When the call came into the Homicide Unit of the Philadelphia Police Department from Police Radio that Officer Jerome H. Kellog had been found shot to death in his home in the Twenty-fifth District, Detective Joseph P. D’Amata was holding down the desk.
D’Amata took down the information quickly, hung up, and then called, “We’ve got a job.”
When there was no response, D’Amata looked around the room, which is on the second floor of the Roundhouse, its windows opening to the south and overlooking the parking lot behind the building. It was just about empty.
“Where the hell is everybody?” D’Amata, a slightly built, natty, olive-skinned thirty-eight-year-old, wondered aloud.
D’Amata walked across the room and stuck his head in the open door of Lieutenant Louis Natali’s office. Natali, who was also olive-skinned, dapper, and in his mid-thirties, looked something like D’Amata. He was with Sergeant Zachary Hobbs, a stocky, ruddy-faced forty-four-year-old. Both looked up from whatever they were doing on Natali’s desk.
“We’ve got a job. In the Twenty-fifth. A cop. A plainclothes narc by the name of Kellog.”
“What happened to him?”
“Shot in the back of his head in his kitchen.”
“And?” Natali asked, a hint of impatience in his voice.
“Joe said his name was Kellog, Lieutenant,” Hobbs said delicately.
“Kellog?” Natali asked. And then his memory made the connection. “Jesus Christ! Is there more?”
D’Amata shook his head.
There was a just-perceptible hesitation.
“Where’s Milham?”
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.
“And you can’t find his wife?” Talley asked.
“No. Bob, there’s some unpleasant gossip-”
“All of it probably true,” Talley interrupted.
“You’ve heard it?”
“Yeah. Fred, where are you? In your office?”
“Yeah. Bob, I know that you and Henry Quaire are pretty close-”
Captain Henry Quaire was Commanding Officer of the Homicide Unit.
“I’ll call him, Fred, and get back to you,” Talley said. He broke the connection with his finger, and started to dial a number. Then, sensing Sergeant Dolan’s eyes on him, quickly decided that telling him something of what he knew made more sense than keeping it to himself, and letting Dolan guess. Dolan had a big mouth and a wild imagination.
“They just found Jerry Kellog shot to death in his house,” he said.
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!” Dolan said. “They know who did it?”
“All I know is what I told you,” Talley said. “I’m going to call Captain Quaire and see what I can find out.”
“You heard the talk?” Dolan asked.
“Talk is cheap, Dolan,” Talley said shortly. He walked across the room to his office, closed the door, and dialed a number from memory.
“Homicide, Sergeant Hobbs.”
“Captain Talley, Sergeant. Let me talk to Captain Quaire. His private line is always busy.”
“Sir, the Captain’s tied up at the moment. Maybe I could help you?”
“I know what he’s tied up with, Hobbs. Tell him I need to talk to him.”
“Captain, Chief Lowenstein’s in there with him.”
“Tell him I’d like to talk to him,” Talley repeated.
“Yes, sir. Hang on a minute, please.”
Sergeant Hobbs walked through the outer office to the office of the Commanding Officer and knocked at it.
The three men inside-Captain Henry Quaire, a stocky, balding man in his late forties; Chief Inspector of Detectives Matt Lowenstein, a stocky, barrel-chested man of fifty-five; and Lieutenant Louis Natali-all looked at him with annoyance.
“It’s Captain Talley,” Sergeant Hobbs called, loud enough to be heard through the door.
“I thought we might be hearing from him,” Chief Lowenstein said, then raised his voice loud enough to be heard by Hobbs. “On what, Hobbs?”
“One Seven Seven, Chief,” Hobbs replied.
Lowenstein turned one of the telephones on Quaire’s desk around so that he could read the extension numbers and pushed the button marked 177.
“Chief Lowenstein, Talley. I guess you heard about Officer Kellog?”
“Yes, sir. Captain Samuels of the Twenty-fifth called. He’s-”
“Having trouble finding the Widow Kellog?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Detective Milham, who’s working a job, has been asked to come in to see Captain Quaire and myself to see if he might be able to shed light on that question. If he can, I will call Captain Samuels. And for your general fund of information, Detective Milham was not up for the Kellog job. Does that answer all the questions you might have?”
Sergeant Harry McElroy, a wiry, sandy-haired thirty-eight-year-old, had been “temporarily” assigned as driver to Chief Matt Lowenstein three years before. He had then been a detective, assigned to East Detectives, and didn’t want the job. Like most detectives, he viewed the Chief of Detectives with a little fear. Lowenstein had a well-earned reputation for a quick temper, going strictly by the book, and an inability to suffer fools.
The term “driver” wasn’t an accurate description of what a driver did. In military parlance, a driver was somewhere between an aide-de-camp and a chief of staff. His function was to relieve his chief of details, sparing him for more important things.
During Harry’s thirty-day temporary assignment, Lowenstein had done nothing to make Harry think he had made a favorable impression on him. He had been genuinely surprised when Lowenstein asked him how he felt about “sticking around, and not going back to East.”
Since that possibility had never entered Harry’s mind, he could not-although he himself had a well-earned reputation for being able to think on his feet-think of any excuse he could offer Lowenstein to turn down the offer.
Over the next eleven months, as he waited for his name to appear on the promotion list to sergeant-he had placed sixteenth on the exam, and was fairly sure the promotion would come through-he told himself that all he had to do was keep his nose clean and all would be well. He had come to believe that Lowenstein wasn’t really as much of a sonofabitch as most people thought, and when his promotion came through, he would be reassigned.
He would, so to speak, while greatly feeling the threat of evil, have safely passed through the Valley of Death. And he knew that he had learned a hell of a lot from his close association with Lowenstein that he could have learned nowhere else.
McElroy learned that his name had come up on a promotion list from Chief Lowenstein himself, the morning of the day the list would become public.
“There’s a vacancy for sergeant in Major Crimes,” Lowenstein had added. “And they want you. But what I’ve been thinking is that you could learn more staying right where you are. Your decision.”
That, too, had been totally unexpected, and by then he had come to know Lowenstein well enough to know that when he asked for a decision, Lowenstein wanted it right then, that moment.
“Thank you, Chief,” Harry had said. “I’d like that.”
McElroy now had his own reputation, not only as Lowenstein’s shadow, but for knowing how Chief Lowenstein thought, and what he was likely to do in any given situation.
His telephone often rang with conversations that began, “Harry, how do you think the Chief would feel about…”
He did, he came to understand, really have an insight into how Lowenstein thought, and what Lowenstein wanted.
Usually, Harry went wherever Lowenstein went. This morning, however, he sensed without a hint of any kind from Lowenstein that he would not be welcome in Captain Henry Quaire’s office when the Chief went in there to discuss the murder of Officer Jerome H. Kellog with Quaire and Lieutenant Natali.
He got himself a cup of coffee and stationed himself near the entrance to the Homicide Unit, where he could both keep an eye on Quaire’s office and intercept anybody who thought they had to see the Chief.
Chief Lowenstein came suddenly out of Quaire’s office and marched out of Homicide. As he passed Harry, he said, “I’ve got to go see the Dago.”
“Yes, sir.”
The Dago was the Mayor of the City of Philadelphia, the Honorable Jerry Carlucci.
They rode down to the lobby in the elevator, and out the door to where Harry had parked the Chief’s official Oldsmobile, by the CHIEF INSPECTOR DETECTIVE BUREAU sign at the door.
The police band radios came to life with the starting of the engine, and there was traffic on the command band:
“Mary One, William Five, at the Zoo parking lot,” one metallic voice announced.
“A couple of minutes,” a second metallic voice replied.
“Mary One” was the call sign of the limousine used by the Mayor of Philadelphia, “William” the identification code assigned to Special Operations.
“Who’s William Five?” Sergeant McElroy asked thoughtfully.
“Probably Tony Harris,” Lowenstein said. “Washington is William Four. But what I’d really like to know is why Special Operations is meeting the Mayor, or vice versa, in the Zoo parking lot. I wonder what wouldn’t wait until the Mayor got to his office.”
“Yeah,” McElroy grunted thoughtfully.
“Well, at least we know where to wait for the Mayor. City Hall, Harry.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Did Weisbach call in this morning?”
“No, sir.”
“When we get to City Hall, you find a phone, get a location on Weisbach, call him, and tell him to stay wherever he is until I get back to him.”
“Yes, sir.”
When the mayoral Cadillac limousine rolled onto the sidewalk on the northeast corner of Philadelphia City Hall, which sits in the middle of the junction of Broad and Market streets in what is known as Center City, Chief Lowenstein was leaning against the right front fender of his Oldsmobile waiting for him.
He knew that Police Commissioner Taddeus Czernich habitually began his day by waiting in Mayor Carlucci’s office for his daily orders, and he wanted to see Mayor Carlucci alone.
Lowenstein walked quickly to the side of the long black Cadillac, reaching it just as Lieutenant Jack Fellows pulled the door open. He saw that his presence surprised Fellows, and a moment later, as he came out of the car, Mayor Carlucci as well.
“’Morning, Matt,” Carlucci said. He was a tall, large-boned, heavyset man, wearing a well-tailored, dark blue suit, a stiffly starched, bright-white shirt, a dark, finely figured necktie, and highly polished black wing-tip shoes.
He did not seem at all pleased to see Lowenstein.
“I need a minute of your time, Mr. Mayor.”
“Here, you mean,” Carlucci said, on the edge of unpleasantness, gesturing around at the traffic circling City Hall.
A citizen recognized His Honor and blew his horn. Carlucci smiled warmly and waved.
“Yes, sir,” Lowenstein said.
Carlucci hesitated a moment, then got back in the limousine and waved at Lowenstein to join him. Fellows, after hesitating a moment, got back in the front seat. The Mayor activated the switch that raised the divider glass.
“OK, Matt,” Carlucci said.
“A police officer has been shot,” Lowenstein began.
“Dead?” the Mayor interrupted. There was concern and indignation in the one word.
“Yes, sir. Shot in the back of his head.”
“Line of duty?”
“His name is Kellog, Mr. Mayor. He was an undercover officer assigned to the Narcotics Unit. He was found in his home about an hour ago.”
“By who?”
“When he didn’t show up for work, they sent a Twenty-fifth District car to check on him.”
“He wasn’t married?”
“Separated.”
“Has she been notified?”
“They are trying to locate her.”
“Get to the goddamned point, Matt.”
“The story is that she’s moved in with another detective.”
“Oh, Jesus! Do you know who?”
“Detective Wallace J. Milham, of Homicide.”
“Isn’t he the sonofabitch whose wife left him because she caught him screwing around with her sister?”
Mayor Carlucci’s intimate knowledge of the personal lives of police officers was legendary, but this display of instant recall surprised Lowenstein.
“Yes, sir.”
“Is what you’re trying to tell me that this guy, or the wife, is involved?”
“We don’t know, sir. That is, of course, possible.”
“You realize the goddamned spot this puts me in?” the Mayor asked rhetorically. “I show up, or Czernich shows up, to console the widow, and there is a story in the goddamned newspapers, and the day after that it comes out-and wouldn’t the Ledger have a ball with that? — that she’s really a tramp, shacked up with a Homicide detective, and they’re the doers?”
“Yes, sir. That’s why I thought I’d better get to you right away with this.”
“And if I don’t show up, or Czernich doesn’t, then what?” the Mayor went on. He turned to Lowenstein. “So what are you doing, Matt?”
“Detective Milham is on the street somewhere. They’re looking for him. A good man, Joe D’Amata, is the assigned detective. Lou Natali’s already on his way to the scene, and probably Henry Quaire, too.”
“You ever hear the story of the fox protecting the chicken coop?” Carlucci asked nastily. “If you haven’t, you can bet that the Ledger has.”
“Henry Quaire is a straight arrow,” Lowenstein said.
“I didn’t say he wasn’t. I’m talking about appearances. I’m talking about what the Ledger’s going to write.”
“I don’t think Wally Milham has had anything to do with this. I think we’re going to find it’s Narcotics-related.”
“A man who would slip the salami to his wife’s sister is capable of anything,” the Mayor said. “I have to think that maybe he did. Or the wife did, and if he’s shacked up with her…”
“So what do you want me to do, give it to Peter Wohl?”
“Wohl’s got enough on his back right now,” the Mayor said.
You mean running an investigation of corruption that I’m not even supposed to know about, even though I’m the guy charged with precisely that responsibility?
“What’s the name of that mousy-looking staff inspector? Weis-something?”
“Mike Weisbach?”
“Him. He’s good, and he’s a straight arrow.”
You used to think I was a straight arrow, Jerry. What the hell happened to change your mind?
“What are you going to do? Have him take over the investigation?”
“The Commissioner’s going to tell him to observe the investigation, to tell you every day what’s going on, and then you tell me every day what’s going on.”
The Mayor pushed himself off the cushions and started to crawl out of the car, over Lowenstein. He stopped, halfway out, and looked at Lowenstein, whose face was no more than six inches from his.
“I hope, for everybody’s sake, Matt, that your Homicide detective who can’t keep his pecker in his pocket isn’t involved in this.”
Lowenstein nodded.
The Mayor got out of the limousine and walked briskly toward the entrance to City Hall. Lieutenant Fellows got quickly out of the front seat and ran after him.
Lowenstein waited until the two of them disappeared from sight, then got out of the limousine, walked to his Oldsmobile, and got in the front seat beside Harry McElroy.
“You get a location on Weisbach?”
“He’s in his car, at the Federal Courthouse, waiting to hear from you.”
Lowenstein picked a microphone up from the seat.
“Isaac Fourteen, Isaac One.”
“Fourteen.”
“Meet me at Broad and Hunting Park,” Lowenstein said.
“En route.”
Staff Inspector Michael Weisbach’s unmarked year-old Plymouth was parked on Hunting Park, pointing east toward Roosevelt Boulevard, when Chief Inspector Lowenstein’s Oldsmobile pulled up behind it.
“We’ll follow you to the scene,” Lowenstein said to Harry McElroy as he opened the door. “You know where it is?”
“I’ll find out,” McElroy said.
Lowenstein walked to Weisbach’s car and got in beside him.
“Good morning, Chief,” Weisbach said.
He was a slight man of thirty-eight, who had started losing his never-very-luxuriant light brown hair in his late twenties. He wore glasses in mock tortoise frames, and had a slightly rumpled appearance. His wife, Natalie, with whom he had two children, Sharon (now eleven) and Milton (six), said that thirty minutes after putting on a fresh shirt, he looked as if he had been wearing it for three days.
“Mike,” Lowenstein replied, offering his hand. “Follow Harry.”
“Where are we going?”
“A police officer named Kellog was found an hour or so ago shot in the back of his head.”
“I heard it on the radio,” Weisbach said as he pulled into the line of traffic.
“You are going to- observe the investigation. You are going to report to me once a day, more often if necessary, if anything interesting develops.” He looked at Weisbach and continued. “And I will report to the Mayor.”
“What’s this all about?”
“It seems that Officer Kellog’s wife-he’s been working plainclothes in Narcotics, by the way-moved out of his bed into Detective Milham’s.”
“Wally Milham’s a suspect?” Weisbach asked disbelievingly.
“He’s out on the street somewhere. Quaire is looking for him. I want you to sit in on the interview.”
“Then he is a suspect?”
“He’s going to be interviewed. The Mayor doesn’t want to be embarrassed by this. He wants to be one step ahead of the Ledger. If a staff inspector is involved, he thinks it won’t be as easy for the Ledger to accuse Homicide, the Department-him-of a cover-up.”
“Why me?” Weisbach asked.
“What the Mayor said was, ‘He’s good and he’s a straight arrow,’” Lowenstein replied, and then he met Weisbach’s eyes and smiled. “He knows that about you, but he doesn’t know your name. He referred to you as ‘that mousy-looking staff inspector, Weis-something.’”
Weisbach chuckled.
“He knows your name, Mike,” Lowenstein said. “What we both have to keep in mind is that the real name of the game is getting Jerry Carlucci reelected.”
“Yeah,” Weisbach said, a tone that could have been either resignation or disgust in his voice.
Staff Inspector Michael Weisbach, who was one of the sixteen staff inspectors in the Philadelphia Police Department, had never really wanted to be a cop until he had almost five years on the job.
His father operated a small, mostly wholesale, findings store, Weisbach’s Buttons and Zipper World, on South Ninth Street in Center City Philadelphia, and the family lived in a row house on Higbee Street, near Oxford Circle. By the time he had finished high school, Mike had decided, with his parents’ approval, that he wanted to be a lawyer.
He had obtained, on a partial scholarship, in just over three years, a bachelor of arts degree from Temple University, by going to school year round and supporting himself primarily by working the graveyard shift managing a White Tower hamburger emporium on the northwest corner of Broad and Olney. The job paid just a little more than his father’s business could afford to pay, and there was time in the early-morning hours, when business was practically nonexistent, to study.
Sometime during this period, Natalie had changed from being the Little Abramowitz Girl Down the Block into the woman with whom Michael knew he wanted to share his life. And starting right then-when he saw her in her bathing suit, he thought of the Song of Solomon-not after he finished law school and took the bar exams and managed to build a practice that would support them.
The thing for them to do, he and Natalie decided, was for him to get a job. Maybe a day job with the City, or the Gas Company, that would pay more than he was making at White Tower, not require a hell of a lot of work from him, and permit him to go to law school at night. With what she could earn working in her new job as a clerical assistant at the Bursar’s Office of the University of Pennsylvania, there would be enough money for an apartment. That was important, because they didn’t want to live with his family or hers.
He filed employment applications with just about every branch of city government, and because there didn’t seem to be a reason not to, took both the Police and Fire Department entrance examinations.
When the postcard came in the mail saying that he had been selected for appointment to the Police Academy, they really hadn’t known what to do. He had never seriously considered becoming a cop, and his mother said he was out of his mind, as big as he was, what was going to happen if he became a cop was that some six foot four Schwartzer was going to cut his throat with a razor; or some guy on drugs would shoot him; or some gangster from the Mafia in South Philly would stand him in a bucket full of concrete until it hardened and then drop him into the Delaware River.
Michael graduated from the Philadelphia Police Academy and was assigned to the Seventh District, in the Far Northeast region of Philadelphia. For the first year, he was assigned as the Recorder in a two-man van, transporting prisoners from the District to Central Lockup in the Roundhouse, and carrying people and bodies to various hospitals.
The second year he spent operating an RPC, turning off fire hydrants in the summer and working school crossings. He took the examination for promotion to detective primarily because it was announced two weeks after he had become eligible to take it. At the time, he would have been much happier to take the corporal’s exam, because corporals, as a rule of thumb, handled administration inside districts. But there had been no announcement of a corporal’s exam, so he took the detective’s examination.
If he passed it, he reasoned, there would be the two years of increased pay while he finished law school.
Detective Michael Weisbach was assigned first to the Central Detective District, which covers Center City. There, almost to his surprise, he not only proved adept at his unchosen profession, but was actually happy to go to work, which had not been the case when he’d been working the van or walking his beat in the Seventh District.
His performance of duty attracted the attention of Lieutenant Harry Abraham, whose rabbi, it was said, was then Inspector Matt Lowenstein of Internal Affairs. When Abraham was promoted to captain and assigned to the Major Crimes Unit, he arranged for Weisbach to be transferred with him.
Detective Weisbach was promoted to sergeant three weeks before he passed the bar examination. With it came a transfer to the office of just-promoted Chief Inspector Matt Lowenstein, who had become Chief of the Detective Division.
It just made sense, he told Natalie, to stick around the Department for a little longer. If he was going to go into private practice, they would need a nest egg to furnish an office, pay the rent, and to keep afloat until his practice reached the point where it would support them.
By then, although he was really afraid to tell even Natalie, much less his mother, he was honest enough to admit to himself that the idea of practicing law, handling people’s messy divorces, trying to keep some scumbag from going to prison, that sort of thing, did not have half the appeal for him that being a cop did.
When he passed the lieutenant’s examination, Chief Lowenstein actually took him out and bought him lunch and told him that if he kept up the good work, there was no telling how high he could rise in the Department. Natalie said that Chief Lowenstein was probably just being polite. But when the promotion list came out, and he was assigned to the Intelligence Unit, instead of in uniform in one of the districts, he told Natalie he knew Lowenstein had arranged it, and that he had meant what he said.
There had been a shake-up in the Department, massive retirements in connection with a scandal, and he had made captain much sooner than he had expected to. With that promotion came an assignment in uniform, to the Nineteenth District, as commanding officer. The truth was that he rather liked the reflection he saw in the mirror of Captain Mike Weisbach in a crisp white shirt, and captain’s bars glistening on his shoulders, but Natalie said she liked him better in plain clothes.
More vacancies were created two years later in the upper echelons of the Department, as sort of an aftershock to the scandal and the retirements the original upheaval had caused. Three staff inspectors, two of whom told Mike they had never planned to leave the Internal Affairs Division, were encouraged to take the inspector’s examination. That of course meant there were now three vacancies for staff inspectors, and Mike had already decided to take the exam even before Chief Lowenstein called him up and said that it would be a good idea for him to do so.
And like the men he had replaced, Mike Weisbach thought he had found his final home in the Department. He had some vague notion that, a couple of years before his retirement rolled around, if there was an inspector’s exam, he would take it. There would be a larger retirement check if he went out as an inspector, but he preferred to do what he was doing now to doing what the Department might have him do-he didn’t want to wind up in some office in the Roundhouse, for example-if he became an inspector now.
Staff inspectors, who were sometimes called-not pejoratively-“supercops,” or “superdetectives,” had, Weisbach believed, the most interesting, most satisfying jobs in the Department. They handled complicated investigations, often involving prominent government officials. It was the sort of work Mike Weisbach liked to do, and which he knew he was good at.
He still went to work in the morning looking forward to what the day would bring. It was only rarely that he was handed a job he would rather not do.
This “observation” of a Homicide investigation fell into that category. It was the worst kind of job. The moment he showed up on the scene, whichever Homicide detective had the job-for that matter, the whole Homicide Unit-would immediately and correctly deduce that they were not being trusted to do their job the way it should be done.
And he would feel their justified resentment, not Lowenstein or Mayor Carlucci.
As he followed Harry McElroy, crossing over Old York Road and onto Hunting Park Avenue, then onto Ninth Street, he tried to be philosophical about it. There was no sense moaning over something he couldn’t control.
The street in front of Officer Kellog’s home was now crowded with police vehicles of all descriptions, and Mike was not surprised to see Mickey O’Hara’s antenna-festooned Buick among them.
“I don’t have to tell you what to do,” Chief Lowenstein said as he got out of the car. “Call me after the Milham interview.”
“Yes, sir,” Mike said, and walked toward the District cop standing at the door of the row house.
The cop looked uncomfortable. He recognized the unmarked Plymouth as a police vehicle, and was wise enough in the ways of the Department to know that a nearly new unmarked car was almost certain to have been assigned to a senior white-shirt, but this rumpled little man was a stranger to him.
“I’m Staff Inspector Weisbach. I know your orders are to keep everybody out, but Chief Lowenstein wants me to go in.”
“Yes, sir.”
Captain Henry Quaire and Lieutenant Lou Natali were in the kitchen, trying to stand out of the way of the crew of laboratory technicians.
They don’t have any more business here than I do. You don’t get to be a Homicide detective unless you know just about everything there is to know about working a crime scene. Homicide detectives don’t need to be supervised.
“Good morning, Henry, Lou.”
“Hello, Mike,” Quaire replied. His face registered his surprise, and a moment later his annoyance, at seeing Weisbach.
“Inspector,” Natali said.
Weisbach looked at the body and the pool of blood and quickly turned away. He was beyond the point of becoming nauseous at the sight of a violated body, but it was very unpleasant for him. His brief glance would stay a painfully clear memory for a long time.
“Shot twice, it looks, at close range,” Quaire offered.
“I don’t suppose you know who did it?” a voice behind Mike asked.
Mike turned to face Mr. Michael J. O’Hara of the Bulletin.
“Not yet, Mickey,” Quaire said. “The uniform was told to keep people out of here.”
“I have friends in high places, Henry,” O’Hara said. “Not only do I know Staff Inspector Weisbach here well enough to ask him what the hell he’s doing here, but I know the legendary Chief Lowenstein himself. Lowenstein told the uniform to let me in, Henry. He wouldn’t have, otherwise.”
“He’s out there?” Quaire asked.
O’Hara nodded.
“Talking to Captain Talley.”
“I want to talk to Talley too,” Quaire said, and walked toward the front door.
“So what are you doing here, Mike?” O’Hara asked.
“‘Observing,’” Weisbach said. He saw the displeased reaction on Lieutenant Lou Natali’s face.
“Is that between you and me, or for public consumption?” O’Hara asked.
“Spell my name right, please.”
“‘Observing’? Or ‘supervising’?”
“Observing.”
“Exactly what does that mean?”
“Why don’t you ask Chief Lowenstein? I’m not sure, myself.”
“OK. I get the picture. But-this is for both of you, off the record, if you want-do you have any idea who shot Kellog?”
“No,” Natali said quickly.
“I just got here, Mike.”
“Is there anything to the story that the Widow Kellog is-how do I phrase this delicately? — personally involved with Wally Milham?”
“I don’t know how to answer that delicately,” Natali said.
“Mike?”
“I heard that gossip for the first time about fifteen minutes ago,” Weisbach said. “I don’t know if it’s true or not.”
His eye fell on something in the open cabinet behind Natali’s head.
“What’s that?” he asked, and pushed by Natali for a closer look.
“It’s a tape recorder. With a gadget that turns it on whenever the phone is used,” Weisbach said. “Has that been dusted for prints, Lou?”
“Yes, sir.”
Weisbach pulled the recorder out of the cabinet and saw that there was no cassette inside.
“Anything on the tape?” he asked.
“There was no tape in it when D’Amata found it,” Natali said. “And no tape anywhere around it. There was an empty box for tapes, but no tapes.”
“That’s strange,” Weisbach thought out loud. “The thing is turned on.” He held it up to show the red On light. “Did the lab guys turn it on?”
“D’Amata said you can’t turn it off, it’s wired to the light socket.”
“Strange,” Weisbach said.
“Yeah,” Mickey O’Hara agreed. “Very strange.”
A uniformed officer came into the kitchen.
“Lieutenant, the Captain said that Detective Milham is on his way to the Roundhouse.”
“Thank you,” Natali said.
“I want to sit in on the interview,” Weisbach said.
“You’re going to question Milham?” Mickey O’Hara asked.
“Yes, sir,” Natali said, not quite succeeding in concealing his displeasure.
“Routinely, Mick,” Weisbach said. “If there’s anything, I’ll call you. All right?”
O’Hara thought that over for a second.
“You have an honest face, Mike, and I am a trusting soul. OK. And in the meantime, I will write that at this point the police have no idea who shot Kellog.”
“We don’t,” Weisbach said.