The Victim

by W. E. B Griffin

  “I know,” Wohl said.

  “I don’t think you do, Peter,” Lowenstein said as he hauled himself to his feet. “I was sitting at my kitchen table this morning wondering if I had the balls to come out here and apologize to you when Carlucci made up my mind for me.”

  “I’m sorry?” Wohl asked, confused.

  Chief Lowenstein examined the glowing end of his cigar for a moment and then met Wohl’s eyes.

  “The dago called me at the house,” he said. “He said he wanted me to come out here this morning and see how things were going. He said that he’d told Lucci to call him at least once a day, but that ‘too much was at stake here to leave something like this to someone like Lucci.’”

  “Jesus Christ!” Wohl said bitterly. “If he didn’t think I could do the job, why did he give it to me?”

  “Because if you do the job, he looks good. And if you don’t, you look bad. They call that smart politics, Peter.”

  “Yeah,” Wohl said.

  “I think I can expect at least a daily call from the dago, Peter, asking me how I think you’re handling this. I wouldn’t worry about that. I don’t want these jobs back, so all he’s going to get from me is an expression of confidence in you, and the way you’re doing things. On the other hand, whatever else I may think of him, your Lieutenant Lucci is smart enough to know which side of the bread has the butter—no telling what he’s liable to tell the dago.”

  “Christ, my father warned me about crap like this. I didn’t believe him.”

  “Give my regards to your dad, Peter,” Lowenstein said. “I always have admired him.”

  Wohl stared at the phone on his coffee table for a moment. When he finally raised his eyes, Lowenstein was gone.

  Lieutenant Foster H. Lewis, Sr., who was wearing a light blue cotton bathrobe over his underwear, had just offered, aloud, although he was alone in the apartment, his somewhat less than flattering opinion of morning television programming and the even more appallingly stupid people who watched it, himself included, when the chimes sounded.

  He went to the door and opened it.

  “Good morning, sir,” the uniformed policeman standing there said, “would you like to take a raffle ticket on a slightly used 1948 Buick?”

  “What did you do, Foster, lose your key?”

  He looks good in that uniform, even if I wish he weren’t wearing it.

  “So that I wouldn’t lose it, I put it somewhere safe,” Tiny Lewis said. “One of these days I’ll remember where.”

  “I just made some coffee. You want some?”

  “Please, Dad.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I’ve got to get a suit,” Tiny said. “Mom said she put them in a cedar bag.”

  “Probably in your room,” Foster Lewis, Sr., said. “Am I permitted to ask why you need a suit?”

  “Certainly,” Tiny said. He followed his father into the kitchen and took a china mug from a cabinet.

  “Well?” Foster Lewis asked.

  “Well, what? Oh, do you want to know why I need a suit?”

  “I asked. Where were you when I asked?”

  “You asked if you were permitted to ask, and I said, ‘Certainly,’ but you didn’t actually ask.”

  “Wiseass.” His father chuckled. “There’s a piece of cake in the refrigerator.”

  “Thank you,” Tiny said, and helped himself to the cake.

  “You know a Homicide—ex-Homicide—detective named Harris? Tony Harris?”

  “Yeah. Not well. But he’s supposed to be good.”

  “You are now looking, sir, at his official errand runner,” Tiny said.

  “What does that mean?”

  “I suppose it means that if he says ‘Go fetch,’ I go fetch, happily wagging my tail.”

  “If you’re being clever, stop it,” his father said. “Tell me what’s going on.”

  “Well, I was told to report to a Captain Sabara at Highway. When I got there, he wasn’t, but Inspector Wohl called me into his office—”

  “You saw him?” Foster Lewis, Sr., asked.

  “Yeah. Nice guy. Sharp dude. Nice threads.”

  I was on the job, Lieutenant Foster H. Lewis thought, for two or three years before I ever saw an inspector up close.

  “Go on.”

  “Well, he said that Harris has the Magnella job, and that he needed a second pair of hands. He said it would involve a lot of overtime, and if I had any problem with that to say so; he didn’t want any complaints later. So I told him the more overtime the better, and I asked him what I would be doing. He said—that’s where I got that—that if Harris said ‘Go fetch,’ I was to wag my tail and go fetch. He said the detail would last only until Harris got whoever shot Magnella, but it would be good experience for me.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Well, he gave me a speech about what not to do with the car—”

  “What car?”

  “A ’71 Ford. Good shape.”

  “You have a Department car?”

  “Yeah. Unmarked, naturally,” Tiny said just a little smugly.

  “My God!”

  “What’s wrong?”

  Lieutenant Foster H. Lewis, Sr., thought, When I got out of the Academy, I was assigned to the 26th District. A pot-bellied Polack sergeant named Grotski went out of his way to make it plain he didn’t think there was any place in the Department for niggers and then handed me over to Bromley T. Wesley, a South Carolina redneck who had come north to work in the shipyards during the Second World War and had joined the cops because he didn’t want to go back home to Tobacco Road.

  I walked a beat with Bromley for a year. When he went into a candy store for a Coke or something, he made me wait outside. For six months he never used my name. I was either “Hey, You!” or worse, “Hey, Boy!” I was told that if I turned out okay, maybe after a year or so, I could work my way up to a wagon. The son of a bitch made it plain he thought all black people were born retarded.

  Bromley T. Wesley was an ignorant bigot with a sixth-grade education, but he was a cop. He knew the streets and he knew people, and he taught me about them. Between Wesley and what I learned on the wagon, when I went out in an RPC by myself for the first time I was a cop.

  What the hell is Peter Wohl thinking of, putting this rookie in civilian clothes instead of in a wagon, at least?

  “Nothing, I suppose,” Lieutenant Lewis said. “It’s a little unusual, that’s all. Eat your cake.”

  ELEVEN

  The normally open gate of the Detweiler estate in Chestnut Hill, like the gate at the Browne place in Merion, was now both closed and guarded by rent-a-cops.

  When Matt pulled the nose of Penelope Detweiler’s Mercedes against the gate, one of them, a burly man in a blue suit, came through a small gate within the gate and looked down at Matt.

  “May I help you, sir?”

  “We’re returning Miss Detweiler’s car,” Matt said.

  “‘We,’ sir?”

  “I’m a cop,” Matt said, and jerked his thumb toward Jason Washington, who was following him in the unmarked Ford. “And so is he.”

  “You expected?”

  “No.”

  “I’ll have to call, sir.”

  “Tell them it’s Matt Payne.”

  The rent-a-cop looked at him strangely and then said, “Matt Payne. Yes, sir.”

  He went back through the small gate, entered the gate house, and emerged a moment later to swing the left half of the double gate open. He waved Matt through.

  H. Richard Detweiler, himself, answered the door. He had a drink in his hand.

  “Boy, that was quick!” he said. “Come in, Matt.”

  “Sir?”

  “I just this second got off the phone with Czernich,” Detweiler said. “Penny was worried about her car, so I called him and asked about it, and he said he’d have it sent out here.”

  “I think we probably were on our way when you called him, Mr. Detweiler,” Matt said. “Mr. Detweiler
, this is Detective Washington.”

  “I was just talking about you too,” Detweiler said, offering Washington his hand. “Thad Czernich told me you’re the best detective in the Department.”

  “Far be it from me to question the commissioner’s judgment,” Washington said. “How do you do, Mr. Detweiler?”

  Detweiler chuckled. “Oh, about as well as any father would be after just seeing a daughter who looks like the star of a horror movie.”

  “We saw Miss Detweiler earlier this morning,” Washington said.

  “So she said. That was kind of you, Matt. And you, too, Mr. Washington.”

  “I think you’ll be surprised to see how quickly that discoloration goes away, Mr. Detweiler,” Washington said.

  “I hope,” Detweiler said. “I needed a drink when I got back here. I’d offer you one, but I know—”

  “That would be very nice, thank you,” Washington said.

  “Oh, you can take a drink on duty?” Detweiler asked. “Fine. I always feel depraved drinking alone. Let’s go in the bar.”

  He led them to a small room off the kitchen.

  “This is supposed to be the serving pantry,” he said, motioning them to take stools set against a narrow counter under and above the glass-fronted cupboards. The cupboards held canned goods, and there was an array of bottles on the counter.

  “I’m not exactly sure what a butler’s pantry is supposed to be for,” Detweiler went on, reaching for a bottle of gin. “My grandfather copied this place from a house in England, so it came with a butler’s pantry. Anyway, what we serve here is liquor. Help yourself.”

  “Matt, if you would splash a little of that Johnny Walker Black in a glass, and a little water, and one ice cube?” Washington said.

  “You sound like a man who appreciates good Scotch and knows how to drink it,” Detweiler said.

  “I try,” Washington said.

  Matt made two drinks to Washington’s specifications, handed him one, and raised his own.

  “To Penny’s recovery,” he said.

  “Hear, hear,” Washington said.

  “Penny,” Detweiler said, his voice breaking. “Goddamn whoever did that to her!”

  “I’m sure He will,” Washington said, “but we would like to get our licks in on him before he gets to the Pearly Gates.”

  Detweiler looked at him, smiling.

  “Good thinking,” he said.

  The telephone on the counter buzzed; one of the four lights on it lit up. Detweiler made no move to answer it.

  “Have you found out anything, Mr. Washington? What’s going on?”

  “Well, frankly, Mr. Detweiler, we don’t have much to go on. The theory I’m working under is that Miss Detweiler was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time—”

  “Is there another theory? Theories?”

  “Well, I’ve been doing this long enough to know the hazards of reaching premature conclusions—” Washington said.

  “Goddamn,” Detweiler said, angrily grabbing for the phone, which had continued to buzz, “we keep six in help here, and whenever the phone rings, they all disappear.” He put the handset to his ear and snarled, “Yes?”

  There was a pause.

  “This is Dick Detweiler, Commissioner. I wish I could get people as efficient as yours. No sooner had I put down the phone than Matt Payne and Detective Washington drove up with my daughter’s car. I’m impressed with the service.”

  There was an inaudible reply to this, then Detweiler said, “Thank you very much, Commissioner.” He extended the phone to Washington. “He wants to talk to you.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Watch yourself out there, Washington. And when you leave, call me and let me know how it went.”

  The phone went dead in Washington’s ear.

  “Yes, of course, Commissioner,” Washington said after a pause that sounded longer than it was. “Thank you very much, sir. Good-bye, sir.”

  He handed the telephone to Detweiler.

  “The commissioner asked me to impress upon you, Mr. Detweiler, that the Department is doing everything humanly possible to get to the bottom of this, to find whoever did this to your daughter. He said that I was to regard this case as my first priority.”

  “Thank you,” Detweiler said. “That’s very good of him.”

  “We were talking, a moment ago, about other theories,” Washington said. “I think one of the possibilities we should consider is robbery.”

  “Robbery?”

  Washington nodded.

  “Ranging from a simple, that is to say, unplanned, mugging, some thug lurking in the parking garage for whoever might come his way to someone who knew about the dinner party in the Union League—”

  “How would someone know about that?” Detweiler said, interrupting.

  “I’m sure it was in the society columns of the newspapers,” Washington went on. “That might explain the shotgun.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Muggers are rarely armed with anything more than a knife. A professional thief, for lack of a better word, who went to the Penn Services Parking Garage knowing that there would be a number of well-to-do people using it at that time, would be more likely to take a shotgun with him. Not intending to shoot anyone but for its psychological effect.”

  “Yes,” Detweiler said.

  “And his plans could have gone astray, and he found himself having to use it.”

  “Yes, I see,” Detweiler said.

  “Was your daughter wearing any valuable jewelry, Mr. Detweiler?”

  “I don’t think so,” Detweiler said. “She doesn’t have any. Some pearls. All girls have pearls. But nothing really valuable.” He looked at Matt and grinned. “Matt hasn’t seen fit to offer her an engagement ring yet.…”

  “A brooch? A pin of some sort?” Washington said, pursuing the matter.

  “She has a pin, a brooch”—he gestured at his chest to show where a female would wear such an ornament—“from my wife’s mother. She could have been wearing that. It has some rubies or whatever, in a band of—what do they call those little diamonds?—chips?”

  “I believe so,” Washington said.

  “She could have been wearing that,” Detweiler said.

  “There was no such pin in her personal effects,” Washington said. “Do you happen to know where she kept it?”

  “In her room, I suppose,” Detweiler said. “Do you think we should check to see if it’s there?”

  “I think we should,” Washington said.

  Detweiler led them up a narrow flight of stairs from the serving pantry to the second floor and then into Penelope’s bedroom. There was a Moroccan leather jewelry case, sort of a miniature chest of drawers, on a vanity table. Detweiler went to it and searched through it and found nothing.

  “It’s not here,” he said. “But let me check with my wife. She needed a lay-down when we came back from the hospital.”

  Washington nodded sympathetically.

  “I hate to disturb her,” he said.

  “Nonsense, she’d want to help,” Detweiler said, and walked out of the room.

  Washington immediately picked up a wastebasket beside the vanity table and dumped the contents on the floor. He squatted and flicked through with his fingers, picking up a couple of items and putting them in his pocket. Then, very quickly, he was erect again.

  “Fix that,” he ordered, and moved toward a double mirrored-door closet. Matt set the wastebasket upright and began to replace what Washington had dumped on the floor.

  When he was finished, he turned to see what Washington was doing. He was methodically patting down the clothing hanging in the closet, dipping his hands in every pocket. Matt saw him stuffing small items—including what, at quick glance, appeared to be some sort of plastic vial—in his pocket.

  And then Mrs. H. Richard Detweiler appeared in the doorway, just a moment after Washington had slid closed the mirrored door.

  “I think this is what you were looking for,�
� she said, holding up a gold brooch.

  “Hello, Mrs. Detweiler,” Matt said. “Mrs. Detweiler, this is Detective Washington.”

  “I’m Grace Detweiler. How do you do?” she said, flashing a quick smile. Then she turned to Matt. “I don’t know what to think about you. It’s natural to see you here, under these absolutely horrible circumstances, but not as a policeman. I really don’t quite know what to make of that.”

  “We’re trying to find out what happened to Penny,” Matt said.

  “You’re driving your mother to distraction, you know,” she said. “I can’t fathom your behavior.”

  “Grace,” H. Richard Detweiler said, “that’s none of your business.”

  “Yes it is,” she snapped. “Patricia is one of my dearest friends, and I’ve known Matt since he was in diapers.”

  “Matt’s no longer a child,” Detweiler said. “He can make his own decisions about what he wants to do with his life.”

  “Why am I not surprised you’d say something like that?” she replied. “Well, all right then, Mr. Policeman, what do you think happened to Penny?”

  “Right now we think she was just in the wrong place at the wrong time,” Matt said.

  “How can parking your car in a public garage be the wrong place?” she snapped.

  “We think she was probably an innocent bystander,” Matt said.

  “Probably? What do you mean, ‘probably’? What other explanation could there possibly be?”

  “Ma’am, we try to check out everything,” Washington said. “That’s why we were interested in the jewelry.”

  “Penny doesn’t have any good jewelry,” she said.

  “They didn’t know that until they asked,” Detweiler said. “Ease off, Grace.”

  Washington gave him a grateful look.

  “Mrs. Detweiler, what about money?” Washington asked.

  “What about it?”

  “Did Miss Detweiler habitually carry large amounts of cash?”

  “No,” she said, “she didn’t. It’s not safe to carry cash, or anything else of value, in your purse these days.”