Final Justice

by W. E. B Griffin

  Not only was Wachenhut’s regional vice president for the Philadelphia area resident in one of the luxury apartments behind the striped-pole barrier, but so were executives of other corporations, which employed large numbers of Wachenhut Security personnel.

  Number 9 Stockton Place, for example, a triplex constructed behind the facades of four of the twelve pre-Revolutionary brownstone buildings on the east side of Stockton Place, was owned by NB Properties, Inc., the principal stockholder of which was Chadwick Thomas Nesbitt III and was occupied by Mr. and Mrs. Chadwick T. Nesbitt IV.

  Mr. Nesbitt IV was working his way upward in the corporate ranks—he had recently been named a vice president—of Nesfoods International, of which his father was chairman of the executive committee. Four of Nesfoods International’s Philadelphia-area manufacturing facilities employed the Wachenhut Corporation to provide the necessary security, as did many other Nesfoods establishments around the world.

  It therefore behooved Wachenhut to put its best security foot forward, so to speak, on Stockton Place.

  It wasn’t only a question of providing faultless around-the -clock security—Wachenhut had learned how to do that splendidly over the years—but to do so in such a manner as not to antagonize those being protected, and their guests.

  The senior security officer on duty in the shack when the Porsche Carrera rolled up was a retired soldier who had spent twenty years in the Corps in the military police. His retirement pay wasn’t going as far as he’d thought it would, and since he had enlisted at seventeen and retired at thirty-eight, he’d still been a young man who wanted to work.

  Wachenhut had been glad to have him, assigned him— with a raise in pay—to Stockton Place after only six months on the job, and made him a supervisor eighteen months after he had joined the firm. His superiors thought he would be capable of handling the sometimes delicate Stockton Place assignment, and he had proven them right.

  When the silver Porsche Carrera slowed as it approached the barrier, the senior security officer on duty nodded at it, then spoke softly to the trainee.

  “Now this guy doesn’t look like he’s either about to break into an apartment, or try to sell something. Very few burglars drive cars like that. So you smile at him, ask him who he wishes to see, and then for his name. Then you say ‘Thank you very much, sir,’ raise the barrier, and call whoever he said he’s going to see and tell them he’s coming.”

  “Got it,” the trainee said, and stepped out of the guard shack.

  “Good evening, sir,” he said to the driver. “How may I help you?”

  “Matthew Payne to see Mr. Nesbitt,” Matt said.

  “Thank you, sir,” the trainee said, and stepped inside the guard shack, and pushed the button that raised the barrier. Before the Porsche was past the barrier, the Wachenhut supervisor was on the interior telephone.

  “Like this,” he said, and then when the phone was answered, said, “This is the gate. We have just passed a Mr. Payne to see Mr. Nesbitt.”

  Matt pulled the Porsche to the curb in front of Number 9, got out, walked to the red-painted door, and pushed the doorbell.

  The door was opened almost immediately by Mr. Nesbitt IV, who looked very much like Matt Payne but a little shorter and a little heavier.

  “Hello, you ugly bastard,” he said. Then he raised his voice. “Dump the dope! The cops are here!”

  Then he embraced Matt.

  “Thanks for coming. And for Christ’s sake, behave yourself. ”

  The ground floor foyer of Number 9 was open to a skylight in the roof, invisible from the street. To the right was the door to the elevator, and to the left the door to the stairs. There were balconies on the first and second floors of the atrium.

  Mrs. Chadwick T. Nesbitt IV, the former Daphne Elizabeth Browne, known for most of her life as “Daffy,” a tall, attractive blonde, appeared on the upper balcony, looked down, smiled, and called, “Matt, how nice! Come up.”

  Matt and Chad got on the elevator, and when the door closed, and he was reasonably sure he couldn’t be heard, Matt asked, “ ‘How nice’? Is she into the sauce?”

  Chad laughed.

  “Looketh not ye gift horse in ye mouth,” he said.

  The elevator stopped, and the door opened, revealing the living room of the apartment. Floor-to-ceiling tinted glass walls provided a view of the Delaware River, the Benjamin Franklin Bridge, and on the New Jersey shore, mounted on now-disused buildings, a huge illuminated sign showing a steaming bowl of soup and the legend “Nesfoods Delivers Taste and Nutrition!”

  Daffy Nesbitt kissed Matt on the cheek, then turned and cried, “Terry, this is Chad’s and my oldest friend in the world.”

  Sitting on the thickly carpeted floor with Miss Penelope Alice Nesbitt, aged twenty-two months, was Terry Davis.

  She smiled at Matt’s pleased surprise.

  Matt looked at Mrs. Nesbitt.

  “Get it over with, Daffy,” he said.

  “Get what over with?”

  “Whatever you’re going to say next in the mistaken belief that it will either be clever or terribly amusing.”

  “Hey, Matt, she’s being nice,” Chad said.

  “That’s what worries me,” Matt said.

  “Hello, again,” Terry said.

  “Again?” Daffy asked.

  “We met this morning,” Terry said.

  “I’d tell Daffy we had breakfast together, but she would read something into that,” Matt said, smiling at Terry.

  “Now who’s being clever and terribly amusing, you prick?” Daffy snapped.

  “Daffy, please, try to control your vulgarity in front of my goddaughter,” Matt said, unctuously.

  Terry Davis laughed.

  “Is she really?” she asked. “Your goddaughter?”

  “Yeah,” Matt said.

  “She’s adorable.”

  “Yeah.”

  “What do you mean you had breakfast?” Daffy asked.

  “At the Ritz-Carlton, no less,” Matt said.

  “Anybody for a drink?” Chad asked.

  “You got any champagne?” Matt asked.

  “You hate champagne,” Daffy said.

  “Not on those days on which I get promoted, I don’t,” Matt said. “But I’ll settle for scotch.”

  “Promoted to what?” Daffy asked.

  “To sergeant, thank you for asking.”

  “No shit! Hey, good for you, Matt!” Chad said. He went behind a wet bar and came up with a bottle of champagne. “I knew there was one in here.”

  “Terry,” Daffy said, “Matt is a police officer.”

  “I know. ‘One of Philadelphia’s finest,’ ” Terry said.

  “Who said that?” Daffy asked in disbelief.

  “The monsignor. What was his name?”

  “Schneider,” Matt said. “I think he’s a closet cop groupie.”

  He dropped to the carpet and picked up the toddler, and tickled her.

  She shrieked in delight.

  “Matt, you know you’re not supposed to do that with her,” Daffy said.

  “She obviously hates it,” Matt said. “What have you got against tickling?”

  He nonetheless handed the child to Terry and got up.

  “It hyperexcites her,” Daffy said.

  “Oh,” Matt said.

  The champagne cork popped, and Matt walked to the wet bar and took a glass, then handed it to Terry.

  “Thank you,” she said. “Congratulations.”

  “Thank you,” he said, and turned to Daffy. “Yes, thank you very much, I’d love to.”

  “You’d love to what?”

  “Stay for supper,” Matt said.

  “Would you believe, wiseass, that Chad tried to call you to ask you to supper? He said they said you were out of town, and they didn’t know when you’d be back,” Daffy said.

  “I talked to him, but I didn’t know if he could make it,” Chad said. “So I didn’t tell you.”

  “Daffy has this terribl
e habit of offering me up to the ugliest women,” Matt said. “I think they pay her.”

  “That’s what I thought she was doing to me when she said someone was coming she really wanted me to meet,” Terry said. “You’re not nearly as ugly as I thought you would be.”

  “Then you can’t ask for your money back, can you?”

  Terry laughed.

  “You really are a bastard, aren’t you?” she asked.

  He took a second glass of champagne from Chad, then, making a show of thinking it over carefully, shrugged and handed it to Daffy.

  “In these circumstances, I will give you a walk,” he said.

  “Which means what?”

  “That tonight I will not wring your neck for playing cupid,” Matt said. “Half the police department already knows I’m in love with Terry.”

  “Damn you, you’re embarrassing Terry!”

  “Are you embarrassed, Terry?” Matt asked.

  “I’m still having trouble getting used to the idea that you’re a policeman,” she said. “And that you showed up here. Did you know I was here?”

  “Of course. I had you under surveillance from the time you left the Savoy-Plaza. That man in the overcoat who exposed himself to you on Broad Street? One of my better men.”

  Terry laughed.

  “Baloney!” she said.

  “I’ll prove it to you. He has a camera . . . delicacy forbids my telling where. I’ll send you a print.”

  He mimed opening an overcoat, focused his hips, and then mimed pushing a shutter cord.

  “Say ‘Cheese.’ Click. Gotcha!”

  Chad laughed.

  “Oh, God!” Terry said.

  “I can’t believe you did that!” Daffy said.

  “But you’re smiling, Daffy darling!”

  “We thought we’d eat in,” Daffy said, quickly changing the subject. “Terry has to be at the airport at eleven-thirty. I bought some shrimp at the Twelfth Street Market, but Monday the cook is off.”

  “That’s Daffy’s way, Terry,” Matt said, “of asking whether I will be good enough to prepare my world famous Wild Turkey shrimp.”

  “Wild Turkey shrimp?”

  “Over wild rice,” Matt said. “Yes, Daffy, I will. But you’ll have to peel the slimy crustaceans. That’s beneath the dignity of a master chef such as myself.”

  “I’ve got to give Penny her bath,” Daffy complained.

  “I’ll peel the shrimp,” Terry said. “I have to see this. Wild Turkey—you’re talking about the whiskey? . . .” Matt nodded. “. . . shrimp?”

  “Bring your glass, I’ll bring the bottle. The kitchen for some unknown reason is on the ground floor.”

  Matt led Terry into the kitchen, turned on the fluorescent lights, and then took his jacket off and laid it on a counter. Then he took his pistol from its shoulder holster, held it toward the floor, away from Terry, removed the clip, and then ejected the round in the chamber.

  “I’m impressed,” Terry said. “If that was your intention.”

  He gave her a dirty look but didn’t reply. He reloaded the ejected round in the magazine, put the magazine in the pistol, the pistol in the shoulder holster, then shrugged out of that and hung it on an empty hook of the pot rack above the stainless-steel stove.

  Then he looked at her.

  “I wasn’t trying to impress you. I don’t like leaving guns around with a round in the chamber.”

  “Sorry,” she said, and then asked, “What kind of a gun is that?”

  He looked at her for a moment before deciding the question was a peace offering.

  “It’s an Officer’s Model Colt,” Matt said. “A .45. A cut-down version of the old Army .45.”

  “That’s what all the cops carry?”

  “No. Most Philadelphia cops carry Glocks. They’re semiautomatic, like this one, but nine-millimeter, not .45.”

  “Then?”

  “I think this a better weapon.”

  “And they let you do that?”

  “With great reluctance. I had to go through a lot of bureaucratic bullsh—difficulty before I got permission to carry this.”

  “What is it with Colt?” Terry asked.

  “Excuse me?”

  “There’s some sort of significance, obviously. Stan actually changed his name legally to Colt. And he always carries a Colt automatic in his films.”

  “What was his name before?”

  “Coleman.”

  “Stan Colt, née Stanley Coleman?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Whatever works, I guess,” Matt said, chuckling. “To answer your question, I suppose there is a certain romance to ‘Colt.’ They call the old Colt .44 revolver ‘The Gun That Won the West,’ and then the Colt Model 1911—the big brother of my pistol—was the service weapon right through Vietnam. Now the services use a nine-millimeter Beretta.”

  “You ever shoot anybody with that pistol?”

  “Not with that one.”

  “But you have shot someone?”

  “Why don’t we just drop this subject right here?” Matt flared.

  “Sorry,” she said, offended and sarcastic.

  He found a plastic bag of shrimp in the refrigerator, took it to the sink, tore the bag open, and started to peel them.

  After a long moment, Terry went and stood beside him and took a handful of shrimp.

  He glanced at her but said nothing.

  They peeled shrimp in silence for perhaps three minutes, and then Matt said, “That’s not the first time you’ve peeled shrimp.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “Most people don’t know how to squeeze the tail that way.”

  “My dad has a boat. We have a place on Catalina Island. I practically grew up peeling shrimp.”

  “Your father’s a movie star? Producer? Executive?”

  “Lawyer,” she said. “With connections in the industry. Enough to get me my first job with GAM.”

  “So’s mine,” Matt said. “A lawyer with connections.”

  "Daffy told me—when she was selling me on the blind date.”

  “Actually, he’s my adoptive father,” Matt said, as he took a large skillet from an overhead rack.

  “Your parents were divorced? Mine too.”

  “My father was killed before I was born,” Matt said. “He was a cop, a sergeant named John X. Moffitt, and he answered a silent alarm and got himself shot. My mother married my dad—that sounds funny, doesn’t it?—about six months later. He’d lost his wife in a car crash. A really good guy. He adopted me legally.”

  “Is that why you’re a policeman? Because of your father?”

  “That’s one of the reasons, certainly,” Matt said, as he unwrapped a stick of butter. “I like being a cop.”

  “Daffy doesn’t approve,” Terry said.

  “I know. Daffy would be delighted—because of Chad—if I married a nice young woman, such as yourself, went to law school, and took my proper role in society.”

  “Yeah,” Terry replied thoughtfully. “I picked up a little of that. Tell me about your promotion.”

  “The sergeant’s examination list came out today,” Matt said. “With underwhelming modesty, I was number one, and get to pick my assignment.”

  “Which is?”

  “Homicide.”

  “What is that, some sort of a death wish?”

  “Huh?”

  “Homicide sounds dangerous,” she said. “Killers, right?”

  “I never thought about it,” Matt said. “But now that I do . . . Homicide’s not dangerous. Being on the street is dangerous. My father was a uniform sergeant in a district. That’s dangerous. Cops get hurt answering domestic-disturbance calls. Stopping speeders. Homicide’s nothing like that. You’ve been watching too many Stan Colt movies.”

  “I don’t really understand.”

  “Street cops face the bad guys every day. Last night, a uniform cop answered a robbery-in-progress call at the Roy Rogers restaurant on Broad Street. One of the two bad g
uys shoved a revolver under his bulletproof vest and killed him. The first homicide guy didn’t get to the scene for maybe fifteen minutes. By then, the bad guys were long gone.”

  She looked at him but said nothing.

  “The trick to this is to sauté them slowly in butter with a little Cajun seasoning,” he said. “You add the booze just before serving, and flame it. And since the rice isn’t done, we can put this on hold and have another glass of wine while we wait for the rice and the bathers to finish with the bathee.”

  “What about when they arrest . . . the bad guys? Isn’t that dangerous?”

  “First you have to find out who the bad guys are. Then make sure you can—to the district attorney’s satisfaction— make the case against them. Then, if they’re not already in the Roundhouse surrounded by cops, if you have to go out to arrest them, you take enough uniforms with you to make sure nobody gets hurt.”

  “That’s not much like one of Stan’s movies, is it?” she asked.

  “Not much,” he agreed, as he filled her glass.

  “Then why does Homicide have the prestige? You were as proud as a peacock to tell me you were going to Homicide.”

  “Homicide detectives are the best detectives in the department, ” he said. “When you’re trying somebody for a capital offense, all the ‘t’s have to be crossed and the ‘i’s dotted. There’s no room for mistakes. People who kill people should pay for it.”

  “And Homicide sergeants?”

  “Modesty precludes my answering that question.”

  “Modest you ain’t, Sergeant.”

  “Sergeant I ain’t, either. I’m just number one on The List. God only knows when I’ll actually get promoted and sent to Homicide.”

  “And in the meantime, you’ll have to do something beneath your dignity, like protecting Stan from his adoring fans? Or vice versa.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Now that we’re going to be professionally associated, I think I should tell you that Stan likes young women. Very young women.”

  “That ought to go over big with the monsignor and the cardinal. And I’m not—I am now really sorry to say—going to be involved in that. That’s Dignitary Protection, and sometimes, since the subject came up, that can be really dangerous. Dignitaries, celebrities, attract lunatics like a magnet.”