W E B Griffin - Badge of Honor 01 - Men In Blue

by Men In Blue(lit)

  W E B Griffin - Badge of Honor 01 - Men In Blue

  ONE

  I think I am, the long-haired, long-legged blonde thought, torn between excitement and alarm, about to have my first affair with a married man.

  Her name was Louise Dutton, and she pursed her lips thoughtfully and cocked her head unconsciously to one side as she considered that improbable likelihood.

  She was at the wheel of a yellow, six-year-old, 1967 Cadillac convertible, the roof down, moving fifteen miles over the posted forty-five-miles-per-hour speed limit northward in the center lane of Roosevelt Boulevard, which runs through the center of Northeast Philadelphia, from Broad Street to the Bucks County line.

  Louise Dutton was twenty-five years old, weighed 115 pounds, and her blond hair was real--a genetic gift from her father. She had graduated three years before (BA, English) from the University of Chicago. She had worked a year as a general-assignment reporter on the Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Clarion; six months as a newswriter for KLOS-TV (Channel 10), Los Angeles, California; and for eleven months as an on-camera reporter for WNOG-TV (Channel 7), New Orleans, Louisiana. For the past five weeks Louise Dutton had been co-anchor of "Nine's News," over WCBL-TV (Channel 9), Philadelphia: thirty minutes of local news telecast at six p.m., preceding the 6:30 national news, and again at 11 p.m.

  A crazy scenario entered her mind.

  She would get arrested for speeding. Preferably by one of the hotshot Highway Patrolmen. He would swagger over to the car, in his shiny leather jacket and his gun and holster with all the bullets showing.

  "Where's the fire, honey?" Mr. Macho, with a gun and a badge, would demand.

  "Actually," she would say, batting her eyelashes at him, "I'm on my way to meet Captain Moffitt."

  Captain Richard C. "Dutch" Moffitt was the commanding officer of the Philadelphia Highway Patrol.

  And the cop who stopped her for speeding would either believe her, and leave her properly awed, or he would not believe her, and ask her where she was supposed to meet the captain, and she would tell him, and maybe he would follow her there to see if she was telling the truth. That would be even better. Maybe it would embarrass Dutch Moffitt to have one of his men learn that he was meeting a blonde in a restaurant.

  It would not, she decided. He'd love it. The cop would wink at Captain Big Dutch Moffitt and Dutch would modestly shrug his shoulders. Dutch expected to have blond young women running after him.

  I am losing my mind.

  Is this what happened to my mother? One day my father appeared, and she went crazy?

  Is that why I'm going where I'm going, and in this circumstance ? Because Dutch Moffitt reminds me of my father?

  Is it true that all little girls harbor a shameful secret desire to go to bed with their fathers? Is that what this is, "Dutch Moffitt, in loco parentis"?

  Ahead, on the left, she spotted the site of their rendezvous. Or was it assignation?

  The Waikiki Diner, to judge from the outside decor, was not going to be the Philadelphia equivalent of Arnaud's, or for that matter, even Brennan's; more like the Golden Kettle in Cedar Rapids.

  She turned into the U-turn lane, jammed the accelerator to the floor to move her ahead of an oncoming wave of traffic, and then turned off Roosevelt Boulevard, too fast. Louise winced when she felt the Cadillac bottom going over the curb.

  The Cadillac was her college graduation gift. Or one of them. Her father had handed her a check and told her to pick herself out a car.

  "I'd rather have yours," she said. "If I could."

  He had looked at her, confused, for a moment, and then understood. "The yellow convertible? It's three years old. I was about to get rid of it."

  "Then I can have it?" she'd said. "It's hardly used." He had looked at her for a moment, understanding, she thought, before replying.

  "Of course," he said. "I'll have someone bring it here."

  She had leaned forward and kissed him and said, "Thank you, Daddy," and he'd hugged her.

  Louise Dutton's father was not, and never had been, married to her mother. She was illegitimate, a bastard; but the reality hadn't been--wasn't--as bad as most people, when they heard the facts, presumed it was.

  She had been presented with the facts when she was a little girl, matter-of-factly told there were reasons her father and mother could not be married, that he could not live with them, or see her as often as he would like. That was the way things were, and it wasn't going to change. She didn't even hate her father's wife, or her half-brothers and -sisters.

  It wasn't as if her father considered her an embarrassment, wished she had never happened. The older she got, the more she saw of him. He spent his Christmases with his family, and she spent hers with her mother and her mother's husband, and she called both men "Daddy." So far as she knew, they had never met, and she had never seen her father's family, even across a room.

  Her father had always, from the time she was nine or ten, found a couple of days to spend with her before or after Christmas, and he sent for her several times during the year, and she spent several days or a week with him, and he always introduced her as "my daughter."

  She had been a freshman in college when he'd taken her deep-sea fishing for ten days in Baja, California. She'd flown to Los Angeles, and spent the night in his beach house in Malibu, and then driven, in the yellow convertible, to Baja. A wonderful ten days. And he knew why she wanted the convertible.

  She had wondered what his wife, and her half-brothers and -sisters thought about her, and finally realized they were in the same position she was. Stanford Former Wells III, chairman of the board of Wells Newspapers, Inc., did what he damned well pleased. They were just lucky that what he damned well pleased to do was almost invariably kind, and thoughtful, and ethical.

  Maybe that was easier if you had inherited that kind of money, and maybe he wouldn't have been so kind, thoughtful, or ethical if he was a life insurance salesman or an automobile dealer, but he wasn't. He had inherited seventeen newspapers and three radio stations from his father, and turned that into thirty-one newspapers, four television stations, and four (larger) radio stations.

  The only thing that Louise could discover that her father had done wrong was, as a married man, impregnate a woman to whom he was not married. He had sown her seed in a forbidden field. But even then, he had done the decent thing. He had not abandoned his wife and children for the greener fields of a much younger woman, and he had not abandoned her. He could very easily have made "appropriate financial arrangements" and never shown his face.

  She loved and admired her father, and if people didn't understand that, fuck 'em.

  Louise found a place to park the yellow convertible, and then walked to the Waikiki Diner. There were no cars in the parking lot that looked like unmarked police cars, which meant that he had either come in his own car, or that he wasn't here yet.

  She pushed open the door to the Waikiki Diner and stepped inside. It was larger inside than it looked to be from the outside. It was shaped like an L. The shorter leg, which was what she had seen from the street, held a counter, with padded seats on stools, and one row of banquettes against the wall. Beside the door, which was at the juncture of the legs, was the cashier's glass counter and a bar with a couple of stools, but obviously primarily a service bar. The longer leg was also wider, and was a dining room. There were probably forty tables in there, Louise judged, plus banquettes against the walls.

  He wasn't in there.

  She thought: Captain Richard C. "Dutch" Moffitt, commanding officer of the Philadelphia Police Department 's Highway Patrol, has not yet found time to grace the Waikiki Diner with his pat
ronage.

  "Help you, doll?" a waitress asked. She was slight, had orange hair, too much makeup, and was pushing sixty.

  "I'm supposed to meet someone here," Louise said.

  "Why'ncha take a table?" the waitress asked, and led Louise into the dining room. Louise saw that one of the banquettes against the wall, in a position where she could see the door beside the cash register, was empty, and she slipped into it. The waitress went thirty feet farther before she realized that she wasn't being followed.

  Then she turned and, obviously miffed, laid an enormous menu in front of Louise.

  "You want a cocktail or something while you're waiting?" she asked.

  "Coffee, please, black," Louise said.

  She didn't want alcohol to cloud her reasoning any more than it was already clouded.

  She looked around the dining room. It was arguably, she decided, the ugliest dining room she had ever been in. Fake Tiffany lamps, with enormous rotating fans hanging from them, in turn hung from plastic replicas of wooden ceiling beams. The banquettes were upholstered in diamond-embossed purple vinyl. The wall across the room was a really awful mural of lasses in flowing dresses and lads in what looked like diapers dancing around what was probably supposed to be the Parthenon.

  The coffee was delivered in a thick china mug decorated with a pair of leaning palm trees and the legend, "Waikiki Diner Roosevelt Blvd. Phila Penna."

  Captain Richard C. "Dutch" Moffitt came in as Louise had removed, in shock and surprise, the scalding hot mug from her burned lips.

  He had no sooner come through the door by the cashier than a small, slight man with a large mustache, wearing a tight, prominently pin-striped suit, came up to him and offered his hand, his smile revealing a lot of goldwork.

  Dutch smiled back at him, revealing his own mouthful of large, white, even teeth. And then he saw Louise, and the smile brightened, and his eyebrows rose and he headed toward the table.

  "Hello," Dutch said to her, sliding into the chair facing her.

  "Hi!" Louise said.

  "This is our host," Dutch said, nodding at the mustached man. "Teddy Galanapoulos."

  "A pleasure, I'm sure. Any friend of Captain Moffitt's..."

  "Hello," Louise said. There was a slight Greek accent, and the gowned lasses and the lads in diapers dancing around the Parthenon were now explained.

  "You're beautiful," Dutch said.

  "Thank you," Louise said, mortified when she felt her face flush. She stood up. "Will you excuse me, please?"

  When she came back from the ladies' room, where she had, furious with herself, checked her hair and her lipstick, Dutch had changed places. He was now sitting on the purple vinyl banquette seat. His left hand, which was enormous, was curled around a squat glass of whiskey. There was a wide gold wedding band on the proper finger.

  He started to get up when he saw her.

  It was the first time she had ever seen him in civilian clothing. He was wearing a blue blazer over a yellow knit shirt. The shirt was tight against his large chest, and there wasn't, she thought, a lot of excess room in the shoulders of the blazer either.

  "Keep your seat," Louise said, "since you seem to like that one better."

  "I'm a cop," he said. "Cops don't like to sit with their backs to the door."

  "Really?" she asked, not sure if he was pulling her leg or not.

  "Really," he said, then added: "I didn't know what you drink."

  "I'm surprised," she said. She had first met him two days before. His Honor, Mayor Jerry Carlucci, who never passed up an opportunity to get his face in the newspapers or on television, reopened a repaired stretch of the Schuylkill Expressway with a ribbon-cutting ceremony. Louise, having nothing better to do at the time, had gone along with the regular crew of cameraman/producer and reporter, originally intending to do the on-camera bit herself.

  But when she got there, and saw what it was, much ado about nothing, she had decided not to usurp the reporter. But instead of leaving, she decided to hang around in case the mayor ran off at the mouth again. Mayor Carlucci had a tendency to do that (in the most recent incident, he had referred to a city councilman as "an ignorant coon") and that would make a story.

  She told the cameraman to shoot the mayor from the time he arrived until he left.

  The mayor usually moved around the city in style, in a black Cadillac limousine, preceded by two unmarked police cars carrying his plainclothes bodyguards.

  A third car had stopped right where Louise had been standing. The driver's door had opened, and Captain Richard C. "Dutch" Moffitt had erupted from it. He was a large man, and he had been in uniform. The Highway Patrol wore different uniforms than the rest of the Philadelphia Police Department.

  The Highway Patrol had begun, years before, as a traffic-control force, and had been mounted on motorcycles. They had kept their motorcyclist outfits--leather jackets and breeches and black leather puttees--even though, except for mostly ceremonial occasions, they had given up their motorcycles for patrol cars; and had, in fact become an elite force within the police department, deployed city-wide in high-crime areas.

  In the Channel 9 newsroom, the Philadelphia Highway Patrol was referred to as "Carlucci's Commandos." But, not, Louise had noticed, without a not-insignificant tone of respect, however grudging.

  Louise Dutton had found herself standing so close to Captain Richard C. Moffitt that she could smell his leather jacket, and that he had been chewing Sen-Sen. Her eyes were on the level of his badge, above which was pinned a blue, gold-striped ribbon, on which were half a dozen stars. It was, Louise correctly guessed, some kind of a citation. Citations, plural, with the stars representing multiple awards.

  He winked at her, and then, putting his hand on the car door, rose on his toes to look back at Mayor Carlucci's limousine. Louise saw that he wore a wedding ring, and then turned to see what he was looking at. Two plainclothesmen were shouldering a path for His Honor the Mayor through the crowd to the flag-bedecked sawhorses where the ribbon would be cut.

  Then he looked down at her.

  "I've seen you on the tube," he said. "I'm Dutch Moffitt."

  She gave him her hand and her name.

  "You look better in real life, Louise Dutton," he said.

  "May I ask you a question, Captain Moffitt?" she had said.

  "Sure."

  "Some of the people I know refer to the Highway Patrol as 'Carlucci's Commandos.' What's your reaction to that?"

  "Fuck 'em," he said immediately, matter-of-factly.

  "Can I quote you?" she flared.

  "You can, but I don't think you could say that on TV," he said, smiling down at her.

  "You arrogant bastard!"

  "I'd be happy, since you just came to town, to explain what the Highway Patrol does," he said. "And why that annoys the punks and the faggots."

  She gave him what she hoped was her most disdainful look.

  "I'll even throw in a couple of drinks and dinner," he said.

  "Why don't you call me?" Louise had asked, flashing him her most dazzling smile. "At home, of course. I wouldn't want it to get around the station that I was having drinks and dinner with one of Carlucci's Commandos. Especially a married one. So nice to talk to you, Captain."

  She did not get the response she expected.

  "You're really full of piss and vinegar, aren't you?" he said, approvingly.

  She had stormed furiously away. She first decided that he was arrogant enough to call her, even if her sarcasm had flown six feet over his head. She took what she later recognized was childish solace in the telephone arrangements at the studios. With all the kooks and nuts out there in TV Land, you just couldn't call Channel 9 and get put through to Louise Dutton. But they might put a police captain through, and then what?

  When she went back to the studio, she went to the head telephone operator and told her that for reasons she couldn't go into, if a police captain named Moffitt called, she didn't want to talk to him; tell him she was out.

/>   The arrogant bastard would sooner or later get the message.

  And there was no way he could call her at home. The studio wouldn't tell him where she lived, and the number was unlisted.

  Today, three hours before, the telephone had rung in her apartment, just as she had stepped into the shower.

  She knew it wasn't her father; he had called at ten, waking her up, asking her how it was going. Anybody else could wait. If they'd dropped the atomic bomb, she would have heard it go off.

  The phone had not stopped ringing, and finally, torn between gross annoyance and a growing concern that some big story had developed, she walked, dripping water, to the telephone beside her bed.

  "Hello?"

  "Are you all right?"