The Victim

by W. E. B Griffin

  “I’ve got zilch,” Tony Harris said.

  “That’s encouraging,” Coughlin said sarcastically.

  “Officer Magnella, on routine patrol in the 22nd District,” Harris said, “was shot by the side of his RPC near the intersection of Colombia and Clarion between eleven-ten and eleven twenty-five. We know the time because he met with his sergeant at eleven-ten, and the call from the civilian that a cop had been shot came at eleven twenty-five. The medical examiner has determined that the cause of death is trauma caused by five .22-caliber—.22 Long Rifle, specifically—lead bullets, four in the chest, and one in the upper left leg.

  “Officer Magnella did not, did not, get on the radio to report that he was doing anything at all. When he met with his sergeant, he did not indicate to him that anything at all was out of the ordinary. In fact, he commented that it had been an unusually quiet night. Neither his sergeant, nor his lieutenant, was aware of him taking any kind of a special interest in anything in his patrol area. Nobody in the 22nd had any idea that he was on to something special. There have been no reports of any special animosity toward him specifically, or the 22nd generally.

  “There are no known witnesses, except, of course, the civilian who called Emergency and reported him down. That civilian is not identified and has not come forward. Obviously he—the tape suggests it was a male, probably white and probably around forty—doesn’t want to get involved.

  “No one in the neighborhood heard anything unusual, including shots. A .22 doesn’t make a hell of a lot of noise.

  “Everything I have been able to turn up suggests that Magnella was a straight arrow. He didn’t gamble; he hardly drank; he was about to get married to a girl from his neighborhood; he was a churchgoer; he didn’t drink—I said that, didn’t I? Anyway, there’s nothing to suggest that the shooting was connected to anything in his personal life—”

  “What’s your gut feeling, Tony?” Chief Coughlin asked, interrupting.

  “Chief, what I think is he saw something, a couple of kids, a drunk, a hooker, nothing he considered really threatening. And he stopped the car and got out and they—or maybe even she—shot him.”

  “Why?” Coughlin asked.

  Harris shrugged and held his hands up in a gesture of helplessness.

  “So where are you now, Tony?” Coughlin asked.

  “Going over it all again. There are some people in the neighborhood we haven’t talked to yet. We’re going to talk to people who work in the neighborhood. We’re going to check everybody Magnella ever arrested. We’re going to talk to his family again, and people in his neighborhood—”

  “You need anything?” Coughlin asked.

  That’s my question, Wohl thought. But Coughlin wanted to ask it so that when Tony says, “Can’t think of anything,” he can say, “Well, if there’s anything at all you need, speak up.” And Lucci will report that to the mayor, that Chief Coughlin is staying on top of things.

  “Can’t think of anything, Chief,” Tony Harris said.

  “Well, if there’s anything you need, anything at all, speak up,” Coughlin said.

  “You getting everything you need from Homicide?” Wohl asked.

  “Yeah, sure,” Harris said. “Lou Natali even called me up and asked if there was anything he could do. Said Chief Lowenstein told him to.”

  “I’m sure that it’s just a matter of time, Tony,” Coughlin said.

  “Jason?” Wohl asked.

  “Nothing. Well, not quite nothing. We found out the Detweiler girl uses cocaine, and we found out she knew DeZego, so that’s where we’re headed.”

  “You’re sure about that?” Coughlin asked. “Detweiler’s daughter is using cocaine?”

  “I’m sure about that,” Washington said evenly.

  “Jesus!” Coughlin said. “And she knew DeZego?”

  “I got that just a couple of minutes ago when I came in,” Washington said. “Matt Payne left a message.”

  “I thought he was working with you. I mean, why isn’t he here?” Coughlin asked.

  “He’s at the wedding. I thought he might hear something. He did. I wouldn’t be surprised if he heard a little more at the reception.”

  “I thought you were working on the scenario that the Detweiler girl was just an innocent bystander,” Coughlin said.

  “That was before we found out she’s using cocaine and knew DeZego.”

  “Any other explanation could turn into a can of worms, Jason,” Coughlin said.

  “I’m getting a gut feeling, Chief, that what happened on the roof was that somebody wanted to pop DeZego. I have no idea why. But if that holds up, if DeZego getting popped wasn’t connected, in other words, with cocaine or robbery—but had something to do with the mob is what I’m trying to say—then the Detweiler girl could very easily really be an innocent bystander.”

  “Yeah,” Coughlin said thoughtfully, adding, “It could very well be something like that.”

  You’d like that, wouldn’t you, Chief? Wohl thought, somewhat unpleasantly. That would eliminate that can of worms you’re talking about.

  “I’m going to see Jim Osgood when I leave here,” Washington said. “Maybe he’ll have something.”

  Lieutenant James H. Osgood, of the Organized Crime Division, was the department expert on the internal workings of the mob (actually, mobs) and the personal lives of their members.

  “You waited until now to get into that?” Coughlin asked. It was a reprimand.

  “I was over there at eight this morning, Chief,” Washington said, “before I went to Hahneman to see the girl. Osgood was in New York. He got back, was supposed to get back, at five.”

  “If anyone would have a line on something like that, it would be Osgood,” Chief Coughlin said somewhat lamely.

  “Chief,” Wohl asked, “am I under any sort of budgetary restrictions about overtime?”

  “Absolutely not!” Coughlin said emphatically. “You spend whatever you think is necessary, Peter, on overtime or anything else.”

  I hope you wrote that down, Lucci. I’m sure that Chief Coughlin really wants that on the record, for the mayor to know that he personally authorized me to spend whatever I think is necessary on overtime or anything else. The son of a bitch is covering his ass while he hangs me out in the wind.

  “Anybody else got anything?” Wohl asked.

  Heads shook. “No.”

  “Chief, have you got anything else?” Wohl asked.

  “No. I’m going to get out of here and let you and your people get on with it,” Coughlin said.

  He got out of the couch, shook hands with everyone in the room, and left.

  “I think this is where, as your commanding officer, I am expected to say something inspiring,” Wohl said.

  They all looked at him.

  “‘Something inspiring,’” Wohl said. “Get the hell out of here. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  When they had all gone, Wohl closed the door after them and then sat on the edge of his desk again and pulled the phone to him.

  “Yes?” a gruff voice asked.

  “Buy you a beer?”

  “Come to supper.”

  “I don’t want to, Dad,” Wohl said.

  “Oh,” Chief Inspector August Wohl (retired), said. “Downey’s, Front and South, in half an hour?”

  “Fine. Thanks.”

  THIRTEEN

  Captain David Pekach was relieved when the meeting in Wohl’s office broke up so quickly. Under the circumstances it could have gone on for hours.

  Both he and Mike Sabara followed Lieutenant Lucci to his desk, where Sabara told Lucci he would either be at home or at St. Sebastian’s Church; Lucci had both numbers. Pekach told him that he would be at either of the two numbers he had given Lucci, and from half past seven at the Ristorante Alfredo downtown. He wrote the number down and gave it to Lucci.

  Lucci and Sabara exchanged smiles.

  “Big date, Dave, huh?” Sabara asked.

  “I’m taking a lady friend to
dinner, all right?” Pekach snapped. “Is there anything wrong with that?”

  “Wow!” Sabara said. “What did I do? Strike a raw nerve?”

  Pekach glared at him, then walked toward the door to the parking lot.

  “Nice watch, Dave,” Sabara called after him.

  Pekach turned and gave him the finger, then stormed out of the building. Sabara and Lucci grinned at each other.

  “What was that about the watch?” Lucci asked.

  “His ‘lady friend’ gave him a watch for his birthday,” Sabara said. “An Omega. Gold. With all the dials. What do you call it, a chronometer?”

  “Chronograph,” Lucci said. “Gold, huh?”

  “Gold,” Sabara confirmed.

  “Why’s he so sensitive about her?” Lucci asked, deciding at the last moment not to tell Captain Sabara that he had heard Captain Pekach’s lady friend call him Precious when he had called him at her house.

  “I don’t know,” Sabara replied. “I’ve seen her. She’s not at all bad-looking. Nothing for him to be ashamed of.”

  She was Miss Martha Ellen Peebles, a female Caucasian thirty-four years and six months old, weighing 121 pounds and standing five feet four inches tall.

  Miss Peebles resided alone, in a turn-of-the-century mansion at 606 Glengarry Lane in Chestnut Hill. There was a live-in couple—a chauffeur-butler-majordomo and a housekeeper-cook—who were in turn helped by a constantly changing staff of maids and groundskeepers, most often nieces and nephews of the live-in couple, who kept the place up.

  The house had been built by Alexander F. Peebles, who owned, among other things, what the Wall Street Journal estimated was eleven percent of the nation’s anthracite coal reserves. Mr. Peebles had one son, Alexander, Jr., who in turn had two children, Martha, and her brother Stephen, four years younger.

  Mrs. Alexander Peebles, Jr., had died of cancer when Martha was twelve and Stephen eight. Alexander Peebles decided on the night that God finally put his wife out of her misery that his daughter was an extraordinarily good creature. Martha, who was entitled to being comforted by him on the loss of her mother, had instead come to him, in his gun-room sanctuary, where he was wallowing in Scotch-soaked self-pity, and comforted him. He was not to worry, Martha had told him; she would take care of him from now on.

  Mr. Peebles never remarried and devoted the remaining eighteen years of his life to his quest for grouse in Scotland, big game in Africa, trophy sheep in the Rocky Mountains, and his collection of pre-1900 American firearms.

  Since Martha truly believed she was taking care of him, her father didn’t think it right to leave her at home in the company of a governess or some other domestic, so he engaged a tutor-companion for her and took her along on his hunting trips.

  Their adoration was mutual. Martha thought her father was perfect in all respects. He thought she embodied all the desirable feminine traits of beauty and gentility. Her reaction to learning, while they were shooting Cape Buffalo in what was then still the Belgian Congo, that Miss Douglass, her tutor-companion, was sharing his cot was, he thought, simply splendid. One simply didn’t expect that sort of sympathetic, sophisticated understanding from a sixteen-year-old girl. And by then she was as good a shot as most men he knew. What more could a father expect of a daughter?

  Alexander Peebles, Jr.’s, relationship with his son was nowhere near so idyllic. The boy had always been delicate. That was probably genetic, he decided, inherited from his mother’s side of the family. Her father had died young, he recalled, and her two brothers looked like librarians.

  The several times he had tried to include Stephen, when he turned sixteen, in hunting trips had been disasters. When Stephen had finally managed to hit a deer-for-the-safari-pot in Tanganyika, he had looked down at the carcass and wept. The next year, after an absolutely splendid day of shooting driven pheasant on the Gladstone estate in Scotland, when their host had asked him what he thought of pheasant shooting, Stephen had replied, “Frankly I think it’s disgusting slaughter.”

  When Alex Peebles had told his son that his remark had embarrassed him and Martha, Stephen had replied, “Tit for tat, Father. I am grossly embarrassed having a father who brings a whore along on a trip with his children.”

  Alex Peebles, furious at his defiant attitude and at his characterization of Karen Cayworth (who really had had several roles in motion pictures before giving up her acting career to become his secretary) as a whore, had slapped his son, intending only that, not a dislocated jaw.

  Predictably, Martha had stood by her father and gone with Stephen to the hospital and then ridden with him on the train to London and put him on the plane home. She had then returned to Scotland. But the damage had been done, of course. Lord Gladstone was polite but distant, and Alex Peebles knew that it would be a long time before he was asked to shoot the estate again.

  Five months after that, a month before he was to graduate, Stephen was expelled from Groton for what the headmaster called “the practice of unnatural vice.”

  From then on, until his death of a heart attack in the Rockies at fifty-six, Alex Peebles had as little to do with his son as possible. He put him on an allowance and gave him to understand that he was not welcome in the house on Glengarry Lane when his father was at home.

  Martha, predictably, urged him to forgive and forget, but he could not find it in himself to do so. He relented to the point of offering, via Martha, to arrange for whatever psychiatric treatment was necessary to cure him of his sexual deviance. Stephen, as predictably, refused, and so far as Alex Peebles was concerned, that was that.

  Alex Peebles’s last will and testament was a very brief document. It left all of his worldly possessions, of whatever kind and wherever located, to his beloved daughter, Martha, of whom he was as proud as he was ashamed of his son, to whom, consequently, he was leaving nothing.

  It did occur to Alex Peebles that Martha, being the warm-hearted, generous, indeed Christian young woman that she was, would certainly continue to provide some sort of financial support for her brother. Stephen would not end up in the gutter.

  It never entered Alex Peebles’s mind that Martha, once the to-be-expected grief passed, would have trouble getting on with her own life. She was not at all bad-looking, and a damn good companion, and he was, after all, leaving her both a great deal of money and a law firm, Mawson, Payne, Stockton, McAdoo & Lester, which he felt sure would manage her affairs as well, and as honestly, as they could.

  Equally important—perhaps even more so—Martha was highly intelligent, well read, and levelheaded. Somewhere down the pike a man would enter her life. It was not unreasonable to hope that she would name her firstborn son after her father, Alexander Peebles Whatever.

  He erred. Matha Peebles was devastated by the death of her father, and her perception of herself as a thirty-year-old woman literally all alone in the world, rather than passing, grew worse.

  A self-appointed delegation of her mother’s family pressed her soon after the will was probated to share her inheritance with her brother. Stephen’s “peculiarities,” they argued, were not his fault and probably should be laid at his father’s feet. His treatment of his son, they said, was barbaric.

  When she refused to do that, deciding it would constitute disobedience, literally, of her father’s last will and testament, she understood that she was more than likely closing the door on any relationship she might have developed with them. That prediction soon proved to be true.

  She came to understand that while she had a large number of acquaintances, she had very few, almost no, friends. There were overtures of friendship, to be sure. Some of them were genuine, but she quickly understood that she had virtually nothing in common with other well-to-do women in Philadelphia except money. She hadn’t been in any school long enough to make a lifelong best friend, and felt that it was too late to try to do so now.

  There was some attention from men, but she suspected that much of it was because they knew (from a rather nasty lawsuit Stephen
had undertaken and lost, to break his father’s will) that she alone owned Tamaqua Mining and everything else. And none of the suitors, if that word fit, really interested her.

  The hunting was gone too. It was not the sort of thing a single woman could do by herself, even if she had wanted to, and without her father she had no interest in going.

  She forced herself to take an interest in the business, going so far as to spend three months in Tamaqua and Hazleton, and taking courses in both mineralogy and finance at the University of Pennsylvania. Taking the courses became an end in itself. It passed the time, got her out of the house every day, and posed a challenge to her when an essay was required or an examination was to be taken.

  Three years after their father died, she allowed Stephen to move back into the house. Or didn’t throw him out when he moved back in without asking. She didn’t want to fight with him, the court suit had been a terrible experience, she was lonely, and they could at least take some meals together.

  But that didn’t work, either. Stephen’s young friends proved to be difficult. They didn’t like him; she saw that. They were selling themselves to him. There wasn’t much difference, she came to think, between her father’s “secretaries” and Stephen’s young men. While there probably was not an actual cash payment in either case, there were gifts and surprises that amounted to the same thing.

  And when the gifts and surprises were not judged to be adequate by Stephen’s young men, there were either terrible scenes or the theft of things they saw in the house. That came to a head with a handsome young man named William Walton, who said he was an actor.

  She went to Stephen and told him she was sure that his friend, William Walton, was stealing things, and Stephen told her, almost hysterically, that she didn’t know what she was talking about. When she insisted that she knew precisely what she was talking about, he said some very cruel things to her. She told Stephen that the next time something turned up missing, she was going to the police.