The Victim

by W. E. B Griffin

  There was a young Italian guy (a real Italian, to judge by the way he mangled the language) in a tuxedo behind a sort of stand-up desk in the lobby of Ristorante Alfredo. When Pekach said his name was Pekach and that he had made reservations, the guy almost pissed his pants unlatching a velvet rope and bowing them past it to a table in a far corner of the room.

  Dave saw other diners in the elegantly furnished room looking at Martha in her black dress and pearls, and the way she walked, and he was proud of her.

  The Italian guy in the tuxedo held Martha’s chair for her and said he hoped the table was satisfactory, and then he snapped his fingers and two other guys appeared, a busboy and a guy in a short red jacket with what looked like a silver spoon on a gold chain around his neck. The busboy had a bottle wrapped in a towel in a silver bucket on legs.

  The guy with the spoon around his neck unwrapped the towel so that Dave could see that what he had was a bottle of French champagne.

  “Compliments of the house, Captain Pekach,” the Italian guy said. “I hope is satisfactory.”

  “Oh, Moet is always satisfactory,” Martha said, smiling.

  “You permit?” the Italian guy said, and unwrapped the wire, popped the cork, and poured about a quarter of an inch in Pekach’s glass.

  I’m supposed to sip that, to make sure it’s not sour or something, Dave remembered, and did so.

  “Very nice,” he said.

  “I am so happy,” the Italian guy said, and poured Martha and then Pekach each a glassful.

  “I leave you to enjoy wine,” the Italian guy said. “In time I will recommend.”

  “To us,” Martha said, raising her glass.

  “Yeah,” Dave Pekach said.

  A waiter appeared a minute or so later and delivered menus.

  And a minute or so after that the Italian guy came back.

  “Captain Pekach, you will excuse. Mr. Baltazari would be so happy to have a minute of your time,” he said, and gestured across the room to the far corner where two men sat at a corner table. When they saw him looking, they both gave a little wave.

  Dave Pekach decided the younger one, a swarthy-skinned man with hair elaborately combed forward to conceal male pattern baldness, must be Baltazari, whom he had never heard of. The other man, older, in a gray suit, he knew by sight. On a cork bulletin board in the Intelligence Division, his photograph was pinned to the top of the Organized Crime organizational chart. The Philadelphia Daily News ritually referred to him as “Mob Boss Vincenzo Savarese.”

  Jesus Christ, what’s all this? What’s he want to do, say hello?

  The Italian guy was already tugging at Dave Pekach’s chair.

  “Excuse me, honey?”

  “Of course,” Martha said.

  Dave walked across the room.

  “Good evening, Captain Pekach,” Baltazari said. “Welcome to Ristorante Alfredo. Please sit down.”

  He waved his hand and a waiter appeared. He turned over a champagne glass and poured and then disappeared. Then Baltazari got up and disappeared.

  “I won’t take you long from the company of that charming lady,” Vincenzo Savarese said. “But when I heard you were in the restaurant, I didn’t want to miss the opportunity to thank you.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You were exceedingly understanding and gracious to my granddaughter, Captain, and I wanted you to know how grateful I am.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Dave Pekach said honestly.

  “Last June—defying, I have to say, the orders of her parents—my granddaughter went out with a very foolish young man and found herself in the hands of the police.”

  Pekach shook his head, signifying that he was still in the dark as he searched his memory.

  “It was very late at night in North Philadelphia, where Old York Road cuts into North Broad?”

  Pekach continued to shake his head no.

  “There was a chase by the police. The boy wrecked the car?” Savarese continued.

  Dave suddenly remembered. He had been on the way home from his Cousin Stanley’s wedding in Bethlehem. He had passed the scene of a wreck and had seen a Narcotics team and their car and, curious, stopped. What it was, was a minor incident, a carful of kids who had bought some marijuana, been caught at it, and had run.

  There had been four kids, the driver and another boy, and two girls, both of them clean-cut, nice-looking, both scared out of their minds, in the back of a district RPC, which was about to transport them to Central Lockup. He had felt sorry for the girls and didn’t want to subject them to the horrors of going through Central Lockup. So, after making sure the district cops had their names, he had turned them loose, sending them home in a cab.

  “I remember,” he said.

  “My granddaughter said that you were gracious and understanding,” Savarese said. “Far more, I suspect, than were her mother and father. I don’t think she will be doing anything like that ever again.”

  “She seemed to be a very nice young woman,” Pekach said. “We all stub our toes from time to time.”

  “I simply wanted to say that I will never forget your kindness and am very grateful,” Savarese said, and then stood up and put out his hand. “If there is ever anything I can do for you, Captain…”

  “Forget it. I was just doing my job.”

  Savarese smiled at him and walked across the restaurant to the door. The Italian in the tuxedo stood there waiting for him, holding his hat and coat.

  Pekach shrugged and started back toward Martha.

  Baltazari intercepted him.

  “I think you dropped these, Captain,” he said, and handed Pekach a book of matches.

  “No, I don’t think so,” Pekach said.

  “I’m sure you did,” Baltazari said.

  Pekach examined the matchbook. It was a Ristorante Alfredo matchbook. It was open, and a name and address was written inside it. The name didn’t ring a bell.

  “Mr. Savarese’s friends are always grateful when someone does him, or his family, a courtesy, Captain Pekach,” Baltazari said. “Now go and enjoy your meal.”

  Pekach put the matches in his pocket.

  The young Italian was at his table.

  “If I may suggest—”

  “What was that all about?”

  Dave shrugged. He smiled at her. “You may suggest,” he said to the young Italian.

  Martha’s knee found Dave’s under the table.

  “I think you like our Tournedos Alfredo very much,” the young Italian said.

  “I love tournedos,” Martha said.

  Dave Pekach had no idea what a tournedo was.

  “Sounds fine,” he said.

  Martha’s knee pressed a little harder against his.

  “And before, some clams with Sauce Venezia?”

  “Fine,” Dave said.

  FOURTEEN

  Certain enforcement and investigation jobs in Narcotics, Vice, and elsewhere require the use, in plainclothes, of young policemen who don’t look like policemen, or even act like policemen, and whose faces are unknown to the criminals they are after. The only source of such personnel is the pool of young police officers fresh out of the Police Academy.

  There are certain drawbacks to the assignment of such young and, by definition, inexperienced officers to undercover jobs. While they are working undercover, they require as much supervision as they can be given, because of their inexperience. But the very nature of undercover work makes close supervision difficult at best, and often impossible. Most of the time an undercover cop is on his own, literally responsible for his own fate.

  Some young undercover cops can’t handle the stress and ask to be relieved. Some are relieved because of their inability to do what is asked of them, either because of a psychological inability to act as anything but what they are—nice young men—or, along the same line, their inability to learn to think like the criminals they are after.

  But some rookies fresh from the Academy take to und
ercover work like ducks to water. The work is sometimes what they dreamed it would be like—conditioned by cops-and-robbers movies and television series—when they got to be cops: putting the collar on really bad guys, often accompanied by some sort of sanctioned violence, knocking down doors, or apprehending the suspect by running the son of a bitch down and slamming his scumbag ass against a wall.

  There are rarely—although this is changing—either the gun battles or high-speed chases of movies and television, but there is danger and the excitement that comes with that, plus a genuine feeling of accomplishment when the assistant district attorney reviews their investigation and their arrest and decides it is worth the taxpayers’ money and his time to bring the accused before the bar of justice, and, with a little luck, see the scumbag son of a bitch sent away for, say, twenty to life.

  Officers Charles McFadden and Jesus Martinez had been good, perhaps even very good, undercover police officers working in the area of narcotics. Officer McFadden, very soon after he went to work, learned that he had a rather uncanny ability to get purveyors of controlled substances to trust him. Officer Martinez, who shared with Officer McFadden a set of values imparted by loving parents and the teachings of the Roman Catholic church, took great pride in his work.

  He had a Latin temperament, which had at first caused him to grow excited or angry—or both—during an arrest. He had noticed early on that when he was excited or angry or both, more often than not the scumbags they had against the wall somewhere seemed far more afraid of him than they did of Officer McFadden, although Charley was six inches taller and outweighed him by nearly ninety pounds.

  As Charley had honed the skills that caused the bad guys to trust him and help dig their own graves, Hay-zus worked on what he thought of as his practice of psychological warfare against the criminal element. During the last nine months or year of his undercover Narcotics assignment, he was seldom nearly as excited or angry as those he was arresting thought he was. And he had picked up certain little theatrical embellishments, for example, sticking the barrel of his revolver up an arrestee’s nose or excitedly encouraging Charley, knowing that he was incapable of such a thing, to “Shoot the cocksucker, Charley. We can plant a gun on him.”

  Either or both techniques, and some others that he had learned, often produced a degree of cooperation from those arrested that was often very helpful in securing convictions and in implicating others involved in criminal activities.

  Both Martinez and McFadden knew they had been good, perhaps even very good, undercover cops, and they both knew they had not been relieved of their undercover Narcotics assignments because of anything wrong they had done, but quite the reverse: They had bagged the junkie scumbag who had shot Captain Dutch Moffitt of Highway. That had gotten their pictures in the newspapers and destroyed their effectiveness on the street.

  They would have happily forgone their celebrity if they had been allowed to keep working undercover Narcotics, but that, of course, was impossible.

  A grateful Police Department hierarchy had sent them to Highway Patrol, where they were offered, presuming satisfactory probationary performance, appointment as real Highway Patrolmen much earlier on in their police careers than they could have normally expected.

  Big fucking deal!

  Maybe that shit about getting to wear boots and a Sam Browne belt and a cap with the top crushed down would appeal to some asshole who had spent four years in a district, keeping the neighborhood kids from getting run over on the way home from school, and turning off fire hydrants in the summer, and getting fucking cats out of fucking trees, and that kind of shit, but it did not seem so to either Hay-zus or Charley.

  They had gone one-on-one (or two-on-two) with some really nasty critters in some very difficult situations, had come out on top, and thought themselves, not entirely without justification, to be just as experienced, just as good real cops, as anybody they’d met in Highway.

  They were smart enough, of course, to smile and sound grateful for the opportunity they had been offered. While Highway wasn’t undercover Narcotics, neither was it a district, where they would have spent their time breaking up major hubcap-theft rings, settling domestic arguments, and watching the weeds grow.

  There was soon going be another examination for detective, and they were both determined to pass it. Once they were detectives, they had agreed, they could apply for—and more important probably get, because they had caught Gerald Vincent Gallagher, Esquire—something interesting, Major Crimes, maybe, but if not Major Crimes, then maybe Intelligence or even Homicide.

  In the meantime they understood that the smart thing for them to do was keep smiling, keep their noses clean, keep studying for the detective exam, do what they were told to do, and act like they liked it.

  As their first tour enforcing the Motor Vehicle Code on the Schuykill Expressway very slowly passed, however, they found this harder and harder to do.

  Only two interesting things had happened since they began their patrol. First, of course, was making asses of themselves by turning the lights and the siren on and then pulling alongside Captain Pekach and that rich broad from Chestnut Hill he was fucking and signaling him to pull over.

  Captain Pekach probably wouldn’t say anything. He was a good guy, and before he made captain they had worked for him when he was a lieutenant in Narcotics, but that sure hadn’t made them look smart.

  And an hour after that a northbound Buick had clipped a Ford Pinto in the ass, spinning him around and over into the southbound lane, where he got hit by a Dodge station wagon, which spun him back into his original lane. Nobody got hurt bad, but there wasn’t much left of the Pinto, and the Buick had a smashed-in grille from hitting the Pinto and a smashed-in quarter-panel where the Pinto had been knocked back into it by the Dodge. The insurance companies were going to have a hard time sorting out who had done what to whom on that one. It had been forty-five minutes before they’d gotten that straightened out, before the ambulance had carried the guy in the Pinto and his girlfriend off to the hospital and the wreckers had hauled the wrecked cars off.

  Sergeant William “Big Bill” Henderson had shown up at the crash site about five minutes after they’d called it in, even before the ambulance got there. He clearly got his rocks off working accidents.

  First he called for another Highway car, and then he took over from Charley McFadden, who by then had a bandage on the forehead of the guy in the Pinto where he’d whacked his head on the door and had him and his girlfriend calmed down and sitting in the back of the RPC.

  He sent Charley down the expressway to help Hay-zus direct traffic around the wreck. And then once the other Highway car and then the ambulance and the wreckers showed up, he really started to supervise. He told the ambulance guys to put the guy in the Pinto in the ambulance, which wasn’t really all that hard to figure out, since he was the only one bleeding. Then he told the wrecker guys how to haul away the Pinto and the Buick. He even got his whistle out and directed traffic while that was going on.

  Sergeant Henderson, in other words, confirmed the opinion (asshole, blowhard) Officers McFadden and Martinez had formed of him when he delivered his little pep talk at Bustleton and Bowler before sending them on patrol.

  Neither Charley nor Hay-zus had liked standing in the middle of the expressway, directing traffic. They had especially disliked it after the southbound lane had been cleared, and four hundred and twenty assholes had passed them going fifty miles an hour two feet away while gawking at the crumpled Pinto and the other cars.

  It had to be done, of course; otherwise the assholes would have tried to drive right over the Dodge before they got that out of the way. Both privately wondered if the Highway guys got used to having two tons of automobile whiz past them—whoosh, whoosh, whoosh, whoosh—two feet away at fifty miles an hour, or if they were scared by it.

  But directing traffic did temper their enthusiasm to enforce rigidly the Motor Vehicle Code insofar as it applied to permitted vehicular speeds. T
here were several things wrong with stopping a guy who was going five or ten miles over the posted speed limit but doing nothing else wrong.

  First, there was something not quite right about handing a guy a ticket for doing something you knew you had done yourself. Then there was the fine; and there were a lot of points against your record in Harrisburg for a moving violation and so many points and you lost your license. And finally, the goddamn insurance companies found out you had a speeding ticket and they raised your premiums.

  If a guy was going maybe seventy where the limit was fifty-five, or he was weaving in and out of traffic or tailgating some guy so close that he couldn’t stop, that was something else: Ticket the son of a bitch and get him off the road before he hurt somebody.

  That made the other things wrong with handing out tickets worthwhile. You never knew, when you pulled some guy to the side of the road to write him a ticket, what you were going to find. Ninety times out of a hundred it would be some guy who would be extra polite, admit he was going a little over the limit, and maybe mention he had a cousin who was an associate member of the FOP and hope you would just warn him.

  Four times out of a hundred it would be some asshole who denied doing what you had caught him doing; said he was a personal friend of the mayor (and maybe was); or that kind of crap. And maybe one time in a hundred, one time in two hundred, when you pulled a car to the side and walked up to it, it was stolen, and the driver tried to back over you; or the driver was drunk and belligerent and would hit you with a tire iron when you leaned over and asked to see his license and registration. Or the driver was carrying something he shouldn’t be carrying, something that would send him away for a long time, unless he could either bribe, or shoot, the cop who had stopped him.

  And one hundred times out of one hundred, when you pulled a guy over on the Schuylkill Expressway, when you bent over and asked him for his license and registration, two-ton automobiles went fifty-five miles per hour two feet off your ass—whoosh, whoosh, whoosh, whoosh.