Final Justice boh-8

by W. E. B Griffin

  “You got something going with her, Matty?” O’Hara asked.

  “No, I don’t.”

  Mr. Colt winked broadly, held up his balled first with the thumb extended, and said, “Right.”

  Washington and Wohl smiled.

  “So what’s going on in here?” Mr. Colt inquired. “You’re just hanging out, or what?”

  O’Hara looked at Wohl.

  “You tell him, Peter,” he said.

  Wohl’s smile vanished. He looked thoughtful for a moment, then shrugged.

  “Mr. Colt…” he began.

  “I can’t get you to call me ‘Stan’?”

  “Stan, just about everybody in the department trusts Mickey to keep his mouth shut when he knows something we don’t want to be public knowledge,” Wohl said.

  “There’s usually a little you-scratch-my-back-and-I’ll-scratch — yours in the deal, Stan,” Mickey said. “You asked before if what we’re doing here is hanging out. No. What I’m doing is waiting to see if, or how well, the inspector is going to scratch my back.”

  “Under the circumstances, Stan, I’m going to have to ask you not to repeat, to anyone, what I’m about to tell Mickey and you.”

  “You got it. My lips are sealed,” Mr. Colt said. He looked at Matt, held up his right hand with the three center fingers extended, and added, “Boy Scout’s Honor.”

  “Tony Harris went to Harrisburg,” Wohl said. “The State Police were able to get a hit from the print on the visor cap using the AFIS.”

  “I’m terribly sorry to interrupt, old sport,” Mr. Colt interrupted in his British accent, “but I haven’t the foggiest fucking idea what you are talking about.”

  Wohl turned his head to look at Colt, and for a moment Matt thought Colt was about to be either frozen with a Wohl glance, or perhaps even treated to an example of Wohl sarcasm, but Wohl surprised him by smiling.

  “Well, dear boy, we certainly can’t have that, now can we?” Wohl said, in a British accent very nearly as good as the actor’s. Then he dropped the accent and added, “There was a double homicide in connection with an armed robbery of a Roy Rogers restaurant on South Broad, the guys who did it got away, and we just found out, using a fingerprint we previously thought was useless, who they are.”

  “You got a match?” Mickey asked. “I thought the lab- Candelle himself-said there wasn’t enough?”

  “We’ve identified one of them. The fat guy. And in Known Associates on his sheet is a guy who lives two doors away from him in the Paschall Homes Project in Southwest Philly who fits the description of the other one.”

  He stopped and looked at Washington.

  “You brought the pictures for Mick?”

  Washington nodded and went into his suit jacket, coming out with two Philadelphia Police mug shots. He handed them to O’Hara.

  “Can you make either of them, Mick?” Wohl asked.

  O’Hara looked carefully at both and then shook his head.

  “As much as I’d like to, no,” O’Hara said. “It was dark, and as you may recall, the bastards took a shot at me.”

  “No shit?” Mr. Colt inquired, awe in his voice.

  “Anyway, the D.A. doesn’t think what we have is enough to convict them for sure. We need more-the weapon, for example. So we’re not going to arrest them right now.”

  “Instead?”

  “We’re going to keep them under surveillance until we can develop more. That’s the reason that Jason and I were still in Homicide when you called. We had everybody and his brother in there, setting up the surveillance…”

  “And that’s why I was ever so politely booted out of there, right?” Mr. Colt inquired.

  “Excuse me?” Wohl asked.

  “When that captain sent Matt’s girlfriend to explain that other job to me…” He paused and made a pumping motion with his fist. “That was to get me out of Homicide, right?”

  “I think one could reasonably draw that assumption, Mr. Colt,” Washington said.

  “I would have been in the way, right?”

  “And been privy to things we would rather not be known to the public,” Washington replied.

  “Well, what the hell, we had a nice dinner, right?” Mr. Colt said.

  “Very nice,” Matt said.

  “Can I ask you a question, Mickey?” Mr. Colt inquired, and then went on without waiting for an answer. “How come you were at this Roy Rogers? Just a coincidence? You went there for a hamburger or whatever?”

  “No. I responded to a possible armed-robbery-in-progress call, and I got there just as these bastards were leaving.”

  “Explain that? You’ve got a police scanner? Right?”

  “He has a battery of police scanners,” Washington said. “With which he eavesdrops on police communications in the tristate area. You may have noticed all the antennae.”

  “That Buick Whatchamacallit outside is yours? I saw all the antennas.”

  “It’s a Rendezvous,” Mickey said. “Yeah, that’s mine.”

  “If you want to really see the police department at work, Mr. Colt,” Washington said, “perhaps Mr. O’Hara would be good enough to let you ride around with him. He responds to every interesting call, which usually means a call where violence is likely to be found.”

  “Be glad to have you, Stan,” Mickey said.

  “Jeez, I’d like that.”

  “Then we’ll do it,” Mickey said.

  “There’s a problem there,” Wohl said. “We really have to make sure you have a police officer with you, Stan.”

  “Why, and what’s wrong with Matt?”

  “Because the commissioner says so,” Wohl said. “And what’s wrong with Matt is that he’s been on the job all day and it’s getting close to midnight.”

  “What about the other detective?” Mr. Colt asked. “The little one?”

  He held out his hand to indicate Detective Martinez’s diminutive stature.

  “Who’s he talking about?” Wohl asked Matt.

  “Hay-zus,” Matt said. “McFadden relieves him at midnight.”

  “Another Mick, Stan,” O’Hara said. “Good guy. You’ll like him.”

  “Inspector, I would venture to suggest that Mr. Colt would be safe in the capable Gaelic hands of Detective McFadden,” Washington said.

  “You mind if I ask if you always talk like that?” Mr. Colt asked.

  “Always, I’m afraid,” Wohl said, chuckling. He looked at his watch. “Put the arm out for him, Matt. Have him meet us here.”

  “Have him meet us at D’Allesandro’s,” Mr. Colt said. “This drink is my third and last one for the day, and I’m determined to have a cheese steak. You’re all invited, of course.”

  Washington and Wohl looked at each other.

  “Far be it from me to reject Mr. Colt’s generous invitation, ” Washington said. “And not only because it will afford me a splendid answer to Martha’s inevitable question when I finally get home.”

  “Where the hell have you been, what have you been doing, and with whom?” Wohl asked.

  “ ‘Actually, my precious, I was having a cheese steak at D’Allesandro’s with Mr. Stan Colt, the movie star.’ That should for once strike her dumb.”

  At five past one, Mr. Stanley Colt having had his cheese steak, and having been transferred into the capable hands of Detective Charles McFadden, Matt got in his unmarked Crown Victoria and started home.

  He smiled at the memory of Mr. Colt’s response to Inspector Wohl’s instructions to Detective McFadden: “He is not to get out of Mickey’s car without your permission. If he gives you any trouble, cuff him, and turn him over to Dignitary Protection at the Ritz-Carlton. Trouble is defined to include any gesture toward a member of the opposite sex beyond a friendly smile.”

  “That’s not going to be a problem. I can get laid anytime. But doing this, wow!”

  He had just turned onto Walnut Street and was headed west toward Rittenhouse Square when his cellular went off.

  Jesus, now what?
>
  “Payne.”

  “Can you talk?” Detective Olivia Lassiter inquired.

  “Yeah.”

  “They have a positive ID on one of the doers in the Roy Rogers job-”

  “I heard,” Matt interrupted. “And they’re running an around-the-clock surveillance, which is why they threw us out of Homicide.”

  There was a silence.

  “How’s your hand?” Olivia asked after a long moment.

  He looked at it.

  “Fine,” he said. “I had just about forgotten about it.”

  “Oh.”

  Another silence.

  “I thought maybe you needed the bandage changed,” she said, finally.

  “No. It looks fine.”

  “Oh.”

  Jesus Christ, Matthew, you are the dumbest sonofabitch in Philadelphia!!!

  “Where are you, Mother?”

  “I’m not your mother.”

  “Where are you, Not My Mother?”

  “In the Starbucks at Twelfth and Market.”

  “What are you doing there? I thought you went to Homicide?”

  “I hung around Homicide for a while, made a few more calls. Then I came here and waited until I thought you’d probably put Colt to bed. Then I called.”

  “I’m at Nineteenth and Walnut. I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

  “No.”

  “For Christ’s sake, I’ll take you home.”

  “If you come here, somebody who knows one or both of us will see us.”

  “Then go stand in the dark around the corner on Twelfth and Filbert. I’ll pick you up there and take you home.”

  There was a long pause again, before she asked, “If I took a cab to Rittenhouse Square, how could I get in the building this time of night?”

  Another pause, this one on Matt’s part, and shorter.

  “When you get out of the cab, I’ll be waiting for you in the lobby.”

  And one final pause before she said, “The way you were talking before, I thought you didn’t want me to come over there.”

  "Oh, baby!”

  The chiefs of police of Daphne and Fairhope, Alabama, were privately not at all happy with the Jackson’s Oak Citizens’ Community Watch, Inc.

  Daphne and Fairhope are small, prosperous, primarily residential communities in Baldwin County on Mobile Bay in South Alabama. They lie across Mobile Bay from the city of Mobile, and about thirty miles from the Gulf of Mexico.

  Baldwin County, which is larger than the state of Rhode Island, is similarly prosperous, both because of its fertile fields and its seashore on the Gulf of Mexico-known, despite the valiant efforts of the local chambers of commerce, as the Redneck Riviera-which is famous for its spectacular snow-white beaches, and which attracts affluent tourists throughout the year.

  There is not much crime-certainly not as that term is interpreted in Philadelphia-in Baldwin County or in Daphne or Fairhope. But to fight what there is, there is a nice tax base to support law enforcement and the various fire departments.

  The police cruisers of the Daphne and Fairhope police departments are state-of-the-art vehicles, equipped with the latest communication systems, video recorders, computers, and speed-detection radar. They are generally replaced annually, and the “old” vehicles sold to less prosperous communities.

  The Daphne chief of police was not happy with the Jackson’s Oak Citizens’ Community Watch, Inc., because he thought it was unnecessary, potentially dangerous, and enjoyed the opposite of respect from his sworn officers. The Fairhope chief of police was not happy with JOCCWI (sometimes referred to privately within the law enforcement community as “Jabberwocky”) because he feared it would be contagious and Fairhope would get one like it.

  JOCCWI had been formed by a group of concerned citizens as their response to what they regarded as the Daphne police department’s inability to rid the community of drug addicts, petty thieves, Peeping Toms, and other disturbers of the domestic tranquillity.

  There was a thread of justification in their complaints. So far as the chief knew, if there were those in Daphne using hard drugs, they did so in their homes and purchased them elsewhere. If a stranger appeared in either Fairhope or Daphne who looked remotely as if he might be using-much less selling-hard drugs, a cop trailed him until a search of his/her person was legally justified, or he/she left town, whichever came first.

  There was cannabis sativa, of course. And on any given pleasant evening, the chief knew, the young and sometimes not-so-young might go to the beach and smoke a joint or two. Or they might go outside the clubhouse of the Lake Forest Golf and Country Club and take a couple of puffs. If his officers saw them, they were arrested.

  There was more validity to the petty-theft charge. There were more than two hundred boats, power and sail, in the marina of the Lake Forest Yacht Club. Just about every one of them had something aboard-from radar sets and depth meters or “fish finders” on a forty-foot Hatteras to oars in a row-boat-that was both quickly removable and easily sold, no questions asked, in any one of a hundred places from Biloxi, Mississippi, in the west to Pensacola, Florida, in the east.

  Most of these thefts could be prevented by the boats’ owners taking reasonable measures. And the only way to stop the thefts completely would be to station officers not only at the marina but in boats guarding access to it. That was out of the question.

  Easily removable things, from radar detectors to hubcaps to entire wheels, were stolen from cars, too, as the founders of JOCCWI contended. And sometimes expensive lawn furniture-or even a new garden hose-bought from Home Depot would vanish from a back lawn overnight.

  Sometimes the thieves were caught, sometimes they were not. It was obviously impossible for the police to be everywhere all the time.

  The Peeping Tom allegation also had some merit. There were a lot of good-looking young women, married and not, in the condominiums adjacent to the Yacht Club, and on the fringes of Lake Forest, a huge area of small to medium-sized homes. It was not a gated community. It was easily possible for someone with an interest in watching young women undress to go into Lake Forest and hide behind one of its many trees with binoculars. And hard as hell to catch them at it.

  Among the other disturbers of the peace JOCCWI wished to control were high school kids racing around in Pop’s-or their own-car in the middle of the night. The chief had his officers spend a lot of time trying to stop that-he had had more than his fill of picking up dead kids who’d missed a turn and hit a tree-but he knew he hadn’t stopped it all.

  On the surface, having a number of responsible citizens roaming through the area at night in their own cars, looking for something amiss, and when finding it, reporting it to the police by cell phone seemed at first-even to the chief-to be not so bad an idea.

  And among the founders of JOCCWI were the pillars of the community. They were lawyers, executives, schoolteachers, businessmen, dentists, and retired members of the armed forces, including two full colonels, three lieutenant colonels (one of them a former Green Beret), a number of other commissioned officers, and nearly a dozen retired master chief petty officers, sergeants major, and other high-ranking former noncoms.

  They showed the chief what they intended to do, and how they intended to do it, and he frankly had felt more than a little admiration for their plan.

  The night the concerned citizens went into action, the chief and the mayor went to their headquarters, a rented former concession stand at the Yacht Club, to wish them well.

  They learned that the organization now had a name, Jackson’s Oak Citizens’ Community Watch. It was taken from Jackson’s Oak, a tree in Daphne under which Andrew Jackson had allegedly stood shortly before moving west to fight the Battle of New Orleans.

  That’s when the chief and the mayor saw that the retired Green Beret, who would serve as watch commander that night, had a Colt. 45 semiautomatic pistol in the small of his back. And so did Dr. Smiley, the dentist who would command the first four-hour tour. Other members of J
OCCW (without the “I” for “Incorporated”) were also armed, with everything from pistols to shotguns.

  As tactfully as he could, the chief had suggested to the retired Green Beret that perhaps firearms weren’t really such a good idea. All that JOCCW was supposed to do was keep an eye open and call the police if they saw something that looked suspicious.

  “How the hell can you go on guard without a weapon? Jesus Christ, Charley!”

  The next morning, the mayor, the chief, the (part-time) municipal judge, and the (part-time) city attorney conferred vis-a-vis the armed members of JOCCW patrolling the city.

  Legally, there didn’t seem much that could be done about it. Under the laws of Alabama, any law-abiding citizen over twenty-one could apply to the Baldwin County Sheriff for a permit to carry a handgun concealed about the person, on or in a vehicle. The permit could not be denied without good cause.

  They agreed that the sheriff of Baldwin County, who is an elected official and wished to be re-elected ad infinitum, was not about to tell the pillars of the community who had organized JOCCW that he’d changed his mind, and they could no longer go about armed.

  The laws regarding longarms were similarly not very comforting to the mayor et al. No licenses were required to own longarms. Citizens had to pass a firearms safety program to get a hunting license, unless they were veterans of an armed force, or over the age of sixty-five. Many, perhaps 75 percent, of the members of JOCCW met both of the latter two requirements.

  Finally, the city attorney suggested that since the members of JOCCW were all reasonable men, if they were aware of the legal ramifications-primarily tort lawsuits for hundreds of thousands of dollars-for shooting someone without full justification, they might lose their enthusiasm for carrying weapons.

  This was brought tactfully to the attention of one of the two retired full colonels-a Marine who’d fought all over the Orient from Guadalcanal to Khe Sanh-who listened attentively, thanked the city attorney for his interest, and said it wasn’t a problem.

  “That potential difficulty occurred to Bob Skinner,” the colonel said. J. Robert Skinner, Esq., one of the founders of JOCCW, was an attorney, specializing in corporate liability. “We expected to be incorporated within the week. If somebody sues JOCCWI-‘I’ for ‘Incorporated’-the corporation treasury will be empty, or nearly so.”