The Murderers boh-6 Read online

  The Murderers

  ( Badge of Honor - 6 )

  W. E. B. Griffin

  W. E. B. Griffin

  The Murderers

  ONE

  Officer Jerry Kellog, who was on the Five Squad of the Narcotics Unit of the Philadelphia Police Department, had heard somewhere that if something went wrong, and you found yourself looking down the barrel of a gun, the best thing to do was smile. Smiling was supposed to make the guy holding the gun on you less nervous, less likely to use the gun just because he was scared.

  He had never had the chance to put the theory to the test before-the last goddamned place in the world he expected to find some scumbag holding a gun on him was in his own kitchen-but he raised his hands to shoulder level, palms out, and smiled.

  “No problem,” Jerry said. “Whatever you want, you got it.”

  “You got a ankle holster, motherfucker?” the man with the gun demanded.

  Jerry’s brain went on automatic, and filed away, White male, 25–30, 165 pounds, five feet eight, medium build, light brown hair, no significant scars or distinguishing marks, blue. 38 Special, five-inch barrel, Smith amp; Wesson, dark blue turtleneck, dark blue zipper jacket, blue jeans, high-topped work shoes.

  “No. I mean, I got one. But I don’t wear it. It rubs my ankle.”

  That was true.

  Christ, that’s my gun! I hung it on the hall rack when I came in. This scumbag grabbed it. And that’s why he wants to know if I have another one!

  “Pull your pants up,” the scumbag said.

  “Right. You got it,” Jerry said, and reached down and pulled up his left trousers leg, and then the right.

  Jerry remembered to smile, and said, “Look, we got what could be a bad situation here. So far, it’s not as bad as it could-”

  “Shut your fucking mouth!”

  “Right.”

  “Who else is here?”

  “Nobody,” Jerry answered, and when he thought he saw suspicion or disbelief in the scumbag’s eyes, quickly added, “No shit. My wife moved out on me. I live here alone.”

  “I seen the dishes in the sink,” the scumbag said, accepting the three or four days’ accumulation of unwashed dishes as proof.

  “Ran off with another cop, would you believe it?”

  The scumbag looked at him, shrugged, and then said, “Turn around.”

  He’s going to hit me in the back of the head. Jesus Christ, that’s dangerous. It’s not like in the fucking movies. You hit somebody in the head, you’re liable to fracture his skull, kill him.

  Jerry turned around, his hands still held at shoulder level.

  Maybe I should have tried to kick the gun out of his hands. But if I had done that, he’d have tried to kill me.

  Jerry felt his shoulders tense in anticipation of the blow.

  The scumbag raised the Smith amp; Wesson to arm’s length and fired it into the back of Jerry’s head, and then, when Jerry had slumped to the floor, fired it again, leaning slightly over to make sure the second bullet would also enter the brain.

  Then he lowered the Smith amp; Wesson and let it slip from his fingers onto the linoleum of Jerry Kellog’s kitchen floor.

  “Where the hell,” Sergeant Patrick J. Dolan of the Narcotics Unit demanded in a loud voice, paused long enough to make sure he had the attention of the seven men in the crowded squad room of Five Squad, and then finished the question, “is Kellog?”

  There was no reply beyond a couple of shrugs.

  “I told that sonofabitch I wanted to see him at quarter after eight,” Sergeant Dolan announced. “I’ll have his ass!”

  He glowered indignantly around the squad room, turned around, and left the room.

  Sergeant Patrick J. Dolan was not regarded by the officers of the Five Squad of the Narcotics Unit-or, for that matter, by anyone else in the entire Narcotics Unit, with the possible exception of Lieutenant Michael J. “Mick” Mikkles-as an all-around splendid fellow and fine police officer with whom it was a pleasure to serve. The reverse was true. If a poll of the officers in Narcotics were to be conducted, asking each officer to come up with one word to describe Sergeant Dolan, the most common choice would be “prick,” with “sonofabitch” running a close second.

  This is not to say that he was not a good police officer. He had been on the job more than twenty years, a sergeant for ten, and in Narcotics for seven. He was a skilled investigator, reasonably intelligent, and a hard worker. He seldom made mistakes or errors of judgment. Dolan’s problem, Officer Tom Coogan had once proclaimed, to general agreement, in the Allgood Bar, across the street from Five Squad’s office at Twenty-second and Hunting Park Avenue, where Narcotics officers frequently went after they had finished for the day, was that Dolan devoutly believed that not only did he never make mistakes or errors of judgment but that he was incapable of doing so.

  Tom Coogan had been on the job eight years, five of them in plain clothes in Narcotics. For reasons neither he nor his peers understood, he had been unable to make a high enough grade on either of the two detective’s examinations he had taken to make a promotion list. Sometimes this bothered him, as he was convinced that he was at least as smart and just as good an investigator as, say, half the detectives he knew. On the other hand, he consoled himself, he would much rather be doing what he was doing than, for example, investigating burglaries in Northeast Detectives, and with the overtime he had in Narcotics he was making as much money as a sergeant or a lieutenant in one of the districts, so what the hell difference did it make?

  Coogan had absolutely no idea why Dolan had summoned Jerry Kellog to an early-morning meeting, or why Kellog hadn’t shown up when he was supposed to, but a number of possibilities occurred to him, the most likely of which being that Kellog had simply forgotten about it. Another, slightly less likely possibility was that Kellog had overslept. Since his wife had moved out on him, he had been at the sauce more heavily and more often than was good for him.

  It wasn’t just that his wife had moved out on him-broken marriages are not uncommon in the police community-but that she had moved in with another cop. A police officer whose wife leaves the nuptial couch because she has decided that the life of a cop’s wife is not for her can expect the understanding commiseration of his peers. Kellog’s wife, however, had moved out of a plainclothes narc’s bed into the bed of a Homicide detective. That was different. There was an unspoken suggestion that maybe she had reasons-ranging from bad behavior on Kellog’s part to the possibility that the Homicide detective was giving her something in the sack that Kellog hadn’t been able to deliver.

  The one thing Jerry Kellog didn’t need right now was trouble from Sergeant Patrick J. Dolan, which could range from a simple ass-chewing to telling the Lieutenant he wasn’t where he was supposed to be when he was supposed to be, to something official, bringing him up on charges.

  Tom Coogan wasn’t a special pal of Jerry Kellog, but they worked together, and Kellog had covered Coogan’s ass more than once, so he owed him. He picked up his telephone, pulled out the little shelf with the celluloid-covered list of phone numbers on it, found Kellog’s, and dialed it.

  The line was busy.

  Two minutes later, Coogan tried it again. Still busy.

  Who the hell is he talking to? His wife, maybe? Some other broad? His mother? Something connected with the job?

  Fuck it! The important thing is to get him over here and get Dolan off his back.

  He tried it one more time, and when he got the busy signal broke the connection with his finger and dialed the operator.

  “This is Police Officer Thomas Coogan, badge number 3621. I have been trying to reach 555-2330. This is an emergency. Will you break in, please?”

  “There’s no one on t
he line, sir,” the operator reported thirty seconds later. “The phone is probably off the hook.”

  “Thank you,” Coogan said.

  The fact that the phone is off the hook doesn’t mean he’s not there. He could have come home shitfaced, knocked it off falling into bed, or on purpose so that he wouldn’t be disturbed. He’s probably lying there in bed, sleeping it off.

  That posed the problem of what to do next. He realized he didn’t want to drive all the way over to Kellog’s house to wake him up, for a number of reasons, including the big one, that Sergeant Dolan was liable to ask him where the fuck he was going.

  He thought a moment, then reached for his telephone.

  “Twenty-fifth District, Officer Greene.”

  “Tom Coogan, Narcotics. Who’s the supervisor?”

  “Corporal Young.”

  “Let me talk to him, will you?”

  He knew Corporal Eddie Young.

  “Tom Coogan, Eddie. How are you?”

  “Can’t complain, Tom. What’s up?”

  “Need a favor.”

  “Try me. All I can say is ‘no.’”

  “One of our guys, Jerry Kellog, you know him?”

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “He lives at 300 West Luray Street. He’s supposed to be here. Our Sergeant is shitting a brick. Could you send somebody over to his house and see if he’s there and wake him up and tell him to get his ass over here? I’ve been trying to call him. His phone is off the hook. I think he’s probably sleeping one off.”

  “Give me the address again and it’s done, and you owe me one.”

  A nearly new Buick turned off Seventh Street and into the parking lot at the rear of the Police Administration Building of the City of Philadelphia. The driver, Mr. Michael J. O’Hara, a wiry, curly-haired man in his late thirties, made a quick sweep through the parking lot, found no parking spot he considered convenient enough, pulled to the curb directly in front of the rear entrance to the building, and got out.

  A young police officer who had been on the job just over a year, and assigned to duty at the PAB three days before, intercepted Mr. O’Hara as he headed toward the door.

  “Excuse me, sir,” he said. “You can’t leave your car there.”

  Mr. O’Hara smiled at what he considered the young officer’s rather charming naivete.

  “It’s OK, son,” he said. “I’m Commissioner Czernich’s bookie.”

  “Excuse me?” the young officer said, not quite believing what he heard.

  “The Commissioner,” Mr. O’Hara went on, now enjoying himself, “put two bucks on a long shot. It paid a hundred ninety-eight eighty. When I come here to pay him off, he says I can park anywhere I want.”

  The young officer’s uneasiness was made worse by the appearance of Chief Inspector Heinrich “Heine” Matdorf, Chief of Training for the Philadelphia Police Department, whom the young officer remembered very clearly from his days at the Police Academy. It was the first time the young officer had ever seen him smile.

  “What did you tell him?” Chief Matdorf asked.

  “I told him I was Czernich’s bookie.”

  “Jesus Christ, Mickey!” Matdorf laughed, patting him on the back as he did so.

  As the young police officer had begun to suspect, the driver of the Buick was not a bookmaker. Mr. Michael J. “Mickey” O’Hara was in fact a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter employed by the Philadelphia Bulletin. There was little question in the minds of his peers-and absolutely none in his own mind-that he was the best police reporter between Boston and Washington, and possibly in an even larger geographical area.

  Mickey O’Hara extended his hand to Matdorf’s driver, a sergeant.

  “How are you, Mr. O’Hara?” the Sergeant asked, a respectful tone in his voice.

  “Heine,” O’Hara asked, “have you got enough pull around here to tell this fine young officer I can park here?”

  “The minute he goes inside,” Chief Matdorf instructed the young officer, “let the air out of his tires.”

  “Thanks a lot, Heine.”

  “What’s going on, Mickey?”

  “I hoped maybe you could tell me,” O’Hara said.

  “So far as I know, not much. There was nothing on the radio.”

  “I know,” O’Hara said.

  “Going in, Mickey?” Matdorf asked.

  “I got to pay off the Commissioner,” O’Hara said. “And I thought I might take a look at the Overnights.”

  The Overnights were reports from the various districts and other bureaucratic divisions of the Philadelphia Police Department of out-of-the-ordinary police activity overnight furnished to senior police officials for their general information.

  They were internal Police Department correspondence not made available to the public or the press. Mr. Michael J. O’Hara, as a civilian, and especially as a journalist, was not entitled to be privy to them.

  But Mickey O’Hara enjoyed a special relationship with the Police Department. He was not in their pocket, devoting his journalistic skills to puff pieces, but on the other hand, neither did he spend all of his time looking for stories that made the Department or its officers look bad. Most important, he could be trusted. If he was told something off the record, it stayed off the record.

  “Come on in, then,” Chief Matdorf said. “I’ll even buy you a cup of coffee.”

  He touched O’Hara’s arm and they started toward the rear door of the building. There is a front entrance, overlooking Metropolitan Hospital, but it is normally locked. The rear door opens onto a small foyer. Just inside is a uniformed police officer sitting behind a heavy plate-glass window controlling access to the building’s lobby with a solenoid switch.

  To the right is a corridor leading past the Bail Clerk’s Office and the Arraignment Room to the Holding Room. The Municipal Judge’s Court is a small, somewhat narrow room separated from the corridor by heavy glass. There are seats for spectators in the corridor. Farther to the right is the entrance to the Holding Room, in effect a holding prison, to which prisoners brought from the various police districts and initially locked up in cells in the basement are brought to be booked and to face a Municipal Court Judge, who sets bail. Those prisoners for whom bail is denied, or who can’t make it, are moved, males to the Detention Center, females to the House of Correction.

  When the corporal on duty behind the plate-glass window saw Chief Matdorf, he activated the solenoid, the lock buzzed, and Matdorf pushed the door open and waved O’Hara through it ahead of him into the lobby of the PAB, where the general civilian populace is not allowed.

  They walked toward the elevators, past the wall display of photographs of police officers who have been killed in the line of duty. As they approached the elevator, the door opened and discharged a half-dozen people, among them Chief Inspector Dennis V. Coughlin and Inspector Peter Wohl.

  “Hey, whaddaya say, Mickey?” Chief Coughlin greeted him with a smile, and offered his hand.

  “Hello, Mick,” Wohl said, as he offered his hand first to O’Hara and then to Chief Matdorf.

  Mickey O’Hara had not earned the admiration of his peers, or the Pulitzer Prize, by being wholly immune to the significance of body language.

  Despite that warm greeting, neither of these two is at all happy to see me. That means that something is going on that they would rather not tell me about just now. And what are the two of them doing together this early in the morning?

  “What’s up, Mickey?” Chief Coughlin asked.

  “I hoped maybe you would tell me.”

  Chief Coughlin shrugged, indicating nothing.

  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 ag
ain. 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.