“Why would that make the Mayor happier?”
“Maybe assisted by Detective Payne?” Mickey went on, not directly answering the question. “Handsome Matthew is always good copy. That picture, I’m almost sure, would make page one. Isn’t that what Carlucci wants? More to the point, why he fixed it for me to be here?”
“I suggested last night that Mike make all the arrests.”
“Thanks a lot, Peter,” Mike Weisbach said sarcastically.
“Coughlin shot me down,” Wohl went on. “There’s apparently a sacred protocol here, and Coughlin wants it followed.”
“Just trying to be helpful,” Mickey said. “For purely selfish reasons. I want to get invited back the next time. I guess the Mayor will have to be happy with a picture of the Black Buddha standing behind Cazerra going into the Roundhouse. That should produce a favorable reaction from the voting segment of the black population, right?”
“Even if it does humiliate every policeman in Philadelphia,” Wohl said bitterly. “Mike, you’ve heard it. See anything wrong with it?”
Weisbach shook his head.
“OK,” Wohl said. “Then that’s the way we’ll do it.”
“OK,” Weisbach parroted.
“Afterward, Mike, you and I are going to have a long talk about the Ethical Affairs Unit.”
“Right,” Weisbach said.
Wohl’s door opened and Chief Inspector Coughlin walked in.
“Morning,” he said.
“Good morning, Chief,” Wohl and Weisbach said, almost in unison.
“How are you, Mickey?” Coughlin said cordially, offering his hand.
“No problems,” O’Hara said.
“Peter fill you in on what’s going to happen?”
“Yep.”
“Mick, just now, as I was driving over here, I wondered if you might not want to go with Captain Sabara when he arrests Cassandro.”
“Nice try, Denny,” O’Hara said. “But like I told Peter, a picture of a third-rate gangster in cuffs isn’t news. A District captain getting arrested is.”
Officer O’Mara put his head in the door.
“Inspector Sawyer is here, sir.”
Wohl looked at Coughlin, who nodded.
“Ask him to come in,” Peter said.
Inspector Gregory Sawyer, a somewhat portly, gray-haired man in his early fifties, came in the room.
He was visibly surprised at seeing Mickey O’Hara.
“I’ll see you guys later,” Mickey said. “How are you, Greg?”
He walked out of the room.
“Greg,” Coughlin said. “I wasn’t exactly truthful with you last night.”
“Excuse me, Chief?”
“That thing ready?” Coughlin asked, pointing at the tape recorder.
“Yes, sir,” Wohl said.
“Sit down, Greg,” Coughlin said.
“Yes, sir.”
“At the orders of the Commissioner, Inspector Wohl has been conducting an investigation of certain allegations involving Captain Cazerra, Lieutenant Meyer, and others in your division. A court order was obtained authorizing electronic surveillance of a room in the Bellvue-Stratford Hotel. What you are about to hear is one of the recordings made,” Coughlin said formally. “Turn it on, please,” he said, and then walked to Wohl’s window and looked out at the lawn in front of the building.
ELEVEN
At 7:40 A.M. Miss Penelope Detweiler was sitting up in her canopied four-poster bed in her three-room apartment on the second floor of the Detweiler mansion when Mrs. Violet Rogers, who had been employed as a domestic servant by the Detweilers since Miss Detweiler was in diapers, entered carrying a tray with coffee, toast, and orange juice.
Miss Detweiler was wearing a thin, pale blue, sleeveless nightgown. Her eyes were open, and there was a look of surprise on her face.
There was a length of rubber medical tubing tied around Miss Detweiler’s left arm between the elbow and the shoulder. A plastic, throwaway hypodermic injection syringe hung from Miss Detweiler’s lower left arm.
“Oh, Penny!” Mrs. Rogers moaned. “Oh, Penny!”
She put the tray on the dully gleaming cherrywood hope chest at the foot of the bed, then stood erect, her arms folded disapprovingly against her rather massive breast, her full, very black face showing mingled compassion, sorrow, and anger.
And then she met Miss Detweiler’s eyes.
“Oh, sweet Jesus!” Mrs. Rogers said, moaned, and walked quickly to the bed.
She waved a large, plump hand before Miss Detweiler’s eyes. There was no reaction.
She put her hand to Miss Detweiler’s forehead, then withdrew it as if the contact had burned.
She put her hands on Miss Detweiler’s shoulders and shook her.
“Penny! Penny, honey!”
There was no response.
When Mrs. Rogers removed her hands from Miss Detweiler’s shoulders and let her rest again on the pillows against the headboard, Miss Detweiler started to slowly slide to the right.
Mrs. Rogers tried to stop the movement but could not. She watched in horror as Miss Detweiler came to rest on her side. Her head tilted back, and she seemed to be staring at the canopy of her bed.
Mrs. Rogers turned from the bed and walked to the door. In the corridor, the walk became a trot, and then she was running to the end of the corridor, past an oil portrait of Miss Detweiler in her pink debutante gown, past the wide stairway leading down to the entrance foyer of the mansion, into the corridor of the other wing of the mansion, to the door of the apartment of Miss Detweiler’s parents.
She opened and went through the door leading to the apartment sitting room without knocking, and through it to the closed double doors of the bedroom. She knocked at the left of the double doors, then went through it without waiting for a response.
H. Richard Detweiler, a tall, thin man in his late forties, was sleeping in the oversize bed, on his side, his back to his wife Grace, who was curled up in the bed, one lower leg outside the sheets and blankets, facing away from her husband.
Mr. Detweiler, who slept lightly, opened his eyes as Mrs. Rogers approached the bed.
“Mr. D,” Violet said. “You better come.”
“What is it, Violet?” Mr. Detweiler asked in mingled concern and annoyance.
“It’s Miss Penny.”
H. Richard Detweiler sat up abruptly. He was wearing only pajama bottoms.
“Jesus, now what?”
“You’d better come,” Mrs. Rogers repeated.
He swung his feet out of the bed and reached for the dressing gown he had discarded on the floor before turning out the lights. As he put it on, his feet found a pair of slippers.
Mrs. Detweiler, a finely featured, rather thin woman of forty-six, who looked younger, woke, raised her head, and looked around and then sat up. Her breasts were exposed; she had been sleeping wearing only her underpants.
“What is it, Violet?” she asked as she pulled the sheet over her breasts.
“Miss Penny.”
“What about Miss Penny?”
H. Richard Detweiler was headed for the door, followed by Violet.
“Dick?” Mrs. Detweiler asked, and then, angrily, “Dick!”
He did not reply.
Grace Detweiler got out of bed and retrieved a thick terry-cloth bathrobe from the floor. It was too large for her, it was her husband’s, but she often wore it between the shower and the bed. She put it on, and fumbling with the belt, followed her husband and Violet out of her bedroom.
H. Richard Detweiler entered his daughter’s bedroom.
He saw her lying on her side and muttered something unintelligible, then walked toward the canopied bed.
“Penny?”
“I think she’s gone, Mr. D,” Violet said softly.
He flashed her an almost violently angry glare, then bent over the bed and, grunting, pushed his daughter erect. Her head now lolled to one side.
Detweiler sat on the bed and exhaled audibly.
“Call Jensen,” he ordered. “Tell him we have a medical emergency, and to bring the Cadillac to the front door.”