The Murderers (Badge of Honor 6)

“Interesting,” Charley said. “I’ve never seen Homicide 75–49s before.”

“That’s because God doesn’t love you,” Matt said piously.

McFadden looked at him curiously.

“How are you doing?” he asked.

“Fine,” Matt said, cheerfully and immediately, and then, chagrined, remembered he was supposed to be grief-stricken.

“Yeah?” Charley asked suspiciously. “Are you on something? Wohl…” He quickly corrected himself, remembering that Inspector Wohl was ten feet away: “…Inspector Wohl said your sister gave you a pill.”

Matt didn’t want to get into the subject of the pill, and he didn’t want to lie to McFadden. He avoided a direct reply.

“I’m OK, Charley.” he said, and leaned over McFadden’s shoulder hoping he could find something in the 75–49s that would allow him to change the subject.

He found something, on the page Charley was just about to turn facedown.

“Bingo!”

McFadden looked up at him.

“What the hell does that mean?”

“Look here,” Matt said, and pointed toward the bottom of the page. “We had a tip that the doer was somebody named Frankie. Milham and I, starting from zilch, were out looking for him early this morning. We think we found him, on 2320 South Eighteenth Street. And here’s a Frankie who was in the Inferno, and there’s a description.”

“I know that neighborhood,” McFadden said, and then was interrupted when the door buzzer sounded.

“This is Captain Pekach,” a metallic voice announced.

“Push the button, Charley,” Matt said. “I’ll stack this stuff together.”

He read again the page Charley had been reading:

“Well, what do we do now? Go back to your place?” Detective McFadden inquired of Detective Payne as they came out of the Detective Bureau in the Roundhouse and waited for the elevator.There had been nothing in the 75–49s on the Kellog job that Matt thought Wohl would be interested in, and nothing much new on the Inferno job that Matt found in Milham’s box.

“I don’t think so,” Matt said. “I think he’ll get on the radio when whatever is going to happen at the apartment has happened.”

“So where shall we go in that spanking-new unmarked car? You all have cars like that’?”

“God loves us.”

“Knock that shit off, will you, Matt? It’s blasphemous.”

“Sorry,” Matt said, meaning it. He had trouble remembering that Charley was almost, if not quite, as devoutly Roman Catholic as Mother Moffitt, his grandmother, and took sincere offense at what he had not thought of as anything approaching blasphemy.

“What are you going to do about that name you picked up on in the 75–49?”

“Frankie, you mean?”

“Yeah.”

“Wait for Milham, I guess.”

“That’s my neighborhood, Matt. And I think I know a guy who could probably give us a good line on him. Or are you afraid of spooking him?”

Matt remembered what Milham had said when they had come out of the bar after Milham had told the bartender he was Frankie’s cousin from Conshohocken, that he hoped the bartender would tell Frankie a cop had been looking for him, that it would make Frankie nervous.

“No. I get the feeling