“Expensive knicknacks,” McFadden offered.
“—and figured he was in a toy store. Especially after the brother went to France. So he’s been ripping her off.”
“How would you handle this crime wave?”
“Find the fag,” McFadden said.
“Cherchez la pouf,” Wohl said.
Matt Payne laughed.
“Excuse me?” Martinez said.
“Go on,” Wohl said. “How would you do that?”
“Give us a couple of days,” McFadden said. “We’ll find him.”
“You think you know where to look?”
“There’s a couple of fairies around who owe me some favors,” Martinez said.
“Just off the top of my head, do you think there is any chance this Mr. Williams could be the doer in the rapes?”
“I called Detective Hemmings at Northwest Detectives,” McFadden said. “The best description of that doer is that he’s hairy. Black hairy. The description we got from Miss Peebles is that the brother’s boyfriend is blond.”
“And ‘delicate,’” Martinez said.
Well, they’re thinking, Wohl thought.
“What about his stealing her underwear?”
“That’s a puzzler,” Martinez said. “When I catch him, I’ll ask him.”
“We could stake out the house, Inspector,” McFadden said. “Until he comes back. I’m sure he’ll be back. But I think the easiest and cheapest way to catch him is for you to let us go look for him.”
“What did you say ‘cheapest’?” Wohl asked.
“I got the feeling that when we catch this guy, Miss Peebles isn’t going to want to go testify against him,” McFadden said. “Because of the brother. What he is would get out. And the brother may not want the guy locked up.”
“I see.”
“But if we can find him, maybe we can talk to him,” Martinez said. “Maybe we can even get some of the stuff back. But I think we can discourage him from going back there again.”
“You’re not suggesting anything that would violate Mr. Williams’s civil rights, are you, Martinez?”
“No, sir,” Martinez said, straight-faced. “As a minority member myself, I am very sensitive about civil rights.”
“I’m glad to hear that,” Wohl said. “I would be very annoyed if I learned any of my men were slapping some suspect around. You understand that?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You, too, McFadden?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Okay, go look for him,” Wohl said.
“Yes, sir,” they said in unison, pleased.
“Sir, the best time to deal with people like that is at night, say from nine o’clock on, until the wee hours,” McFadden said.
“You’re talking about overtime?” Wohl asked, looking at Matt Payne as he spoke.
“Yes, sir,” McFadden said.
“Put in as much overtime as you think is necessary,” Wohl said. “I want you to take Officer Payne along with you, to give him a chance to see how you work.”
“Yes, sir,” McFadden said, immediately.
“Inspector, that might be a little awkward,” Martinez said.
“That wasn’t a suggestion,” Wohl said.
“Yes, sir,” Martinez said.
“Can we keep the car we’ve been driving, sir?” McFadden asked.
“If you mean, do you have to turn it in when you go off duty, the answer is no, not for the time being. I don’t care which one of you keeps it overnight, but I don’t want to hear that somebody stole the radios, or the tires, or ran a key down the side to show his affection for the police.”
“I’ll take good care of it, sir,” Martinez said.
“For right now, for the rest of the afternoon, I want you to keep drawing cars and taking them for radios and bringing them here. Take Payne with you. He’s doing an errand for me, and he’ll need a car to do it.”
“Yes, sir,” McFadden said.
“That’s all,” Wohl said. He looked at Payne. “Get that Xeroxed, and then come back here.”
“Yes, sir,” Payne said.
“I have every confidence that in the morning, Mr. Williams will be in the hands of the law, and that I can call the Commissioner and tell him that not only has justice been done, but that Miss Peebles is more than satisfied with her police support.”
Martinez and McFadden flashed smiles that were not entirely confident, and got up. As Payne started to follow them out of the office Wohl said, softly, “Keep your eyes open and your mouth shut tonight, Matt.”
THIRTEEN
Matt Payne turned off Seventh Street into the parking lot behind the Roundhouse at the wheel of an almost new Plymouth Fury. Forty-five minutes before, he had picked it up at the Radio garage, and it was equipped with the full complement of radios prescribed for Special Operations by Staff Inspector Peter Wohl.
He knew the radio worked, because he had tried it.
“W-William Two Oh Nine,” he had called on the Highway Band. “Out of service at Colosimo’s Gun Store in the nine-hundred block of Spring Garden.”
And Radio had called back, “W-William Two Oh Nine, is that the nine-hundred block on Spring Garden?”
The Radio Dispatcher was Mrs. Catherine Wosniski, a plump, gray-haired lady of sixty-two who had been, it was said, a dispatcher since Police Dispatch had been a couple of guys blowing whistles from atop City Hall, long before Marconi had even thought of radio.
Mrs. Wosniski had been around long enough to know, for example, that:
Special units—and Special Operations was certainly a Special Unit—did not have to report themselves out of service as did the RPCs in the Districts. The whole idea of reporting out of (or back in) service was to keep the dispatchers aware of what cars were or were not available to be sent somewhere by the dispatchers. Dispatchers did not dispatch special unit vehicles.
Catherine Wosniski also knew about Colosimo’s Gun Store. It was where three out of four cops in Philadelphia, maybe more, bought their guns. And she also knew that many of them stopped by Colosimo’s to shop on a personal basis when they had been officially sent to the Roundhouse; that they shopped there, so to speak, on company time, almost invariably “forgetting” to call Police Radio to report themselves out of service.
So what she had here was a car that was not required to report itself out of service doing just that, and at a location where cars rarely reported themselves out of service, because supervisors, who also had radios, frowned on officers shopping on company time.
Although Mrs. Catherine Wosniski was a devout and lifelong member of the Roman Catholic Church, she was also conversant with certain phrases used by those of the Hebraic persuasion: What she thought was, there’s something not kosher here.
“W-William Two Oh Nine,” she radioed back. “Do you want numbers on this assignment?”
What she was asking was whether the officer calling wanted the District Control Number for whatever incident was occurring at Colosimo’s Gun Store that he had elected to handle. A District Control Number is required for every incident of police involvement.
Officer Matthew Payne had no idea at all what she was talking about.
“W-William Two Oh Nine. No, thank you, ma’am, I don’t need any numbers.”
It had been at least two years since anyone had said thank you to Catherine Wosniski over the Police Radio; she could never remember anyone who had ever called her ‘ma’am’ over the air.
“W-William Two Oh Nine,” she radioed, a touch of concern in her voice, “is everything all right at that location?”
“W-William Two Oh Nine,” Officer Payne replied, “everything’s fine here. I’m just going inside to buy a gun.”
There was a pause before Mrs. Wosniski replied. Then, very slowly, she radioed, “Ooooooo-kaaaaaay, W-Two Oh Nine.”
Everyone on this band thus knew that Mrs. Wosniski knew that she was dealing with an incredible dummy who hadn’t the foggiest idea how to cover his tracks when he
was taking care of personal business.
Blissfully unaware of the meaning of his exchange with Police Radio, and actually complimenting himself on the professional way he had handled the situation, Matt Payne got out of the car and went into Colosimo’s Gun Store.
Thirty minutes after that, after equipping himself with a Smith & Wesson Model 37 Chief’s Special Airweight J-Frame .38 Special caliber revolver and an ankle holster for it, he had called Radio again and reported W-William Two Oh Nine back in service.
Getting the pistol had been far more complicated than he had imagined. He had—naively, he now understood—assumed that since he was now a sworn Police Officer, and equipped with a badge and a photo identification card to prove it, buying a revolver would be no more difficult than buying a pair of shoes.
But that hadn’t been the case. First there had been a long federal government form to fill out, on which he had to swear on penalty of perjury, the punishments for which were spelled out to be a $10,000 fine and ten years imprisonment, that he was not a felon, a drunk, or a drug addict; and that neither was he under psychiatric care or under any kind of an indictment. And when that was complete, the salesman took his photo identification to a telephone and called the Police Department to verify that there was indeed a Police Officer named Matthew Payne on their rolls.
But finally the pistol was his. He carried it out to the car and, with more trouble than he thought it would be, managed to fasten the ankle holster to his right ankle. Then, sitting in the car, he had gone through some actually painful contortions to take off his jacket and his shoulder holster.
He took the revolver from the holster, opened the cylinder, and dumped the six shiny, somehow menacing, cartridges into his hand. He loaded five of them, all it held, into the Undercover revolver’s cylinder and put it back into the ankle holster. He slipped the leftover cartridge into his trousers pocket.
When he tried to put the service revolver and the shoulder holster in the glove compartment, it was full of shortwave radio chassis. He finally managed to shove it all under the passenger-side seat.
The ankle holster, as he drove to the Roundhouse, had felt both strange and precariously mounted, raising the very real possibility that he didn’t have it on right.
As he looked for a parking place, other doubts rose in his mind. He had never been inside the Roundhouse; the closest he’d come was waiting outside while Inspector Wohl had gone inside to get Detectives Washington and Harris.
He had no idea where to go inside to gain access to a Xerox machine. And there was, he thought, a very good possibility that as he walked down a corridor somewhere, the ankle holster would come loose and his new pistol would go sliding down the corridor before the eyes of fifty Police Officers, most of them Sergeants or better.
He found a parking place, pulled the Fury into it, and almost immediately backed out and left the Roundhouse parking lot. He knew where there was a Xerox machine, and where to park the car to get to it. He picked up the microphone.
“W-William Two Oh Nine,” he reported, “out of service at Twelfth and Market.”
“Why hello, Matt,” Mrs. Irene Craig, executive secretary to the senior partners of Mawson, Payne, Stockton, McAdoo & Lester, said. “How are you?”
“Just fine, Mrs. Craig,” Matt said. “And yourself?”
His confidence in the ankle holster had been restored. He had walked, at first very carefully, and then with growing confidence through the parking building to the elevator, and it had not fallen off.
“What can I do for you?”
“I need to use the Xerox machine,” he said.
“Sure,” she said. “It’s in there. Do you know how to use it?”
“I think so,” he said.
“Come on,” she said. “I’ll show you.”
When the fifth sheet was coming out of the Xerox machine, she turned to him.
“What in the world is this?”
“It’s the investigation reports of the Northwest Philadelphia rapes,” Matt said.
“What are you doing with them?” she asked. “Or can’t I ask?”
“I’m working on them,” Matt said, and then the lie became uncomfortable. “My boss told me to get them Xeroxed.”
“Doesn’t the Police Department have a Xerox machine?”
“Ours doesn’t work,” Matt said. “So they sent me down to the Roundhouse to have it done. And since I’d never been in there, I figured it would be easier to come in here.”
“We’ll send the city a bill.” She laughed. And then, after a moment, she asked, “Is that what they have you doing? Administration?”
“Sort of.”
“I didn’t think, with your education, that they’d put you in a prowl car to hand out speeding tickets.”
“What they would like to have done was put me in a paddy wagon, excuse me, EPW, but Denny Coughlin has put his two cents in on my behalf.”
“You don’t sound very happy about that,” she said. Irene Craig had known Matthew Payne virtually all of his life, liked him very much, and shared his father’s opinion that Matt’s becoming a cop ranked high on the list of Dumb Ideas of All Time.
“Ambivalent,” he said, as he started to stack the Xeroxed pages. “On one hand, I am, at least theoretically, opposed to the idea of special treatment. On the other hand—proving, I suppose, that I am not nearly as noble as I like to think I am—I like what I’m doing.”
“Which is?”
“I’m the gofer for a very nice guy, and a very sharp cop, Staff Inspector Peter Wohl.”
“He’s the one who had his picture in the paper? The one they put in charge of this new—”
“Special Operations,” Matt filled in.
“That sounds interesting.”
“It’s fascinating.”
“I’m glad for you,” she said.
Not really, she thought. I would be a lot happier if he was miserable as a cop; then maybe he’d come to his senses and quit. But at least Denny Coughlin is watching out for him; that’s something.
“I like it,” Matt said. “So much I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop.”
“Stick around,” she said, laughing. “It will. It always does.”
“Thanks a lot,” Matt said, chuckling.
“You want to see your father?”
“No,” he said, and when he saw the look on her face, quickly added, “I’ve got to get back. He’s probably busy; and I had breakfast with him this morning.”
“Well, I’ll tell him you were in.”
“If you think you have to.”
“You’re a scamp,” she said. “Okay. I won’t tell him. How’s the apartment?”
“I can’t get used to the quiet,” he said.
He had, two weeks before, moved into an attic apartment in a refurbished pre-Civil War building on Rittenhouse Square. His previous legal residence had been a fraternity house on Walnut Street near the University of Pennsylvania campus. Irene Craig knew that he knew his father had “found” the apartment for him, in a building owned by Rittenhouse Properties, Inc., the lower three floors of which were on long-term lease to the Delaware Valley Cancer Society. She wondered if he knew that eighty percent of the stock of Rittenhouse Properties, Inc., was owned by Brewster Cortland Payne II. Now that she thought of it, she decided he didn’t.
“Maybe what you need is the patter of little feet to break the quiet,” Irene Craig said.
“Don’t even think things like that!” Matt protested.
When the Xerox machine finally finished, Irene Craig gave him thick rubber bands to bind the four copies together, and then, impulsively, kissed him on the cheek.
“Take care of yourself, sport,” she said.
When Matt returned to the Highway Patrol building at Bustleton and Bowler, he stopped first at his car, double-parking the Fury to do so, and put his service revolver and shoulder holster under the driver’s seat of his Porsche. Then he drove the Fury into the parking lot.
He gave
the keys to Sergeant Frizell, who apparently had had a word with Inspector Wohl about Officer Payne’s place in the pecking order of Special Operations.
Frizell handed him a cardboard box full of multipart forms.
“The Inspector said do as many of these as you can today,” Frizell sad. “There’s a typewriter on a desk in there.”
“What are they?” Matt asked.
“The requisition and transfer forms for the cars, and for the extra radios,” Frizell explained. “On top is one already filled out; just fill out the others the same way.”
They were, Matt soon saw, the “paperwork” without which Good Old Ernie in the radio garage had been, at first, unwilling to do any work. Plus the paperwork for the cars themselves, the ones they had already taken from the motor pool, and blank forms, with the specific data for the particular car to be later filled in, for cars yet to be drawn, as they were actually taken from the motor pool.
The only word to describe the typewriter was “wretched.” It was an ancient Underwood. The keys stuck. The platen was so worn that the keys made deep indentations in, or actually punched through, the upper layers of paper and carbon, and whatever the mechanism that controlled the paper feeding was called, that was so worn that Matt had to manually align each line as he typed.
He completed two forms and decided the situation was absurd. He looked at his watch. It was quarter to five.
He went into the other room.
“Sergeant,” he said. “I think I know where I can get a better typewriter. Would it be all right if I left now and did these forms there?”
“You mean, at home?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I don’t give a damn where you type them, Payne, just that they get typed.”
“Good night, then.”
“Yeah.”
Matt took the carton of blank forms and carried it to the Porsche. At this time of day, he decided, he would do better going over to I-95 and taking that downtown, rather than going down Roosevelt Boulevard to North Broad Street. He could, he decided, make better time on I-95. There was not much fun driving a car capable of speeds well over one hundred if you couldn’t go any faster than thirty-five.
Special Operations Page 21
