The Victim

by W. E. B Griffin

  Commissioner Czernich looked as if he were about to speak.

  “You don’t have anything to say about anyone not going to like that, do you, Commissioner?” the mayor asked icily.

  “No, sir,” Commissioner Czernich said.

  “You hear that, Peter?” the mayor called.

  “Yes, sir,” Peter Wohl replied.

  “Keep up the good work, Payne,” the mayor said, then walked quickly to his limousine.

  EIGHT

  Staff Inspector Peter Wohl walked to where Officer Payne was standing. Matt saw Captain Pekach step out of the shadows and follow him.

  “What did the mayor say to you?” Wohl asked.

  “He asked me if I’d been at the Union League,” Matt replied, “and then he turned and told the Commissioner he wanted us to handle what happened at the Penn Services Parking Garage.”

  Wohl shook his head.

  “I had a strange feeling I should have driven myself up here,” Wohl said to Pekach. “Jesus Christ!”

  Matt added, chuckling, “And then he told me to keep up the good work.”

  “I’m beginning to wonder if I can afford you and all your good work, hotshot,” Wohl said, and then he saw the look on Matt’s face. “Relax. Only kidding.”

  “You think he might think it over and change his mind?” Captain Pekach asked.

  “No. That would mean he made a mistake. We all know the mayor never makes a mistake. Where’s Mike?”

  “At home.”

  “And Jason Washington? You know where he is?”

  “At the shore. He’s got a place outside Atlantic City.”

  “When’s he coming back?”

  “Day after tomorrow.”

  “Get on the radio, Dave. Get word to Mike Sabara to meet me here. And get me a number on Washington. He’ll have to come back tomorrow. What about Tony Harris?”

  “He’s probably at home this time of night.”

  “Get him over here—now,” Wohl ordered. “Have Lucci tell him he and Washington have this job.”

  “Yes, sir,” David Pekach said.

  “Where’s my car?” Wohl asked Matt.

  Matt pointed.

  “You might as well go home,” Wohl said.

  “I don’t mind staying,” Matt said.

  “Go home,” Wohl repeated. “I’m going to have enough trouble with Chief Lowenstein the way things are. I don’t need his pungent observations about a cop in a tuxedo.”

  “You’re going to stay here?”

  “Until Lowenstein shows up and can vent his spleen at me,” Wohl said, and then added, “Speaking of the devil…”

  Everybody followed his glance down Colombia Street, where a black, antenna-festooned car was approaching.

  “I think that’s Mickey O’Hara, Inspector,” Pekach said. “He’s driving a Buick these days.”

  “Yeah, so it is,” Wohl said. “But if our Mickey is here, can Chief Lowenstein be far behind?” He looked around the area, then turned to Pekach. “There’s enough district cars here. Do we need Sergeant—What’s-his-name?—anymore?”

  Pekach found what Wohl had seen.

  “DeBenedito, Inspector. No.”

  “Sergeant DeBenedito!” Wohl called.

  DeBenedito trotted over.

  “Yes, sir?”

  “There’s no point in you hanging around here, Sergeant,” Wohl said. “Take Officer Payne home, and then take it to the barn.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Matt looked at his watch. It was a quarter past one. DeBenedito and Martinez had already worked more than an hour past the end of their shift.

  “I can catch the subway, Inspector,” he said.

  “If the mayor heard that a guy in a dinner jacket got propositioned on the subway, Officer Payne, he would almost certainly give the investigation of that affront to law and order to Special Operations too. Go with the sergeant.”

  Pekach laughed.

  “Good night, Matt,” Wohl said. “See you in the morning. Early in the morning.”

  “Good night, Inspector,” Matt said. “Captain.”

  “Good night, Payne.”

  Matt got in the back of the Highway RPC.

  “Where do you live, Payne?”

  “Rittenhouse Square,” Officer Jesus Martinez answered for Matt. “In the Delaware Valley Cancer Society Building.”

  “Yeah, that’s right. You guys know each other, don’t you?”

  Matt knelt on the floor and put his elbows on the top of the front seat.

  “What the hell happened here tonight?” he asked as they drove down Colombia to North Broad and then turned left toward downtown.

  “A very nice young cop named Joe Magnella got himself shot,” DeBenedito said.

  “You knew him?” Matt asked.

  “He was a second cousin once removed, or a first cousin twice removed, something like that. My mother’s sister, Blanche, is married to his uncle. I didn’t know him good, but I seen him at weddings and funerals, feast days, like that. Nice kid. Just come back from Veet-Nam. I don’t think he was on the job six months. He was about to get married. Son of a bitch!”

  “What happened?” Matt asked softly.

  “Nobody seems to know. He was working an RPC out of the 22nd. He didn’t call in or anything, from what I hear. There was a call to Police Emergency, saying there was a cop shot on Clarion Street. Fucker didn’t give his name, of course. Martinez and I were on Roosevelt Boulevard, not close, but it was a cop, so we went in on it. By the time we got there, the place was crawling with cops, so we found ourselves directing traffic. Anyway, the kid was in the gutter, dead. Shot at least twice. The door to his car was open, but he hadn’t taken his gun out or anything. And he hadn’t called in to say he was doing anything out of the ordinary. Some son of a bitch who didn’t like cops or whatever just shot him.”

  “Jesus Christ!” Matt said.

  “What was that shit going on between the mayor and them other big shots?” Sergeant DeBenedito asked.

  “The mayor assigned the investigation to Special Operations,” Matt said.

  “Can you guys handle something like that? This is a fucking homicide, isn’t it? Pure and simple?”

  “When we were looking for the Northwest rapist,” Matt said, “Inspector Wohl had two Homicide detectives transferred in. The best. Jason Washington and Tony Harris. If anybody can find the man who shot…what was his name…?”

  “Magnella, Joseph Magnella,” DeBenedito furnished.

  “…Officer Magnella, those two can.”

  “Washington is that great big black guy?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I seen him around,” DeBenedito said. “And I heard about him.”

  “He’s really good,” Matt said. “I had the chance to be around him—”

  “You’re the guy who put down the rapist, ain’t you?” DeBenedito asked, and then went on without waiting for an answer. “Martinez told me about that after I put you on the ground in the parking garage. I’m sorry about that. You didn’t look like a cop.”

  “Forget it,” Matt said.

  “Talk about looking like a cop!” Martinez said. “Did you see the baby-blue pants and the hat on Inspector Wohl? It looked like he was going to play fucking golf or something! Jesus H. Christ!”

  “Is he as good as they say he is?” DeBenedito asked, “or does he just have a lot of pull?”

  “Both, I’d say,” Matt said. His knees hurt. He pushed himself back onto the seat as DeBenedito drove around City Hall and then up Market Street.

  The Highway Patrol pulled to the curb on the south side of Rittenhouse Square as a foot-patrol officer made his way down the sidewalk. He looked on curiously as the cop in the passenger seat jumped out and opened the rear door so that a civilian in a tuxedo could get out. (The inside handles on RPCs are often removed so that people put in the back can’t get out before they’re suppose to.)

  “Good night, Hay-zus,” Matt said, and raising his voice, called, “Thanks for
the ride, Sergeant.”

  “Stay off parking garage roofs, Payne,” Sergeant DeBenedito called back as Jesus Martinez got back in and slammed the door.

  “Good morning,” Matt said to the foot-patrol cop.

  “Yeah,” the cop responded, and then he watched as Matt let himself into the Delaware Valley Cancer Society Building. It was a renovated, turn-of-the-century brownstone. Renovations for a long-term lease as office space to the Cancer Society had been just about completed when the architect told the owner he had found enough space in what had been the attic to make a small apartment.

  Matt had found the apartment through his father’s secretary and moved in when he’d gone on the job. A month ago he had learned that his father owned the building.

  The elevator ended on the floor below the attic. He got out of the elevator, thinking it was a good thing Amanda had been willing to park his car for him before catching a cab to Merion; he would need his car tomorrow, for sure, and then walked up the narrow flight of stairs to the attic apartment.

  The lights were on. He didn’t remember leaving them on, but that wasn’t at all unusual.

  He walked to the fireplace, raised his left leg, and detached the Velcro fasteners that held his ankle holster in place on the inside of his leg and took it off. He took the pistol, a five-shot .38 caliber Smith & Wesson Chief’s Special from it. He laid the holster on the fireplace mantel and then wiped off the pistol with a silicone-impregnated cloth.

  Jason Washington had told him about doing that; that anytime you touched the metal of a pistol, the body left minute traces of acidic fluid on it. Eventually it would eat away the bluing. Habitually wiping it once a day would preserve the bluing.

  He laid the pistol on the mantel and, starting to take off his dinner jacket, turned away from the fireplace.

  Amanda Spencer was standing by the elbow-high bookcase that separated the “dining area” from the “kitchen.” Both, in Matt’s opinion, were too small to be thought of without quotation marks.

  “Welcome home,” Amanda said.

  Matt dismissed the first thought that came to his mind: that Amanda was here because she wanted to make the beast with two backs as wishful-to-the-nth-degree thinking.

  “No rent-a-cop downstairs?” he asked. “I should have told you to look in the outer lobby. They can usually be found there, asleep.”

  “He was there. He let me in,” Amanda said.

  “I don’t understand,” Matt said.

  “Either do I,” she said. “What happened where you went with Peter Wohl?”

  “There was a dead cop,” Matt said. “A young one. Now that I think about it, I saw him around the academy. Somebody shot him.”

  “Why?”

  “No one seems to know,” Matt said. “Somebody called it in, a dead cop in the gutter. When they got there, there he was.”

  “How terrible.”

  “He had been to Vietnam. He was about to get married. He was a relative of Sergeant DeBenedito.”

  “Who?”

  “He was at the garage,” Matt said. “And then he was at Colombia and Clarion—where the dead cop was. Wohl had him drive me home.”

  “Oh.”

  “Amanda, I’ll take you out to Merion. But first, would you mind if I made myself a drink?”

  “I helped myself,” she said. “I hope that’s all right.”

  “Don’t be silly.”

  He started for the kitchen. As he approached her, Amanda stepped out of the way, making it clear, he thought, that she didn’t want to be embraced, or even patted, in the most friendly, big-brotherly manner.

  In the kitchen he saw that she had found where he kept his liquor, in a cabinet over the refrigerator; a squat bottle of twenty-four-year-old Scotch, a gift from his father, was on the sink.

  He found a glass and put ice in it, and then Scotch, and then tap water. He was stirring it with his finger when Amanda came up behind him and wrapped her arms around him.

  “I wanted to be with you tonight,” she said softly, her head against his back. “I suppose that makes me sound like a slut.”

  “Not unless you announce those kind of urges more than, say, twice a week,” he said.

  Oh, shit, he thought, you and your fucking runaway mouth! What the hell is the matter with you?

  Her arms dropped away from him and he sensed that she had stepped back. He turned around.

  “I suppose I deserved that,” she said.

  “I’m sorry,” Matt said. “Jesus Christ, Amanda, I can’t tell you how sorry I am I said that.”

  She looked into his eyes for a long time.

  “You’ll be the second, all right? I was engaged,” she said.

  “I know,” he said.

  “You do?”

  “I mean, I know you’re not a slut. I have a runaway mouth.”

  “Yes, you do,” she agreed. “We’ll have to work on that.”

  She put her hand to his cheek. He turned his head and kissed it.

  When he met her eyes again, she said, “I knew you were going to be trouble for me the first time I laid eyes on you.”

  “I’m not going to be trouble for you, I promise.”

  She laughed.

  “Oh, yes you are,” she said. “So now what, Matthew? You want to show me your etchings now or what?”

  “They’re in my sleeping-accommodations suite,” he said. “That’s the small closet to your immediate rear.”

  “I know,” she said. “I looked. Lucky for you I didn’t find any hairpins or forgotten lingerie in there.”

  “You’ll be the first,” he said.

  “You mean in there,” she said, and when she saw the uncomfortable look on his face, she stood on her toes and kissed him gently on the lips. Then she took his hand and led him into his bedroom.

  When Sergeant Nick DeBenedito and Officer Jesus Martinez walked into Highway Patrol headquarters at Bustleton and Bowler, Officer Charley McFadden was sitting on one of the folding metal chairs in the corridor.

  Martinez was surprised to see him. He knew that McFadden had spent his four-to-midnight tour riding with a veteran Highway Patrolman named Jack Wyatt. Since he and DeBenedito were more than an hour late coming off shift, he had presumed that Charley would be long gone.

  McFadden, a large, pleasant-faced young man of twenty-three, had already changed out of his uniform. He was wearing a knit sport shirt, a cotton jacket with a zipper closing, and blue jeans. When McFadden stood up, the jacket fell open, exposing, on his right, his badge, pinned over his belt, and his revolver. Charley carried his off-duty weapon, a .38-caliber five-shot Smith & Wesson Undercover Special revolver in a “high-rise pancake,” a holster reportedly invented by a special agent of the U.S. Secret Service, which suspended the revolver under his right arm, above the belt, almost as high as a shoulder holster would have placed it.

  Jesus thought Charley looked, except that his hair was combed and he was shaved and the clothes were clean, as he had looked when the two of them were working undercover in Narcotics.

  “You still here, McFadden?” Sergeant DeBenedito asked in greeting.

  “I thought maybe Hay-zus would want to go to the FOP bar and hoist one,” Charley said.

  Charley had taken to using the Spanish pronunciation of Martinez’s Christian name because of his mother, a devout Irish Catholic who had been made distinctly uncomfortable by having to refer to her son’s partner as Jesus.

  “Yeah, why not?” Martinez replied. Actually he did not want to go to the FOP bar with Charley at all. But he didn’t see how he could say no after Charley had hung around the station for more than an hour waiting for him. “Give me a minute to change.”

  He consoled himself with the thought that it was only the decent thing to do. Charley had, after all, volunteered to drive him to work when he learned that Jesus’s Ford was (again) in the muffler shop for squeaking brakes, and then he’d hung around for more than an hour waiting to drive him home. If he wanted to have a beer, they’d go
get a beer.

  Five minutes later he emerged from the locker room in civilian clothing. He wore a dark blue shirt, even darker blue trousers, and a light brown leather jacket. There was a fourteen-karat gold-plated chain around his neck, and what the guy in the jewelry store had said was an Inca sun medallion hanging from that. His badge was in his pocket, and although he, too, carried an Undercover Special, he did so in a shoulder holster. He had tried the pancake and it hadn’t worked. His hips weren’t wide enough or something. It always felt like it was about to fall off.

  Despite the early-morning hour, the parking lot of the FOP Building, just off North Broad Street in Central Philadelphia, was almost full. About a quarter of the Police Department had come off shift at midnight with a thirst. Cops are happiest in the company of other cops, and attracting more customers to the bar at the FOP has never posed a problem for the officers of the FOP.

  Jesus followed Charley down the stairs from the street to the basement bar and was surprised when Charley took a table against the wall. Charley usually liked to sit at the bar, which gave him, he said, a better look at the activity, by which he meant the women.

  “Hold the table,” Charley ordered, and went to the bar. He returned with two bottles of Ortlieb’s and a huge bowl of popcorn. A year or so before, Jesus Martinez had become interested in nutrition, and was convinced that popcorn, and most of what else Charley put in his mouth, was not good for you.

  “You’re going to eat the whole damned bowl?”

  “You can have some,” Charley said. “I read in the paper that they just found out that popcorn is just as good for you as wheat germ.”

  “Really?” Jesus said, and then realized his chain was being pulled.

  “Yeah, the article said that they found out that popcorn is almost as good for you as french fries without catsup. No match, of course, for french fries with catsup.”

  “Bullshit!”

  “Had you going, didn’t I?” Charley asked, pleased with himself.

  “Laugh at me all you want. All that garbage you keep putting in your mouth is going to catch up with you sooner or later.”