and I don’t like to think how much that’s going to be, plus the cost of a new jacket, shirts, pants, necktie, and loafers, is going to be borne personally by Detective Matt Payne. I don’t even dare to put in for overtime.

It didn’t take as long to reach the pier along the Chester waterfront as Matt expected it would.

And finding the pier was easy. There was a Chester police car sitting on it, and it could be seen a half-mile away.

Thirty minutes after the Marine Police Unit boat tied up to the pier, a police diver, wearing a diving helmet, bobbed to the surface with a package. It was a white plastic garbage bag, wrapped in duct tape.

“That it, Matty?” Denny Coughlin asked.

“That looks like what I saw Atchison carry out of the Yock’s Diner.”

“Good job, Matty.”

Unless, of course, it contains something like the records of the loan-shark operation Atchison was operating, and not guns.

A police photographer recorded the diver in the water, the package on the deck, and then as a laboratory technician carefully cut the duct tape away. Inside the plastic garbage bag was a paper bag. Inside the paper bag, wrapped in mechanic’s wiping cloths, were three guns. A large revolver, which a ballistics technician identified for another technician to write down as a. 44-40 single-action six-shot revolver, of Spanish manufacture, a. 38 Special Caliber six-shot Colt revolver, and a Savage. 32 ACP semiautomatic pistol.

Officer Woodrow Wilson Bailey, Sr., woke to the smell of brewing coffee and fried ham. It pleased him. He didn’t complain or feel sorry for himself most days that he didn’t get to eat breakfast with Joellen and Woodrow Junior. Policing was a twenty-four-hour-a-day job, and everybody had to take their fair turn working the four-to-midnight tours, and the midnight-to-eight-in-the-morning tours. And truth to tell, he sort of liked the last-out tour; there was something he liked about cruising around the deserted streets, say, at half past three or four, when all the punks had finally decided to go to bed.

But it was nice when he was working the day shift, and could sit down at the kitchen table and have breakfast with Joellen and Woodrow Junior. Having breakfast like that every day was one of the things Woodrow looked forward to, when he got his time in and went home to Hartsville.

He got out of bed and took a quick shower and a careful shave, then put on his terry-cloth bathrobe and went down to the kitchen. He really hated it when he dribbled coffee or egg or redeye gravy or something on a clean uniform shirt and had to change it, so he ate in his bathrobe. All you had to do if you made a pig of yourself on your bathrobe was throw it in the washing machine. Joellen knew he took pride in the way he looked in his uniform, and always had one clean and pressed waiting for him. That was a lot of work, and Woodrow knew it, and made a genuine effort not to get his uniform dirty, so that what Joellen did for him would not be wasted.

“I was about to come see if you were going to take breakfast with us,” Joellen said when he walked in the kitchen.

“I could smell that cooking,” Woodrow said. “It would wake a dead man.”

Joellen smiled and kissed him.

“Good morning, son.”

“Good morning, sir,” Woodrow Junior said. He was wearing a white shirt and a blue sweater and a necktie. He was a junior at Cardinal Dougherty High School, and they had a dress code there. More important, they taught Christian morals, even if they weren’t Protestant Christians. It would have been nicer if Third Abyssinian had a church-run school that Woodrow Junior could have gone to, but they didn’t.

And he certainly couldn’t have sent Woodrow Junior to a public high school. The corridors of the public schools, Woodrow sometimes thought, were not a bit better than the corners of the neighborhood. You could buy anything in there, and it was no place to send your child unless you didn’t care what was going to happen to him, what he would see, what punks would give him trouble.

Woodrow thought it was a truly Christian act on the part of the Catholics to let Protestant Baptist boys like Woodrow into their schools. And there were a lot of them. There was a charge, of course, but in Woodrow’s case it was reduced because Joellen went over there every day and helped out in the cafeteria for free.

Woodrow sat down at the kitchen table. Woodrow Junior bent his head, and standing behind her husband, Joellen closed her eyes and bent her head.

“Dear Lord, we thank You for Your bounty which we are now about to receive, and for Thy many other blessings. We ask You to watch over us. Through Thy Son, our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ.”

Joellen and Woodrow Junior said, “Amen,” and Joellen put breakfast on the table: sunny-side-up eggs and ham, redeye gravy and grits, and the biscuits Mamma Dear had taught Joellen to make before the Good Lord took her into heaven.

Then Woodrow went upstairs and put on his uniform, and started to get his gun out of the drawer. He glanced down at his shoes and almost swore. There was a scratch across the toe of the left one, and the toe of the right one was smudged. He wondered when that had happened. He closed the drawer in the dresser where he kept his gun, and went back down to the kitchen.

Joellen watched as he put on a pair of rubber gloves and very carefully polished his shoes.

“Woodrow Junior would have done that if you’d have told him,” Joellen said.

“I messed them up, I’ll make them right,” he said.

Then he went back upstairs, got his gun from the drawer, went back downstairs, kissed Joellen good-bye. He got his uniform cap and his nightstick from the hall clothes hanger and left the house.

It was seven blocks to the District Headquarters at Twenty-second and Hunting Park Avenue.

Woodrow walked briskly, looking to see what he could see, thinking that when roll call was over and he went on patrol he’d cruise the alleys. He’d been off for seventy hours, and there was no telling what might have happened in that time.

It was a morning like any other. There was absolutely nothing different about it that would have made him suspect that before the day was over, he would be in the office of the Northwest Police Division Inspector, getting his hand shook, and having his picture made with the Mayor of the City of Philadelphia.

Having decided First things first, Matt limped to Imported Motor Cars, Ltd., Inc., from the Marine Police Unit pier. There the Senior Maintenance Advisor, a somewhat epicene young man in a blazer and bow tie and three maintenance technicians in spotless white thigh-length coats which made them look more, Matt thought, like gynecologists waiting for a patient than automobile mechanics, confirmed his worst fears about the Porsche.

“Whatever did you do to it?” the Senior Maintenance Advisor asked, in what Matt thought was mingled horror and joy as he calculated the size of the repair bill.

Well, I was chasing a murder suspect down by the refineries in Chester, and I had to turn the headlights off so that he wouldn’t know he was being followed.

“I ran over a bumper,” Matt said.

“I’ll say you did!”

“You should have left it where you did it,” one of the maintenance technicians volunteered, his tone suggesting Matt deserved a prize for Idiot of the Year. “Called a wrecker. No telling how much damage to the suspension you did driving it in.”

Imported Motor Cars, Ltd., Inc., evidently felt such enormous sympathy for him, or figured they could make up the cost when they presented him with the bill, that they gave him a loaner. A new 911 Demonstrator. Matt suspected that sometime in the next day or two he would receive a call from Imported Motor Cars, Ltd., Inc., asking him, taking into consideration what the repair bill for repairing the damage he had done to his old car would be, would he be interested in a very special deal on the car he was now driving?