And then Adelaide had really surprised him two and a half months before by calling him up-she sounded like she was half in the bag on the phone-and telling him she had just come back from Elkton, Maryland, where she and Greg had tied the knot.
Which meant that he could stop paying for her career education and move out of the one-room apartment, which was all he could afford on what was left of his pay, into something at least decent.
And then he went to Lieutenant Sackerman’s funeral, and met Helene. Jack Sackerman was an old-time Homicide detective, a good one. When Wally had first gone to Homicide, he had taken him under his wing and showed him how to operate. Wally thought that if it hadn’t been for Jack Sackerman, he probably never would have gotten to stay in Homicide.
When Jack had started thinking about retirement, he knew he had to leave Homicide. Homicide detectives make good money, damned good money, because of all the overtime, but when they retire, they get the same retirement pay as any other detective, and that’s not much. So Jack had taken the examination for sergeant, and passed that, and they assigned him to Narcotics. Then he took the lieutenant’s examination, and passed that, and they kept him in Narcotics. He was getting ready for the captain’s examination when they discovered the cancer. And that, of course, was that.
Everybody from Narcotics was at Jack’s viewing, of course, and that’s when he met Helene and her husband. Captain Talley, the Narcotics Commander, introduced them. Her husband, Officer Kellog, had on a suit and a tie, but he still looked like a bum. Anybody who worked Plainclothes Narcotics had to dress like he was part of the drug business, so it was understandable-when Lieutenant Pekach, who was now a Captain in Special Operations, was running Undercover Narcotics, he actually had a pigtail-but he still looked like a bum.
He met Helene first at the viewing, and then the next day at the reception at Sackerman’s house after the funeral, and a third time at Emmett’s Place bar, where a bunch of the mourners went after they left Sackerman’s house. Jack had had a lot of friends.
Her husband wasn’t with her at Emmett’s Place, but they seemed to wind up together and started talking. Wally was attracted to her, but didn’t come on to her. Only a stupid bird dirties his own nest, and she was married to a cop.
After that, they kept bumping into each other. She worked for the City in the Municipal Services Building in Center City, and he was always around the City Hall courtrooms or the DA’s Office, in the same area, so that was understandable. Wally ran into Helene one time on his way to the Reading Terminal Market for lunch and asked her if she wanted a cheese steak or something, and she said yes and went with him.
After that, they started meeting once or twice a week for lunch, or sometimes dinner, and she let him understand that things weren’t perfect with her husband, but she never told him-and he didn’t ask-what specifically was wrong between them. He told her about Adelaide, what had happened. And absolutely nothing happened between them, he didn’t so much as try to hold her hand, until the night she called him, three days after he’d moved into the new apartment, and sounded as if she was crying.
Wally asked her what the matter was, and she said she was calling from the Roosevelt Motor Inn, on Roosevelt Boulevard, that what had happened was that she had finally left the sonofabitch-he remembered that she had used that word, because it was the first time she had ever said anything nasty about him-and needed to talk to somebody.
He said sure, and did she want him to come out there and pick her up and they could go somewhere for a drink, and she said it wouldn’t look right, in case somebody saw them, for him to pick her up at a motel. And as far as that went, it wouldn’t look right if somebody saw them having a drink someplace the very night she moved out on her husband.
So Wally had asked her, did she maybe want to come to his apartment, and Helene said she didn’t know, what did he think, and she didn’t want to impose or anything.
So he told her to get in a taxi and come down. And she did. And before she got there, he went to a Chinese restaurant and got some takeout to go with the bottle of wine he knew he had somewhere at home. He didn’t want to offer her a drink of whiskey, to keep her from getting the wrong idea. All he wanted to be was a friend, offering her something to eat and wine, and a sympathetic ear.
She didn’t even take the wine when he offered it to her, but she wolfed down the Chinese, and he was glad he thought of that, and while he watched her eat, he decided that if she wanted to talk about her husband, fine, and if she didn’t, fine, too.
When she finished, she smiled at him and asked him if he thought she would be terrible if she asked for a drink. She really needed a drink.
So he made her one and handed it to her, and she started to take a sip and then started crying and he put his arm around her, and one thing led to another, and that was the way they started.
Whatever was wrong between her and her husband wasn’t that she was frigid, or anything like that.
And she told him, afterward, that the truth of the matter was that she had been thinking about him and her like that from the very first time she saw him, at Lieutenant Sackerman’s viewing; that he was really an attractive man.
So at five o’clock in the morning, he took her back to the Roosevelt Motor Inn on Roosevelt Boulevard, and met her in City Hall at noon, after she’d talked to a lawyer, and they went to his apartment so they could talk without worrying about people at the next table in a restaurant listening in. They didn’t do much talking about what the lawyer said, except that it was going to be harder getting a divorce than she thought it would be.
She took a tiny apartment so that her family wouldn’t ask questions, but from the first they lived together, and they got along just fine, and without coming right out and talking about it, they understood that as soon as she got him to agree to the divorce, they would get married. With what they made between them, they could live pretty well. They talked about getting a larger apartment, maybe even a house, so there would be room for his kids when he had them on weekends or whenever.
They never talked much about what bad had happened between her and Kellog, but he got the feeling it had something to do with Kellog being dirty on the job. She knew something, and Wally knew if he pressed her, he could get it out of her.
But then what? For one thing, she might not know what she was talking about, and for another, dirty cops are Internal Affairs’ business, not his. If he learned something he felt he had to tell somebody about, it would come out that he and Helene were living together, and it would look as if he was trying to frame the sonofabitch.
And then the sonofabitch gets himself shot. And guess who they think had something to with it?
Kellog was in Narcotics. If they ever found out who the doer, or doers, were, it was ten-to-one it would have something to do with Narcotics. But they might not ever find the doers, and until they did, Helene was going to be a suspect, and so was he.
The interview in Homicide was the most humiliating thing that Wally could remember ever having to go through. Except maybe being driven to his apartment by Ken Summers to pick up his guns, and having Ken look around “professionally” to see what he could see that might connect him with the Kellog shooting.
And when he finally got to see Helene, he could see that she had been crying, and she told him that D’Amata and Staff Inspector Weisbach had been to see her, and that she thought it would be better for everybody concerned if they didn’t see each other until things settled down, at least until after the funeral, and that she was going to the apartment right then to pick up her things and take them to her apartment. And that she thought it would be better if he didn’t try to see her, or even telephone, until she thought it would be all right, and when she thought it would be she would telephone him.