The Victim

by W. E. B Griffin

  “What did I say before?”

  “About him probably fucking somebody he shouldn’t have,” Victor said. “Those really good-looking guys are always getting in trouble doing that.”

  “Not all of us,” Charles said.

  Victor laughed.

  Two minutes later he said, “Oh, shit, he’s going right downtown.”

  “Is that a problem?”

  “The traffic is a bitch,” Victor said.

  “Don’t lose him.”

  “If I do, then what? We know where he lives?”

  “We do. But I don’t want to do it there unless we have to.”

  Victor did not lose Anthony J. DeZego in traffic. He was a good wheelman. Charles knew of none better, which was one of the reasons he had brought Victor in on this. They had worked together before, too, and Charles had learned that Victor didn’t get excited when that was a bad thing to do.

  Thirty minutes after they had picked up DeZego—the traffic was that bad—DeZego pulled the Cadillac in before the entrance to the Warwick Hotel on South 16th Street in downtown Philadelphia, got out of the car, handed the doorman a bill, and then went into a cocktail lounge at the north end of the hotel.

  “A real big shot,” Victor said. “Too big to park his car himself.”

  “I’d like to know where it gets parked,” Charles said. “That might be useful.”

  “I’ll see what I can see,” Victor said.

  “You’ll drive around the block, right?”

  “Right.”

  Charles got out of the Pontiac and walked past the door to the cocktail lounge. He saw DeZego slip into a chair by a table right by the entrance, shake hands with three men already sitting there, and jokingly kiss the hand of a long-haired blonde who wasn’t wearing a bra.

  I hope she was worth it, pal, Charles thought.

  The Cadillac de Ville was still in front of the hotel entrance when Charles got there, engine running. But he hadn’t walked much farther when, casually glancing over his shoulder, he saw it move away from the curb and then make the first left. A heavily jowled man in a bellboy’s uniform was at the wheel.

  Charles crossed the street, now walking quickly, to see if he could—if not catch up with it—at least get some idea where it had gone.

  Heavy traffic on narrow streets helped him. He actually got ahead of the car and had to stand on a corner, glancing at his watch, until it passed him again. Two short blocks farther down, he saw it turn into a parking garage.

  He waited nearby until, a couple of minutes later, the jowly bellboy came out and waddled back toward the hotel. Charles followed him on the other side of the street and, when the bellboy came close to the hotel, timed his pace, crossing the street so that he would be outside the cocktail lounge. He saw the bellboy hand DeZego the keys to the Cadillac, then saw DeZego drop them in the pocket of his jacket.

  He walked back to the parking garage and stood near the corner, examining the building carefully. Somewhat surprised, he saw that the pedestrian entrance to the building was via a one-way gate, like those in the subways in New York, a system of rotating gates, ceiling-high that turned only one way, letting people in but not out.

  He thought that over, wondering how the system worked, how a pedestrian—or somebody who had just parked his car—got out of the building. Then he saw how it worked. There was a pedestrian exit way down beside the attendant’s booth. You had to walk past the attendant to get out. The system, he decided, was designed to reduce theft, at least theft by people who looked like thieves.

  He walked to the garage and passed through the one-way gate. Inside was a door. He pushed it open and found two more doors. One had ONE painted on it in huge letters, and the other read, STAIRS. He went through the ONE door and found himself on the ground floor of the garage. The door closed automatically behind him, and there was no way to open it.

  DeZego’s Cadillac was not on the ground floor. He went up the vehicular ramp to the second floor. DeZego’s car wasn’t there, either, but he saw that one could enter through the door to the stairwell. He walked up the stairs to the third floor. Same thing. No brown Cadillac but he could get back on the stairs. He found the Caddy on the fourth floor. Then he went back into the stairwell and up another flight of stairs. It turned out to be the last; the top floor was open.

  He walked to the edge and looked down, then went into the stairwell again and walked all the way back to the ground floor. The attendant looked up but didn’t seem particularly interested in him.

  I don’t look as if I’ve just ripped off a stereo, Charles thought.

  He walked back to South 16th Street and stood on the corner catty-corner to wait for Victor to come around the block again.

  Then he saw the cops. Two of them in an unmarked car parked across the street from the hotel, watching the door to the cocktail lounge.

  Were they watching Brother DeZego? Or somebody with him? Or somebody entirely different?

  Victor showed up, and when Charles raised his hand and smiled, Victor stopped the Pontiac long enough for Charles to get in.

  “The Caddy’s in a parking garage,” Charles said.

  “Penn Services—I saw it,” Victor said.

  “There,” Charles said.

  “I also saw two cops,” Victor said. “Plainclothes. Detectives. Whatever.”

  “If they were in plainclothes, how could you tell they were cops?”

  “Shit!” Victor chuckled.

  “I saw them,” Charles said.

  “And?”

  “And nothing. For all we know, they’re the Vice Squad. Or looking for pickpockets. Take a drive for five minutes and then drop me at the garage. Then drive around again and again, until you can find a place to park on the street outside the parking garage. You can pick me up when I’m finished.”

  “How long is this going to take?”

  “However long it takes Lover Boy to leave that bar,” Charles said, and then, “How would I get from the garage exit to the airport?”

  “I’m driving,” Victor said.

  “I’m toying with the idea of driving myself in Lover Boy’s car,” Charles said. “I think I would attract less attention from the attendant if I drove out, instead of carrying the bag.”

  “Then leave the bag,” Victor said.

  “I’ve already walked out of there once,” Charles said. “He might remember, especially if I was carrying a bag the second time. I’m not sure what I’ll do. Whatever seems best.”

  “And if you do decide to drive, what do you want me to do?”

  “First, you tell me which way I turn to get to the airport,” Charles said.

  “Left, then the next left, then the next right. That’ll put you on South Broad Street. You just stay on it. There’ll be signs.”

  “If you see me drive out, follow me. As soon as you can, without attracting attention, get in front of me and I’ll follow you.”

  “Okay,” Victor said.

  Victor then doubled back, driving slowly through the heavy traffic until he was close to the Penn Services parking garage. Then he pulled to the curb and Charles got out. He opened the rear door, took out his carry-on bag, held it over his shoulder, and crossed the street to the pedestrian entrance to the garage, where he went through the one-way gate.

  There is a basic flaw in my brilliant planning, he thought as he walked up the stairs to the fourth floor. Lover Boy may send Jowls the Bellboy to fetch his Caddy.

  When he reached the fourth floor, he saw that there were windows from which he more than likely could look down at the street and see who was coming for the car.

  If Jowls comes for it, I’ll just have to walk down the stairs and get to the hotel before Jowls does, or at least before Lover Boy leaves the bar to get into the car, and follow him wherever he goes next. If the attendant remembers me, so what? Nothing will have happened here, anyway.

  Charles took his handkerchief out and wiped the concrete windowsill clean, so that he wouldn’t soil his Burb
erry, and then settled down to wait.

  Four young men, one much younger than the other three, each with a revolver concealed somewhere under their neat business suits, stood around a filing cabinet in the outer office of the Police Commissioner of the City of Philadelphia, drinking coffee from plastic cups and trying to stay out of the way.

  Two of them were sergeants, one was a detective, and one—the young one—was an officer, the lowest rank in the police hierarchy.

  Both sergeants and the detective were, despite their relative youth, veteran police officers. One of the sergeants had taken and passed the examination for promotion to lieutenant; the detective had taken and passed the examination for sergeant; and both were waiting for their promotions to take effect. The other sergeant had two months before being promoted from detective. The young man had not been on the job long enough even to be eligible to take the examination for promotion to either corporal or detective, which were comparable ranks, and the first step up from the bottom.

  They all had comparable jobs, however. They all worked, as a sort of a police equivalent to a military aide-de-camp, for very senior police supervisors. Their bosses had all been summoned to a meeting with the Commissioner and the Deputy Commissioner of Operations, and for the past hour had been sitting around the long, wooden table in the Commissioner’s conference room.

  Tom Lenihan, the sergeant who was waiting for his promotion to lieutenant to become effective, was carried on the books as “driver” to Chief Inspector Dennis V. Coughlin, generally acknowledged to be the most influential of the fourteen Chief Inspectors in the Department, and reliably rumored as about to become a Deputy Commissioner.

  Sergeant Stanley M. Lipshultz, who had gone to night school at Temple, had passed the bar exam a week before his promotion to sergeant. He was “driver” to Chief Inspector Robert Fisher, who headed the Special Investigations Division of the Police Department.

  Detective Harry McElroy, soon to be a sergeant, was carried on the books as “driver” to Chief Inspector Matt Lowenstein, who was in charge of all the detectives in the Philadelphia Police Department.

  Officer Matthew W. Payne, a tall, muscular young man who looked, dressed, and spoke very much like the University of Pennsylvania fraternity man he had been six months before, was carried on the manning charts as Special Assistant to Staff Inspector Peter Wohl, who was Commanding Officer of the newly formed Special Operations Division.

  It was highly unusual for a rookie to be assigned anywhere but a district, most often as one of the two officers assigned to a radio patrol wagon, much less to work directly, and in civilian clothes, for a senior supervisor. There were several reasons for Officer Matthew Payne’s out-of-the-ordinary assignment as Special Assistant to Staff Inspector Wohl, but primary among them was that Mayor Jerry Carlucci had so identified his role in the Department to the press.

  What Mayor Jerry Carlucci had to say about what went on within the Police Department had about as much effect as if Moses had carried it down from a mountaintop chiseled on stone tablets.

  The mayor had spent most of his life as a cop, rising from police officer to police commissioner before running for mayor. He held the not unreasonable views that one, he knew as much about what was good for, or bad for, the Police Department as anybody in it; and two, he was the mayor and as such was charged with the efficient administration of all functions of the city government. It wasn’t, as he had told just about all the senior police supervisors at one time or another, that he “was some goddamned politician butting in on something he didn’t know anything about.”

  Officer Payne had been assigned, right out of the Police Academy, to Special Operations before his status as Special Assistant had been made official by Mayor Carlucci, and it could be reasonably argued that that assignment had been blatant nepotism.

  The assignment had been arranged by Chief Inspector Coughlin, and there had been a lot of talk about that in the upper echelons of the Department. Officer Payne had grown up calling Chief Inspector Coughlin Uncle Denny, although they were not related by blood or marriage.

  Chief Inspector Coughlin had gone through the Police Academy with a young Korean War veteran named John Xavier Moffitt. They had become best friends. As a young sergeant, while answering a silent burglar alarm at a West Philadelphia service station, John X. Moffitt had been shot to death.

  Two months later his widow had been delivered of a son. A year after that she had remarried, and her husband had adopted Sergeant Moffitt’s son as his own. Denny Coughlin, who had never married, had kept in touch with his best friend’s widow and her son over the years, serving as sort of a bridge between the boy and his natural father’s family.

  The bridge had crossed a stormy chasm. Johnny Moffitt’s mother, Gertrude Moffitt, whose late husband had been a retired police captain, was known as Mother Moffitt. She was a devout Irish Catholic and had never forgiven Patricia Sullivan Moffitt, Johnny’s widow, for what she considered a sinful betrayal of her heritage. Not only had she married out of the church, to an Episcopalian, a wealthy, socially prominent attorney, but she had abandoned the Holy Mother Church herself and acquiesced to the rearing of her son as a Protestant, and even his education at Philadelphia’s Episcopal Academy.

  When Mother Moffitt had lost her second son, Captain Richard C. “Dutch” Moffitt, commanding officer of the Highway Patrol, to a stickup vermin’s bullet six months before, she had pointedly excluded Patricia Sullivan Moffitt Payne’s name from the family list for seating in St. Dominic’s Church for Dutch’s funeral mass.

  The day after Captain Dutch Moffitt had been laid to rest, Matthew W. Payne went to the City Administration Building and joined the Police Department.

  Chief Inspector Dennis V. Coughlin had been nearly as unhappy about this as had been Brewster Cortland Payne II, Matt’s adoptive father. It was clear to both of them why he had done so. Part of it was because of what had happened to his Uncle Dutch, and part of it was because, weeks before he was to enter the Marine Corps as a second lieutenant, they had found something wrong with his eyes disqualifying him for Marine service.

  The Marines, in other words, had told him that they had found him wanting as a man. He could prove to himself, and the world, that he was indeed a man by becoming a cop, in the footsteps of his father and uncle.

  It was not, in Denny Coughlin’s eyes, a very good reason to become a cop. But he and Brewster C. Payne, during a long lunch at the Union League, had decided between them that there was nothing they could, or perhaps even should, do about it. Matt was a bright lad who would soon come to his senses and realize (possibly very soon, when he was still going through the Academy) that he wasn’t cut out for a career as a policeman. With his brains and education, he should follow in Brewster C. Payne’s footsteps and become a lawyer.

  But Matt Payne had not dropped out of the Police Academy, and as graduation grew near, Dennis V. Coughlin thought long and hard about what to do about him. He had never forgotten the night it had been his duty to tell Patricia Sullivan Moffitt that her husband had been shot to death. Now he had no intention of having to tell Patricia Sullivan Moffitt Payne that something had happened on the job to her son.

  Shortly before Matt was to graduate from the Police Academy, at the mayor’s “suggestion” (which had, of course, the effect of a papal bull), the Police Department organized a new unit, Special Operations. Its purpose was to experiment with new concepts of law enforcement, essentially the flooding of high-crime areas with well-trained policemen equipped with the very latest equipment and technology and tied in with a special arrangement with the district attorney to push the arrested quickly through the criminal-justice system.

  Mayor Carlucci, a power in politics far beyond the city limits, had arranged for generous federal grants to pay for most of it.

  The mayor had also “suggested” the appointment of Staff Inspector Peter Wohl as commanding officer of Special Operations. Peter Wohl was the youngest of the thirty-odd staff inspectors in
the Department. Staff inspectors, who rank immediately above captains and immediately below full inspectors, were generally regarded as super detectives. They handled the more difficult investigations, especially those of political corruption, but they rarely, if ever, were given the responsibility of command.

  There was muttering about special treatment and nepotism vis-à-vis Wohl’s appointment too. A division the size of the new Special Operations Division, which was to take over Highway Patrol, too, should have had at least an inspector, and probably a chief inspector, as its commander. Wohl, although universally regarded as a good and unusually bright cop, was in his thirties and only a staff inspector. People remembered that when Mayor Carlucci was working his way up through the ranks, his rabbi had been August Wohl, Peter Wohl’s father, now a retired chief inspector.

  It was also said that Wohl’s appointment had more to do with his relationship with Arthur J. Nelson than with anything else. Nelson, who owned the Philadelphia Ledger and WGHA-TV, had put all the power of his newspaper and television station against Jerry Carlucci during his campaign for the mayoralty. And it was known that Nelson loathed and detested Wohl, blaming him for making it public knowledge that his son, who had been murdered, was both homosexual and had shared his luxury apartment with a black lover. Right after that had come out, Nelson had had to put his wife in a private psychiatric hospital in Connecticut, and Peter Wohl had made an enemy for life.

  Those who knew Jerry Carlucci at all knew that he believed “the enemies of my enemies are my friends.”

  Denny Coughlin was one of Peter Wohl’s admirers. He believed that the real reason Wohl had been given Special Operations was because Jerry Carlucci thought he was the best man for the job, period. He was careful without being timid; innovative without going overboard; and, like Coughlin himself, an absolute straight arrow.

  And Denny Coughlin had decided that the safest place to hide young Matt Payne—until he realized that he really shouldn’t be a cop—was under Peter Wohl’s wing. Wohl didn’t think Payne was cut out to be a cop, either. He went to work for Wohl, as sort of a clerk, with additional duties as a gofer. It would be, Denny Coughlin believed, only a matter of time until Matt came to his senses and turned in his resignation.