“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.
