“Daffy warned me about you,” she said. “The best defense is a good offense. Haven’t you ever heard that?”
“How did the kiss fit into that strategy?”
“How far is where we’re going?” she said, cleverly changing the subject.
“Not far enough. In no more than twenty minutes we’ll be there.”
A Mercedes-Benz 380 SL convertible with its ragtop up drove onto the fourth floor of the Penn Services Parking Garage. The driver, a young woman, looked forward over the steering wheel, looking for a place to park.
She did not look toward where Charles was standing, behind a round concrete pole at the north end of the building, in a position that both gave him a view of the street down which Anthony J. DeZego would probably come—unless, of course, he sent Jowls the Bellboy to fetch the car—and also shielded him from the view of anyone who came out of the stairwell to get his car.
And she did not find a parking space, as Charles knew she would not; the fourth floor was full.
The Mercedes continued around and went up the vehicular ramp to the roof.
Charles looked out the window again and saw Anthony J. DeZego walking quickly down the street toward the Penn Services Parking Garage from the fourth-floor window. He was alone; there would have been a problem if he had had the blonde-without-a-bra with him.
He looked down at the street and saw Victor, or at least Victor’s shoulder, where he was sitting in the Pontiac. It would have been better if he could have caught Victor’s attention and signaled him that DeZego was coming; but where Victor was parked, the garage attendant could see him and probably would have remembered having seen some guy across the street in a Pontiac who kept looking up at the garage.
Victor was watching the exit; that was all that counted.
Charles took his pigskin gloves from his pocket and pulled them on. Then he picked up the carry-on bag and walked down the center of the vehicular path toward the stairwell. If another car came or someone walked out of the stairwell, he would be just one more customer leaving the garage.
No one came.
The stairwell was sort of a square of concrete blocks set aside the south side of the building. The door from it was maybe six feet from the wall. Management had generously provided a rubber wedge to keep the door open when necessary. When Charles decided the dame in the Benz had had time to park her car and go down the stairs, he opened the door and propped it open with the wedge.
He had considered doing the job in the stairwell itself but had decided that the stairwell probably would carry the sound of the Remington down to the attendant and make him curious. When he heard footsteps coming up the stairwell, he would kick the wedge loose and let the automatic door-closer do its thing.
Then, when DeZego came onto the fourth floor, and he was sure it was him, he would do the job. With the door closed, the noise would not be funneled downstairs.
He stepped into the shadow of the stairwell wall, unzipped the carry-on, removed the Remington, pushed the safety off, and checked to make sure the red on the little button was visible, that he hadn’t by mistake put the safety on. Then he put the Remington under the Burberry trench coat. The pocket had a flap and a slit, so that you could get your hand inside the coat. He held the Remington by the pistol grip straight down against his leg.
He heard footsteps on the stairs.
He dislodged the rubber wedge with his toe, and the door started to close.
He put his ear to the concrete, not really expecting to hear anything. But he was surprised. The stairs were metal, and they sort of rang like a bell. He could hear DeZego coming closer and closer. He waited for the door to open.
It didn’t.
There was a moment’s silence, and Charles decided that DeZego had reached the landing. The door would open any second.
But then there came the unmistakable sound of footsteps on the metal stairs again.
What the fuck?
Lover Boy is going up to the roof. He’s daydreaming, or stupid, or something, his Caddy is on this floor, not the fucking roof! In a moment he’ll come back down.
But he did not.
Charles considered the situation very quickly.
No real problem. There or here. There’s nobody on the roof, and if he sees me, he doesn’t know me.
He pulled the door open and, as quietly as he could, quickly ran up the stairs to the roof. He pulled the stairwell door open.
Lover Boy was right there, leaning against the concrete blocks of the stairwell, like he was waiting for somebody.
“Long walk up here,” Charles said, smiling at him.
“You said it,” Anthony J. DeZego said.
Charles walked ten feet past Anthony J. DeZego, turned around suddenly, raised the shotgun to his shoulder, and blew off the top of Anthony J. DeZego’s head.
DeZego fell backward against the concrete blocks of the stairwell and slumped to the ground.
There was a sound like a run-over dog.
Charles looked around the roof. In the middle of the vehicular passageway was a young woman, her eyes wide, both of her hands pressed against her mouth, making run-over-dog noises.
Charles raised the Remington and fired. She went down like a rock.
The goddamned broad in the goddamned Mercedes! She didn’t go downstairs. She sat there and fixed her fucking hair or something!
Charles went to Anthony J. DeZego’s corpse and took the Caddy keys from his pocket.
I better do her again, to make sure she’s dead.
There was the sound of tires squealing. Another car was coming up.
And since there’s no room on the fourth floor, he’ll be coming up here! Damn!
Charles went into the stairwell and down to the fourth floor. He opened the door a crack, saw nothing, and then pushed it open wide enough to get through.
He went to DeZego’s Cadillac, unlocked the door, put the Remington on the floor, and got behind the wheel. He started the engine and drove down the vehicular ramp. He stopped at the barrier, put the window down, handed the attendant a five-dollar bill and the claim check, waited for his change, and then for the barrier to be lifted.
Then he drove out onto the street and turned left. He looked in the rearview mirror and saw the Pontiac pull away from the curb and start to follow him.
“Damn, here we are already,” Matt Payne said as he turned the Porsche into the Penn Services Parking Garage behind the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel in downtown Philadelphia.
“How time flies,” Amanda said, mocking him gently.
He stopped to get a ticket from a dispensing machine and then drove inside. He drove slowly, hoping to find a space on a lower floor. There were none. He searched the second level, and then the third and fourth. They finally emerged on the roof.
Matt stepped hard on the brakes. The Porsche shuddered and skidded to a stop, throwing Amanda against the dashboard.
“My God!” she exclaimed.
“Stay here,” Matt Payne ordered firmly.
“What is it?” Amanda asked.
He didn’t answer. He got out of the Porsche and ran across the rooftop parking lot. Amanda saw him drop to one knee, and then for the first time saw that a girl was lying facedown, on the roadway between lines of parked cars.
She pushed open her door and got out and ran to him.
“What happened?” Amanda asked.
“I told you to stay in the fucking car!” he said furiously.
She looked at him, shocked as much by the tone of his voice as by the language, and then at the girl on the floor. For the first time she saw there was a pool of blood.
“What happened?” she asked, her voice weak.
“Will you please go get in the goddamned car?” Matt asked.
“Oh, my God!” Amanda wailed. “That’s Penny!”
“You know her?”
“Penny Detweiler,” Amanda said. “You must know her. She’s one of the bridesmaids.”
Matt looked at the girl on
the floor. It was Penelope Detweiler, Precious Penny to Matt, to her intense annoyance, because that’s what her father had once called her in Matt’s hearing.
Why didn’t I recognize her? I’ve known her all of my life!
“I’ll be damned,” he said softly.
“Matt, what happened to her?”
“She’s been shot,” Matt Payne said, and looked at Amanda.
You don’t expect to find people you know, especially people like Precious Penny, lying in a pool of blood after somebody’s shot them in a garage. Things like that aren’t supposed to happen to people like Precious Penny.
He found his voice: “Now, for chrissake, will you go get in the goddamned car!” he ordered furiously.
Amanda looked at him with confusion and hurt in her eyes.
“This just happened,” he explained more kindly. “Whoever did it may still be up here.”
“Matt, let’s get out of here. Let’s go find a cop.”
“I am a cop, Amanda,” Matt Payne said. “Now, for the last fucking time, will you go get in the car? Stay there until I come for you. Lock the doors.”
He stooped, bending one knee, and when he stood erect again, there was a snub-nosed revolver in his hand. Amanda ran back to the silver Porsche and locked the doors. When she looked for Matt, she couldn’t see him at first, but then she did, and he was holding his gun at the ready, slowly making his way between the parked cars.
I don’t believe this is happening. I don’t believe Penny Detweiler is lying out there bleeding to death, and I don’t believe that Matt Payne is out there with a gun in his hand, a cop looking for whoever shot Penny.
Oh, my God. What if he gets killed?
FOUR
With difficulty, for there is not much room in the passenger compartment of a Porsche 911 Carrera, Amanda Spencer crawled over from the passenger seat to the driver’s and turned the ignition key.
There was a scream of tortured starter gears, for the engine was still running. She threw the gearshift lever into reverse, spun the wheels, and turned around, then drove as fast as she dared down the ramps of the parking garage to street level.
She slammed on the brakes and jumped out of the car and ran to the attendant’s window.
“Call the police!” she said. “Call the police and get an ambulance.”
“Hey, lady, what’s going on?”
“Get on that phone and call the police and get an ambulance,” Amanda ordered firmly. “Tell them there’s been a shooting.”
A red light began to flash on one of the control consoles in the radio room of the Philadelphia Police Department.
Foster H. Lewis, Jr., who was sitting slumped in a battered and sagging metal chair, a headset clamped to his head, threw a switch and spoke into his microphone. “Police Emergency,” he said.
Foster H. Lewis, Jr., was twenty-three years old, weighed two hundred and twenty-seven pounds, stood six feet three inches tall, and was perhaps inevitably known as Tiny. For more than five years before he had entered the Police Academy, he had worked as a temporary employee in Police Emergency: five years of nights and weekends and during the summers answering calls from excited citizens in trouble and needing help had turned him into a skilled and experienced operator.
He had more or less quit when he entered the Police Academy and was working tonight as a favor to Lieutenant Jack Fitch, who had called him and said he had five people out with some kind of a virus and could he help out.
“This the police?” his caller asked.
“This is Police Emergency,” Tiny Lewis said. “May I help you, sir?”
“I’m the attendant at the Penn Services Parking Garage on Fifteenth, behind the Bellevue-Stratford.”
“How may I help you, sir?”
“I got a white lady here says there’s been a shooting on the roof and somebody got shot and says to send an ambulance.”
“Could you put her on the phone, please?”
“I’m in the booth, you know, can’t get her in here.”
“Please stay on the line, sir,” Tiny said.
There are twenty-two police districts in Philadelphia. Without having to consult a map, Tiny Lewis knew that the parking garage behind the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel was in the 9th District, whose headquarters are at 22nd Street and Pennsylvania Avenue.
He checked his console display for the 9th District and saw that an indicator with 914 on it was lit up. The 9 made reference to the District; 14 was the number of a radio patrol car assigned to cover the City Hall area.
Tiny Lewis reached for a small black toggle switch on the console before him and held it down for a full two seconds. A long beep was broadcast on the Central Division radio frequency, alerting all cars in the Central Division, which includes the 9th District, that an important message is about to be broadcast.
“Fifteenth and Walnut, the Penn Services Parking Garage, report of a shooting and a hospital case,” Tiny Lewis said into his microphone, and added, “914, 906, 9A.”
There was an immediate response: “914 okay.”
This was from Officer Archie Hellerman, who had just entered Rittenhouse Square from the west. He then put the microphone down, flipped on the siren and the flashing lights, and began to move as rapidly as he could through the heavy early-evening traffic on the narrow streets toward the Penn Services Parking Garage.
Tiny Lewis began to write the pertinent information on a three-by-five index card. At this stage the incident was officially an “investigation, shooting, and hospital case.”
As he reached up to put the card between electrical contacts on a shelf above his console, which would interrupt the current lighting the small bulb behind the 914 block on the display console, three other radio calls came in.
“Radio, EPW 906 in.”
“9A okay.”
“Highway 4B in on that.”
EPW 906 was an emergency patrol van, in this case a battered 1970 Ford, one of the two-man emergency patrol wagons assigned to the 9th District to transport the injured, prisoners, and otherwise assist in law enforcement. If this was not a bullshit call, 906 would carry whoever was shot to a hospital.
The district sergeant, 9A, was assigned to the eastern half of the 9th District.
Highway 4B was a radio patrol car of the Highway Patrol, an elite unit of the Philadelphia Police Department which the the Philadelphia Ledger had recently taken to calling Carlucci’s Commandos.
As a police captain, the Honorable Jerome H. “Jerry” Carlucci, mayor of the City of Philadelphia, had commanded the Highway Patrol, which had begun, as its name implied, as a special organization to patrol the highways. Even before Captain Jerry Carlucci’s reign, Highway Patrol had evolved into something more than motorcycle-mounted cops riding up and down Roosevelt Boulevard and the Schuylkill Expressway handing out speeding tickets. Carlucci, however, had presided over the ultimate transition of a traffic unit into an all-volunteer elite force. Highway had traded most of its motorcycles for two-man patrol cars and had citywide authority. Other Philadelphia police rode alone in patrol cars and patrolled specific areas in specific districts.
Highway Patrol had kept its motorcyclist’s special uniforms (crushed crown cap, leather jacket, boots, and Sam Browne belts) and prided itself on being where the action was; in other words, in high-crime areas.
Highway Patrol was either “a highly trained, highly mobile anticrime task force of proven effectiveness” (Mayor Jerry Carlucci in a speech to the Sons of Italy) or “a jack-booted Gestapo” (an editorial in the Philadelphia Ledger).
Tiny Lewis had expected prompt responses to his call. EPWs generally were sent in on any call where an injury was reported, a supervisor responded to all major calls, and somebody from Highway Patrol (sometimes four or five cars) always went in on a “shooting and hospital case.”
The door buzzer for the radio room went off. One of the uniformed officers on duty walked to it, opened it, smiled, and admitted a tall, immaculately uniformed lieutenant.
He was tall, nearly as tall as Tiny Lewis, but much leaner. He had very black skin and sharp Semitic features. He walked to Tiny Lewis’s control console and said, somewhat menacingly, “I didn’t expect to find you here. I went to your apartment and they told me where to find you.”
“My apartment? Not my ‘disgusting hovel’?”
“We have to talk,” Lieutenant Lewis said.
“Not now, Pop,” Tiny Lewis said. “I’m working a shooting and hospital case.” And then he added, “In your district, come to think of it. On the roof of the Penn Services Parking Garage behind the Bellevue-Stratford. Civilian by phone, but I don’t think it’s bullshit.”
“Can we have coffee when you get off?” Lieutenant Lewis asked. “I just heard you’re going to Special Operations.”
“Strange, I thought you arranged that,” Tiny said.
“I told you, I just heard about it.”
“Okay, Pop,” Tiny said. “I’ll meet you downstairs.”
Lieutenant Lewis nodded, then walked very quickly out of the radio room.
Officer Archie Hellerman, driving RPC 914, couldn’t count how many times he had been summoned to the Penn Services Parking Garage since it had been built seven years before. The attendant had been robbed at least once a month. One attendant, with more guts than brains, had even been shot at when he had refused to hand over the money.
Like most policemen who had been on the same job for years, Archie Hellerman had an encyclopedic knowledge of the buildings in his patrol area. He knew how the Penn Services Parking Garage operated. Incoming cars turned off South 15th Street into the entranceway. Ten yards inside, there was a wooden barrier across the roadway. Taking a ticket from an automatic ticket dispenser activated a mechanism that raised the barrier.
Departing cars left the building at the opposite end of the building, where an attendant in a small, allegedly robbery-proof booth collected the parking ticket, computed the charges, and, when they had been paid, raised another barrier, giving the customer access to the street.
Archie Hellerman in RPC 914 was the first police vehicle to arrive at the crime scene. As he approached the garage, he turned off his siren but left the flashing lights on. He pulled the nose of his Ford blue-and-white onto the exit ramp, which was blocked by a silver Porsche 911 Carrera, and jumped out of the car.
The Victim Page 6
