W. Griffin: The Murderers

Hobbs shrugged.

“Lieutenant, there’s nobody out there but me,” D’Amata said.

“Is Captain Quaire in his office?”

“Yes, sir,” D’Amata said.

“Hobbs, see if you can find out where Milham is,” Natali ordered. “You get out to the scene, Joe. Right now. We’ll get you some help.”

“Yes, sir.”

Natali walked to Captain Henry C. Quaire’s office, where he found him at his desk, visibly deep in concentration.

“Boss,” Natali said. It took a moment to get Quaire’s attention, but he finally looked up.

“Sorry. What’s up, Lou?”

“Radio just called in a homicide. In the Twenty-fifth. The victim is a police officer. Jerome H. Kellog. The name mean anything to you?”

“He worked plainclothes in Narcotics?”

Natali nodded. “He was found with at least one bullet wound to the head in his house.”

“You don’t think…?”

“I don’t know, Boss.”

“We better do this one by the book, Lou.”

“Yes, sir. D’Amata was holding down the desk. He’s on his way.” He gestured across the room to where D’Amata was taking his service revolver from a cabinet in a small file room. “And so am I.”

“Give me a call when you get there,” Quaire ordered.

“Yes, sir.”

There were two Twenty-fifth District RPCs, a District van, a Twenty-fifth District sergeant’s, and a battered unmarked car D’Amata correctly guessed belonged to East Detectives in front of Kellog’s house when D’Amata turned onto West Luray Street.

A Twenty-fifth District uniform waved him into a parking spot at the curb.

Joe got out of his car and walked to the front door, where a detective D’Amata knew, Arnold Zigler from East Detectives, was talking to the District uniform guarding the door. Joe knew the uniform’s face but couldn’t recall his name. Zigler smiled in recognition.

“Well, I see that East Detectives is already here, walking all over my evidence,” D’Amata said.

“Screw you, Joe,” Zigler said.

“What happened?”

“What I hear is that when he didn’t show up at work, somebody in Narcotics called the Twenty-fifth, and they sent an RPC-Officer Hastings here-over to see if he overslept or something. The back door was open, so Hastings went in. He found him on the floor, and called it in.”

“Hastings, you found the back door was open?”

“Right.”

Kellog’s row house was about in the middle of the block. D’Amata decided he could look at the back door from the inside, rather than walk to the end of the block and come in that way.

D’Amata smiled at Officer Hastings, touched his arm, and went into the house.

“Hey, Joe,” Sergeant Manning said. “How are you?”

Again D’Amata recognized the face of the Sergeant but could not recall his name.

“Underpaid and overworked,” D’Amata said with a smile. “How are you, pal?”

“Underpaid, my ass!” the Sergeant snorted.

D’Amata squatted by Kellog’s body long enough to determine that there were two entrance wounds in the back of his skull, then carefully stepped over it and the pool of blood around the head, and went into the kitchen.

The kitchen door was open. There were signs of forced entry.

Which might mean that someone had forced the door. Or might mean that someone who had a key to the house-an estranged wife, for example-wanted the police to think that someone had broken in.

Without consciously doing so, he put We Know For Sure Fact #1 into his mental case file: Officer Jerome H. Kellog was intentionally killed, by someone who fired two shots into his skull at close range.

He looked around the kitchen. The telephone, mounted on the wall, caught his eye. There were extra wires coming from the wall plate. He walked over for a closer look.

The wires led to a cabinet above the sink.

D’Amata took a pencil from his pocket and used it to pull on the cabinet latch. Inside the cabinet was a cassette tape recorder. He stood on his toes to get a better look. The door of the machine was open. There was no cassette inside. There was another machine beside the tape recorder, and a small carton that had once held an Economy-Pak of a half-dozen Radio Shack ninety-minute cassette tapes. It was empty.

He couldn’t be sure, of course, and he didn’t want to touch it to get a better look until the Mobile Crime Lab guys went over it for prints, but he had a pretty good idea that the second machine was one of those clever gadgets you saw in Radio Shack and places like that that would turn the recorder on whenever the telephone was picked up.

There were no tapes in the cabinet, nor, when he carefully opened the drawers of the lower cabinets, in any of them, either. He noticed that, instead of being plugged into a wall outlet, the tape recorder had been wired to it.

Probably to make sure nobody knocked the plug out of the wall.

But where the hell are the tapes?

What the hell was on the tapes?

“Joe?” a male voice called. “You in here?”

“In the kitchen,” D’Amata replied.

“Jesus, who did this?” the voice asked. There were hints of repugnance in the voice, which D’Amata now recognized as that of a civilian police photographer from the Mobile Crime Lab.

“Somebody who didn’t like him,” D’Amata said.

“What is that supposed to be, humor?”

“There’s a tape recorder in the kitchen cabinet. I want some shots of that, and the cabinets,” D’Amata said. “And make sure they dust it for prints.”

“Any other instructions, Detective?” the photographer, a very tall, very thin man, asked sarcastically.

“What have I done, hurt your delicate feelings again?”

“I do this for a living. Sometimes you forget that.”

“And you wanted to be a concert pianist, right?”

“Oh, fuck you, Joe,” the photographer said with a smile. “Get out of my way.”

“Narcotics, Sergeant Dolan,” Dolan, a stocky, ruddy-faced man in his late forties, answered the telephone.

“This is Captain Samuels, of the Twenty-fifth District. Is Captain Talley around? He doesn’t answer his phone.”

“I think he’s probably in the can,” Sergeant Dolan said. “Just a second, here he comes.”

Samuels heard Dolan call, “Captain, Captain Samuels for you on Three Six,” and then Captain Robert F. Talley, the Commanding Officer of the Narcotics Bureau, came on the line.

“Hello, Fred. What can I do for you?”

“I’ve got some bad news, and a problem, Bob,” Samuels said. “They just found Officer Jerome Kellog’s body in his house. He was shot in the head.”

“Jesus Christ!” Talley said. “Self-inflicted?”

Talley, like most good supervisors, knew a good deal about the personal lives of his men, often more than he would have preferred to know. He knew in the case of Officer Jerome Kellog that he was having trouble, serious trouble, with his wife. And his experience had taught him the unpleasant truth that policemen with problems they could not deal with often ate their revolvers.

“No. Somebody shot him. Twice, from what I hear.”

“Do we know who?”

“No,” Samuels said. “Bob, you know the routine. He lived in my district.”

Talley knew the routine. In the case of an officer killed on the job, the body was taken to a hospital. The Commanding Officer of the District where the dead officer lived drove to his home, informed his wife, or next of kin, that he had been injured, and drove her to the hospital.

By the time they got there, the Commissioner, if he was in the City, or the senior of the Deputy Commissioners, and the Chief Inspector of his branch of the Police Department-and more often than not, the Mayor-would be there. And so would be, if it was at all possible to arrange it, the dead officer’s parish priest, or minister, or rabbi, and if not one of these, then the Departmental Chaplain of the appropriate faith. They would break the news to the widow or next of kin.