The Victim

by W. E. B Griffin

  And then Payne got the Northwest Philadelphia serial rapist. While he was delivering a package of papers to Wohl’s apartment in Chestnut Hill late at night, he had spotted, by blind luck, the van everybody was looking for. The driver had tried to run him down. Payne had drawn his pistol and fired at the van, putting a bullet through the brain of the driver. Inside the van was a naked woman, right on the edge of becoming the scumbag’s next mutilated victim.

  The first car (of twenty) to answer the radio call—“Assist officer, police by phone. Report of shots fired and a hospital case”—was M-Mary One, the mayoral limousine, a black Cadillac. Jerry Carlucci had been headed to his Chestnut Hill home from a Sons of Italy banquet in South Philly and was five blocks away when the call came over the police radio.

  By the time the first reporter—Michael J. “Mickey” O’Hara of the Philadelphia Bulletin, generally regarded as a friend of the Police Department—arrived at the crime scene, Mayor Carlucci was prepared for him. In the next edition of the Bulletin there was a four-column front-page picture of the mayor, his arm around Officer Matt Payne and his suit jacket open just wide enough to remind the voters that even though he was now the mayor, His Honor still rushed to the scene of crimes carrying a snub-nosed revolver on his belt.

  In the story that went with the photograph, Officer Payne was described by the mayor as both the Special Assistant to the commanding officer of Special Operations and “the type of well-educated, courageous, highly motivated young police officer Commissioner Czernich is assigning to Special Operations.”

  Matt Payne, who was perfectly aware that his role in the shooting was far less heroic than painted in the newspapers, had been prepared to be held in at least mild scorn, and possibly even contempt by his new peers, the small corps of “drivers.” He had known even before he joined the Department that the “drivers,” people like Sergeant Tom Lenihan, who was Denny Coughlin’s driver, had been chosen for that duty because they were seen as unusually bright young officers who had proven their ability on the streets and were destined for high ranks.

  Working for senior supervisors, drivers were exposed to the responsibilities of senior officers, the responsibilities they, themselves, would assume later in their careers. They had earned their jobs, Matt reasoned, where he had been given his, and there was bound to be justifiable resentment toward him on their part.

  That hadn’t happened. He was accepted by them. He thought the most logical explanation of this was that Tom Lenihan had put in a good word for him. Tom obviously thought that Denny Coughlin could walk on water if he wanted to, and could do no wrong, even if that meant special treatment for his old buddy’s rookie son.

  But that wasn’t really the case. Part of it was that it was difficult to dislike Matt Payne. He was a pleasant young man whose respect for the others was clear without being obsequious. But the real reason, which Payne didn’t even suspect, was they were actually a little in awe of him. He had found himself in a life-threatening situation—the Northwest Philly serial rapist would have liked nothing better than to run over him with his van—and had handled it perfectly, by blowing the scumbag’s brains out.

  Only Sergeant Lenihan and Detective McElroy had ever drawn their Service revolvers against a criminal, and even then they had been surrounded by other cops.

  The kid had faced a murderous scumbag one-on-one and put the son of a bitch down. He had paid his dues, like the two kids from Narcotics, now also assigned to Special Operations, Charley McFadden and Jesus Martinez, both of whom had gone looking on their own time for the scumbag who’d shot Captain Dutch Moffitt. They had found him, and McFadden had chased him one-on-one down the subway tracks until the scumbag had fried himself on the third rail.

  No matter how long they’d been on the job, it wasn’t fair to call kids like that rookies; doing what they had done had earned them the right to be called, and considered, cops.

  The door to the commissioner’s conference room opened, and Chief Inspector Matt Lowenstein—a short, barrel-chested, bald-headed man in the act of lighting a fresh, six-inch-long nearly black cigar—came out. He did not look pleased with the world. He located Detective McElroy in the group of drivers, gestured impatiently for him to come along, and marched out of the outer office without speaking.

  “Why do I suspect that Chief Lowenstein lost a battle in there?” Sergeant Tom Lenihan said very softly.

  Sergeant Lipshultz chuckled and Officer Payne smiled as Chief Inspectors Dennis V. Coughlin and Robert Fisher and Staff Inspector Wohl came into the outer office.

  Coughlin was a large man, immaculately shaved, ruddy-faced, and who took pride in being well dressed. He was wearing a superbly tailored glen-plaid suit. Fisher, a trim and wiry man with a full head of pure white hair, was wearing one of his blue suits. He also had brown suits. He had three or four of each color, essentially identical. No one could ever remember having seen him, for example, in a sport coat or in a checked, plaid, or striped suit.

  Matt had heard from both Coughlin and Wohl that Chief Fisher believed that entirely too many police officers were wearing civilian clothing when, in the public interest, they should be in uniform.

  Coughlin walked over to the drivers and shook hands with Sergeant Lipshultz.

  “How are you, Stanley?” he asked. “You know where I can find a good, cheap lawyer?”

  “At your service, Chief,” Lipshultz said, smiling.

  “Matthew,” Coughlin said to Matt Payne.

  “Chief,” Matt replied.

  “Let’s go, Tom,” Coughlin said to Lenihan. “Chief Lowenstein had a really foul one smoldering in there. I need some clean air.”

  “We could smell it out here, Chief,” Lenihan said, and went out the door to the corridor.

  Chief Inspector Fisher nodded at Matt Payne, offered his hand to Coughlin and Wohl, and then walked out of the room. Sergeant Lipshultz hurried after him.

  “Say good-bye to the nice people, Matthew,” Inspector Wohl said dryly, “and drive me away from here. It’s been a long afternoon.”

  “Good-bye, nice people,” Matt said obediently to the others, the commissioner’s secretary, his driver, and the other administrative staff.

  Some chuckled. The commissioner’s driver said, “Take it easy, kid.”

  The commissioner’s secretary, an attractive, busty woman in her forties, said, “Come back anytime, Matthew. You’re an improvement over most of the people we get in here.”

  Officer Matt Payne followed Staff Inspector Wohl out of the office and down the corridor toward the elevators.

  There was no one else in the elevator. Wohl leaned against the wall and exhaled audibly.

  “Christ, that was rough in there,” he said.

  “What was it all about?”

  “Not here,” Wohl said.

  He pushed himself erect as the door slid open, and walked across the lobby to the rear entrance of the building, stopping just outside to turn and ask, “Where are we?”

  Payne pointed. There were four new Ford four-door sedans, one of them two-tone blue, parked together toward the rear of the lot. When they arrived at the roundhouse, Payne had dropped Wohl off at the door and then searched for a place to park.

  There were five spaces near the roundhouse reserved for division chiefs and chief inspectors, and one of them was empty, but Matt had learned that the sign didn’t mean what it said. What it really meant was that the spaces were reserved for chief inspectors who were also division chiefs, and that other chief inspectors could use the spaces if they happened to find one empty. It did not mean that Staff Inspector Wohl, although he was a division chief, had the right to park there.

  None of this was written down, of course. But everyone understood the protocol, and Matt had learned that the senior supervisors in the Department were jealous of the prerogatives of their rank. He had parked the unmarked two-tone Ford farther back in the lot, beside the unmarked cars of other senior supervisors who, like Wohl, were not senior enough to be ab
le to use one of the parking spaces closest to the building.

  Unmarked new cars were a prerogative of rank too. Senior supervisors, Matt had learned—chief inspectors and inspectors and some staff inspectors—drove spanking new automobiles, turning them over (“When the ashtrays got full,” Wohl had said) to captains, who then turned their slightly used cars over to the lieutenants, who turned their cars over to detectives.

  When Special Operations had been formed and had needed a lot of cars from the police garage right away, the system had been interrupted, and some full inspectors and captains hadn’t gotten new cars when they thought they were entitled to get them, and they had made their indignation known.

  When they got to the two-tone Ford and Matt started to get behind the wheel, Wohl said, “I think I’m going to go home. Where’s your car?”

  “Bustleton and Bowler,” Matt said. “I can catch a ride out there.”

  Special Operations had set up its headquarters in the Highway Patrol headquarters at Bustleton and Bowler Streets in Northeast Philadelphia.

  “No, I have to stop by the office, anyway. I just didn’t know if you had to go out there or not,” Wohl said, and got in the passenger seat.

  Matt drove to North Broad Street and headed north. They had traveled a dozen blocks in silence when Wohl broke the news. “There are allegations that—I don’t have to tell you that you don’t talk about this, do I?”

  “No, sir.”

  “There are allegations that certain Narcotics officers have had a little more temptation than they can handle put under their noses and are feeding information to the mob,” Wohl said.

  “Jesus!”

  “Several arrests and confiscations that should have gone smoothly didn’t happen,” Wohl went on. “Chief Lowenstein told Commissioner Czernich what he thought was happening. Maybe a little prematurely, because he didn’t want Czernich to hear it anywhere else. Czernich, either on his own or possibly because he told the mayor and the mayor made the decision, took the investigation away from Chief Lowenstein.”

  “Who did he give it to?”

  “Three guesses,” Wohl said dryly.

  “Is that why Chief Lowenstein was so sore?”

  “Sure. If I were in his shoes, I’d be sore too. It’s just about the same thing as telling him he can’t be trusted.”

  “But why to us? Why not Internal Affairs?”

  “Why not Organized Crime? Why not put a couple of the staff inspectors on it? Because, I suspect, the mayor is playing detective again. It sounds like him: ‘I can have transferred to us anybody I want from Internal Affairs, Narcotics, Vice, or Organized Crime’—theoretically routine transfers. But what they’re really for, of course, is to catch the dirty cops-presuming there are dirty cops—in Narcotics.”

  Wohl then fell silent, obviously lost in thought. Matt knew enough about his boss not to bother him. If Wohl wanted him to know something, he would tell him.

  Several minutes later Wohl said, “There’s something else.”

  Matt glanced at him and waited for him to go on.

  “On Monday morning Special Operations is getting another bright, young, college-educated rookie, by the name of Foster H. Lewis, Jr. You know him?”

  Matt thought, then shook his head and said, “Uh-uh, I don’t think so.”

  “His assignment,” Wohl said dryly, “is in keeping with the commissioner’s policy, which of course has the mayor’s enthusiastic support, of staffing Special Operations with bright, young, well-educated officers such as yourself, Officer Payne. Officer Lewis has a bachelor of science degree from Temple. Until very recently he was enrolled at the Temple Medical School.”

  “The medical school?” Matt asked, surprised.

  “It was his father’s dream that young Foster become a healer of men,” Wohl went on. “Unfortunately young Foster was placed on academic probation last quarter, whereupon he decided that rather than heal men, he would prefer to protect society from malefactors; to march, so to speak, in his father’s footsteps. His father just made lieutenant. Lieutenant Foster H. Lewis, Sr. Know him?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Good cop,” Wohl said. “He has something less than a warm, outgoing personality, but he’s a good cop. He is about as thrilled that his son has become a policeman as yours is.”

  Matt chuckled. “Why are we getting him?”

  “Because Commissioner Czernich said so,” Wohl said. “I told you that. If I were a suspicious man, which, of course, for someone with a warm, outgoing, not to forget trusting, personality like mine is unthinkable, I might suspect that it has something to do with the mayor.”

  “Doesn’t everything?” Matt chuckled again.

  “In this case a suspicious man might draw an inference from the fact that Officer Lewis’s assignment to Special Operations was announced by the mayor in a speech he gave last night at the Second Abyssinian Baptist Church.”

  “This is a colored guy?”

  “The preferred word, Officer Payne, is black.”

  “Sorry,” Matt said. “What are you going to do with him?”

  “I don’t know. I was just thinking that there is a silver lining in every black cloud. I’m going to give myself the benefit of the doubt there; no pun was intended, and no racial slur should be inferred. What I was thinking is that young Lewis, unlike the last bright, college-educated rookie I was blessed with, at least knows his way around the Department. He’s been working his way through school as a police radio operator. Mike Sabara has been talking about having a special radio net for Highway Patrol and Special Operations. Maybe something to do with that.”

  When they pulled into the parking lot at Bustleton and Bowler, Matt saw that Captain Mike Sabara’s car was in the space reserved for it. Wohl saw it at the same moment. Sabara was Wohl’s deputy.

  “Captain Sabara’s still here. Good. I need to talk to him. You can take off, Matt. I’ll see you in the morning.”

  “Yes, sir,” Matt said.

  He did not volunteer to hang around. He had learned that if Wohl had a need for him, he would have told him to wait. And he had learned that if he was being sent home, thirty minutes early, it was because Wohl didn’t want him around. Wohl had decided that whatever he had to say to Captain Sabara was none of Officer Payne’s business.

  THREE

  Matt Payne walked a block and a half to the Sunoco gas station at which he paid to park his car. Wohl had warned him not to leave it in the street if he couldn’t find a spot for it in the police parking lot; playful neighborhood youths loved to draw curving lines on automobile fenders and doors with keys and other sharp objects, taking special pains with nice cars they suspected belonged to policemen.

  “Getting a cop’s nice car is worth two gold stars to take home to Mommy,” Wohl had told him.

  Matt got in his car, checked to see that he had enough gas for the night’s activities, and then started home, which meant back downtown.

  He drove a 1974 silver Porsche 911 Carerra with less than five thousand miles on the odometer. It had been his graduation present, sort of. He had graduated cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania and had expected a car to replace the well-worn Volkswagen bug he had driven since he’d gotten his driver’s license at sixteen. But he had not expected a Porsche.

  “This is your reward,” his father had told him, “for making it to voting age and through college without having required my professional services to get you out of jail, or making me a grandfather before my time.”

  The Porsche he was driving now was not the one that had surprised him on graduation morning, although it was virtually identical to it.

  That car, with 2,107 miles on the speedometer, had suffered a collision, and Matt had come out of that a devout believer that an uninsured-motorist clause was a splendid thing to have in your insurance policy, providing of course that you had access to the services, pro bono familias, of a good lawyer to make the insurance company live up to its implied assurances.
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  The first car had been struck on the right rear end by a 1970 Ford van. The driver did so intentionally, hoping to squash Matthew Payne between the two and thus permitting himself to carry on with his intentions to carry a Mrs. Naomi Schneider, who was at the time trussed up naked in the back of the van under a tarpaulin, off to a cabin in Bucks County for rape and dismemberment.

  He failed to squash Officer Payne, who had jumped out of the way and, a moment later, shot him to death with his off-duty revolver.

  The deceased, Matt learned shortly after the Porsche dealer had given him a first rough but chilling estimate of repair costs, had no insurance that a diligent search of Department of Motor Vehicle records in Harrisburg could find.

  He next learned the opinion of legal counsel to the Philadelphia Police Department vis-à-vis the outrage perpetrated against his vehicle: Inasmuch as Officer Payne was not on duty at the time of the incident, the Police Department had no responsibility to make good any alleged damages to his personal automobile.

  Next came a letter on the crisp, engraved stationery of the First Continental Assurance Company of Hartford, Connecticut. It informed the insured that since he had said nothing whatever on his application for insurance that he was either a police officer or that he intended to use his car in carrying out his police duties; and inasmuch as it had come to their attention that he was actually domiciled in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, rather than as his application stated, in Wallingford, Pennsylvania; and inasmuch as they would have declined to insure him if any one of the aforementioned facts had come to their attention; they clearly had no obligation in the case at hand.

  Furthermore, the letter was to serve as notice that inasmuch as the coverage had been issued based on his misrepresentation of the facts, it was canceled herewith, and a refund of premium would be issued in due course.