Investigators

by W. E. B Griffin

  Young had absolutely nothing to do with what was going on, but when Walter Davis had announced, at six-thirty—to everybody’s initial relief—that he had things pending in the office that just could not be put off, and would have to leave, he finished the announcement by saying not to worry, he would call Frank Young and have him come to Special Operations to see what help he could be.

  Coughlin could not think of any credible reason to suggest that all Young would do would be in the way. There was no question in his mind that Young’s presence would be primarily to make sure the FBI didn’t get left out of anything that would accrue to the interest of the FBI.

  “Thirty minutes,” Coughlin announced. “Peter gets to have breakfast with Pietro.”

  “I can hardly wait,” Wohl said.

  “You really think this is necessary, Denny?” the mayor asked.

  “I don’t want Prasko killed before we get the Five Squad to trial,” Coughlin said.

  “We’d really look bad, Jerry,” Lowenstein said, coming to his aid, “if somebody stuck a knife in Prasko in the Detention Center.”

  The mayor threw up his hands, admitting he could not counter that argument.

  “Frank,” Coughlin said, turning to the FBI official, “we don’t want to spook Savarese. Could you, without making many waves, see if you could keep the FBI—or, for that matter, any other feds—away from the Warwick from now until, say, nine-thirty?”

  “FBI. No problem. I’ll get right on that. Have you got any idea what other agency might be interested in Savarese?”

  Coughlin saw Wohl’s eyes roll before he answered for Coughlin.

  “Frank, if Savarese sees anybody who looks like a cop, or a fed, doing anything at the Warwick, he will think they’re interested in him. Whether or not they are. The safest thing to do is keep everybody with any kind of a badge away from the Warwick for an hour or so.”

  “Well, I understand that, certainly,” Young said, a little lamely. “I’ll call around.”

  “I’ll put the word out that nobody is to go near the Warwick,” Matt Lowenstein said. “Which will probably have the result that every cop in Philadelphia will show up to see what’s going on.”

  “What are we waiting for now?” Mayor Carlucci asked.

  “To hear from Matt Payne in Harrisburg,” Wohl said. “To see if he’s got anything on Calhoun or not.”

  “I’ve been thinking about that,” the mayor said.

  “We should hear something in fifteen or twenty minutes, Mr. Mayor,” Peter said.

  “A lot can happen in fifteen or twenty minutes,” Carlucci said. “Why don’t you do it now, Peter?”

  “Mr. Mayor, we gave that a lot of thought. And we decided—”

  “You’re a good cop, Peter. And I love you. But the last time I looked, I was mayor of Philadelphia. Arrest the bastards!”

  “Yes, sir,” Wohl said.

  Detective Matt Payne looked at his watch when there was a knock at the door. It was 7:59.

  He opened the door. Lieutenant Paul Deitrich was standing there.

  “Good morning, sir,” Matt said. “Please come in.”

  Deitrich nodded but didn’t say anything.

  “Lieutenant, these are Detectives McFadden and Martinez,” Matt said, making the introductions. “Charley, Jesus, this is Lieutenant Deitrich.”

  Deitrich nodded, just perceptibly, then looked at Matt for an explanation for the two detectives.

  “They’ve got a warrant for Calhoun,” Matt said.

  “We got lucky,” McFadden said. “Somebody dumped the answer in our lap.”

  “I got lucky here, too,” Deitrich said. “I remembered that if you really want to find something out, ask the cop on the beat.”

  “Our guy was a retired detective, who smelled something rotten.”

  Deitrich looked at Matt.

  “I know one of the guys who work that area pretty well,” Deitrich said. “I went to see him. He told me—without me having to tell him why I was asking—that Mrs. Worner lives at 218 Maple. Her yard backs up against 223 Elm, which is where—”

  “Vincent T. Holmes, Calhoun’s uncle, lives,” Matt furnished.

  Deitrich nodded.

  “You’re talking about the lady who works in the bank, right?” Martinez asked.

  Deitrich nodded again.

  “Holmes’s wife died two years ago, of cancer,” Deitrich went on. “About the time Mrs. Worner finally gave up and put her husband away.”

  “Excuse me?” Matt asked.

  “He got hurt bad in Korea,” Deitrich said. “Lost one leg above the knee and the foot on the other leg. She married him anyway. He got a one-hundred percent disability pension. They weren’t hurting for money. But he couldn’t work, and he got into the sauce pretty bad. I guess he was in pain a lot, and he just sort of went downhill until she couldn’t handle him anymore. The last time he got arrested for drunken driving, the judge gave him the choice of going into the VA hospital or two years in jail. He went to the VA hospital.”

  “And enter the friendly neighbor, right?” McFadden said.

  Deitrich nodded again.

  “She’s Catholic, so she won’t divorce her husband. Maybe she wouldn’t marry Holmes anyway. He’s not a real catch. He works for Pennsylvania Power and Light as a lineman, and he doesn’t look much like Paul Newman. But anyway, she sneaks over to his house at night, or he over to hers, fooling nobody in the neighborhood, of course, but everybody feels sorry for them—mostly for her—and nobody says anything.”

  “Shit!” McFadden said.

  “So there’s your connection, Payne,” Deitrich said. “What do you want to do about it?”

  “The question is, what did she do?” Matt asked.

  “You know fucking well what she did, Payne,” Martinez said. “She conspired with Calhoun to hide whatever those Five Squad scumbags wanted to hide in a safe-deposit box. That makes her an accessory after the fact.”

  “First of all, we don’t know if anything connected to Five Squad is in that safe-deposit box—”

  “We will, the minute we go into the box.”

  “Which box, Jesus?” Matt said, patiently. “When we go to the judge for a search warrant, he’s going to want to know what box we have cause to believe there is something in. He’s not going to give us a warrant to go in every box in the bank.”

  “Maybe Calhoun will have the key on him when we arrest him, Matt,” McFadden said.

  “And maybe he won’t,” Matt said. “Maybe the uncle keeps the key for him.”

  “And maybe,” Deitrich chimed in, “the key never leaves the bank.”

  “Excuse me?” Matt said again.

  “You’re working on the idea that there is a box in there rented under a phony name,” Deitrich said. “What I’m thinking is maybe Mrs. Worner, who is in charge of the whole operation, is just letting your man use a box that’s not rented. Who would know? He goes in, she gives him the key, and that’s the end of it. No record, of course.”

  “That makes a lot of sense,” Matt said.

  “Have we got enough to arrest the uncle on?” McFadden asked.

  “After we get in the box, presuming we find something in the box, then maybe. Right now, no.”

  “It’s eight o’clock,” Martinez said. “Wohl is waiting to hear from you whether or not we can tie Calhoun to anything in the box.”

  “I have an idea,” Matt said. “Let’s scare everybody.”

  “What the fuck does that mean?” Martinez asked.

  “We go along, right now, when the Harrisburg cops go to Uncle Vincent’s house to arrest Calhoun. We don’t do it quietly. We make sure Mrs. Worner sees the police cars at Uncle Vincent’s house. Following good police procedure, the Harrisburg cops send a couple of uniforms to make sure Calhoun doesn’t get out the back door. Looking out her kitchen window, she’ll see that. Charley and I will also be at the back door. She’ll see us. Calhoun is taken off.”

  “So?” Martinez asked.

&
nbsp; “Nothing else happens. Except that a police car stays at the curb in front of Uncle Vincent’s. So Uncle Vincent, already worried about Calhoun getting hauled off, has two options. He can either pretend he has no idea what’s going on—which I don’t think he’ll want to do—or he can go to work as usual. In which case the police car follows him. The last thing I think he’ll do is try to get in touch with Mrs. Worner, which he can’t do in person, with the cops watching. And I don’t think he’d try to use the telephone, because he’d be afraid it was tapped. So he goes to work. And sees that he’s being followed by the cops.”

  “What is this shit, Payne?” Martinez asked.

  “Then Mrs. Worner has one of two options. Well, maybe three. She could run, but I don’t think that’s going to happen. She either goes to work as usual, or she stays home. If she stays home, we go to see her. If she goes to work, she is called into her boss’s office, where there are two policemen, the same two she saw standing outside Uncle Vincent’s place. We then tell her we know all about the safe-deposit box, and if she cooperates with us, it will go easier on her—you know that routine.”

  “That’s pure bullshit!” Martinez said. “Hotshot here has been watching too much TV.”

  “I don’t know, Matt,” McFadden said. “It might work, but there’s a lot of ifs.”

  “What I’m going to do,” Martinez announced angrily, “is go down to police headquarters here, get a couple of local uniforms to back me up, go arrest Calhoun, and then call Wohl and tell him we have Calhoun and probably don’t have anything with the safe-deposit box.”

  “No, you’re not,” Matt said. “We’re going to do it my way.”

  “Who the fuck do you think you are, hotshot?”

  “I was assigned to this case first,” Matt said. “That makes it mine.”

  “Oh, fuck you, hotshot,” Martinez said, and walked to the telephone.

  “Who are you calling?” Matt asked.

  “Who the fuck do you think? Wohl. We’ll settle this shit right now!”

  “Put the phone down, Jesus,” Charley said, choosing sides.

  “Let him go, Charley,” Matt said.

  “Put the phone down, Jesus,” McFadden repeated, walking up to Martinez.

  Literally quivering with rage, Detective Martinez looked up at Detective McFadden.

  “For the last time, Jesus, put it down.”

  “Well, fuck you, too, McFadden!” Martinez said, and slammed the telephone down in its cradle.

  “I’m sorry you had to see all this, Lieutenant,” Matt said.

  “Why do I have the feeling you two don’t like each other much?” Deitrich said.

  “They love each other, Lieutenant,” McFadden said. “They just have a strange way of showing it.”

  “So what have you decided to do?” Deitrich said.

  “Unless somebody can show me what’s wrong with my idea . . .” Matt said.

  “It’s your ass, hotshot,” Martinez said.

  “How long would it take to get two—better even, three—patrol cars out to Maple Avenue?”

  “Five minutes after I get on the radio.”

  “How about one car to meet us on Maple Avenue?” Matt asked. “And two cars to Elm Street, to go noisily through Mrs. Worner’s backyard to make sure nobody gets out Uncle Vincent’s back door?”

  “No problem.”

  “Screaming sirens and flashing lights would be nice,” Matt said.

  “No problem.”

  “Martinez, are you going with McFadden, or would you rather stay here and sulk?” Matt asked.

  “You son of a bitch!” Martinez spluttered.

  “Jesus Christ, Matt,” McFadden said. “You never know when to quit.”

  “This gentleman,” Vincenzo Savarese said softly to the waiter, “is my guest, and so are those two.”

  He pointed to a table near the door of the Hotel Warwick’s small, elegant dining room, where Pietro Cassandro and Peter Wohl were holding large, ornate menus.

  “That’s very kind,” Chief Inspector Dennis V. Coughlin said, “but why don’t we go Dutch?”

  “I am Italian, and you are Irish. How can we go Dutch?” Savarese asked. “Besides, it’d give me pleasure. Please indulge me.”

  “Thank you,” Coughlin said, giving in.

  He ordered freshly squeezed orange juice, scrapple, two soft-scrambled eggs, biscuits, and coffee. Savarese—surprising him, for Savarese was slight, almost delicate—ordered a much larger breakfast of freshly squeezed orange juice, eggs Benedict, a side order of corned beef hash, biscuits, and coffee, and asked that his coffee be served now, with fresh cream only—if they had only milk, then black.

  “Looking at Inspector Wohl reminds me how quickly the years pass,” Savarese said. “I remember him, in short pants, at baseball games with his father.”

  “I think he’ll be police commissioner one day,” Coughlin said. “He’s a fine man.”

  “And when are they going to make you police commissioner?”

  “The day after Miami gets twelve inches of snow,” Coughlin said.

  “I think you are much too modest,” Savarese said. “You are universally recognized as one of the best policemen in Philadelphia.”

  “Thank you, but police commissioner is not in the cards for me.”

  The waiter appeared with their coffee and a small pitcher of fresh cream.

  “One never knows what the future will bring,” Savarese said.

  Coughlin waited until they had put cream and sugar in their coffee.

  “Let me begin, Mr. Savarese, by telling you how sorry I am, both professionally and personally, about what happened to your granddaughter.”

  Savarese’s expression didn’t change at all. After a moment, he said: “Thank you. We can only pray for her full recovery. We have tried to get the best possible medical attention.”

  “I think you have found the best,” Coughlin said.

  Savarese nodded.

  “As I was just saying, one never knows what the future will bring.”

  “I thought you would like to know that at seven fifty-eight this morning, the animal responsible for your granddaughter’s difficulty was stripped of his police officer’s badge and arrested. The entire Philadelphia Police Department is deeply ashamed that he once wore our uniform. He has brought shame on us all.”

  Savarese looked directly at Coughlin, but said nothing.

  The waiter appeared with their orange juice, a wicker basket full of assorted biscuits, rolls and croissants, two tubs of butter, and a selection of marmalades.

  Savarese absently selected a croissant, broke it in two, and buttered the half he kept in his hand.

  “You’re sure you have the right man?” he asked finally.

  “We’re sure.”

  “He has confessed to this outrage?”

  “At this very moment, he is being interviewed by the man I believe to be the best interrogator in the department.”

  “But he has not confessed?”

  “There was a witness, Mr. Savarese. He has positively identified him.”

  “But he has not confessed,” Savarese insisted.

  “That’s one of the things I wanted to talk to you about,” Coughlin said. “Under the circumstances—”

  “What circumstances?”

  “To bring this animal to trial, Mr. Savarese, it would be necessary to identify the victim of his unspeakable behavior to the court and his defense counsel—”

  “We are speaking, aren’t we, as man-to-man?” Savarese interrupted.

  “Yes, we are.”

  “I’m sure you’ll understand that I cannot permit my granddaughter to suffer any more than she has already suffered.”

  “I understand that,” Coughlin said. “More important, Mr. Callis, the district attorney, understands that.”

  “There is only one situation that I can imagine that would guarantee that what happened to my granddaughter would not become public knowledge . . . ,” Savarese said.


  “That’s what I wanted to speak to you about, Mr. Savarese,” Coughlin said.

  “. . . and that would be the unavailability of this animal to stand trial,” Savarese finished.

  “That sounds to me, Mr. Savarese, as if you are suggesting this animal be killed.”

  “What I said, Mr. Coughlin, is that the only way I can see that my granddaughter’s name will not be dragged through the sewer, as it would be if there was to be a trial, would be if there was no trial. And there can be no trial if there is no accused.”

  “The man we’re talking about was not arrested on a rape charge, Mr. Savarese, but on a wide array of other charges that should see him sent away for a very long time.”

  “What you have this man on, Mr. Coughlin,” Savarese said patiently, as if explaining something to a backward child, “is nothing more than allegations that he stole from drug dealers. He will not spend much time—if, indeed, any—in prison.”

  The waiter appeared with Savarese’s eggs Benedict and Coughlin’s scrapple and scrambled eggs.

  Coughlin had not seen him coming, and when he looked up at him in surprise, he knew from the look on the waiter’s face that he had heard at least the end—the “time in prison”—of Savarese’s last sentence.

  He laid the food before the two of them and fled.

  “I’m surprised you know about the charges,” Coughlin said.

  “And I’m surprised that you got to this animal before I did,” Savarese said. “Perhaps we have both underestimated the other.”

  “I’ve never underestimated you, Mr. Savarese, but I think you may have underestimated me. Or at least the Philadelphia Police Department.”

  “Why would you say that?” Savarese said.

  “Mr. Ronald R. Ketcham is now under the protection of the U.S. Marshals’ Service . . .”

  “I don’t believe I know the name, Mr. Coughlin.”

  “. . . as a material witness to an unlawful abduction on federal property.”

  “As I said, I don’t believe I know the name, Mr. Coughlin.”