Special Operations boh-2

by W. E. B Griffin

  "Yes, sir," McFadden said, immediately.

  "Inspector, that might be a little awkward," Martinez said.

  "That wasn't a suggestion," Wohl said.

  "Yes, sir," Martinez said.

  "Can we keep the car we've been driving, sir?" McFadden asked.

  "If you mean, do you have to turn it in when you go off duty, the answer is no, not for the time being. I don't care which one of you keeps it overnight, but I don't want to hear that somebody stole the radios, or the tires, or ran a key down the side to show his affection for the police."

  "I'll take good care of it, sir," Martinez said.

  "For right now, for the rest of the afternoon, I want you to keep drawing cars and taking them for radios and bringing them here. Take Payne with you. He's doing an errand for me, and he'll need a car to do it."

  "Yes, sir," McFadden said.

  "That's all," Wohl said. He looked at Payne. "Get that Xeroxed, and then come back here."

  "Yes, sir," Payne said.

  "I have every confidence that in the morning, Mr. Williams will be in the hands of the law, and that I can call the Commissioner and tell him that not only has justice been done, but that Miss Peebles is more than satisfied with her police support."

  Martinez and McFadden flashed smiles that were not entirely confident, and got up. As Payne started to follow them out of the office Wohl said, softly, "Keep your eyes open and your mouth shut tonight, Matt."

  THIRTEEN

  Matt Payne turned off Seventh Street into the parking lot behind the Roundhouse at the wheel of an almost new Plymouth Fury. Forty-five minutes before, he had picked it up at the Radio garage, and it was equipped with the full complement of radios prescribed for Special Operations by Staff Inspector Peter Wohl.

  He knew the radio worked, because he had tried it.

  "W-William Two Oh Nine," he had called on the Highway Band. "Out of service at Colosimo's Gun Store in the nine-hundred block of Spring Garden."

  And Radio had called back, "W-William Two Oh Nine, is that the ninehundred block on Spring Garden?"

  The Radio Dispatcher was Mrs. Catherine Wosniski, a plump, grayhaired lady of sixty-two who had been, it was said, a dispatcher since Police Dispatch had been a couple of guys blowing whistles from atop City Hall, long before Marconi had even thought of radio.

  Mrs. Wosniski had been around long enough to know, for example, that:

  Special units-and Special Operations was certainly a Special Unit-did not have to report themselves out of service as did the RPCs in the Districts. The whole idea of reporting out of (or back in) service was to keep the dispatchers aware of what cars were or were not available to be sent somewhere by the dispatchers. Dispatchers did not dispatch special unit vehicles.

  Catherine Wosniski also knew about Colosimo's Gun Store. It was where three out of four cops in Philadelphia, maybe more, bought their guns. And she also knew that many of them stopped by Colosimo's to shop on a personal basis when they had been officially sent to the Roundhouse; that they shopped there, so to speak, on company time, almost invariably "forgetting" to call Police Radio to report themselves out of service.

  So what she had here was a car that was not required to report itself out of service doing just that, and at a location where cars rarely reported themselves out of service, because supervisors, who also had radios, frowned on officers shopping on company time.

  Although Mrs. Catherine Wosniski was a devout and lifelong member of the Roman Catholic Church, she was also conversant with certain phrases used by those of the Hebraic persuasion: What she thought was, there's something not kosher here.

  "W-William Two Oh Nine," she radioed back. "Do you want numbers on this assignment?"

  What she was asking was whether the officer calling wanted the District Control Number for whatever incident was occurring at Colosimo's Gun Store that he had elected to handle. A District Control Number is required for every incident of police involvement.

  Officer Matthew Payne had no idea at all what she was talking about.

  "W-William Two Oh Nine. No, thank you, ma'am, I don't need any numbers."

  It had been at least two years since anyone had said thank you to Catherine Wosniski over the Police Radio; she could never remember anyone who had ever called her 'ma'am' over the air.

  "W-William Two Oh Nine," she radioed, a touch of concern in her voice, "is everything all right at that location?"

  "W-William Two Oh Nine," Officer Payne replied, "everything's fine here. I'm just going inside to buy a gun."

  There was a pause before Mrs. Wosniski replied. Then, very slowly, she radioed, "Ooooooo-kaaaaaay, W-Two Oh Nine."

  Everyone on this band thus knew that Mrs. Wosniski knew that she was dealing with an incredible dummy who hadn't the foggiest idea how to cover his tracks when he was taking care of personal business.

  Blissfully unaware of the meaning of his exchange with Police Radio, and actually complimenting himself on the professional way he had handled the situation, Matt Payne got out of the car and went into Colosimo's Gun Store.

  Thirty minutes after that, after equipping himself with a Smith amp; Wesson Model 37 Chief's Special Airweight J-Frame.38 Special caliber revolver and an ankle holster for it, he had called Radio again and reported W-William Two Oh Nine back in service.

  Getting the pistol had been far more complicated than he had imagined. He had-naively, he now understood-assumed that since he was now a sworn Police Officer, and equipped with a badge and a photo identification card to prove it, buying a revolver would be no more difficult than buying a pair of shoes.

  But that hadn't been the case. First there had been a long federal government form to fill out, on which he had to swear on penalty of perjury, the punishments for which were spelled out to be a $10,000 fine and ten years imprisonment, that he was not a felon, a drunk, or a drug addict; and that neither was he under psychiatric care or under any kind of an indictment. And when that was complete, the salesman took his photo identification to a telephone and called the Police Department to verify that there was indeed a Police Officer named Matthew Payne on their rolls.

  But finally the pistol was his. He carried it out to the car and, with more trouble than he thought it would be, managed to fasten the ankle holster to his right ankle. Then, sitting in the car, he had gone through some actually painful contortions to take off his jacket and his shoulder holster.

  He took the revolver from the holster, opened the cylinder, and dumped the six shiny, somehow menacing, cartridges into his hand. He loaded five of them, all it held, into theUndercover revolver's cylinder and put it back into the ankle holster. He slipped the leftover cartridge into his trousers pocket.

  When he tried to put the service revolver and the shoulder holster in the glove compartment, it was full of shortwave radio chassis. He finally managed to shove it all under the passenger-side seat.

  The ankle holster, as he drove to the Roundhouse, had felt both strange and precariously mounted, raising the very real possibility that he didn't have it on right.

  As he looked for a parking place, other doubts rose in his mind. He had never been inside the Roundhouse; the closest he'd come was waiting outside while Inspector Wohl had gone inside to get Detectives Washington and Harris.

  He had no idea where to go inside to gain access to a Xerox machine. And there was, he thought, a very good possibility that as he walked down a corridor somewhere, the ankle holster would come loose and his new pistol would go sliding down the corridor before the eyes of fifty Police Officers, most of them Sergeants or better.

  He found a parking place, pulled the Fury into it, and almost immediately backed out and left the Roundhouse parking lot. He knew where there was a Xerox machine, and where to park the car to get to it. He picked up the microphone.

  "W-William Two Oh Nine," he reported, "out of service at Twelfth and Market."

  ****

  "Why hello, Matt," Mrs. Irene Craig, executive secretary to the senior
partners of Mawson, Payne, Stockton, McAdoo amp; Lester, said. " How are you?"

  "Just fine, Mrs. Craig," Matt said. "And yourself?"

  His confidence in the ankle holster had been restored. He had walked, at first very carefully, and then with growing confidence through the parking building to the elevator, and it had not fallen off.

  "What can I do for you?"

  "I need to use the Xerox machine," he said.

  "Sure," she said. "It's in there. Do you know how to use it?"

  "I think so," he said.

  "Come on," she said. "I'll show you."

  When the fifth sheet was coming out of the Xerox machine, she turned to him.

  "What in the world is this?"

  "It's the investigation reports of the Northwest Philadelphia rapes," Matt said.

  "What are you doing with them?" she asked. "Or can't I ask?"

  "I'm working on them," Matt said, and then the lie became uncomfortable. "My boss told me to get them Xeroxed."

  "Doesn't the Police Department have a Xerox machine?"

  "Ours doesn't work," Matt said. "So they sent me down to the Roundhouse to have it done. And since I'd never been in there, I figured it would be easier to come in here."

  "We'll send the city a bill." She laughed. And then, after a moment, she asked, "Is that what they have you doing? Administration?"

  "Sort of."

  "I didn't think, with your education, that they'd put you in a prowl car to hand out speeding tickets."

  "What they would like to have done was put me in a paddy wagon, excuse me, EPW, but Denny Coughlin has put his two cents in on my behalf."

  "You don't sound very happy about that," she said. Irene Craig had known Matthew Payne virtually all of his life, liked him very much, and shared his father's opinion that Matt's becoming a cop ranked high on the list of Dumb Ideas of All Time.

  "Ambivalent," he said, as he started to stack the Xeroxed pages. "On one hand, I am, at least theoretically, opposed to the idea of special treatment. On the other hand-proving, I suppose, that I am not nearly as noble as I like to think I am-I like what I'm doing."

  "Which is?"

  "I'm the gofer for a very nice guy, and a very sharp cop, Staff Inspector Peter Wohl."

  "He's the one who had his picture in the paper? The one they put in charge of this new-"

  "Special Operations," Matt filled in.

  "That sounds interesting."

  "It's fascinating."

  "I'm glad for you," she said.

  Not really, she thought. I would be a lot happier if he was miserable as a cop; then maybe he 'd come to his senses and quit. But at least Denny Coughlin is watching out for him; that's something.

  "I like it," Matt said. "So much I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop."

  "Stick around," she said, laughing. "It will. It always does."

  "Thanks a lot," Matt said, chuckling.

  "You want to see your father?"

  "No," he said, and when he saw the look on her face, quickly added, " I've got to get back. He's probably busy; and I had breakfast with him this morning."

  "Well, I'll tell him you were in."

  "If you think you have to."

  "You're a scamp," she said. "Okay. I won't tell him. How's the apartment?"

  "I can't get used to the quiet," he said.

  He had, two weeks before, moved into an attic apartment in a refurbished pre-Civil War building on Rittenhouse Square. His previous legal residence had been a fraternity house on Walnut Street near the University of Pennsylvania campus. Irene Craig knew that he knew his father had "found" the apartment for him, in a building owned by Rittenhouse Properties, Inc., the lower three floors of which were on long-term lease to the Delaware Valley Cancer Society. She wondered if he knew that eighty percent of the stock of Rittenhouse Properties, Inc., was owned by Brewster Cortland Payne II. Now that she thought of it, she decided he didn't.

  "Maybe what you need is the patter of little feet to break the quiet," Irene Craig said.

  "Don't eventhink things like that!" Matt protested.

  When the Xerox machine finally finished, Irene Craig gave him thick rubber bands to bind the four copies together, and then, impulsively, kissed him on the cheek.

  "Take care of yourself, sport," she said.

  When Matt returned to the Highway Patrol building at Bustleton and Bowler, he stopped first at his car, double-parking the Fury to do so, and put his service revolver and shoulder holster under the driver's seat of his Porsche. Then he drove the Fury into the parking lot.

  He gave the keys to Sergeant Frizell, who apparently had had a word with Inspector Wohl about Officer Payne's place in the pecking order of Special Operations.

  Frizell handed him a cardboard box full of multipart forms.

  "The Inspector said do as many of these as you can today," Frizell sad. "There's a typewriter on a desk in there."

  "What are they?" Matt asked.

  "The requisition and transfer forms for the cars, and for the extra radios," Frizell explained. "On top is one already filled out; just fill out the others the same way."

  They were, Matt soon saw, the "paperwork" without which Good Old Ernie in the radio garage had been, at first, unwilling to do any work. Plus the paperwork for the cars themselves, the ones they had already taken from the motor pool, and blank forms, with the specific data for the particular car to be later filled in, for cars yet to be drawn, as they were actually taken from the motor pool.

  The only word to describe the typewriter was "wretched." It was an ancient Underwood. The keys stuck. The platen was so worn that the keys made deep indentations in, or actually punched through, the upper layers of paper and carbon, and whatever the mechanism that controlled the paper feeding was called, that was so worn that Matt had to manually align each line as he typed.

  He completed two forms and decided the situation was absurd. He looked at his watch. It was quarter to five. He went into the other room.

  "Sergeant," he said. "I think I know where I can get a better typewriter. Would it be all right if I left now and did these forms there?"

  "You mean, at home?"

  "Yes, sir."

  "I don't give a damn where you type them, Payne, just that they get typed."

  "Good night, then."

  "Yeah."

  Matt took the carton of blank forms and carried it to the Porsche. At this time of day, he decided, he would do better going over to 1-95 and taking that downtown, rather than going down Roosevelt Boulevard to North Broad Street. He could, he decided, make better time on 1-95. There was not much fun driving a car capable of speeds well over one hundred if you couldn't go any faster than thirty-five.

  Two miles down 1-95, he glanced in the mirror to see if it was clear to pass a U-Haul van, towing a trailer. It was not. There was a car in the lane beside him. It was painted blue-and-white, and there was a chrome-plated device on its roof containing flashing lights. They were flashing.

  He dropped his eyes to the speedometer and saw that he was exceeding the speed limit by fifteen miles per hour. The police car, aHighway Patrol car, he realized with horror, pulled abreast of him, and the Highway Patrolman in the passenger seat gestured with his finger for Matt to pull to the side of the superhighway.

  "Oh, Jesus!" Matt muttered, as he looked in the mirror and turned on his signal.

  He had a flash of insight, of wisdom.

  He broke the law. He would take his medicine. He would not mention that he was a fellow Police Officer, in the faint hope that he could beat the ticket. That way, there was a chance that it would not come to Staff Inspector Wohl's attention that on his very first day on the job, he had been arrested for racing down 1-95 somewhere between eighty and eighty-five miles per hour.

  He stopped and went into the glove compartment for the vehicle registration certificate. The glove compartment was absolutely empty. Matt had a sudden, very clear, mental image of the vehicle registration. It, together with the bill of sa
le and the title and the other paperwork, was in the upper right-hand drawer of the chest of drawers in his room in the house in Wallingford.

  He glanced in the mirror and saw that both Highway Patrolmen had gotten out of the car and were approaching his. He hurriedly dug his wallet from his trousers and got out of the car.

  First one, and then three more cars in the outer lane flashed past him, so close and so fast that he was genuinely frightened. He walked to the back of the car and extended his driver's license to one of the Highway Patrolmen.

  "I don't seem to have the registration with me," Matt said.

  "You were going at least eighty," the patrolman said. "You had it up to eighty-five."

  "Guilty," Matt said, wanly.

  "You mind if we examine the interior of your car, sir?" the other Highway Patrolman said. Matt turned his head to look at him; he was at the passenger-side window, looking inside.

  "No, not at all," Matt said, obligingly. "Help yourself."

  He turned to face the Highway Patrolman who had his driver's license.

  "My registration is at home," Matt said.

  "This your address, 3906 Walnut?"

  "No, sir," Matt said. "Actually, I just moved. I now live on Rittenhouse Square."

  "Look what I got!" the other Highway Patrolman said.

  Matt turned to look. The other Highway Patrolman was holding Matt's service revolver and his shoulder holster in his hand.

  He didn't get a really good look. He felt himself being suddenly spun around, and felt his feet being kicked out from under him, and then a strong shove against his back. Just in time, he managed to get his hands out in front of him, so that he didn't fall, face first, against the Porsche.

  "Don'tmove!" the Highway Patrolman behind him said.

  He felt hands moving over his body, around his chest, his waist, between his legs, and then down first one leg and then the other.

  "He's got another one!" the Highway Patrolman said, pulling Matt's right trousers leg up, and then jerking the Chief's Special from the ankle holster.