Special Operations

by W. E. B Griffin

  “And I’m going to get on the telephone right now and tell him about this,” the victim said. “This is simply outrageous.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Charley McFadden said.

  Clarence Sims was led to the wagon, helped inside, and driven to the West Detectives District at Fifty-fifth and Pine Streets, where his glowing ember of hope that he was going to walk was extinguished by a detective who began their discussion by explaining his rights under Miranda.

  Lieutenant Ed Michleson, the Day Watch commander at the Twelfth District, was not at all surprised to get the telephone call from Sergeant Willoughby of Chief Inspector Coughlin’s office informing him that he was about to lose the services of Officers Jesus Martinez and Charles McFadden.

  When they had been assigned to the Twelfth District, it had been with the understanding that it was only temporary, that they would be reassigned. The District Commander had told him that he had gotten it from Chief Coughlin himself that their assignment was only until he could find a good job for them.

  They had been previously working plainclothes in Narcotics, a good, but not unusual assignment for young cops who showed promise and whose faces were not yet known on the street, and who, if they let their hair grow and dressed like bums could sort of melt into the drug culture.

  When their faces became known, which was inevitable, the next step was usually back into uniform. But McFadden and Martinez had, on their own, staked out the Bridge & Pratt Street terminal of the subway, and there found the junkie who had shot Captain Dutch Moffitt, of Highway Patrol, to death. McFadden had chased Gerald Vincent Gallagher down the tracks where Gallagher had fallen against the third rail and then gotten himself run over by a subway train.

  In the movies, or in a cop-and-robbers program on TV, with the mayor and assorted big shots beaming in the background, the Commissioner would have handed them detectives’ badges, and congratulations for a job well done. But this was real life, and promotions to detective in the Philadelphia Police Department came only after you had taken, and passed, the civil service examination. Martinez had taken the exam and flunked it, and McFadden hadn’t been a cop long enough to be eligible to even take it.

  But it was good police work, and Chief Inspector Coughlin, who was a good guy, didn’t want to put them back into uniform—which young cops working plainclothes considered a demotion—even though with their pictures on the front page of every newspaper in Philadelphia, and on TV, their effectiveness as undercover Narcs was destroyed.

  So he’d loaned them to Twelfth District, which was understrength, and had a problem with thieves working shopping mall parking lots, until he could find someplace to assign them permanently. And now he had.

  Lieutenant Michleson got up and walked into the Operations Room and asked the corporal where Mutt and Jeff were. They looked like Mutt and Jeff. McFadden was a great big kid, large boned, tall and heavy. Martinez was a little Latin type, wiry and just over Department minimums for height and weight.

  “They’re on their way in,” the corporal said. “They just arrested a guy robbing a car in the parking lot at Penrose Plaza. That makes five they caught since they been here.”

  “When they finish up the paperwork, send them in to me,” Michleson said. “We’re going to lose them.”

  “Where they going?”

  “Highway.”

  “Highway?” the corporal replied, surprised, then laughed. “Those two?”

  “That’s not kind, Charley,” Michleson said, smiling at the mental image of Mutt and Jeff all decked out in Highway Patrol regalia.

  “I don’t think Hay-zus is big enough to straddle a Harley,” the corporal said.

  “Maybe somebody figures they paid their dues,” Lieutenant Michleson said. “Highway didn’t catch the critter who shot Captain Moffitt. They did.”

  “When are they going?”

  “They’re to report in the morning.”

  Staff Inspector Peter Wohl, at thirty-five the youngest of the eighteen Staff Inspectors of the Police Department of the City of Philadelphia, who was lying on his back, looked up from what he was doing and found himself staring up a woman’s shorts at her underpants. The underpants were red, and more or less transparent, and worn under a pair of white shorts.

  He pushed himself, on his mechanic’s crawler, the rest of the way out from under the Jaguar XK-120, and sat up. There was grease on his face, and on his bare, smoothly muscled chest, but there was still something about him that suggested more the accountant, or the lawyer, than a mechanic. Or a police officer.

  “Hi,” the wearer of the red underpants and white shorts said.

  “Hi,” Peter Wohl said, noticing now that she was also wearing a man’s white shirt, the bottom rolled up and tied in a knot under her bosom, which served to bare her belly and put her not at all unattractive navel on display.

  “I saw you working out the window,” the woman said, “and I figured you could use this.” She extended a bottle of Budweiser to him.

  Peter Wohl noticed now that the hand holding the bottle had both an engagement and a wedding ring on the appropriate finger.

  He took the beer.

  “Thank you,” he said, and took a pull at the neck.

  “Naomi,” the woman said. “Naomi Schneider.”

  “Peter Wohl,” he said.

  Naomi Schneider, it registered on Peter Wohl’s policeman’s mind, was a white female, approximately five feet six inches tall, approximately 130 pounds, approximately twenty-five years of age, with no significant distinguishing marks or scars.

  “We’re in Two-B,” Naomi Schneider volunteered. “My husband and I, I mean. We moved in last week.”

  “I saw the moving van,” Peter said.

  Two-B was the apartment occupying the rear half of the second floor of what Peter thought of as the House. There were six apartments in the House, a World War I-era mansion on the 8800 block of Norwood Road in Chestnut Hill, which had been converted into what the owner, a corporation, called “luxury apartments.” The apartments in the rear of the building looked out on the four-car garage, and what had been the chauffeur’s quarters above it. Peter Wohl lived in the ex-chauffeur’s quarters, and to the often undisguised annoyance of the tenants of the House occupied two of the four garages.

  It was possible, he thought, that Mr. Schneider had suggested to his wife that maybe if they made friends with the guy in the garage apartment with the Jaguar and two garages they could talk him out of one of them. There had been, he had noticed lately, a Porsche convertible coupe parked either on the street, or behind the house. They could probably make the argument that as fellow fine sports car aficionados he would appreciate that it was nearly criminal to have to leave a Porsche outside exposed to the elements.

  But he dismissed that possible scenario as being less likely than the possibility that Mr. Schneider knew nothing of his wife’s gesture of friendliness, and that Naomi had something in mind that had nothing to do with their Porsche.

  “My husband travels,” Naomi offered. “He’s in floor coverings. He goes as far west as Pittsburgh.”

  Bingo!

  “Oh, really?”

  He now noticed that Naomi Schneider’s eyes were very dark. Dark-eyed women do not have blond hair. Naomi’s hair was, therefore, dyed blond. It was well done, no dark roots or anything, but obviously her hair was naturally black, or nearly so. Peter had a theory about that. Women with dark hair who peroxided it should not go out in the bright sunlight. Dyed blond hair might work inside, especially at night, but in the sunlight, it looked…dyed.

  “He’s generally gone two or three nights a week,” Naomi offered. “What do you do?”

  Peter elected to misunderstand her. “I just had the seats out,” he said. “I took them to a place downtown and had the foam rubber replaced, and now I’m putting them back in.”

  Naomi stepped to the car and ran her fingers over the softly glowing red leather.

  “Nice,” she said. “But I meant, what do
you do?”

  “I work for the city,” Peter said. “I see a Porsche around. That yours?”

  “Yeah,” Naomi said. “Mel, my husband, sometimes drives it on business, but there’s not much room in it for samples, so usually he takes the station wagon, and leaves me the Porsche.”

  “I don’t suppose,” Peter agreed amiably, “that there is much room in a Porsche for floor-covering samples.”

  “This is nice,” Naomi said, now stroking the Jaguar’s glistening fender with the balls of her fingers. “New, huh?”

  Peter Wohl laughed. “It’s older than you are.”

  She looked at him in confusion. “It looks new,” she said.

  “Thank you, ma’am,” Peter said. “But that left Coventry in February 1950.”

  “Left where?”

  “Coventry. England. Where they make them.”

  “But it looks new.”

  “Thank you again.”

  “I’ll be damned,” Naomi said. She looked down at Peter and smiled. “You hear what happened last night?”

  “No.”

  “About the woman who was raped? Practically right around the corner?”

  “No,” Peter Wohl replied truthfully. He had spent the previous day, and the day before that, the whole damned weekend, in Harrisburg, the state capital, in a hot and dusty records depository.

  “He forced her into his van, did—you know—to her, and then threw her out of the van in Fairmount Park. It was on the radio, KYW.”

  “I hadn’t heard.”

  “With Mel gone so much, it scares me.”

  “Did they say, on the radio, if it was the same man they think has done it before?” Peter asked.

  “They said they think it is,” Naomi said.

  Interesting, Peter Wohl thought, if it is the same guy, it’s the first time he’s done that.

  “Naked,” Naomi said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “He threw her out of the van naked. Without any clothes.”

  Well, that would tie in with the humiliation that seems to be part of this weirdo’s modus operandi.

  There was the sound of tires moving across the cobblestones in front of the garages, and Peter’s ears picked up the slightly different pitch of an engine with its idle speed set high; the sound of an engine in a police car.

  He hoisted himself off the mechanic’s crawler. A Highway Patrol car pulled to a stop. The door opened, and a sergeant in the special Highway Patrol uniform (crushed crown cap, Sam Browne belt, and motorcyclist’s breeches and puttees) got out. Wohl recognized him. His name was Sergeant Alexander W. Dannelly. Wohl remembered the name because the last time he had seen him was the day Captain Dutch Moffitt had been shot to death at the Waikiki Diner, over on Roosevelt Boulevard. Sergeant Dannelly had been the first to respond to the call, “Officer needs assistance; shots fired; officer wounded.”

  And Dannelly recognized him, too. He smiled, and started to wave, and then caught the look in Wohl’s eyes and the barely perceptible shake of his head, and stopped.

  “Can I help you, Officer?” Wohl asked.

  “I’m looking for a man named Wohl,” Sergeant Dannelly said.

  “I’m Wohl.”

  “May I speak to you a moment, sir?”

  “Sure,” Wohl said. “Excuse me a minute, Naomi.”

  She smiled uneasily.

  Wohl walked to the far side of the Highway Patrol car.

  “What’s up, Dannelly?” he asked.

  “You’re not answering your phone, Inspector.”

  “I’ve got the day off,” Wohl said. “Who’s looking for me?”

  “Lieutenant Sabara,” Dannelley said. “He said to send a car by here to see if you were home; that maybe your phone wasn’t working.”

  “The phone’s upstairs,” Wohl said. “If it’s been ringing, I didn’t hear it.”

  “Okay with you, sir, if I get on the radio and tell him you’re home?”

  “Sure.” Wohl wondered what Sabara wanted with him that was so important he had sent a car to see if his phone was working. “Tell him to give me fifteen minutes to take a bath, and then I’ll wait for his call.”

  “You want to wait while I do it?”

  “No,” Wohl said, smiling. “You get out of here and then you call him.”

  “I understand, sir,” Dannelly said, nodding just perceptibly toward Naomi.

  “No, you don’t,” Wohl said, laughing. “The only thing I’m trying to hide, Sergeant, is that I’m a cop.”

  “Whatever you say, Inspector,” Dannelly said, unabashed, winking at Wohl.

  Wohl waited until Sergeant Dannelly had gotten back in the car and driven off, then walked back to Naomi Schneider. Her curiosity, he saw, was about to bubble over.

  “I saw an accident,” Peter lied easily. “I have to go to the police station and make a report.”

  Sometimes, now for example, Peter Wohl often wondered if going to such lengths to conceal from his neighbors that he was a cop was worth all the trouble it took. It had nothing to do with anything official, and he certainly wasn’t ashamed of being a damned good cop, the youngest Staff Inspector in the department; but sometimes, with civilians, especially civilians like his neighbors—bright, young, well-educated, well-paid civilians—it could be awkward.

  Before he had, just after his promotion to Staff Inspector, moved into the garage apartment, he had lived in a garden apartment on Montgomery Avenue in the area of West Philadelphia known as Wynnfield. His neighbors there had been much the same kind of people, and he had learned that their usual response to having a cop for a neighbor was one of two things, and sometimes both. What was a lowlife, like a cop, doing in among his social betters? And what good is it having a cop for a neighbor, if he can’t be counted on to fix a lousy speeding ticket?

  He had decided, when he moved into the garage apartment, not to let his neighbors know what he did for a living. He almost never wore a uniform, and with his promotion to Staff Inspector had come the perk of an official car that didn’t look like a police car. Not only was it unmarked, but it was new (the current car was a two-tone Ford LTD) and had white-wall tires and no telltale marks; the police shortwave radio was concealed in the glove compartment and used what looked like an ordinary radio antenna.

  When his neighbors in the garage apartment asked him what he did, he told them he worked for the city. He didn’t actually come out and deny that he was a cop, but he managed to convey the impression that he was a middle-level civil servant, who worked in City Hall.

  He didn’t get chummy with his neighbors, for several reasons, among them that, like most policemen, he was most comfortable with other policemen, and also because there was no question in his mind that when he was invited to come by for a couple of beers, at least marijuana, and probably something even more illegal, would be on the menu as well.

  If he didn’t see it, he would not have to bust his neighbors.

  “Oh,” Naomi Schneider said, when he told her about the accident he had seen and would have to go to the station to make a report about.

  “Actually,” Peter said, “I’m a suspect in a bank robbery.”

  Naomi laughed delightedly, which made her bosom jiggle.

  “Well, it was nice to meet you, Naomi,” Peter said. “And I thank you for the beer—”

  “My pleasure,” Naomi interrupted. “You looked so hot!”

  “And I look forward to meeting Mr. Schneider.”

  “Mel,” she clarified. “But he won’t be home until Thursday. He went to Pittsburgh, this time.”

  “But now I have to take a shower and go down to the police station.”

  “Sure, I understand,” Naomi said. “How come you’re home all the time in the daytime, if you don’t mind my asking?”

  “I have to work a lot at night,” he explained. “So instead of paying me overtime, they give me what they call compensatory time.”

  “Oh,” Naomi said.

  He handed her the empty Budweiser bo
ttle, smiled, and went up the stairs at the end of the building to his apartment.

  The red light on his telephone answering machine in the bedroom was flashing. That was probably Sabara, he decided. But even if it wasn’t, if it was either business, or more likely his mother, who was not yet convinced that he was really eating properly living by himself that way, it would have to wait until he had his shower.

  He showered and shaved in the shower, a trick he had learned in the army, and started to dress. After he pulled on a pair of DAK slacks, he stopped. He knew Mike Sabara—now the Acting Commander of Highway Patrol, until they made it official—but they were not close friends. That made it likely that what Sabara wanted was official; that he would have to meet him somewhere, and he could not do that in lemon-colored DAKs and a polo shirt.

  Barefoot, wearing only the DAKs, he pushed the PLAY button on the answering machine. The tape rewound, and then began to play. He had had a number of calls while he was outside putting the seats back in the XK-120. But most of the callers had either hung up when they heard the recorded message, or cussed and then hung up. Finally, he heard Mike Sabara’s voice:

  “Inspector, this is Mike Sabara. I’d like to talk to you. Would you call Radio and have them give me a number where you can be reached? Thank you.”

  This was followed by his mother’s voice (“I don’t know why I call, you’re never home”) and three more beeps and clicks indicating his callers’ unwillingness to speak to a damned machine.

  He looked at his watch and decided he didn’t want to hang around until Sabara called him. He dialed the number of Police Radio from memory.

  “This is Isaac Seventeen,” he said. “Would you get word to Highway One that I’m at 928-5923 waiting for his call? No. Five nine two three. Thank you.”

  He decided another beer was in order, and went to the refrigerator in the kitchen and got one. Then he went back into the living room and sat down on his long, low, white leather couch and put his feet on the plate-glass coffee table before it to wait for Sabara’s call.

  Peter Wohl had once had a girlfriend, now married to a lawyer and living in Swarthmore, who had been an interior decorator, and who had donated her professional services to the furnishing of the apartment when it had seemed likely they would be married. From time to time he recalled what the couch, two matching chairs, and the plate-glass coffee table had cost him, even with Dorothea’s professional discount. Everytime he did, he winced.