The Victim

by W. E. B Griffin

  Officers Martinez and McFadden heard him out politely, then left the building and got in the Highway RPC.

  “Do you believe that shit?” Jesus Martinez said.

  “If I’d have known they were going to have us handing out speeding tickets, I’d have told them to stick their overtime up their ass,” Charley McFadden said.

  TWELVE

  Matt dropped change into the pay phone at the gas station where he parked his car near Special Operations, got a dial tone, and dialed a number from memory.

  “Hello?”

  The voice of the bridegroom-to-be did not seem to be bubbling over with joyous anticipation or anything else.

  “It’s not too late to change your mind,” Matt said. “I believe that’s known as leaving the bride at the altar.”

  “Where the fuck have you been? Where are you?”

  “I just got off work,” Matt said. “I’m at Bustleton and Bowler.”

  “I was getting worried.”

  “I can’t imagine why.”

  “Can you get a couple of suitcases in that car of yours?”

  “Sure.”

  “Then come get me,” Chad Nesbitt ordered. “You can take me by Daffy’s with my bags and then to the hotel.”

  “Oh, thank you! Thank you!” Matt said emotionally, but he said it to a dead telephone. Chad Nesbitt had hung up.

  Second Lieutenant Chadwick T. Nesbitt IV, USMCR, was waiting under the fieldstone portico of the Nesbitt mansion in Bala-Cynwyd when Matt got there. He was in uniform, freshly shaved, and sitting astride a life-size stone lion. Two identical canvas suitcases with his name, rank, and serial number stenciled on them sat beside the lion. A transparent bag held a Marine dress uniform, and there was a box that presumably held the brimmed uniform cap, and another that obviously held Chad’s Marine officer’s sword.

  He held a stemmed glass filled with red liquid in his hand. Another glass, topped with a paper napkin, was balanced on one of the suitcases.

  “It took you long enough,” he greeted Matt when Matt got out of the car and walked up to him.

  “Fuck you.”

  “Well, fuck you too. Now you don’t get no Bloody Mary.”

  “Is that what that is?” Matt replied, picking up the glass. “Thank you, I don’t mind if I do.”

  They smiled at each other.

  “You must have had a good time last night,” Matt said. “You look like the finest example of the mortician’s art.”

  “Speaking of that, where the hell were you?”

  “Fighting crime, where do you think?”

  “‘Fighting crime’? Is that what you call it? Daffy said you were shacked up with What’s-her-name Stevens.”

  “Her name is Amanda and we weren’t shacked up.”

  “Methinks thou dost protest too much,” Chad said. “Madame Browne is, of course, morally outraged at you.”

  “So what else is new?”

  “I think I’ll have another of these to give me courage to face the traffic, and then you can take us over there, and then to the hotel.”

  “I thought you weren’t supposed to see the bride before the wedding.”

  “All I’m going to do is drop my bags off. Then we go to the hotel and get a little something to quiet my nerves.”

  “You’re already—or maybe still—bombed,” Matt said. “I don’t want to have to carry you into the church.”

  “You have always been something of a prig, Payne. Have I ever told you that?”

  “Often,” Matt said, putting the Bloody Mary down and picking up the suitcases. “Jesus, what the hell have you got in here?”

  “Just the chains and whips and handcuffs and other stuff one takes on one’s bridal trip,” Chad said. “Plus, of course, what every Marine second lieutenant takes with him when going off to battle the forces of Communism in far-off Okinawa.”

  “The sword and dress blues too?”

  “I’ll change into the blues at the hotel, and then out of them at Daffy’s after the wedding. We don’t use swords no more, you know, to battle the forces of Communism.”

  Matt set the suitcases on the cobblestone driveway and opened the hatch.

  “Get in,” he said, then, “What are your travel plans, by the way?”

  “We’re going into New York tonight and flying to the West Coast tomorrow.”

  “You’re not coming back here?”

  “I hope to come back, of course, but if you were asking ‘after the wedding and before going overseas,’ no.”

  He swung his leg off the stone lion, picked up Matt’s Bloody Mary glass, and walked to the car.

  “If you were to open the door for me, I think I could get in without spilling any of this on your pristine upholstery,” he said.

  Matt closed the hatch and opened the door for him. He took his Bloody Mary from him, drained it, and set the glass on the step.

  When he straightened, Mrs. Chadwick T. Nesbitt III was standing there.

  “I’m not at all sure that’s a very good idea, Matt,” she said, and then walked around him to the car.

  “He insisted, Mother,” Chad said. “He said he didn’t think he could get through the ceremony without the assistance of a little belt.”

  “Well, don’t let him give you any more,” she said. “Have you got everything?”

  “Yes, Mother.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yes, Mother.”

  “Well, then, I guess we’ll see you at St. Mark’s.”

  “God willing, and if the creek don’t rise,” Chad said, and slammed his door shut.

  Matt walked around to the driver’s side of the Porsche.

  “Matt…” Chad’s mother said.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Just…behave, the two of you.”

  “We will,” Matt said.

  He got behind the wheel, made a U-turn, and started down the drive to the gate.

  Mrs. Nesbitt waved. Chad waved back.

  “Mother, I think, is aware that she may be watching her firstborn leave the family manse for the last time,” Chad said. “That somewhat discomfiting thought has occurred to me.”

  Matt didn’t know what to say.

  “If I asked you politely, would you give me a straight answer to a straight question?” Chad asked.

  Matt sensed that Chad was serious. “Sure,” he said.

  “What does it feel like to kill somebody?”

  “Jesus!”

  “At the moment your experience in that area exceeds mine,” Chad said, “although, to be sure, I am sure the Marine Corps plans to correct that situation as quickly as possible.”

  “I haven’t had nightmares or done a lot of soul-searching about it,” Matt said. “Nothing like that. The man I shot was a certified scumbag—”

  “Interesting word,” Chad said, interrupting. “Meaning, I take it, someone who has as much value as a used rubber?”

  “I really don’t know what it means. It’s…cop talk. A very unpleasant individual. The same day I shot him, earlier that day I saw what he did to a woman he abducted. He raped her, tortured her, mutilated her, and then killed her. I suppose that’s part of the equation. I knew that he was no fucking good.”

  “In other words, you were pleased that you had killed him?”

  “When I saw him, he tried to run me over. He totaled my car. The only emotion I had was fear and anger. He was trying to kill me. I had a gun, so I killed him.”

  “Courage is defined as presence of mind under stress,” Chad said.

  “Then, ergo sum, courage was not involved in what I did,” Matt said. “He had a woman in the van, another one he had abducted. It was just blind fucking luck that I didn’t hit her when I was shooting at him. If I had had ‘presence of mind,’ I wouldn’t have shot at him at all.”

  “The newspapers made quite a hero of you,” Chad said thoughtfully. “The Old Man sent them all to me.”

  “That was all bullshit,” Matt said.

  “Fuck yo
u. I’m impressed.”

  “You never were very smart.”

  “So tell me, Sherlock, who popped Penny Detweiler?”

  “We’re still looking,” Matt said.

  “Let me give you a clue,” Chad said. “Daffy said Penny knew that Eye-talian.”

  “Daffy told you that?”

  “Surprised?”

  “No,” Matt said. “She tell you anything else?”

  “No. Just that she knew Penny had been seeing him.”

  “‘Seeing,’ as opposed to ‘buying cocaine from’?”

  “Penny’s into cocaine?”

  “A small voice just told me I shouldn’t be talking to you about this.”

  “Just between thee, me, and this empty Bloody Mary glass?”

  “To go absolutely no further than that, Chad, yeah. Penny has a problem with cocaine. But she doesn’t know that we know, and I want to keep it that way.”

  “What she said was ‘seeing,’” Chad said, “as in getting fucked by. She didn’t say anything about dope. Are you sure about that? Penny Detweiler?”

  “Yeah, we’re sure, Chad.”

  “‘We’re sure,’ huh? I think I liked things better when ‘we’ meant you and me and Daffy and Penny, and the cops were…well, the goddamn cops.”

  “I’m sorry we got into this,” Matt said. “Do you suppose you could forget we did?”

  “Consider it forgotten,” Chad said. “But one more question?”

  “You can ask it.”

  “You ever take any of that shit?”

  “No.”

  “You never even smoked grass?”

  “No.”

  “Me, either. But I’m beginning to suspect that it’s us two Boy Scouts alone in the world.”

  Soames T. Browne, whom they found wandering around among the catering staff on his lawn, insisted they have a little nip with him, which turned into three before they could get away.

  “You know, I really think he likes me,” Chad said when they were finally back in the Porsche.

  “You’re taking Daffy off his hands,” Matt said. “He should be overwhelmed with gratitude.”

  “Fuck you, Matt.”

  “He will be considerably less fond of you, of course, if you show up at the church shit-faced.”

  “Don’t worry about me, buddy,” Chad said confidently.

  Matt dropped Chad and his sword and dress blues and uniform cap box off at the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel on South Broad Street, then drove to his apartment on Rittenhouse Square, several blocks away. The idea was that he would pick up his tails and carry them to the hotel and change there in the suite of rooms the Nesbitts had taken for Chad’s out-of-town ushers.

  But he decided that he would rather not do that, as it would really be easier to change in his apartment. He called Special Operations on the rent-a-cop’s telephone. Jason Washington was not there, so he left word for him that he had confirmation that Penelope Detweiler knew Anthony J. DeZego and that he would be, for the next couple of hours, at the Bellevue-Stratford.

  Then he walked back to the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel.

  The Nesbitts had rented two large adjoining suites on the seventh floor for Chad’s out-of-town guests. The Brownes had done the same thing for Daffy’s friends, putting the girls up in a series of rooms on the fifth floor. It was inevitable that they should find each other, and there was a party just getting started when he got there. The official pre-wedding party, in a ballroom on the mezzanine floor, would not start for an hour.

  He had been in the room less than five minutes when one of Chad’s Marine Corps buddies answered the telephone, then stood on a coffee table, holding up the phone, and bellowed, “At ease!”

  When he had everyone’s attention, some of it shocked, he politely inquired, “Is there a Mr. Matthew Payne in the house?”

  “Here,” Matt said, and went and took the phone, certain that it would be Jason Washington. It was not.

  “Matt, if he comes to the church drunk,” Daffy Browne said, “I’ll never speak to you again as long as I live.”

  “Would you be willing to put that in writing?”

  “Oh, Matt, please!”

  “I’ll do my best, Daffy,” Matt said.

  “Try to remember this is the most important day in our lives,” Daffy said.

  “Right.”

  “He listens to you, Matt, you know he does.”

  He was looking at Chad Nesbitt. Chad had a Bloody Mary in his hand.

  Bullshit, he listens to me!

  “Relax, Daphne,” he said. “I’ll get him to the church on time.”

  Daffy was not amused. She hung up. Matt put the telephone down and walked over to Chad.

  “That was the bride-to-be,” he said. “She wants you sober for the wedding.”

  “Well, one doesn’t always get what one wishes, does one?”

  “Come on, Chad. You get pissed and I’m the villain.”

  “Who’s going to get pissed?”

  Matt decided he was wasting his breath.

  If he wants to drink, he will drink. He does not listen to me. If he gets pissed, Daffy will be pissed off with me, and that means that I will not be able to get her alone and ask her, between old pals, what she knows about Penny and Tony the Zee. Shit!

  A gentle hand brushed his back.

  “I thought maybe you’d be here,” Amanda said.

  She was so close that he could smell her perfume. She was wearing a skirt and a crisp white blouse.

  Jesus, she’s beautiful!

  “Hi,” he said.

  “I understand that this disreputable character has been keeping you out all night,” Chad said to Amanda.

  Amanda walked away without replying, or even showing that she had heard him. Matt walked after her. She headed for the door; he caught up with her there.

  “Where are you going?” he asked.

  “If you’re having a good time,” she said, “by all means stay.”

  He followed her into the corridor and to the elevator.

  “I heard all that,” she said. “You did everything you could be expected to do.”

  “Tell Daffy,” he said.

  “I intend to,” Amanda said.

  That pleased him very much.

  “There’s a couple of bars right here in the hotel,” he said as they stepped onto the elevator.

  “No bars, thank you,” she said.

  “Okay. Then how about Professor Payne’s famous walking tour of downtown Philadelphia until it’s time for the cocktail party?”

  “No cocktail party for me, thank you just the same.”

  “Then where would you like to go? What would you like to do?”

  She looked up at him with mischief, and something else, in her eyes.

  “Really?” he asked after a moment.

  “Really,” she said.

  Somehow their hands touched and then grasped, and holding hands, they walked out of the elevator and through the lobby and then to the apartment over the Delaware Valley Cancer Society on Rittenhouse Square.

  At five minutes to five Lieutenant Tony Lucci knocked at Staff Inspector Peter Wohl’s office door, waited to be told to come in, and then announced, “Everyone’s here, Inspector.”

  “Ask them to come in, please, Tony,” Wohl said. He was sitting on the front edge of his desk. Chief Inspector Dennis V. Coughlin and his driver, Sergeant Tom Lenihan, who had come to Bustleton and Bowler ten minutes before, were sitting on the couch.

  “Harris has the Lewis kid with him, Inspector. Him too?”

  “Why not?”

  I recognize your dilemma, Tony, my boy. His Honor the Mayor has told you to keep your eye on things, or words to that effect. And now, with, so to speak, a conference at the highest levels of this little fiefdom about to take place behind a closed door without you, you don’t quite know how to handle it. Are you going to ask if I want you in here? If you do that, it would be tantamount to admitting that you are functioning as the mayor’s litt
le birdie. Or are you going, so to speak, to put your ear to the keyhole? Desperately hoping, of course, that I won’t catch you at it.

  “Yes, sir,” Lucci said.

  Captains Mike Sabara and David Pekach, Detectives Jason Washington and Tony Harris, and Officer Foster H. Lewis, Jr., filed into the office.

  Lieutenant Lucci stood in the open door, almost visibly hoping that he would be told to come in.

  “Chief,” Wohl said, “do you know Officer Lewis?”

  “How are you?” Coughlin said, offering his hand. “I know your dad.”

  Wohl looked at Lucci in the door, his eyebrows raised in question. Lucci quickly closed the door.

  “For reasons I can’t imagine, Officer Lewis is known as Tiny,” Wohl said. “He’s been helping Tony.”

  There were chuckles and Coughlin said, “Good experience for you, son.”

  “Tiny, would you ask Lucci to come in here?” Wohl said.

  Coughlin looked at Wohl curiously as Tiny went to the door.

  Lucci appeared in a moment.

  “Tony, get yourself a pad and sit in on this, please,” Wohl said. Lucci disappeared for a moment, then returned with a stenographer’s notebook and three pencils in his hand.

  “Tony, I want you to make note of anything you think the mayor would like to know. I know he’s interested in what we’re doing, and you’re obviously the best person to tell him. From now on I want you to stay in close touch with him, so that he’s up-to-date on what’s happening.”

  “Yes, sir,” Lucci said, now very confused.

  Coughlin’s and Wohl’s eyes met for a moment; Wohl thought he saw both amusement and approval in Coughlin’s eyes.

  This is either proof of my general, all-around brilliance in How to Deal with the Honorable Jerry Carlucci, or one more proof of the adage that when rape is inevitable, the thing to do is relax and enjoy it.

  “From now until we can clear these jobs—Officer Magnella, Anthony J. DeZego, and Penelope Detweiler,” Wohl began, “I think we should have a meeting like this every day. At this time of day, probably, but that can be changed if need be. And I think we should start by hearing what Tony has.”