Final Justice

by W. E. B Griffin

  (Photo 2 L-R, Washington, Wohl, and Harris) Speaking to this reporter later, Inspector Wohl said it was not his intention to take over the investigation from Lieutenant Jason Washington, “who is beyond question the most skilled homicide investigator I know of,” but rather to “ensure that Lieutenant Washington and his able team leader, Detective Anthony Harris, get whatever assistance they need from not only Special Operations, but the entire police department, so these criminals can be quickly removed from our streets.”

  (Photo 3 L-R, Sabara, Wohl, Pekach, Sgt M. M. Payne, and Capt F. X. Hollaran) Wohl’s deputy, Captain Michael J. Sabara, and Captain David R. Pekach, commanding officer of the elite Highway Patrol, nodded their agreement with both Wohl’s cold determination and with his explanation of the difficulty sometimes encountered—as now—in identifying the perpetrators of a crime.

  “The patrons of the Roy Rogers restaurant were terrorized by the cold brutality of these criminals. Shots were fired. Two people were killed, and everyone else’s life was in danger. It’s regrettable, but I think very understandable, that the horrified witnesses can’t really agree on a description of the men we seek.

  “This is not to say that we won’t apprehend them, and soon, but that it will take a bit longer than we like.”

  Wohl went on to say that “it’s only in the movies that a fingerprint lifted from the scene of a crime can be quickly matched with that of a criminal whose identity is unknown. There are hundreds of thousands of fingerprints in our files, millions in those of the FBI, and the prints we have in our possession will have to be matched to them one at a time until we get a match.”

  Wohl went on to explain that once the people sought are in custody, their fingerprints can be used to prove they were at the scene of the crime, “but until that happens, fingerprints won’t be of immediate use to us.

  “And once we have these people in custody, and can place them in a police lineup, there is no question in my mind—experience shows—that the witnesses to their crime will be able to positively identify them. This crime will not go unpunished.”

  Wohl said that police are already running down “a number of leads,” but declined to elaborate.

  end

  Wohl slid the two sheets of paper across the table to Coughlin. Lowenstein leaned over so that he could read it, too.

  “Magnificent story, Mickey,” Wohl said. “There’s just one little thing wrong with it. All those quotes from me are pure bullshit.”

  “Is the Black Buddha the most skilled homicide investigator you know of, or not?” O’Hara challenged.

  “Of course I am,” Washington said. “Let me see that when you’re finished, Dennis, please.”

  “He is, but I didn’t tell you that,” Wohl said.

  “But if I had asked, you would have said so, right? And I’m right about the fingerprints, right?”

  “But I didn’t even talk to you at the goddamn funeral home!”

  “But if you had, you would have said what I said you said, more or less, right?”

  “This’ll be in the paper tomorrow, Mick?” Lowenstein asked.

  “It will, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it was on page one.”

  “Pity you couldn’t have put in there that we had a late-night conference,” Lowenstein said. “Martin would have loved that.”

  “I didn’t know about the ‘late-night conference’ until I walked in here,” O’Hara said. “When I heard on the command band that everybody was headed to the 700 block of North Second, I thought there was a war on here.”

  “Commissioner Coughlin and myself were conferring privately with Inspector Wohl,” Lowenstein said, “when these underlings coincidentally felt the need for a late-night cup of coffee at this fine establishment.”

  There were chuckles.

  “Nice story, Mickey,” Coughlin said.

  “Presuming the conference is over,” Wohl said, as he got to his feet, “I am going home.” He looked at Matt. “And so are you.”

  Coughlin stood up.

  “Are we square with the tab here?”

  “I’ll get the tab,” Mickey O’Hara said. “My pleasure.”

  “Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and at the mayor’s office at quarter to nine, Matty,” Coughlin ordered. “And I expect you to be nice to your grandmother.”

  “I have, as always,” Jason Washington said, getting to his feet, “thoroughly enjoyed the company of my colleagues. And I am sure you have all profited greatly from the experience. ”

  Detective Harris shook his head, then chuckled, then giggled, and then laughed. That proved contagious, and each of them was smiling, or chuckling, or laughing as they filed out the door onto North Second Street.

  SIX

  [ONE]

  The Hon. Alvin W. Martin looked up from his desk when his executive assistant, Dianna Kerr-Gally, a tall, thin, stylish, thirtyish black woman, slipped into his office.thin,

  "It’s ten past nine, Mr. Mayor.”

  “Is everybody in the conference room?”

  “Just about, but Commissioner Mariani has someone he wants you to meet.”

  She nodded toward the outer office.

  “Sure, send him in,” the mayor replied, with an enthusiasm he really didn’t feel. He had things to do, and the less time spent on the promotion ceremony the better.

  It wasn’t only Commissioner Mariani. He had with him Deputy Commissioner Coughlin and a tall, lean, stern-faced, gray-haired woman in a simple black dress and the young detective who had scored number one.

  “Good morning, Mr. Mayor,” Mariani said.

  “Good morning, Ralph.”

  The mayor smiled at the woman, who returned it with a barely perceptible curling of her lips.

  She looks like that farmer’s wife in the Grant Wood painting.

  What’s that on her dress? Miniature police badges. Three of them.

  “Mr. Mayor,” Coughlin said. “I thought before the program begins that you’d like to meet Mrs. Gertrude Moffitt. . . .”

  “I’m delighted. How do you do, Mrs. Moffitt?”

  She nodded, her lips curled slightly again, but she didn’t say anything.

  “Mrs. Moffitt is the widow of a police officer, and two of her sons died in the line of duty as police officers . . . ,” Coughlin said.

  Well, that explains the three badges.

  “. . . Sergeant John X. Moffitt and Captain Richard C. Moffitt . . . ,” Coughlin went on.

  “That’s a proud tradition, Mrs. Moffitt,” the mayor said. “I’m honored to meet you.”

  She nodded again.

  “. . . and she is Detective Payne’s grandmother,” Coughlin finished.

  “The tradition continues, then,” the mayor said. “This must be a proud moment for you.”

  “If my grandson still carried his father’s name, it would be,” she said.

  What the hell does that mean?

  Detective Payne looked pained.

  Whatever the hell it is, I’m not going to get into it here and now.

  “Since you know full well, Mrs. Moffitt, that police work never ceases, I’m sure you’ll forgive me if I ask the commissioner if there have been any developments in the Roy Rogers case.”

  “I’m afraid not, Mr. Mayor . . .”

  Damn! The press will be in the conference room. It would have been a perfect place and time to announce the cops have finally bagged those animals.

  “. . . but Commissioner Coughlin tells me there was a meeting last night of all the principals of the task force, plus Chief of Detectives Lowenstein.”

  “Really? Well, I hope something good will come from it.”

  “I feel sure that it will, Mr. Mayor,” Coughlin said. “We all feel there will be developments in the very near future.”

  “I hope you’re right, Commissioner,” the mayor said. “Mrs. Moffitt, when we go into the conference room”—he looked at his watch—“and we’re going to have to do that right now, I think it would be very appropriate i
f you were to pin his new badge on your grandson.”

  And a picture like that will certainly make the evening news.

  “All right,” she said.

  “Here it is, Mother Moffitt,” Coughlin said. “That’s Jack’s badge.”

  “That’s Jack’s badge?” she asked, looking at the badge Coughlin was holding out to her.

  “Yes, it is.”

  “You told me, Dennis Coughlin, that it had been buried with him.”

  “I was wrong,” Coughlin said.

  “And where was it all these years? She had it, didn’t she?”

  “Patricia’s Jack’s widow, Mother Moffitt.”

  She snatched the badge out of his hand.

  “Well, at least she won’t have it now,” Mother Moffitt said.

  “If you will all go into the conference room now?” Dianna Kerr-Gally asked, gesturing at a door. “We can get the ceremony under way.”

  When the mayor tried to follow the procession into the conference room, Dianna Kerr-Gally held up her arm, palm extended, to stop him.

  He stopped.

  Dianna Kerr-Gally, using her fingers and mouthing the numbers, counted downward from ten, then signaled the mayor to go into the conference room.

  He walked briskly to the head of the table, where a small lectern had been placed. He looked around the room, smiling, attempting to lock eyes momentarily with everyone.

  There were five promotees, all of whom looked older than Detective Payne, and all but Payne were in uniform. Two of the promotees were gray-haired. All the promotees were accompanied by family and/or friends. Dianna Kerr-Gally had put out the word no more than four per promotee, and apparently that had been widely ignored. The large room was crowded, just about full.

  There were three video cameras at the rear of the room, and at least half a dozen still photographers. One of them was Michael J. O’Hara of the Bulletin.

  I’ll have to remember to thank him for that front-page story about the task force.

  Jesus, is that who I think it is? It damn sure is.

  Brewster C. Payne in the flesh.

  The last time I saw him was on Monday in Washington, in the Senate Dining Room. He was the “something really important has come up” reason our distinguished senior senator was sorry he couldn’t have lunch with me.

  What’s his connection with Detective Payne?

  When Dianna Kerr-Gally came to the lectern to hand him the three-by-five cards from which he would speak, he motioned her close to him and whispered, “The tall WASP in the back of the room?”

  She looked and nodded.

  “His name is Brewster Payne,” she whispered back.

  “I know who he is. Ask him if he can spare me a minute when this is over.”

  She nodded.

  “If I may have your attention, ladies and gentlemen?” the mayor began, raising his voice so that it could be heard over the hubbub in the room.

  The next time we do something like this, there should be a microphone.

  “I realize you’re a busy man, Mr. Payne,” the mayor said, as Dianna Kerr-Gally ushered Brewster Payne into his office. “But I did want to say hello. I don’t think we’ve ever actually met, have we?”

  “I don’t believe we have. But didn’t I see you in Washington on Monday?”

  “Across the dining room,” the mayor said, waving him into a chair. “I need a cup of coffee. Do you have the time?”

  “Thank you very much,” Payne said. “I’d love one.”

  “Dianna, please?”

  “Right away, Mr. Mayor.”

  “Would it be impolitic for me to ask what you and the senator seemed to be talking so intently about?”

  “My firm represents Nesfoods,” Payne said. “The senator chairs the Agricultural Subcommittee. We were talking about tomatoes, United States and Mexican.”

  Nesfoods gave me one hundred thousand for my campaign. I wonder how much they gave to the senator?

  “The tomato growers here are concerned about cheap Mexican tomatoes?”

  “That issue has been resolved by the Free Trade Agreement. What I hoped to do—what I think I did—was convince the senator that it’s in everybody’s best interests for the Department of Agriculture to station inspectors in Nesfoods processing plants in Mexico, so that we can process the tomatoes there, and ship the pulp in tank trucks to the Nesfoods plants here and in California. That will both save Nesfoods a good deal of money and actually increase the quality of the finished product. Apparently, the riper the tomato when processed, the better the pulp.”

  “And what was the problem?”

  “As hard as it is to believe, there are those who are unhappy with the Free Trade Agreement,” Payne said, dryly, “and object to stationing Agriculture Department inspectors on foreign soil.”

  “But after you had your little chat, the senator seemed to see the light?”

  “I hope so, Mr. Mayor.”

  Dianna Kerr-Gally came into the office with a silver coffee service and poured coffee.

  When she had left them alone again, the mayor looked over his coffee cup and said, “I wasn’t aware until this morning that your son was a policeman.”

  “I think of it as the firm’s loss is the city’s gain,” Payne said. “Actually, Matt’s my adopted son. His father—a police sergeant—was killed before he was born. I adopted Matt before he could walk.”

  “You’d rather he would have joined Mawson, Payne, Stockton, McAdoo and Lester?” the mayor asked.

  “Wouldn’t your father prefer to see you in a pulpit?” Payne responded.

  “Whenever I see him, he shakes his head sadly,” the mayor said. “I don’t think he’s given up hope that I will see the error of my ways.”

  “Neither have I given up hope,” Payne said. “But in the meantime, I am as proud of Matt as I daresay your father is of you.”

  “I like to think public service is an honorable, even noble, calling.”

  “So does Matt,” Payne said. “He thinks of the police as a thin blue line, all that separates society from the barbarians.”

  “Unfortunately, he’s probably right,” the mayor said.

  Payne set his cup down.

  “I don’t want to keep you, Mr. Payne,” the mayor said. “But I did want to say hello. Could we have lunch one day?”

  “I’d be delighted,” Payne said. “And thank you for the coffee.”

  He stood up, shook hands with the mayor, and walked out of the room.

  Commissioner Mariani told me that if I didn’t send that young man to Homicide as promised I could expect trouble from the Fraternal Order of Police. He didn’t tell me that the FOP would be represented, pro bono, by Mawson, Payne, Stockton, McAdoo & Lester.

  [TWO]

  The Hon. Eileen McNamara Solomon, Philadelphia’s district attorney, devoutly believed that at least seventy percent of the nurses under fifty in the surgical department of the hospital of the University of Pennsylvania would rush to console Benjamin A. Solomon, M.D., the moment he started to feel sorry for himself because his wife-the-D.A. had become careless about her appearance.

  So, although she was always too busy to waste a lot of time in a beauty parlor, she made it to Cathleen’s Coiffeurs every Tuesday at 8:00 A.M., watched what she ate, and, weather permitting, jogged on the Parkway for an hour starting at 7:00 A.M. Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.

  The result was a rather tall, lithe forty-nine-year-old, who wore her blonde hair cut stylishly but short, and whose husband had no reason to see if the grass was greener in someone else’s bedroom.

  After graduation—third in her class—from the University of Pennsylvania School of Law, and passing the bar examination, Eileen McNamara had declined offers to join any of the several more or less prestigious law firms because she suspected she was going to become the Token Female.

  Instead, she took a job with the Public Defender’s Office, which had the responsibility of providing legal counsel to the indigent. She had quickly prov
en herself to be a highly competent courtroom lawyer.

  But she had always been a little uncomfortable after she had convinced a jury that there was reasonable doubt that some miserable sonofabitch had actually pistol-whipped a grandmother while in the process of robbing her corner grocery, or some other miserable sonofabitch had actually been pushing drugs on grammar school kids.

  And she had been unhappy in the company of her colleagues, who almost universally believed that having been born into poverty, or to a drug-addict mother, or of Afro-American /Puerto Rican/Latin/Outer Mongolian/Whatever parentage was an excuse to commit robbery, rape, and murder, and to meanwhile support oneself in outrageous luxury by selling what were known as “prohibited substances” to others.

  So she had changed sides. Philadelphia’s district attorney was delighted to offer Miss Eileen McNamara a position as an assistant district attorney not only because she was a good-looking blonde, but also because her record of successfully defending people his assistant D.A.s had prosecuted unsuccessfully had made them look even more incompetent than they actually were.

  She had been somewhat happier in the D.A.’s office, but not much. The cases she would have liked to prosecute seemed to get assigned to the “more experienced” of her fellow assistant D.A.s, and the cases she was assigned to prosecute were—she quickly figured out—the ones her fellow assistant D.A.s didn’t want because the cases were either weak or politically dangerous or both.

  But she did her best with the cases she was given, and managed to convince one jury after another that not only was there not any reasonable doubt that some miserable sonofabitch had done what the cops had said he or she had done, but that he or she had done it with full knowledge of what he or she was doing, and in the belief he or she was going to get away with it, and therefore did not deserve much pity from the criminal justice system.

  Assistant District Attorney McNamara quickly discovered— as something of a surprise—that as a general rule of thumb, she liked the cops. By and large, they were really what they considered themselves to be, a thin blue line protecting society from the barbarians.