home not less than once each half hour,” he said. “and to check on any car, or person, who looks halfway suspicious.”
“You’re really taking that threat seriously, aren’t you’?” Matt asked.
“Somebody shot her husband,” Wohl said. “If they’re willing to do that once…”
“If somebody is watching her parents’ house, they’ll probably make the Highway drive-bys.”
“Good, let’s make them nervous,” Wohl said. He paused, almost visibly having another thought. “If I was wondering what Mrs. Kellog told Washington, I think I’d also be worrying what she told Milham. So I think you’d better stick with him, Matt, instead of sitting on her.”
“OK.”
“I think it would also make her feel better to know he’s not walking around alone. Question: Should Milham be here when she talks to Washington or not?”
“She seems to listen to him,” McFadden said.
“Yeah,” Matt said.
“OK. So you pack your bag, Matt, and be ready to get out when I tell you. Take McFadden with you. Go to Homicide and let him read the 75-49s on Kellog. I’ll call Quaire and fix it with him. If anything has come up that looks like it has a connection with this, call me.”
“Right.”
When Matt returned to the kitchen after getting dressed, and carrying a small suitcase into which he had put his toilet kit and a spare pair of shoes, Charley McFadden was at the kitchen table, reading the 75-49s on the Inferno job. Wohl was in the living room, studiously writing in his notebook.
“Interesting,” Charley said. “I’ve never seen Homicide 75-49s before.”
“That’s because God doesn’t love you,” Matt said piously.
McFadden looked at him curiously.
“How are you doing?” he asked.
“Fine,” Matt said, cheerfully and immediately, and then, chagrined, remembered he was supposed to be grief-stricken.
“Yeah?” Charley asked suspiciously. “Are you on something? Wohl…” He quickly corrected himself, remembering that Inspector Wohl was ten feet away: “…Inspector Wohl said your sister gave you a pill.”
Matt didn’t want to get into the subject of the pill, and he didn’t want to lie to McFadden. He avoided a direct reply.
“I’m OK, Charley.” he said, and leaned over McFadden’s shoulder hoping he could find something in the 75- 49s that would allow him to change the subject.
He found something, on the page Charley was just about to turn facedown.
“Bingo!”
McFadden looked up at him.
“What the hell does that mean?”
“Look here,” Matt said, and pointed toward the bottom of the page. “We had a tip that the doer was somebody named Frankie. Milham and I, starting from zilch, were out looking for him early this morning. We think we found him, on 2320 South Eighteenth Street. And here’s a Frankie who was in the Inferno, and there’s a description.”
“I know that neighborhood,” McFadden said, and then was interrupted when the door buzzer sounded.
“This is Captain Pekach,” a metallic voice announced.
“Push the button, Charley,” Matt said. “I’ll stack this stuff together.”
He read again the page Charley had been reading:
“Well, what do we do now? Go back to your place?” Detective McFadden inquired of Detective Payne as they came out of the Detective Bureau in the Roundhouse and waited for the elevator.
There had been nothing in the 75-49s on the Kellog job that Matt thought Wohl would be interested in, and nothing much new on the Inferno job that Matt found in Milham’s box.
“I don’t think so,” Matt said. “I think he’ll get on the radio when whatever is going to happen at the apartment has happened.”
“So where shall we go in that spanking-new unmarked car? You all have cars like that’?”
“God loves us.”
“Knock that shit off, will you, Matt? It’s blasphemous.”
“Sorry,” Matt said, meaning it. He had trouble remembering that Charley was almost, if not quite, as devoutly Roman Catholic as Mother Moffitt, his grandmother, and took sincere offense at what he had not thought of as anything approaching blasphemy.
“What are you going to do about that name you picked up on in the
75-49?”
“Frankie, you mean?”
“Yeah.”
“Wait for Milham, I guess.”
“That’s my neighborhood, Matt. And I think I know a guy who could probably give us a good line on him. Or are you afraid of spooking him?”
Matt remembered what Milham had said when they had come out of the bar after Milham had told the bartender he was Frankie’s cousin from Conshohocken, that he hoped the bartender would tell Frankie a cop had been looking for him, that it would make Frankie nervous.
“No. I get the feeling that Milham would like it if Frankie got a little nervous.”
“OK. Let’s do that.”
“Who are we going to see?”
“Sonny Boyle, we went to St. Monica’s at Sixteenth and Porter.”
Timothy Francis “Sonny” Boyle, who was twenty-seven years of age, weighed 195 pounds, and stood six feet one inch tall, had not known for the past year or so what to think about Charles Thomas McFadden.
Sonny had decided early on that the world was populated by two kinds of people: those that had to work hard for a living because they weren’t too smart, and a small group of the other kind, who didn’t have to work hard because they used their heads.
He had been in maybe the second year at Bishop Neuman High School when he had decided he was a member of the small group of the other kind, the kind who lived well by their wits, figuring out the system, and putting it to work for them.
He had known Charley since the second grade at St. Monica’s, and liked him, really liked him. But that hadn’t stopped him from concluding that Charley was just one more none-too-bright Irish Catholic guy from South Philly who would spend his life doing what other people told him to do, and doing it for peanuts.
He had not been surprised when Charley had gone on the cops. For people like Charley, it was either going into the service, or going on the cops, or becoming a fireman, or maybe in Charley’s case, since his father worked in the sewers, getting on with U.G.I., the gas company.
Charley, Sonny had decided when he had heard that Charley had gone on the cops, would spend his life riding around in a prowl car, or standing in the middle of the street up to his ass in snow and carbon monoxide, directing traffic. With a little bit of luck, and the proper connections, he might make sergeant by the time he retired. And in the meantime, he would do what other people told him to do, and for peanuts.
Charley, Sonny had decided, wasn’t smart enough to figure out how to make a little extra money as a cop, and if he tried to be smart, he wouldn’t be smart enough and would get caught at it.
He had really been surprised to hear that Charley had become a detective. It took him a lot of thought to realize that what it probably was was dumb luck. As asshole named Gerry Gallagher had got himself hooked on drugs, desperately needed money, and had tried to stick up the Waikiki Diner on Roosevelt Boulevard in Northeast Philly.
Tough luck for the both of them, the Commanding Officer of the Highway Patrol, a big mean sonofabitch
