W E B Griffin - Badge of Honor 03 - The Victim

by The Victim(lit)

  Still, it was worth looking into.

  He got into the Volkswagen, started it up, and drove around the block, eventually turning onto South Broad Street, head-ing north. And there was the redhead, obviously waiting for a bus.

  Impulsively he pulled to the curb and stopped. First he started to lean across the seat and roll the window down, and then he decided it would be better to get out of the car. He did so, and leaned on the roof and smiled at her. He was suddenly absolutely sure that he was about to make a real horse's ass out of himself.

  "You looking for a ride?" he blurted.

  "I'm waiting for a bus," the redhead said.

  "I didn't mean that the way it sounded," Charley said.

  "How did you mean it?" the redhead said.

  "Look," he said somewhat desperately, "I'm Charley McFadden-"

  "I know who you are," she said. "My Uncle Bob and your father are friends."

  "Yeah," he said.

  "You don't remember me, do you?" she said.

  "Yeah, sure I do."

  "No you don't." She laughed. "I used to come here when I was a kid."

  His mind was blank. "Look, I'm headed across town. Can I give you a ride?"

  "I'm going to Temple," she said. "You going anywhere near there?''

  "Right past it," he said.

  "Then yes, thank you, I would like a ride," she said.

  "Great," Charley said.

  She walked to the car and got in. When he got behind the wheel and glanced at her, she had her hand out.

  "Margaret McCarthy," she said. "Bob McCarthy is my uncle, my father's brother."

  "I'm pleased to meet you," Charley said.

  He turned the key, which resulted in a grinding of the starter gears, as the engine was already running. He winced.

  "So what are you doing at Temple?" he asked a moment or so later.

  "Going for my B.S. in nursing."

  "Your what?"

  "I'm already an RN," she said. "So I came here to get a degree. Bachelor of Science, in Nursing. I live in Balti-more."

  "Oh," Charley said, digesting that. "How long will that take?"

  "About eighteen months," she said. "I'm carrying a heavy load."

  "Oh."

  What the hell did she mean by that?

  "I'm a cop," he said.

  She giggled.

  "I would never have guessed," she said.

  "Oh, Christ!" he said.

  "Uncle Bob sent us the clippings from the newspaper," Margaret McCarthy said, "when you caught that murderer "

  "Really?"

  "My father said he thought you would wind up on the other side of the bars," she said, laughing. And then she added, "Oh, I shouldn't have said that."

  "It's all right," he said.

  "You put a golf ball through his windshield," she said. "Do you remember that? Playing stickball?"

  "Yeah," Charley said, remembering. "My old man beat hell out of me."

  "So, do you like being a policeman?"

  "I liked it better when I was plainclothes," he said. "But, yeah, I like it all right."

  "I don't know what that means," she said.

  "I used to work undercover Narcotics," Charley said. "Sort of like a detective."

  "That was in the newspapers," she said.

  "Yeah, well, after that, getting your picture in the news-papers, the drug people knew who I was. So that was the end of Narcotics for me."

  "You liked that?"

  "I liked Narcotics, yeah," Charley said.

  "What are you doing now?"

  "What I want to do is be a detective," Charley said. "So what I'm really doing now is killing time until I can take the examination.''

  "How are you 'killing time'?"

  "Well, they transferred us, me and my partner, Hay-zus Martinez-"

  "Hay-zus?"

  "That's the way the Latin people say Jesus," Charley ex-plained.

  "Oh," she said.

  "They transferred us to Special Operations," Charley said, "which is new. And then they made us probationary Highway Patrolmen. Which means if we don't screw up, after six months we get to be Highway Patrolmen."

  "Is that something special?"

  "They think it is. Like I said, I'd rather be a detective."

  "I should think that after what you did, they'd want to make you a detective," Margaret McCarthy said.

  "It don't work that way. You have to take the examina-tion."

  "Oh," she said.

  I'm going to ask her if she wants to go to a movie or some-thing. Maybe dinner and a movie.

  He had difficulty framing in his mind the right way to pose the question, the result of that being that they rode in silence almost to the Temple campus without his saying a word.

  Then he was surprised to hear himself say, "Right in there, two blocks down, is where Magnella got himself shot."

  "You mean the police officer who was murdered?" Mar-garet asked, and when Charley nodded, she went on. "My Uncle Bob and his father are friends. They're in the Knights of Columbus together."

  "Yeah. That's why I'm going to work now. They called up and asked me to come in early to work on that.''

  "Like a detective, you mean?"

  "Yeah, well, sort of."

  "That should be very rewarding," Margaret McCarthy said. "Working on something like that."

  "Yeah," he said. "Look, you want to catch a movie, have dinner or something?''

  "A movie or dinner sounds nice," she said. "I'm not so sure about something."

  "I'll call you," he said. "Okay?"

  "Sure," she said. "I'd like that. I get out at the next cor-ner."

  "How about in the morning?" Charley asked.

  "You want to go to the movies in the morning?"

  "Christ, I'm on the four-to-twelve," he said. "How are we going to..."

  "We could have coffee or something in the mornings," she said. "My first classes aren't until eleven."

  He pulled to the curb and smiled at her. She smiled back.

  A horn blew impatiently behind him.

  Charley, at the last moment, did not shout, "Blow it out your ass, asshole!" at the horn blower. Instead he got out of the Volkswagen and stood on the curb with Margaret McCarthy for a moment.

  "I have to go, Charley," she said. "I'll be late."

  "Yeah," he said. "I'll call you."

  "Call me," she said.

  They shook hands. Margaret walked onto the campus.

  Charley glowered at the horn blower, who was now smil-ing nervously, and then got in the Volkswagen and drove off. He remembered that he had not dropped off his dirty uniform at the dry cleaner. It didn't seem to matter. He felt better right now than he could remember feeling in a long time.

  Things were looking up. Even things at work were looking up. It didn't make sense that they would call him, and prob-ably Hay-zus, too, to go through that probationary bullshit and pay them overtime. The odds were that Captain Pekach was going to put them back on the street, doing what he knew they already knew how to do: grabbing scumbags.

  ***

  "Is Inspector Wohl in his office?" the heavyset, balding man with a black, six-inch-long handmade long filler Costa Rican cigar clamped between his teeth demanded.

  "I believe he is, sir," Sergeant Edward Frizell said po-litely as he picked up his telephone. "I'll see if he's free, sir.''

  By the time he had the telephone to his ear, Chief Inspector Matt Lowenstein was inside Staff Inspector Peter Wohl's office at the headquarters of the Special Operations Division at Bustleton and Bowler Streets.

  Peter Wohl was not at his desk. He was sitting on his couch, his feet up on his coffee table. When he saw Lowenstein come through the door, he started to get up.

  "Good morning, Chief," he said.

  Lowenstein closed the door.

  "I came to apologize," he said. "For what I said last night.''

  "No apology necessary, Chief."

  "I didn't mean what I said, Peter, I was just pissed
off."

  "You had a right to be," Wohl said. "I would have been."

  "At the dago I did. Do. Not at you. Goddamn him! If he wanted to run the Police Department, why didn't he just stay as commissioner?"

  "Because when he was commissioner, the mayor could tell him how to run the Department. Now he answers only to God and the voters."

  "I'm not so sure how much input he'd take from God," Lowenstein said. "The last I heard, God was never a captain in Highway."

  Wohl chuckled. "Would you like some coffee?" he asked.

  "Yes, I would, thank you," Lowenstein said.

  When Wohl handed him the cup, Lowenstein said, "I want you to know that before I came out here, I called Homicide and Organized Crime and Narcotics and told them that I com-pletely agreed with Czernick's decision and that they were to give cooperation with you their highest priority. Goddamn lie, of course, about me agreeing, but it wasn't your fault, and I want the people who shot that young cop. As far as the DeZego job goes, frankly you're welcome to that one. I don't want the Detweilers mad at me."

  "Thanks a lot, Chief," Wohl said.

  "What's this I hear that one of your guys is dirty?"

  "No. I don't think so. The Narcotics sergeant went off the deep end."

  "Is that so?"

  "The cop he suspected of being dirty is Matt Payne."

  "Dutch Moffitt's nephew? I thought that he was working for you."

  "He is. Payne drove into the parking lot shortly after the Detweiler girl. The Narcotics sergeant was watching her. Right afterward Payne drove away, which the sergeant thought was suspicious. Payne drives a Porsche, which is the kind of a car a successful drug dealer would drive. And then, when the Narcotics guy found out Payne was a cop, he really put his nose in high gear."

  "But he's clean?"

  "Payne parked his car there because he was also headed for the Union League, and the reason he drove the car away was because the 9th District lieutenant, Foster Lewis... ?"

  "I know him. Just made lieutenant. Good cop."

  "... on the scene sent him to tell the Detweiler family, at the Union League."

  "Payne drives a Porsche?"

  Wohl nodded.

  "Nice to have a rich father."

  "Obviously."

  "I heard Denny Coughlin put him in your lap."

  "Chief Coughlin and the gentleman with an interest in the Police Department we were discussing earlier," Wohl said. "After Payne shot the rapist the mayor told the newspapers that Payne is my special assistant, so I decided Payne is my special assistant."

  "Good thinking," Lowenstein said, chuckling.

  "I also got Foster H. Lewis, Jr., this morning," Wohl said.

  "Lewis's son is a cop?"

  "Just got out of the Academy.''

  "Why did they sent him here?"

  "Just a routine assignment of a new police officer that the mayor just happened to announce in a speech at the First Abyssinian Baptist Church."

  "Oh, I see." Lowenstein grunted. "The Afro-American voters. There's two sides to being the mayor's fair-haired boy, aren't there?"

  "Chief," Wohl said solemnly, "I have no idea what you're talking about."

  "The hell you don't," Lowenstein growled. "What are you going to do with the Lewis boy?"

  "1 gave him to Tony Harris, as a gofer. Harris has Lewis, and Jason Washington just borrowed Payne."

  "To do what?"

  "Whatever Jason tells him to. I think Washington likes him. I think they may have the same tailor."

  "Well, you better hope Harris and Washington get lucky," Lowenstein said. "Your salami is on the chopping block with these two jobs, Peter."

  "Chief, that thought has run through my mind," Wohl said.

  Chief Lowenstein, who had not finished delivering his as-sessment of the situation, glowered at Peter Wohl for cutting him short and then went on.

  "When the Payne kid got lucky and put down the serial rapist, that only made Arthur Nelson and his goddamn Ledger pause for breath. It did not shut him up. Now he's got two things: drug-related gang warfare in the center city with a nice little rich girl lying in a pool of blood as a result of it; and a cop shot down in cold blood, the cops not having a clue who did it. Nelson would make a case against the De-partment, and Carlucci, if the doers were already in Central Lockup. With the doers still running around loose-"

  "I know," Wohl said.

  "I don't think you do, Peter," Lowenstein said as he hauled himself to his feet. "I was sitting at my kitchen table this morning wondering if I had the balls to come out here and apologize to you when Carlucci made up my mind for me."

  "I'm sorry?" Wohl asked, confused.

  Chief Lowenstein examined the glowing end of his cigar for a moment and then met Wohl's eyes.

  "The dago called me at the house," he said. "He said he wanted me to come out here this morning and see how things were going. He said that he'd told Lucci to call him at least once a day, but that `too much was at stake here to leave something like this to someone like Lucci.' "

  "Jesus Christ!" Wohl said bitterly. "If he didn't think I could do the job, why did he give it to me?"

  "Because if you do the job, he looks good. And if you don't, you look bad. They call that smart politics, Peter."

  "Yeah," Wohl said.

  "I think I can expect at least a daily call from the dago, Peter, asking me how I think you're handling this. I wouldn't worry about that. I don't want these jobs back, so all he's going to get from me is an expression of confidence in you, and the way you're doing things. On the other hand, whatever else I may think of him, your Lieutenant Lucci is smart enough to know which side of the bread has the butter-no telling what he's liable to tell the dago."

  "Christ, my father warned me about crap like this. I didn't believe him."

  "Give my regards to your dad, Peter," Lowenstein said. "I always have admired him."

  Wohl stared at the phone on his coffee table for a moment. When he finally raised his eyes, Lowenstein was gone.

  ***

  Lieutenant Foster H. Lewis, Sr., who was wearing a light blue cotton bathrobe over his underwear, had just offered, aloud, although he was alone in the apartment, his somewhat less than flattering opinion of morning television program-ming and the even more appallingly stupid people who watched it, himself included, when the chimes sounded.

  He went to the door and opened it.

  "Good morning, sir," the uniformed policeman standing there said, "would you like to take a raffle ticket on a slightly used 1948 Buick?"

  "What did you do, Foster, lose your key?"

  He looks good in that uniform, even if I wish he weren't 't wearing it.

  "So that I wouldn't lose it, I put it somewhere safe," Tiny Lewis said. "One of these days I'll remember where."

  "I just made some coffee. You want some?"

  "Please, Dad."

  "What are you doing here?"

  "I've got to get a suit," Tiny said. "Mom said she put them in a cedar bag."

  "Probably in your room," Foster Lewis, Sr., said. "Am I permitted to ask why you need a suit?''

  "Certainly," Tiny said. He followed his father into the kitchen and took a china mug from a cabinet.

  "Well?" Foster Lewis asked.

  "Well, what? Oh, do you want to know why I need a suit?''

  "I asked. Where were you when I asked?"

  "You asked if you were permitted to ask, and I said, 'Cer-tainly,' but you didn't actually ask."

  "Wiseass." His father chuckled. "There's a piece of cake in the refrigerator."

  "Thank you," Tiny said, and helped himself to the cake.

  "You know a Homicide-ex-Homicide-detective named Harris? Tony Harris?"

  "Yeah. Not well. But he's supposed to be good."