Peter Wohl laughed out loud. “True story, Matt,” he said.
“Well,” Chief Wohl went on, “like I said, Matt, this guy was a real wiseass, and I knew I was wasting my breath. If Carlucci had beat him up, he wasn’t going to tell me. So I went home. About a week later a piece of paper crossed my desk. It was a court order for the release of evidence in a truck heist before trial. You know what I mean, son?”
“Matt,” Peter Wohl said, “sometimes a court will order the release of stolen property to its owners before the case comes to trial, if they can prove undue hardship, that sort of thing.”
“Yes, sir,” Matt said.
“The evidence was described as ‘theatrical costumes and accessories.’ Highway had the evidence. I didn’t pay much attention to it at the time, but the same afternoon, I was out at Bustleton and Bowler, and I was a little curious. So I asked the sergeant where the theatrical costumes were—I was asking, in other words, if they had been returned to the owners yet. The sergeant said, ‘Everything but the gorilla suit’s out in the storeroom. Captain Carlucci’s got the gorilla suit.’”
He put his glass down and laughed so hard, his eyes watered.
“That goddamn Jerry Carlucci had actually put the gorilla suit on, gone into the holding cell, and worked the bum over. And the bum, who had his reputation to think of, was not going to go to court and complain he’d been assaulted by a guy in a gorilla suit. Oh, Jesus, Jerry was one hell of a cop!”
There were the sounds of footsteps on the stairs outside, and then a rap at the door. Wohl went to it and opened it. Sergeant Big Bill Henderson stood there.
“Not that I’m not glad to see you, Sergeant,” Wohl said, “but I guess I should have asked for a two-man car.”
“What’s the problem, Inspector?”
“There’s no problem at all, Sergeant,” Chief Wohl said. “My son has got the cockamamie idea that I’m too drunk to drive.”
“Hello, Chief,” Big Bill said. “Nice to see you again, sir.”
“I was just telling Matt Payne about Jerry Carlucci and the gorilla suit,” Chief Wohl said. “You ever hear that story?”
“No, sir,” Big Bill said. “You can tell me on the way home. Inspector, I’ll have a car pick up mine and meet me at the chief’s house. Okay?”
“Fine,” Wohl said. “Or we could wait for a two-man car.”
“No, I’ll take the chief. I want to hear about the gorilla suit.” He winked at Peter Wohl.
Peter Wohl found his father’s coat and helped him into it. Matt saw for the first time that Chief Wohl had a pistol.
I guess once a cop, always a cop.
“You tell Mother going to Groverman’s Bar was your idea, Dad?” Peter said.
“I can handle your mother, don’t you worry about that,” Chief Wohl said. He walked over to Matt and shook his hand. “Nice to meet you, son. I probably shouldn’t tell you this, but Peter thinks you’re going to make a hell of a cop.”
“I said ‘in twenty years or so’ is what I said,” Peter Wohl said.
Chief Wohl and Sergeant Henderson left.
Wohl walked past Matt, into his bedroom, and returned in a moment carrying sheets and blankets and a pillow. He tossed them at Matt.
“Make up the couch. Go to bed. Do not snore. Leave quietly in the morning. You are still working with Jason?”
“Yes, sir. I’m to meet him at the Roundhouse at eight.”
“Try not to breathe on him,” Wohl said. “I would hate for him to get the idea that you’ve been out till all hours drinking.”
“Yes, sir. Good night, sir.”
At his bedroom door Peter Wohl turned. “When you hear the gorilla suit story again, and you will, remember that the first time you heard it, you heard it from the source,” he said.
“Yes, sir.”
“Good night, Matt,” Wohl said, and closed the door.
Matt undressed to his underwear. The last thing he took off was his ankle holster. He laid it on the table beside his tuxedo trousers.
My gun, he thought. The tool of the policeman’s trade. Chief Wohl still carries his. And Chief Wohl thinks I’m a cop. A rookie, maybe, but a cop. He wouldn’t have told that story to a civilian, about the mayor when he was a cop, putting on a gorilla suit and knocking some wiseass around. I wouldn’t tell it to my father; he’s a civilian and wouldn’t understand. And Chief Wohl wasn’t kidding when he said that Inspector Wohl told him he thought I could make a good cop.
Matt Payne went to sleep feeling much happier than when he had walked in the door.
SIXTEEN
Matt Payne’s bladder woke him with a call to immediate action at half past five. It posed something of a problem. There was only one toilet in Peter Wohl’s apartment, off his bedroom. It was either try to use that without waking Wohl or going outside and relieving himself against the wall of the garage, something that struck him as disgusting to do, but he knew he could not make it to the nearest open diner or hamburger joint.
When he stood up, the decision-making process resolved itself. A sharp pain told him he could not wait until he got outside.
On tiptoe he marched past Wohl, who was sleeping on his stomach with his head under a pillow. He carefully closed the door to the bathroom, raised the lid, and tried to accomplish what had to be done as quietly as possible. He had just congratulated himself on his skill doing that and begun to hope that he could tiptoe back out of Wohl’s room undiscovered when the toilet, having been flushed, began to refill the tank. It sounded like Niagara Falls.
Finally it stopped, with a groan like a wounded elephant. Matt opened the door and looked. Wohl did not appear to have moved. Matt tiptoed past the foot of Wohl’s bed and made it almost to the door.
“Good morning, Officer Payne,” Wohl said from under his pillow. “You’re up with the goddamn roosters, I see.”
“Sorry,” Matt said.
He closed Wohl’s door, dressed quickly, left the apartment as quietly as he could, and drove to Rittenhouse Square. He went directly to the refrigerator, took out a half gallon of milk, and filled a large glass. It was sour.
Holding his nose, he poured it down the drain, then leaned against the sink.
The red light on his telephone answering machine was flashing.
“Why did you leave?” Amanda’s voice inquired metallically. Because, after telling me the cruise ship had docked, you went to bed. “I hope I didn’t run you off.” Perish the thought! “Call me.” Now? It’s quarter after six in the morning!
This was followed by electronic beeping noises that indicated that half a dozen callers had declined Matt’s recorded invitation to leave their number so he could get back to them. Then a familiar, deep, well-modulated voice: “This is Jason, Matt. I’ve got to do something first thing in the morning. Don’t bother to come to the Roundhouse. I’ll either see you at Bustleton and Bowler around nine, or I’ll call you there.”
Another series, five this time, of electronic beeping noises, indicating that many callers had not elected to leave a recorded message, and then Amanda’s recorded voice, sounding as if she were torn between sorrow and indignation, demanded, “Where the hell are you? I’ve called you every half hour for hours. Call me!”
Matt looked at his watch.
It is now 6:18A.M. I will shower and shave and see if I can eliminate the source of the rumbling in my belly, and then dress, and by then it will be close to 7:00A.M., and I will call you then, because I really don’t want to talk to Mrs. Soames T. Browne at 6:18A.M.
At 7:02 A.M. Matt called the residence of Mr. and Mrs. Soames T. Browne and asked for Miss Spencer. Mrs. Soames T. Browne came on the line. Mrs. Browne told him that five minutes before, Amanda had gotten into her car and driven home, and that if he wanted her opinion, his behavior in the last couple of days had been despicable. She said she had no idea what he’d said or done to Amanda to make her cry that way and didn’t want to know, but obviously he was still as cavalier about other people’s feelings as
he had always been. She told him she had not been surprised that he had thought it amusing to try to get Chad drunk before the wedding, but she really had been surprised to learn that he had been spreading scurrilous stories about poor Penny Detweiler to one and all, with the poor girl lying at death’s door in the hospital.
And then she terminated the conversation without the customary closing salutation.
“Oh, shit!” Matt said to a dead telephone.
He put on his necktie, slipped his revolver into his ankle holster, and left the apartment. He went to his favorite restaurant, Archie’s, on 16th Street, where he had the specialité de la maison, a chili dog with onions and two bottles of root beer, for his breakfast.
Then he got in the Porsche and headed for Bustleton and Bowler. He was almost there when he noticed that a thumb-sized glob of chili had eluded the bun and come to rest on his necktie and shirt.
Jason Washington had been glad when the computer came along, not so much for all the myriad benefits it had brought to industry, academia, and general all-around record-keeping, but rather because it gave him something to sort of explain the workings of the brain.
He had been fascinated for years with the subconscious deductive capabilities of the brain, going way back to his freshman year in high school, where he found, to his delight, that he could solve simple algebraic equations in his head. He had often had no idea why he had written answers to certain examination questions, only that they had been the right answers. He had sailed through freshman algebra with an A. When he got to sophomore algebra, not having taken the time to memorize the various theories offered in freshman algebra, he got in trouble, but he never forgot the joy he had experienced the year before when the brain, without any effort at all on his part, had supplied the answers to problems he didn’t really understand.
He had first theorized that the brain was something like a muscle; the more you flexed it, the better it worked. That seemed logical, and he carried that around a long time, even after he became a policeman. He had really wanted to become a detective and had studied hard to prepare for the detective’s examination. When he took the examination, he remembered things he was surprised that he had ever learned. That tended to support the-brain-is-a-muscle theory, but he suspected that there was more to it than that.
He saw comptometers on various bureaucrats’ desks, watched them in operation, and thought that possibly the brain was sort of a supercomptometer, but that (and its predecessor, the abacus) seemed too crude and too slow for a good comparison.
Then came the computer. Not only did the computer never forget anything it was told, but it had the capability to sort through all the data it had been fed, and do so with the speed of light. The computer was a brain, he concluded. More accurately the brain was a computer, a supercomputer, better than anything at MIT, capable of sorting through vast amounts of data and coming up with the answer you were looking for.
Some of its capabilities vis-à-vis police work were immediately apparent. If you fed everyone’s license-plate number into it, and the other data about a car, and queried the computer, it would obligingly come up with absolutely correct listings of addresses, names, makes, anything you wanted to know.
Jason Washington had gone to an electronics store and bought a simple computer and, instead of watching television, had learned to program it in BASIC. He had written a program that allowed him to balance his checkbook. There had been a difference of a couple of pennies between what his computer said he had in his account and what the bank’s computer said he had. He went over his program and then challenged the bank, not caring about the three cents but curious why two computers would disagree. He didn’t get anywhere with the First Philadelphia Savings Fund Society, but a long-haired kid at the electronics store, a fellow customer, had taught him about anomalies.
As the kid explained it, it was a freak, where sometimes two and two added up to four point one, because something in either the data or the equation wasn’t quite right.
By then Jason had been a detective for a long time, was already working in Homicide, and had learned that when you were working a tough job, what you looked for was something that didn’t add up. An anomaly. That had a more professional ring to it than “something smells.”
And he had learned something else, and that was that the brain never stopped working. It was always going through its data bank if you let it, sifting and sifting and sifting, looking through its data for anomalies. And he had learned that sometimes he could, so to speak, turn the computer on. If he went to sleep thinking about a problem, sometimes, even frequently, the brain would go on searching the data bank while he was asleep. When he woke up, rarely was there the solution to the problem. Far more often there was another question. There was no answer, the brain seemed to announce, because something is either missing or wrong. Then, wide awake, all you had to do was think about that and try to determine what was missing and/or what was wrong.
Jason Washington had gone to sleep watching the NBC evening news on television while he was going over in his mind the sequence of events leading to the death, at the hands of person or persons unknown, of Anthony J. DeZego.
Mr. DeZego had spent the day at work, at Gulf Seafood Transport, 2184 Delaware Avenue, which fact was substantiated not only by his brother-in-law, Mr. Salvatore B. Mariano, another guinea gangster scumbag, but by four of his coworkers whom Jason Washington believed were telling the truth.
Mr. DeZego had then driven to the Warwick Hotel in downtown Philadelphia in his nearly new Cadillac. That fact was substantiated by the doorman, whom Washington believed, who said that Mr. DeZego had handed him a ten spot and told him to take care of the car. The car had then been parked in the Penn Services Parking Garage, fourth floor, by Lewis T. Oppen, Jr., a bellboy, who had done the car parking, left the parking stub, as directed, on the dashboard, and then delivered the keys to Mr. DeZego in the hotel cocktail lounge.
Mr. DeZego had later walked to the Penn Services Parking Garage and gone to the roof, where someone had blown the top of his head off, before or after popping Miss Penelope Detweiler, who had more than likely gone there to meet Mr. DeZego.
There was additional confirmation of this sequence of events by Sergeant Dolan and Officer What’s-his-name of Narcotics, who had staked out the Warwick. They even had photographs of Mr. DeZego arriving at the Warwick, in the bar at the Warwick, and walking to, and into, the Penn Services Parking Garage.
Mr. DeZego’s car had been driven by somebody to the airport. Probably by the doer. Doers. Why?
“Wake up, Jason, dammit!” Mrs. Martha Washington had interrupted the data-sorting function of his subconscious brain. “You toss and turn all night if I let you sleep in that chair!”
“You act like I’ve done something wrong,” Jason said indignantly.
His brain said, There is an anomaly in what Dolan told me.
“Run around the room or something,” Martha Washington said. “Just don’t lay there like a beached whale. When you snore, you sound like—I don’t know what.”
Jason went into the kitchen.
I will just go see Sergeant Dolan in the morning. But I can’t take the kid with me. Dolan thinks Matt is dealing coke.
He poured coffee in a mug, then dialed Matt’s number and told his answering machine not to meet him at the Roundhouse but to go to Bustleton and Bowler instead.
At nine-fifteen he went to bed, at the somewhat pointed suggestion of his wife.
He went to sleep feeding questions to the computer.
Where is the anomaly? I know it’s there.
Officers Jesus Martinez and Charles McFadden, in uniform, came to their feet when Captain David Pekach walked into the building at Bustleton and Bowler.
“Good morning,” Pekach said.
“Sir, can we talk to you?” McFadden asked.
I know what that’s about, I’ll bet, Pekach thought. They were not thrilled by their twelve-hour tour yesterday riding up and down the Schuylkill
Expressway. They want to do something important, be real cops, and they do not think handing out speeding tickets meets that criteria.
Then he had an unpleasant thought: Do they think that because they caught me speeding, they have an edge?
“Is this important?” he asked somewhat coldly.
“I don’t know,” McFadden said. “Maybe not.”
“Have you spoken to your sergeant about it?”
“We’d really like to talk to you, sir,” Jesus Martinez said.
Pekach resisted the urge to tell them to go through their sergeant. They were good cops. They had done a good job for him. He owed them that much.
“I’ve got to see the inspector,” he said. “Hang around, if you like. If I can find a minute, we’ll talk.”
“Yes, sir,” Martinez said.
“Thank you,” McFadden said.
Pekach walked to Peter Wohl’s door. It was open, and Wohl saw him and waved him in.
“Good morning, Inspector,” Pekach said.
“That’s open to debate,” Wohl said. “Have I ever told you the distilled essence of my police experience, Dave? Never drink with cops.”
“You’ve been drinking with cops?”
“Two cops. My father and Payne.”
Pekach chuckled. “What’s that, the odd couple?”
“I went to cry on the old man’s shoulder, and that led us first to Groverman’s Bar and then to my place, and then Payne showed up to cry on my shoulder. I sent the old man home with Sergeant Henderson and made Payne sleep on my couch.”
“What was Payne’s problem?”
“He let his mouth run away with him, told the Nesbitt kid, the one who was married, the Marine…?”
Pekach nodded.
“…that we know the Detweiler girl was using coke. And he told the bride, and she told her mother, and her mother told H. Richard Detweiler, who is highly pissed that we could suspect his daughter of such a thing, and the last time Payne saw him, he was looking for the mayor to express his outrage.”
The Victim Page 27
