ELEVEN


At 7:40 A.M. Miss Penelope Detweiler was sitting up in her canopied four-poster bed in her three-room apartment on the second floor of the Detweiler mansion when Mrs. Violet Rogers, who had been employed as a domestic servant by the Detweilers since Miss Detweiler was in diapers, entered carrying a tray with coffee, toast, and orange juice.

Miss Detweiler was wearing a thin, pale blue, sleeveless nightgown. Her eyes were open, and there was a look of surprise on her face.

There was a length of rubber medical tubing tied around Miss Detweiler’s left arm between the elbow and the shoulder. A plastic, throwaway hypodermic injection syringe hung from Miss Detweiler’s lower left arm.

“Oh, Penny!” Mrs. Rogers moaned. “Oh, Penny!”

She put the tray on the dully gleaming cherrywood hope chest at the foot of the bed, then stood erect, her arms folded disapprovingly against her rather massive breast, her full, very black face showing mingled compassion, sorrow, and anger.

And then she met Miss Detweiler’s eyes.

“Oh, sweet Jesus!” Mrs. Rogers said, moaned, and walked quickly to the bed.

She waved a large, plump hand before Miss Detweiler’s eyes. There was no reaction.

She put her hand to Miss Detweiler’s forehead, then withdrew it as if the contact had burned.

She put her hands on Miss Detweiler’s shoulders and shook her.

“Penny! Penny, honey!”

There was no response.

When Mrs. Rogers removed her hands from Miss Detweiler’s shoulders and let her rest again on the pillows against the headboard, Miss Detweiler started to slowly slide to the right.

Mrs. Rogers tried to stop the movement but could not. She watched in horror as Miss Detweiler came to rest on her side. Her head tilted back, and she seemed to be staring at the canopy of her bed.

Mrs. Rogers turned from the bed and walked to the door. In the corridor, the walk became a trot, and then she was running to the end of the corridor, past an oil portrait of Miss Detweiler in her pink debutante gown, past the wide stairway leading down to the entrance foyer of the mansion, into the corridor of the other wing of the mansion, to the door of the apartment of Miss Detweiler’s parents.

She opened and went through the door leading to the apartment sitting room without knocking, and through it to the closed double doors of the bedroom. She knocked at the left of the double doors, then went through it without waiting for a response.

H. Richard Detweiler, a tall, thin man in his late forties, was sleeping in the oversize bed, on his side, his back to his wife Grace, who was curled up in the bed, one lower leg outside the sheets and blankets, facing away from her husband.

Mr. Detweiler, who slept lightly, opened his eyes as Mrs. Rogers approached the bed.

“Mr. D,” Violet said. “You better come.”

“What is it, Violet?” Mr. Detweiler asked in mingled concern and annoyance.

“It’s Miss Penny.”

H. Richard Detweiler sat up abruptly. He was wearing only pajama bottoms.

“Jesus, now what?”

“You’d better come,” Mrs. Rogers repeated.

He swung his feet out of the bed and reached for the dressing gown he had discarded on the floor before turning out the lights. As he put it on, his feet found a pair of slippers.

Mrs. Detweiler, a finely featured, rather thin woman of forty-six, who looked younger, woke, raised her head, and looked around and then sat up. Her breasts were exposed; she had been sleeping wearing only her underpants.

“What is it, Violet?” she asked as she pulled the sheet over her breasts.

“Miss Penny.”

“What about Miss Penny?”

H. Richard Detweiler was headed for the door, followed by Violet.

“Dick?” Mrs. Detweiler asked, and then, angrily, “Dick!”

He did not reply.

Grace Detweiler got out of bed and retrieved a thick terry-cloth bathrobe from the floor. It was too large for her, it was her husband’s, but she often wore it between the shower and the bed. She put it on, and fumbling with the belt, followed her husband and Violet out of her bedroom.

H. Richard Detweiler entered his daughter’s bedroom.

He saw her lying on her side and muttered something unintelligible, then walked toward the canopied bed.

“Penny?”

“I think she’s gone, Mr. D,” Violet said softly.

He flashed her an almost violently angry glare, then bent over the bed and, grunting, pushed his daughter erect. Her head now lolled to one side.

Detweiler sat on the bed and exhaled audibly.

“Call Jensen,” he ordered. “Tell him we have a medical emergency, and to bring the Cadillac to the front door.”

Violet went to the bedside and punched the button that would ring the telephone in the chauffeur’s apartment over the five-car garage.

H. Richard Detweiler stood up, then squatted and grunted as he picked his daughter up in his arms.

“Call Chestnut Hill Hospital, tell them we’re on the way, and then call Dr. Dotson and tell him to meet us there,” Detweiler said as he started to carry his daughter across the room.

Mrs. Arne-Beatrice-Jensen answered the telephone on the second ring and told Mrs. Rogers her husband had just left in the Cadillac to take it to Merion Cadillac-Olds for service.

“Mr. D,” Mrs. Rogers said, “Jensen took the limousine in for service.”

“Go get the Rolls, please, Violet,” Detweiler said, as calmly as he could manage.

“Oh, my God!” Mrs. Grace Detweiler wailed as she came into the room and saw her husband with their daughter in his arms. “What’s happened?”

“Goddamn it, Grace, don’t go to pieces on me,” Detweiler said. He turned to Violet.

“Not the Rolls, the station wagon,” he said, remembering.

There wasn’t enough room in the goddamned Rolls Royce Corniche for two people and a large-sized cat, but Grace had to have a goddamned convertible.

“What’s the matter with her?” Grace Detweiler asked.

“God only knows what she took this time,” Detweiler said, as much to himself as in reply to his wife.

“Beatrice,” Violet said, “get the keys to the station wagon. I’ll meet you by the door.”

“Oh, my God!” Grace Detweiler said, putting her balled fist to her mouth. “She’s unconscious!”

“Baxley has the station wagon,” Mrs. Jensen reported. “He’s gone shopping.”

Baxley was the Detweiler butler. He prided himself that not one bite of food entered the house that he had not personally selected. H. Richard Detweiler suspected that Baxley had a cozy arrangement with the grocer’s and the butcher’s and so on, but he didn’t press the issue. The food was a good deal better than he had expected it would be when Grace had hired the Englishman.

“Baxley’s gone with the station wagon,” Violet reported.

Goddamn it all to hell! Both of them gone at the same time! And no car, of five, large enough to hold him with Penny in his arms. And nobody to drive the car if there was one.

“Call the police,” H. Richard Detweiler ordered. “Tell them we have a medical emergency, and to send an ambulance immediately.”

He left the bedroom carrying his daughter in his arms, and went down the corridor, past the oil portrait of his daughter in her pink debutante gown and then down the wide staircase to the entrance foyer.

“Police Radio,” Mrs. Leander-Harriet-Polk, a somewhat more than pleasingly plump black lady, said into the microphone of her headset.

“We need an ambulance,” Violet said.

Harriet Polk had worked in the Radio Room in the Police Administration Building for nineteen years. Her long experience had told her from the tone of the caller’s voice that this was a genuine call, not some lunatic with a sick sense of humor.

“Ma’am, what’s the nature of the problem?”

“She’s unconscious, not breathing.”

“Where are you, Ma’am?”

“928 West Chestnut Hill Avenue,” Violet said. “It’s the Detweiler estate.”

Harriet threw a switch on her console which connected her with the Fire Department dispatcher. Fire Department Rescue Squads are equipped with oxygen and resuscitation equipment, and manned by firemen with special Emergency Medical Treatment training.

“Unconscious female at 928 West Chestnut Hill Avenue,” she said.

Then she spoke to her caller.

“A rescue squad is on the way, Ma’am,” she said.

“Thank you,” Violet said politely.

Nineteen years on the job had also embedded in Harriet Polk’s memory a map of the City of Philadelphia, overlaid by Police District boundaries. She knew, without thinking about it, that 928 West Chestnut Hill Avenue was in the Fourteenth Police District. Her board showed her that Radio Patrol Car Twenty-three of the Fourteenth District was in service.

Harriet moved another switch.

“Fourteen Twenty-three,” she said. “928 West Chestnut Hill Avenue. A hospital case. Rescue en route.”

Police Officer John D. Wells, who also had nineteen years on the job, was sitting in his three-year-old Chevrolet, whose odometer was halfway through its second hundred thousand miles, outside a delicatessen on Germantown Avenue.

He had just failed to have the moral courage to refuse stuffing his face before going off shift and home. He had a wax-paper-wrapped Taylor-ham-and-egg sandwich in his hand, and a large bite from same in his mouth.

He picked up his microphone and, with some difficulty, answered his call: “Fourteen Twenty-three, OK.”

He took off the emergency brake and dropped the gearshift into drive.

He had spent most of his police career in North Philadelphia, and had been transferred to “The Hill” only six months before. He thought of it as being “retired before retiring.” There was far less activity in affluent Chestnut Hill than in North Philly.

He didn’t, in other words, know his district well, but he knew it well enough to instantly recall that West Chestnut Hill Avenue was lined with large houses, mansions, on large plots of ground, very few of which had numbers to identify them.

Where the hell is 928 West Chestnut Hill Avenue?

Officer Wells did not turn on either his flashing lights or siren. There was not much traffic in this area at this time of the morning, and he didn’t think it was necessary. But he pressed heavily on the accelerator pedal.

H. Richard Detweiler, now staggering under the hundred-and-nine-pound weight of his daughter, reached the massive oak door of the foyer. He stopped and looked angrily over his shoulder and found his wife.

“Grace, open the goddamned door!”

She did so, and he walked through it, onto the slate-paved area before the door.

Penny was really getting heavy. He looked around, and walked to a wrought-iron couch and sat down in it.

Violet appeared.

“Mr. D,” she said, “the police, the ambulance, is coming,” she said.

“Thank you,” he said.

He looked down at his daughter’s face. Penny was looking at him, but she wasn’t seeing him.

Oh, my God!

“Violet, please call Mr. Payne and tell him what’s happened, and that I’m probably going to need him.”

Violet nodded and went back in the house.

Brewster Cortland Payne II, Esq., a tall, well-built-he had played tackle at Princeton in that memorable year when Princeton had lost sixteen of seventeen games played-man in his early fifties, was having breakfast with his wife, Patricia, on the patio outside the breakfast room of his rambling house on a four-acre plot on Providence Road in Wallingford when Mrs. Elizabeth Newman, the Payne housekeeper, appeared carrying a telephone on a long cord.

“It’s the Detweilers’s Violet,” she said.

Mrs. Payne, an attractive forty-four-year-old blonde, who was wearing a pleated skirt and a sweater, put her coffee cup down as she watched her husband take the telephone.

“For you?” she asked, not really expecting a reply.

“Good morning, Violet,” Brewster C. Payne said. “How are you?”

“Mr. Detweiler asked me to call,” Violet said. “He said he will probably need you.”

“What seems to be the problem?”

Payne, who was a founding partner of Mawson, Payne, Stockton, McAdoo amp; Lester, arguably Philadelphia’s most prestigious law firm, was both Mr. H. Richard Detweiler’s personal attorney and his most intimate friend. They had been classmates at both Episcopal Academy and Princeton.

Violet told him what the problem was, ending her recitation of what had transpired by almost sobbing, “I think Penny is gone, Mr. Payne. He’s sitting outside holding her in his lap, waiting for the ambulance, but I think she’s gone.”

“Violet, when the ambulance gets there, find out where they’re taking Penny. Call here and tell Elizabeth. I’m leaving right away. When I get into Philadelphia, I’ll call here and Elizabeth can tell me where to go. Tell Mr. Detweiler I’m on my way.”

He broke the connection with his finger, lifted it and waited for a dial tone, and then started dialing again.

“Well, what is it?” Patricia Payne asked.

“Violet went into Penny’s room and found her sitting up in bed with a needle hanging out of her arm,” Payne replied, evenly. “They’re waiting for an ambulance. Violet thinks it’s too late.”

“Oh, my God!”

A metallic female voice came on the telephone: “Dr. Payne is not available at this time. If you will leave your name and number, she will return your call as soon as possible. Please wait for the tone. Thank you.”

He waited for the tone and then said, “Amy, if you’re there, please pick up.”

“Dad?”

“Penny was found by the maid ten minutes ago with a needle in her arm. Violet thinks she’s gone.”

“Damn!”

“I think you had better go out there and deal with Grace,” Brewster Payne said.

“Goddamn!” Dr. Amelia Payne said.

“Tell her I’m coming,” Patricia said.

“Your mother said she’s coming to Chestnut Hill,” Payne said.

“All right,” Amy said, and the connection went dead.

Payne waited for another dial tone and dialed again.

“More than likely by mistake,” Matt’s voice said metallically, “you have dialed my number. If you’re trying to sell me something, you will self-destruct in ten seconds. Otherwise, you may leave a message when the machine goes bleep.”

Bleep.

“Matt, pick up.”

There was no human voice.

He’s probably at work, Payne decided, and replaced the handset in its cradle.

“Elizabeth, please call Mrs. Craig-you’d better try her at home first-and tell her that something has come up and I don’t know when I’ll be able to come to the office. And ask her to ask Colonel Mawson to let her know where he’ll be this morning.”

Mrs. Newman nodded.

“Poor Matt,” Mrs. Newman said.

“Good God!” Brewster Payne said, and then stood up. His old-fashioned, well-worn briefcase was sitting on the low fieldstone wall surrounding the patio. He picked it up and then jumped over the wall and headed toward the garage. His wife started to follow him, then stopped and called after him: “I’ve got to get my purse. And I’ll try to get Matt at work.”

She waited until she saw his head nod, then turned and went into the house.

Officer John D. Wells, in RPC Fourteen Twenty-three, slowed down when he reached the 900 block of West Chestnut Hill Avenue, a little angry that his memory had been correct.

There are no goddamned numbers. Just tall fences that look like rows of spears and fancy gates, all closed. You can’t even see the houses from the street.

Then, as he moved past one set of gates, it began to open, slowly and majestically. He slammed on the brakes and backed up, and drove through the gates, up a curving drive lined with hundred-year-old oak trees.

If this isn’t the place, I can ask.

It was the place.

There was a man on a patio outside an enormous house sitting on an iron couch holding a girl in her nightgown in his arms.

Wells got quickly out of the car.

“Thank God!” the man said, and then, quickly, angrily: “Where the hell is the ambulance? We called for an ambulance!”

“A rescue squad’s on the way, sir,” Wells said.

He looked down at the girl. Her eyes were open. Wells had seen enough open lifeless eyes to know this girl was dead. But he leaned over and touched the carotid artery at the rear of her ear, feeling for a pulse, to make sure.

“Can you tell me what happened, sir?” he asked.

“We found her this way, Violet found her this way.”

There came the faint wailing of a siren.

“There was a needle in her arm,” a large black woman said softly, earning a look of pained betrayal from the man holding the body.

Wells looked. There was no needle, but there was a purple puncture wound in the girl’s arm.

“Where did you find her?” Wells asked the black woman.

“Sitting up in her bed,” Violet said.

The sound of the ambulance siren had grown much louder. Then it shut off. A moment later the ambulance appeared in the driveway.

Two firemen got quickly out, pulled a stretcher from the back of the van, and, carrying an oxygen bottle and an equipment bag, ran up to the patio.

The taller of them, a very thin man, did exactly what Officer Wells had done, took a quick look at Miss Penelope Detweiler’s lifeless eyes and concluded she was dead, and then checked her carotid artery to make sure.

He met Wells’s eyes and, just perceptibly, shook his head.

“Sir,” he said, very kindly, to H. Richard Detweiler, “I think we’d better get her onto the stretcher.”

“There was, the lady said, a needle in her arm,” Wells said.

H. Richard Detweiler now gave Officer Wells a very dirty look.

The very thin fireman nodded. The announcement did not surprise him. The Fire Department Rescue Squads of the City of Philadelphia see a good many deaths caused by narcotics overdose.

Officer Wells went to his car and picked up the microphone.

“Fourteen Twenty-three,” he said.

“Fourteen Twenty-three,” Harriet Polk’s voice came back immediately.

“Give me a supervisor at this location. This is a Five Two Nine Two.”

Five Two Nine Two was a code that went back to the time before shortwave radio and telephones, when police communications were by telegraph key in police boxes on street corners. It meant “dead body.”

“Fourteen B,” Harriet called.

Fourteen B was the call sign of one of two sergeants assigned to patrol the Fourteenth Police District.

“Fourteen B,” Sergeant John Aloysius Monahan said into his microphone. “I have it. En route.”

Officer Wells picked up a clipboard from the floor of the passenger side of his car and then went back onto the patio. The firemen were just finishing lowering Miss Detweiler onto the stretcher.

The tall thin fireman picked up a worn and spotted gray blanket, held it up so that it unfolded of its own weight, and then very gently laid it over the body of Miss Detweiler.

“What are you doing that for?” H. Richard Detweiler demanded angrily.

“Sir,” the thin fireman said, “I’m sorry. She’s gone.”

“She’s not!”

“I’m really sorry, sir.”

“Oh, Jesus H. fucking Christ!” H. Richard Detweiler wailed.

Mrs. H. Richard Detweiler, who had been standing just inside the door, now began to scream.

Violet went to her and, tears running down her face, wrapped her arms around her.

“What happens now?” H. Richard Detweiler asked.

“I’m afraid I’ve got to ask you some questions,” Officer Wells said. “You’re Mr. Detweiler? The girl’s father?”

“I mean what happens to…my daughter? I suppose I’ll have to call the funeral home-”

“Mr. Detweiler,” Wells said, “what happens now is that someone from the Medical Examiner’s Office will come here and officially pronounce her dead and remove her body to the morgue. Under the circumstances, the detectives will have to conduct an investigation. There will have to be an examination of the remains.”

“An autopsy, you mean? Like hell there will be.”

“Mr. Detweiler, that’s the way it is,” Wells said. “It’s the law.”

“We’ll see about that!” Detweiler said. “That’s my daughter!”

“Yes, sir. And, sir, a sergeant is on the way here. And there will be a detective. There are some questions we have to ask. And we’ll have to see where you found her.”

“The hell you will!” Detweiler fumed. “Have you got a search warrant?”

“No, sir,” Wells said. There was no requirement for a search warrant. But he did not want to argue with this grief-stricken man. The Sergeant was on the way. Let the Sergeant deal with it.

He searched his memory. John Aloysius Monahan was on the job. Nice guy. Good cop. The sort of a man who could reason with somebody like this girl’s father.

Sergeant John Aloysius Monahan got out of his car and started to walk up the wide flight of stairs to the patio. Officer Wells walked down to him. Monahan saw a tall man in a dressing robe sitting on a wrought-iron couch, staring at a blanket-covered body on a stretcher.

“Looks like an overdose,” Wells said softly. “The maid found her, the daughter, in her bed with a needle in her arm.”

“In her bed? How did she get down here?”

“The father carried her,” Wells said. “He was sitting on that couch holding her in his arms when I got here. He’s pretty upset. I told him about the M.E., the autopsy, and he said ‘no way.’”

“You know who this guy is?” Monahan asked.

Wells shook his head, then gestured toward the mansion. “Somebody important.”

“He runs Nesfoods,” Monahan said.

“Jesus!”

Monahan walked up the shallow stairs to the patio.

“Mr. Detweiler,” he said.

It took a long moment before Detweiler raised his eyes to him.

“I’m Sergeant Monahan from the Fourteenth District, Mr. Detweiler,” he said. “I’m very sorry about this.”

Detweiler shrugged.

“I’m here to help in any way I can, Mr. Detweiler.”

“It’s a little late for that now, isn’t it?”

“It looks that way, Mr. Detweiler,” Monahan agreed. “I’m really sorry.” He paused. “Mr. Detweiler, I have to see the room where she was found. Maybe we’ll find something there that will help us. Could you bring yourself to take me there?”

“Why not?” H. Richard Detweiler replied. “I’m not doing anybody any good here, am I?”

“That’s very good of you, Mr. Detweiler,” Sergeant Monahan said. “I appreciate it very much.”

He waited until Detweiler had stood up and started into the house, then motioned for Wells to follow them.

“What’s your daughter’s name, Mr. Detweiler?” Monahan asked gently. “We have to have that for the report.”

“Penelope,” Mr. Detweiler said. “Penelope Alice.”

Behind them, as they crossed the foyer to the stairs, Officer Wells began to write the information down on Police Department Form

75-48.

They walked up the stairs and turned left.

“And who besides yourself and Mrs. Detweiler,” Sergeant Monahan asked, “was in the house, sir?”

“Well, Violet, of course,” Detweiler replied. “I don’t know if the cook is here yet.”

“Wells,” Sergeant Monahan interrupted.

“I got it, Sergeant,” Officer Wells said.

“Excuse me, Mr. Detweiler,” Sergeant Monahan said.

Officer Wells let them get a little ahead of them, then, one at a time, he picked two of the half-dozen Louis XIV chairs that were neatly arranged against the walls of the corridor. He placed one over the plastic hypodermic syringe that both he and Sergeant Monahan had spotted, and the second over a length of rubber surgical tubing, to protect them.

Then he walked quickly after Sergeant Monahan and Mr. Detweiler.

Sergeant John Aloysius Monahan was impressed with the size of Miss Penelope Alice Detweiler’s apartment. It was as large as the entire upstairs of his row house off Roosevelt Boulevard. The bathroom was as large as his bedroom. He was a little surprised to find that the faucets were stainless steel. He would not have been surprised if they had been gold.

And he was not at all surprised to find, on one of Miss Detweiler’s bedside tables, an empty glassine packet, a spoon, a candle, and a small cotton ball.

He touched nothing.

“Is there a telephone I can use, Mr. Detweiler?” he asked.

Detweiler pointed to the telephone on the other bedside table.

“The detectives like it better if we don’t touch anything,” Monahan said. “Until they’ve had a look.”

“There’s one downstairs,” Detweiler said. “Sergeant, may I now call my funeral director? I want to get…her off the patio. For her mother’s sake.”

“I think you’d better ask the Medical Examiner about that, Mr. Detweiler,” Monahan said. “Can I ask you to show me the telephone?”

“All right,” Detweiler said. “I was thinking of Penny’s mother.”

“Yes, of course,” Monahan said. “This is a terrible thing, Mr. Detweiler.”

He waited until Detweiler started out of the room, then followed him back downstairs. Officer Wells followed both of them. Detweiler led him to a living room and pointed at a telephone on a table beside a red leather chair.

“Officer Wells here,” Monahan said, “has some forms that have to be filled out. I hate to ask you, but could you give him a minute or two?”

“Let’s get it over with,” Detweiler said.

“Officer Wells, why don’t you go with Mr. Detweiler?” Monahan said, waited until they had left the living room, closed the door after them, went to the telephone, and dialed a number from memory.

“Northwest Detectives, Detective McFadden.”

Detective Charles McFadden, a very large, pleasant-faced young man, was sitting at a desk at the entrance to the offices of the Northwest Detective Division, on the second floor of the Thirty-fifth Police District building at North Broad and Champlost streets.

“This is Sergeant Monahan, Fourteenth District. Is Captain O’Connor around?”

“He’s around here someplace,” Detective McFadden said, then raised his voice: “Captain, Sergeant Monahan on Three Four for you.”

“What can I do for you, Jack?” Captain Thomas O’Connor said.

“Sir, I’m out on a Five Two Nine Two in Chestnut Hill. The Detweiler estate. It’s the Detweiler girl.”

“What happened to her?”

“Looks like a drug overdose.”

“I’ll call Chief Lowenstein,” Captain O’Connor said, thinking aloud.

Lowenstein would want to know about this as soon as possible. For one thing, the Detweiler family was among the most influential in the city. The Mayor would want to know about this, and Lowenstein could get the word to him.

Captain O’Connor thought of another political ramification to the case: the Detweiler girl’s boyfriend was Detective Matthew Payne. Detective Payne had for a rabbi Chief Inspector Dennis V. Coughlin. It was a toss-up between Coughlin and Lowenstein for the unofficial title of most important chief inspector. O’Connor understood that he would have to tell Coughlin what had happened to the Detweiler girl. And then he realized there was a third police officer who had a personal interest and would have to be told.

“You’re just calling it in?” O’Connor asked.

“I thought I’d better report it directly to you.”

“Yeah. Right. Good thinking. Consider it reported. I’ll get somebody out there right away. A couple of guys just had their court appearances canceled. I don’t know who’s up on the wheel, but I’ll see the right people go out on this job. And I’ll go myself.”

“The body’s still on a Fire Department stretcher,” Monahan said. “The father carried it downstairs to wait for the ambulance. I haven’t called the M.E. yet.”

“You go ahead and call the M.E.,” O’Connor said. “Do this strictly by the book. Give me a number where I can get you.”

Monahan read it off the telephone cradle and O’Connor recited it back to him.

“Right,” Monahan said.

“Thanks for the call, Jack,” O’Connor said, and hung up.

He looked down at Detective McFadden.

“Who’s next up on the wheel?”

“I am. I’m holding down the desk for Taylor.”

“When are Hemmings and Shapiro due in?”

Detective McFadden looked at his watch.

“Any minute. They called in twenty minutes ago.”

“Have Taylor take this job when he gets here. I don’t think you should.”

McFadden’s face asked why.

“That was a Five Two Nine Two, Charley. It looks like your friend Payne’s girlfriend put a needle in herself one time too many.”

“Holy Mother of God!”

“At her house. That’s all I have. But I don’t think you should take the job.”

“Captain, I’m going to need some personal time off.”

“Yeah, sure. As soon as Hemmings comes in. Take what you need.”

“Thank you.”

“I’ve seen pictures of her,” Captain O’Connor said. “What a fucking waste!”

“Chief Coughlin’s office. Sergeant Holloran.”

“Captain O’Connor, Northwest Detectives. Is the Chief available?”

“He’s here, but the door is closed. Inspector Wohl is with him, Captain.”

“I think this is important.”

“Hold on, Captain.”

“Coughlin.”

“Chief, this is Tom O’Connor.”

“I hope this is important, Tom.”

“Sergeant Monahan of the Fourteenth just called in a Five Two Nine Two from the Detweiler estate. The girl. The daughter. Drug overdose.”

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” Chief Coughlin responded with even more emotion than O’Connor expected. Then, as if he had not quite covered the mouthpiece with his hand, O’Connor heard him say, “Penny Detweiler overdosed. At her house. She’s dead.”

“I’ll be a sonofabitch!” O’Connor heard Inspector Peter Wohl say.

“Chief, I’ve been trying to get Chief Lowenstein. You don’t happen to know where he is, do you?”

“Haven’t a clue, Tom. It’s ten past eight. He should be in his office by now.”

“I’ll try him there again,” O’Connor said.

“Thanks for the call, Tom.”

“Yes, sir.”

At 7:55 A.M., Police Commissioner Taddeus Czernich, a tall, heavyset, fifty-seven-year-old with a thick head of silver hair, had been waiting in the inner reception room of the office of the Mayor in the City Hall Building when one of the telephones on the receptionist’s desk had rung.

“Mayor Carlucci’s office,” the receptionist, a thirty-odd-year-old, somewhat plump woman of obvious Italian extraction, had said into the telephone, and then hung up without saying anything else. Czernich thought he knew what the call was. Confirmation came when the receptionist got up and walked to the door of the Mayor’s private secretary and announced, “He’s entering the building.”

The Mayor’s secretary, another thirty-odd-year-old woman, also of obvious Italian extraction, who wore her obviously chemically assisted blond hair in an upswing, had arranged for the sergeant in charge of the squad of police assigned to City Hall to telephone the moment the mayoral limousine rolled into the inner courtyard of the City Hall Building.

Czernich stood up and checked the position of the finely printed necktie at his neck. He was wearing a banker’s gray double-breasted suit and highly polished black wing-tip shoes. He was an impressive-looking man.

Three minutes later, the door to the inner reception room was pushed open by Lieutenant Jack Fellows. The Mayor marched purposefully into the room.

“Good morning, Mr. Mayor,” the Police Commissioner and the receptionist said in chorus.

“Morning,” the Mayor said to the receptionist and then turned to the Police Commissioner, whom he did not seem especially overjoyed to see. “Is it important?”

“Yes, Mr. Mayor, I think so,” Czernich replied.

“Well, then, come on in. Let’s get it over with,” the Mayor said, and marched into the inner office, the door to which was now held open by Lieutenant Fellows.

“Good morning,” the Mayor said to his personal secretary as he marched past her desk toward the door of his office. By moving very quickly, Lieutenant Fellows reached it just in time to open it for him.

Commissioner Czernich followed the Mayor into his office and took up a position three feet in front of the Mayor’s huge, ornately carved antique desk. The Mayor’s secretary appeared carrying a steaming mug of coffee bearing the logotype of the Sons of Italy.

The Mayor sat down in his dark green high-backed leather chair, leaned forward to glance at the documents waiting for his attention on the green pad on his desk, lifted several of them to see what was underneath, and then raised his eyes to Czernich.

“What’s so important?”

Commissioner Czernich laid a single sheet of paper on the Mayor’s desk, carefully placing it so that the Mayor could read it without turning it around.

“Sergeant McElroy brought that to my house while I was having my breakfast,” Commissioner Czernich said, a touch of indignation in his voice.

The Mayor took the document and read it.


CITY OF PHILADELPHIA MEMORANDUM TO: POLICE COMMISSIONER FROM: COMMANDING OFFICER, DETECTIVE BUREAU SUBJECT: COMPENSATORY TIME/RETIREMENT


1. The undersigned has this date placed himself on leave (compensatory time) for a period of fourteen days.

2. The undersigned has this date applied for retirement effective immediately.

3. Inasmuch as the undersigned does not anticipate returning to duty before entering retirement status, the undersigned’s identification card and police shield are turned in herewith.

Matthew L. Lowenstein

Chief Inspector

82-S-1AE (Rev. 3/59) R ESPONSE TO THIS MEMORANDUM MAY BE MADE HEREON IN LONGHAND


“Damn!” the Mayor said.

Czernich took a step forward and laid a chief inspector’s badge and a leather photo identification folder on the Mayor’s desk.

“You did not see fit to let me know Chief Lowenstein was involved in your investigation,” Czernich said.

“Damn!” the Mayor repeated, this time with utter contempt in his voice, and then raised it. “Jack!”

Lieutenant Fellows pushed the door to the Mayor’s office open.

“Yes, Mr. Mayor?”

“Get Chief Lowenstein on the phone,” the Mayor ordered. “He’s probably at home.”

“Yes, sir,” Fellows said, and started to withdraw.

“Use this phone,” the Mayor said.

Fellows walked to the Mayor’s desk and picked up the handset of one of the three telephones on it.

“This makes the situation worse, I take it?” Commissioner Czernich asked.

“Tad, just close your mouth, all right?”

“Mrs. Lowenstein,” Fellows said into the telephone. “This is Lieutenant Jack Fellows. I’m calling for the Mayor. He’d like to speak to Chief Lowenstein.”

There was a reply, and then Fellows covered the microphone with his hand.

“She says he’s not available,” he reported.

“Tell her thank you,” the Mayor ordered.

“Thank you, Ma’am,” Lieutenant Fellows said, and replaced the handset in its cradle and looked to the Mayor for further orders.

“Take a look at this, Jack,” the Mayor ordered, and pushed the memorandum toward Fellows.

“My God!” Fellows said.

“I had no idea this mess we’re in went that high,” Commissioner Czernich said.

“I thought I told you to close your mouth,” the Mayor said, then looked at Fellows. “Jack, call down to the courtyard and see if there’s an unmarked car down there. If there is, I want it. You drive. If there isn’t, call Special Operations and have them meet us with one at Broad and Roosevelt Boulevard.”

“Yes, sir,” Fellows reported, and picked up the telephone again.

The Mayor watched, his face expressionless, as Fellows called the sergeant in charge of the City Hall detail.

“Inspector Taylor’s car is down there, Mr. Mayor,” Fellows reported.

“Go get it. I’ll be down in a minute,” the Mayor ordered.

“Yes, sir.”

The Mayor watched Fellows hurry out of his office and then turned to Commissioner Czernich.

“How many people know about that memo?”

“Just yourself and me, Mr. Mayor. And now Jack Fellows.”

“Keep-” the Mayor began.

“And Harry McElroy,” Czernich interrupted him. “It wasn’t even sealed. The envelope, I mean.”

“Keep it that way, Tad. You understand me?”

“Yes, of course, Mr. Mayor.”

The Mayor stood up and walked out of his office.

“Sarah,” the Mayor of the City of Philadelphia said gently to the gray-haired, soft-faced woman standing behind the barely opened door of a row house on Tyson Street, off Roosevelt Boulevard, “I know he’s in there.”

She just looked at him.

She looks close to tears, the Mayor thought. Hell, she has been crying. Goddamnitalltohell!

“What do you want me to do, Sarah?” the Mayor asked very gently. “Take the door?”

The door closed in his face. There was the sound of a door chain rattling, and then the door opened. Sarah Lowenstein stood behind it.

“In the kitchen,” she said softly.

“Thank you,” the Mayor said, and walked into the house and down the corridor beside the stairs and pushed open the swinging door to the kitchen.

Chief Matthew L. Lowenstein, in a sleeveless undershirt, was sitting at the kitchen table, hunched over a cup of coffee. He looked up when he heard the door open, and then, when he saw the Mayor, quickly averted his gaze.

The Mayor laid Lowenstein’s badge and photo ID on the table.

“What is this shit, Matt?”

“I’m trying to remember,” Lowenstein said. “I think if you just walked in, that’s simple trespassing. If you took the door, that’s forcible entry.”

“Sarah let me in.”

“I told her not to. What’s on your mind, Mr. Mayor?”

“I want to know what the hell this is all about.”

Lowenstein raised his eyes to look at the Mayor.

“OK,” he said. “What it’s all about is that you don’t need a chief of detectives you don’t trust.”

“Who said I don’t trust you? For God’s sake, we go back a long way together, twenty-five years, at least. Of course I trust you.”

“That’s why you’re running your own detective squad, right? And you didn’t tell me about it because you trust me? Bullshit, Jerry, you don’t trust me. My character or my professional competence.”

“That’s bullshit!”

“And I don’t have to take your bullshit, either. I’m not Taddeus Czernich. I’ve got my time on the job. I don’t need it, in other words.”

“What are you pissed off about? What happened at that goddamned party? Matt, for Christ’s sake, I was upset.”

“You were a pretty good cop, Jerry. Not as good as you think you were, but good. But that doesn’t mean that nobody else in the Department is as smart as you, or as honest. I’m as good a cop, probably better- I never nearly got thrown out of the Department or indicted-than you ever were. So let me put it another way. I’m sick of your bullshit, I don’t have to put up with it, and I don’t intend to. I’m out.”

“Come on, Matt!”

“I’m out,” Lowenstein repeated flatly. “Find somebody else to push around. Make Peter Wohl Chief of Detectives. You really already have.”

“So that’s it. You’re pissed because I gave Wohl Ethical Affairs?”

“That whole Ethical Affairs idea stinks. Internal Affairs, a part of the Detective Bureau, is supposed to find dirty cops. And by and large, they do a pretty good job of it.”

“Not this time, they didn’t,” the Mayor said.

“I was working on it. I was getting close.”

“There are political considerations,” the Mayor said.

“Yeah, political considerations,” Lowenstein said bitterly.

“Yeah, political considerations,” Carlucci said. “And don’t raise your nose at them. You better hope I get reelected, or you’re liable to have a mayor and a police commissioner you’d really have trouble with.”

“We don’t have a police commissioner now. We have a parrot.”

“That’s true,” the Mayor said. “But he takes a good picture, and he doesn’t give you any trouble. Admit it.”

“An original thought and a cold drink of water would kill the Polack,” Lowenstein said.

“But he doesn’t give you any trouble, does he, Matt?” the Mayor persisted.

“You give me the goddamned trouble. Gave me. Past tense. I’m out.”

“You can’t quit now.”

“Watch me.”

“The Department’s in trouble. Deep trouble. It needs you. I need you.”

“You mean you’re in trouble about getting yourself reelected.”

“If I don’t get reelected, then the Department will be in even worse trouble.”

“Has it ever occurred to you that maybe the Department wouldn’t be in trouble if you let the people who are supposed to run it actually run it?”

“You know I love the Department, Matt,” the Mayor said. “Everything I try to do is for the good of the Department.”

“Like I said, make Peter Wohl chief of detectives. He’s already investigating everything but recovered stolen vehicles. Jesus, you even sent the Payne kid in to spy on Homicide.”

“I sent the Payne kid over there to piss you off. I was already upset about these goddamned scumbags Cazerra and Meyer, and then you give me an argument about your detective who got caught screwing his wife’s sister, and whose current girlfriend is probably involved in shooting her husband.”

“That’s bullshit and you know it.”

“I wish I did know it.”

Lowenstein looked at the Mayor and then shook his head.

“That’s what Augie Wohl said. And Sarah said it, too. That you did that just to piss me off.”

“And it worked, didn’t it?” the Mayor said, pleased. “Better than I hoped.”

“You sonofabitch, Jerry,” Lowenstein said.

“Augie and Sarah are only partly right. Pissing you off wasn’t the only thing I had in mind.”

“What else?”

“I gave Ethical Affairs to Peter Wohl for political considerations, and even if you don’t like the phrase, I have to worry about it. Peter’s Mr. Clean in the public eye, the guy who put Judge Moses Findermann away. I needed something for the newspapers besides ‘Internal Affairs is conducting an investigation of these allegations.’ Christ, can’t you see that? The papers, especially the Ledger, are always crying ‘Police cover-up!’ If I said that Internal Affairs was now investigating something they should have found out themselves, what would that look like?”

Chief Lowenstein granted the point, somewhat unwillingly, with a shrug.

“What’s that got to do with Payne, sending him in to spy on Homicide?”

“Same principle. His picture has been all over the papers. Payne is the kind of cop the public wants. It’s like TV and the movies. A good-looking young cop kills the bad guys and doesn’t steal money.”

There was a faint suggestion of a smile on Lowenstein’s lips.

“So I figured if I send Payne to spend some time at Homicide (a) he can’t really do any harm over there and (b) if it turns out your man who can’t keep his dick in his pocket and/or the widow-and get pissed if you want, Matt, but that wouldn’t surprise me a bit if that’s the way it turns out-had something to do with Kellog getting himself shot, then what the papers have is another example of one of Mr. Clean’s hotshots cleaning up the Police Department.”

“I talked to Wally Milham, Jerry. I’ve seen enough killers and been around enough cops to know a killer and/or a lying cop when I see one. He didn’t do it.”

“Maybe he didn’t, but if she had something to do with it, and he’s been fucking her, which is now common knowledge, it’s the same thing. You talk to her?”

“No,” Lowenstein said.

“Maybe you should,” the Mayor said.

“You’re not listening to me. I’m going out. I’m going to move to some goddamned place at the shore and walk up and down the beach.”

“We haven’t even got around to talking about that.”

“There’s nothing to talk about.”

“You haven’t even heard my offer.”

“I don’t want to hear your goddamned offer.”

“How do you know until you hear it?”

“Jesus Christ, can’t you take no for an answer?”

“No. Not with you. Not when the Department needs you.”

The kitchen door swung open.

“I thought maybe you’d need some more coffee,” Sarah Lowenstein said a little nervously.

“You still got that stuff you bought to get rid of the rats?” Chief Lowenstein said. “Put two heaping tablespoons, three, in Jerry’s cup.”

“You two have been friends so long,” Sarah said. “It’s not right that you should fight.”

“Tell him, Sarah,” the Mayor said. “I am the spirit of reasonableness and conciliation.”

“Four tablespoons, honey,” Chief Lowenstein said.

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