Special Operations

by W. E. B Griffin

  “No. I’ll talk to them. I want you to go talk to Miss Peebles.”

  “What?”

  “You go over there right now,” Wohl said. “And you ooze sympathy, and do whatever you have to do to convince her that we are very embarrassed that this has happened to her again, and that we are going to take certain steps to make absolutely sure it doesn’t happen again.”

  “What certain steps?”

  “We are going to put—call it a stakeout team—on her property from sunset to sunrise.”

  “You lost me there,” Pekach confessed. “Where are you going to get a stakeout team? I mean, my God, if it gets in the paper that you’re using manpower to stake out a third-rate burglary site…”

  “Martinez, McFadden, and Hungover Harry out there,” Wohl said. “The wages of sin are death, David. I’m surprised you haven’t learned that.”

  Pekach chuckled. “Okay,” he said.

  “And you will tell Miss Peebles that a Highway Patrol car will drive past her house not less than once every half hour during the same hours. Then you will tell your shift Lieutenant to set that up, and to tell the guys in the car that they not only are to drive by, but they are to drive into the driveway, making a lot of noise, and slamming the car doors when they get out of the car, so that Miss Peebles, when she looks in curiosity out her window, will see two uniformed officers waving their flashlights around in the bushes.”

  “That’d spook the guy who’s doing this to her,” Pekach argued.

  “I hope so,” Wohl said. “I don’t want another burglary at that address on the Overnight Report on the Commissioner’s desk tomorrow morning.”

  “Okay,” Pekach said, doubtfully, “you’re the boss.”

  “I’m not going to tell Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson this, David,” Wohl said. “But I think they’re right. I think the doer is the brother’s boyfriend. When they’re not sitting outside her house, I want them to keep looking for him. Got the picture?”

  “Like I said, you’re the boss. You’re more devious than I would have thought….”

  “I’ll interpret that as a compliment,” Wohl said. “And as devious as I am, I will frankly tell you that the success of this operation will hinge on how well you can charm the lady.”

  “Then why don’t you go charm her?”

  “Because I am the commanding officer, and that sort of thing is beneath my dignity,” Wohl said, solemnly.

  Pekach smiled.

  “I’ll charm the pants off the lady, boss,” he said.

  “Figuratively speaking, of course, Captain?”

  “I don’t know. What does she look like?”

  “I don’t know,” Wohl said.

  “Then I don’t know about the pants,” Pekach said. “I’ll let you know how well I do.”

  “Just the highlights, please, Captain. None of the sordid details.”

  SEVENTEEN

  Captain David Pekach was tempted to go see both the Captain of Northwest Detectives and the Captain of the Fourteenth District before going to call on the Peebles woman, but finally decided against it. He knew that his success as the new Highway Captain depended in large measure on how well Highway got along with the Detective Bureau and the various Districts. And he was fully aware that there was a certain resentment toward Highway on the part of the rest of the Department, and especially on the part of detectives and uniformed District cops.

  He had seen, several times, and as recently as an hour before, what he thought was the wrong reaction to the Ledger editorial calling Highway “the Gestapo.” This morning, he had heard a Seventh District uniformed cop call “Ach-tung!” when two Highway cops walked into the building, and twice he had actually seen uniformed cops throw a straight-armed salute mockingly at Highway Patrolmen.

  It was all done in jest, of course, but David Pekach was enough of an amateur psychologist to know that there is almost always a seed of genuine resentment when a wife zings her husband, or a cop zings another cop. After he had a few words with the cop who had called “Ach-tung,” and the two cops who had thrown the Nazi salutes, he didn’t think they would do it again. With a little luck, the word would quickly spread that the new Highway Commander had a temper that had best not be turned on.

  He understood the resentment toward Highway. Some of it was really unjustified, and could be attributed to simple jealousy. Highway had special uniforms, citywide jurisdiction, and the well-earned reputation of leaving the less pleasant chores of police work, especially domestic disputes, to District cops. Highway RPCs, like all other RPCs, carried fire hydrant wrenches in their trunks. When the water supply ran low, or water pressure dropped, as it did when kids turned on the hydrants to cool off in the summer, the word went out to turn the hydrants off.

  David Pekach could never remember having seen a Highway cop with a hydrant wrench in his hand, and he had seen dozens of Highway cars roll blithely past hydrants pouring water into the streets, long after the kids who had turned it on had gone in for supper, or home for the night. That sort of task, and there were others like it—a long list beginning with rescuing cats from trees and going through such things as chasing boisterous kids from storefronts and investigating fender-benders—was considered too menial to merit the attention of the elite Highway Patrol.

  The cops who had to perform these chores naturally resented the Highway cops who didn’t do their fair share of them, and Highway cops, almost as a rule, managed to let the District cops know that Highway was something special, involved in real cop work, while their backward, nonelite brothers had to calm down irate wives and get their uniforms soaked turning off fire hydrants.

  So far as the detectives were concerned, it was nearly Holy Writ among them that if Highway reached a crime scene before the detectives did, Highway could be counted on to destroy much of the evidence, usually by stomping on it with their motorcyclists’ boots. Lieutenant Pekach of Narcotics had shared that opinion.

  One of his goals, now that he had Highway, was to improve relations between Highway and everybody else, and he didn’t think a good way to do that would be to visit Northwest Detectives and the Fourteenth District to ask about the Peebles burglaries. They would, quite understandably, resent it. It would be tanamount to coming right out and saying “since you ordinary cops can’t catch the doer in a third-rate burglary, Highway is here to show you how real cops do it!”

  And, David Pekach knew, Peter Wohl had already been to both the Fourteenth District and Northwest Detectives. Wohl could get away with it, if only because he outranked the captains. And Wohl, in Pekach’s judgment, was a good cop, and if there had been anything not in the reports, he would have picked up on it and said something.

  But Pekach did get out the reports, which he had already read, and he read them again very carefully before getting into his car and driving over to Chestnut Hill.

  Number 606 Glengarry Lane turned out to be a very large Victorian house, maybe even a mansion, sitting atop a hill behind a fieldstone-pillar-and-iron-bar fence and a wide expanse of lawn. The fence, whose iron bars were topped with gilded spear tops, ran completely around the property, which Pekach estimated to be at least three, maybe four acres. The house on the adjacent property to the left could be only barely made out, and the one on the right couldn’t be seen at all.

  Behind the house was a three-car garage that had, Pekach decided, probably started out as a carriage house. The setup, Pekach thought, was much like where Wohl lived, except that the big house behind Wohl’s garage apartment had been converted into six luxury apartments. This big house was occupied by only two people, the Peebles woman and her brother, and the brother was reported to be in France.

  All three garage doors were open when Pekach drove up the driveway and stopped the car under a covered entrance portal. It was not difficult to imagine a carriage drawn by a matched pair of horses pulling up where the blue-and-white had stopped, and a servant rushing off the porch to assist the Master and his Mistress down the carriage steps.
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  No servant came out now. Pekach saw a gray-haired black man, wearing a black rubber apron and black rubber boots, washing a Buick station wagon. There was a Mercedes coupe, a new one, and a Cadillac Coupe de Ville in the garage, and a two-year-old Ford sedan parked beside the garage, almost certainly the property of the black guy washing the car.

  Pekach went up the stairs and rang the doorbell. He heard a dull bonging inside, and a moment or two later, a gray-haired black female face appeared where a lace curtain over the engraved glass window had been pulled aside. And then the door opened.

  “May I help you?” the black woman asked. She was wearing a black uniform dress, and Pekach decided the odds were ten to one she was married to the guy washing the Buick.

  “I’m Captain Pekach of the Highway Patrol,” David said. “I’d like to see Miss Peebles, please.”

  “One moment, please,” the black woman said. “I’ll see if Miss Peebles is at home.”

  She shut the door.

  Pekach glanced around.

  The way this place is built and laid out, it’s an open invitation to a burglar to come in and help himself.

  The door opened again a full minute later.

  “Miss Peebles will see you,” the maid said. “Will you follow me, please?”

  Pekach took off his uniform cap, and put his hand to his pigtail, which of course was no longer there.

  Inside the door was a large foyer, with an octagonal tile fountain in the center. Closed double doors were on both sides of the foyer, and a wide staircase was directly ahead. There was a stained-glass leaded window portraying, Pekach thought, Saint Whoever-It-Was who slayed the dragon on the stairway landing.

  This place looks like a goddamned museum. Or maybe a funeral home.

  The maid slid open one of the double doors.

  “Here’s the policeman, Miss Martha,” the maid said, and gestured for him to go through the door.

  He found himself in a high-ceilinged room, the walls of which were lined with bookshelves.

  “How do you do?” Martha Peebles said.

  A fifty-year-old spinster, Pekach instantly decided, looking at Martha Peebles. She was wearing a white, frilly, high-collared, long-sleeved blouse and a dark skirt.

  “Miss Peebles, I’m Captain Pekach, commanding officer of the Highway Patrol,” David said. “Inspector Wohl asked me to come see you, to tell you how sorry we are about the trouble you’ve had, and to tell you we’re going to do everything humanly possible to keep it from happening again.”

  Martha Peebles extended her hand.

  The cop, as opposed to the man, in Pekach took over. The cop, the trained observer, saw that Martha Peebles was not fifty. She did not have fifty-year-old hands, or fifty-year-old eyes, or fifty-year-old teeth. These were her teeth, not caps, and they sat in healthy gums. There were no liver spots on her hands, and there was a fullness of flesh in the hands that fifty-year-olds have lost with passing time. And her neck had not begun to hang. It was even possible that the firm appearance of her breasts was Miss Peebles herself, rather than a well-fitting brassiere.

  “How do you do, Captain…Pekach, you said?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Her hand was warm and soft, confirming his revised opinion of her age. She was, he now deduced, maybe thirty-five, no more. She just dressed like an old woman; that had thrown him off. He wondered why the hell she did that.

  “You’ll forgive me for saying I’ve heard that before, Captain,” Martha Peebles said, taking her hand back and lacing it with the other one on her abdomen. “As recently as yesterday.”

  “Yes, ma’am, I know,” David Pekach said, uncomfortably.

  “I am really not a neurotic old maid, imagining all this,” she said.

  “No one suggested anything like that, Miss Peebles,” Pekach said. Oh, shit! McFadden and Martinez! “Miss Peebles, did the two officers who were here yesterday say anything at all out of line? Did they insinuate anything like that?”

  “No,” she said. “I don’t recall that they did. But, if I may be frank?”

  “Please.”

  “They did seem a little young to be detectives,” she said, “and I got the impression—how should I put this—that they were rather overwhelmed by the house.”

  “I’m rather overwhelmed with it,” David said. “It’s magnificent.”

  “My father loved this house,” she said. “You haven’t answered my question.”

  “What question was that, Miss Peebles?” Pekach asked, confused.

  “Aren’t those two a little young to be detectives? Do they have the requisite experience?”

  “Well, actually, Miss Peebles, they aren’t detectives,” Pekach said.

  “They were in civilian clothing,” she challenged. “I thought, among policemen, only detectives were permitted to wear civilian clothing.”

  “No, ma’am,” Pekach said. “Some officers work in civilian clothing.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said. “When it seems appropriate, that’s authorized.”

  “It seems to me that the more police in uniform the better,” she said. “That that would tend to deter crime.”

  “You have a point,” Pekach said. “I can’t argue with that. But may I explain the officers who were here yesterday?”

  “We’re talking about the small Mexican or whatever, and the large, simple Irish boy?”

  “Yes, ma’am. Miss Peebles, do you happen to recall hearing about the police officer, Captain Moffitt, who was shot to death recently.”

  “Oh, yes, of course. On the television, it said that he was, unless I’m confused somehow, the commanding officer of the Highway Patrol.”

  “Yes, ma’am, he was,” Pekach said.

  “Oh, I see. And you’re his replacement, so to speak?”

  “Yes, ma’am, but that’s not what I was driving at.”

  “Oh?”

  “We knew who had shot Captain Moffitt within minutes,” Pekach said. “Which meant that eight thousand police officers—the entire Philadelphia Police Department—were looking for him.”

  “I can certainly understand that,” she said.

  “Two undercover Narcotics Division officers found him—”

  “They threw him under a subway train,” she said. “I read that in the Ledger. Good for them!”

  “That story wasn’t true, Miss Peebles,” Pekach said, surprised at her reaction. “Actually, the officer involved went much further than he had to to capture him alive. He didn’t even fire his weapon, for fear that a bullet might hit an innocent bystander.”

  “He should have shot him dead on the spot,” Miss Peebles said, firmly.

  David looked at her with surprise showing on his face.

  “I read in Time,” Martha Peebles said, “that for what it costs to keep one criminal in prison, we could send four people to Harvard.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Pekach said. “I’m sure that’s about right.”

  “Now, that’s criminal,” she said. “Throwing good money after bad. Money that could be used to benefit society being thrown away keeping criminals in country clubs with bars.”

  “Yes, ma’am, I have to agree with you.”

  “I’m sure that people like yourself must find that sort of thing very frustrating,” Martha Peebles said.

  “Yes, ma’am, sometimes,” Pekach agreed.

  “I’m going to draw the blind,” Martha Peebles announced. “The sun bleaches the carpets.”

  She went to the window and did so, and the sun silhouetted her body, for all practical purposes making her blouse transparent. David Pekach averted his eyes.

  Just a bra, huh? I would have thought she’d have worn a slip. Oh, what the hell, it’s hot. But really nice boobs!

  She walked back over to him.

  “You were saying?” she said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “There was a point to your talking about the man who shot your predecessor?”

/>   “Oh, yes, ma’am. Miss Peebles, the officer who found Gerald Vincent Gallagher was Officer Charles McFadden.”

  “Who?”

  “Officer McFadden, Miss Peebles. The officer Inspector Wohl sent to see you yesterday. And Officer Martinez is his partner.”

  “Really?” she replied, genuinely surprised. “Then I certainly have misjudged them, haven’t I?”

  “I brought that up, Miss Peebles, in the hope you might be convinced that we sent you the best men available.”

  “Hummm,” she snorted. “That may be so, but they don’t seem to be any more effective, do they, than anyone else that’s been here?”

  “They were working until long after midnight last night, Miss Peebles, looking for Walton Williams—”

  “They were looking in the wrong place, then,” Martha Peebles said. “They should have been looking here. He was here.”

  Shit, she’s right about that!

  “Well, actually, we don’t know that,” David said. “We don’t know if whoever was here last night was Mr. Williams. For that matter, we don’t even know that Mr. Williams is even connected—”

  “Don’t be silly,” Martha Peebles snapped. “Who else could it be?”

  “Literally, anyone.”

  “Captain, I don’t like to think of a total figure for all the things that have been stolen from this house by one of Stephen’s ‘friends.’ I don’t know whether he actually pays them to do what—whatever they do—but I do know that almost without exception, they tip themselves with whatever they can stick in their pockets before they go back wherever Stephen finds them.”

  “I didn’t see any record of that, prior to this last sequence of events,” Pekach said.

  “For the good reason that I never reported it. I find it very painful to have to publicly acknowledge that my brother, the last of the line, is, so to speak, going to be the last of the line; and that he’s not even very good at that, and has to go out and hire prostitutes.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” David said, genuinely sympathetic.

  “Is that the correct word? Or is there another term for males?”

  “Same word, ma’am.”

  “I suppose I would have gone on and on, closing my eyes to what was going on, pretending that I didn’t really care about the things that turned up missing…but this Williams man shows no sign of stopping this harassment—and that’s what it is, more than the value of the items he’s stolen—and that proves, it seems to me, that it is he and not any other burglar, who would take as much as he could haul off—”