The Murderers (Badge of Honor 6)

Taking a ham or a turkey or a bottle of booze at Christmas wasn’t really being on the take, but even then, when he was walking a beat, he had drawn the line at taking cash, refusing with a smile the offer of a folded twenty-dollar bill or an envelope with money in it.

There was something wrong, he thought, in a cop taking money for doing his job.

What these sleazeballs were doing was taking money, big-time money, for not doing their jobs. Worse, for doing crap behind their badges they knew goddamned well was dirty.

That was one side—they were dirty, and they deserved whatever was going to happen to them.

The other side was, they were cops, brother officers, and doing what he was doing made him uncomfortable.

When Tony had been on the sauce, brother officers had turned him loose a half-dozen times when they would have locked up a civilian for drunken driving, or belting some guy in a bar and making a general asshole of himself.

It wasn’t, in other words, like he was Mr. Pure himself.

Washington, Sergeant Jason Washington, his longtime partner in Homicide, and now his supervisor, was Mr. Pure. And so was Inspector Wohl, who was running this job. About the only thing they had ever taken because they were wearing a badge was the professional courtesy they got from a brother officer who stopped them for speeding.

And the kids he was supervising now were pure too. Payne would never take money because he didn’t have to, he was rich, and Lewis was pure because he’d got that from his father. Lieutenant Foster H. Lewis, Jr., was so pure and such a straight arrow that they made jokes about it; said that he would turn himself in if he got a goober stuck in his throat and had to spit on the sidewalk.

Tony knew that what he was doing was right, and that it had to be done. He just wished somebody else was doing it.

He entered the Bellvue-Stratford Hotel by the side entrance on Walnut Street, into the cocktail lounge. He stood just inside the door long enough to check for a familiar face at the bar, and then, after walking through it, checked the lobby before walking quickly across to the bank of elevators. He told the operator to take him to twelve.

He tried the key he had to 1204, but it was latched—as it should have been—from inside, and he had to wait until Officer Foster H. Lewis, Jr., who was an enormous black kid, six three, two hundred twenty, two hundred thirty even, came to it and peered through the cracked door and then closed it to take the latch off and let him in.

When he opened the door, Lewis was walking quickly across the room to the window, a set of earphones on his head still connected by a long coiled cord to one of the two reel-to-reel tape recorders set up on the chest of drawers.

“What’s going on, Tiny?” Harris asked, and then before Lewis could reply, “Where’s Payne?”

Tiny replied by pointing, out the window and up.

Harris crossed the room, noticing as he did a room-service cart with a silver pot of coffee and what looked like the leftovers from a room-service steak dinner.

Payne, of course. It wouldn’t occur to him to take a quick trip to McDonald’s or some other fast-food joint and bring a couple of hamburgers and some paper cups full of coffee to the room. He’s in a hotel room, call room service and order up a couple of steaks, medium rare. Fuck what it costs.

Detective Tony Harris looked out the window and saw Detective Matthew M. Payne.

“Jesus H. Christ!” he exclaimed. “What the fuck does he think he’s doing?”

“The lady opened the window,” Officer Lewis replied, “which dislodged the suction cup.”

“Did she see the wire?” Harris wondered out loud, and was immediately sorry he had.

Dumb question. If she had seen the wire, Payne would not be standing on a twelve-inch ledge thirteen floors up, trying to put the suction cup back on the window.

“I don’t think so,” Tiny said.

“Did we get anything?”

“If we had a movie camera instead of just a microphone, we would have a really blue movie,” Tiny Lewis said.

“Is he crazy or what, to try that?”

“I told him he was. He said he could do it.”

“How did he get out there?”

“There have been no lights in Twelve Sixteen all night. Two doors down from Twelve Eighteen. He said he thought he could get in.”

“You mean pick the lock?” Harris asked, and again without giving Officer Lewis a chance to reply, went on. “What if someone had seen him in the corridor?”