Final Justice boh-8

by W. E. B Griffin

  “Don’t be such an ass, Matt,” Amy said. “You heard what Dr. Stein said.”

  “Which was?” Patricia Payne asked.

  “That what Matt and a jackass have in common is that they don’t know they have limits, and Matt reached his. All he needs is rest.”

  “He said ‘thoroughbred racehorse,’ ” Matt said.

  “And all he needs is rest?” Patricia Payne asked.

  “That’s it, Mom,” Amy said. “Really.”

  “Can you get some time off?” Patricia Payne asked.

  “I’m sure I can,” Matt said.

  “Well, go tell your father. He’s pacing back and forth on the patio, waiting to know what’s up.”

  Matt walked toward the patio, and Patricia Payne led her daughter into the house, where she sought-and got- confirmation that all that was wrong with her son was that he had been pushed, or had pushed himself, beyond his limits, and that all he needed was rest.

  Matt had just finished telling his father this, and was about to tell him that Amy had another medical theory that he thought had a lot of merit, despite what Drs. Stein and Michaels said, when Deputy Commissioner Dennis V. Coughlin, trailed by Captain Frank Hollaran, came onto the patio.

  Coughlin was carrying in his hand what looked like a briefcase but was the size of a woman’s purse. Matt wondered what it was.

  “I just had a talk with Dr. Keyes Michaels, the department psychiatrist, Brewster,” Coughlin said. “Good man. Comes from a family of cops. Knows cops. Says the only thing wrong with Matty is exhaustion, and all he needs is some rest.”

  He turned to Matt.

  “By order of the commissioner, you are now on vacation. Thirty days.”

  “Great,” Matt said.

  Coughlin handed him the purse-size leather briefcase. “This is yours,” he said.

  “What is it?”

  “Your pistol. You forgot it at IAD.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Matt said. “Thank you.”

  He laid the purselike thing on the fieldstone wall of the patio.

  “Matt,” Brewster Payne said, “why don’t you go inside and get us something to drink?”

  As soon as Matt was out of earshot, Brewster C. Payne sought-and got-confirmation from Dennis V. Coughlin that all that was wrong was that Matt was emotionally and physically exhausted, and all that he needed was rest.

  As Matt rolled the bar cart across the fieldstones of the patio, Armando C. Giacomo, Esq., arrived.

  He was now his normal, sartorially elegant self.

  “Brewster, I realize I’m barging in-”

  “Nonsense, Manny, you don’t need an invitation here.”

  “Actually, I came to see my client,” Giacomo said. “How are you doing, Matt?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “I have been informed, unofficially, of course, but reliably, by both the cops and the D.A.’s office that nothing you did in the La Famiglia parking lot in any way violated any law of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. In legal terminology, it was a righteous shooting, Matt, and you’re off the hook.”

  “Manny, we appreciate how quickly-” Brewster C. Payne began.

  Giacomo waved his hand to signal thanks were unnecessary.

  “But you will have a taste, Manny, right?”

  “I thought you would never ask.”

  Next to arrive were Lieutenant Jason Washington and Detective Joe D’Amata. As Matt was pouring their drinks, the telephone in the niche in the fieldstone wall rang and Brewster C. Payne answered it.

  It was Mr. Stan Colt, calling from the Coast. The monsignor had called him, Mr. Colt said, and said he’d heard that Matt was a little under the weather, and “could I talk to him, if he’s up to it?”

  Sergeant Payne assured Mr. Colt that he was fine, that he had just been a little exhausted, and that he would make a real effort to go out to the Coast, and soon.

  Inspector Peter Wohl appeared next. He was intercepted by Mrs. Patricia Payne and Dr. Amelia Payne as he walked up the now car-clogged drive toward the house.

  “Amy told me what you did for Matt the night… it happened, ” Patricia Payne said, “and I just wanted to say, ‘Thank you.’ ”

  “Absolutely unnecessary,” Wohl replied. “I was just glad I was there. I think of Matt-I think of all of you-as family.”

  “And we do, too, Peter,” Patricia Payne said, emotionally. “Don’t we, Amy?”

  “Yeah,” Amy said, looking intently at him. “I guess we all really do.”

  Her tone was strange, and Peter looked at her with a raised eyebrow, and as if he was about to say something. But then he saw something else, and smiled instead.

  “Look who’s here,” he said. “Mutt and Jeff.”

  Detectives Charles McFadden and Jesus Martinez got out of their unmarked Special Operations Crown Victoria and started up the drive.

  They stopped, and looked uncomfortable when they saw Wohl.

  “Sir,” McFadden said, biting the bullet, “Captain Sabara said it would be all right if we took the rest of the day off- we just took the truck to the impound lot-and came out here and saw how Sergeant Payne was doing.”

  Wohl nodded.

  “How’s he doing?” McFadden asked.

  “He was exhausted, really exhausted,” Amy said. “But he’s fine, and he’ll be glad to see you.”

  Detective Martinez unrolled the newspaper he had in his hand and extended it to Dr. Payne.

  “My mother saved this for me-Charley and me was driving up from Alabama when this happened,” he said. “I didn’t know if Pa… Sergeant Payne had seen them or not.”

  It was the Philadelphia Bulletin, with a three-column picture of Sergeant Matthew M. Payne in a dinner jacket, standing, pistol in hand, over a man on the ground.

  With an effort, Mrs. Payne smiled and said,

  “No, I don’t think he has. It was very kind of you, Detective, to think of bringing this.”

  An hour-and several bottles of spirits-later, everybody had gone, and Matt and Brewster Payne found themselves again alone on the patio.

  “Well, I don’t know if that was the rest Aaron Stein prescribed for you, but I don’t see how it could have been avoided, and in the long run, I think it was good for you,” Brewster C. Payne said.

  “I’m all right, Dad.”

  “What are you going to do for thirty days? Given it any thought?”

  “Aside from getting the Porsche fixed… It’s in the impound lot, Peter told me-”

  “You’re going to have it repaired?”

  “I don’t know. There was a lot of damage.”

  “You have time to decide.”

  “I may get another car, something less ostentatious, suitable for a starving law student.”

  Brewster Payne looked at him for a long moment without saying anything.

  “When did you decide that?” he asked finally.

  “In the hospital,” Matt said.

  “May I comment?”

  “I sort of expected ‘Finally, thank God, he’s come to his senses!’ ”

  Brewster C. Payne chuckled, then said, “I would be delighted if that’s what you finally decide to do, Matt, but I suggest to you that that’s a very important decision to make, and important decisions should not he made impulsively.”

  “Okay.”

  “Why don’t you go to the Cape May house and take Final Tort out of sight of shore and watch the waves go up and down for a couple of days? That always helps me to think when I really need to.”

  Matt thought that over for a moment, then nodded.

  “You’re probably right. You usually are. But I really think my days as the Wyatt Earp of the Main Line are over.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  The theory that using Final Tort V, the Payne fifty-eight-foot Hatteras, as a platform from which, as he watched the waves go up and down, Matt could do some really serious thinking-and, his father hoped, incidentally get some rest- would be an excellent idea did not work out well in practice largely b
ecause of her captain.

  Her captain, retired Coast Guard chief petty officer Al Bowman, who had been with the Paynes since Matt was ten, when the family boat was Final Tort II, a much smaller Hatteras, was on vacation.

  Matt had learned small-boat handling from Chief Bowman, and took not a little pride in knowing he had met Chief Bowman’s criteria in that area. Usually, when they went out on Final Tort V together, the chief would come to the bridge only to hand Matt another beer.

  Standing in for him in his absence was another, much younger retired Coast Guard chief petty officer, who was visibly nervous when Matt went to the control console, fired up the engines, and asked him to let loose the lines, with the obvious intent of taking the vessel to sea with himself at the helm.

  Even when Matt managed to get the Final Tort V away from the wharf and into the wide Atlantic without running her aground, the stand-in captain never got far from Matt or the controls.

  What was worse, however, was that the replacement captain had seen in the Bulletin both the photograph of Matt getting off the Citation with Homer C. Daniels and the photograph of Matt, pistol in hand, in the parking lot near La Famiglia, and naturally presumed Matt would be delighted to tell him all about the murdering rapist, exchanging gunfire with a couple of armed robbers, and what it was really like to be a real-life Stan Colt. And incidentally, what’s Stan Colt really like?

  Compounding the problem was that the replacement captain was a really nice guy, the sort of man to whom one could not say, “I wish you’d shut the fuck up!” although that thought did run more than once through Matt’s mind.

  And finally, if there were fish in the Atlantic, none of them showed any interest whatever in the bait supposed to tempt them to any of the four lines Matt put in the water.

  At 2 P.M., Matt said, “I think we’d might as well call it a day. You want to take her in?”

  The replacement captain had been obviously pleased with the request for his professional services.

  Matt, sitting in a fishing chair with his feet on the stern rail, watching the churning water, had time for two beers and some private thoughts before he saw that they were nearly at the dock and he would have to go forward and handle the lines.

  He had reached no profound conclusions, except that he didn’t want to do this again tomorrow.

  When he went forward, he saw a familiar vehicle, a Buick Rendezvous with an antennae farm on its roof, sitting beside the house.

  Michael J. O’Hara himself was sprawled in a lawn chaise on the wharf, drinking from the neck of a beer bottle. The chair was from the deck of the house. There was a portable cooler beside Mickey that he’d obviously brought with him.

  He waved, but rose from the chair only when Matt called, “Hey, Mickey, want to grab the line?”

  On the third try, he managed to do so, whereupon he inquired, “What am I supposed to do with it?”

  Matt resisted the temptation to tell him the first thing that came to his mind, and instead said, “Wrap it, twice, around that pole, and then hang on to it.”

  When he saw that Mickey had done so, he went aft to handle the stern lines.

  I wonder what he’s doing here. Who cares? I really am glad to see him.

  “You didn’t answer your phone,” Mickey said, by way of greeting. “I was about to call the cops.”

  “On the water, you call the Coast Guard, not the cops,” Matt said. “Write that down.”

  “So why didn’t you answer the phone?”

  “I didn’t have it turned on, for one thing,” Matt said, helping himself to a beer from the cooler, “and for another, I was probably out of range.”

  “You’re not supposed to be,” O’Hara said.

  “Well, sorry. My profound apologies.”

  “I meant of this,” Mickey said, and patted his shirt pocket, which held what looked to Matt like a bulky cellular telephone. “They advertise worldwide service. They use satellites.”

  “Then I guess I didn’t have my phone turned on.”

  “I guess not,” Mickey said.

  It occurred to Matt that unless they got off the wharf before the reserve captain got off Final Tort V, he would probably be joining them for whatever happened next, which included a couple of beers, for sure, and then probably dinner.

  Worse, that he would probably recognize Mickey’s name, and start asking questions about what it was like being a famous journalist, and even worse than that, Mickey would delight in telling him.

  “All I had for lunch was a ham and cheese sandwich,” Matt said. “Let’s go get something to eat.”

  “Steamed clams,” Mickey announced. “I didn’t have any lunch at all, and steamed clams seems like a splendid idea.”

  He picked up the portable cooler and started down the wharf.

  “Are we going out tomorrow?” the reserve captain called down from the Final Tort V.

  “I’ll call you,” Matt said.

  In the Rendezvous, Mickey asked,

  “You okay, Matty?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “I heard you came apart for a while.”

  “I came apart for a while, but I’m fine now.”

  Mickey handed him his cellular telephone.

  “Call Denny Coughlin and tell him. He’s worried about you.”

  “He sent you down here to keep me company?”

  “He told me how to get here,” O’Hara said. “You have to dial Zero Zero One first.”

  “Zero Zero One first?”

  “That’s the United States,” O’Hara explained.

  “I thought that’s where we were.”

  “That’s a worldwide telephone. You have to dial the country code first. Call Denny, for Christ’s sake.”

  Matt punched in the numbers, including the Zero Zero One country code, then the Philadelphia area code, and then Commissioner Coughlin’s number, and was finally connected with him.

  He told him that he was fine, thank you; that Mickey had found him; that they were in his car en route to get some steamed clams; and that he felt fine, thank you, nothing has changed in the thirty seconds since you asked me that the first time.

  “Is Mickey going to be in the way, Matty? He really wanted to see you. I thought maybe you’d like some company, so I told him where to find you.”

  “I’m glad you did. Thank you.”

  “Well, have a couple of beers, but get some rest. And give me a call every once in a while, okay?”

  “I’ll do it,” Matt said, and pushed the Off button.

  They sat at the bar of the Ocean Vue Bar amp; Grill and viewed the ocean while eating two dozen steamers and drinking two Heinekens each. Aside from “Hand me the Tabasco, please,” there was not much conversation.

  Matt pushed the second tin tray of empty mollusk shells away from him, finished his beer, signaled for another round, and then asked,

  “Can I ask you a personal question, Mick?”

  “Shoot.”

  “Have you ever been out of the country?”

  “No. Why should I have been?”

  “Then what’s with the worldwide dial Zero Zero One as the country code telephone all about?”

  “I’m thinking of going to Europe,” Mickey said.

  “Really? What for?”

  “Actually, Matty, that’s one of the reasons I came all the way over here. The other was to apologize for not coming to see you after Doc Michaels told me that he let you out of the loony bin. I was busy.”

  “You have been discussing my mental condition with Dr. Michaels, I gather?”

  “He said medical ethics prohibited his discussing your case with me, but apropos of nothing whatever, there was nothing wrong with you that a little rest wouldn’t fix. He’s a good guy.”

  “And he suggested you come to see me?”

  “No,” Mickey said, his tone suggesting that even the question surprised him. “What happened was after I heard that you’d been in and out of the loony bin, I called your mother, and she gave me th
e runaround about where you were, so I called your father, ditto, and I began to have visions of you in a rubber room somewhere, so I went and saw Doc Michaels, and he told me… what I told you he told me.. so I called Denny and asked him where you were, and he told me. So I came.”

  “Tell me about Europe.”

  “I told you I was busy. What it was was that I was involved in a contractual dispute with my employers.”

  “About what?”

  “I knocked my city editor on his ass,” Mickey said. “With a bloody nose.”

  “Why?”

  “It was a matter of journalistic principle,” Mickey said. “The lawyers for the Bulletin said it was justification for my termination, unless I apologized to the sonofabitch, which I will do the morning after the Pope gives birth to triplets.”

  “So where does the matter stand now?” Matt said, smiling.

  “Casimir responded that in this era of political correctness, it is not professionally acceptable behavior for a supervisor, before a room full of his fellow employees, to call an underling ‘you insane Shanty Irish sonofabitch’…”

  “He actually called you that?” Matt asked, on the edge of laughter.

  Mickey nodded, smiling, and went on, obviously quoting Bolinski verbatim,

  “…‘and to threaten a distinguished Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist such as Mr. O’Hara, before the same gathering of his peers, with using his influence to ensure that Mr. O’Hara would never find employment again, even with the National Enquirer, a periodical generally held in contempt by responsible journalists.’ ”

  “He did that?”

  “As blood dripped down his chin from his bloody nose onto his shirt,” Mickey said.

  “What set you two off?” Matt asked.

  “That’s not important. The sonofabitch has never liked me, and vice versa. It just happened.”

  “So what’s going to happen?”

  “We have entered a thirty-day cooling-off period, during which they hope that I will change my mind about apologizing-they know I won’t-and the Bull hopes Kennedy will make a full and public apology for his reprehensible remarks and behavior to me-which he just might. During this period, I have withdrawn my professional services from the Bulletin. I still get paid, of course.”