“He implied that he would have a word with the others,” H. Richard Detweiler said. “We take a lot of advertising in those newspapers. We’re entitled to a little consideration.”
“Oh, Richard,” Grace said, disgusted, “you can be such an ass! If Nelson has influence with the other newspapers, how is it that he couldn’t keep them from printing every last sordid detail of his son’s homosexual love life?”
Detweiler looked at Payne.
“I’m afraid Grace is right,” Payne said.
“You can’t talk to them? Mentioning idly in passing how much money Nesfoods spends with them every year?”
“I’d be wasting my breath,” Payne said. “The only way to deal with the press is to stay away from it.”
“You’re a lot of help,” Detweiler said. “I just can’t believe there is nothing that can be done.”
“Unfortunately there is nothing that can be done. Except, of course, to reiterate, to stay away from the press. Say nothing.”
“Just a moment, Brewster,” Colonel Mawson said. “If I might say something?”
“Go ahead,” Grace said.
“The way to counter bad publicity is with good publicity,” Mawson said. “Don’t you agree?”
“Get to the point,” Grace Detweiler said.
He did.
TWENTY
Matt Payne was watching television determinedly. PBS was showing a British-made documentary of the plight of Australian aborigines in contemporary society, a subject in which he had little or no genuine interest. But if he did not watch television, he had reasoned, he would get drunk, which did not at the moment have the appeal it sometimes did, and which, moreover, he suspected was precisely the thing he should not do at the moment, under the circumstances.
He had disconnected his telephone. He did not want to talk to either his father, Officer Charles McFadden, Amanda Spencer, Captain Michael J. Sabara, or Chief Inspector Dennis V. Coughlin, all of whom had called and left messages that they would try again later.
All he wanted to do was sit there and watch the aborigines jumping around Boy Scout campfires in their loincloths and bitching, sounding like brown, fuzzy-haired Oxford dons, about the way they were treated.
His uniform was hanging from the fireplace mantelpiece. He had taken it from the plastic mothproof bag and hung it there so he could look at it. He had considered actually putting it on and examining himself in the mirror, and decided against that as unnecessary. He could imagine what he would look like in it as Officer Payne of the 12th Police District.
If there was one thing that could be said about the uniform specified for officers of the Philadelphia Police Department, it did not have quite the class or the élan of the uniform prescribed for second lieutenants of the United States Marine Corps.
He had actually said, earlier on, “Damn my eyes,” which sounded like a line from a Charles Laughton movie. But if it wasn’t for his goddamn eyes, he would now be on his way to Okinawa and none of this business with the cops would have happened.
He would have gone to Chad and Daffy’s wedding as a Marine officer and met Amanda, and they would have had their shipboard romance, as she called it, in much the same way. And things probably would have turned out much the same way, except that what had happened between them in the apartment would have happened in a hotel room or something, for if he had gone into the Marines, ergo, he would not have gotten the apartment.
But he had not gone into the Marines. He had gone into the cops and as a result of that had proven beyond any reasonable doubt that he was a world-class asshole with a naïveté that boggled the imagination, spectacular delusions of his own cleverness, and a really incredible talent for getting other people—goddamn good people, Washington and Wohl, plus of course his father—in trouble because of all of the above. Not to mention embarrassing Uncle Denny Coughlin.
And now, having sinned, he was expected to do penance. He had not told Wohl the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth about whether he thought he was too good to ride around in an RPW hauling drunks off to holding cells and fat ladies off to the hospital. He didn’t want to do it. Was that the same as thinking he was too good to do it?
Presuming, of course, that he could swallow his pride and show up at the 12th District on Monday, preceded by his reputation as the wiseass college kid who had been sent there in disgrace, what did he have to look forward to?
Two years of hauling the aforementioned fat lady down thestairs and into the wagon and then off to the hospital, perhaps punctuated, after a while, when they learned that within reason I could be trusted with exciting assignments, like guarding school crossings and maybe even—dare I hope?—filling in for some guy on vacation or something and actually getting to go on patrol in my RPC.
Then I will be eligible to take the examination for detective or corporal. Detective, of course. I don’t want to be a corporal. And I will pass that. I will even study to do well on it, and I will pass it, and then what?
Do I want to ride shotgun in a wagon for two years to do that?
Amanda would, with justification, decide I was rather odd to elect to ride shotgun on a wagon. Amanda does not wish to be married to a guy who rides shotgun on a wagon. Can one blame Amanda? One cannot.
There was a rustling, and then a harsher noise, almost metallic.
The building is empty. I carefully locked the door to my stairs; therefore it cannot be anything human rustling around my door. Perhaps the raven Mr. Poe spoke of, about to quote “Nevermore” to me, as in “Nevermore, Matthew Payne, will you be the hotshot, hotshit special assistant to inspector Wohl.”
It’s a rat, that’s what it is. That’s all I need, a fucking rat!
“You really ought to get dead-bolt locks for those doors,” a vaguely familiar voice said.
Matt, startled, jumped to his feet.
Chief Inspector August Wohl, retired, was standing just inside the door, putting something back in his wallet.
“How the hell did you get in?” Matt blurted.
“I’ll show you about doors sometime. Like I said, you really should get dead-bolt locks.”
“What can I do for you, Mr. Wohl?”
“You could offer me a drink,” he said. “I would accept. It’s a long climb up here. And call me Chief, if you don’t mind. It has a certain ring to it.”
Matt walked into the kitchen and got out the bottle of Scotch his father had given him.
“Well, I’m glad to see there’s some left,” Chief Wohl said.
“Sir?”
“I really expected to find you passed out on the floor,” Chief Wohl said. “That’s why I let myself in. People who drink alone can get in a lot of trouble.”
“I’m already in a lot of trouble,” Matt said.
“So I understand.”
“Water all right?”
“Just a touch. That’s very nice whiskey.”
“How’d you know I was here?”
“Your car’s downstairs. There’s lights on. There was movement I could see—shadows—from the street. It had to be either you or a burglar. I’m glad it was you. I’m too old to chase burglars.”
Matt chuckled.
“Why’d you come?” he asked.
“I wanted to talk to you, but I’ll be damned if I will while drinking alone.”
“I’m not so sure that drinking is what I need to be doing just now.”
“And the pain of feeling sorry for yourself is sharper when you’re stone sober, right? And you like that?”
“What the hell,” Matt said, and poured himself a drink.
“I see you have your uniform out,” Chief Wohl said. “Does that mean you’re going to report to the 12th on Monday?”
“It means I’m thinking about it,” Matt said.
“Which side is winning?”
“The side that’s wondering if I can find anybody interested in buying a nearly new set of uniforms, size forty regular,” Matt said.
“You going
to ask me if I want to sit down?” Chief Wohl said.
“Oh! Sorry. Please sit down.”
“Thank you,” Chief Wohl said. He sat in Matt’s chair and put his feet up on the footstool. Matt sat on the window ledge.
“I told Peter that I think he’s wrong about you needing the experience you’ll get—if you decide to go over there on Monday—at the 12th,” Chief Wohl said. “Incidentally, Peter feels lousy about the way that happened. I want you to understand that. It was out of his hands. That’s one of the reasons I came here, to make sure you understood that.”
“I thought it probably was,” Matt said. “I mean the commissioner’s decision.”
“Reaction, not decision,” Chief Wohl said. “There’s a difference. When you decide something, you consider the facts and make a choice. When you react, it’s different. Reactions are emotional.”
“I’m not sure I follow you.”
“Right or wrong wasn’t on Czernich’s agenda. What he saw was that Jerry Carlucci was going to be pissed off at Peter because of your little escapade with the Detweiler girl. He wanted to get himself out of the line of fire. He reacted. By jumping on you before Carlucci said anything, he was proving, he thinks, to Jerry Carlucci, that he’s one of the good guys.”
Matt took a pull at his drink.
“You’re not going to learn anything,” Chief Wohl said, “if you decide to go over there on Monday, hauling fat ladies with broken legs downstairs—”
Matt laughed.
“I say something funny?” Chief Wohl snapped.
“I’m sorry,” Matt said. “But I was thinking in exactly those terms—hauling fat ladies—when I was thinking about what I would be doing in the 12th.”
“As I was saying, you won’t learn anything hauling fat ladies except how to haul fat ladies. The idea of putting rookies on jobs like that is to give them experience. You’ve already had your experience.”
“Do you mean because I shot the serial rapist?” Matt asked.
“No. As a matter of fact, I didn’t even think about that,” Chief Wohl said. “No, not that. That was something else. What I meant was the price of going off half-cocked before you think through what’s liable to happen if you do what seems like such a great idea. The price of doing something dumb is what I mean.”
“It’s obviously expensive,” Matt said. “I lose my job. I get my boss in trouble. I get to haul fat ladies. And because I was dumb, the scumbags who shot the other scumbag and Penny Detweiler get away with it. That really makes me mad. No, not mad. Ashamed of myself.”
He became aware that Chief Wohl was looking at him with an entirely different look on his face.
“Chief, did I say something wrong?” Matt asked.
“No,” Chief Wohl replied. “No, not at all. Can I have another one of these?”
“Certainly.”
When Matt was at the sink, Chief Wohl got up and followed him.
“They may not get away with it,” he said. “I have just decided that if I tell you something, it won’t go any further. Am I right?”
“Do you think, after the trouble I’ve caused, that I am any judge of my reliability?”
“I think you can judge whether or not you can keep your mouth shut, particularly since you have just learned how you can get other people in trouble.”
“Yes, sir,” Matt said after a moment. “I can keep my mouth shut.”
Chief Wohl met his eyes for a moment and then nodded.
“There is a set of rules involving the Mob and the police. Nobody talks about them, but they’re there. I won’t tell you how I know this, but Vincenzo Savarese got word to Jerry Carlucci that the Mob—Mobs, there’s a couple of them—had nothing to do with the shooting of that Italian cop…what was his name?”
“Magnella. Joseph Magnella,” Matt furnished.
“We believe him. The reason he told us that is not because he gives a damn about a dead cop but because he doesn’t want us looking for the doer, doers, in the Mob. We might come across something else he doesn’t want us to know. Since we’re taking him at his word, that means we can devote the resources to looking elsewhere. You with me?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Okay. The DeZego hit is different. Ordinarily we really don’t spend a lot of time worrying about the Mob killing each other. If we can catch the doer, fine. But we know that we seldom do catch the doers, so we go through the motions and let it drop. The DeZego hit is different.”
“Because of Penny Detweiler?”
“No. Well, maybe a little. But that’s not what I’m talking about. The one thing the Mob does not do is point the finger at some other Mob guy and say he’s the doer, go lock him up. That violates their Sicilian Code of Honor, telling the police anything about some other mafioso. If a Mob guy is hit, it’s one of two ways. It was, by their standards, a justified hit, and that’s the end of it. Or it was unjustified and they put out a contract on the guy who did it. This was different. They pointed us, with that matchbook Savarese gave Dave Pekach, at the pimp.”
“He was black.”
“More important,” Chief Wohl said, a tone of impatience in his voice, “he didn’t do it.”
“Yeah,” Matt said, chagrined. “Maybe they wanted him—the pimp, I mean—killed for some other reason.”
“Could well be, but that’s not the point. The point is that Savarese tried to play games with us. Two things with that. One, we wonder why. Two, more important, that breaks the rules. He lied to us. We can’t have that.”
“So what happens?”
“The first thing we think is that if he lied to us about the pimp, he’s probably lying to us about not knowing who killed the Italian cop. So that means we can’t trust him.”
“So you start looking around the Mob for who killed DeZego and who killed Magnella.”
“Yeah,” Chief Wohl said. “But before we do that, to make sure that he knows we haven’t broken our end of the arrangement, we let him know we know he broke the rules first.”
“How?”
Chief Wohl told him. And as he was explaining what was going to happen—in fact, had already happened, thirty minutes before, just after ten P.M., just before Chief Inspector Wohl, retired, had shown up at the apartment—a question arose in Matt’s mind that he knew he could never raise: whether the chief had been a spectator or a participant.
When Mr. Vincenzo Savarese’s Lincoln pulled to the curb in front of the Ristorante Alfredo right on time to pick up Mr. Savarese following his dinner and convey him to his residence, a police officer almost immediately came around the corner, walked up to the car, and tapped his knuckles on the window.
When the window came down, Officer Foster H. Lewis, Jr., politely said, “Excuse me, sir, this is a no-parking, no-standing zone. You’ll have to move along.”
“We’re just picking somebody up,” Mr. Pietro Cassandro, who was driving the Lincoln, said.
“I’m sorry, sir, this is a no-standing zone,” Officer Lewis said.
“For chrissake, we’ll only be two minutes,” Mr. Gian-Carlo Rosselli, who was in the front seat beside Mr. Cassandro, said.
Officer Lewis removed his booklet of citations from his hip pocket.
“May I see your driver’s license and registration, please, sir? I’m afraid that I will have to issue a citation.”
“We’re moving, we’re moving,” Mr. Cassandro said as he rolled up the window and put the car in gear.
“Just drive around the block,” Mr. Rosselli said.
“Arrogant fucking nigger—put them in a uniform and they really think they’re hot shit.”
“That was a big nigger. Did you see the size of that son of a bitch?”
“I didn’t want to have Mr. S. coming out of the place and finding jumbo Sambo standing there. If there’s anything he hates worse than a nigger, it’s a nigger cop.”
There was more fucking trouble with the fucking cops going around the block. There was something wrong with the sewer or something, and t
here was a cop standing in the middle of the street with his hand up. And they couldn’t back up and go around, either, because another car, an old Jaguar convertible, was behind them. They took five minutes minimum, and the result was that when they went all the way around the block, Mr. S. was standing on the curb looking nervous. He didn’t like to wait around on curbs.
“Sorry, Mr. S.,” Mr. Cassandro said. “We had trouble with a cop.”
“What kind of trouble with a cop?”
“Fresh nigger cop, just proving he had a badge,” Mr. Cassandro said.
“I don’t like trouble with cops,” Mr. Savarese said.
“It wasn’t his fault, Mr. S.,” Mr. Rosselli said.
“I don’t want to hear about it. I don’t like trouble with cops.”
Mr. Savarese’s Lincoln turned south on South Broad Street.
Mr. Cassandro became aware that the car behind, the stupid bastard, had his bright lights on. He reached up and flicked the little lever under the mirror, which deflected the beam of light, and he could see the car behind him.
“There’s a fucking cop behind us,” Mr. Cassandro said.
“I don’t like trouble with cops,” Mr. Savarese said. “Don’t give him any excuse for anything.”
“Maybe he’s just there, like coincidental,” Mr. Rosselli said.
“Yeah, probably,” Mr. Cassandro said.
Six blocks down South Broad Street, the police car was still behind the Lincoln, which was now traveling thirty-two miles per hour in a thirty-five-mile-per-hour zone.
“Is the cop still back there?” Mr. Savarese asked.
“Yeah, he is, Mr. S.,” Mr. Cassandro said.
“I wonder what the fuck he wants,” Mr. Rosselli asked.
“I don’t like trouble with cops,” Mr. Savarese said. “Have we got a bad taillight or something?”
“I don’t think so, Mr. S.,” Mr. Cassandro said.
Three blocks farther south, the flashing lights on the roof of the police car turned on, and there was the whoop of its siren.
“Shit,” Mr. Cassandro said.
“You must have done something wrong,” Mr. Savarese said.
The Victim Page 36
