Badge of Honour 06 - The Murderers Read online

  She had first practiced her profession as a freelance entrepreneur, until, inevitably, her nightly presence in the lounges of the better Center City hotels had come to the attention of the plainclothes vice officers assigned to the Inspector of Central Police Division.

  Following her third conviction, which resulted in a thirty-day sentence at the House of Correction for violation of Sections 5902 (Prostitution) and 5503 (Disorderly Conduct) of the Crimes Code of Pennsylvania, she realized that she would either have to go out of business or change her method of doing business. By then, she had come to know both many of her fellow freelance practitioners of the world’s oldest profession, and several gentlemen who she correctly believed had a certain influence in certain areas in Philadelphia.

  With a high degree of tact, she managed to get to meet Mr. Cassandro, and to outline her plan for the future. If it would not interfere in any way with any similar arrangement in which any of Mr. Cassandro’s friends and his associates had an interest, she believed the establishment of a very high-class escort service would fill a genuine need in Philadelphia.

  Since she was unaware of how things were done in Philadelphia, and was a woman alone, she would require both advice, in such things as finding suitable legal and medical services, and protection from unsavory characters who might wish to prey upon her. She said she believed that ten percent of gross receipts would be a fair price to pay for such advice and protection.

  Mr. Cassandro had told Mrs. Osadchy that he would consider the question, make certain inquiries, and get back to her.

  He then sought an audience with Mr. Savarese and reported the proposal to him. After thinking it over for several days Mr. Savarese told Mr. Cassandro that he believed Mrs. Osadchy’s proposal had some merit, and that he should encourage her to cautiously proceed with it.

  It was agreed between them as men of honor that Mr. Savarese would receive twenty-five percent of the ten percent of gross proceeds Mrs. Osadchy would pay to Mr. Cassandro, in payment for his counsel.

  The business prospered from the start. Mrs. Osadchy chose both her work force and her clientele with great care. She also understood the absolute necessity of maintaining good relations with the administrative personnel of the hotels—not limited to security personnel—where her work force practiced their profession.

  For example, if she anticipated a large volume of business from, say, a convention of attorneys, or vascular surgeons, or a like group of affluent professionals, she would engage a room (or even, for a large convention, a small suite) in the hotel for the duration of the convention. No business was conducted in the room. But between professional engagements, her work force would use it as a base of operations. This both increased efficiency and eliminated what would otherwise have been a parade of unaccompanied attractive young women marching back and forth through the hotel lobby.

  And Mrs. Osadchy was of course wise enough to be scrupulously honest when it came to making the weekly payments of ten percent of gross income to Mr. Cassandro.

  For his part, Mr. Cassandro introduced Mrs. Osadchy to several attorneys and physicians who could be relied upon to meet the needs of Mrs. Osadchy and her work force with both efficacy and confidentiality. And, more important, he let the word get out that Mrs. Osadchy was a very good friend of his, and thus entitled to a certain degree of respect. An insult to her would be considered an insult to him.

  It was a smooth-running operation, and everybody had been happy with it.

  And now this fucking cop was getting greedy, which could fuck everything up, and was moreover a personal embarrassment to Mr. Cassandro, who had not liked having to go to Mr. Savarese with the problem.

  I should have known, when he started wanting to help himself to the hookers, Mr. Cassandro thought angrily, that this sonofabitch was going to cause me trouble.

  He’s a real sleazeball, and now it’s starting to show. And cause me trouble.

  What I have to remember, because I keep forgetting it, is that Lieutenant Seymour Meyer is a cop, a cop on the take, and not a businessman, and consequently can be expected to act like an asshole.

  When Mr. Cassandro left Mr. Savarese in the Ristorante Alfredo, instead of getting into the car that was waiting for him outside, he walked to the Benjamin Franklin Hotel on Chestnut Street and entered a pay telephone booth in the lobby.

  He telephoned to Mrs. Harriet Osadchy and told her that he was working on their problem, that he had been given permission to deal with it.

  “I’m really glad to hear that,” Mrs. Osadchy replied. “He’s really getting obnoxious.”

  “Financially speaking, you mean?” Mr. Cassandro asked, laughing. “Or generally speaking?”

  “He called up about an hour ago, and asked what the room number was at the Bellvue. So I told him. And then he said the reason he wanted to know was because it was a slow night, and he was a little bored, so why didn’t I send Marianne over there, so they could have a little party.”

  “He’s a real shit, Harriet,” Mr. Cassandro sympathized.

  “It’s not just the money that he don’t pay the girls and I have to. He’s a sicko with the girls. I had a hard time making Marianne go.”

  “He’s a real shit,” Mr. Cassandro repeated, and then he had a pleasant thought. “Harriet, why don’t you call over there?”

  “What?”

  “Tell her to keep him there. I want to talk to him. That’s as good a place as any.”

  “I’ll call her,” Harriet said dubiously. “But I don’t want her involved in anything, Paulo.”

  “Trust me, Harriet,” Mr. Cassandro said, and hung up.

  Detective Matt Payne turned off the Parkway into the curved drive of a luxury apartment building and stopped with a squeal of tires right in front of the door. The uniformed doorman standing inside looked at him in annoyance.The car was a silver Porsche 911. It had been Matt’s graduation present, three years before, when he had finished his undergraduate studies, cum laude, at the University of Pennsylvania.

  Miss Penelope Detweiler, who was his fiancée in everything but formal announcement and ring-on-her-finger, frequently accused him, with some justification, of showering far more attention on it than he did on her.

  He was still wearing the gray cotton uniform of the Bellvue-Stratford Hotel Maintenance Staff. By the time he had gone from the hotel to his apartment on Rittenhouse Square, which is five blocks west of the Bellvue-Stratford Hotel, to get the car, he had concluded (a) the smart thing for him to have done was to have prevailed yet again on Tiny Lewis’s good nature and asked him to take the damned tapes to Washington, and (b) that since he had failed to do so he was going to be so late that changing his clothing was out of the question. He had gone directly to the basement garage and taken his car.

  “I’ll just be a minute,” he said to the doorman, who, accustomed to Payne’s frequent, brief, nocturnal visits, simply grunted and picked up his telephone to inform Ten Oh Six that a visitor was on his way up.

  Mrs. Martha Washington, a very tall, lithe, sharply featured woman, who looked, Matt often thought, like one of the women portrayed on the Egyptian bas-reliefs in the museum, opened the door to him. She was wearing a loose, ankle-length silver lamé gown.

  “He’s not here, Matt,” she said, giving him her cheek to kiss. “I just opened a nice bottle of California red, if you’d like to come in and wait. He was supposed to be here by now.”

  “I’m already late for dinner, thank you,” he said. “Would you give him this, please?”

  He handed her a large, sealed manila envelope.

  “Dinner, dressed like that?” she said, indicating his maintenance department uniform. “It looks like you’ve been fixing stopped-up sinks. What in the world have you been up to?”

  She saw the uncomfortable look on his face, and quickly added: “Sorry, forget I asked.”

  “I’ll take a rain check on the California red,” Matt said. “I don’t know where we’re going for dinner, but I’ll be home early
if he wants me.”

  “I’ll tell him.”

  Ten minutes later, Matt pulled the Porsche to a stop at the black painted aluminum pole, hinged at one end, which barred access to a narrow cobblestone street in Society Hill, not far from Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell. A neatly lettered sign reading “Stockton Place—Private Property—No Thoroughfare” hung on short lengths of chain from the pole. A Wachenhut Private Security officer came out of a Colonial-style redbrick guard shack and walked to the Porsche.“May I help you, sir?”

  “Matthew Payne, to see Mr. Nesbitt.”

  “One moment, sir, I’ll check,” the Wachenhut Security officer said, and went back into his shack.

  It was said that, before renovation, the area known as Society Hill, not far from the Delaware River, had been going downhill since Benjamin Franklin—whose grave was nearby in the Christ Church Cemetery at Fifth and Arch streets—had walked its narrow streets. Before renovation had begun, it was an unpleasant slum.

  Now it was an upscale neighborhood, with again some of the highest real estate values in Philadelphia. The Revolutionary-era buildings had been completely renovated—often the renovations consisted of discarding just about everything but the building’s facades—and turned into luxury apartments and town houses.

  One of the developers, while doing title research, had been pleasantly surprised to learn that a narrow alley between two blocks of buildings had never been deeded to the City. That provided the legal right for them to bar the public from it, something they correctly suspected would have an appeal to the sort of people they hoped to interest in their property.

  They promptly dubbed the alley “Stockton Place,” closed one end of it, and put a Colonial-style guard shack at the other.

  Having been informed that Mr. Chadwick Thomas Nesbitt IV, who with his wife occupied Number Nine B Stockton Place—an apartment stretching across what had been the second floor of three Revolutionary-era buildings—did in fact expect a Mr. Payne to call, the Wachenhut Security officer pressed a switch on his control console which caused the barrier pole to rise.

  Matt drove nearly to the end of Stockton Place, carefully eased the right wheels of the Porsche onto the sidewalk, walked quickly into the lobby of Number Nine, and then quickly up a wide carpeted stairway to the second floor.

  The door to Nine B opened as he reached the landing. Standing in it, looking more than a little annoyed, was Miss Penelope Detweiler, who was twenty-four, blond, and just this side of beautiful. She was wearing a simple black dress, adorned with a string of pearls and a golden pin, a representation of a parrot.

  “Where the hell have you been?” Miss Detweiler asked, and then, seeing how Detective Payne was attired, went on: “Matt, for Christ’s sake, we’re going to dinner!”

  “Hi!” Detective Payne said.

  “Don’t ‘Hi’ me, you bastard! We had reservations for nine-thirty, you’re not even here at nine-thirty, and when you finally show up, you’re dressed like that!”

  He tried to kiss her cheek; she evaded him, then turned and walked ahead of him into the living room of the apartment. Wide glass windows offered a view of the Benjamin Franklin Bridge, the Delaware River, and an enormous sign atop a huge brick warehouse on the far—New Jersey—side of the river showing a representation of a can of chicken soup and the words NESFOODS INTERNATIONAL.

  “I would hazard to guess, old buddy, that you are on the lady’s shitlist,” said Mr. Chadwick Thomas Nesbitt IV, who was sprawled on a green leather couch. Sitting somewhat awkwardly beside him was his wife, the former Daphne Elizabeth Browne, who was visibly in the terminal stages of pregnancy.

  A thick plate-glass coffee table in front of the couch held a bottle of champagne in a glass cooler.

  “What are we celebrating?” Matt asked.

  “Look at how he’s dressed!” Penny Detweiler snapped.

  “Never fear, Chadwick is here, the problem will be solved,” Chad Nesbitt said, waving his champagne glass as he rose from the couch. “Will you have a little of this, Matthew?”

  “What are we celebrating?” Matt asked again.

  “I am no longer peddling soup store by store,” Nesbitt said. “I will tell you all about it as you change out of your costume.”

  Chadwick Thomas Nesbitt IV and Matthew Mark Payne had been best friends since they had met, at age seven, at Episcopal Academy. They had been classmates and fraternity brothers at the University of Pennsylvania, and Matt had been Chad’s best man when he married.

  Nesbitt grabbed the champagne bottle from its cooler by its neck, snatched up a glass, handed it to Matt, then led him down a corridor to his bedroom. There he gestured toward a walk-in closet and arranged himself against the headboard of his king-sized bed.

  “What the hell are you dressed up for?” he asked. “Or as?”

  “I was on the job.”

  “Unstopping toilets?”

  “That’s not original. I was asked the same question just fifteen minutes ago,” Matt said as he selected a shirt and tie from Chad Nesbitt’s closet.

  “In other words, it’s secret police business, right? Not to be shared with the public?”

  “Right.”

  “I wouldn’t count on dipping your wick tonight, Matthew. Penny’s really pissed.”

  “I told her I didn’t know when I could get here,” Matt said.

  “Your tardy appearance is a symptom of what she’s pissed about, not the root cause.”

  “So what else is new?”

  “How long are you going to go on playing cop?”

  “I am not playing cop, goddamn it! And you. This is what I do. I’m good at it. I like it. Don’t you start, too.”

  “I’m afraid I have contributed to the lady’s discontent,” Nesbitt said. “The champagne is because you are looking at the newest Assistant Vice President of Nesfoods International.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. I hate to admit it, but the old man was right. The whole goddamned business does ride on the shoulders of the guys who are out there every day fighting for shelf space. And the only way to really understand that is to go out on the streets and do it yourself.”

  The business to which Mr. Nesbitt referred was Philadelphia’s largest single employer, Nesfoods International. Four generations before, George Detweiler had gone into partnership with Chadwick Thomas Nesbitt to found what was then called The Nesbitt Potted Meats & Preserved Vegetables Company. It was now Nesfoods International, listed just above the middle of the Fortune 500 companies and still tightly held. C. T. Nesbitt III was Chairman of the Executive Committee and H. Richard Detweiler, Penny’s father, was President and Chief Executive Officer.

  “Newest Assistant Vice President of what?” Matt asked.

  “Merchandising.”

  “Congratulations,” Matt said.

  “A little more enthusiasm would not be out of order,” Chad said. “Vice President, even Assistant Vice President, has a certain ring to it.”

  Matt threw a pair of Nesbitt’s trousers and a tweed sports coat on the bed, then started to take his gray uniform trousers off. He had trouble with the right leg, which he finally solved by sitting on the bed, pulling the trousers leg up, and unstrapping an ankle holster.

  “Doesn’t that thing bother your leg?” Chad asked.

  “Only when I’m taking my pants off. I meant it, Chad. Congratulations.”

  “Penny was already here when I got home,” Chad said. “When I made the grand announcement, her response was, ‘And Matt is still childishly playing policeman,’ or words to that effect.”

  “If I had gone into the Marine Corps with you, I would just be finishing my first year in law school,” Matt replied. “I wonder what she would call that.”

  “Sensible,” Chad said. “Your first foot on the first rung of your ladder to legal and/or corporate success. Anyway, if she is bitchy tonight, you know who to blame.”

  “I don’t want to be a lawyer, and I don’t—especially don’t—want
to work for Nesfoods International.”

  “‘Especially don’t’? What are you going to do when you marry Penny? It’s a family business, for Christ’s sake.”

  “Your family. Her family. Not mine.”

  “That’s bullshit and you know it,” Chad said. “She’s an only child. I don’t know how much stock she owns now, but…”

  “Let it go, Chad!”

  “…eventually, she’ll inherit…”

  “Goddamn it, quit!”

  “Your old man sits on the board,” Chad went on. “Mawson, Payne, Stockton, McAdoo and Lester’s biggest client is Nesfoods.”

  “Just for the record, it is not,” Matt said. “Now, are you going to quit, or do you want to celebrate your vice presidency all by yourself?”

  Nesbitt sensed the threat wasn’t idle.

  “One final comment,” he said. “And then I’ll shut up. Please?”

  After a moment, as he closed the zipper of Chad’s gray flannel slacks, Matt nodded.

  “I liked the Marine Corps. I was, I thought, a damned good officer. I really wanted to stay. But I couldn’t, Matt. For the same reasons you can’t ignore who you are, and who Penny is. I think they call that maturity.”

  “You’re now finished, I hope?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Good. Now we’ll go out and celebrate your vice-presidency. I can handle you alone, or Penny, but not the both of you together.”

  “OK.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “There’s a new Italian place down by the river. Northern Italian. I think that means without tomato sauce.”

  Matt pulled up his trousers leg and strapped his ankle holster in place.

  “You really have to carry that with you all the time?” Chad asked.