Special Operations

by W. E. B Griffin

  His door chimes went off. They were another vestige of Dorothea. She said they were darling. They played the first few bars of “Be It Ever So Humble, There’s No Place Like Home.” They were “custom,” and not only had cost accordingly, but were larger than common, ordinary door chimes, so that when, post-Dorothea, he had tried to replace them, he couldn’t, without repainting the whole damned wall by the door.

  It was Naomi Schneider. He was annoyed but not surprised.

  “Hi,” she said. “All cleaned up?”

  “I hope so,” he said. “What can I do for you?”

  “Mel, my husband, asked me to ask you something,” she said.

  The phone began to ring.

  “Excuse me,” he said, and went toward it. When he realized that she had invited herself in, he walked past the phone on the end table and went into his bedroom and picked up the bedside phone.

  “Hello?”

  “Tom Lenihan, Inspector,” his caller said.

  Sergeant Tom Lenihan worked for Peter’s boss, Chief Inspector Dennis V. Coughlin. He was sort of a combination driver and executive assistant. Peter Wohl thought of him as a nice guy, and a good cop.

  “What’s up, Tom?”

  “The Chief says he knows you worked all weekend, and it’s your day off, and he’s sorry, but something has come up, and he wants to see you this afternoon. I’ve got you scheduled for three-thirty. Is that okay?”

  “What would you say if I said no?”

  “I think I’d let you talk to the Chief.” Lenihan chuckled.

  “I’ll be there.”

  “I thought maybe you could fit the Chief into your busy schedule,” Lenihan said. “You being such a nice guy, and all.”

  “Go to hell, Tom,” Wohl said, laughing, and hung up. He wondered for a moment if the Chief wanting to see him was somehow connected with Lieutenant Mike Sabara wanting to talk to him.

  Then he became aware that Naomi Schneider was standing in the bedroom door, leaning on the jamb, and looking at the bed. On the bed were his handkerchief, his wallet, his keys, the leather folder that held his badge and photo-identification card, and his shoulder holster, which held a Smith & Wesson “Chief’s Special” five-shot .38 Special revolver, all waiting to be put into, or between layers of, whatever clothing he decided to wear.

  “What are you, a cop or something?” Naomi asked.

  “A cop.”

  “A detective, maybe?” Naomi asked, visibly thrilled.

  “Something like that.”

  Christ, now it will be all over the House by tomorrow morning!

  “What does that mean?” Naomi asked. “Something like that?”

  “I’m a Staff Inspector,” he said. “And, Naomi, I sort of like for people not to know that I am.”

  “What’s a Staff Inspector?”

  “Sort of like a detective.”

  “And that’s sort of a secret.”

  The phone rang again, and he picked it up.

  “Peter Wohl,” he said.

  “Inspector, this is Mike Sabara.”

  Wohl covered the mouthpiece with his hand.

  “Excuse me, please, Naomi?”

  “Oh, sure,” she said, and put her index finger in front of her lips in a gesture signifying she understood the necessity for secrecy.

  When she turned around, he saw that her red underpants had apparently gathered in the decolletage of her buttocks; her cheeks peeked out naked from beneath the white shorts.

  “What’s up, Mike?” Wohl asked.

  “I’d like to talk to you, if you can spare me fifteen minutes.”

  “Anytime. Where are you?”

  “Harbison and Levick,” Sabara said. “Could I come over there?”

  The headquarters of the Second and Fifteenth districts, and the Northeast Detectives, at Harbison and Levick Streets, was in a squat, ugly, two-story building whose brown-and-tan brick had become covered with a dark film from the exhausts of the heavy traffic passing by over the years.

  “Mike, I’ve got to go downtown,” Wohl said, after deciding he really would rather not go to Harbison and Levick. “What about meeting me in DaVinci’s Restaurant? At Twenty-first and Walnut? In about fifteen minutes?”

  “I’ll be there,” Lieutenant Sabara said. “Thank you.”

  “Be with you in a minute, Naomi,” Wohl called, and closed the door. He dressed in a white button-down shirt, a regimentally striped necktie, and the trousers to a blue cord suit. He slipped his arms through the shoulder holster straps, shrugged into the suit jacket, and then put the wallet and the rest of the impedimenta in various pockets. He checked his appearance in a mirror on the back on the door, then went into the living room, where he caught Naomi having a pull at the neck of his beer bottle.

  “Very nice!” Naomi said.

  “Naomi, I don’t want to sound rude, but I have to go.”

  “I understand.”

  “What was it Mr. Schneider wanted you to ask me?” he asked.

  “He said I should see if I could find out if you would consider subletting one of your garages.”

  “I’m sorry, I can’t do that. I need one for the Jaguar, and my other car belongs to the city, and that has to be kept in a garage.”

  “Why?” It was not a challenge, but simple curiosity.

  “Well, there’s a couple of very expensive radios in it that the city doesn’t want to have boosted.”

  “Boosted? You mean stolen?”

  “Right.”

  “That makes sense,” she said. “I’ll tell Mel.”

  She got off the couch, displaying a large and not at all unattractive area of inner thigh in the process.

  “Well,” she said. “I’ll let you go.”

  He followed her to the door, aware that as a gentleman he should not be paying as much attention as he was to her naked gluteus maximus, which was peeking out the hem of her shorts.

  “Naomi,” he said, as he pulled the door open for her, “when you talk to your husband about me, would you tell him that I would consider it a favor if he didn’t spread it around that I’m a cop?”

  “I won’t even tell him.”

  “Well, you don’t have to go that far.”

  “There’s a lot of things I don’t tell Mel,” Naomi said, softly.

  And then her fingers brushed his crotch. Peter pulled away, in a reflex action, and had just decided it was an accidental contact, when that theory was disproved. Naomi’s fingers followed his retreating groin, found what she was looking for, and gave it a gentle squeeze.

  “See you around, Peter,” she said, looking into his eyes. Then she let go of him, laughed, and went quickly down the stairs.

  SEVEN

  Peter Wohl glanced at the fuel gauge of the Ford LTD as he turned the ignition key off in the parking lot on Walnut Street near the DaVinci Restaurant. The needle was below E; he was running on the fumes. Since he had driven only from his apartment here, that meant that it had been below E when he had arrived home; and that meant he had come damned close to running out of gas on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, or on the Schuylkill Expressway, which would have been a disaster. It would have given him the option of radioing for a police wrecker to bring him gas, which would have been embarrassing, or getting drowned in the torrential rain trying to walk to a gas station. Drowned and/or run over.

  Periodically in his life, Wohl believed, he seemed to find himself walking along the edge of a steep cliff, a crumbling cliff, with disaster a half-step away. He was obviously in that condition now. The gas gauge seemed to prove that; and so did Naomi of the traveling husband and groping fingers. And, he decided, he probably wasn’t going to like at all what Mike Sabara had on his mind.

  He got out of the car, and locked it, aware that when he got back in it, the inside temperature would be sizzling; that he would sweat, and his now natty and freshly pressed suit would be mussed when he went to see Chief Coughlin. And he had a gut feeling that was going to be some sort of a disaster, too. It wasn’
t very likely that Coughlin was going to call him in on a day off to tell him what a splendid job he had been doing and why didn’t he take some time off as a reward.

  A quick glance around the parking lot told him that Sabara wasn’t here yet. He would have spotted a marked Highway Patrol car immediately, and even if Sabara was in an unmarked car, he would have spotted the radio antenna and black-walled tires.

  And, he thought, as he walked into the DaVinci, if what Coughlin was after was to hear how his current investigation was going, the reason he had been in Harrisburg, he wasn’t going to come across as Sherlock Holmes, either. The only thing two days of rooting around in the Pennsylvania Department of Records had produced was a couple of leads that were weak at best and very probably would turn out to be worthless.

  The DaVinci restaurant, named after the artist/inventor, not the proprietor, served very good food despite what Peter thought of as restaurant theatrics. As a general rule of thumb, he had found that restaurants that went out of their way to convert their space into something exotic generally served mediocre to terrible food. The DaVinci had gone a little overboard, he thought, trying to turn their space into rustic Italian. There were red checkered tableclothes; a lot of phony trellises; plastic grapes; and empty Chianti bottles with candles stuck in their necks. But the food was good, and the people who ran the place were very nice.

  He asked for and got a table on the lower level, which gave him a view of both the upper level and the bar just inside the door. The waitress was a tall, pretty young brunette who looked as though she should be on a college campus. Then he remembered hearing that the waitresses in DaVinci’s were aspiring actresses, hoping to meet theatrical people who came to Philly, and were supposed to patronize DaVinci’s.

  Her smile vanished when he ordered just coffee.

  Or can she tell I’m not a movie producer?

  When she delivered his coffee, he handed her a dollar and told her to keep the change. That didn’t seem to change her attitude at all.

  Mike Sabara came into the room a few minutes later, immediately after Peter had scalded his mouth on the lip of the coffee cup, which had apparently been delivered to his table fresh from the fires of hell.

  Mike was in uniform, the crushed-crown cap and motorcyclist’s breeches and puttees peculiar to Highway Patrol, worn with a Sam Browne belt festooned with a long line of cartridges and black leather accoutrements for the tools of a policeman’s trade, flashlight, handcuffs, and so on. Mike was wearing an open-collared white shirt, with a captain’s insignia, two parallel silver bars, on each collar point.

  The Highway Patrol and its special uniform went back a long time, way before the Second World War. It had been organized as a traffic law enforcement force, as the name implied, and in the old days, it had been mounted almost entirely on motorcycles, hence the breeches and puttees and soft-crowned cap.

  There were still a few motorcycles in Highway—from somewhere Wohl picked out the number twenty-four—but they were rarely used for anything but ceremonial purposes, or maybe crowd control at Mummers Parades. The Highway Patrol still patrolled the highways—the Schuylkill Expressway and Interstate 95—but the Patrol had evolved over the years, especially during the reign of Captain Jerry Carlucci, and even more during the reign of Mayor Carlucci, into sort of a special force that was dispatched to clean up high-crime areas.

  Highway Patrol cars carried two officers, while all other Philadelphia police cars carried only one. Unless they had specific orders sending them somewhere else, Highway Patrol cars could patrol wherever, within reason, they liked, without regard to District boundaries. They regarded themselves, and were regarded by other policemen, as an elite force, and there was always a long waiting list of officers who had applied for transfer to Highway Patrol.

  Anyone with serious ambitions to rise in the police hierarchy knew the path led through Highway Patrol. Wohl himself had been a Highway Patrol Corporal, and had liked the duty, although he had been wise enough to keep to himself his profound relief that his service in Highway had been after the motorcycles had been all but retired and he had rarely been required to get on one. Going through the “wheel training course,” which he had considered necessary to avoid being thought of as less then wholly masculine, had convinced him that anybody who rode a motorcycle willingly, much less joyfully, had some screws in urgent need of tightening.

  Wohl had several thoughts as he saw Mike Sabara walking across the room to him, wearing what for Sabara was a warm smile. He thought that Mike was not only an ugly sonofabitch but that he was menacing. Sabara’s swarthy face was marked with the scars of what could have been small pox, but more probably were the remnants of adolescent acne. He wore an immaculately trimmed pencil-line mustache. If it was designed to take attention from his disfigured skin, Wohl thought, it had exactly the opposite effect.

  He was a short, stocky, barrel-chested man, with an aggressive walk. He was also hairy. Thick black hair showed at the open collar of his shirt and covered his exposed arms.

  All of these outward things, Wohl knew, were misleading. Mike Sabara was an extraordinarily gentle man, father of a large brood of well-cared-for kids. He was a Lebanese, and active—he actually taught Sunday School—in some kind of Orthodox Church. Wohl had seen him crying at Dutch Moffitt’s funeral, the tears running unashamedly down his cheeks as he carried Dutch to his grave.

  Sabara put out his large hand as he slipped into the seat across from Wohl. His grip was firm, but not a demonstration of all the strength his hand possessed.

  “I appreciate you meeting me like this, Inspector,” Sabara said.

  “I know why you’re calling me ‘Inspector,’ Mike,” Wohl said, smiling, “so I’ll have to reply, ‘My pleasure, Captain Sabara.’ Congratulations, Mike, it’s well deserved, and how come I wasn’t invited to your promotion party?”

  Wohl immediately sensed that what he had intended as humor had fallen flat. Sabara gave him a confused, even wary, look.

  “The Commissioner called me at home last night,” Sabara said. “He said to come to work today wearing captain’s bars.”

  Which you just happened to have lying around, Wohl thought, and was immediately ashamed of the unkind thought. He himself had bought a set of lieutenant’s bars the day the examination scores had come out, even though he had known it would be long months before the promotion actually came through.

  “So it’s official then?” Wohl said. “Well, congratulations. I can’t think of anybody better qualified.”

  Wohl saw that, too, produced a reaction in Sabara different from what he expected. More confusion, more wariness.

  The waitress reappeared.

  “Get you something?”

  “Iced tea, please,” Captain Sabara said. The waitress looked at him strangely. Sabara, Wohl thought, was not the iced tea type.

  “Can I get right to it, Inspector?” Sabara asked, when the waitress had left.

  “Sure.”

  “If it’s at all possible,” Sabara said, “I’d like Highway Patrol.”

  Sabara had, Wohl sensed, rehearsed that simple statement.

  “I’m not sure what you mean, Mike.”

  “I mean, I’d really like to take over Highway,” Sabara said, and there was more uncertainty in his eyes. “I mean, Christ, no one knows it better than I do. And I know I could do a good job.”

  What the hell is he driving at?

  “You want me to put in a good word for you? Is that it, Mike? Sure. You tell me to who, and I’ll do it.”

  There was a pause before Sabara replied.

  “You don’t know, do you?” he said, finally.

  “Know what?”

  “About Highway and Special Operations.”

  “No,” Wohl said, and searched his memory. “The last I heard about Special Operations was that it was an idea whose time had not yet come.”

  “It’s time has come,” Sabara said, “and Highway’s going under it.”

  “And who’s g
etting Special Operations?”

  “You are,” Sabara said.

  Jesus H. Christ!

  “Where did you get that?” Wohl asked.

  Sabara looked uncomfortable.

  “I heard,” he said.

  “I’d check out that source pretty carefully, Mike,” Wohl said. “This is the first I’ve heard anything like that.”

  “You’re getting Special Operations and David Pekach is getting Highway,” Sabara said. “I thought Pekach was your idea, and maybe I could talk you out of it.”

  “Did your source say what’s in mind for you?” Wohl asked.

  “Your deputy.”

  “Where the hell did you get this?”

  “I can’t tell you,” Sabara said. “But I believe it.”

  And now I’m beginning to. Sabara has heard something he believes. Jesus, is this why Chief Coughlin sent for me?

  Why me?

  “I’m beginning to,” Wohl said. “Chief Coughlin wants to see me at half-past three. Maybe this is why.”

  “Now I’m on the spot,” Sabara said. “I’d appreciate it if you didn’t—”

  “Tell him we talked? No, of course not, Mike. And I really hope you’re wrong.”

  From the look in Sabara’s eyes, Wohl could tell he didn’t think there was much chance he was wrong. That meant his source was as good as he said it was. And that meant it had come from way up high in the police department hierarchy, a Chief Inspector, or more likely one of the Deputy Commissioners.

  Someone important, who didn’t like the idea of Special Operations, of Peter Wohl being given command of Special Operations, of David Pekach being given command of Highway over Mike Sabara. Or all of the above.

  “Peter,” Mike Sabara said. It was the first time he had used Wohl’s Christian name. “You understand…there’s nothing personal in this? You’re a hell of a good cop. I’d be happy to work for you anywhere. But—”