Chief Inspector Fisher nodded at Matt Payne, offered his hand to Coughlin and Wohl, and then walked out of the room. Sergeant Lipshultz hurried after him.
"Say good-bye to the nice people, Matthew," Inspector Wohl said dryly, "and drive me away from here. It's been a long afternoon."
"Good-bye, nice people," Matt said obediently to the oth-ers, the commissioner's secretary, his driver, and the other administrative staff.
Some chuckled. The commissioner's driver said, "Take it easy, kid."
The commissioner's secretary, an attractive, busty woman in her forties, said, "Come back anytime, Matthew. You're an improvement over most of the people we get in here."
Officer Matt Payne followed Staff Inspector Wohl out of the office and down the corridor toward the elevators.
There was no one else in the elevator. Wohl leaned against the wall and exhaled audibly.
"Christ, that was rough in there," he said.
"What was it all about?"
"Not here," Wohl said.
He pushed himself erect as the door slid open, and walked across the lobby to the rear entrance of the building, stopping just outside to turn and ask, "Where are we?"
Payne pointed. There were four new Ford four-door se-dans, one of them two-tone blue, parked together toward the rear of the lot. When they arrived at the roundhouse, Payne had dropped Wohl off at the door and then searched for a place to park.
There were five spaces near the roundhouse reserved for division chiefs and chief inspectors, and one of them was empty, but Matt had learned that the sign didn't mean what it said. What it really meant was that the spaces were re-served for chief inspectors who were also division chiefs, and that other chief inspectors could use the spaces if they hap-pened to find one empty. It did not mean that Staff Inspector Wohl, although he was a division chief, had the right to park there.
None of this was written down, of course. But everyone understood the protocol, and Matt had learned that the senior supervisors in the Department were jealous of the preroga-tives of their rank. He had parked the unmarked two-tone Ford farther back in the lot, beside the unmarked cars of other senior supervisors who, like Wohl, were not senior enough to be able to use one of the parking spaces closest to the building.
Unmarked new cars were a prerogative of rank too. Senior supervisors, Matt had learned-chief inspectors and inspec-tors and some staff inspectors-drove spanking new auto-mobiles, turning them over ("When the ashtrays got full," Wohl had said) to captains, who then turned their slightly used cars over to the lieutenants, who turned their cars over to detectives.
When Special Operations had been formed and had needed a lot of cars from the police garage right away, the system had been interrupted, and some full inspectors and captains hadn't gotten new cars when they thought they were entitled to get them, and they had made their indignation known.
When they got to the two-tone Ford and Matt started to get behind the wheel, Wohl said, "I think I'm going to go home. Where's your car?"
"Bustleton and Bowler," Matt said. "I can catch a ride out there."
Special Operations had set up its headquarters in the High-way Patrol headquarters at Bustleton and Bowler Streets in Northeast Philadelphia.
"No, I have to stop by the office, anyway. I just didn't know if you had to go out there or not," Wohl said, and got in the passenger seat.
Matt drove to North Broad Street and headed north. They had traveled a dozen blocks in silence when Wohl broke the news. "There are allegations that-I don't have to tell you that you don't talk about this, do I?"
"No, sir."
"There are allegations that certain Narcotics officers have had a little more temptation than they can handle put under their noses and are feeding information to the mob," Wohl said.
"Jesus!"
"Several arrests and confiscations that should have gone smoothly didn't happen," Wohl went on. "Chief Lowenstein told Commissioner Czernick what he thought was happening. Maybe a little prematurely, because he didn't want Czernick to hear it anywhere else. Czernick, either on his own or pos-sibly because he told the mayor and the mayor made the de-cision, took the investigation away from Chief Lowenstein."
"Who did he give it to?"
"Three guesses," Wohl said dryly.
"Is that why Chief Lowenstein was so sore?''
"Sure. If I were in his shoes, I'd be sore too. It's just about the same thing as telling him he can't be trusted."
"But why to us? Why not Internal Affairs?"
"Why not Organized Crime? Why not put a couple of the staff inspectors on it? Because, I suspect, the mayor is playing detective again. It sounds like him: 'I can have transferred to us anybody I want from Internal Affairs, Narcotics, Vice, or Organized Crime'-theoretically routine transfers. But what they're really for, of course, is to catch the dirty cops-presuming there are dirty cops-in Narcotics."
Wohl then fell silent, obviously lost in thought. Matt knew enough about his boss not to bother him. If Wohl wanted him to know something, he would tell him.
Several minutes later Wohl said, "There's something else."
Matt glanced at him and waited for him to go on.
"On Monday morning Special Operations is getting an-other bright, young, college-educated rookie, by the name of Foster H. Lewis, Jr. You know him?"
Matt thought, then shook his head and said, "Uh-uh, I don't think so."
"His assignment," Wohl said dryly, "is in keeping with the commissioner's policy, which of course has the mayor's enthusiastic support, of staffing Special Operations with bright, young, well-educated officers such as yourself, Officer Payne. Officer Lewis has a bachelor of science degree from Temple. Until very recently he was enrolled at the Temple Medical School."
"The medical school?" Matt asked, surprised.
"It was his father's dream that young Foster become a healer of men," Wohl went on. "Unfortunately young Foster was placed on academic probation last quarter, whereupon he decided that rather than heal men, he would prefer to pro-tect society from malefactors; to march, so to speak, in his father's footsteps. His father just made lieutenant. Lieutenant Foster H. Lewis, Sr. Know him?"
"I don't think so."
"Good cop," Wohl said. "He has something less than a warm, outgoing personality, but he's a good cop. He is about as thrilled that his son has become a policeman as yours is."
Matt chuckled. "Why are we getting him?"
"Because Commissioner Czernick said so," Wohl said. "I told you that. If I were a suspicious man, which, of course, for someone with a warm, outgoing, not to forget trusting, personality like mine is unthinkable, I might suspect that it has something to do with the mayor."
"Doesn't everything?" Matt chuckled again.
"In this case a suspicious man might draw an inference from the fact that Officer Lewis's assignment to Special Op-erations was announced by the mayor in a speech he gave last night at the Second Abyssinian Baptist Church."
"This is a colored guy?"
"The preferred word, Officer Payne, is black."
"Sorry," Matt said. "What are you going to do with him?"
"I don't know. I was just thinking that there is a silver lining in every black cloud. I'm going to give myself the benefit of the doubt there; no pun was intended, and no racial slur should be inferred. What I was thinking is that young Lewis, unlike the last bright, college-educated rookie I was blessed with, at least knows his way around the Department. He's been working his way through school as a police radio operator. Mike Sabara has been talking about having a spe-cial radio net for Highway Patrol and Special Operations. Maybe something to do with that."
When they pulled into the parking lot at Bustleton and Bowler, Matt saw that Captain Mike Sabara's car was in the space reserved for it. Wohl saw it at the same moment. Sabara was Wohl's deputy.
"Captain Sabara's still here. Good. I need to talk to him. You can take off, Matt. I'll see you in the morning."
"Yes, sir," Matt said.
He did not volunteer to hang around. He had learned that if Wohl had a need for him, he would have told him to wait. And he had learned that if he was being sent home, thirty minutes early, it was because Wohl didn't want him around. Wohl had decided that whatever he had to say to Captain Sabara was none of Officer Payne's business.
THREE
Matt Payne walked a block and a half to the Sunoco gas station at which he paid to park his car. Wohl had warned him not to leave it in the street if he couldn't find a spot for it in the police parking lot; playful neighborhood youths loved to draw curving lines on automobile fenders and doors with keys and other sharp objects, taking special pains with nice cars they suspected belonged to policemen.
"Getting a cop's nice car is worth two gold stars to take home to Mommy," Wohl had told him.
Matt got in his car, checked to see that he had enough gas for the night's activities, and then started home, which meant back downtown.
He drove a 1974 silver Porsche 911 Carrera with less than five thousand miles on the odometer. It had been his gradu-ation present, sort of. He had graduated cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania and had expected a car to replace the well-worn Volkswagen bug he had driven since he'd got-ten his driver's license at sixteen. But he had not expected a Porsche.
"This is your reward," his father had told him, "for mak-ing it to voting age and through college without having re-quired my professional services to get you out of jail, or making me a grandfather before my time."
The Porsche he was driving now was not the one that had surprised him on graduation morning, although it was virtu-ally identical to it.
That car, with 2,107 miles on the speedometer, had suf-fered a collision, and Matt had come out of that a devout believer that an uninsured-motorist clause was a splendid thing to have in your insurance policy, providing of course that you had access to the services, pro bono familias, of a good lawyer to make the insurance company live up to its implied assurances.
The first car had been struck on the right rear end by a 1970 Ford van. The driver did so intentionally, hoping to squash Matthew Payne between the two and thus permitting himself to carry on with his intentions to carry a Mrs. Naomi Schneider, who was at the time trussed up naked in the back of the van under a tarpaulin, off to a cabin in Bucks County for rape and dismemberment.
He failed to squash Officer Payne, who had jumped out of the way and, a moment later, shot him to death with his off-duty revolver.
The deceased, Matt learned shortly after the Porsche dealer had given him a first rough but chilling estimate of repair costs, had no insurance that a diligent search of Department of Motor Vehicle records in Harrisburg could find.
He next learned the opinion of legal counsel to the Phila-delphia Police Department vis-…-vis the outrage perpetrated against his vehicle: Inasmuch as Officer Payne was not on duty at the time of the incident, the Police Department had no responsibility to make good any alleged damages to his personal automobile.
Next came a letter on the crisp, engraved stationery of the First Continental Assurance Company of Hartford, Connect-icut. It informed the insured that since he had said nothing whatever on his application for insurance that he was either a police officer or that he intended to use his car in carrying out his police duties; and inasmuch as it had come to their attention that he was actually domiciled in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, rather than as his application stated, in Wallingford, Pennsylvania; and inasmuch as they would have de-clined to insure him if any one of the aforementioned facts had come to their attention; they clearly had no obligation in the case at hand.
Furthermore, the letter was to serve as notice that inas-much as the coverage had been issued based on his misrep-resentation of the facts, it was canceled herewith, and a refund of premium would be issued in due course.
He tried to handle the problem himself. He was, after all, no longer a little boy who had to run to Daddy with every little problem but a grown man, a university graduate, and a police officer.
His next learning experience was how insurance compa-nies regarded their potential liability in insuring unmarried males under the age of twenty-five who drove automobiles with 140-mile-per-hour speedometers that were fancied by car thieves and whose previous insurance had been canceled. Five insurance agents as much as laughed at him, and the sixth thought he might be able to get Matt coverage whose premium would have left Matt not quite one hundred dollars a month from his pay to eat, drink, and be merry. At that point he went see Daddy.
The next Monday morning, a letter on crisp, engraved stationery, the letterhead of Mawson, Payne, Stockton, McAdoo & Lester, Philadelphia Savings Fund Society Building, Philadelphia, went out to the general counsel of the First Continental Assurance Company of Hartford, Connecticut. It was signed by J. Dunlop Mawson, senior partner, and began, "My Dear Charley," which was a rather unusual lack of for-mality for anyone connected with Mawson, Payne, Stockton, McAdoo & Lester.
But Colonel Mawson had quickly come to the point. Maw-son, Payne, Stockton, McAdoo & Lester was representing Matthew W. Payne, he said, and it was their intention to sue First Continental Assurance Company for breach of contract, praying the court to award $9,505.07 in real damages and $2 million in punitive damages.
Six days later, possibly because the general counsel of First Continental recalled that when they had been socked with a $3.5 million judgment against the Kiley Elevator Company after a hotel guest had been trapped for eight hours in an elevator, thereby suffering great mental pain and anguish, the plaintiff had been represented by Colonel J. Dunlop Mawson of Mawson, Payne, Stockton, McAdoo & Lester, Matt had both a check for $9,505.07 and a letter stating that First Con-tinental Assurance Company deeply regretted the misunder-standing and that they hoped to keep the favor of his business for many years.
A week later, after the Porsche mechanic told him that after a smash like that, getting the rear quarter panel and knocking the engine off its mounts, cars were never quite right, Matt took delivery of a new one, and the old one was sent off to be dismantled for parts.
It was generally believed by Mart's fellow officers that with a car like that he got laid a lot, so how could he miss?
But this was not the case. When he thought about that, and sometimes he thought a lot about it, he realized that he had spent a lot more time making the beast with two backs when he was still at U of P than he had lately.
He had once thought that if the activity had been charted, the delightful physical-encounters chart would show a gradual increase during his freshman and sophomore years, rising from practically zero to a satisfactory level halfway through his sophomore year. Then the chart would show a plateau lasting through his junior year, then a gradual decline in his senior year. Since his graduation and coming on the job, the chart would show a steep decline, right back to near zero, with one little aberration.
He had encountered a lady at the FOP Bar, off North Broad Street, a divorcee of thirty-five or so who found young po-licemen fascinating. He did not like to dwell on the aberration on the declining curve.
There were reasons for the decline, of course. In school there seemed to be a pairing off, some of which had resulted in engagements and even marriage. He had never met anyone he wanted to pair with. But there had been a gradual deple-tion of the pool of availables.
And once he'd graduated and shortly afterward come on the job, he had fallen out of touch with the girls he knew at school and at home.
Tonight, he hoped, the situation might be different. He had met a new girl. He almost had blown that but hadn't. He had heard that God takes care of fools and drunks, and he thought he qualified on both counts.
Her name was Amanda Chase Spencer. She had graduated that year from Bennington. Her family lived in Scarsdale and they had a winter place in Palm Beach. So far he liked Amanda very much, which was rather unusual, for it had been his experience, three times that he could immediately call to mind, that strikingly beautiful blond y
oung women of considerable wealth, impeccable social standing, and, in par-ticular those who went to Bennington, were usually a flaming pain in the ass.
Matt had met Amanda only four days before, at the begin-ning of what they were now calling "the wedding week." He had not at first been pleased with the prospect. When informed by the bridegroom-to-be that it had been arranged that he serve as escort to Miss Spencer throughout the week, his response had been immediate and succinct: "Fuck you, Chad, no goddamn way!"
Chad was Chadwick T. Nesbitt IV (University of Pennsyl-vania '73) of Bala-Cynwyd and Camp Lejeune, North Caro-lina, where he was a second lieutenant, United States Marine Corps Reserve. Matt Payne and Chad Nesbitt had been best friends since they had met, at age seven, at Episcopal Acad-emy. No one was surprised when Chad announced that Matt would be his best man when he married Miss Daphne Eliz-abeth Browne (Bennington '73) of Merion and Palm Beach.
W E B Griffin - Badge of Honor 03 - The Victim Page 4
