“Okay, let’s hear it,” he said.
Tankersley nodded, and said, “They gamed the system, women did. Damn thing’s rigged in their favor.”
“What system?”
“Marriage and divorce. The days of most folks having a traditional long-term nuclear family are over.”
Payne looked at Wohl.
“Have you heard this?” he said. “More to the point, has my sister? Clearly, you two have been talking.”
Wohl shook his head.
Payne took a sip of his martini and gestured with his free hand for Tankersley to continue.
“Pray tell,” he said.
“Okay,” Tankersley said. “So after your glorious honeymoon’s over and everyone gets back to the nitty-gritty of everyday life, then what? Maybe you make it to when the seven-year itch kicks in. Or, before that, boredom sets in. Or job stress. Whatever . . .”
“It’s no secret that about half of first marriages do end in divorce,” Payne said, a bit sharply. “But, call me naïve, I intend to be among the happily ever after other half.”
“Oh, now, don’t we all, Mr. Naïve?” Tankersley said. “No one goes in thinking short-term. And for those really brilliant ones who go and get remarried”—he raised his hand over his head and pointed at it—“that divorce rate is even higher. And cop marriages that go kaput? Through the roof. It takes a really special woman to put up with us. They exist, God bless ’em, but they’re really rare.”
The waitress delivered three more martinis. Payne glanced at his first glass. It was still half full.
“I don’t mean to suggest this applies in either of your cases,” Tankersley went on, looking at Payne, then Wohl, “but, hell, there’s a lot of females who don’t even bother with the charade of dragging you to the altar. All they want is the kid. And then you get the court order saying, ‘Congratulations, Daddy, you’ll be paying child support until that little tax deduction turns eighteen.’ And there it is: Game over.”
He took a sip of his martini, and added, “So, word to the wise: You’d better keep that rascal wrapped when playing hide the salami. Even better, get the Big V.” He held up his hand and moved his index and middle fingers together, simulating scissor blades. “Snip! Snip!”
Payne shook his head.
Wohl said, grinning, “With all due respect, Tank, you really are one cynical bastard.”
“Cynical? After two marriages? You bet. And let me tell you, it ain’t limited to baby mamas, though they pop out more little bastards—ahem, children out of wedlock, if you prefer—than anyone. I’m not making this up. You can look it up. The numbers track with the level of education. They’re highest for those without a high school diploma, then drop for those without a college degree, and drop again, though do not go away, for those with a college education. Hell, just check out online dating services. My nephew showed me. They are packed—and, I mean, packed full—with single mothers in their twenties to forties who say they’re either divorced or never been married.”
His eyes moved from Wohl to Payne as he took a sip of his martini.
“Ask any lawyer practicing family law,” he went on, putting down his glass. “They’ll tell you that the vast majority of divorces end up with the wife getting at least fifty—standard, really, is sixty—percent of the couple’s assets, plus custody of the kids. Which means they usually get the house, plus alimony to keep the house the way they like it, and, of course, child support, which they invariably spend on themselves and maybe their new boy toy. And you? Yeah, lucky you gets to drag your indebted ass back to your cheap rental apartment and work on growing hairy knuckles.”
Making another visual aid, he formed a fist and jerked it back and forth a few times.
Payne shook his head and grinned.
“You a religious man, Matt?” Tankersley said.
“Well, I don’t wear it on my sleeve. But you’re looking at one who served as an acolyte and then an altar boy in the Episcopal Church.”
“Then along the way you might’ve picked up on the teachings of Jeremiah, who is said to have warned: ‘The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?’”
“At the risk of repeating myself,” Wohl said, with a chuckle, “you really are one cynical bastard.”
Tankersley shrugged.
“When did you start having a hard time accepting uncomfortable facts, Wohl?” he said.
“This all reminds me of what some rock star once said,” Wohl said. “To paraphrase: ‘When I considered getting married a third time, I got smart, and instead of an expensive diamond ring, I just gave her a new house.’”
Tankersley laughed, and nodded.
“Now you’re getting it,” he said. “And I just heard Rear Admiral Fellerman’s voice offering me his sage advice on this issue.”
“Which was?”
“Which was advice that I clearly chose to ignore. Twice. ‘Tank,’ the good admiral said, ‘I’ve sailed the world and can counsel you unequivocally that if it flies, floats, or fucks, rent it.’”
Payne and Wohl laughed.
Payne said, “If it’s any consolation, Tank, I’ve been told that, too, and mostly from married guys who also own airplanes or big boats. Classic case of do as I say, not as I do.”
Payne felt his smartphone vibrate.
Maybe Amanda? he thought. Considering the topic of conversation, her timing’s impeccable . . .
“Excuse me,” he said, pulling out the device and scrolling the messages on-screen. He saw that he’d somehow missed two from Tony Harris, time-stamped twenty minutes earlier.
He looked up, and said, “Looks like we’ve found the doers from the shooting yesterday at Rittenhouse Square.”
He then, in a slow, deliberate motion to avoid causing pain to his wound, rose from his seat.
Wohl picked up on it.
“You sure you’re okay?”
“Harris says he’s picking me up. I’m afraid I’ve got to get back to it,” Payne said, nodding at Wohl, then holding out his hand to Tankersley. “It’s been a genuine pleasure meeting you.”
“Work never stops—I get it,” Tankersley said, nodding as he took Payne’s hand. “Good to meet you, too. Sorry I rambled on.”
Payne pulled his money clip from his pants pocket. Wohl, just perceptively, raised his right hand, palm out—stop.
“I’ve got this, Matt.”
“Thanks. Next time’s on me, gentlemen,” Payne said, looking back and forth between them.
“You ever get in a bind on a job,” Tankersley said, “feel free to bounce it off me. Like I said, I do miss talking shop. Be careful out there.”
Payne nodded.
“Will do. I appreciate that,” he said, then saw Harris coming through the front entrance. “And there’s my ride.”
Tankersley drained his glass and slid Payne’s untouched martini toward him.
“Waste not, want not,” Tankersley said, flashed an exaggerated smile, and looked at Wohl. “You promised you’d feed me, too.”
VI
[ ONE ]
Office of the Mayor
City Hall
1 Penn Square
Room 215
Philadelphia
Friday, January 6, 4:01 P.M.
“Before we get into the meat of this goddamn meeting,” the Honorable Jerome H. Carlucci said, glancing anxiously around his elegant but cluttered office, “what’s the latest on the Rittenhouse outrage?”
The fifty-nine-year-old mayor, wearing a dark, two-piece suit, leaned back in his leather judge’s chair with his polished black shoes on his massive wooden desk. He held his hands together as if praying, tapping his fingertips together, as he looked at fifty-one-year-old First Deputy Police Commissioner Dennis V. Coughlin, who sat in a gray-woolen-upholstered armchair on the other side of the desk.
Carlucci was quick to say that though he had left the job of top cop for the office of mayor, he still remained responsible for every aspect of the police department—perhaps more so now than ever.
Coughlin saw that Carlucci had gestured toward the large flat-screen television that was mounted in a wooden frame on the wall. With rare exception, Carlucci kept it tuned to the KeyCom cable system’s Philly News Now channel that had round-the-clock coverage. The muted TV now showed video footage—the image shook, suggesting it had been made using a cellular telephone’s camera—taken the previous afternoon at Rittenhouse Square of the Cadillac SUV upside down and erupting in flame, then picked up the black Porsche speeding past.
“One of the anonymous tips we got turned out to be solid,” Denny Coughlin said.
“How so?”
“I’m not privy to all the details—it’s still a fluid situation as we speak—but around noon a caller told the nine-one-one dispatcher where we could find the two doers responsible for the shooting. When I checked with Homicide just before walking in here, I was told that there were two bodies where the caller said they would be.”
“Where?”
“At the old power plant in Fishtown. Apparently it’s a pretty gruesome scene.”
“How do we know they actually are the shooters?”
“We don’t. Yet. As I said, it’s fluid. We don’t know a helluva lot more than what we released to the media”—he gestured at the TV—“that the driver, Ken Benson, was killed, and John Austin, the passenger, survived.”
“And they’re somehow connected to Camilla Rose Morgan?”
“Yeah, she and Austin were certainly close, and possibly romantically involved. The two men grew up together in Houston.”
“And Matt Payne is the lead on this Benson’s case?” Carlucci said.
“Matty owns it and the Morgan woman’s.”
“Then we know she didn’t jump? It wasn’t suicide?”
Coughlin shrugged.
“Too early to tell. Still awaiting autopsy results. Toxicology, too.”
“I don’t mean to speak ill of the dead,” Carlucci said, “but her brother said she was certifiable crazy.”
Coughlin’s bushy gray eyebrows rose.
“Mason Morgan also said she was smart as hell,” Carlucci added.
“I’m guessing he called you, Jerry.”
Carlucci nodded.
“Morgan said he simply wanted the courtesy of being told if there were any surprises he should know about concerning her death. So that he could deal with them, as he’d done in years past. I believe he was alluding to her trips to rehab.”
“You know that she ran the family philanthropic arm,” Coughlin said, “and that it recently donated thirty new Harley-Davidsons to Highway Patrol to replace their aging bikes.”
Carlucci nodded. “Electra Glides. At over twenty grand each, that saved the city more than a half million. Old Man Morgan was a big supporter.”
Coughlin nodded. He knew it went unsaid that friends like that received preferential treatment.
“The only possible thing that comes to mind that might be a surprise,” Coughlin said, “was evidence of cocaine and Ecstasy was found at her condo. As opposed to just the usual fair amount of alcohol such parties have.”
“In other words, nothing,” Carlucci said. “Personal consumption.”
Coughlin nodded. “Unless we want to start locking up a large number of Center City denizens for the same offense. In her defense, we don’t know that she used the narcotics. No telling what was in her system, if anything. The toxicology results could come back clean.”
Carlucci, nodding, looked out a window. Coughlin thought he had a somewhat pained expression.
After a minute, Coughlin said, “So, what is the meat of this meeting?”
Carlucci glanced at the TV again, and said, “That killing was the tenth so far this year and we’re not even a full week into January. And thanks to Payne shooting that heroin-pushing punk, even though we already had surpassed the previous year’s total of numbers killed, we just hit an all-time record.”
“And now we appear on pace to beat it, Jerry. Is this where I invoke our critics’ favored term Killadelphia? Year after year, it’s become a classic SNAFU.”
Carlucci, staring at the TV, now clearly had a pained expression. Coughlin could tell something weighed heavy on his mind—something beyond the usual Situation Normal: All Fucked Up.
“Denny,” he said, meeting Coughlin’s eyes, “we go way back. What I’m about to tell you goes no farther than these walls.”
“Of course, Jerry. You know that.”
“A couple months back,” Carlucci began, “Five-F waltzed his arrogant ass in here, uninvited, and proceeded to tell me pretty much everything that I already knew about this city’s challenges.”
There was a somewhat small circle, which naturally included Coughlin, that was aware that 5-F was shorthand for the derisive nickname of a well-known forty-five-year-old Philly businessman. The circle also knew that Matt Payne had come up with it, and the mayor, having heard Payne blurt it in a moment of anger, had immediately embraced it, on occasion repeating the longer version: “Fucking Francis Franklin Fuller the Fifth.”
Fuller, who traced his family lineage to Benjamin Franklin, had been born to wealth. He had built that into a much bigger personal fortune, one that was over two billion dollars. Short and stout of stature, Fuller had a bulging belly and a round face and male-pattern baldness similar to his ancestor’s. He embraced with enthusiasm everything Franklinite, beginning with the pen name Richard Saunders that Franklin had used in writing Poor Richard’s Almanack.
Under Richard Saunders Holdings—his main company that was headquartered at North Third and Arch streets in Old City—Fuller owned outright, or had majority interest in, KeyProperties (luxury high-rise office and residential buildings), KeyCargo Import-Exports (largest user of the Port of Philadelphia docks and warehousing facilities), and KeyCom (a Fortune 500, nationwide telecommunications corporation).
Carlucci, jabbing his finger in the direction of the empty armchair beside Coughlin, went on. “Five-F sat in that chair and told me this city, the third poorest in the nation, is headed to becoming the next Detroit. Bankrupt, unless drastic changes are made. And chief among those drastic changes: the violent crimes rate.”
“Which would be the job of the city council members,” Coughlin said, his tone defensive but even. “They can talk to their constituents and figure out a way to stop the robbing and raping and killing. Beginning with cooperating with the police and the district attorney’s office.”
Carlucci, nodding, said, “I agree. And about that point Five-F said—and the research tends to prove he’s right—that unless all that changes, the next generation just graduating college is going to marry and raise families where they feel safer. When they go, their tax base goes, too. And companies follow. And we start circling the Detroit bankruptcy drain faster.”
Coughlin shrugged. “So, then, what’s the magic solution?”
“I have ideas, plans,” Carlucci said. “But what I may not have is time for them.”
“I don’t think I understand.”
“The primaries are a year away. I can’t turn this sinking ship around in that short time.”
“You need another term as mayor,” Coughlin said after a pause. “And guaranteeing that takes a lot of . . . support . . . from high places.”
“Right. And it’s been made clear unless there are changes, that support won’t be there.” He paused to let that sink in, then added, “But with t
hat support, another term would have you, already my right hand, at the helm of the department. Four stars?”
Coughlin had been appointed—as had all deputy commissioners to commissioners, the one- to four-stars—by the city’s managing director. But that happened only with the blessing—read order—of the mayor.
“And after that,” Carlucci said, “perhaps even higher office.”
Coughlin looked at Carlucci, mentally going over what he had just heard, and felt his eyes widen involuntarily.
The pieces had fallen into place.
On a Saturday a month earlier, as holiday celebrations were peaking, Coughlin had been called to an emergency meeting in the mayor’s office to address that morning’s gruesome slayings of a young college coed, who had been stabbed in JFK Park, across from City Hall, and of a young teenage boy, whose throat had been slashed in Franklin Park, across from the Roundhouse.
In addition to Carlucci and Coughlin, the meeting included only two others, Edward Stein and James Finley, both of whom had joined the mayor’s staff no more than thirty days earlier.
Stein, a lawyer, held the new title of chief executive advisor to the mayor. Finley was head of the Philadelphia Convention and Visitors Office. Each was being paid, due to budgetary considerations, $1 per annum by the city. But this was not a hardship for them. While it was not broadcast, it was not exactly a secret that Stein and Finley continued to be well compensated—some believed in the middle to high six figures, plus generous bonuses and stock options—as senior vice presidents at Richard Saunders Holdings.
In short, Francis Fuller was loaning two of his top corporate executives to the city. It certainly was not the first time—nor would it be the last—that corporate businessmen would cycle into the political realm, influence the workings, then cycle back out to the corporate world.
In the meeting, Finley left no question that he was out to get rid of what he saw as the city’s chief public relations disaster concerning killings—the Wyatt Earp of the Main Line, Sergeant Matthew Payne.
Stein, Coughlin believed, tended to be the voice of reason between the two of them, going so far as telling Finley that he believed Payne was doing a great job protecting society from the barbarians—and that he didn’t think Payne went to work hoping to get into another shoot-out at the O.K. Corral.
Broken Trust Page 17