The Murderers (Badge of Honor 6)

“I didn’t expect you for a couple of days,” Milham said. “I heard about…I thought the funeral was today.”“It was,” Matt said.

Milham looked at Matt intently for a moment, then suddenly stood up. He took his coat from the back of the chair he had been sitting on and shrugged into it.

“Come on, Payne,” he said.

“Where are we going?”

“Out,” Milham said, and gestured toward the door.

“You drive over here?” Milham asked when they came out of the back door of the Roundhouse.“Yeah.”

“Where’d you park?” Milham asked.

Matt pointed at the Porsche.

“Nice wheels,” Milham said. “Leave it, we’ll pick it up later.”

“Whatever you say,” Matt replied.

They got in Milham’s unmarked three-year-old Ford, left the parking lot, went south on Eighth Street, crossed Market and turned right on Walnut Street to South Broad, and then left.

“How much have you had to drink?” Milham asked.

“I had a couple.”

“More than a couple, to judge from the smell,” Milham said. “That wasn’t really smart, Payne.”

“I couldn’t sleep.”

“I mean coming into Homicide shitfaced,” Milham said. “Lucky for you, Hobbs and Natali went out on a job—a stabb

ing, two Schwartzers fighting over a tootsie in the East Falls project—and Logan, who was on the desk, either didn’t smell you or didn’t want to. It could have gone the other way. If it had, Lowenstein would have heard first thing in the morning that you showed up drunk. I get the feeling he would love to tell that to the Mayor.”

“Oh, shit!” Matt said.

“I think you were lucky, so forget it. But don’t do it again.”

“Sorry,” Matt said.

“We’re going to a bar called Meagan’s,” Milham said, changing the subject somewhat, “where you are going to have either coffee or a Coke.”

Milham handed Matt a clipboard, then turned on the large, specially installed light mounted on the headliner. Matt saw that the clipboard held a pad of lined paper and a Xerox of a page from the telephone book. On closer examination, there were two Xerox pages. There was also a pencil-written list of what looked like bars.

“There are ninety-seven Foleys in the phone book,” Milham said. “We may have to check every one of them out. Just because there’s no Frank or Francis listed doesn’t mean there’s nobody at that address named Frank or Francis. In the morning, I’ll check driver’s licenses in Harrisburg, and see if they have a Frank or Francis matching one of these addresses. Right now, I’m working on a hunch.”

“What kind of a hunch?”

“A hunch hunch. There are eleven Foleys in the phone book in a six-block area in South Philly. There are twelve bars in that six-block area. A couple of them will probably still be open. One—Meagan’s—I know stays open late. We will ask, ‘Is this the place where Ol’ Frankie Foley drinks?’”

“What about this tip? Where did it come from? Is it any good?”

“We are probably on a wild-goose chase, but you never know until you know. As to where it came from, I don’t know. Not from someone inside Homicide. Who knows? Lowenstein thinks it’s worth checking out, that’s all that matters.”

Meagan’s Bar, on Jackson Street, turned out to be an ordinary neighborhood bar. There were half a dozen customers, two of them middle-aged women, sitting at the bar, each with a beer in front of them. There was a jukebox, but no one had fed it coins. A television, with a flickering picture, was showing a man and a peroxide blonde in an apron demonstrating a kitchen device guaranteed to make life in the kitchen a genuine joy.The bartender, a heavyset man in his fifties, hoisted himself with visible reluctance from his stool by the cash register and walked to them, putting both hands on the bar and wordlessly asking for their order.

“Ortleib’s,” Milham ordered.

“I think I better have coffee,” Matt said.