“You can’t get any specifics out of her?”
“Not a one,” Washington replied. “But I believe she believes she is telling the truth that the whole squad is dirty. And to support that, they do own, without a mortgage, a condominium at the shore, and a boat. Their combined, honestly acquired, income is not enough to pay for those sorts of luxuries. And then we have the threatening telephone call.”
“How do you think Five Squad heard she had talked to you?”
“There’s no way that they could have. I think the simple explanation for that is that someone on Five Squad knew that Homicide would be talking to her, and they didn’t want her volunteering any information.”
“And you think that’s why Kellog was killed?”
“It looks to me as if there are two possibilities, one of which no one seems to have considered very much. That he was killed in connection with his honest labor as a Narcotics officer. He knew something-where are the tapes from his tape recorder?-and had to be silenced. And of course it is entirely possible that he was killed by someone on the Five Squad for the same reason. His wife had left him. He might have wanted her back bad enough…”
“Milham and Mrs. Kellog seem pretty tight; I don’t think she was going to go back to her husband.”
“I noticed that,” Washington said. “But neither of us have any way of knowing what Kellog was thinking, perhaps irrationally. Losing your wife to another man is traumatic. If she left him because of what he was doing, or, more to the point, because of what it was doing to him, and thus to their relationship, it’s entirely possible that he thought by stopping what he was doing he might be able to get her back. Whatever was on those tapes that we can’t find might have been his insurance.”
“Excuse me?” Matt interrupted. He was having trouble following Washington’s reasoning; the introduction of the missing tapes left him wholly confused.
“I’m quitting, I’m through,” Washington said. “I’m not going to squeal, but just to keep anyone from getting any clever ideas, I have tapes of whatever that will wind up in the hands of Internal Affairs if anything happens to me.”
“This is starting to sound like a cops show on television,” Matt said. “A very convoluted plot.”
“Yes,” Washington said thoughtfully. “It does. And that bothers me.” He was silent for a moment, then changed the subject. “For a number of reasons, including not wanting Wally Milham to think I’m pushing him out of the way, I am not going with you when you chat with Mr. Foley.”
“OK,” Matt said. “You going to tell me the other reasons?”
“I’ll take you back to the Media police station,” Washington said, ignoring the question. “We will get Wally Milham on the telephone and decide where you are to meet. Then you can get in your car and meet him. Relay to him in appropriate detail the essence and the ambience of our conversation with Mr. Atchison.”
“OK.”
Officer Paul Thomas O’Mara, Inspector Wohl’s administrative assistant, knocked on Wohl’s office door, and then, without waiting for a reply, pushed it open.
“Mr. Giacomo for Inspector Weisbach on Four,” he announced.
Staff Inspector Michael Weisbach was sitting slumped on Wohl’s couch, his legs stretched out in front of him, balancing a cup of coffee on his chest.
Wohl, behind his desk, picked up one of the telephones and punched a button.
“Peter Wohl, Armando,” he said. “How are you? How odd that you should call. Mike and I were just talking about you. Here he is.”
Weisbach smiled as he walked behind Wohl’s desk and took the telephone. They had not been talking about Giacomo. They had been discussing the time-consuming difficulty they would have in investigating the personal finances of the Narcotics Five Squad, and the inevitability that their interest would soon become known.
“Hello, Armando,” Weisbach said. “What can I do for you?”
He moved the receiver off his ear so that Wohl could hear the conversation.
“I wanted you to know I haven’t forgotten our conversation at luncheon, Mike, and that I have already begun to accumulate some information-nothing yet that I’d feel comfortable about passing on to you-but I am beginning to hear some interesting things. I need some time, you’ll understand, to make certain that what I pass on to you is reliable.”
“My heart is always warmed, Armando, when citizens such as yourself go out of their way to assist the police.”
Wohl chuckled.
“I consider it my civic duty,” Giacomo said.
“Armando, perhaps I could save you some time, keep you from chasing a cat, so to speak, that’s already nearly in the bag. In our own plodding way, we have come up with a name. What I’m getting at, Armando, is that it would bother me if you came up with a name we already have, and you would still figure we owed you.”
“What’s the name?”
“Frankie Foley,” Weisbach said.
“He wasn’t, between us, one of the names I heard. Frankie Foley?”
“Frankie Foley.”
“How interesting.”
“Nice to talk to you, Armando,” Weisbach said. “I appreciate the call.”
He hung up.
“Why did you give him Foley’s name?” Wohl asked. “A question, not a criticism.”
“By now, Foley probably knows we’re looking at him. If he told Giacomo, or the mob found out some other way, Italian blood being stronger than Irish water, they may have decided to give him to us to keep Cassandro out of jail.”
“Michael, you are devious. I say that as a compliment.”
“So maybe, with Foley taken off the table, Giacomo may come up with another name.”
Frankie Foley waited impatiently, time card in hand, for his turn to punch out. He really hated Wanamaker’s, having to spend all day busting open crates, breaking his hump shoving furniture around, and for fucking peanuts.
It would, he consoled himself, soon be over. He could tell Stan Wisznecki, his crew chief, to shove his job up his ass. He would go to work in the Inferno, get himself some decent threads with the money Atchison owed him, and wait for the next business opportunity to come along. And he wasn’t going to do the next hit for a lousy five thousand dollars. He’d ask for ten, maybe even more, depending on who he had to hit.
Frankie had been a little disappointed with the attention, or lack of it, paid to the Inferno hit by the newspapers and TV. There had been almost nothing on the TV, and only a couple of stories in the newspapers.
He had, the day after he’d made the Inferno hit, clipped out Michael J. O’Hara’s story about it from the Bulletin with the idea of keeping it, a souvenir, like of his first professional job.
But after he’d cut it out he realized that might not be too smart. If the cops got his name somehow, and got a search warrant or something, and found it, it would be awkward explaining what he was doing with it.
Not incriminating. What the fuck could they prove just because he’d cut a story out of the newspaper? He could tell them he’d cut it out because he drank in the Inferno. Shit, if they pressed him, he could say he cut it out because he had fucked Alicia Atchison.
But it was smarter not to have it, so he had first crumpled up the clipping and tossed it in the toilet, and then, when he thought that the front page now had a hole in it where the story had been, tore off the whole front page and sliced it up with scissors and flushed the whole damn thing down the toilet. He really hated to throw the story away, but knew that it was the smart thing to do.
And anyway, the word would get out who’d done the hit among the people who mattered. That was what mattered.