The Victim

by W. E. B Griffin

  “Tell me about Payne,” McFadden said abruptly.

  “You heard about that, huh?” Jesus said, chuckling.

  “Yeah, I heard about it,” McFadden said, on the edge of unpleasantness.

  “Well, it was really sort of funny—”

  “Funny?” McFadden asked. “You think it’s funny?”

  “Yeah, Charley, I do. It was sort of funny.”

  “Well, I think it was shitty, pal!”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m talking about DeBenedito putting Payne down on the roof of the parking garage in his fancy clothes.”

  “I didn’t hear about that,” McFadden said.

  “Well, DeBenedito and I went in on the shooting on the roof of the Penn Services Parking Garage. He put me out of the car one floor down, and I went up the stairs. When I got there, he’s got your pal Payne down on the floor. ‘Tell him I’m a cop, Martinez!’ Payne yells when he sees me. So I did, and DeBenedito let him up. I thought it was funny. If you don’t, go fuck yourself.”

  “I didn’t hear about that,” Charley repeated, sounding a little confused. “I was talking about your pal, Sergeant Dolan, taking Payne and his girlfriend over to Narcotics and searching his car.”

  “I don’t know anything about that,” Jesus said.

  “Bullshit!”

  “I don’t. You sure about your facts?”

  “Yeah, I’m sure about my facts.”

  “Well, all I know is that Payne was at the scene, where the cop got shot. He came there driving Inspector Wohl’s Jaguar, and then Wohl made us take him home. That’s one of the reasons we was an hour late. If Dolan had him over at Narcotics, two things: One, I didn’t know about it; and two, he would now be in Central Lockup. Dolan doesn’t make mistakes.”

  “Yeah, I know you think he walks on water.”

  “He’s a goddamned good cop,” Martinez said flatly. “Where’d you hear he had something going with Payne?”

  “Wyatt and I went by Bustleton and Bowler about ten-thirty, and somebody told him, and he told me.”

  “You sure he wasn’t pulling your chain?”

  “Yeah. It was no joke. Dolan had Payne, his girlfriend, and his car, over at Narcotics.”

  “Then Dolan had something,” Martinez said.

  “Something he got from you, maybe?” McFadden asked.

  “I told you, I never heard about this,” Martinez said, and then the implication of what McFadden had said sank in.

  “Fuck you, Charley!” he said, flaring, and he stood up so quickly that he bumped against the table, knocking over the beer bottles. “Jesus Christ, what a shitty thing to say!”

  “If you didn’t do it, then I’m sorry,” McFadden said after a moment.

  “That’s not good enough. Fuck you!”

  “You cut off his tire valves!” McFadden said. “Tell me that wasn’t a shitty thing to do.”

  “The son of a bitch was sound asleep on a stakeout,” Martinez said. “He deserved that.”

  “No he didn’t. A pal would have woke him up.”

  “Rich Boy is not my pal,” Martinez said. “He doesn’t take me riding around in his Porsche like some people I know. All he’s doing is playing cop.”

  “He put down the Northwest rapist. That’s playing cop?”

  “You know, and I know, that he just stumbled on that scumbag,” Martinez said.

  “He put him down! Jesus Christ, Hay-zus!”

  “Okay, so he put him down,” Martinez admitted grudgingly. “But it wouldn’t surprise me at all to find he’s stuffing shit up his nose.”

  “You’ve got no right to say something like that!”

  “You had no right to say what you did about me fingering him to Dolan.”

  “I said I was sorry.”

  “Yeah, you said you were sorry,” Martinez said. “I’m going home. I’ve had enough of your bullshit for one night.”

  “Oh, sit down and drink your beer.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “Sit down, Hay-zus.”

  “Or what?”

  “Or I’ll sit on you.”

  Martinez glowered at him angrily for a moment and then smiled.

  “You would, too, you fucking, overgrown Mick.”

  “You bet your ass I would,” McFadden said.

  Matt woke up and opened his eyes and saw that Amanda was supporting her head on her hand and looking down at him.

  “Hi,” she said, and bent her head and kissed him.

  “Christ, and some people have alarm clocks!”

  She laughed.

  He looked up at the ceiling, where his bedside clock, a housewarming gift from his sister Amy, projected the time on the ceiling. It was a quarter past five.

  “What were you thinking?” he asked.

  “Wondering, actually.”

  “Okay. What were you wondering?”

  “Two things.”

  “What two things?”

  “Whether there is anything in your refrigerator besides a jar of olives.”

  “No,” he said. “I haven’t been shopping in a week. And what else were you wondering?”

  “Whether I’m pregnant,” Amanda said.

  “Jesus! You’re not on the pill?”

  “I stopped taking the pill when I broke my engagement. And something like this wasn’t supposed to be on the agenda.”

  “I would be delighted to make an honest woman of you,” Matt said.

  “Maybe I’ll be lucky.”

  “Not at all, my pleasure.”

  “That’s not what I meant.” She giggled and jerked one of the hairs curling around his nipple out.

  “Ouch,” he said, and reached out for her and pulled her down to him so that she was lying with her face on his chest and her leg thrown over him.

  “This is probably not a very smart thing for us to do,” she said.

  “I disagree absolutely,” he said.

  “What are the Brownes going to think?” she asked.

  “We could tell them we had car trouble. Do you really care what the Brownes think?”

  “No,” she said, after a moment. “Okay. We’ll tell them we had car trouble and not give a damn whether or not they believe us.”

  He chuckled and tightened his arm around her.

  “Are you going to feed me, or what?” she asked.

  “I’d rather ‘or what,’” he said.

  “You’re boasting,” she said. “Idle promises.”

  “See for yourself,” Matt said.

  She raised her head an inch off his chest.

  “I’ll be damned,” she said. “Isn’t that amazing?”

  There were two Highway cops sitting at the counter of the small restaurant in the Marriott Motel on City Line Avenue when Matt and Amanda walked in.

  He didn’t recognize either of them and saw nothing like recognition in their eyes, either. Both looked carefully at Amanda and him, however, something Matt ascribed to Amanda’s good looks, her low-cut evening dress, and the disparity between that and the tweed sport coat and slacks he had put on to go to work; or all of the above.

  He was wrong. As soon as they had sat down in one of the booths, he saw alarm in Amanda’s eyes and looked over his shoulder to see what had caused it. Both Highway cops were marching to the booth.

  And they were, Matt thought, in their breeches and boots, their Sam Browne belts and leather jackets, intimidating.

  “Seen the papers, Payne?” the larger of the two asked.

  “No.”

  “Thought maybe not,” the cop said.

  How the hell am I going to introduce these guys to Amanda? That’s obviously what they want, and I have absolutely no idea what either of their names are.

  He was wrong about that too. The second Highway cop carefully laid slightly mussed copies of the Bulletin, the Ledger, and the Daily News on the table and then nodded to Amanda.

  “Ma’am,” he said. By t
hen the first cop was halfway to the door.

  “Hey!” Matt called. Both cops looked at him. “Thank you.”

  Both waved and then left the diner.

  “For a moment there I thought we were going to be arrested again,” Amanda said.

  “We weren’t.”

  “Call it what you like,” she said. “Are they all like that?”

  “Like what?”

  “So, what’s a word? Those two looked like an American version of the Gestapo.”

  “They’re Highway,” Matt said. “They’re sort of special. Sort of the elite.”

  “That’s what they said about the Gestapo,” Amanda said.

  “Hey, they’re the good guys,” Matt said.

  “How is it they knew you?”

  “I guess they know I work for Inspector Wohl.”

  “What does Peter Wohl have to do with them?”

  “He’s their boss, one step removed. He commands Special Operations. Highway is under Special Operations.”

  A waitress appeared with menus.

  “Isn’t that awful?” she said, pointing at the front page of the Daily News.

  Matt looked at it for the first time. Above the headline there was a half-page photo of Anthony J. DeZego slumped against the concrete blocks of the stairwell at the Penn Services Parking Garage.

  MAFIA FIGURE MURDERED

  SOCIALITE WOUNDED IN

  CENTER CITY SHOOTING

  “Let me see,” Amanda said, and he slid the tabloid across the table to her and turned to the Ledger. The story was at the lower right corner of the front page, under a two-column picture of Miss Penelope Detweiler:

  NESFOODS HEIRESS SHOT

  IN CENTER CITY

  POLICE BAFFLED

  BY EARLY EVE SHOOTING

  * * *

  By Charles E. Whaley, Ledger Staff Writer

  Phila—Miss Penelope Detweiler, 23, of Chestnut Hill, was seriously wounded, apparently by a shotgun blast, in the Penn Services Parking Garage, on South 15th Street early last evening. She was taken to Hahneman Hospital where she is reported by a hospital spokesperson to be in “serious but stable” condition.

  Miss Detweiler, whose father, H. Richard Detweiler, is president of Nesfoods International, was en route to the Union League Club on South Broad Street for a social event when the shooting occurred. A family spokesperson theorized that Miss Detweiler had just parked her car when she found herself in the middle of a “gangland shootout.”

  Police Captain Henry Quaire refused to comment on the shooting, saying the case is under investigation, but he did confirm that Miss Detweiler had been found lying on the floor of the roof of the garage by Miss Amanda Chase Spencer, of Scarsdale, N.Y., and her escort, as they parked their car. The couple were also guests of Mr. and Mrs. Chadwick T. Nesbitt III at the Union League dinner to honor out-of-town guests for the wedding (tonight) of Miss Daphne Browne of Merion and Lieutenant C. T. Nesbitt IV, USMCR.

  “It is absurd to think that Miss Detweiler was anything more than an innocent bystander,” the Detweiler family spokesperson said. “It is a sad commentary on life in Philadelphia that something like this could happen.”

  * * *

  Matt slid the Ledger across the table to Amanda and then became aware that the waitress was still standing there.

  “Amanda, would you like to order?”

  “I think I lost my appetite,” she said.

  “You have to eat.”

  “Can I get a breakfast steak?” she asked.

  “Honey, anything your heart desires, we got it,” the waitress said.

  “They’re running a special on me,” Matt said. “I’m specially marked down for the occasion.”

  “Breakfast steak, medium-rare, eggs sunny-side up, toast, tomato juice, and coffee,” Amanda said.

  “Twice,” Matt said. “Thank you.”

  Matt turned to the Bulletin. It used two photographs on the front, placed side by side. One was the same photo the Ledger had used of Amanda. The other was of Anthony J. DeZego scowling at the camera from above a board that read PHILA POLICE DEPT and carried his name and the date. Under these the caption gave their names and read, “shooting victims.”

  MAFIOSO KILLED: SOCIALITE

  WOUNDED

  IN CENTER CITY

  POLICE SEEKING CLUES

  IN EARLY EVENING SHOOTING

  * * *

  By Michael J. O’Hara

  A shotgun blast to the head killed Anthony J. “Tony the Zee” DeZego, a Philadelphia underworld figure, and a second blast critically wounded Penelope Detweiler, socialite daughter of H. Richard Detweiler, president of Nesfoods International, shortly after seven last night on the roof level of the Penn Services Parking Garage on South 15th Street in downtown Philadelphia.

  Miss Detweiler is in “critical but stable” condition at Hahneman Hospital. She was struck by “many” pellets from a shotgun shell, according to a hospital spokesman.

  Off-duty Police Officer Matthew M. Payne discovered first Miss Detweiler, lying in a pool of blood, and then DeZego’s body when he went to park his car. Payne, who is special assistant to Staff Inspector Peter Wohl, commanding officer of the Police Department’s Special Operations Division, last month shot to death Warren K. Fletcher, 31, of Germantown, ending what Mayor Jerry Carlucci termed “the reign of terror of the Northwest serial rapist.”

  Miss Detweiler, Payne, and Miss Amanda Spencer, of Scarsdale, N.Y., who was with Payne in his silver Porsche, were en route to the Union League Club on South Broad Street to attend a dinner being given for out-of-town wedding guests by C. T. Nesbitt III, Nesfoods International chairman of the board, whose son is to marry Daphne Browne of Merion at seven-thirty tonight at St. Mark’s Church, near the site of the shooting.

  According to senior police officials, it is most likely that Miss Detweiler was an innocent bystander caught in the middle of a mob exchange of gunfire, but this reporter has learned that police are quietly investigating the possibility that Miss Detweiler knew DeZego, and possibly may have gone to the parking garage to meet him.

  In a surprise development last night, Police Commissioner Thaddeus Czernich announced that responsibility for the investigation of the shooting had been assigned to Staff Inspector Peter Wohl and the Special Operations Division. Such an investigation would normally be conducted by the Homicide Division.

  Commissioner Czernich also assigned to Wohl the investigation of the murder of Police Officer Joseph Magnella, who was shot to death last night in North Philadelphia. (See related story.) One theory advanced for this unusual move was the reassignment of ace Homicide Detectives Jason Washington and Anthony J. Harris to Special Operations during the search for the North Philadelphia serial rapist.

  * * *

  “They’ve got my name in here,” Amanda said, “but not yours.”

  “The Ledger never mentions a cop’s name unless they can say something nasty about him,” Matt said.

  “Really?” Amanda said, not sure if he was serious or not. She put her hand on the Bulletin, “What does that one say?”

  “About the same thing,” Matt said.

  “Through?” Amanda asked, and slid the Bulletin away from Matt’s side of the table.

  He saw her eyes widen when she got to the place in the story about him. She glanced at him, then finished the story.

  “You never told me about that,” she said.

  “Yes I did,” Matt said. “You said if you had a car like mine and somebody dinged it, you’d kill him. And I said somebody did and I had.”

  The waitress appeared with a stainless-steel coffee pot. Amanda waited until she had poured the coffee and left.

  “I thought you were just being a wiseass,” she said.

  “You should have seen what he did to my car,” Matt said. “He was lucky I didn’t get really mad.”

  “Matt, stop!”

  “Sorry,” he said after a moment.

  And a moment after that Amanda reached out and caught h
is hand. They sat that way, holding hands and looking into each other’s eyes, until the waitress delivered breakfast.

  NINE

  There was a fence around the Browne place in Merion, fieldstone posts every twenty-five feet or so with wrought-iron bars between them. The bars were topped with spear points, and as a boy of six or seven Matt had spent all of one afternoon trying to hammer one loose so that he would have a spear to take home.

  There was also a gate and a gate house, but the gate had never in Matt’s memory been closed, and the gate house had always been locked and off-limits.

  When he turned off the road, the gate was closed, and he had to jump on the brakes to avoid hitting it. And the door to the gate house was open. A burly man in a dark suit came out of it and walked to the gate.

  A rent-a-cop, Matt decided. Had he been hired because the Princess of the Castle was getting married? Or did it have something to do with what had happened at the parking garage?

  The rent-a-cop opened the left portion of the gate wide enough to get through and came out to the Porsche.

  “May I help you, sir?”

  “Would you open the gate, please? Miss Spencer is a guest here.”

  The rent-a-cop looked carefully at both of them, then smiled, said, “Certainly, sir,” and went to the gate and swung both sides open.

  Matt saw that a red-and-white-striped tent, large enough for a two-ring circus, had been set up on the lawn in front of the house. There were three large caterer’s trucks parked in the driveway. A human chain had been formed to unload folding chairs from one of them and set them up in the tent, and he saw cardboard boxes being unloaded in the same way from a second.

  Soames T. Browne, in his shirt sleeves, and the bride-to-be, in shorts and a tattered gray University of Pennsylvania sweatshirt that belonged, Matt decided, to Chad Nesbitt, were standing outside the castle portal when Matt drove up. The rent-a-cop had almost certainly telephoned the house. Matt saw another large man in a business suit standing just inside the open oak door.

  “I’ll see you later,” Matt said, waving at the Brownes with his left hand and touching Amanda’s wrist with his right.