Badge of Honour 06 - The Murderers (10 page)

Wally told himself that he should have expected something lousy to happen—not something as lousy as this, but something—the other shoe to drop, so to speak, because things lately had been going so damned well. For eighteen months, things had really been lousy.

In what he was perfectly willing to admit was about the dumbest thing Wally had ever done in his life, he had gotten involved with his wife Adelaide’s sister, Monica. Monica lived in Jersey, in Ocean City. Her husband was a short fat guy who sold insurance. Adelaide’s and Monica’s mother and dad owned a cottage close to the beach in Wildwood.

Everybody in the family—Adelaide’s family; Wally was an only child—got to use the cottage. Adelaide had one other sister besides Monica, and two brothers. The Old Man—Adelaide’s father—wouldn’t take any money when anybody used it, which sort of bothered Wally, who liked to pay his own way and not be indebted to anybody. So when the place needed a paint job, he volunteered to do that. He told the Old Man that the way his schedule worked, there were often two or three days he had off in the middle of the week, when Adelaide was working in the library, and he would rather do something useful with that time than sit around the house watching the TV.

Which was true. When he offered to paint the cottage in Wildwood, that was all he had in mind, pay his way. Monica didn’t come into his thinking at all.

But Charles, Monica’s husband, got in the act. He said that if Wally was going to drive all the way over from Philly to do the labor, the least he could do was provide the materials. So he did. And Monica drove the paint down in their station wagon because Charles of course was at work.

And he didn’t think about that either. The first two days he spent painting the cottage, he used up most of the paint that Charles had Monica drive down to give him, so he told Adelaide to call Monica to ask Charles if he wanted to provide more paint, or have Wally get it, in which case he would have to know where he’d gotten the first three gallons, so they could mix up some more that would match.

Adelaide told him that Charles said that the paint would be there waiting for him the next time he went to Wildwood. It wasn’t, so he started painting with what was left, and just before noon Monica showed up with the paint, and said that Charles had told her to take him out to lunch, and not to take no for an answer, it was the least they could do for him.

So they went out for lunch, and he was surprised when Monica tossed down three martinis, one after the other. He had never seen her take more than one drink at a time. And she started talking—women with a couple of drinks in them tend to do that—and she started out by saying that she was a little jealous of Adelaide because Adelaide was married to a man who had an exciting career, catching murderers, and Charles was a bore.

In more ways than one, she said, if Wally took her meaning.

And he told her that being a Homicide detective wasn’t as exciting as people who didn’t know thought it was, that most of it was pretty ordinary stuff, just asking questions until somebody came up with the answer.

She said, yeah, but he got to meet interesting, exciting people, and she asked him if he ever met any exciting women, and he told her no, but she said he was just saying that, and she’d bet that if he told her the truth, he got to meet a lot of exciting women.

That’s when he realized what was going on, and if he had had half the sense he was born with, he would have stopped it right there, but he’d had three martinis too.

In her car on the way back to the Old Man’s cottage, she kept letting her hand fall on his leg, and ten minutes after they got back to the cottage, they were having at it in the Old Man’s and Grandma’s bed.

Afterward, Monica told him she didn’t know what had come over her, it must have been the martinis, and they could never let anything like that happen again. But the way she stuck her tongue down his throat when she kissed him good-bye, he knew that was what she was saying, not what she meant.

So far as he was concerned, that was it, the one time. It would be a long time before he ever let himself be alone with her again.

Two weeks after that, at eleven o’clock in the morning, he had just gotten out of bed and made himself a cup of coffee when the doorbell at the house rang and there was Monica.

She was in Philly to do some shopping, she said, and she thought she would take a chance and see if maybe Adelaide hadn’t gone to work at the library and they could go together.

He told her no, Adelaide had gone to work, and wouldn’t be home until five, five-thirty.

And she asked what about the kids, and he told her they were both at school and wouldn’t be home until quarter to four.

And then she said that she just couldn’t get him out of her mind, and since he hadn’t called her or anything, she had come to see him.

Three weeks after that, Adelaide walked in on them and caught them in her bed, right in the middle of doing it.

The way Adelaide saw it, it was all his fault, and maybe, he thought, in a way it was. He had known what was going on.

Adelaide said she hoped that he would at least have the decency to get a civilized divorce, so that nobody in her family knew that it was Monica he was taking advantage of, and ruin her life too. She said that she would hate to tell the children what an unmitigated immoral sonofabitch their father was, and hoped he wouldn’t make her.

There was a clause in the divorce that said he had to pay a certain amount to her, in addition to child support, so that she could learn a trade or a profession. She decided she would go back to college and get a degree in library science, and get a better job than the one she had, which was “clerical assistant,” which meant that he would be giving her money for two years, maybe three. Or more. She was going only part time.

And then she met Greg. Greg was a great big good-looking guy who sold trucks for a living, and who made a hell of a lot more money doing that than Wally had ever made, even in Homicide.

Adelaide started to spend nights in Greg’s apartment whenever Wally had the kids over the weekend or she could get the Old Man and Grandma to take them. Wally knew that, because he sometimes drove by Greg’s apartment at midnight and saw her car, and then drove past again at three in the morning, and again at seven, and it was still there.

But she wasn’t going to marry Greg, because the minute she married him, that was the end of her training for a new career at his expense. She as much as told him that, and let him know if he made any trouble for her about how she conducted her private affairs, she would have to tell the kids what a sonofabitch he was, seducing her own sister, caring only for himself and not for his family.

And then Adelaide had really surprised him two and a half months before by calling him up—she sounded like she was half in the bag on the phone—and telling him she had just come back from Elkton, Maryland, where she and Greg had tied the knot.

Which meant that he could stop paying for her career education and move out of the one-room apartment, which was all he could afford on what was left of his pay, into something at least decent.

And then he went to Lieutenant Sackerman’s funeral, and met Helene. Jack Sackerman was an old-time Homicide detective, a good one. When Wally had first gone to Homicide, he had taken him under his wing and showed him how to operate. Wally thought that if it hadn’t been for Jack Sackerman, he probably never would have gotten to stay in Homicide.

When Jack had started thinking about retirement, he knew he had to leave Homicide. Homicide detectives make good money, damned good money, because of all the overtime, but when they retire, they get the same retirement pay as any other detective, and that’s not much. So Jack had taken the examination for sergeant, and passed that, and they assigned him to Narcotics. Then he took the lieutenant’s examination, and passed that, and they kept him in Narcotics. He was getting ready for the captain’s examination when they discovered the cancer. And that, of course, was that.

Everybody from Narcotics was at Jack’s viewing, of course, and that’s when he met Helene and her husband. Captain Talley, the Narcotics Commander, introduced them. Her husband, Officer Kellog, had on a suit and a tie, but he still looked like a bum. Anybody who worked Plainclothes Narcotics had to dress like he was part of the drug business, so it was understandable—when Lieutenant Pekach, who was now a Captain in Special Operations, was running Undercover Narcotics, he actually had a pigtail—but he still looked like a bum.

He met Helene first at the viewing, and then the next day at the reception at Sackerman’s house after the funeral, and a third time at Emmett’s Place bar, where a bunch of the mourners went after they left Sackerman’s house. Jack had had a lot of friends.

Her husband wasn’t with her at Emmett’s Place, but they seemed to wind up together and started talking. Wally was attracted to her, but didn’t come on to her. Only a stupid bird dirties his own nest, and she was married to a cop.

After that, they kept bumping into each other. She worked for the City in the Municipal Services Building in Center City, and he was always around the City Hall courtrooms or the DA’s Office, in the same area, so that was understandable. Wally ran into Helene one time on his way to the Reading Terminal Market for lunch and asked her if she wanted a cheese steak or something, and she said yes and went with him.

After that, they started meeting once or twice a week for lunch, or sometimes dinner, and she let him understand that things weren’t perfect with her husband, but she never told him—and he didn’t ask—what specifically was wrong between them. He told her about Adelaide, what had happened. And absolutely nothing happened between them, he didn’t so much as try to hold her hand, until the night she called him, three days after he’d moved into the new apartment, and sounded as if she was crying.

Wally asked her what the matter was, and she said she was calling from the Roosevelt Motor Inn, on Roosevelt Boulevard, that what had happened was that she had finally left the sonofabitch—he remembered that she had used that word, because it was the first time she had ever said anything nasty about him—and needed to talk to somebody.

He said sure, and did she want him to come out there and pick her up and they could go somewhere for a drink, and she said it wouldn’t look right, in case somebody saw them, for him to pick her up at a motel. And as far as that went, it wouldn’t look right if somebody saw them having a drink someplace the very night she moved out on her husband.

So Wally had asked her, did she maybe want to come to his apartment, and Helene said she didn’t know, what did he think, and she didn’t want to impose or anything.

So he told her to get in a taxi and come down. And she did. And before she got there, he went to a Chinese restaurant and got some takeout to go with the bottle of wine he knew he had somewhere at home. He didn’t want to offer her a drink of whiskey, to keep her from getting the wrong idea. All he wanted to be was a friend, offering her something to eat and wine, and a sympathetic ear.

She didn’t even take the wine when he offered it to her, but she wolfed down the Chinese, and he was glad he thought of that, and while he watched her eat, he decided that if she wanted to talk about her husband, fine, and if she didn’t, fine, too.

When she finished, she smiled at him and asked him if he thought she would be terrible if she asked for a drink. She really needed a drink.

So he made her one and handed it to her, and she started to take a sip and then started crying and he put his arm around her, and one thing led to another, and that was the way they started.

Whatever was wrong between her and her husband wasn’t that she was frigid, or anything like that.

And she told him, afterward, that the truth of the matter was that she had been thinking about him and her like that from the very first time she saw him, at Lieutenant Sackerman’s viewing; that he was really an attractive man.

So at five o’clock in the morning, he took her back to the Roosevelt Motor Inn on Roosevelt Boulevard, and met her in City Hall at noon, after she’d talked to a lawyer, and they went to his apartment so they could talk without worrying about people at the next table in a restaurant listening in. They didn’t do much talking about what the lawyer said, except that it was going to be harder getting a divorce than she thought it would be.

She took a tiny apartment so that her family wouldn’t ask questions, but from the first they lived together, and they got along just fine, and without coming right out and talking about it, they understood that as soon as she got him to agree to the divorce, they would get married. With what they made between them, they could live pretty well. They talked about getting a larger apartment, maybe even a house, so there would be room for his kids when he had them on weekends or whenever.

They never talked much about what bad had happened between her and Kellog, but he got the feeling it had something to do with Kellog being dirty on the job. She knew something, and Wally knew if he pressed her, he could get it out of her.

But then what? For one thing, she might not know what she was talking about, and for another, dirty cops are Internal Affairs’ business, not his. If he learned something he felt he had to tell somebody about, it would come out that he and Helene were living together, and it would look as if he was trying to frame the sonofabitch.

And then the sonofabitch gets himself shot. And guess who they think had something to with it?