The Victim

by W. E. B Griffin

  “Yeah, so do I. And I really think he might be useful. I don’t have a hell of a lot of experience with Nesfood Heiresses.”

  “Don’t let them worry you,” Wohl said. “Dave Pekach seems to do very well with heiresses.”

  “How about that?” Washington laughed. “Is that as serious as I hear?”

  “Take a look at his watch,” Wohl said. “He had a birthday.”

  “What’s he got?”

  “A gold Omega with about nine dials,” Wohl said. “It does everything but chime. Maybe it does that too.”

  “Well, good for him,” Washington said. He put down his coffee cup and stood up and shot his cuffs.

  “I’ll keep you up-to-date,” he said. “Thanks for the coffee.”

  “Let me know if I can help,” Wohl said.

  “I will. Count on it,” Washington said.

  He walked out of Peter Wohl’s office. Matt Payne was leaning over the desk of Wohl’s administrative sergeant.

  “Still have your driver’s license, Matthew?” Washington said.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “The next time you say ‘Yes, sir’ to me, I will spill something greasy on that very nice sport coat,” Washington said. “Come on, hotshot, take me for a drive.” He saw the look on Matt’s face and added, “I fixed it with the boss.”

  “Frankly,” H. Russell Dotson, M.D., a short, plump man in a faintly striped dark blue suit that Jason Washington thought was very nice, indeed, said, “I’m very reluctant to permit you to see Miss Detweiler—”

  “I understand your concern, Doctor,” Washington said. “May I say two things?”

  Dotson nodded impatiently.

  “Time is often critically important in cases like this—”

  “I know why you think you should see her,” Dr. Dotson interrupted. If the interruption annoyed Washington, it didn’t show on his face or in his voice.

  “And we really do understand your concern about unduly upsetting your patient, and with that in mind I arranged for Officer Payne to come with me and actually speak with Miss Detweiler. Officer Payne is a close friend—”

  “So that is who you are! Matt Payne, right? Brewster Payne’s boy?”

  “Yes, sir,” Matt said politely.

  “I thought I recognized you. And you’re a policeman?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “That’s a new one on me,” Dr. Dotson said. “Since when?”

  “Since right after graduation, Dr. Dotson,” Matt said.

  “Well, you understand my concern, Matt. I don’t want anything to upset Penny. She’s been severely traumatized. Physically and psychologically. For a while there, frankly, I thought we might lose her.”

  “She’s going to be all right now?”

  “Well, I don’t think she’s going to die,” Dr. Dotson said. “But she’s still very weak. We had her in the operating room for over two hours.”

  “I understand, sir,” Matt said.

  “I’m going in there with you,” Dr. Dotson said. “And I want you to keep looking at me. When I indicate that I want you to leave the room, I want you to leave right then. Understood? Agreed?”

  “Yes, of course, sir.”

  “Very well, then.”

  If it had been Dr. Dotson’s intention to discreetly keep Jason Washington out of Penelope Detweiler’s room, he failed. By the time the doctor turned to close the door, Washington was inside the room, already leaning against the wall, as if to signal that while he had no intention of intruding, neither did he intend to leave.

  Penny Detweiler’s appearance shocked Matt Payne. The head of her bed was raised slightly, so that she could watch television. Her face and throat and what he could see of her chest were, where the skin was not covered with bandages and exposed sutures, black and blue, as if she had been severely beaten. Patches of hair had been been shaved from the front of her head, and there were bandages and exposed sutures there too. Transparent tubing fed liquid into her right arm from two bottles suspended at the head of the bed.

  “Now that the beauticians are through with you, are you ready for the photographer?” Matt asked.

  “I made them give me a mirror,” she said. “Aren’t I ghastly?”

  “I cannot tell a lie. You look like hell,” Matt said. “How do you feel?”

  “As bad as I look,” she said, and then, “Matt, what are you doing here? And how did you get in?”

  “I’m a cop, Penny.”

  “Oh, that’s right. I heard that. I don’t really believe it. Why did you do something like that?”

  “I didn’t want to be a lawyer,” Matt said. He saw that Dr. Dotson, who had been tense, had now relaxed somewhat.

  She laughed and winced.

  “It hurts,” she said. “Don’t make me laugh.”

  “What the hell happened, Penny?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I was walking to the stairwell. You know where this happened to me?”

  “We found you. Amanda Spencer and me. When we drove on the roof, you were on the floor. Amanda called the cops.”

  “You did? I don’t remember seeing you.”

  “You were unconscious,” Matt said.

  “I guess I won’t be able to make it to the wedding, will I?” she asked, and then added, “What are they going to do about the wedding?”

  “I saw Daffy—and the Brownes—before I came here. They asked me what I thought about that, and since it was none of my business, I told them.”

  She giggled, then winced again.

  “I told you, don’t make me laugh,” she said. “Every time I move my—chest—it hurts.”

  “Sorry.”

  “What did you tell them?”

  “That Chad is in the Marines and that they couldn’t postpone it.”

  “And?”

  “I don’t know, but I think everything’s going ahead as planned.”

  “Just because this happened to me is no reason to ruin everybody else’s fun,” Penny said.

  “I still don’t know what happened to you,” Matt said.

  “I don’t really know,” Penny said.

  “You don’t remember anything?”

  “I remember getting out of my car and walking toward the stairwell. And then the roof fell in on me. I remember, sort of, being in a truck—not an ambulance, a truck—and I think there was a cop in there with me. But that’s all.”

  “There’s no roof over the roof,” Matt said.

  “You know what I mean. It was like something ran into me. Hit me hard.”

  “You didn’t see anyone up there?”

  “No.”

  “Nothing at all?”

  “There was nobody up there but me,” she said firmly.

  “Does the name Tony DeZego mean anything to you?”

  “No. Who?”

  “Tony. Tony DeZego.”

  “No,” she said, “should it?”

  “No reason it should.”

  “Who is he?”

  “A guinea gangster,” Matt said.

  “A what?”

  “An Italian-American with alleged ties to organized crime,” Matt said dryly.

  “Why are you asking me about him?”

  “Well, he was up there too,” Matt said. “On the roof of the garage. Somebody blew the top of his head off with a shotgun.”

  “My God!”

  “No great loss to society,” Matt said. “He wasn’t even a good gangster. Just a cheap thug with ambition. A small-time drug dealer, from what I hear.”

  “I think that’s about enough of a visit, Matt,” Dr. Dotson said. “Penny needs rest. And her parents are on their way.”

  Matt touched her arm.

  “I’ll bring you a piece of the wedding cake,” he said. “Try to behave yourself.”

  “I don’t have any choice, do I?” she said.

  In the corridor outside, Dr. Dotson laid a hand on Matt’s arm.

  “I can’t imagine why you told her about that gangster,” he said.


  “I thought she’d be interested,” Matt said.

  “Thank you very much, Dr. Dotson,” Jason Washington said. “I very much appreciate your cooperation.”

  “She’s lying,” Matt said when Washington got in the passenger seat beside him.

  “She is? About what?”

  “About knowing DeZego.”

  “Really? What makes you think so?”

  “Jesus, didn’t you see her eyes when I called him a ‘guinea gangster’?”

  “You’re a regular little Sherlock Holmes, aren’t you?” Washington asked.

  Matt looked at him, the hurt showing in his eyes.

  “If I did that wrong in there, I’m sorry,” he said. “If you didn’t think I could handle it, you should have told me what to ask and how to ask it. I did the best I could.”

  “As a matter of fact, hotshot,” Washington said, “I couldn’t have done it any better myself. I would have phrased the questions a little differently, probably, because I don’t know the lady as well as you do, but that wasn’t at all bad. One of the most difficult calls to make in an interview like that, with a subject like that, is when to let them know you know they’re lying. That wasn’t the time.”

  “I didn’t think so, either,” Matt said, and then smiled, almost shyly, at Washington.

  “Let’s go to the parking garage,” Washington said.

  As they drove around City Hall, Matt said, “I’d like to know for sure if she’s taking dope. Do you suppose they took blood when she got to the hospital? That could be tested?”

  “I’m sure they did,” Washington said. “But as a matter of law, not to mention ethics, the hospital could not make the results of that test known to the police. It would be considered, in essence, an illegal search or seizure, as well as a violation of the patient’s privacy. Her rights against compulsory incrimination would also be involved.”

  “Oh,” Matt said.

  “Your friend is a habitual user of cocaine,” Washington went on, “using it in quantities that make it probable that she is on the edges of addiction to it.”

  Matt looked at him in surprise.

  “One of the most important assets a detective can have, Officer Payne,” Washington replied dryly, “is the acquaintance of a number of people who feel in his debt. Apropos of nothing whatever, I once spoke to a judge prior to his sentencing of a young man for vehicular theft. I told the judge that I thought probation would probably suffice to keep the malefactor on the straight and narrow, and that I was acquainted with his mother, a decent, divorced woman who worked as a registered nurse at Hahneman Hospital.”

  “Nice,” Matt said.

  “I suppose you know the difference between ignorance and stupidity?”

  “I think so.” Matt chuckled.

  “A good detective never forgets he’s ignorant. He knows very, very little about what’s going on. So that means a good detective is always looking for something, or someone, that can reduce the totality of his ignorance.”

  “Okay,” Matt said with another chuckle. “So where does that leave us, now that we know she’s using cocaine and knew DeZego?”

  “I don’t have a clue—witticism intended—why either of them got shot,” Washington said. “There’s a lot of homicide involved with narcotics, but what it usually boils down to is simple armed robbery. Somebody wants either the drugs or the money and uses a gun to take them. The Detweiler girl had nearly seven hundred dollars in her purse; Tony the Zee had a quantity of coke—say five hundred dollars worth, at least. Since they still had the money and the drugs, I think we can reasonably presume that robbery wasn’t the basic cause of the shooting.”

  They were at the Penn Services Parking Garage. When Matt started to pull onto the entrance ramp, Washington told him to park on the street. Just in time Matt stopped himself from protesting that there was no parking on 15th Street.

  Washington did not enter the building. He walked to the alley at one end, then circled the building as far as he could, until he encountered a chain-link fence. He stood looking at the fence and up at the building for a moment, then he retraced his steps to the front and walked onto the entrance ramp. Then he walked up the ramp to the first floor.

  Three quarters of the way down the parking area, Matt saw a uniformed cop, and a moment later yellow CRIME SCENE—DO NOT CROSS tape surrounding a Dodge sedan.

  “What’s that?” he asked, curiosity overwhelming his solemn, silent vow to keep his eyes open and his mouth shut.

  “It was a hit on the NCIC when they ran the plates,” Washington said. “Reported stolen in Drexel Hill.”

  The National Crime Information Center was an FBI-run computer system. Detectives (at one time there had been sixteen Homicide detectives in the Penn Services garage) had fed the computer the license numbers of every car in the garage at the time of the shooting. NCIC had returned every bit of information it had on any of them. The Dodge had been entered into the computer as stolen.

  “Good morning,” Washington said to the uniformed cop. “The lab get to this yet?”

  “They were here real early this morning,” the cop said. “I think there’s still a couple of them upstairs.”

  Washington nodded. He walked around the car and then looked into the front and backseats. Then he started up the ramp to the upper floors.

  “It’ll probably turn out the Dodge has nothing to do with the shooting,” he said to Matt. “But we’ll check it out, just to be sure.”

  The ramp to the roof was blocked by another uniformed cop and a cross of crime-scene tape, but when Matt and Washington walked on it, Matt saw there was only a Police Lab truck and three cars—a Mercedes convertible, roof up; a blue-and-white; and an unmarked car—on the whole floor.

  He could see a body form outlined in white, where Penny Detweiler had been when he had driven on the roof and where he had found the body of Anthony J. DeZego. It seemed pretty clear that the Mercedes was Penny’s car.

  But where was DeZego’s?

  A hollow-eyed man came out of the unmarked car, smiled at Washington, and offered his hand.

  “You are your usually natty self this morning, Jason, I see,” he said.

  “Is that a touch of jealousy I detect, Lieutenant?” Washington replied. “You know Matt Payne? Matt, this is Lieutenant Jack Potter, the mad genius of Forensics.”

  “No. But what do they say? ‘He is preceded by his reputation’? How are you, Payne?”

  “How do you do, sir?”

  “Anything?” Washington asked.

  “Not much. We picked up some shotshell pellets and two wads, either from off the floor or picked out of the concrete. No more shell casings. Which means that the shooter knew what he was doing; or that he had only two shells, which suggests it was double-barrel, as opposed to an autoloader; or all of the above.”

  “Anything in the girl’s car?”

  “Uh-uh. No bags of anything,” Lieutenant Potter replied. “Haven’t had a chance either to run the prints or analyze what the vacuum cleaner picked up.”

  “I’d love to find a clear print of Mr. DeZego inside the Mercedes,” Washington said.

  “If there’s a match, you’ll be the first to know,” Potter said.

  “Can you release the Mercedes?” Washington asked. Potter’s eyebrows rose in question. “I thought it might be a nice gesture on our part if Officer Payne and I returned the car to the Detweiler home.”

  “Why not?” Potter replied. “What about the Dodge? There was nothing out of the ordinary there.”

  “You’ve got the name and address of the owner?”

  Potter nodded.

  “Let me have it. I’ll have someone check him out. I think we can take the tape down, anyway.”

  Potter grunted.

  “Which raises the question, of course, of Mr. DeZego’s car,” Washington said. “Do you suppose he walked up here?”

  “Or he came up here with the shooter and they left without him,” Potter said.

  �
�Or his car is parked on the street,” Washington said. “Or was parked on the street and may be in the impound yard now.”

  “I’ll check on that for you, if you like,” Potter said.

  “Matt,” Washington said, “find a phone. Call Organized Crime and see if they know what kind of a car Anthony J. DeZego drove. Then call Traffic and see if they impounded a car like that and, if so, where they impounded it. Maybe we’ll get lucky.”

  “Right,” Matt replied.

  “And if that doesn’t work, call Police Radio and have them see if they can locate the car and get back to me, if they can.”

  “Right,” Matt said.

  Washington turned to Potter.

  “You have any idea where the shooter was standing?”

  “Let me show you,” Potter said as Matt walked to the telephone.

  TEN

  Mrs. Charles McFadden, Sr., a plump, gray-haired woman of forty-five, was watching television in the living room of her home, a row house on Fitzgerald Street not far from Methodist Hospital in South Philadelphia when the telephone rang.

  Not without effort, and sighing, she pushed herself out of the upholstered chair and went to the telephone, which had been installed on a small shelf mounted on the wall in the corridor leading from the front door past the stairs to the kitchen.

  “Hello?”

  “Can I reach Officer McFadden on this number?” a male voice inquired.

  “You can,” she said. “But he’s got his own phone. Did you try that?”

  “Yes, ma’am. There was no answer.”

  Come to think of it, Agnes McFadden thought, I didn’t hear it ring.

  “Just a minute,” she said, and then: “Who did you say is calling?”

  “This is Sergeant Henderson, ma’am, of the Highway Patrol. Is this Mrs. McFadden?”

  “Senior,” she said. “I’m his mother.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “I’ll get him,” she said. “Just a moment.”

  She put the handset carefully beside the base and then went upstairs. Charley’s room was at the rear. When he had first gone on the job—working Narcotics undercover, which had pleased his mother not at all, the way he went around looking like a bum and working all hours at night—he had had his own telephone line installed.