************CITY OF PHILADELPHIA************
*************POLICE DEPARTMENT*************
ANNOUNCEMENT WILL BE MADE AT ALL ROLL CALLS OF THE FOLLOWING COMMAND ASSIGNMENT: EFFECTIVE IMMEDIATELY CAPTAIN MICHAEL J. SABARA IS REASSIGNED FROM (ACTING) COMMANDING OFFICER HIGHWAY PATROL TO SPECIAL OPERATIONS DIVISION AS DEPUTY COMMANDER.
“I’ll be in touch,” Chief Coughlin said to the telephone, and hung up. He turned to Wohl, smiling.
“You don’t seem very surprised, Peter,” Coughlin said.
“I heard.”
“You did?” Coughlin said, surprised. “From who?”
“I forget.”
“Yeah, you forget,” Coughlin said, sarcastically. “I don’t know why I’m surprised.”
“I don’t suppose I can get out of this?” Wohl asked.
“You’re going to be somebody in the Department, Peter,” Coughlin said. “It wouldn’t be much of a surprise if you got to be Commissioner.”
“That’s very flattering, Chief,” Wohl said. “But that’s not what I asked.”
“Don’t thank me,” Coughlin said. “I didn’t say that. The mayor did, to the Commissioner. When the mayor told him he thought you should command Special Operations.”
Wohl shook his head.
“That answer your question, Inspector?” Chief Coughlin asked.
“Chief, I don’t even know what the hell Special Operations is,” Wohl said, “much less what it’s supposed to do.”
“You saw the teletype. Highway and ACT. You were Highway, and you’ve got Mike Sabara to help you with Highway.”
“I don’t suppose anybody asked Mike if he’d like to have Highway?” Wohl asked.
“The mayor says Mike looks like a concentration camp guard,” Coughlin said. “Dave Pekach, I guess, looks more like what the mayor thinks the commanding officer of Highway Patrol should look like.”
“This is a reaction to that ‘Gestapo in Jackboots’ editorial? Is that what this is all about?”
“That, too, sure.”
“The Ledger is going after Carlucci no matter what he does,” Wohl said.
“His Honor the Mayor,” Coughlin corrected him.
“And after me, too,” Wohl said. “Arthur J. Nelson blames me for letting it out that his son was…involved with other men.”
Arthur J. Nelson was Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer of Daye-Nelson Publishing, Inc., which owned the Ledger and twelve other newspapers across the country.
“‘Negro homosexuals,’” Coughlin said.
It had been a sordid job. Jerome Nelson, the only son of Arthur J. Nelson, had been murdered, literally butchered, in his luxurious apartment in a renovated Revolutionary War—era building on Society Hill. The prime suspect in the case was his live-in boyfriend, a known homosexual, a man who called himself “Pierre St. Maury.” A fingerprint search had identified Maury as a twenty-five-year-old black man, born Errol F. Watson, with a long record of arrests for minor vice offenses and petty thievery. Watson had himself been murdered, shot in the back of the head with a .32 automatic, by two other black men known to be homosexuals.
Wohl believed he knew what had happened: It had started as a robbery. The almost certain doers, and thus the almost certain murderers, were Watson’s two friends. They were currently in the Ocean County, New Jersey jail, held without bail on a first-degree murder charge. Watson’s body had been found buried in a shallow grave not far from Atlantic City, near where Jerome Nelson’s stolen Jaguar had been abandoned. When the two had been arrested, they had been found in possession of Jerome Nelson’s credit card, wristwatch, and ring. Other property stolen from Jerome Nelson’s apartment had been located and tied to them, and their fingerprints had been all over the Jaguar.
The way Wohl put it together in his mind, the two critters being held in New Jersey had gotten the keys to the Nelson apartment from Watson, probably in exchange for a promise to split the burglary proceeds with him. Surprised to find Jerome Nelson at home, they had killed him. And then they had killed Watson to make sure that when the police found him, he couldn’t implicate them.
But the two critters had availed themselves of their right under the Miranda Decision to have legal counsel. And their lawyer had pointed out to them that while they were probably going to be convicted of the murder of Watson, if they professed innocence of the Nelson robbery and murder, the Pennsylvania authorities didn’t have either witnesses or much circumstantial evidence to try them with.