The Murderers

FIVE

Detective Wallace H. Milham reported for duty in the Homicide Unit in the Roundhouse at midnight as his duty schedule called for. The alternative, he knew, was sitting around his apartment alone with a bottle of bourbon. Or sitting around in a bar somewhere, alone, which he thought would be an even dumber thing to do than getting plastered all by himself in his apartment.

It had been a really lousy day.

Wally told himself that he should have expected something lousy to happen-not something as lousy as this, but something-the other shoe to drop, so to speak, because things lately had been going so damned well. For eighteen months, things had really been lousy.

In what he was perfectly willing to admit was about the dumbest thing Wally had ever done in his life, he had gotten involved with his wife Adelaide’s sister, Monica. Monica lived in Jersey, in Ocean City. Her husband was a short fat guy who sold insurance. Adelaide’s and Monica’s mother and dad owned a cottage close to the beach in Wildwood.

Everybody in the family-Adelaide’s family; Wally was an only child-got to use the cottage. Adelaide had one other sister besides Monica, and two brothers. The Old Man-Adelaide’s father-wouldn’t take any money when anybody used it, which sort of bothered Wally, who liked to pay his own way and not be indebted to anybody. So when the place needed a paint job, he volunteered to do that. He told the Old Man that the way his schedule worked, there were often two or three days he had off in the middle of the week, when Adelaide was working in the library, and he would rather do something useful with that time than sit around the house watching the TV.

Which was true. When he offered to paint the cottage in Wildwood, that was all he had in mind, pay his way. Monica didn’t come into his thinking at all.

But Charles, Monica’s husband, got in the act. He said that if Wally was going to drive all the way over from Philly to do the labor, the least he could do was provide the materials. So he did. And Monica drove the paint down in their station wagon because Charles of course was at work.

And he didn’t think about that either. The first two days he spent painting the cottage, he used up most of the paint that Charles had Monica drive down to give him, so he told Adelaide to call Monica to ask Charles if he wanted to provide more paint, or have Wally get it, in which case he would have to know where he’d gotten the first three gallons, so they could mix up some more that would match.

Adelaide told him that Charles said that the paint would be there waiting for him the next time he went to Wildwood. It wasn’t, so he started painting with what was left, and just before noon Monica showed up with the paint, and said that Charles had told her to take him out to lunch, and not to take no for an answer, it was the least they could do for him.

So they went out for lunch, and he was surprised when Monica tossed down three martinis, one after the other. He had never seen her take more than one drink at a time. And she started talking-women with a couple of drinks in them tend to do that-and she started out by saying that she was a little jealous of Adelaide because Adelaide was married to a man who had an exciting career, catching murderers, and Charles was a bore.

In more ways than one, she said, if Wally took her meaning.

And he told her that being a Homicide detective wasn’t as exciting as people who didn’t know thought it was, that most of it was pretty ordinary stuff, just asking questions until somebody came up with the answer.

She said, yeah, but he got to meet interesting, exciting people, and she asked him if he ever met any exciting women, and he told her no, but she said he was just saying that, and she’d bet that if he told her the truth, he got to meet a lot of exciting women.

That’s when he realized what was going on, and if he had had half the sense he was born with, he would have stopped it right there, but he’d had three martinis too.

In her car on the way back to the Old Man’s cottage, she kept letting her hand fall on his leg, and ten minutes after they got back to the cottage, they were having at it in the Old Man’s and Grandma’s bed.

Afterward, Monica told him she didn’t know what had come over her, it must have been the martinis, and they could never let anything like that happen again. But the way she stuck her tongue down his throat when she kissed him good-bye, he knew that was what she was saying, not what she meant.

So far as he was concerned, that was it, the one time. It would be a long time before he ever let himself be alone with her again.

Two weeks after that, at eleven o’clock in the morning, he had just gotten out of bed and made himself a cup of coffee when the doorbell at the house rang and there was Monica.

She was in Philly to do some shopping, she said, and she thought she would take a chance and see if maybe Adelaide hadn’t gone to work at the library and they could go together.

He told her no, Adelaide had gone to work, and wouldn’t be home until five, five-thirty.

And she asked what about the kids, and he told her they were both at school and wouldn’t be home until quarter to four.

And then she said that she just couldn’t get him out of her mind, and since he hadn’t called her or anything, she had come to see him.

Three weeks after that, Adelaide walked in on them and caught them in her bed, right in the middle of doing it.

The way Adelaide saw it, it was all his fault, and maybe, he thought, in a way it was. He had known what was going on.

Adelaide said she hoped that he would at least have the decency to get a civilized divorce, so that nobody in her family knew that it was Monica he was taking advantage of, and ruin her life too. She said that she would hate to tell the children what an unmitigated immoral sonofabitch their father was, and hoped he wouldn’t make her.

There was a clause in the divorce that said he had to pay a certain amount to her, in addition to child support, so that she could learn a trade or a profession. She decided she would go back to college and get a degree in library science, and get a better job than the one she had, which was “clerical assistant,” which meant that he would be giving her money for two years, maybe three. Or more. She was going only part time.

And then she met Greg. Greg was a great big good-looking guy who sold trucks for a living, and who made a hell of a lot more money doing that than Wally had ever made, even in Homicide.

Adelaide started to spend nights in Greg’s apartment whenever Wally had the kids over the weekend or she could get the Old Man and Grandma to take them. Wally knew that, because he sometimes drove by Greg’s apartment at midnight and saw her car, and then drove past again at three in the morning, and again at seven, and it was still there.

But she wasn’t going to marry Greg, because the minute she married him, that was the end of her training for a new career at his expense. She as much as told him that, and let him know if he made any trouble for her about how she conducted her private affairs, she would have to tell the kids what a sonofabitch he was, seducing her own sister, caring only for himself and not for his family.

And then Adelaide had really surprised him two and a half months before by calling him up-she sounded like she was half in the bag on the phone-and telling him she had just come back from Elkton, Maryland, where she and Greg had tied the knot.

Which meant that he could stop paying for her career education and move out of the one-room apartment, which was all he could afford on what was left of his pay, into something at least decent.

And then he went to Lieutenant Sackerman’s funeral, and met Helene. Jack Sackerman was an old-time Homicide detective, a good one. When Wally had first gone to Homicide, he had taken him under his wing and showed him how to operate. Wally thought that if it hadn’t been for Jack Sackerman, he probably never would have gotten to stay in Homicide.

When Jack had started thinking about retirement, he knew he had to leave Homicide. Homicide detectives make good money, damned good money, because of all the overtime, but when they retire, they get the same retirement pay as any other detective, and that’s not much. So Jack had taken the examination for sergeant, and passed that, and they assigned him to Narcotics. Then he took the lieutenant’s examination, and passed that, and they kept him in Narcotics. He was getting ready for the captain’s examination when they discovered the cancer. And that, of course, was that.

Everybody from Narcotics was at Jack’s viewing, of course, and that’s when he met Helene and her husband. Captain Talley, the Narcotics Commander, introduced them. Her husband, Officer Kellog, had on a suit and a tie, but he still looked like a bum. Anybody who worked Plainclothes Narcotics had to dress like he was part of the drug business, so it was understandable-when Lieutenant Pekach, who was now a Captain in Special Operations, was running Undercover Narcotics, he actually had a pigtail-but he still looked like a bum.

He met Helene first at the viewing, and then the next day at the reception at Sackerman’s house after the funeral, and a third time at Emmett’s Place bar, where a bunch of the mourners went after they left Sackerman’s house. Jack had had a lot of friends.

Her husband wasn’t with her at Emmett’s Place, but they seemed to wind up together and started talking. Wally was attracted to her, but didn’t come on to her. Only a stupid bird dirties his own nest, and she was married to a cop.

After that, they kept bumping into each other. She worked for the City in the Municipal Services Building in Center City, and he was always around the City Hall courtrooms or the DA’s Office, in the same area, so that was understandable. Wally ran into Helene one time on his way to the Reading Terminal Market for lunch and asked her if she wanted a cheese steak or something, and she said yes and went with him.

After that, they started meeting once or twice a week for lunch, or sometimes dinner, and she let him understand that things weren’t perfect with her husband, but she never told him-and he didn’t ask-what specifically was wrong between them. He told her about Adelaide, what had happened. And absolutely nothing happened between them, he didn’t so much as try to hold her hand, until the night she called him, three days after he’d moved into the new apartment, and sounded as if she was crying.

Wally asked her what the matter was, and she said she was calling from the Roosevelt Motor Inn, on Roosevelt Boulevard, that what had happened was that she had finally left the sonofabitch-he remembered that she had used that word, because it was the first time she had ever said anything nasty about him-and needed to talk to somebody.

He said sure, and did she want him to come out there and pick her up and they could go somewhere for a drink, and she said it wouldn’t look right, in case somebody saw them, for him to pick her up at a motel. And as far as that went, it wouldn’t look right if somebody saw them having a drink someplace the very night she moved out on her husband.

So Wally had asked her, did she maybe want to come to his apartment, and Helene said she didn’t know, what did he think, and she didn’t want to impose or anything.

So he told her to get in a taxi and come down. And she did. And before she got there, he went to a Chinese restaurant and got some takeout to go with the bottle of wine he knew he had somewhere at home. He didn’t want to offer her a drink of whiskey, to keep her from getting the wrong idea. All he wanted to be was a friend, offering her something to eat and wine, and a sympathetic ear.

She didn’t even take the wine when he offered it to her, but she wolfed down the Chinese, and he was glad he thought of that, and while he watched her eat, he decided that if she wanted to talk about her husband, fine, and if she didn’t, fine, too.

When she finished, she smiled at him and asked him if he thought she would be terrible if she asked for a drink. She really needed a drink.

So he made her one and handed it to her, and she started to take a sip and then started crying and he put his arm around her, and one thing led to another, and that was the way they started.

Whatever was wrong between her and her husband wasn’t that she was frigid, or anything like that.

And she told him, afterward, that the truth of the matter was that she had been thinking about him and her like that from the very first time she saw him, at Lieutenant Sackerman’s viewing; that he was really an attractive man.

So at five o’clock in the morning, he took her back to the Roosevelt Motor Inn on Roosevelt Boulevard, and met her in City Hall at noon, after she’d talked to a lawyer, and they went to his apartment so they could talk without worrying about people at the next table in a restaurant listening in. They didn’t do much talking about what the lawyer said, except that it was going to be harder getting a divorce than she thought it would be.

She took a tiny apartment so that her family wouldn’t ask questions, but from the first they lived together, and they got along just fine, and without coming right out and talking about it, they understood that as soon as she got him to agree to the divorce, they would get married. With what they made between them, they could live pretty well. They talked about getting a larger apartment, maybe even a house, so there would be room for his kids when he had them on weekends or whenever.

They never talked much about what bad had happened between her and Kellog, but he got the feeling it had something to do with Kellog being dirty on the job. She knew something, and Wally knew if he pressed her, he could get it out of her.

But then what? For one thing, she might not know what she was talking about, and for another, dirty cops are Internal Affairs’ business, not his. If he learned something he felt he had to tell somebody about, it would come out that he and Helene were living together, and it would look as if he was trying to frame the sonofabitch.

And then the sonofabitch gets himself shot. And guess who they think had something to with it?

Kellog was in Narcotics. If they ever found out who the doer, or doers, were, it was ten-to-one it would have something to do with Narcotics. But they might not ever find the doers, and until they did, Helene was going to be a suspect, and so was he.

The interview in Homicide was the most humiliating thing that Wally could remember ever having to go through. Except maybe being driven to his apartment by Ken Summers to pick up his guns, and having Ken look around “professionally” to see what he could see that might connect him with the Kellog shooting.

And when he finally got to see Helene, he could see that she had been crying, and she told him that D’Amata and Staff Inspector Weisbach had been to see her, and that she thought it would be better for everybody concerned if they didn’t see each other until things settled down, at least until after the funeral, and that she was going to the apartment right then to pick up her things and take them to her apartment. And that she thought it would be better if he didn’t try to see her, or even telephone, until she thought it would be all right, and when she thought it would be she would telephone him.

She didn’t even kiss him before she walked away.

Wally did the only thing he could think of doing. He worked on the Grover job. And nothing. Not from interviewing neighbors or friends, or what he learned from New Haven. She did not have an insurance policy on her husband, except for the ones she told him about. And neither did anyone else.

But she did him. Wally was sure about that. Somehow, he was going to get her.

He went to the apartment about six and had a beer and made himself a hamburger, and it was pretty goddamned lonely. Then he tried to sleep, setting the alarm for eleven. With nothing else to do, he might as well go to work.

He woke up at nine-thirty, alone in their bed, and couldn’t get back to sleep, and got up and drank a beer, and then he thought about going to a bar and having a couple of drinks, and fuck going to work. Captain Quaire had told him to take off what time he needed.

But he knew that would be dumb, so he just had the one beer, and took a shower and a shave and left the apartment at half past eleven for the Roundhouse.

A new Plymouth sedan slowed to a near stop in front of the Delaware Valley Cancer Society Building on Rittenhouse Square, and then slowly and carefully put the right-side wheels on the curb, finally stopping equidistant between two signs announcing that this was a No Parking At Any Time Tow Away Zone.

The door opened and a very large, black, impeccably dressed gentleman got out. He was Sergeant Jason Washington of the Special Operations Division of the Philadelphia Police Department, known-behind his back, of course-to his peers as “the Black Buddha.”

He believed himself to be the best investigator in the Philadelphia Police Department. This opinion was shared by a number of others, including the Honorable Jerome H. “Jerry” Carlucci, Mayor of the City of Brotherly Love, by Inspector Peter Wohl, Commanding Officer of the Special Operations Division, for whom Washington worked, and by Detective Matthew M. Payne, who worked for Sergeant Washington.

Sergeant Washington was wearing a light gray pin-striped suit. His Countess Mara necktie was fixed precisely in place at the collar of a custom-made crisply starched white Egyptian cotton shirt, and gold cuff links bearing his initials gleamed at the shirt’s cuffs.

For most of their married life, Jason Washington and his wife had lived frugally, although their combined income had been above average. He had spent most of his career in Homicide, where overtime routinely meant a paycheck at least as large as an inspector’s, and Martha had a very decent salary as an artist for a Center City advertising agency.

They had put money away faithfully for the education of their only child, a daughter, and they had invested what they could carefully, and, it turned out, wisely.

In the last three or four years, they had become affluent. Their daughter had married (much too young, they agreed) an electrical engineer, at whom (they also agreed) RCA in Cherry Hill seemed to throw money. Her marriage had, of course, relieved them of the expense of her college education, and at about the same time, what had begun as Martha’s dabbling in the art market had suddenly blossomed into the amazingly profitable Washington Galleries on Chestnut Street.

They could afford to live well, and did.

Sergeant Washington walked to the plate-glass door of the Cancer Society Building and waited until it was opened to him by the rent-a-cop on duty.

“Is Supercop at home?” Sergeant Washington greeted him. The rent-a-cop was a retired police officer whom Washington had known for years.

“Came in about ten minutes ago. What’s he done now?”

“Since he works for me, I’m embarrassed to tell you,” Washington said, and then had a sudden thought: “Did he come home alone?”

“For once,” the rent-a-cop said.

“Good. I would not like to redden the ears of his girlfriend with what I have to say to him,” Washington said, smiling, as he got into the elevator.

He rode to the third floor, then pushed a doorbell beside a closed door.

“Yes?” A voice came over an intercom.

“Would you please let me in, Matthew?”

“Hey, Jason, sure.”

The door’s solenoid buzzed and Washington opened the door. He climbed a steep, narrow flight of stairs. Matt Payne waited for him, smiling.

“Don’t smile,” Washington said. “I just had a call from Tony Harris vis-a-vis your human-fly stunt, you goddamned fool! What the hell is the matter with you?”

“The Lieutenant’s lady friend opened the window and knocked the mike suction cup loose. We weren’t getting anything at all.”

“These people are not plotting the overthrow of Christian society as we know it, you damned fool! We have some dirty cops, that’s all. Not one of them, not this whole investigation, is worth risking your life over.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good God, Matt! What were you thinking?”

Matt didn’t reply.

“I would hate to think that you were trying to prove your all-around manhood,” Washington said.

It was a reference to one of the reasons offered for a nice young man from the Main Line electing to follow a police career instead of a legal one. He had failed, at the last minute before entering upon active duty, the Marine Corps’ Pre-Commissioning Physical Exam. He had then, the theory went, joined the Police Department as a means to prove his masculinity.

“I was thinking I could put the mike back without getting hurt,” Matt said coldly. “And I did.”

Washington saw in his eyes that he had gotten through to him. He fixed him with an icy glance for another thirty seconds, which seemed much longer.

Then he smiled, just a little.

“It would seem to me, considering the sacrifice it has meant for me to come here at this late hour to offer you my wise counsel, that the least you could do would be to offer me a small libation. Perhaps some of the Famous Grouse scotch?”

“Sure, sorry,” Matt said, smiling. He went into his kitchen. As he opened first one, and then another over-the-sink cabinet, he called, “What are you doing out this late?”

“Our beloved Mayor has been gracious enough to find time to offer me his wise counsel.”

“Really?”

“Specifically, he is of the opinion that we should go to Officers Crater and Palmerston and offer them immunity from prosecution in exchange for their testimony against Captain Cazerra and Lieutenant Meyer.”

“Jason,” Matt said, “I can’t find a bottle of any kind of scotch. Not even Irish.”

“I am not surprised,” Washington said. “It’s been one of those days. Get your coat. We will pub crawl for a brief period.”

“There’s some rum and gin. And vermouth. I could make you a martini.”

“Get your coat, Matthew,” Washington said. “I accept your kind offer of a drink at the Rittenhouse Club bar.”

“Oh, thank you, kind sir,” Matt said, mockingly, and started shrugging into Chad Nesbitt’s tweed jacket. “I think the Mayor’s idea stinks.”

“Why?”

“Because any lawyer six weeks out of law school could tear them up on the stand, and we know Cazerra and Meyer’s lawyers will be good.”

“Armando C. Giacomo, Esquire,” Washington agreed, citing the name of Philadelphia’s most competent criminal lawyer. “Or someone of his ilk. Perhaps even the legendary Colonel J. Dunlop Mawson, Esquire.”

Matt laughed. “No way. My father would go ballistic. I’m ready.”

“I made that point to His Honor,” Washington said as he pushed himself out of one of Matt’s small armchairs.

“And?”

“And as usual got nowhere. Or almost nowhere. We have two weeks to get something on Cazerra and Meyer that will stand up in court. He wants those two in jail.”

“Or what?”

“We work Crater and Palmerston over, figuratively speaking of course, with a rubber hose.”

“What does Wohl say?” Matt asked as he waved Washington ahead of him down the stairs.

“I haven’t told him yet. I figured I would ruin tomorrow for him by doing that first thing in the morning.”

The Rittenhouse Club was closed when they got there.

“What do we do now?” Matt asked.

“Why don’t we take a stroll down Market Street?” Washington replied. “It will both give us a chance to see how the other half lives, and trigger memories of those happy days when Officer Washington was walking his first beat.”

“You walked a beat on Market Street?” Matt asked. It was difficult for him to imagine Washington in a police officer’s uniform, patrolling Market Street.

Officer Friendly Black Buddha, he thought, impeccably tailored and shined, smiling somewhat menacingly as he slapped his palm with his nightstick.

“Indeed I did. Under the able leadership of Lieutenant Dennis V. Coughlin. And on our watch,” Washington announced sonorously, “the thieves and mountebanks plied their trade in someone else’s district.”

“Police Emergency,” David Meach said into his headset.

“This is the Inferno Lounge,” his caller announced. “1908 Market. There’s been a shooting, and somebody may be dead.”

“Your name, sir, please?”

“Shit!” the caller responded and hung up.

David Meach had been on the job six years, long enough to be able to unconsciously make judgments regarding the validity of a call, based on not only what was said, but how it was said. Whether, for example, the caller sounded mature (as opposed to an excited kid wanting to give the cops a little exercise) and whether or not there was excitement or tension or a certain numbness in his voice. This call sounded legitimate; he didn’t think he’d be sending police cars racing through downtown Philadelphia for no purpose.

He checked to see what was available.

RPC Nine Ten seemed closest to the scene. Meach pressed a key to send two short attention beeps across the airways, then activated his microphone:

“All cars stand by. 1908 Market Street, the Inferno Lounge, report of a shooting and a hospital case. Nine Ten, you have the assignment.”

The response was immediate.

“Nine Ten, got it,” Officer Edward Schirmer called into the microphone of Radio Patrol Car Number Ten of the Ninth District, as Officer Lewis Roberts, who was driving the car down Walnut Street, reached down to the dashboard and activated the siren and flashing lights.

“Nine Seven in on that,” another voice reported, that of Officer Frederick E. Rogers, in RPC Nine Seven.

“Highway Thirteen, in on the 1908 Market,” responded Officer David Fowler.

“Nine Oh One, got it,” responded Officer Adolphus Hart, who was riding in one of the two vans assigned to the Ninth District.

Nine Oh One had five minutes before left the Police Administration Building at Eighth and Race streets, after having transferred two prisoners from the holding cells at the Ninth District to Central Lockup.

Officer Thomas Daniels, who was driving Nine Oh One, had for no good reason at all elected to drive up Market Street and was by happenstance able to be the first police vehicle responding to the “Shooting and Hospital Case” call to reach the scene.

There was nothing at all unusual about the location when they pulled to the curb. The Inferno Lounge’s neon-flames sign was not illuminated, and the establishment seemed to be closed for the night.

He stopped just long enough to permit Officer Hart to jump out of the van and walk quickly to the door of the Inferno, and to see if Hart could open the door. He couldn’t. Then he turned left on Ludlow Street, so that he could block the rear entrance.

Two civilians, a very large black man and a tall young white man, both very well dressed, were walking down Nineteenth Street, toward Market. They could have, Officer Daniels reasoned, just come out of the alley behind the Inferno.

Officer Daniels, sounding his horn, drove the van into the alley, blocking it, and jumped out of the van.

“Hold it right there, please!” he called out.

His order proved to be unnecessary. The two civilians had stopped, turned, and were looking at him with curiosity.

While a Pedestrian Stop was of course necessary, Officer Daniels made the snap judgment that it was unlikely that these two had anything to do with whatever-if anything-had happened at the Inferno. They hadn’t run, for one thing, and they didn’t look uncomfortable.

Officer Daniels had an unkind thought: This area was an unusual place to take a stroll after midnight, unless, of course, the two were cruising for women. Or men. Maybe they had just found each other.

“Excuse me, sir,” Daniels said. “May I please see some identification?”

The younger man laughed. Daniels glowered at him.

“We’re police officers,” the black man said. “What have you got?”

The younger one exhibited a detective’s badge.

“What’s going on here, Officer?” the black man asked.

Officer Daniels hesitated just perceptibly before replying: “Shooting and hospital case inside the Inferno.”

“Was the front door open?” the black man asked.

“No.”

“I’ll go block the front,” the black man said. “The rear door to this place is halfway down the alley. There’s usually a garbage can full of beer bottles, and so on.” He turned to the young white man. “You go with him, Matt.”

The young man sort of stooped, and when he stood erect again, there was a snub-nose revolver in his hand.

Officer Daniels looked dubiously at the black man.

“I told you to go with him,” the black man said to Officer Daniels, a tone of command in his voice. Then he started to trot toward Market Street.

Officer Daniels ran after the young white man and caught up with him.

“Who is that guy?” he asked.

“That is Sergeant Jason Washington. He just told me he used to walk this beat.”

“He doesn’t have any authority here.”

“You tell him that,” Matt said, chuckling as he continued down the alley.

The sound of dying sirens and the squeal of tires announced the arrival of other police vehicles.

The alley between the buildings was pitch dark, and twice Matt stumbled over something he hadn’t seen. There was more light when he reached the end of the alley, coming down what had been in Colonial times a cobblestone street but was now not much more than a garbage-littered alley.

He found the Inferno Lounge’s garbage cans. As Jason had said they would be, they were filled to overflowing with kitchen scraps and beer bottles.

He went to a metal door and tried it. It opened.

If there was somebody in here, they’re probably gone. The door would ordinarily be locked.

He stepped to one side, hiding, so to speak, behind the bricks of the building, and then pulled the door fully open.

“Police officers!” he called.

There was no response.

He looked very carefully around the bricks. There was no one in sight, but he could see a corridor dimly illuminated by the lights burning in the kitchen, and beyond that, in the public areas of the bar, or restaurant, or whatever the hell this place was.

“Stay here,” he ordered Officer Daniels, and then entered the building and started down the corridor. Halfway down it, he saw a flight of stairs leading to the basement, and saw lights down there. It was possible that someone was down in the basement; he was pleased with himself for having told the wagon uniform to stay at the back door.

He went carefully through the kitchen, and then into the public area of the restaurant. There was banging on the closed front door of the place, and someone-not Jason, but to judge by the depth of his voice, not the young guy in the wagon, either-was calling, not quite shouting, “Police, open up.”

The door was closed with a keyed dead bolt. There were keys in it. It was hard to unlock. Matt had shoved his pistol in his hip pocket and used both hands to get it open.

There was a uniformed sergeant standing there, and two Highway Patrolmen. Behind them Matt could see Jason Washington looking for all the world like a curious civilian.

“What have you got, Payne?” one of the Highway Patrolmen said. Matt recalled having met him somewhere. He couldn’t recall his name.

“Nothing yet. I figured I’d better let you guys in.”

“How’d you get in?”

“Back door was unlocked. The wagon guy’s covering it.”

“Who are you?” the uniformed sergeant asked.

“He’s Detective Payne of Special Operations,” Jason answered for him. “And I am Sergeant Washington. Nothing, Matt?”

“Nothing on the floor. There’s a basement, I didn’t get down there.”

“I think we should have a look,” Washington said, and moving with a quick grace, suddenly appeared in front of the two Highway Patrolmen and the uniformed sergeant. “Lead on, Matthew!”

Matt turned and walked quickly back through the bar, the restaurant, and the kitchen to the corridor, then started down the stairs. Washington stopped him with a massive hand on his shoulder.

“Announce your arrival,” he said softly. “You don’t know what you’re going to find down there, and if the proprietor, for example, is down there, you want to be sure he knows the man coming down the stairs is a police officer.”

“Police!” Matt called.

“Down here!” a male voice called.

The stairs led to a narrow corridor, and the corridor to a small office.

The first thing Matt saw was a somewhat stocky man in his forties sitting behind a battered desk, in the act of taking a pull from the neck of a bottle of Seagram’s VO. There was a Colt Cobra revolver lying on the desk.

The next thing Matt saw, as he entered the office, was a young female, white, sitting in a chair. Her head was hanging limply back. Her eyes were open and her head, neck, and chest were covered with blood. She was obviously dead. On the floor, lying on his side in a thick pool of blood, was the body of a heavy man. His arm was stretched out, nearly touching the desk.

Matt looked at the man behind the desk.

“What happened here?”

“I was held up,” the man said.

“By who?”

Matt looked at the office door and saw that Jason Washington and one of the Highway Patrolmen had stepped inside the office.

“Two white guys.”

“Are you all right?”

“I was shot in the leg,” the man said.

Matt crossed to him and saw that he had his right leg extended, and that the trouser leg between the knee and the groin was soaked in blood.

“Can you describe the men?” Matt asked.

“There was two of them,” the man said. “One was a short, stocky sonofabitch, and the other was about as big as I am.”

“How were they dressed?”

“The little fucker was in a suit; the other one was wearing a zipper jacket.”

“Mustaches, beards, anything like that?”

The man shook his head.

Jason Washington turned to the Highway Patrolman standing beside him.

“Get out a flash on that,” he said softly. “And tell Police Radio that Sergeant Washington and Detective Payne of Special Operations are at the scene of what appears to be an armed robbery and double homicide.”