The Witness

by W. E. B Griffin

  “I really don’t know what to think, Matt,” Mickey replied.

  “What did you write?”

  “About the Islamic Liberation Army, you mean?”

  “Yes.”

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Just because somebody sends me a piece of paper that says they’re the Islamic Liberation Army and that they’ve declared war on the Jews doesn’t make it so. You tell me you think the Islamic Liberation Army shot up Goldblatt’s and murdered that maintenance man, and I’ll write it. But not until.”

  “You got that after the robbery, right?”

  “Of course,” O’Hara said. “And Joe D’Amata told me that the Central Detective is on the job, Pelosi?”

  “Jerry Pelosi,” Lowenstein furnished.

  “He’s got a damned good idea who the doers are. And he doesn’t think they’re a bunch of looney-tune amateur Arabs.”

  Lieutenant Jack Malone was not equipped with the necessary household skills for happy bachelorhood. He was the fourth of five children, the others all female. Jack and his father (a Fire Department captain) had met what the Malone family perceived to be the responsibility of the male gender: They moved furniture, washed the car, cut the grass, painted, and even moved the garbage cans from beside the kitchen door to the curb, and then moved them back.

  But the other domestic tasks in the house were clearly feminine responsibilities, and Mrs. Jeannette Malone and her daughters shopped, cooked, laundered, ironed, made beds, set and cleaned the table, and washed the dishes.

  This arrangement lasted until, a week after he graduated from North Catholic High School, Jack enlisted in the Army. For four years thereafter, except for the making of his bunk in the prescribed manner and shining of boots and brass, the Army took over for his mother and sisters. He ate in mess halls. Once a week he carried a bag full of dirty clothing to the supply room and picked up last week’s laundry, now washed, starched, and pressed by an Army laundry for a three-dollar-a-month charge.

  When he got out of the Army, he immediately took both the Fire Department and Police Department tests. The Police Department came up first, and he became a cop. He really had not wanted to be a fireman, although, rather than hurt his father’s feelings, he would have joined the firemen if that test had come back first.

  He lived at home until, fifteen months after he got out of the Army, he had married Ellen Fogarty. Ellen had been reared under a comparable perception of the roles and responsibilities of the sexes in marriage. The man went to work, and the woman kept house. The only real difference, aside from the joys of the marriage bed, in living with Ellen as opposed to living with his mother and sisters was that Ellen put some really strange food on the table. Mexican, Chinese, even Indian-Indian, things like that.

  He had pretended to like it, and after a while had even grown used to it.

  When he had reentered the single state, he was for the first time in his life forced to fend for himself. Obviously, he could not move back into his parents’ house. For one thing, his sister Deborah had married a real loser who couldn’t hold a job for more than three months at a time, and Charley and Deborah and their two kids were “until things worked out for Charley” living in the house.

  But that wasn’t the only reason he couldn’t live there. His father had made it clear that he believed he wasn’t getting the whole story about what had gone wrong with Jack and Ellen. Good Catholic girls like Ellen from decent families don’t suddenly just decide to start fucking some lawyer; there are two sides to every story, and since he wasn’t getting Ellen’s that was because Ellen was too decent to tell anybody what Jack had done that made her do it.

  The only time in ten years and four months of marriage that Jack had laid a hand on Ellen was that one time, after he’d knocked Howard Candless around, and then gone home to tell her, and ask her why, and she had screamed, so mad that she was spitting in his face, that because whenever he touched her, she wanted to puke.

  He couldn’t be any sorrier about that than he was, sorry and ashamed, but it had happened, and there was no taking it back. And it had happened only once.

  His mother had cried when she heard about it, which was even worse than having her yell at him, and his sisters, every damned one of them, had made it plain they believed the reason Ellen had done what she had done was because he had been regularly knocking Ellen around all the time, and she’d finally had enough.

  That had really surprised him and made him wonder about his brothers-in-law. Was the reason his sisters were so quick to jump on the idea that he was regularly knocking Ellen around because they were regularly getting it from their husbands? It wasn’t such a far-out idea when he thought about it. If his sisters were getting slapped around, they would have kept it to themselves, knowing full well that their father and their brother would have kicked the living shit out of their husbands.

  And if that was the case, Jack Malone reasoned, that would explain why they were almost happy to find out that Jack Malone was no better than their husbands.

  And Ellen had jumped on that, and made it sing like a violin. When she had taken Little Jack to see Grandma, she had told Grandma she didn’t think it would do anyone any good, least of all Little Jack, to dwell on what had happened between them. All she thought was that Little Jack’s father needed help, and she really hoped he could get it.

  In the eyes of Grandma and his sisters, that made Ellen just about as noble as the Virgin Mary.

  So not only could he not move back into his parents’ house, he really hated to go over there at all.

  So into the St. Charles Hotel. In some ways, it was like when he made sergeant in the Army and he had gotten his own room. The big differences were that he couldn’t get his laundry done for three bucks a month, and there was no mess hall passing out free “take all you want, but eat what you take” meals.

  The one uniform Jack had bought when he made lieutenant came with two pair of pants, so he still had a freshly pressed pair to wear on the job tomorrow. Tomorrow night, depending on whether he spilled something on the jacket or not, he would have to have it at least pressed, but that wasn’t a problem for tonight.

  What he would have liked to do tonight was go out and have a couple of beers, beers hell, drinks, and then a steak with a glass of red wine or two with that, and then maybe a nightcap or something afterward.

  What he did was what he could afford to do. He went to Colonel Sanders’s and bought the special (a half breast, a leg, a couple of livers, a roll, and a little tub of cole slaw) for $1.69 and took it back to the St. Charles. There he took off his clothes and ate it in his underwear, watching the TV, washing it down with a glass of water from the tap.

  He fell asleep watching a rerun of I Love Lucy and woke up to the trumpets and drum roll announcing Nine’s News at Nine.

  He could taste all of the Colonel’s Seventeen Secret Herbs and Spices in his mouth, and his left leg had gone to sleep. He hobbled around the room flexing and shaking his left leg.

  He put the remnants of the $1.69 Special in the wastebasket under the sink in the toilet, and then tested the water. It ran rusty red for a couple of seconds, burped, and then turned hot.

  He took a hot shower, thinking that simply because there was hot water now there was no guarantee that there would be hot water in the morning.

  He was now wide awake. He knew that even if he could force himself to go to sleep, he would almost certainly wake up at say half past four and, if that happened, never get back to sleep.

  He put on a pair of blue jeans and a sweatshirt and a pair of sneakers and left the room.

  There was a tavern on the corner of 18th and Arch. He certainly could afford a beer.

  He pushed open the door and looked inside and changed his mind. A bunch of losers sitting around staring into the stale, getting warm beer in their glasses. Nobody was having a good time.

  He acted like he was looking for somebody who wasn’t there, and went back out onto 18
th Street.

  He knew where he wanted to go, and what he wanted to do, and walked to where he had parked his car and got in it.

  Am I doing this because I didn’t want to belly up to the bar with the other losers, or is this what I really wanted to do in the first place?

  He drove up North Broad Street until he came to the Holland Pontiac-GMC showroom. The lights were on, but there was no one in the showroom. They closed at half past nine.

  He turned left and made the next left, which put him behind the Pontiac-GMC showroom building and between it and a large concrete block building on which was lettered, HOLLAND MOTOR COMPANY BODY SHOP.

  It was a factory-type building. The windows were of what he thought of as chicken wire reinforced glass. They passed light, but you couldn’t see through them.

  The Holland Motor Company Body Shop was going full blast.

  It was a twenty-four-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week operation. Part of this was because they fixed the entire GM line of cars in this body shop, not just Pontiacs and GMCs. And part of it was because, to help the working man who needed his car to drive to work, you could bring your crumpled fender to the Holland Motor Car Body Shop in installments, leaving it there overnight and getting it back in the morning. They would straighten the fender one night, prime it the second, and paint it the third night, or over the weekends.

  And the other reason they were open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, Lieutenant Jack Malone was convinced, was because the Working Man’s Friend had a hot car scam of some kind going.

  Malone had no facts. Just a gut feeling. But he knew.

  I don’t care if he and Commissioner Czernich play with the same rubber duck, the sonofabitch is a thief. And I’m going to catch him.

  He circled the block, and then found a place to park the rusty old Mustang in the shadow of a building where he would not attract attention, and from which he could keep his eyes on the door to the Holland Motor Company Body Shop.

  Something, maybe not tonight, maybe not this week, maybe not this fucking year, but something, sometime, sooner or later, is going to happen, and then I’ll know how he’s doing it.

  He lit a cigarette, saw that it was his next to last—

  Fuck it, I smoke too much anyway—

  —and settled himself against the worn-out and lumpy cushion and started to look.

  NINE

  When Officer Charles McFadden finished his tour at four, he went looking for Officer Matthew Payne. When he went through the door marked HEADQUARTERS, SPECIAL OPERATIONS, Payne was not at his desk. And there was no one sitting at the sergeant’s desk either.

  Charley sat on the edge of Payne’s desk, confident that one or both of them would turn up in a minute; somebody would be around to answer the inspector’s phone.

  A minute or so later, the door to the inspector’s office opened and a slight, fair-skinned, rather sharp-featured police officer came out. He was in Highway regalia identical to Officer McFadden’s, except that there were silver captain’s bars on the epaulets of his leather jacket. He was Captain David Pekach, commanding officer of Highway Patrol.

  McFadden pushed himself quickly off Payne’s desk.

  “Hey, whaddaya say, McFadden?” Captain Pekach said, smiling, and offering his hand.

  “Captain,” McFadden replied.

  “Where’s the sergeant?” Pekach asked.

  “I don’t know,” Charley said. “I came in here looking for Payne.”

  “The inspector’s got him running down some paperwork. I don’t think he’ll be back today. Something I can do for you?”

  “No, sir, it was—I wanted to see if he wanted to have a beer or something.”

  “You might try him at home in a couple of hours,” Pekach said. “I really don’t think he’ll be coming back. Do me a favor, Charley?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Stick around for a couple of minutes and answer the phone until the sergeant comes back. He’s probably in the can. But somebody should be on that phone.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “The inspector’s gone for the day. Captain Sabara and I are minding the store.”

  “Yes, sir,” McFadden said, smiling. He liked Captain Pekach. Pekach had been his lieutenant when he had worked undercover in Narcotics.

  The door opened and a sergeant whom McFadden didn’t know came in.

  “You looking for me, sir?”

  “Not anymore,” Pekach said, tempering the sarcasm with a little smile.

  “I had to go to the can, Captain.”

  “See if you can find Detective Harris,” Pekach said. “Keep looking. Tell him to call either me or Captain Sabara, no matter what the hour.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Pekach turned and went back into the office he shared with Captain Mike Sabara. Then he turned again, remembering two things: first, that he had not said “So long” or something to McFadden; and second that McFadden and his partner had answered the call on the shooting at Goldblatt’s furniture.

  He reentered the outer office just in time to hear the sergeant snarl, “What do you want?” at McFadden.

  “Officer McFadden, Sergeant,” Pekach said, “for the good of the Department, you understand, was kind enough to be standing by to answer the telephone. Since, you see, there was no one else out here.”

  The sergeant flushed.

  “Come on in a minute, Charley,” Pekach said. “You got a minute?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Pekach held the door open for Charley and then followed him into the office.

  Captain Michael J. Sabara, a short, muscular, swarthy-skinned man whose acne-scarred face, dark eyes, and mustache made him appear far more menacing than was the case, looked up curiously at McFadden.

  “You know Charley, don’t you, Mike?” Pekach asked.

  “Yeah, sure,” Sabara said, offering his hand. “How are you, McFadden?”

  At least this one, he thought, looks like a Highway Patrolman.

  The other one, in Captain Sabara’s mind, was Officer Jesus Martinez; the other of the first two probationary Highway Patrolmen. Jesus Martinez was just barely over Departmental height and weight minimums. It wasn’t his fault, but he just didn’t look like a Highway Patrolman. He looked, in Captain Sabara’s opinion, like a small-sized spic dressed up in a cut-down Highway Patrol uniform.

  “Charley, you went in on that shots fired, hospital case at Goldblatt’s, didn’t you?” Pekach asked.

  “Yes, sir. Quinn and I were at City Hall when we heard it.”

  “What did you find?”

  “Nothing. They were long gone—they had stashed a van out in back—when we got there.”

  “You hear anything on the scene about the doers?”

  “Spades in bathrobes,” McFadden said, “Is what we heard. Dumb spades. They—Goldblatt’s—don’t keep any real money in the store.”

  “What do you think about this?” Captain Sabara said, and handed him a photocopy of the press release that had been sent to Mickey O’Hara at the Bulletin.

  “What the hell is it?” McFadden asked.

  “What do you think it is, Charley?” Pekach asked.

  “I think it’s bullshit. If this thing is real, and they’re going to have a war with the Jews, how come the guy they shot was an Irishman?”

  “Good question,” Pekach said. “If you had to guess, Charley, what would you say?”

  “Jesus, Captain, I don’t know. I don’t think this Liberation Army is for real—is it?”

  “That seems to be the question of the day, Charley,” Pekach said, and then changed the subject. “I don’t seem to see you much anymore. How do you like Highway?”

  “It’s all right, I guess,” Charley replied. “But sometimes, Captain, I sort of miss Narcotics.”

  “Narcotics or undercover?” Pekach pursued.

  “Both, I guess.”

  “If you don’t catch up with Payne tonight, I’ll tell him you were looking for him,” Pekach said.
/>
  McFadden understood he was being dismissed.

  “Yes, sir. Good night, Captain.” He faced Sabara and repeated, “Captain.”

  Sabara nodded and smiled.

  When McFadden had closed the door behind him, Sabara said, “There are three hundred young cops out there with five, six years on the job who would give their left nut to be in Highway, and that one says, ‘It’s all right, I guess.’”

  “But your three hundred young cops never had the opportunity to work for me in Narcotics,” Pekach said.

  “Oh, go to hell,” Sabara chuckled. “You’re no better than he is.”

  “He wasn’t much help, was he?”

  “No, he wasn’t. Did you think he would be?”

  “Wohl said he thought we should find out what we could about Goldblatt’s. I was trying.”

  “You really think Special Operations is going to wind up with that job?”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised. Carlucci probably sees a story in the newspapers, ‘Mayor Carlucci announced this afternoon that the Special Operations Division arrested the Islamic Liberation Army—’”

  “All eight of them,” Sabara interrupted. “That’s if there is an Islamic Liberation Army. And anyway, Highway could handle it without the bullshit.”

  “That’s my line, Mike. Write this on your forehead: ‘Pekach is Highway, I’m Special Operations.’”

  Sabara chuckled again. “What the hell is Wohl up to?”

  “I guess he’s just trying to cover his ass,” Pekach replied. “In case he does—in other words, we do—get that job.”

  Charley McFadden drove home, took a bottle of Schlitz from the refrigerator, carried it into the living room, sat on the couch, and dialed Matt Payne’s apartment. It rang twice.

  “Matthew Payne profoundly regrets, knowing what devastating disappointment it will cause you, that he is not available for conversation at this time. If you would be so kind as to leave your number at the beep, he will know that you have called.”

  “Shit!” Charley said, laughing, and hung up.