It was a statement of fact that sentences handed down to critters of whatever color for having murdered another critter tended to be less severe than those handed down to black men for having murdered a rich and socially prominent white man. And if the two critters in the Ocean County jail hadn’t known this before the State of New Jersey provided them with free legal counsel, they knew it now.
Their story now was that they had met Watson riding around in a Jaguar, and bought certain merchandise he had for sale from him. They had last seen him safe and sound near the boardwalk in Atlantic City. They had no idea who had killed him, and they had absolutely no knowledge whatever of a man named Jerome Nelson, except that his had been the name on the credit card they bought from Errol Watson/Pierre St. Maury.
Ordinarily, it wouldn’t have mattered. It would have been just one more sordid job in a long, long list of sordid jobs. The critters would have gone away, even if the New Jersey prosecutor had plea-bargained Watson’s murder down to second-degree murder or even first-degree manslaughter. They would have gotten twenty-to-life, and the whole job would have been forgotten in a month.
But Jerome Nelson was not just one more victim. His father was Arthur J. Nelson, who owned the Ledger, and who had naturally assumed that when Mayor Jerry Carlucci and Police Commissioner Taddeus Czernick had called on him immediately after the tragedy to assure him that the full resources of the Philadelphia Police Department would be brought to bear to bring whoever was responsible for this heinous crime against his son to justice, that the Police Department would naturally do what it could to spare the feelings of the victim’s family. That, in other words, the sexual proclivities of the prime suspect, or his racial categorization, or that he had been sharing Jerome’s apartment, would not come out.
Mayor Carlucci had seemed to be offering what Arthur J. Nelson had, as the publisher of a major newspaper, come to expect as his due: a little special treatment. Commissioner Czernick had even told Nelson that he had assigned one of the brightest police officers in the Department, Staff Inspector Peter Wohl, to oversee the de
tectives in the Homicide Division as they conducted their investigation, and to make sure that everything that could possibly be done was being done.
That hadn’t happened.
Mr. Michael J. O’Hara, of the Bulletin, had fed several drinks to, and stroked the already outsized ego of, a Homicide Division Lieutenant named DelRaye, which had caused Lieutenant DelRaye to say something he probably would not have said had he been entirely sober. That resulted in a front page, bylined story in the Bulletin announcing that “according to a senior police official involved in the investigation” the police were seeking Jerome Nelson’s live-in lover, who happened to be a black homosexual, or words to that effect.
Once Mickey O’Hara’s story had broken the dam, the other two major newspapers in Philadelphia, plus all the radio and television stations, had considered it their sacred journalistic duty to bring all the facts before the public.
Mrs. Arthur J. Nelson, who had always manifested some symptoms of nervous disorder, had had to be sent back to the Institute of Living, in Hartford, Connecticut, said to be the most expensive psychiatric hospital in the country, after it had come out, in all the media except the Ledger, that her only child had been cohabiting with a Negro homosexual.
Mr. Arthur J. Nelson had felt betrayed, not only by his fellow practitioners of journalism, but by the mayor and especially by the police. If that goddamned cop hadn’t had diarrhea of the mouth, Jerome could have gone to his grave with some dignity, and his wife wouldn’t be up in Hartford again.
Peter Wohl had been originally suspected by both Arthur J. Nelson and the mayor as the cop with the big mouth, but Commissioner Czernick had believed Wohl’s denial, and found out himself, from Mickey O’Hara, that the loudmouth had been Lieutenant DelRaye.
When Mayor Carlucci had called Mr. Nelson to tell him that, and also that Lieutenant DelRaye had been relieved of his Homicide Division assignment and banished in disgrace—and in uniform—to a remote district; and also to tell him that Peter Wohl had been in on the arrest of the two suspects in Atlantic City, what had been intended as an offering of the olive branch had turned nasty. Both men had tempers, and things were said that could not be withdrawn.
And it had quickly become evident how Arthur J. Nelson intended to wage the war. Two days later, a young plainclothes Narcotics Division cop had caught up with Gerald Vincent Gallagher, the drug addict who had been involved in the shooting death of Captain Dutch Moffitt. It had been a front-page story in all the newspapers in Philadelphia, the stories generally reflecting support for the police, and relief that a drug-addict cop-killer had been run to ground. The Ledger had buried the story, although factually reported, far inside the paper. The Ledger editorial, headlined “Vigilante Justice?” implied that Gerald Vincent Gallagher, who had fallen to his death under the wheels of a subway train as he tried to escape the Narcotics cop, had instead been pushed in front of the train.
The most recent barrage had been the “Jackbooted Gestapo” editorial. Arthur J. Nelson wanted revenge, and apparently reasoned that since Mayor Carlucci had risen to political prominence through the ranks of the Police Department, a shot that wounded the cops also wounded Carlucci.
“What is he doing,” Wohl asked, “putting me between him and the Ledger?”
“Peter, I think what you see is what you get,” Coughlin said.
“What I see is me,” Wohl said, “who hasn’t worn a uniform or worked anywhere but headquarters in ten years being put in charge of Highway, and of something called ACT that I don’t know a damned thing about. I don’t even know what it’s supposed to do.”
“The mayor told the Commissioner he has every confidence that, within a short period of time—I think that means a couple of weeks—he will be able to call a press conference and announce that his Special Operations Division has arrested the sexual deviate who has been raping the decent women of Northwest Philadelphia.”
“Rape is under the Detectives’ Bureau,” Wohl protested.
“So it is,” Coughlin said. “Except that the Northwest Philly rapist is yours.”
“So it is public relations.”
“What it is, Peter, is what the mayor wants,” Coughlin said.
“Matt Lowenstein will blow a blood vessel when he hears I’m working his territory.”
“The Commissioner already told him,” Coughlin said. “Give up, Peter. You can’t fight this.”
“Who’s in ACT? What kind of resources am I going to find there?”
“I’ve sent you three people,” Coughlin said, “to get you started. Officers Martinez and McFadden. They’ve been ordered to report to you at eight tomorrow morning.”
Officer Charley McFadden was the plainclothes Narc the Ledger had as much as accused of pushing Gerald Vincent Gallagher in front of the subway train; Officer Jesus Martinez had been his partner.
Wohl considered that for a moment, then said, “You said three?”
“And Officer Matthew Payne,” Coughlin said. “Dutch’s nephew. You met him.”