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“OK,” Matt said. “You going to tell me the other reasons?”
“I’ll take you back to the Media police station,” Washington said, ignoring the question. “We will get Wally Milham on the telephone and decide where you are to meet. Then you can get in your car and meet him. Relay to him in appropriate detail the essence and the ambience of our conversation with Mr. Atchison.”
“OK.”
Officer Paul Thomas O’Mara, Inspector Wohl’s administrative assistant, knocked on Wohl’s office door, and then, without waiting for a reply, pushed it open.“Mr. Giacomo for Inspector Weisbach on Four,” he announced.
Staff Inspector Michael Weisbach was sitting slumped on Wohl’s couch, his legs stretched out in front of him, balancing a cup of coffee on his chest.
Wohl, behind his desk, picked up one of the telephones and punched a button.
“Peter Wohl, Armando,” he said. “How are you? How odd that you should call. Mike and I were just talking about you. Here he is.”
Weisbach smiled as he walked behind Wohl’s desk and took the telephone. They had not been talking about Giacomo. They had been discussing the time-consuming difficulty they would have in investigating the personal finances of the Narcotics Five Squad, and the inevitability that their interest would soon become known.
“Hello, Armando,” Weisbach said. “What can I do for you?”
He moved the receiver off his ear so that Wohl could hear the conversation.
“I wanted you to know I haven’t forgotten our conversation at luncheon, Mike, and that I have already begun to accumulate some information—nothing yet that I’d feel comfortable about passing on to you—but I am beginning to hear some interesting things. I need some time, you’ll understand, to make certain that what I pass on to you is reliable.”
“My heart is always warmed, Armando, when citizens such as yourself go out of their way to assist the police.”
Wohl chuckled.
“I consider it my civic duty,” Giacomo said.
“Armando, perhaps I could save you some time, keep you from chasing a cat, so to speak, that’s already nearly in the bag. In our own plodding way, we have come up with a name. What I’m getting at, Armando, is that it would bother me if you came up with a name we already have, and you would still figure we owed you.”
“What’s the name?”
“Frankie Foley,” Weisbach said.
“He wasn’t, between us, one of the names I heard. Frankie Foley?”
“Frankie Foley.”
“How interesting.”
“Nice to talk to you, Armando,” Weisbach said. “I appreciate the call.”
He hung up.
“Why did you give him Foley’s name?” Wohl a
sked. “A question, not a criticism.”
“By now, Foley probably knows we’re looking at him. If he told Giacomo, or the mob found out some other way, Italian blood being stronger than Irish water, they may have decided to give him to us to keep Cassandro out of jail.”
“Michael, you are devious. I say that as a compliment.”
“So maybe, with Foley taken off the table, Giacomo may come up with another name.”
Frankie Foley waited impatiently, time card in hand, for his turn to punch out. He really hated Wanamaker’s, having to spend all day busting open crates, breaking his hump shoving furniture around, and for fucking peanuts.It would, he consoled himself, soon be over. He could tell Stan Wisznecki, his crew chief, to shove his job up his ass. He would go to work in the Inferno, get himself some decent threads with the money Atchison owed him, and wait for the next business opportunity to come along. And he wasn’t going to do the next hit for a lousy five thousand dollars. He’d ask for ten, maybe even more, depending on who he had to hit.
Frankie had been a little disappointed with the attention, or lack of it, paid to the Inferno hit by the newspapers and TV. There had been almost nothing on the TV, and only a couple of stories in the newspapers.
He had, the day after he’d made the Inferno hit, clipped out Michael J. O’Hara’s story about it from the Bulletin with the idea of keeping it, a souvenir, like of his first professional job.
