The Victim

by W. E. B Griffin

  “Oh, shit,” Matt said. “I really fucked this up, didn’t I?”

  “Yeah, and good intentions don’t count,” Wohl said. “What counts, I’m afraid, is that Commissioner Czernich believes, more than likely correctly, that H. Richard Detweiler is going to be furious when he hears about your little escapade and is going to make his displeasure known to the mayor. When the mayor calls him, the commissioner will now be able to say that he’s taken care of the matter. You have been relieved out here and assigned to duties appropriate to your experience. In other words, in a district, in uniform, and more than likely in a wagon.”

  “Oh, Christ, I’m sorry.”

  “So am I, Matt,” Wohl said gently. “But what you did was stupid. For what it’s worth, you probably should have gone to a district like anybody else fresh from the Academy.”

  “Hell, I’ll just resign,” Matt said.

  “You think you’re too good to ride around in a wagon?” Wohl asked.

  “No,” Matt said, “not at all. That’s what I expected to do when I got out of the Academy. Denny Coughlin made sure I understood what to expect. I mean, under these circumstances. I have fucked up by the numbers, and they’ll know that at the 12th. I think it would be best all around, that’s all, if I just folded my tent and silently stole away.”

  “Today’s Thursday,” Wohl said. “I’ll call the captain of the 12th and tell him you will either report for duty on Monday or resign by then. Think it over, over the weekend.”

  “You don’t think I should resign?”

  “I don’t think you should resign right now, today,” Wohl said. “I think you would have made a pretty good cop. I think you were given too great an opportunity to fuck up. But you did fuck up, and you’re going to have to make your mind up whether or not you want to take your lumps.”

  Matt looked at him.

  “That’s all, Officer Payne,” Wohl said. “You can go.”

  When Payne had left and closed the door behind him, Wohl went to his coffee machine and poured himself a cup of coffee.

  “Fuck it,” he said suddenly, angrily. He opened a filing cabinet drawer and took out a bottle of bourbon and liberally laced the coffee with it.

  “If anybody wants any of that, help yourself,” he said.

  “Inspector,” Captain Sabara said, “I didn’t want to open my mouth, but a lot of what happened just now went right over my head.”

  Wohl looked at him as if confused.

  “Oh, that’s right,” he said. “You guys don’t know about the FBI agents, do you?”

  Both shook their heads.

  He told them.

  “So what Payne was really doing at Hahneman Hospital was less playing at detective than trying to get my chestnuts out of the fire,” he concluded. “The poor bastard waited for me out there, in that pathetic innocence, really thinking that now that he had solved this shooting, it would get me off the hook for making an ass of myself with the FBI.”

  “Shit,” Pekach said.

  “If I was him, I’d quit,” Wohl said. “But if he doesn’t, I’ll—I don’t know how—try to get the word around the 12th that he’s really a good kid.”

  “I know Harry Feldman over there,” Sabara said.

  “He’s the captain?”

  “Yeah. I’ll have a word with him,” Sabara said.

  “Thanks. Not surprising me at all, it seems to have turned out that Payne’s new boss hates my ass. Do you think Czernich knew that?”

  “I know a couple of guys in the 12th,” Pekach said. “I’ll talk to them.”

  “What do you think is going to happen about the FBI?” Sabara asked.

  “If Duffy doesn’t know about the photographs yet, or of me going down there out of channels, he will shortly,” Wohl said. “And from there, how long will it take him to walk down the corridor from his office to Czernich’s?”

  “Give Czernich Dolan,” Sabara said. “That wasn’t your fault.”

  “I might have done the same thing,” Wohl said. “Those two looked like your standard, neatly dressed, shiny-shoes ‘Look at me, Ma, I’m a G-man’ FBI agents, just begging for the needle. I won’t give Czernich Dolan. What he did was dumb, but not dumb enough to lose his pension over it, and that’s what Czernich’s reaction would be. Anyway, all Czernich is interested in doing is covering his ass in front of the mayor. I’m on his list now, so just let him add the photographs to everything else I’ve done wrong or shown a lack of judgment doing.”

  “Dolan won’t do anything like that again, Peter,” Pekach said.

  “You’re not defending the son of a bitch, Dave, are you?” Sabara asked.

  “I should have added ‘when I’m through with him,’” Pekach said.

  “Well, what’s done is done,” Sabara said. “Let’s go get some lunch.”

  “I’ve got to meet someone for lunch,” Pekach said.

  “Is that what they call a nooner, Dave?” Wohl asked mischievously. Then he saw the look on Pekach’s face. “Sorry, I shouldn’t have said that.”

  Pekach’s face showed the apology was inadequate.

  “What that is, Dave,” Wohl said, “is a combination of a bad day and a bad case of jealousy. But I was out of line, and I’m sorry.”

  “I already forgot it,” Pekach said. Both his face and his tone of voice made it clear that was far short of the truth.

  “I’ll buy lunch,” Captain Mike Sabara said, “providing it doesn’t go over two ninety-five.”

  Wohl chuckled. “Thanks, Mike, I really hate to pass that up, but I’ve got plans too. Maybe it would be a good idea if you hung around here until either Dave or I get back.”

  “You got it,” Sabara said. “I’ll send out for something. You want to tell me where you’re going?”

  “If you need me, put it on the radio,” Wohl said. He looked at Dave Pekach. “If you’re still sore, Dave, I’m still sorry.”

  “I just don’t like people talking that way about her,” Pekach blurted. “It’s not like what everybody thinks.”

  “What everybody thinks, Dave, is that you have a nice girl,” Wohl said. “If anybody thought different, you wouldn’t get teased.”

  “That’s right, Dave,” Sabara agreed solemnly.

  Pekach looked intently at each of them. He smiled, shrugged, and walked out of the room.

  When he was out of earshot, Sabara said, “But you were right, that’s what you call it, a nooner.”

  “Captain Sabara, for a Sunday school teacher, you’re a dirty old man,” Wohl said. “I should be back in an hour. If something important comes up, put it on the radio.”

  “Yes, sir,” Sabara said.

  Martha Peebles was on the lawn, armed with the largest hedge clippers Dave Pekach had ever seen—they looked like two of King Arthur’s swords or something stuck together—when he drove into the drive. She waved it at him when she saw him.

  He parked the car in the garage, where it wouldn’t attract too much attention, and walked toward the house. She met him under the portico.

  “Hello, Precious,” she said. “What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing,” he said. “What are you going to do with that thing?”

  She pointed the clippers in the general direction of his crotch and opened and closed it. Both of his hands dropped to protect the area.

  “Oh, come on,” she said. “You know I wouldn’t want to hurt that.”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I hope not.”

  “Something is wrong,” she said. “I can tell. Something happen at Bustleton and Bowler?”

  “Nothing that anybody can do anything about,” Pekach said.

  “Well,” she said, taking his arm. “You can tell me all about it over lunch. I made French onion soup. Made it. Not from one of those packet things. And a salad. With Roquefort dressing.”

  “Sounds good,” he said.

  “And there’s nobody in the house,” she said. “Which I just happen to mention en passant and not to give you any ideas.�
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  “I always wonder when I eat this stuff,” Jason Washington said as he skillfully picked up a piece of Peking Beef with chopsticks and dipped it in a mixture of mustard and plum preserves, “if they really eat it in Peking, or whether it was invented here by some Chinaman who figured Americans will eat anything.”

  “It’s good,” Peter Wohl said.

  “They use a lot of monosodium glutamate,” Washington said. “To bring the taste out. It doesn’t bother me, but it gets to Martha. She thought she was having a heart attack—angina pectoris.”

  “Really?”

  “Pain in the pectoral muscles,” Washington explained, and pointed to his pectorals.

  “She went to the doctor and told him that whenever she had Chinese food, she had angina pectoris. He said, in that case, don’t eat Chinese food. And then, when she calmed down, he told her that making diagnoses was his business, and about the monosodium glutamate.”

  “I didn’t know that,” Wohl said, “about monosodium glutamate.”

  In his good time, Wohl thought, Jason will get around to telling me what’s on his mind. He didn’t ask if I was free for lunch because he didn’t want to eat Peking Beef alone.

  “I feel really bad about Matt Payne,” Washington said. “If I had any idea he was going to see that Detweiler girl, I would have stopped him.”

  So that’s what’s on his mind.

  “I know that,” Wohl said. “He went over there to help me.”

  “He thinks you’re really something special,” Washington said.

  “He thinks you make Sherlock Holmes look like a mental retard,” Wohl replied.

  “If I was Matthew M. Payne and they put me back in uniform and in a 12th District wagon or handed me a wrench and told me to go around and turn off fire hydrants, I would quit.”

  “I think he probably will.”

  “We need young cops like that, Peter,” Washington said.

  “So?”

  “I have a few favors owed me,” Washington said. “How sore would you be if I called them in?”

  “You’d be wasting them,” Wohl said. “Czernich decided the way to cover his ass was to jump on the kid before the mayor told him to. He knew that would piss off a lot of people. Denny Coughlin, for one. If Coughlin goes to the mayor, and I really hope he doesn’t, it would make the mayor choose between him and Czernich. I’m not sure how that would go. And while I agree, I would hate to see Matt resign, and I would really hate to see Denny Coughlin retire. I’d like to see Coughlin as commissioner.”

  “So you’re saying, just let the kid go, right? ‘For the good of the Department’?”

  “Pekach and Sabara say they know people in the 12th. They’ll put in a good word for him.”

  “You won’t?”

  “Feldman is the captain. When I was working as a staff inspector, I put his brother-in-law away.”

  “Christ, I forgot that. Lieutenant in Traffic? Extortion? They gave him five to fifteen?”

  Wohl nodded. “I really don’t think Captain Feldman would be receptive to anything kind I would have to say about Matt Payne.”

  “Interesting, isn’t it, that Czernich sent Payne to the 12th?”

  Wohl grunted.

  “You think I could talk to Payne, tell him to hang in?”

  “I wish you would. I think you might tip the scales.”

  “Okay,” Jason Washington said, nodding his head. And then he changed the subject: “So what’s the real story about DeZego and the pimp getting hit?”

  “It’s your job, you tell me,” Wohl said.

  “You haven’t been thinking about it? That something smells with Savarese pointing Pekach at the pimp? Doing it himself?”

  “I’ve been thinking that it smells,” Wohl replied.

  “Intelligence has a guy, I guess you know, in the Savarese family.”

  Wohl nodded.

  “I talked to him about an hour ago,” Jason Washington said.

  “Intelligence know you did that?”

  “Intelligence doesn’t even know I know who he is,” Washington said. “He tells me that the word in the family is that Tony the Zee ripped off the pimp, the pimp popped him, and Savarese ordered the pimp hit. I even got a name for the doer, not that it would do us any good.”

  “One of Savarese’s thugs?”

  “One of his bodyguards. Gian-Carlo Rosselli, also known as Charley Russell.”

  “Who has eight people ready to swear he was in Atlantic City taking the sun with his wife and kids?”

  Washington nodded.

  “Tony the Zee ripped off the pimp?” Wohl asked. “How?”

  “Drugs, what else?” Washington replied.

  “You don’t sound as if you believe that,” Wohl said.

  “I think that’s what Savarese wants the family to think,” Washington said.

  “Why, do you think?”

  “I think Savarese had DeZego hit, and doesn’t want the family to know about it.”

  “Why?”

  “Why did he have him hit? Couple of possibilities. Maybe Tony went in business for himself driving the shrimp up from the Gulf Coast. That would be enough. Tony the Zee was ambitious but not too smart. He might have figured, who would ever know if he brought a kilo of cocaine for himself back up here in his suitcase.”

  “Interesting,” Wohl said.

  “He was also quite a swordsman,” Washington went on, “who could have played hide-the-salami with somebody’s wife. They take the honor of their women seriously; adultery is a mortal sin.”

  “Wouldn’t Savarese have made an example of him, if that was the case?”

  “Not necessarily,” Washington said. “Maybe the lady was important to him. Her reputation. Her honor. He might have ordered him hit to remove temptation. It didn’t have to be a wife. It could have been a daughter—I mean, unmarried daughter. If it came out that Tony had dishonored somebody’s daughter, she would have a hell of a time finding a respectable husband. These people are very big, Peter, on respectability.”

  Wohl chuckled.

  “You never heard of honor among thieves?” Washington asked innocently.

  They both laughed.

  “Why the hell are we laughing?” Wohl asked.

  “Everyone laughs at quaint native customs,” Washington said, and then added, “Or both of the above. Bottom line: For one or more reasons we’ll probably never find out, Savarese decided Tony the Zee had to go; he didn’t want his family to know that he had ordered the hit, for one or more reasons we’ll probably never find out, either; imported those two guys in the photos Dolan took to do the hit; and then had Gian-Carlo Rosselli, aka Charley Russell, hit Lanier, conveniently leaving the shotgun the imported shooters had used on Tony at the crime scene; and finally, pointed us at the pimp. We would then naturally assume that Lanier had gotten popped for having popped Tony DeZego and tell Mickey O’Hara and the other police reporters, which would lend credence to Savarese’s innocence. He almost got away with it. He would have, if it hadn’t been for Dolan’s snapshots and those two Highway cops hassling the pimp and coming up with another shotgun.”

  Wohl exhaled audibly.

  “One flaw in your analysis,” he said finally. Washington looked at him curiously. “You said, ‘He almost got away with it,’” Wohl went on. “He did get away with it. What the hell have we got, Jason? We don’t know who the professional hit men are, and we’re not likely to find out. And if we did find them, we don’t have anything on them. The only witness we have is a socialite junkie whose testimony would be useless even if we got her on the stand. And we can’t hang the Lanier murder on Rosselli, or Russell, or whatever he calls himself. So the bastard did get away with it. Goddamn, that makes me mad!”

  “You win some and you lose some,” Washington said, “that being my profound philosophical observation for the day.”

  “On top of which we look like the Keystone Kops in the newspapers and, for the cherry on top of the cake, have managed to antagonize H.
Richard Detweiler, Esquire. Christ only knows what that’s going to cost us down the pike. Damn!”

  “What I was going to suggest, Peter,” Washington said softly, “presuming you agreed with what I thought, is that I have a talk with Mickey O’Hara.”

  “About what?”

  “Mickey doesn’t like those guineas any more than I do. He could do one of those ‘highly placed police official speaking on condition of anonymity’ pieces.”

  “Saying what?”

  “Saying the truth. That Tony the Zee was hit for reasons known only to the mob, and that What’s-his-name the pimp, Lanier, didn’t do it. That would at least embarrass Savarese.”

  Wohl sat for a long moment with his lips pursed, tapping the balls of his fingers together.

  “No,” he said finally. “There are other ways to embarrass Mr. Savarese.”

  “You want to tell me how?”

  “You sure you want to know?”

  Washington considered that a moment.

  “Yeah, I want to know,” he said. “Maybe I can help.”

  “So what you were telling me before,” Martha said to Dave, interrupting herself to reach down on the bed and pull a sheet modestly over her, “is that although it’s really not Inspector Wohl’s fault, he looks very bad?”

  “Goddamn shame. He’s a hell of a cop. I really admire him.”

  “And those gangsters are just going to get away with shooting the other gangster?”

  “That happens all the time,” Pekach said. “It’s not like in the movies.” He tucked his shirt in his trousers and pulled up his zipper. “Even if we somehow found those two, they would have alibis. They’ll never wind up in court, is what I mean.”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Sometimes some things happen,” Pekach said.

  “Precious, what in the world are you talking about?”

  “Nothing,” he said. “What makes Wohl look bad is the shot cop. We don’t have a damn thing on that. And that’s bad. It makes the Department look incompetent, stupid, if we can’t get people who murder cops in cold blood. And it makes Peter Wohl look bad, because the mayor gave him the job.”