“You’re Detective Payne, right?”
“Right,” Matt said, shaking the Sergeant’s hand. “Nice to meet you.”
“I don’t mean to put down what you did. It was good work,” the Sergeant said. “But you know what I was just thinking?”
Matt smiled and shook his head.
“I was thinking it must be nice to work for a police department where there’s enough money to surveil somebody like this guy Atchison. We just don’t have the dough to pay for twenty-four-hour surveillance, even on a murder job. How many officers did you have on the detail?”
“I really don’t know,” Matt said.
That is far from the truth. I know precisely how many. Zero. And the surveillance of Mr. Atchison will cost the Philadelphia Police Department zero dollars, because it was not only not authorized, but as Peter pointed out with some emphasis, another manifestation of what’s wrong with me; that I am an undisciplined hotshot who goes charging off in all directions without thinking.
The cost of whatever it’s going to cost to fix the Porsche, and I don’t like to think how much that’s going to be, plus the cost of a new jacket, shirts, pants, necktie, and loafers, is going to be borne personally by Detective Matt Payne. I don’t even dare to put in for overtime.
It didn’t take as long to reach the pier along the Chester waterfront as Matt expected it would.
And finding the pier was easy. There was a Chester police car sitting on it, and it could be seen a half-mile away.
Thirty minutes after the Marine Police Unit boat tied up to the pier, a police diver, wearing a diving helmet, bobbed to the surface with a package. It was a white plastic garbage bag, wrapped in duct tape.
“That it, Matty?” Denny Coughlin asked.
“That looks like what I saw Atchison carry out of the Yock’s Diner.”
“Good job, Matty.”
Unless, of course, it contains something like the records of the loan-shark operation Atchison was operating, and not guns.
A police photographer recorded the diver in the water, the package on the deck, and then as a laboratory technician carefully cut the duct tape away. Inside the plastic garbage bag was a paper bag. Inside the paper bag, wrapped in mechanic’s wiping cloths, were three guns. A large revolver, which a ballistics technician identified for another technician to write down as a. 44–40 single-action six-shot revolver, of Spanish manufacture, a. 38 Special Caliber six-shot Colt revolver, and a Savage. 32 ACP semiautomatic pistol.
Officer Woodrow Wilson Bailey, Sr., woke to the smell of brewing coffee and fried ham. It pleased him. He didn’t complain or feel sorry for himself most days that he didn’t get to eat breakfast with Joellen and Woodrow Junior. Policing was a twenty-four-hour-a-day job, and everybody had to take their fair turn working the four-to-midnight tours, and the midnight-to-eight-in-the-morning tours. And truth to tell, he sort of liked the last-out tour; there was something he liked about cruising around the deserted streets, say, at half past three or four, when all the punks had finally decided to go to bed.
But it was nice when he was working the day shift, and could sit down at the kitchen table and have breakfast with Joellen and Woodrow Junior. Having breakfast like that every day was one of the things Woodrow looked forward to, when he got his time in and went home to Hartsville.
He got out of bed and took a quick shower and a careful shave, then put on his terry-cloth bathrobe and went down to the kitchen. He really hated it when he dribbled coffee or egg or redeye gravy or something on a clean uniform shirt and had to change it, so he ate in his bathrobe. All you had to do if you made a pig of yourself on your bathrobe was throw it in the washing machine. Joellen knew he took pride in the way he looked in his uniform, and always had one clean and pressed waiting for him. That was a lot of work, and Woodrow knew it, and made a genuine effort not to get his uniform dirty, so that what Joellen did for him would not be wasted.
“I was about to come see if you were going to take breakfast with us,” Joellen said when he walked in the kitchen.
“I could smell that cooking,” Woodrow said. “It would wake a dead man.”
Joellen smiled and kissed him.
“Good morning, son.”
“Good morning, sir,” Woodrow Junior said. He was wearing a white shirt and a blue sweater and a necktie. He was a junior at Cardinal Dougherty High School, and they had a dress code there. More important, they taught Christian morals, even if they weren’t Protestant Christians. It would have been nicer if Third Abyssinian had a church-run school that Woodrow Junior could have gone to, but they didn’t.
And he certainly couldn’t have sent Woodrow Junior to a public high school. The corridors of the public schools, Woodrow sometimes thought, were not a bit better than the corners of the neighborhood. You could buy anything in there, and it was no place to send your child unless you didn’t care what was going to happen to him, what he would see, what punks would give him trouble.
Woodrow thought it was a truly Christian act on the part of the Catholics to let Protestant Baptist boys like Woodrow into their schools. And there were a lot of them. There was a charge, of course, but in Woodrow’s case it was reduced because Joellen went over there every day and helped out in the cafeteria for free.
Woodrow sat down at the kitchen table. Woodrow Junior bent his head, and standing behind her husband, Joellen closed her eyes and bent her head.
“Dear Lord, we thank You for Your bounty which we are now about to receive, and for Thy many other blessings. We ask You to watch over us. Through Thy Son, our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ.”
Joellen and Woodrow Junior said, “Amen,” and Joellen put breakfast on the table: sunny-side-up eggs and ham, redeye gravy and grits, and the biscuits Mamma Dear had taught Joellen to make before the Good Lord took her into heaven.
Then Woodrow went upstairs and put on his uniform, and started to get his gun out of the drawer. He glanced down at his shoes and almost swore. There was a scratch across the toe of the left one, and the toe of the right one was smudged. He wondered when that had happened. He closed the drawer in the dresser where he kept his gun, and went back down to the kitchen.
Joellen watched as he put on a pair of rubber gloves and very carefully polished his shoes.
“Woodrow Junior would have done that if you’d have told him,” Joellen said.
“I messed them up, I’ll make them right,” he said.
Then he went back upstairs, got his gun from the drawer, went back downstairs, kissed Joellen good-bye. He got his uniform cap and his nightstick from the hall clothes hanger and left the house.
It was seven blocks to the District Headquarters at Twenty-second and Hunting Park Avenue.
Woodrow walked briskly, looking to see what he could see, thinking that when roll call was over and he went on patrol he’d cruise the alleys. He’d been off for seventy hours, and there was no telling what might have happened in that time.
It was a morning like any other. There was absolutely nothing different about it that would have made him suspect that before the day was over, he would be in the office of the Northwest Police Division Inspector, getting his hand shook, and having his picture made with the Mayor of the City of Philadelphia.
Having decided First things first, Matt limped to Imported Motor Cars, Ltd., Inc., from the Marine Police Unit pier. There the Senior Maintenance Advisor, a somewhat epicene young man in a blazer and bow tie and three maintenance technicians in spotless white thigh-length coats which made them look more, Matt thought, like gynecologists waiting for a patient than automobile mechanics, confirmed his worst fears about the Porsche.
“Whatever did you do to it?” the Senior Maintenance Advisor asked, in what Matt thought was mingled horror and joy as he calculated the size of the repair bill.
Well, I was chasing a murder suspect down by the refineries in Chester, and I had to turn the headlights off so that he wouldn’t know he was being followed.
“I ran over a bumper
,” Matt said.
“I’ll say you did!”
“You should have left it where you did it,” one of the maintenance technicians volunteered, his tone suggesting Matt deserved a prize for Idiot of the Year. “Called a wrecker. No telling how much damage to the suspension you did driving it in.”
Imported Motor Cars, Ltd., Inc., evidently felt such enormous sympathy for him, or figured they could make up the cost when they presented him with the bill, that they gave him a loaner. A new 911 Demonstrator. Matt suspected that sometime in the next day or two he would receive a call from Imported Motor Cars, Ltd., Inc., asking him, taking into consideration what the repair bill for repairing the damage he had done to his old car would be, would he be interested in a very special deal on the car he was now driving?
He then went to his apartment. There was no one there. Helene Kellog had apparently gone off with Wally Milham someplace-Wally had said that it would be three o’clock, maybe later, before the lab was finished testing the guns taken from the river-or possibly had calmed down enough to go to work.
There was evidence of her presence in the apartment-a can of hair spray, a mascara brush, and a jar of deodorant on the sink in his bathroom-when he stripped out of Wohl’s clothes and went to take a shower.
That reminded him that he had not telephoned Amanda on the pretense that she should not be concerned if she called the apartment and a woman answered.
The hot water of the shower exacerbated whatever the hell he had been rolling around in on the Chester pier had done to his face and hands. When he wiped the condensation off the mirror to shave, he looked like a lobster. A lobster with a three-square-inch albino white spot on the right cheek, which served to make the rest of his face look even redder.
And shaving hurt, even with an electric razor.
He had just about finished dressing when the telephone rang.
That’s obviously Inspector Wohl, calling to apologize for having spoken harshly to me, and to express the gratitude and admiration of the entire Police Department for my brilliant detecting.
Or the President of the United States, (b) being quite as likely as (a).
Jesus, maybe it’s Amanda!
“Hello.”
“You’re a hard man to find, Matt,” the familiar voice of Mrs. Irene Craig, his father’s secretary, said. “Hold on.” Faintly, he could hear her add, presumably over the intercom to his father, “Triumph! Perseverance pays!”
“Matt? Good morning.”
“Good morning, Dad.”
“I’ve been concerned about you, and not only because we rather expected to see you at home last night and no one seems to know where you are.”
“Sorry, I was working.”
“Are you working now?”
“No. I just got out of the shower.”
“I don’t suppose you would have time to come by the office for a few minutes?”
“Yes, sir, I could.”
“Fine, I’ll see you shortly,” his father said, and hung up.
He did that, Matt hypothesized, correctly, so that I wouldn’t have time to come up with an excuse not to go to his office. I wonder what he wants.
“What in the world happened to your face?” Brewster Cortland Payne II greeted him twenty minutes later.
“I don’t suppose you would believe I fell asleep under a sunlamp?”
“I wouldn’t,” said Irene Craig. “You’ll have to do better than that. Would you like some coffee, Matt?”
“Very much, thank you. Black, please.”
His father waved him into one of two green leather-upholstered chairs facing his desk.
“Two, Irene, please, and then hold my calls,” his father said.
He waited until Mrs. Craig had served the coffee, left, and closed the door behind her.
“What did happen to your face?”
“I fell into something that, according to Amy, was some kind of caustic.”
“Amy’s had a look at you?”
Matt nodded.
“How did it happen?”
“I was working.”
“That’s what I told your mother, that you were probably working. First, when you didn’t show up for dinner as promised, and again when you didn’t show up by bedtime, and a third time when Amanda Spencer called at midnight.”
“Amanda called out there?”
“She was concerned for you,” Matt’s father said. “Apparently, she called the apartment several times. A woman answered one time, and then she called back and there was a man, who either didn’t know where you are or wouldn’t tell her.”
“God!”
“Your mother said it must have been very difficult for Amanda to call us.”
“Oh, boy!”
“I wasn’t aware that you and Amanda were close,” Matt’s father said, carefully.
Matt met his eyes.
“That’s been a very recent development,” Matt said after a moment. “I don’t suppose it makes me any less of a sonofabitch, but…there was nothing between us before Penny killed herself.”
“I didn’t think there had been,” his father said. “You’ve never been duplicitous. Your mother, however, told me that she saw Amanda looking at you, quote, ‘in a certain way,’ unquote, at Martha Peebles’s party.”
“Jesus, that’s the second time I heard that. I hope the Detweilers didn’t see it.”
“So do I,” his father said. He came around from behind his desk and handed Matt a small sheet of notepaper.
“Your mother told Amanda that she would have you call her as soon as we found you,” he said. “The first number is her office number, the second her apartment. I think you’d better call her; she’s quite upset.”
“What does Mother think of me?”
“I think she’s happy for you, Matt,” Brewster Cortland Payne II said, and walked toward his door. “I am.”
He left the office and closed the door behind him.
Matt reached for the telephone.
TWENTY-ONE
There are a number of City Ordinances dealing with the disposition of garbage and an equally large number of City Ordinances dealing with the setting of open fires within the City. A good deal of legal thought has gone into their preparation, and the means by which they were to be enforced.
In theory, citizens were encouraged to place that which they wished to discard in suitable covered containers of prescribed sizes and construction. The containers were to be placed according to a published schedule in designated places in such a manner that garbage-collection personnel could easily empty the containers’ contents into the rear collection area of garbage trucks.
The ordinances spelled out in some detail what was “ordinary, acceptable” garbage and what was “special types of refuse” and proscribed, for example, the placing of toxic material or explosive material or liquids in ordinary containers.
The setting of open fires within the City was prohibited under most conditions, with a few exceptions provided, such as the burning of leaves at certain times of the year under carefully delineated conditions.
Violation of most provisions was considered a Summary Offense, the least serious of the three classifications of crimes against the Peace and Dignity of the City and County of Philadelphia and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. The other, more serious, classifications were Misdemeanors (for example, simple assault and theft of property worth less than $2000) and Felonies (for example, Murder, Rape, and Armed Robbery).
It was spelled out in some detail what malefactors could expect to receive in the way of punishment for littering the streets with garbage, for example, with small fines growing to potentially large fines, and growing periods of imprisonment for second, third, and subsequent offenses.
Similarly, there were pages of small type outlining the myriad punishments which could be assessed against malefactors who were found guilty of setting open fires in violation of various applicable sections of the ordinances, likewise growing in severity depending o
n the size and type of fire set, the type material set ablaze, under what circumstances, and the number of times the accused had been previously convicted of offending the Peace and Dignity of the City, County, and Commonwealth by so doing.
As a general rule of thumb, the residents of Officer Woodrow Wilson Bailey’s beat were not cognizant of the effort that had been made by their government to carefully balance the rights of the individual against the overall peace and dignity of the community insofar as garbage and setting fires were concerned. Or if they were aware of the applicable ordinances in these regards, they decided that their chances of having to face the stern bar of justice for violating them was at best remote.
If they had a garbage can, or a cardboard box, or some other container that could be used as a substitute, and if they remembered what day the garbageman came, they often-but by no means always, or even routinely-put their garbage on the curb for pickup.
It had been Officer Woodrow Wilson Bailey’s experience that a substantial, and growing, number of the trash-white, brown, and black-who had moved into the neighborhood had decided the least difficult means of disposing of their trash was to either carry it into (or throw it out the window into) their back-yards and alleys when the garbage cans inside their houses filled to overflowing, or the smell became unbearable.
There was little he could do about this. The criminal justice system of Philadelphia was no longer able to cope with many Summary Offenses, and issuing a citation for littering was nothing more than a waste of his time and the taxpayers’ money. He would show up in court, the accused would not, and the magistrates were reluctant to issue a bench warrant for someone accused of littering a back street in North Philadelphia. The police had more important things to do with their time.
He privately thought that if the trash wanted to live in their own filth, so be it.
At a certain point in time, however, backyards became filled to overflowing with refuse. Just about as frequently, the piles of garbage became rat-infested. When either or both of these circumstances occurred, the trash’s solution to an immediate problem was to set the garbage on fire. This both chased the rats away and reduced the height of the garbage piles.
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