Pipe Dream (15 page)

“It was dark,” Butter said, “ ’cause I blew out the candles after the Puerto Rican pulled out his gun. We was gon’ rob him, but we couldn’t really get the gun away from him. And when Rock finally got it and tried to shoot him, he missed. But the white man didn’t. He aimed straight at his head and slumped him. Then he ran out the back door.”

“Where was Leroy?” Hillman asked.

“I heard Leroy, but I ain’t see him. I think he was just comin’ in when everything jumped off.”

“What about Black?”

“I ain’t see him, either.”

At that, Butter arched his back against a pain that pulsed across his chest and the nurse who was stationed at the heart monitor came running into the room. The other detective followed close behind her, rubbing his hands on a paper towel as he returned from the bathroom.

“That’s enough for now,” the nurse said. “All of you are going to have to leave.”

Latoya walked Hillman to the door, knowing that her brother was telling the truth and wondering if it would matter. “Here’s my card, Detective. I’ll be in touch.”

“So will we.”

As Hillman and the other detective got on the elevator, Latoya walked outside the room, slipped Moore’s tape recorder into his jacket pocket, and whispered in his ear. “Write your story,” she said.

“But what . . .”

She put her finger to her lips. “This information is my brother’s only chance. I need you to get it out there. Otherwise, they’re going to twist it and say that he’s lying.”

“Well, what does it—”

“Just trust me. Your story’s here. Now promise me you’ll write it.”

Moore looked into Latoya’s eyes. “Cross my heart and hope to die,” he said.

Lieutenant Darren Morgan sat in the waiting room and watched as the detectives came out of Thomas’s room. Then he watched a woman come out and give something to a man who had been waiting outside the room. The man, who looked vaguely familiar, spoke to the woman briefly, then walked quickly to the elevator, clutching his jacket pocket like he was protecting his most prized possession.

“Excuse me, Nurse,” Morgan said, flashing his badge at the nurses’ station. “Was that man in Darnell Thomas’s room before the detectives went in?”

“Yes.”

“Could you tell me his name, please?”

The nurse perused the list and found his name. “Henry Moore.”

“Thank you.”

Morgan recognized the name from a smear story the reporter had written a month before, outlining a perceived pattern of corruption in the police department. That’s why the face was familiar. The story was published in a local magazine and picked up by a few television stations. Moore made some appearances on local talk shows. He probably was going to try to do the same thing with the Podres story.

Too late, Morgan tried to break for the elevator doors. When they closed, he ran to the stairs, skipping every other step as he bolted down three flights, caught sight of Moore in the lobby, and followed the reporter to the parking lot.

He watched and listened as an anxious Moore pulled the tape recorder from his jacket and rewound it a little. When he hit play, he heard the exchange between Butter and Detective Hillman.

“He had on a white shirt and black pants. He was tall, with blond hair and blue eyes. And he had on this big link bracelet.”

“And what did the white man do?”

“He shot the Puerto Rican. He reached out from behind that curtain and shot the Puerto Rican.”

Moore shut off the tape and muttered a strangled “Yes!”

As he fumbled in his pockets for his car keys, Morgan walked up behind the reporter, causing him to jump.

“Henry Moore?” Morgan said, pulling out his badge. “Darren Morgan. Philadelphia police, Internal Affairs.”

“Man, you scared me,” Moore said, looking down at his keys as he found the one that fit the door. “What’s up?”

“Mr. Moore, I’m going to have to ask you for the tape.”

“What tape?” Moore said, opening the door and getting into the car.

“The one you obtained illegally from the interview with Darnell Thomas.”

“You don’t have a warrant, you don’t have probable cause, I don’t have a tape,” Moore said as he got in his car and tried to close the door.

Morgan held the door open. “I’m going to ask you once more for the tape, Mr. Moore.”

“Don’t bother. Because I’m not giving you any tape. Now, let go of my door so I can go home.”

“Sure.”

Moore closed the door, rolled up his window, and put his key in his ignition. When he looked up, the barrel of Morgan’s gun was pointed at his head.

“Hey,” Moore said, in a voice that was muffled inside the car. “Hey, what are you . . .”

The window shattered. The first bullet lodged in Moore’s eye, splattering blood against the dashboard and the windshield. Morgan reached into the car and unlocked the door. Then he shot the reporter again, this time punching a hole through his chest that blew out the back of the driver’s seat.

While Moore sat dying, Morgan calmly removed the tape recorder from his pocket, then went into the reporter’s back pocket and removed his wallet. For good measure, he took Moore’s watch, too, then dropped an empty cap on the floor between the reporter’s legs.

As Morgan walked away from Moore’s car and got into his own, a security guard came running out of the hospital yelling something into his walkie-talkie. Morgan ignored him, thinking to himself about how Homicide would have at least one more murder to pin on a piper.

He opened his car door, got in, and rewound the tape to the beginning. He looked down at the reporter’s bloodstained watch and saw that it was seven
A.M.
That meant he had a half hour to get to work.

Morgan started his car, pushed play, and drove back to the Roundhouse listening to what turned out to be a very interesting conversation. He knew after listening to Butter’s first few words that he needed to call Sheldon. Because if what Morgan was hearing on the tape was right, Sheldon needed to hear it, too.

*       *       *

Detective Reds Hillman was just leaving Abbottsford Hospital when he heard the shots in the parking lot. The other detective was already gone, and by the time Hillman circled his car around, Henry Moore was dead. Hillman called it in, and in a few minutes, the guys from Northwest Detectives arrived. He told them he’d just seen Moore in Butter’s room, then waited around in case they had questions.

As he watched them stretch yellow crime-scene tape around the perimeter, Hillman wondered who would have wanted to kill Moore. He wasn’t exactly an important guy.

In fact, Moore was a nobody. So much so that if Hillman had known that Latoya Thomas had smuggled a reporter into her brother’s room, it wouldn’t have been a big deal. He had expected to see reporters around the people associated with the Podres case. He’d expected them to try every trick in the book to get whatever information they could get before the competition. He’d half expected to see the entire floor filled with reporters when he got off the elevator to go see Butter. And when they hadn’t been there, he’d shrugged it off, thinking that they’d probably already been there and left.

But none of that was important. What everyone needed to know now was why Moore had eaten two bullets once he’d left the hospital.

From what they could gather from the hospital security guard who had discovered the body, there were two shots fired in the vicinity of Moore’s car. A brown-haired white man with a bushy mustache had walked away from Moore’s car shortly after the shots were fired. He was wearing a gray blazer and black pants. And his car was one of the box-shaped Chryslers that police use. The security guard had even gotten the last three numbers on the license plate—342.

It didn’t make sense to Hillman. If a cop was going to rob someone, it would be someone like a drug dealer: someone he wouldn’t have to kill; someone with enough money to make it worthwhile; someone who wouldn’t talk. He wouldn’t rob someone like Moore unless it was about more than a robbery.

Hillman walked over to the edge of the yellow crime-scene tape, where he noticed steel nine-millimeter shell casings circled with yellow chalk. As he bent down for a closer look, he felt someone standing behind him.

He looked up and saw Latoya Thomas, her face blank, staring straight ahead as her eyes glazed over with hopelessness.

“Tell me that’s not Henry Moore,” she said.

Hillman was about to answer her when a detective called him over to the car.

“Hey, Reds. Take a look at this.”

Latoya followed Hillman to the opposite side of the yellow tape and turned away as the bloody scene came into full view.

“The crime-lab guys just removed a tape recorder from the victim’s pocket,” the detective said. “But there was no tape.”

“What do you mean there’s no tape?” Latoya said, her words tumbling from her mouth as her cool exterior began to crack. “There must be a tape.”

The detectives looked at each other, then rested their eyes on Latoya.

“How do you know there must be a tape?” Hillman said, though he already knew the answer.

She thought of her brother in the hospital bed, his body burned and his life slipping away, and she knew that there was nothing that anyone could do to her that was worse than watching him die.

“I taped the interrogation,” she said, turning to look up into Hillman’s face. “I gave the tape to Moore and told him to write a story about it, because I knew that my brother would never have a chance if the truth didn’t come out somehow.”

A single tear formed in her eye. “I’m a lawyer, Detective. I’ve seen too many innocent brothers go to jail on trumped-up charges. I wasn’t about to let it happen to mine.”

Hillman couldn’t argue. She was right. And from the description that the hospital security guard had given, the people who were hiding the truth about her brother and the other suspects were police officers.

“Whoever killed Moore must have taken the tape,” Hillman said.

“Do you know who killed him?” Latoya Thomas said.

Hillman looked at the other detective, then at Latoya. And before he knew what he was saying, the truth was falling from his lips like dead leaves fall from trees in autumn.

“It was a cop,” he said, grasping Latoya Thomas’s hand as he looked into her eyes. “And I’m going to find him.”

Hillman turned and walked away from the scene. If there had been any doubt in his mind before, it had just been erased. Podres’s killer was a tall white man with blond hair, blue eyes, and a link bracelet. He was a cop. He was working with another cop—one with brown hair and a bushy mustache.

But the descriptions were just a start. Hillman knew where he had to go to get the rest of the information he needed.

When the lieutenant in command of the Radio Room looked up and saw a detective strolling toward his desk with a folder in his hand, he immediately stiffened. He knew that detectives thought they were too important to waste their time in Radio. But the lieutenant knew better. And he was going to make sure that this red-haired bozo knew it, too.

“How ya doin’, Lieutenant?” Hillman said as he walked toward the desk. “I’m Reds Hillman, Homicide.”

“And I’m busy,” the lieutenant said, looking down and shuffling papers at his desk. “Things are pretty crazy with this Podres shooting, and we’re shorthanded. So whatever it is, make it quick.”

Hillman knew what the attitude was about. So he just smiled, looked at the lieutenant’s name tag, and made small talk.

“Jervey, huh? I worked in the 23rd District with a Sergeant Charles Jervey back in ’63. He was a hell of a cop.”

The lieutenant relaxed at the mention of the sergeant. “He was my father.”

“I knew you looked familiar,” Hillman said, his smile broadening. “Your father used to get that same look on his face when somebody came to the district trying to act like a big shot.”

Both men laughed.

“Lieutenant Jervey, I—”

“Call me Charles,” the lieutenant said. “And I’m sorry about before. I guess I’m just stressed-out.”

“Don’t mention it,” Hillman said. “Charles, I need to look at the printouts from every job in the 25th and 39th districts that came in between eleven
P.M.
and twelve-thirty
A.M.
last night. I also need to look at the unit histories for every car in East and Northwest divisions, and any 25-48s you might have.”

“You want the calls that came in, the cars that responded, and police reports,” he repeated, jotting down the request on a piece of paper. “I’ll have everything for you in five minutes.”

“Thanks a lot, Charles.”

While Hillman waited, he opened up the folder he was carrying and looked at the suspects’ criminal records. From what he could see, they all had clear patterns. Leroy did thefts, Black did burglaries, and Pookie did prostitution. Leroy and Black had been arrested together three times in the last two months. But none of them had ever done anything violent.

“Here’s your printout, Detective,” the lieutenant said, dropping a computer-generated sheaf of papers in front of Hillman. “I’ll be right over here if you need me.”

“Thanks.”

As Hillman paged through the printouts, he saw the usual disorderly crowds and theft reports that always came in on Sunday nights. Then he ran across something interesting. It was a call for a theft in progress in front of the church at Broad and Butler.

A priest had called and said that someone was trying to take the tires off his car. Since it was the only thing Hillman had to go on, he called the church and asked the priest for a description of the person who’d tampered with his tires. The priest described Leroy. After the police had come and gone, the priest said, Leroy walked across the street to the barbecue place on Germantown Avenue in the opposite direction of the house on Park Avenue. The time was 11:45
P.M.
The priest knew because he’d checked his watch to see if the news was still on.

Hillman wondered how Leroy could have doubled back and committed the crime when he was walking away from the scene of the shooting at 11:45
P.M.
That is, unless the councilman was already dead by the time Leroy got to the house. And if Leroy had walked in on the tail end of the shooting and escaped in a car with the girl and the other two guys, where had his supposed accomplice been?