Badge of Honour 06 - The Murderers (23 page)

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.

“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.

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!”