Special Operations

by W. E. B Griffin

  “You may have a point, Miss Peebles,” Pekach said.

  “But I am also afraid that he will either steal, or perhaps simply vandalize, for his own perverse reasons, Daddy’s gun collection. That would break my heart, if any of that was stolen or vandalized.”

  Pekach’s eyes actually brightened at the word gun.

  What the hell is going on here? There was not one damned word about guns in any of the reports I read.

  “A gun collection?” Pekach asked. “I wonder if you’d be kind enough to show it to me?”

  “If you like,” she said. “With the understanding that you may look, but not touch.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Well, then, come along.” She led him out of the library and up the stairs, past Saint Whatsisname Slaying the Dragon.

  “There were some edged pieces,” she said.

  “Excuse me?”

  Pekach had been distracted by the sight of Miss Martha Peebles’s rear end as she went up the stairs ahead of him. The thin material of her skirt was drawn tight over her rump. She was apparently not wearing a half slip, for the outline of her underpants was clearly visible. And the kind of underpants she was wearing were…

  Pekach searched his limited vocabulary in the area and as much in triumph as surprise came up with “bikinis.”

  Or the lower half of bikinis, whatever the hell they were called. Little tiny goddamned things, which, what there was of them, rode damned low.

  Nice ass, too.

  “Swords, halberds, some Arabian daggers, that sort of thing,” Martha Peebles said, “but they were difficult and time consuming to care for, and Colonel Mawson—do you know Colonel Mawson, Captain?”

  “I know who he is, Miss Peebles,” Pekach said as she stopped at the head of the stairs and waited for him to catch up with her.

  “Colonel Mawson worked out some sort of tax arrangement with the government for me, and I gave them to the Smithsonian Institution,” she concluded.

  “I see.”

  She led him down a carpeted corridor, and then stopped so suddenly David Pekach bumped into her.

  “Sorry,” he said.

  She gave him a wan smile, and nodded upward, toward the wall behind him.

  “That’s Daddy,” she said.

  It was an oil painting of a tall, mean-looking stout man with a large mustache. He was in hunting clothes, one hand resting on the rack of an elk.

  It was a lousy picture, Pekach decided. It looked more like a snapshot.

  “I had that done after Daddy passed away,” Martha Peebles said. “The artist had to work from a photograph.”

  “I see,” Pekach said. “Very nice.”

  “The photo had Stephen in it, but I told the artist to leave him out. Stephen hated hunting, and Daddy knew it. I think he probably made him go along to…you know, expose him to masculine pursuits. Anyway, I didn’t think Stephen belonged in Daddy’s picture, so I had the artist leave him out.”

  “I understand.”

  Martha Peebles then put her arm deep into a vase sitting on the floor and came out with two keys on a ring. She put one and then the other into locks on a door beside the portrait of her father, and then opened the door, and reached inside to snap a switch. Fluorescent lights flickered to life.

  The room, about fifteen feet wide and twenty feet long, was lined with glass-fronted gun racks, except for the bar end, which was a bookcase above a felt-covered table. There were two large, wide, glass-enclosed display cases in the center of the room, plus a leather armchair and matching footstool, and a table on which an old Zenith Trans-Oceanic portable radio sat.

  “This is pretty much as it was the day Daddy passed away,” Martha Peebles said. “Except that I took out his whiskey.”

  “How long has your father been dead, Miss Peebles?” Pekach asked, as he walked toward the first display case.

  “Daddy passed over three years, two months, and nine days ago,” she said, without faltering.

  Pekach bent over the display case.

  Jesus H. Christ! That’s an 1819 J. H. Hall breech action! Mint!

  “Do you know anything about these guns, Miss Peebles?” Pekach asked.

  She came to him.

  “Which one?” she asked and he pointed and she leaned over to look at it, which action caused her blouse to strain over her bosom, giving David Pekach a quick and unintentional glimpse of her undergarments.

  Even though Captain Pekach was genuinely interested in having his identification of the weapon he had pointed out as a U.S. Rifle, Model 1819, with a J. H. Hall pivoted chamber breech action confirmed, a certain portion of his attention was diverted to that which he had inadvertently and in absolute innocence glimpsed.

  Jesus! Black lace! Who would have ever thought! I wonder if her underpants are black, too? Black lace bikinis! Jesus H. Christ!

  “That’s an Army rifle,” Martha Peebles said. “Model of 1819. That particular piece was made in 1821. It’s interesting because—”

  “It has a J. H. Hall action,” Pekach chimed in.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “I’ve never seen one in such good shape before,” David Pekach said. “That looks unfired.”

  “It’s been test fired,” Martha said. “It has Z.E.H. stamped on the receiver just beside the flintlock pivot. That’s almost certainly Captain Zachary Ellsworth Hampden’s stamp. But I don’t think it ever left Harper’s Ferry Armory for service.”

  “It’s a beautiful piece,” Pekach said.

  “Are you interested—I was about to ask ‘in breech loaders,’ but I suppose the first question should be, are you interested in firearms?”

  “My mother says that’s the reason I never got married,” Pekach blurted. “I spend all my money on weapons.”

  “What kind?”

  “Actually, Remington rolling blocks,” Pekach said.

  “Daddy loved rolling blocks!” Martha Peebles said. “The whole wall case on the left is rolling blocks.”

  “Really?”

  He walked to the cabinet. She caught up with him.

  “I don’t have anything as good as these,” Pekach said. “I’ve got a sporting rifle something like that piece, but it’s worn and pitted. That’s mint. They all look mint.”

  “Daddy said that he regarded himself as their caretaker,” Martha Peebles said. “He said it wasn’t in him to be a dogooder, but preserving these symbols of our heritage for later generations gave him great pleasure.”

  “What a nice way to put it,” Pekach said, absolutely sincerely.

  “Oh, I’m so sorry Daddy passed over and can’t be here now,” Martha said. “He so loved showing his guns to people with the knowledge and sensitivity to appreciate them.”

  Their eyes met. Martha Peeble’s face colored and she looked away.

  “That was his favorite piece,” she said after a moment, pointing.

  “What is it? It looks German.”

  They were looking at a heavily engraved, double-triggered rifle with an elaborately shaped, carved, and engraved wild cherry stock.

  “German-American,” she said. “It was made in Milwaukee in 1883 by Ludwig Hamner, who immigrated from Bavaria in 1849. He took a Remington rolling block action, barreled it himself, in 32-20, one turn in eighteen inches, and then did all the engraving and carving himself. That’s wild cherry.”

  “I know,” Pekach said. “It’s beautiful!”

  She turned and walked away from him. He saw her bending down to lift the edge of the carpet by the door. She returned with a key and used it to unlock the case. Almost reverently, she took the rifle from its padded pegs and handed it to Pekach.

  “I don’t think I should touch it,” he said. “There’s liable to be acid on my fingertips from perspiration.”

  “I’ll wipe it before I put it back, silly,” Martha Peebles said. When he still looked doubtful, she said, “I know Daddy would want you to.”

  He reached to take the gun, and as he did so, his fingers touch
ed hers and she recoiled as if she was being burned, and he almost dropped the rifle.

  But he didn’t, and when, after an appropriately detailed and appreciative examination of the piece, he handed it back to her, their fingers touched again, and this time she didn’t seem to recoil from his touch; quite the contrary.

  “So what does Mr. Walton Williams have to say about the burglaries of the Peebles residence?” Staff Inspector Peter Wohl inquired, at almost the same moment Martha Peebles handed Captain David Pekach the 1893 wild cherry-stocked Ludwig Hamner Remington rolling-block Schuetzen rifle.

  “We had a little trouble finding him, Inspector,” Officer Charley McFadden replied.

  “But you did find him?”

  “No, sir,” McFadden said. “Not really.”

  “You didn’t find him?” Wohl pursued.

  “No, sir. Inspector, we was in every other fag bar in Philadelphia, last night.”

  “Plus the bar in the FOP?” Wohl asked.

  “We met Payne there is all, Inspector,” McFadden said.

  “Oh, I thought maybe you thought you would find Mr. Williams hanging around the FOP.”

  “No, sir. It was just a place to meet Payne.”

  “So you had nothing to drink in the FOP?”

  “Hay-zus didn’t,” Charley said.

  “Does that mean that you and Payne had a drink? A couple of drinks?”

  “We had a couple of beers, yes, sir.”

  “Payne can’t hold his liquor very well, can he?”

  “He put it away all right last night, it seemed to me,” McFadden said.

  “In the FOP, or someplace else?”

  “We had to order something besides a soda when we was looking for Williams, sir.”

  “Hay-zus, too?”

  “Hay-zus doesn’t drink,” McFadden said.

  “I thought you just said, or implied, that to look credible in the various bars and clubs in which you sought the elusive Mr. Williams, it was necessary to drink something other than soda.”

  “I don’t know how Hay-zus handles it, sir.”

  “Weren’t you with him?”

  “No, sir. We split up. Hay-zus took the plain car, and I took Payne and we looked in different places.”

  “Using a personal vehicle?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Must have been fun,” Wohl said. “To judge by the way Payne looks and smells this morning.”

  “He looked all right to me when we went home,” Charley said.

  “I’ll take your word for that, Officer McFadden,” Wohl said. “Far be it from me to suggest that you would consider yourself to be on duty with a bellyful of booze and impaired judgment.”

  “Yes, sir,” McFadden said.

  “I have a theory why you were unable to locate Mr. Williams last night,” Wohl said. “Would you care to hear it?”

  “Yes, sir,” McFadden said.

  Wohl glared at Jesus Martinez.

  “May I infer from your silence that you are not interested in my theory, Officer Martinez?”

  “Yes, sir. No, sir. I mean, yes, sir, I’d like to hear your theory.”

  “Thank you,” Wohl said. “My theory is that while you, McFadden, and Payne were running around town boozing it up on what you erroneously believed was going to be the taxpayer’s expense, and you, Martinez, were doing—I have no idea what—that Mr. Williams went back to Glengarry Lane and burglarized poor Miss Peebles yet one more time. You did hear about the burglary?”

  “Yes, sir,” Martinez said. “Just before we came in here.”

  “Miss Peebles is not going to be burglarized again,” Peter Wohl said.

  “Yes, sir,” they replied in chorus.

  “Would either or both of you be interested to know why I am so sure of that?”

  “Yes, sir,” they chorused again.

  “Because, from now until we catch the Peebles burglar, or hell freezes over, which ever comes sooner, between sundown and sunup, one of the three of you is going to be parked somewhere within sight and sound of the Peebles residence.”

  “Sir,” Martinez protested, “he sees somebody in a car, he’s not going to hit her house again.”

  “True,” Wohl said. “That’s the whole point of the exercise.”

  “Then how are we going to catch him?” Martinez said.

  “I’ll leave that up to you,” Wohl said. “With the friendly advice that since however you were going about that last night obviously didn’t work, that it might be wise to try something else. Are there any questions?”

  Both shook their heads no.

  Wohl made a gesture with his right hand, which had the fingers balled and the thumb extended. Officers McFadden and Martinez interpreted the gesture to mean that they were dismissed and should leave.

  When they were gone, and the door had been closed after them, Captain Michael J. Sabara, who had been sitting quietly on the couch, now quietly applauded.

  “Very good, Inspector,” he said.

  “I used to be a Highway Corporal,” Wohl said. “You thought I’d forgotten how to eat a little ass?”

  “They’re good kids,” Sabara said.

  “Yes, they are,” Wohl said. “And I want to keep them that way. Reining them in a little when they first get here is probably going to prevent me from having to jump on them with both feet a little down the pike.”

  EIGHTEEN

  “What we’re going to do,” Officer Jesus Martinez said, turning to Officer Charles McFadden as they stood at the urinals in the Seventh District POLICE PERSONNEL ONLY men’s room, “is give your rich-kid rookie buddy the midnight-to-sunup shift.”

  “What are you pissed at him for?” Charley McFadden asked.

  “You dumb shit! Where do you think Wohl heard that you two were boozing it up last night?”

  “We wasn’t boozing it up last night,” McFadden argued.

  “Tell that to Wohl,” Martinez said, sarcastically.

  “If we make him work from midnight, then who’s going to be staking out the house from sunset to midnight? Somebody’s going to have to be there.”

  McFadden’s logic was beyond argument, which served to anger Martinez even more.

  “That sonofabitch is trouble, Charley,” he said, furiously. “And he ain’t never going to make a cop.”

  “I think he’s all right,” McFadden said. “He just don’t know what he’s doing, is all. He just came on the job, is all.”

  “You think what you want,” Martinez said, zipping up his fly. “Be an asshole. Okay. This is what we’ll do: We’ll park Richboy outside the house from sunset to midnight. We’ll go look for this Walton Williams. Then we’ll split the midnight to sunrise. You go first, or me, I don’t care.”

  “That would make him work what—what time is sunset, six? Say six hours, and we would only be working three hours apiece.”

  “Tough shit,” Martinez said. “Look, asshole, Wohl meant it: until we catch this Williams guy, we’re going to have to stake out the house from sunset to sunrise. So the thing to do is catch Williams, right? Who can do that better, you and me, or your rookie buddy? Shit, he don’t even know where to look, much less what he should do if he should get lucky and fall over him.”

  Sergeant Ed Frizell raised the same question about the fair division of duty hours when making the stakeout of the Peebles residence official, but bowed to the logic that Officer Payne simply was not qualified to go looking for a suspect on his own. And he authorized three cars, one each for what he had now come to think of as Sherlock Holmes, Dr. Watson, and the Kid. He also independently reached the conclusion that unless Walton Williams was really stupid, or maybe stoned, he would spot the car sitting on Glengarry Lane as a police car, and would not attempt to burglarize the Peebles residence with it there. And that solved the problem of how just-about-wholly inexperienced Matt Payne would deal with the suspect if he encountered him; there would be no suspect to encounter.

  At two-fifteen, when Staff Inspector Wohl walked into
the office after having had luncheon with Detective Jason Washington at D’Allesandro’s Steak Shop, on Henry Avenue, Sergeant Frizell informed him that Captain Henry C. Quaire, the commanding officer of the Homicide Bureau, had called, said it was important, and would Wohl please return his call at his earliest opportunity.

  “Get him on the phone, please,” Wohl said. Waving at Washington to come along, he went into his office.

  One of the buttons on Wohl’s phone began to flash the moment he sat down.

  “Peter Wohl, Henry,” he said. “What’s up?”

  “I just had a call from the State Trooper barracks in Quakertown, Inspector,” Quaire said. “I think they found Miss Woodham.”

  “Hold it, Henry,” Wohl said, and snapped his fingers. When Jason Washington looked at him, Wohl gestured for him to pick up the extension. “Jason’s getting on the line.”

  “I’m on, Captain,” Washington said, as, in a conditioned reflex, he took a notebook from his pocket, then a ballpoint pen.

  “They—the Trooper barracks in Quakertown, Jason,” Quaire went on, “have a mutilated corpse of a white female who meets Miss Woodham’s description. Been dead twenty-four to thirty-six hours. They fed it to NCIC and got a hit.”

  “Shit,” Jason Washington said, bitterly.

  “Where did they find it?” Wohl asked, taking a pencil from his desk drawer.

  “In a summer cottage near a little town called Durham,” Quaire said. “The location is…”

  He paused, and Wohl had a mental image of him looking for a sheet of paper on which he had written down the information.

  “…1.2 miles down a dirt road to the left, 4.4 miles west of US 611 on US 212.”

  Jason Washington parroted the specifics back to Quaire.

  “That’s right,” Quaire said.

  “They don’t have anything on the doer, I suppose?” Washington said.