“Three eight-by-tens,” the corporal said. “No problem.”
Sergeant Patrick J. Dolan is an experienced investigator. If he didn’t spot the guy with the attaché case, my name is Jerry Carlucci. Who the hell is he, and why didn’t Dolan want me to see his picture?
Even in a well-equipped photographic laboratory with all the necessary equipment to print, develop, and then dry photographs, it takes some time to prepare thirty-six eight-by-ten enlargements. It was 10:10 when Detective Jason Washington, carrying three large manila envelopes each containing a set of the dozen photographs Sergeant Dolan had taken, but not either included in his report or shown to Washington, came out of the Police Administration Building.
He got in his car and drove the half dozen blocks to Philadelphia’s City Hall, then parked his car in the inner courtyard with its nose against a sign reading RESERVED FOR INSPECTORS.
As he got out of the car he saw that he had parked beside a car familiar to him, that of Staff Inspector Peter Wohl. He checked the license plate to be sure. Wohl, obviously, was somewhere inside City Hall.
Peter will want to know about this, Jason Washington thought immediately. But even if I could find him in here, what the hell could I tell him I have? It’s probably a good thing I didn’t bump into him.
He then visited inside City Hall and began to prowl the cavernous corridors outside its many courtrooms, looking for Sergeant Patrick J. Dolan.
“You have your special assistant with you, Inspector?” Mayor Jerry Carlucci asked, by way of greeting, Staff Inspector Peter Wohl.
“No, sir,” Peter Wohl replied.
“Where is he?”
“He’s working with Detective Washington, sir.”
“That’s a shame,” the mayor said. “I had hoped to see him.”
“I didn’t know that, sir.”
“Didn’t you, Inspector? Or were you thinking, maybe, ‘He’s a nice kid and I’ll keep him out of the line of fire’?”
“I didn’t know you wanted to see him, Mr. Mayor,” Peter said.
“But now that you do, do you have any idea what I would have liked to have said to him, if given the opportunity?”
“I think he already heard that, Mr. Mayor, from me. Last night,” Peter said.
“So you know he has diarrhea of the mouth?”
“I used those very words, Mr. Mayor, when I counseled him last night,” Peter said.
Carlucci glowered at Wohl for a moment and then laughed. “You counseled him, did you, Peter?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I don’t know why the hell I’m laughing,” the mayor said. “That was pretty goddamn embarrassing at the Browne place. Dick Detweiler was goddamn near hysterical. Christ, he was hysterical.”
“Mr. Mayor,” Chief Inspector Dennis V. Coughlin said, “I think any father naturally would be upset to learn that his daughter was involved with narcotics.”
“Particularly if he heard it third hand, the way Detweiler did,” the mayor said icily, “instead of, for example, from a senior police official directly.”
“Yes, sir,” Coughlin said.
His Honor the Mayor was not through.
“Maybe an Irish police official,” Carlucci said. “The Irish are supposed to be good at politics. An Irishman could have told Detweiler about his daughter with a little Irish—what is it you call your bullshit, Denny, the kind you just tried to lay on me?—blarney.”
“Sir,” Wohl said, “it could have been worse.”
“How the hell could it have been worse?” the mayor snapped. “Do you have any idea how much Detweiler contributed to my last campaign? Or phrased another way, how little he, and his friends, will contribute to my next campaign unless we put away, for a long time—and more importantly, soon—whoever popped his daughter?”
“We have information that Miss Detweiler was involved with Tony the Zee, Mr. Mayor. He may not know that. Payne didn’t tell him.”
The mayor looked him, his eyebrows raised in incredulity.
“Oh, shit!” he said. “How good is your information?”
“My source is Payne. He got it from the Nesbitt boy—the Marine?—who got it from the Browne girl,” Wohl said.
“Then it’s just a matter of time until Detweiler learns that too,” the mayor said.
“Even if that’s true, Mr. Mayor,” Dennis Coughlin said, “I don’t see how he could hold that against you.”
The mayor snapped his head toward Coughlin and glowered at him a moment. “I hope that’s more of your fucking blarney, Denny. I would hate to think that I have a chief inspector who is so fucking dumb, he believes what he just said.”
“Jerry, for chrissake,” Chief Inspector Matt Lowenstein said. It was the first time he had spoken. “Denny’s on your side. We all are.”
Carlucci glared at him, then looked as if he were going to say something but didn’t.
“I really don’t see, Jerry,” Coughlin said reasonably, “how he could hold his daughter’s problems against you.”
“Okay,” Carlucci said, his tone as reasonable, “I’ll tell you how. We have a man who has just learned his daughter is into hard drugs. And, according to Peter, here, is about to learn that she has been running around with a guinea gangster. What’s your information, Peter? What does ‘involved with’ mean? That she’s been fucking him?”
“Yes, sir. Payne seemed pretty sure it was more than a casual acquaintance.”
“Okay. So what we have here is a guy who is a pillar of the community. His wife is a pillar of the community. They have done everything they could for their precious daughter. They have sent her to the right schools and the right churches and seen that she associates with the right kind of people-like young Payne, for example. And all of a sudden she gets herself popped with a shotgun, and then it comes out that she’s a junkie and fucking a. guinea gangster. How can that be? It’s certainly not her fault, and it’s certainly not their fault. So it has to be society’s fault. And who is responsible for society? Who is supposed to put gangsters and drug dealers in jail? Why, the police are. That’s why we have police. If the police had done their job, there would be no drugs on the street, and if the police had done their job, that low-life guinea gangster would have been put in jail and would not have been getting in precious Penny’s pants. That’s what Detweiler called his daughter last night, by the way: ‘precious Penny.’ Is any of this getting through to you, Denny?”
“Yeah, sure,” Coughlin said resignedly. “It’s not fair, but that’s the way it is.”
“Nothing personal, Denny, but that’s the first intelligent thing you’ve said so far this morning,” the mayor said. He let that sink in a moment, then turned to Peter Wohl. “What I told Detweiler last night—not knowing, of course, that his precious Penny was fucking DeZego—was that we were close to finding the man who had shot her. How much more of an asshole is that going to make me look like, Peter?”
“We may be on to something,” Wohl said carefully.
“Christ, I hope so. What?”
“Dave Pekach had dinner with his girlfriend—”
“The Peebles woman? That one?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I’m going off on a tangent,” the mayor said. “What about that? Is that going to embarrass the Department?”
“No. I don’t think so,” Wohl said. “Unless a police captain acting like a teenager in love for the first time is embarrassing.”
The mayor was not amused. “She has friends in very high places,” he said coldly. “Do you think maybe you should drop a hint that he had better treat her right?”
“I don’t think that’s necessary, Mr. Mayor,” Wohl said. “Dave Pekach is really a decent guy. And they’re really in love.”
The mayor considered that dubiously for a moment but finally said, “If you say so, Peter, okay. But what we don’t need is any more rich people pissed off at the Department than we already have. Arthur J. Nelson and Dick Detweiler is enough already. So he had dinner with
her…”
“At Ristorante Alfredo,” Wohl went on. “He had made reservations. When he got there, Vincenzo Savarese was there. He gave him—I’m cutting corners here.”
“You’re doing fine,” the mayor said.
“A little speech about being grateful for a favor Dave had done for him—nothing dirty there, just Dave being nice to a girl he didn’t know was Savarese’s granddaughter. You want to hear about that?”
“Not unless it’s important.”
“Savarese said thank you for the favor, and then Ricco Baltazari gave Dave a matchbook, said Dave dropped it. Inside was a name and address. Black guy named Marvin P. Lanier. Small-time. Says he’s a gambler. Actually he’s a pimp. And according to two of Dave’s undercover cops—Martinez and McFadden, the two who caught the junkie who killed Dutch Moffitt—Lanier sometimes transports cocaine from Harlem.”
“You’ve lost me,” the mayor said. “What’s a nigger pimp got to do with precious Penny Detweiler?”
“Last night Martinez and McFadden saw Lanier. They had been using him as a snitch. Lanier told them, quote, a guinea shot Tony the Zee, unquote.”
“He had a name?” the mayor asked.
“He was supposed to come up with one by four o’clock this afternoon,” Wohl said.
“You think he will?”
“Lanier got popped last night. Five shots with a .38,” Wohl said. “Do you know Joe D’Amata of Homicide?”
“Yeah.”
“He got the job. Because there was a Highway car seen at the crime scene, he came out to Bustleton and Bowler first thing this morning to see what we had on Lanier.”
“Which was?”
“Nothing. Martinez and McFadden were in the car. Working on their own.”
“I’m having a little trouble following all this, Peter,” the mayor said, almost apologetically.
“When McFadden and Martinez saw Lanier, they took a shotgun away from him. Joe D’Amata said Lanier had a shotgun under his bed. So I thought maybe there was a tie-in—”
“How?”
“Savarese pointed us to this guy. DeZego was popped with a shotgun. Lanier had two. Lanier gets killed.”
“What about the shotgun? Shotguns?”
“I sent them to the lab.”
“And?”
“I can call. They may not be through yet.”
“Call.”
Less than a minute later Wohl replaced one of the mayor’s three telephones in its cradle.
“Forensics,” Wohl announced, “says that the shotgun-shell cases found on the roof of the Penn Services Parking Garage were almost certainly, based on the marks made by the ejector, fired from the Remington Model 1100 shotgun D’Amata found under Lanier’s bed.”
“Bingo,” Dennis V. Coughlin said.
“You’re saying the pimp shot DeZego?” the mayor asked.
“I think Savarese wants us to think Lanier shot DeZego,” Matt Lowenstein said.
“Why?” the mayor asked.
“Who the hell knows?” Lowenstein said.
“Check with Organized Crime,” the mayor said. “See if they can come up with any reason the mob would want DeZego dead.”
“They’re working on that, Jerry,” Lowenstein said. “I asked them the day after DeZego got popped; they said they’d already been asked to check by Jason Washington.”
If there was a rebuke in Lowenstein’s reply, the mayor seemed not to have noticed.
“Washington working on this dead-pimp angle?” Carlucci asked.
“No, sir,” Wohl replied. “Chief Lowenstein loaned me D’Amata. I was going to have him work with Washington. But when I couldn’t find him, I put Tony Harris on it.”
“Why can’t you find Washington?”
“I don’t know where he is,” Wohl said, and then heard his words. “I didn’t mean that, sir, the way it came out. He’s working on the street somewhere, and when I got the word to come here, he hadn’t reported in yet. I’ve got Payne looking for him. For all I know, he’s probably already found him.”
“Tony Harris is working on the Officer Magnella job, right?” the mayor asked. “So you turn him off that to put him on this?”
“We’re getting nowhere on the Magnella job, Mr. Mayor,” Peter Wohl said. “That one’s going to take time. I wanted a good Homicide detective at the Lanier scene while it was still hot.”
“Meaning you don’t think Joe D’Amata is a good Homicide detective?” Lowenstein snapped.
“If I didn’t think Joe was as good as he is, I wouldn’t have asked you for him, Chief,” Wohl replied. “Maybe that was a bad choice of words. What I meant was that I wanted Harris and D’Amata, now that we know we’re looking for something beside the doer of a pimp shooting, to take another look at the crime scene as soon as possible.”
“I don’t like that,” the mayor said thoughtfully.
“Sir?” Peter asked.
“Shit, I didn’t mean that the way it came out. I wouldn’t tell you how to do your job, Peter. What I meant was what you said about the Magnella job, that it’s going to take time. We can’t afford that. You can’t let people get away with shooting a cop. You have to catch him—them—quick. And in a good, tight, all-the-i’s-dotted, all-the-t’s-crossed arrest.”
“Yes, sir, I know. But Harris told me all he knows how to do is go back to the beginning. There’s nothing new to run down.”
“Lowenstein giving you all the help you need?”
“Chief Lowenstein has been very helpful, sir. I couldn’t ask for anything more,” Wohl said.
“Denny, you paying attention?” the mayor asked.
“Sir?”
“Peter knows what’s the right thing to say to make friends and influence people. You ought to watch him, learn from him.”
“Oh, fuck you, Jerry,” Coughlin said when he realized that the real target of Carlucci’s barb was Wohl, and that he was being teased.
“Make that, ‘oh, fuck you, Mr. Mayor,’ sir,” Carlucci said, chuckling. Then his voice grew serious. “Okay. Thanks for coming in. If it wasn’t for what Peter said about the Magnella job, I’d say I feel a lot better than I felt before. Jesus, I’d like to hang the DeZego job on Savarese, or even on one of his scumbags.”
Coughlin stood up and shook the mayor’s hand when it was offered. Lowenstein followed him past the mayor’s desk, and then past Wohl.
The mayor hung on to Wohl’s hand, signaling that he wanted Wohl to remain behind.
“Yes, sir?”
“I spoke to your dad last night,” the mayor said.
“Last night?” Peter asked, surprised.
“This morning. Very early this morning. He told me he had been talking to you and that you led him to believe your salami was on the chopping block with all this, and you thought that was unfair.”
“I—We had a couple of drinks at Groverman’s.”
“So he said.”
“I’m sorry he called you, Mr. Mayor.”
“How could you have stopped him? What I told him, Peter, was that you were absolutely right. Your salami is on the chopping block, and it isn’t fair. I also told him that if you come out of this smelling like a rose, you stand a good chance to be the youngest full inspector in the Department.”
“Jesus,” Wohl said.
“My salami’s in jeopardy, Peter, not only yours. I’m going to look like a fucking fool if Special Operations drops the ball on all this. If I don’t look like a fucking fool when this is all over, then you get taken care of. Take my meaning?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Give my regards to your mother, Peter,” Mayor Carlucci said, and walked Peter to his office door.
Charley McFadden was almost home before he realized there was a silver lining in the dark cloud of being on Inspector Wohl’s shit list. And that was a dark cloud indeed. If Wohl was pissed at them, that meant Captains Sabara and Pekach were also pissed at them, and that meant that Sergeant Big Bill Henderson would conclude that hunting season was now
open on him and Hay-zus. Christ only knew what that son of a bitch would do to them now.
There was a good possibility that he and Hay-zus would wind up in a district somewhere, maybe even in a goddamn wagon. McFadden really didn’t want to be a Highway Patrolman, but he wanted to be an ordinary, turn-off-the-fire-hydrants, guard-a-school-crossing cop even less.
And if Wohl did send them to a district, it would probably go on their records that they had been Probationary Highway Patrolmen and flunked, or whatever it would be called. Busted probation. Shit!
The silver lining appeared when he turned onto his street and started looking for a place to park the Volkswagen. His eyes fell on the home of Mr. Robert McCarthy, and his mind’s eye recalled the red hair and blue eyes and absolutely perfect little ass of Mr. McCarthy’s niece, Margaret McCarthy, R.N.
And he had all fucking day off, until say, three, which would give him an hour to get back in uniform and drive out to Bustleton and Bowler.
He found a place to park—for once—almost right in front of his house and ran up the stairs and inside.
“What are you doing home?” his mother asked.
“Got something to do, Ma,” he called as he went up the stairs.
He took his uniform off and hung it carefully in the closet. Then he dressed with great care: a new white shirt with buttons on the collar, like he had seen Matt Payne wear; a dark brown sport coat; slightly lighter brown slacks; black loafers with a flap and little tassels in front, also seen on Matt Payne; and a necktie with stripes like both Inspector Wohl and Payne wore. He was so concerned with his appearance that he forgot his gun and had to take the jacket off and put on his shoulder holster.
Then it occurred to him that although he had shaved before going out to Bustleton and Bowler, that was a couple of hours ago, and a little more after-shave wouldn’t hurt anything; girls were supposed to like it, so he generously splashed Brut on his face and neck before leaving his room.
“Where are you going all dressed up?” his mother asked, and then sniffed suspiciously. “What’s that I smell? Perfume?”
“It’s after-shave lotion, Ma.”
“I’d hate to tell you what it smells like,” she said.
And then he was out the door.
The Victim Page 30
