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

by The Victim(lit)

  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 be-come 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 super comptometer, but that (and its predeces-sor, 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 ac-curately 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-…-vis police work were imme-diately apparent. If you fed everyone's license-plate number into it, and the other data about a car, and queried the com-puter, 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 televi-sion, 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 cus-tomer, 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 pro-fessional 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 some-times he could, so to speak, turn the computer on. If he went to sleep thinking about a problem, sometimes, even fre-quently, the brain would go on searching the data bank while he was asleep. When he woke up, rarely was there the solu-tion to the problem. Far more often there was another ques-tion. 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 substanti-ated not only by his brother-in-law, Mr. Salvatore B. Mari-ano, 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 park-ing, 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 Ser-vices 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 in-dignantly.

  His brain said, There is an anomaly in what Dolan told me.

  "Run around the room or something," Martha Washing-ton 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 Round-house 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 uni-form, 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 h
is daughter of such a thing, and the last time Payne saw him, he was looking for the mayor to express his out-rage."

  "Is he going to be trouble?"

  "Probably," Wohl said, "but Payne looked so down in the mouth about it that I didn't have the heart to jump all over him. You may find this hard to believe, David, but when I was young, I ran off at the mouth once or twice myself."

  "No!" Pekach said in mock shock.

  "True." Wohl chuckled. "How was your evening? How was Ristorante Alfredo? You go there?"

  "Yeah. I want to talk to you about that," Pekach said, and handed Wohl the matchbook he had been given in the restau-rant.

  "There's a name inside. Marvin Lanier. Is that supposed to mean something to me?''

  "I got that from Vincenzo Savarese," Dave replied.

  Wohl looked at him with interest in his eyes.

  "Not from Savarese himself," Pekach went on carefully, "but from the greaseball, Baltazari, who runs it for him. But he made it plain it had come from Savarese."

  "Ricco Baltazari gave you this?" Wohl asked.

  There was a rap on the doorjamb.

  "Busy?" Captain Mike Sabara asked when he had Wohl's attention.

  "Come on in, Mike, I want you to hear this," Wohl said. As Sabara entered the office Wohl tossed the matchbook to him. "Dave got that from Vincenzo Savarese at the Ristorante Alfredo." When Sabara, after examining it, looked at him curiously, Wohl pointed to Pekach.

  "Okay," Pekach said. "From the top. Almost as soon as we got in the place, the headwaiter came to the table and said Baltazari would like a word with me. He was sitting at a table across the room with Savarese."

  "They knew you were going to be there, didn't they?" Wohl said thoughtfully. "You made a reservation, right?"

  "I had a reservation," Pekach said. "So I went to the table, and as soon as I got there, Baltazari left me alone with Savarese. Savarese told me he wanted to thank me for something I did for his granddaughter.''

  "Huh?" Sabara asked.

  "A couple of months ago, when I was still in Narcotics, I was coming home late one night and stopped when I thought I saw a drug bust. Big bust. Four kids caught buying some marijuana. But they ran and there was a chase, and the kid wrecked his old man's car, so they were headed for Central Lockup. I looked at them, felt sorry for the girls, didn't want them to have to go through Central Lockup, and sent them home in a cab."

  "And one of the girls was Savarese's granddaughter?" Sabara asked. "We got any unsolved broken arms, legs, and head assaults on the books? We could probably pin that on Savarese. You don't give grass to his granddaughter unless you've got a death wish."

  Wohl chuckled. "He'd beat it. Temporary insanity."

  "I didn't know who she was and had forgotten about it until Savarese brought it up."

  Pekach nodded and went on. "He gave me some bullshit about my graciousness and understanding-"

  "I always thought you were gracious and understanding, Dave," Wohl said.

  "-and said he would never forget it, etcetera, and said if there was ever anything he could do for me-"

  "And he probably meant it too," Sabara said. "Anybody you want knocked off, Dave? Your neighbors playing their TV too late at night, anything like that?"

  "Shit, Mike!" Pekach exploded.

  "Sorry," Sabara said, not sounding overwhelmed with re-morse.

  "What I thought he was doing was letting me know he'd grab the tab for dinner. But on my way back to the table Baltazari handed me that matchbook and said I dropped them, and I said no, and he said he was sure, so I kept them."

  "You see the name inside?" Wohl asked.

  "Yeah. It didn't mean anything to me. Baltazari gave me the same line of greaser bullshit, something about 'Mr. Sa-varese's friends always being grateful when somebody does him a favor.' What I think he said was 'him or his family a courtesy.' By then I was beginning to wish I'd tossed the little bitch in the can."

  "No you didn't." Wohl chuckled. "You really are gra-cious and understanding, Dave."

  Pekach glared at him.

  "That wasn't a knife," Wohl said.

  "So, anyway, when I got home, I called Records and got a make on this guy. Sort of a make. Black male. He's sup-posed to be a gambler, but what he really is, is a pimp. He runs an escort service."

  "Marvin P. Lanier," Sabara said, reading the name inside the matchbook. "I never heard of him."

  "Misterioso," Wohl said.

  "I figured I better tell you about it," Pekach said.

  "Yeah," Wohl said thoughtfully. "Neither of them gave any hint why they gave you this guy's name?"

  "Nope," Pekach said.

  One of the phones on Wohl's desk rang. Wohl was in his customary position, on the couch with his feet up on the coffee table. Pekach, who was leaning on Wohl's desk, looked at him questioningly. Wohl nodded. Pekach picked up the phone.

  "Captain Pekach," he said, and listened, and then covered the mouthpiece with his hand. "There's a Homicide detective out there. Wants to see you, me, or Dave. You want me to take it?"

  "Bring him in," Wohl said.

  "Send him in, Sergeant," Pekach said to the phone, and put it back in its cradle. He went to the door and pulled it open.

  Detective Joseph D'Amata walked in.

  "Hey, D'Amata," Wohl called. "How are you?"

  "Good morning, Inspector," D'Amata said. "Am I inter-rupting anything?"

  "Captain Pekach was just telling Captain Sabara and me about his dinner last night," Wohl said. "What can we do for Homicide?''

  "You hear about the pimp who got himself blown away last night?"

  "I haven't read the overnights," Wohl said.

  "Black guy," D'Amata said. "Lived on 48th near Haverford."

  "His name wouldn't be Marvin P. Lanier, would it?" Wohl asked.

  "Yes, sir, that's it," D'Amata said, obviously pleased. "I sort of hoped there'd be something for me here."

  "I don't think I follow that," Wohl said.

  "I got the idea, Inspector, that you-that is, Highway- knows something about this guy."

  "Why would you think that?"

  "You knew the name," D'Amata said, just a little defen-sively.

  "That's all?"

  "Sir, an hour before somebody shot this guy there was a Highway car in front of his house. With him. Outside the crime scene, I mean."

  "You're sure about that?"

  "Yes, sir. Half a dozen people in the neighborhood saw it."

  "Dave?" Wohl asked.

  Pekach threw up his hands in a helpless gesture, making it clear that he knew nothing about a Highway involvement.

  "Fascinating," Wohl said. "More misterioso."

  "Sir?" D'Amata asked, confused.

  "Detective D'Amata," Wohl said, "why don't you help yourself to a cup of coffee and then have a chair while Captain Pekach goes and finds out what Highway had to do with Mr. Lanier last night?"

  "Inspector, this is the first I've heard anything about this," Pekach said.

  "So I gathered," Wohl said sarcastically.

  Pekach left the office.

  "How did Mr. Lanier meet his untimely demise, D'Amata?"

  "Somebody popped him five times with a.38," D'Amata said. "In his bed."

  "That would suggest that somebody didn't like him very much," Wohl said. "Any ideas who that might be?"

  D'Amata shook his head.

  "Have you learned anything that might suggest Mr. Lanier was connected with the mob?"

  "He was a pimp, Inspector," D'Amata said.

  "Then let me ask you this: Off the top of your head, would you say that Mr. Lanier was popped, in a crime of passion, so to speak, by one of his ladies, or by somebody who knew what he was doing?"

  D'Amata thought that over briefly. "He took two in the head and three in the chest."

  "Suggesting?"

  "I don't know. Some of those whores are tough enough. A whore could have done it."