The Witness

by W. E. B Griffin

  Davis had been summoned to Washington two days before and informed that after a review of the facts, the United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania had brought the case of the two Negro Males who had kidnapped Pierre St. Maury, taken him against his will across a state border, and then shot him to death before a federal Grand Jury and secured an indictment against them under the Lindbergh Act.

  Davis had been informed that it behooved him to do whatever he could to assist the deputy attorney general in securing a conviction. He had been told that the case had attracted the interest of certain people high in the Justice Department. Davis did not need to be reminded that the deputy attorney general of the United States, before his appointment, had been a senior partner of the law firm that represented the Daye-Nelson Corporation.

  Davis had been on the telephone when Wohl had appeared at his office, and Wohl consequently had had to cool his heels for fifteen minutes before Davis could come out of his office to greet him, and apologize for getting hung up.

  This would have annoyed Peter Wohl in any case, when all things were going fine in his world. Today that wasn’t the case. He had just come from the Roundhouse, where he had had a painful session with Mayor Carlucci and Commissioner Czernich, witnessed by Chief Inspectors Matt Lowenstein (Detective Division) and Dennis V. Coughlin concerning the inability of the Special Operations Division to come up with even one fucking thing that might lead them to find whoever had put four .22 Long Rifle bullets into the chest, and one into the leg, of Police Officer Joseph Magnella.

  He had not been in the mood to be kept waiting by anybody, and Special Agent Davis had seen this on his face.

  It was unfortunate, Davis had thought, that Wohl first of all looked too young to be a staff inspector of police, (he was, in fact, Davis had recalled, the youngest staff inspector in the Department) and second, he seemed to have a thing about not introducing himself by giving his rank or even identifying himself as a police officer unless it was absolutely necessary.

  If he had told the receptionist that he was “Staff Inspector Wohl,” Davis thought, she would certainly have taken him into the staff coffee room as a professional courtesy. But apparently, he had not done so; the receptionist had said, “There’s a man named Wohl to see you.” And so she had pointed out a chair in the outer office to him and let him wait.

  And then, no sooner had Davis put on his topcoat and hat, as they were literally walking out of the reception room to the elevators, there had been another “must-take” telephone call.

  “Peter, I’m sorry.”

  “Why don’t we try this another time? You’re obviously really too busy.”

  “Wait downstairs, I’ll only be a minute.”

  It had been at least ten minutes. When he walked out onto the street, Wohl had been leaning against the fender of his official Plymouth, wearing a visibly insincere smile.

  “Well, Walter, here you are!”

  “You know how these things go,” Davis replied.

  “Certainly,” Wohl said. “I mean, my God, FBI agents aren’t expected to have to eat, are they?”

  “How does Italian sound, Peter?”

  “Italian sounds fine,” Wohl replied and opened the back door of the car for him. Only then did Davis see the young man behind the wheel of the Ford.

  A plainclothesman, he decided. He’s too young to be a detective.

  He realized that the presence of Wohl’s driver was going to be a problem. He didn’t want to talk about the murder-kidnapping case, especially the political implications of it, in front of a junior police officer.

  Wohl slammed the door after Davis and got in the front seat.

  “Shank & Evelyn’s, Matt,” he ordered. “Eleventh and Carpenter.”

  “Yes, sir,” the young cop said.

  “Officer Payne, this is Special Agent—Special Agent in Charge, excuse me, Davis.”

  “How do you do?” Payne said.

  “Nice to meet you,” Davis said absently, forcing a smile. He had begun to suspect that the luncheon was not going to go well. “Peter, I was thinking about Alfredo’s—”

  “That’s a Mob-owned joint,” Wohl said, as if shocked at the suggestion. “I don’t know about the FBI, but we local cops have to worry about where we’re seen, isn’t that so, Officer Payne?”

  “Yes, sir, we certainly do,” the young cop said, playing straight man to Wohl.

  “Besides, the veal is better at Shank & Evelyn’s than at Ristorante Alfredo, wouldn’t you say, Officer Payne?”

  “Yes, sir, I would agree with that.”

  “Officer Payne is quite a gourmet, Walter. He really knows his veal.”

  “Okay, Peter, I give up,” Davis said. “I’m sorry about making you wait. I really am. It won’t happen again.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about, Walter. Anyway, Officer Payne and I don’t have anything else to do but wait around to buy the FBI lunch, do we, Officer Payne?”

  “Not a thing, sir.”

  “I’m buying the lunch,” Davis said.

  “In that case, you want us to go back and stand around on the curb for a while?”

  “So, how are things, Peter?” Davis said, smiling. “Not to change the subject, of course?”

  “Can’t complain,” Wohl said.

  Davis had seen that they had turned left onto South Broad and were heading toward the airport.

  “Where is this restaurant?” Davis asked.

  “In South Philly. If you want good Italian food, go to South Philly, I always say. Isn’t that so, Officer Payne?”

  “Yes, sir,” Officer Payne replied. “You’re always saying that, sir.”

  “So tell me, Officer Payne, how do you like being Inspector Wohl’s straight man?”

  Officer Payne turned and smiled at Davis. “I like it fine, sir,” he said.

  Nice-looking kid, Davis thought.

  A few minutes later Payne turned off South Broad Street, and then onto Christian, and then south onto 11th Street. A 3rd District sergeant’s car was parked in a Tow Away Zone at a corner.

  “Pull up beside him, Matt,” Wohl ordered, and, when Payne did so, rolled down the window.

  What Davis thought of as a real, old-time beat cop, a heavyset, florid-faced sergeant in his fifties, first scowled out of the window and then smiled broadly. With surprising agility, he got out of the car, put out his hand, and said, “Goddamn, look who’s out slumming. How the hell are you, Peter—Inspector?”

  He saw me, Davis thought, and decided he should not call Wohl by his first name in front of a stranger, who is probably a senior police official.

  “Pat, say hello to the headman of the FBI, Walter Davis,” Wohl said. “Walter, Sergeant Pat McGovern. He was my tour sergeant in this district when I got out of the Academy.”

  “Hello, sir, an honor I’m sure,” McGovern said to Davis.

  “How are you, Sergeant?”

  McGovern looked at Payne, decided he wasn’t important, and nodded at him.

  “Anything I can do for you?” McGovern asked.

  “Where can we find a place to park?” Wohl asked.

  “Going in Shank & Evelyn’s?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You got a parking place,” Sergeant McGovern said. He raised his eyes to Matt Payne. “Back it up, son, and I’ll get out of your way.”

  “Good to see you, Pat.”

  “Yeah, you too,” McGovern said as he started to get back in his car. “Say hello to your old man. He all right?”

  Davis remembered that Wohl’s father was a retired chief inspector.

  “If anything, meaner.”

  “Impossible,” McGovern said, and then got his car moving.

  Payne moved into the space vacated, and Davis and Wohl got out of the car.

  “Peter,” Davis said quietly, touching Wohl’s arm. “Could we send your driver someplace else to eat?”

  “Is this personal, Walter?”

  Davis hesitated a moment
before replying.

  “No. Not really.”

  “He’s good with details,” Wohl said, nodding toward Payne.

  Which translates, Davis thought, a little annoyed, that Wohl’s straight man doesn’t go somewhere else to eat.

  Shank & Evelyn’s Restaurant was worse for Davis’s purposes than he could have imagined possible. The whole place was smaller than his office, and consisted of a grill, a counter with ten or twelve stools, and half a dozen tables, at the largest of which, provided they kept their elbows at their sides, four people could eat.

  What I should have done, Davis thought, annoyed, was simply get in my car and drive out to Wohl’s office at Bustleton and Bowler. This is a disaster.

  They found seats at a tiny table littered with the debris of the previous customers’ meals. A massively bosomed waitress with a beehive hairdo first cleaned the table and then took their orders. Wohl ordered the veal, and somewhat reluctantly, Davis ordered the same.

  “Sausage, hot sausage, and peppers, please, extra peppers,” Matt Payne said.

  “Frankie around?” Wohl asked her.

  “In the back,” the waitress said.

  Wohl nodded.

  A minute or so later, a very large, sweating man in a chef’s hat, T-shirt, and white trousers came up to the table, offering his hand.

  “How the hell are you, Peter?”

  “Frankie, say hello to Walter Davis and Matt Payne,” Wohl said. “This is Frankie Perri.”

  Frankie gave them a callused ham of a hand.

  “Matt works for me,” Wohl went on. “Walter runs the FBI. He said he’d never met a Mob guy, so I said I could fix that and brought him here.”

  “He’s kidding, I hope you know,” Frankie said.

  “Yes, of course,” Davis said uncomfortably.

  “With a name like Frankie Perri, the FBI figures you have to be in the Mafia,” Wohl said.

  “Kiss my ass, Peter,” Frankie Perri said, punching Wohl affectionately on the arm. “I’m going to burn your goddamn veal.”

  He put out his hand to Davis, and nodded at Matt.

  “Nice to meet you, Mr. Davis. Come back. Both of you.”

  “Thank you,” Davis said, and then when he was gone, he said, “What do you call that, Peter, community relations?”

  “What’s on your mind, Walter?”

  “The government is going to try Clifford Wallis and Delmore Travis for murder/kidnapping under the Lindbergh Act.”

  “Who?” Matt Payne asked.

  Wohl glanced at him, a flicker of annoyance in his eyes.

  “New Jersey’s got them,” Wohl said, “with a lot of evidence, on a murder one. They might plea bargain that down to manslaughter one, but no further. That’s good for twenty-to-life, anyway. Why?”

  “They violated federal law, Peter.”

  “Come on.”

  “Let us say there is considerable interest in this case rather high up in the Justice Department.”

  “You mean that Arthur Nelson wants them prosecuted,” Wohl said.

  Davis, who had been sitting back in his chair with his left hand against his cheek, moved the hand momentarily away from his face, a tacit agreement with Wohl’s statement.

  “Why?” Wohl asked, visibly thinking aloud.

  “People get paroled on a state twenty-to-life conviction after what, seven years?” Davis said.

  “And he wants to make sure they do more than seven years for the murder of his son. You got enough to try them?”

  “We have enough for a Grand Jury indictment.”

  “That’s not what I asked.”

  “I grant, it’s pretty circumstantial,” Davis said. “That’s why I’m turning to you for help, Peter.”

  “Would you think me cynical to suspect that someone’s leaning on you about this, Walter?”

  “Yes,” Davis said, smiling. “But they called me to Washington yesterday, and both of the telephone calls that delayed this little luncheon of ours concerned this case.”

  The waitress with the beehive hairdo delivered three large plates with sliced tomatoes and onions just about covering them.

  When she had gone, Wohl took a forkful, chewed it slowly, and then asked, “So how can I help, Walter? More than the established, official routine for cooperation with the FBI would be helpful?”

  “I need what you have as soon as I can get it, and I want everything you have, not just what a normal request for information would produce.”

  The waitress delivered three round water glasses, now scarred nearly gray by a thousand trips through the dishwasher. She half filled them, from a battered stainless-steel water pitcher, with a red liquid.

  “Frankie said his grandfather made it over in Jersey,” the waitress said.

  Wohl picked up his glass, then stood up, called “Frankie,” and, when he had his attention, called “Salud!” and then sat down again.

  Walter Davis, thinking, Oh, God, homemade Dago Red! took a swallow. It was surprisingly good.

  “You’re almost certainly drinking an alcoholic beverage on which the applicable federal tax has not been paid,” Wohl said. “Does that bother you?”

  “Not a damned bit, to tell you the truth,” Davis said. He stood up, called “Frankie” and then “Salud!” and then sat down, looking at Wohl, obviously pleased with himself.

  Wohl chuckled, then looked at Matt Payne.

  “Matt, when we get back to the office, round up everything in my files on the Nelson murder case. Make a copy of everything. Then go to Homicide and do the same thing. Then find Detective Harris and photocopy everything he has. Have it ready for me in the morning.”

  “Yes, sir,” Matt Payne said.

  “I’ll take a look at it, see if anything is missing, and then you can take it to the FBI. Soon enough for you, Walter?”

  “Thank you, Peter. ‘Harris,’ you said, was the detective on the job? Any chance that I could talk to him?”

  “You, or one of your people?”

  “Actually, I was thinking of one of my people.”

  “Tony Harris is the exception to the rule that most detectives really would rather be FBI agents, Walter. I don’t think that would be very productive.”

  “I thought everybody loved us,” Davis said.

  “We all do. Isn’t that so, Officer Payne?”

  “Yes, sir. We all love the FBI.”

  The waitress with the beehive hairdo delivered their meal.

  The veal was, Walter Davis was willing to admit, better than the veal in Ristorante Alfredo. And the homemade Chianti was nicer than some of the dry red wine he’d had at twenty-five dollars a bottle in Ristorante Alfredo.

  But he knew that neither the quality of the food nor its considerably cheaper than Ristorante Alfredo prices were the reasons Peter Wohl had brought him here for lunch.

  SIX

  Under the special agent in charge (the “SAC”) of the Philadelphia Office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation were three divisions, Criminal Affairs, Counterintelligence, and Administration. Each division was under an assistant agent in charge, called an “A-SAC.”

  It was SAC Davis’s custom to hold two daily Senior Staff Conferences, called “SSC”s, each business day, one first thing in the morning, and the other at four P.M. Participation at the SSCs was limited to the SAC and the three A-SACs. The conferences were informal. No stenographic record was made of them, except when the SAC could not be present, and one of the A-SACs was standing in for him. The SAC naturally wanted to know what he had missed, so a steno was called in to make a written record.

  If one of the A-SACs could not make a SSC, one of his assistants, customarily, but not always, the most senior special agent in that division, would be appointed to stand in for him.

  This was very common. The A-SACs were busy men, and it was often inconvenient for them to make both daily SSCs, although they generally tried to make at least one of them, and took especial pains not to miss two days’ SSCs in a row.

  B
ut it was a rare thing for SAC Davis to find, as he did when he returned to his office from lunch with Staff Inspector Wohl and Officer Payne, all three A-SACs waiting outside his office for the afternoon SSC.

  He was pleased. In addition to whatever else would be discussed, he intended to discuss the upcoming trials of Clifford Wallis and Delmore Travis. The political aspects were mind-boggling. Washington was going to be breathing down his neck on this one, and not only the senior hierarchy of the FBI, joining which was one of SAC Davis’s most fond dreams, but the higher—highest—echelons of the Department of Justice.

  If he handled this well, it would reflect well upon him. If he dropped the ball (or someone he was responsible for dropped it), there would be no chance whatever that he would be transferred to Washington and named a deputy inspector. And from what he had seen of the situation, there was a saber-toothed tiger behind every filing cabinet, just waiting to leap and bite off somebody’s ass.

  This sort of a case was the sort of thing one should discuss with the A-SACs personally, not with one of their subordinates. With all three of the A-SACs present at this SSC, it would not be necessary to call a special SSC.

  Davis waited until he had heard all the reports of what was going on in the Criminal, Administrative, and Counterintelligence Divisions, and made the few decisions necessary before getting into what he was now thinking of as the “Wallis/Travis Sticky Ball of Wax.”

  Then he gave a report, the essentials and the flavor, of both the personal conference he had had in Washington the day before and the two telephone calls he had had that morning before going off to lunch with Staff Inspector Wohl and his straight man.

  “I had lunch today with Staff Inspector Wohl of the Philadelphia Police Department,” he announced. “Everybody know who Wohl is?”

  The three A-SACs nodded.

  “I didn’t go through you, Glenn,” he explained to Glenn Williamson, A-SAC (Administration), “I know Peter Wohl, and this was unofficial. But I think you should open a line of communication with Captain—What’s his name?”