“The question now is,” Payne said, “were you the target? Or both you and Kenny Benson?”
“How the hell would I know?” Austin said, looking him in the eye.
Payne did not flinch.
But you do know, you sonofabitch. You know something.
Time to play a hunch . . .
“You know because that cash envelope that Camilla Rose gave you right before the shooting held a helluva lot more than the twenty thousand dollars you said.”
“What’re you saying?”
“I heard it was fifty grand, in hundreds—”
“Did she tell you that?”
Yes, but you can’t ask her if she did, can you? So I’ll let you wonder about the source.
And that text said she’d told you that that was the last hundred grand.
Payne’s eyes went to Grosse, then back to Austin.
“Who are you paying off with the hundred grand?” Payne went on. “And why?”
Austin avoided eye contact, turning to look for his drink as he forced a laugh.
“That’s ridiculous. You’re way out of line, Payne.”
“Look, I’m trying to find who’s responsible for these deaths. I can’t help you if you don’t help me. I really don’t care who you’re giving money. I want the killer.”
“And I’ve got nothing for you. I’ve told you all I know.”
Payne met his eyes, and, after mulling it over, thought, What the hell.
He pulled up the photograph on his phone showing the shredded bodies hanging from the iron beam in the coal tower.
“Suit yourself,” Payne said, holding out the phone. “But here’s something to think about.”
Austin looked, and let out what Payne thought sounded like a deep primal groan.
“Jesus,” Grosse said, again in a low voice.
“Feeling lucky now?”
“Get out, Payne!” Austin barked, his left arm stiff as he pointed toward the front door. “Just get the hell out!”
Payne saw that Austin was visibly shaking, beads of sweat forming on his brow.
Is that more of the mania manifesting itself?
Payne slipped his phone in his pocket and came out with a business card. He handed it to Grosse.
“I’d appreciate it if you called me later,” he said, then glanced at Austin. “I’ll let myself out.”
VIII
[ ONE ]
Office of the First Deputy Police Commissioner
The Roundhouse
Eighth and Race Streets
Philadelphia
Saturday, January 7, 9:05 A.M.
The inner door of Dennis V. Coughlin’s office was half open when Matt Payne stuck his head through it. He saw that Coughlin was seated at his desk, holding the receiver of his desktop telephone and nodding. Matt thought it was interesting that he was not in his usual suit and tie but instead wore his class “A” uniform, three gold stars shining on each epaulet of the dark jacket and on both collar points of his stiff white shirt.
“Okay, Jerry,” Coughlin said as he began waving for Payne to enter, “I’ll look into that before the presser and get back to you.”
Press conference? Payne thought. So, that explains the uniform.
Coughlin put the receiver in its base as he looked up at Payne, who was sipping from a to-go cup imprinted with the logotype of the local Good Karma Café.
“You’re late, Matty.”
“Unfortunately, unavoidable, Uncle Denny,” Payne said. “Had to change my bandage.”
Coughlin grunted.
“I suppose I can let it slide for that. But apparently you found the time to stop for coffee.”
“Priorities, sir. You really don’t want to be around me if I haven’t had adequate jolts of caffeine.” He smiled while pointing at the cup. “And, as the Black Buddha would concur, good karma always is an admirable thing to aspire to.”
Coughlin’s expression showed that he was not amused.
“Actually, sorry I’m late,” Payne went on in a more serious tone. “Tony Harris brought in the coffees. We’ve been going back over everything we have on the Morgan case and running down everything we can on the two males who were strung up in the PECO tower.”
Coughlin came out from behind his desk and went to where a low wooden table separated a black leather couch and a pair of heavy armchairs. Payne followed, easing himself carefully into one of the chairs, while Coughlin sat on the couch opposite him.
“Jerry’s keeping a close eye on her case and the shooting,” Coughlin said, and gestured toward the nearby wall-mounted flat-screen television. “High-profile means top of the news cycle. There seems to be a new story about her every hour.”
The TV was, like the one in Mayor Carlucci’s office, constantly tuned to KeyCom cable’s Philly News Now channel, the volume muted. The reason for that, Payne remembered Coughlin telling him, was that the mayor, who held the news media in utter contempt, regularly fired up his phone line, demanding, “Denny, are you seeing what those bastards are now broadcasting about us on the news?”
Coughlin added, “Are you getting any good leads?”
Payne shook his head. “A lot of leads that have gone nowhere. We finally interviewed the two women who had been in the bar with the dentist and went up with Camilla Rose to her condo. They’re commercial realtors. They called in after hearing the news, then came in.”
“And?”
“No smoking gun. Basically, they all just drank—and drank a lot. Their stories match the dentist’s, and everything else we’ve established, including the time-stamped video of them staggering out of the lobby shortly before she died. The women were clearly devastated. They had even been planning to attend her fund-raiser tonight.”
Payne glanced at his watch, and added, “Willie Lane is the last one from that crowd, and he’s due in at ten o’clock for Tony to interview. Everyone he was with has been interviewed, and what few leads they gave us went nowhere. Hard to expect his will be any different.”
“You never know. Still early, I would suggest. So, how is the wound? Besides freshly bandaged. The way you slowly lowered yourself into that chair was not lost on me.”
“Better every day.”
Coughlin studied him, his expression dubious, then said, “I damn sure hope so. That wound was bad enough, and easily could have been a lot worse. And I would have been the one obliged to break the news to your mother.”
Payne nodded, and said, “I saw her at lunch yesterday, and she said to give you her love.”
His mother, of course, hadn’t, but he felt no guilt saying it because he knew she would have said exactly that had she known he would be seeing her son’s godfather.
“Your mother is a wonderful lady.”
“I brought up the Black Buddha—”
“You really have to insist on calling Jason that, Matty?”
“I don’t understand why you object, Uncle Denny. He doesn’t mind. And it fits him.”
Coughlin, gesturing impatiently with his hand for Matt to continue, said, “Okay, so what about him?”
“When I mentioned Jason, Mom said something interesting that I wanted to ask you about.”
“What?”
“I told her about how he came in at the top of the captain’s list but apparently doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell getting promoted. And she said she remembered you and my father talking about it when you were blue shirts. That is, people getting frozen out of promotions.”
Coughlin chuckled.
“What? Why’s that funny?”
“It’s not, Matty. I just had a flashback of all the Bushmills your pop and I put away at that wooden table in the kitchen. By God, we thought we solved, if not all, then many of the world’s problems at that table.”
“So she said.”
>
“Solved a few cases there at that table, too. Anyway, Jack, your pop, to his credit, understood that early on.”
“About getting frozen out?”
He looked at Payne, and nodded.
“Yeah. I suspect he got it from Dutch, who, as I’m sure you remember, was damn sharp. That’s one reason why your uncle made commander of the Highway Patrol. Who knows how far he’d have risen had he not gotten killed by that punk at the diner. Same goes for your pop. Who knows how far? He was smarter than I was, and he’d probably have my job now.”
Payne didn’t know what to say and decided silence was best. He sipped his coffee.
“Even though I knew Jack was smarter,” Coughlin went on, “I still was skeptical about people actually getting ahead who didn’t deserve it, and others who had earned a promotion, genuinely deserved it, getting held back. But, hell, we were in our early twenties. I found out soon enough that even I could learn something new. Even today.”
“Do you remember Tank Tankersley, big guy, retired from Homicide? Apparently has a multitude of ex-wives.”
Coughlin nodded. “Absolutely. Good man. Great detective. I don’t know about the ex-wives. But I can tell you that he got one lousy, rotten deal as a cop.”
“So I heard. Peter introduced me to him. And told me how, when Peter got into Internal Affairs, there was the story of Tank turning in the blue shirts who skimmed money and drugs they had seized in dead dealers’ homes. Tank got painted as a gink.”
Coughlin nodded again.
“One of the blue shirts was Harold Walker’s son-in-law,” he said.
Payne, taking another sip of coffee, almost sprayed it.
Wafflin’ Walker? That sonofabitch!
That has to be one reason why Uncle Denny was pissed that they twisted his arm so that Walker reported to him.
“Walker was the one star in that story?”
Coughlin nodded.
“I heard that after that,” Payne said, “Tank got passed over three times for promotion before tiring of the politics. He gave up and retired.”
“As I said, he got a lousy, rotten deal.”
Payne felt his phone vibrate.
“Sorry,” he said, pulling it out.
Coughlin gestured that he understood.
Payne glanced at its screen. He grunted.
“What?” Coughlin said.
“Guess I’ll be buying lunch. Looks like I won the over-under for Last Out with sixteen.”
“Jesus, Matty,” Coughlin said, shaking his head. “You ever give it a break?”
Payne looked up from his phone.
“Why? Payout’s usually between two, three hundred bucks, cash. I’ll find some place appropriate to donate it to, probably the Camilla’s Kids fund-raiser tonight.”
“Or maybe to one of the new scholarships for Police Explorer Cadets?” Coughlin said.
Payne’s look was questioning.
Coughlin went on. “Someone in the bursar’s office at Temple left me a message yesterday saying they had a question about the, quote, Moffitt brothers police scholarships, unquote. Putting Jack and Dutch together with the fact you’re an Eagle Scout, I said they probably should ask you.”
Coughlin hadn’t been surprised to hear about the scholarships. In the last month, it had come to his attention that Payne quietly had been the one behind a new mentoring program for youth in Kensington, a hellhole neighborhood infamous for its street-corner drug dealers and the junkies overdosing on heroin in Needle Park.
The program’s volunteers, most of whom were off-duty cops, worked with kids who were the product of single-mother homes and were otherwise destined to be lost to the streets—what Lieutenant Jason Washington described as “community policing, winning hearts and minds one at a time.”
“I wondered how Temple got my number,” Payne said, neither confirming nor denying responsibility. He went on. “The sixteen breaks down as four expiring and a dozen wounded. One of the dead was stabbed. And there was a double and a triple shooting. Busy night.”
Coughlin sighed, and said, “Well, there won’t be any lunch. Those sixteen are the reason—make that the latest reason—that Jerry is holding the presser for the noon newscasts. Big announcement on changes in the department.”
“I guess that explains your uniform.”
Coughlin nodded. “Yeah, and I’m afraid I’ve got some news that you won’t want to hear. I damn sure didn’t.”
Payne took a long sip of coffee as he looked at Coughlin.
“Does it have something to do with today’s big announcement?” Payne said.
“Indirectly, yes.”
He paused to collect his thoughts, then went on. “Matty, it’s interesting that you brought up Tank and Jason. And even Walker, for that matter. In each of those cases, there is an example of one having to deal with something that one has no control over. Tank, for example, had to deal with getting passed over. And Jason is dealing with a little of it, but I think with time he will get those captain bars.”
“If too much time passes, he first will have to retake the exam,” Payne said, “which doesn’t seem at all fair.”
“Life is not fair. You may want to write that down.”
“You mentioned Wafflin’ Walker?”
“He’s my cross to bear. As you know, I’m not particularly thrilled he’s reporting to me. I don’t disagree with your nickname for him. But he has an in with Commissioner Mariana, who told me to deal with him. And I have.”
“I’m guessing I’m about to have to swallow something.”
Coughlin nodded.
“And it’s interesting youse phrased it that way,” he said. “It’s what Jerry said to me: ‘Sometimes we all have to swallow something we don’t like.’ And let me tell you, Matty, I don’t like it one damn bit. I made that clear to Jerry. I also made clear that I was going to be straight with you. What I’m telling you is not what I would do personally. But it’s what I think you should know you can expect to happen.”
Payne’s eyebrows raised.
“Okay,” he said, “I’m a big boy. What is it?”
“After last year’s record homicides, and now this new year tracking to do the same, there is enormous pressure on Jerry to do something to lower the rate of violent crime.”
“Especially if he expects to be reelected . . .”
Coughlin, meeting Payne’s eyes, had a look of resignation.
“I told Jerry I wasn’t going to beat around the bush with you,” he said, “and I won’t. You hit the nail on the head.”
“It’s not surprising. Every politician’s priority from their first day in office is to get reelected.”
“And this press conference is part of that.” Coughlin paused, cleared his throat, and added, “As is having the Wyatt Earp of the Main Line resign.”
Payne’s eyes grew wide.
“What?” he said.
“I told you that you wouldn’t like it. It’s a lousy, rotten deal, Matty. No question.”
Coughlin studied him, expecting Matt to explode any minute.
But he didn’t. He simply shook his head in disgust.
“So, is Hizzoner going to announce I’m quitting?”
“Not today.”
“And . . . if I don’t obediently pack my bags and go away, Uncle Denny,” he said, his tone even, “what then?”
“Think that through. It can get ugly, Matty. For starters, the citizen complaints against you have been steadily accumulating. They will be used against you.”
“Those are bogus complaints. Most were made by ghetto ninjas.” He paused, then added, “No income, no jobs.”
“Still, if you were not to resign and those complaints were used against you—especially in this current hostile climate—that’s all that’s needed for a case to be made for suspension w
ithout pay for thirty days with intent to dismiss.”
“That’s, essentially, a firing, and a shitty way of firing.”
“It’s part of the process—”
“Which the FOP will fight tooth and nail, first in arbitration.”
Payne did not have to state the obvious, that no matter what the Fraternal Order of Police accomplished, there would follow a lawsuit. One the city would have to settle for a high price.
“Some of the ugliness I mentioned,” Coughlin said, “comes when there’s generally the accusation made that the bad behavior happened because of failure of proper supervision.”
“Oversight by my superior.”
“It’s one reason I said to think this through,” Coughlin said, nodding. “You really don’t want Jason dragged unjustly through the mud. Among other things, that would very likely see his captain’s bars even further delayed . . .”
“This is bullshit!”
“. . . And even if you win arbitration—and, frankly, I think that you would, and, further, that you should win—then it would just be hell coming to work. Carlucci is a master, and the commissioner his puppet, and they’d see that your assignments ensured that you would be miserable.”
Payne thought, Jesus Christ. Here I thought it would be some petty prick like Wafflin’ Walker who would come after me with knives sharpened.
But it went all the way to the top.
Good ol’ Hizzoner himself!
“Uncle Denny, I always felt there was a trust here. That sounds damn naïve now . . .”
“No, Matty, it’s not. There is a trust. But when politics is involved, and especially money and power, all bets are off.”
Payne grunted again, loud this time.
“What?” Coughlin said.
“I know a little something about that. I just had, as a matter of fact, a similar conversation about trust when we were discussing the Morgan and Benson cases. And then there’s Jeremiah’s warning: ‘The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?’ Tank reminded me of that biblical gem. Fitting, huh?”
Coughlin sighed audibly.
“Matty, I can honestly say that Jerry had your back for a long time. I witnessed it firsthand. But he said that with the record killings year after year, and the public’s perception of your shootings, the dynamic has suddenly changed. You should not take it personally that he’s doing this. It’s not about you. It’s about the political perspective.”
Broken Trust Page 24