The Murderers

“Inspector Wohl told me to give Matt Payne some company,” Tiny said. “I wasn’t needed.”

“What a tragedy!” Lieutenant Lewis said.

“I thought I’d come see Mom,” Tiny said.

“Since I would not be here, you mean?”

“Pop, every time I see you, you jump all over me.”

“I wasn’t aware of that.”

“Just now,” Tiny said. “The implication that I’m screwing off being here.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“That’s what you meant.”

“You are driving a departmental vehicle, presumably on duty, visiting your family.”

“I’m doing what I’m ordered to do. Pop, I’m a pretty good cop! Inspector Wohl expects me to be available if he needs me. I don’t think he expected me to just sit in the car and wait for the radio to go off.”

“You believe that, don’t you?”

“Believe what?”

“That you’re a pretty good cop.”

“I’m not as good a cop as you are, but yeah, I’m a pretty good cop.”

“I’m sure you will take offense when I say this, but you don’t know what being a police officer really means.”

“You mean, I never worked in a district?”

“Exactly.”

“Come on, Pop. If Inspector Wohl thought I would learn anything riding around in a car, walking a beat, that’s what he’d have me doing.”

“That sort of thing is beneath you, right?”

“I think we better stop this before either one of us says something we’ll be sorry for,” Tiny said.

Lieutenant Lewis looked at his son for a moment before replying.

“I’m not saying that what you’re doing is not important, or that you don’t do it well.”

“It is important-we’re going to put a dirty captain and a dirty lieutenant away-and I helped. Wohl and Washington wouldn’t have let me get close to that job if they didn’t think I could handle it.”

“All I’m saying, Foster,” Lieutenant Lewis said, “is that I am concerned that you have no experience as a police officer on the street. You don’t even have any friends who are common, ordinary policemen, do you?”

“I guess not,” Tiny said.

“Would you indulge me if I asked you to do something?”

“Within reason.”

It came out more sarcastically, more disrespectfully than Tiny intended, and there was frost for a moment in his father’s eyes. But then apparently he decided to let it pass.

“Did I understand you to say that, so long as you keep yourself available, you’re free to move about the city?”

“That’s right.”

“Go inside, say hello to your mother, tell her you’re coming to di

“A ride? What police business?”

“We’re going to the Thirty-ninth District. I have a friend there, a common ordinary policeman, who I want you to meet. You might even learn something from him.”

Police Officer Woodrow Wilson Bailey, Sr., badge number 2554 of the Thirty-ninth District, who had twenty-four years on the job, twenty-two of it in the Thirty-ninth District, wanted only one thing from the Philadelphia Police Department. He wanted to make it to retirement, tell them where to mail his retirement checks, and go back home to Hartsville, South Carolina.

Having done that, it was his devout hope that he would never have to put on a uniform, look at a gun, or see Philadelphia, Pe

He thought of it as going back to Hartsville, although in fact he could never remember living there. He had been brought to Philadelphia from Hartsville at the age of three by his father, who had decided that as bad as things might be up north, with the depression and all, they couldn’t be any worse than being a sharecropper with a wife and child to feed on a hardscrabble farm in South Carolina.

The first memory of a home that Officer Bailey had was of an attic room in a row house on Sydenham in North Philadelphia. There was a table in it, and two beds, one for Mamma Dear and Daddy, and one for him, and then when Charles David came along, for him and Charles David. There was an electric hot plate, and a galvanized bucket for water. The bathroom was one floor down, and shared with the three families who occupied the five rooms on the second floor.

The room was provided to them by the charity of the Third Abyssinian Baptist Church, to which Officer Bailey and his family still belonged.

He had vague memories of Daddy leaving the apartment in the morning to seek work as a laborer, and much more clear memories of Daddy leaving the room (and later the two-room apartment on the second floor of another row house) carrying his shoe-shine box to walk downtown to station himself at the Market Street Station of the Pe

And he had memories of Hartsville from those times, too. Of going to see Gra

Bailey had liked Hartsville even then, even if he now recognized that Gra

There were chickens on Gra

He had asked several times why they had to live in Philadelphia, and Daddy had told him that he didn’t expect him to understand, but that Philadelphia was a place where you could better yourself, get a good education, and make something of yourself.

Bailey remembered being dropped off with Charles David at the Third Abyssinian Baptist Church by Mamma Dear, wearing a crisp white maid’s uniform, so he and Charles David could be cared for, and she could work and make some money and realize her and Daddy’s dream of buying a house that would be theirs, instead of paying rent.

He remembered the beating Daddy had given him with a leather belt when he was in the fifth grade at the Dunbar Elementary School and the teacher had come by the house they were then renting and reported that he had not only been cutting school, but giving her talk-back in class, and ru

Charles David, who was now a welder at the Navy Shipyard, still told that story, said that he got through high school because he had been there when Daddy had taken a strap to Woodrow for cutting school and sassing the teacher at Dunbar, and he was smart enough to learn by vicarious experience.

Woodrow had graduated from Dunbar Elementary School and gone on to graduate from William Pe