The Victim

by W. E. B Griffin

  “Yes, sir,” they chorused.

  “Dave,” Wohl said, turning to Pekach, “as soon as D’Amata gets Sherlock Holmes and his partner the shotgun, tell D’Amata what happened in the Ristorante Alfredo,” Wohl ordered.

  “Yes, sir.”

  The door opened. Matt Payne put his head in.

  “Can’t find Washington, sir. He doesn’t answer the radio, and he’s not at home.”

  “What I told you to do, Payne, is find him. Not report that you can’t. Get in a car and go look for him. The next time I hear from you, I want it to be when you tell me Detective Washington is on his way here.”

  “Yes, sir,” Matt said, and quickly closed the door again.

  The telephone rang. Obviously his calls were being held. So the ring indicated that this call was too important to hold.

  “Inspector Wohl,” he said, answering it himself.

  “Dennis Coughlin, Peter.”

  “Good morning, Chief.”

  “We’re due in the mayor’s office at 10:15. You, Matt Lowenstein, and me.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “He’s mad, Peter. I guess you know.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The phone went dead.

  Well, that explains Chief Lowenstein’s inexplicable spirit of enthusiastic cooperation. He knew we were all going to have a little chat with the mayor. He can now go on in there and truthfully say that this very morning, when I asked for it, he gave one more of his brighter detectives and asked if there was anything else he could do for me.

  SEVENTEEN

  Detective Jason Washington did not like Sergeant Patrick J. Dolan, and he was reasonably convinced the reverse was true.

  Specifically, as Washington drove his freshly waxed and polished, practically brand-new unmarked car into the parking lot behind the former district station house that was now the headquarters for both the Narcotics and Intelligence Divisions at 4th and Girard and parked it beside one of the dozen or more battered, ancient, and filthy Narcotics unmarked cars, he thought, I will have to keep in mind that Dolan thinks I’m a slick nigger. It would be better for me if he thought I was a plain old, that is to say, mentally retarded nigger, but he is just smart enough to know that isn’t so. He knows that Affirmative Action does not go so far as to put mentally retarded niggers to work as Homicide detectives.

  I will also have to remember that in his own way Dolan is a pretty good cop, that is to say, that a certain degree of intelligence does indeed flicker behind that profanely loudmouthed mick exterior. He is not really as stupid as I would like to think he is, notwithstanding that really stupid businessof hauling Matt Payne over here in the belief that he was dealing drugs.

  Most important, I will have to remember that what Dolan hasn’t told me—and there is something he hasn’t told me—is because he doesn’t even know he saw it. The dumb mick has tunnel vision. He was looking for a drug bust and saw two rich kids, one driving a Mercedes and one driving a Porsche, and he was so anxious to put them in the bag, what was important to him, a good drug bust, that he just didn’t see Murder One going down.

  Inside the building, Washington found Sergeant Patrick J. Dolan in the office of Lieutenant Mick Mikkles.

  “Good morning, sir,” Jason Washington said politely. “And thank you, Sergeant, for making yourself available.”

  “I’m due in court in an hour,” Sergeant Dolan said. “What’s on your mind, Washington?”

  “I need a little help, Sergeant,” Washington said. “I’m getting nowhere with the DeZego job.”

  “You probably won’t,” Dolan said. “You want to know what I think?”

  “Yes, I really do.”

  “It was a mob hit. Pure and simple. DeZego broke the rules and they put him out of the game. It’s just that simple. You’re Homicide. You tell me how many mob hits ever wind up in court.”

  “Very, very few of them.”

  “Fucking right! You don’t mind me telling you that you’re spinning your wheels on this job, Washington?”

  “Sergeant, I think you’re absolutely right,” Washington said. “But because of the Detweiler girl—”

  “She’s a junkie. I told you that.”

  “She’s also H. Richard Detweiler’s daughter,” Washington said, “and so the mayor wants to know who did the shooting. If she wasn’t involved—”

  “I get the picture,” Dolan interrupted. “So you go through the motions, right?”

  “Exactly.”

  “So you came back here and interviewed me again. And I told you exactly the same thing I told you the first time, all right? So now we’re finished, right?”

  “I’d really like to go over it all again,” Washington said. “Jesus fucking Christ, Washington,” Dolan said. He looked at his watch. “I told you, I’m due in fucking court in fifty-five minutes. I gotta go over my notes.”

  He really wants to get rid of me. And I don’t think it has a damn thing to do with him being due in court.

  “The mayor’s on Inspector Wohl’s back, so he’s on mine. I really—”

  “Fuck Inspector Wohl! That’s your problem.”

  “Hey, Pat,” Lieutenant Mikkles said, “take it easy!”

  “You’re thinking that if Wohl hadn’t come here and turned his driver loose, you could have gotten something, right?”

  “Yeah, that’s exactly what I think.”

  “Well, then you know my problem with Wohl,” Washington said.

  “No, I don’t know your problem with Wohl,” Dolan said.

  “You don’t think I wanted to leave Homicide to go work for him, do you?”

  Dolan considered that for a moment.

  “Yeah, I heard about that. You and Tony Harris, right?”

  “Right. Wohl’s got a lot of clout, Sergeant. He generally gets what he wants.”

  That last remark was for you, Lieutenant Mikkles, to feed your understandable concern that if this doesn’t go well, your face will be in the breeze when the shit hits the fan.

  “Maybe from you,” Dolan said.

  “Pat,” Lieutenant Mikkles said, “give him fifteen minutes. Go through the motions. You know how it is.”

  Dolan looked at Mikkles, his face indicating that he thought he had been betrayed. Mikkles nodded at him.

  “Fifteen minutes,” he said. “You’ll still have time to make court.”

  “Okay,” Sergeant Dolan said. “Fifteen minutes. Okay?”

  “We’ll just go through the motions,” Washington said.

  “Okay. Start.”

  “Those pictures you took handy?”

  “What the hell do you need those for? I already showed them to you.”

  Why doesn’t he want me to look at the pictures?

  “Who knows? Maybe if we look at them again, we’ll see something we missed.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I don’t know where the hell they are.”

  I am on to something!

  “Maybe your partner has them?” Washington asked.

  “Nah, they’re probably in the goddamn file. I’ll look,” Dolan said, and left the room.

  “Washington,” Lieutenant Mikkles said, “Dolan is a good man.”

  “Yes, sir, I know.”

  “But he comes equipped with a standard Irish temper. I would consider it a favor if you could forget that ‘Fuck Inspector Wohl’ remark.”

  “I didn’t hear anybody say anything like that, Lieutenant.”

  “I owe you one,” Lieutenant Mikkles said.

  “Forget it,” Washington said.

  Sergeant Dolan came back in the office with a handful of five-by-seven photographs.

  “Here’s the fucking photographs,” he said, handing them to Washington. “What do you want to know?”

  Washington looked through the photographs, then sorted them so they would be sequential.

  They showed Anthony J. DeZego getting out of his car in front of the Hotel Warwick; handing the doorman
money; walking toward the hotel cocktail lounge; inside the cocktail lounge (four shots, including one of the bellboy giving him the car keys); leaving the cocktail lounge; walking toward the garage; and, the last shot, entering the garage.

  “This is in the right sequence? This all of them?” Washington asked, handing the stack of photographs to Dolan.

  “What do you mean, is this all of them?” Dolan snapped. “Yeah, it’s all of them.” He flipped through them quickly and said, “Yeah, that’s the order I took them in.”

  Anomaly! Anomaly! Anomaly!

  “Sergeant, I’d like a set of these pictures for my report,” Washington said. “The negatives, I guess, are in the photo lab?”

  “The guy that runs the lab is a pal of mine,” Dolan said. “I’ll give him a ring and have him run you off a set.”

  “Thank you,” Washington said. “Looking at them again, does anything new come to your mind?”

  “Not a fucking thing,” Dolan said firmly.

  “Well, we tried,” Washington said.

  “Is that all?”

  “Unless you can think of something.”

  “Not a fucking thing. If I think of something, I’ll give you a call.”

  “I’d really appreciate that,” Washington said.

  “And like I said, I’ll call my friend in the photo lab and have him run off a set of prints for you.”

  “Thank you,” Washington said.

  Jason Washington parked his unmarked car in the parking lot behind the Roundhouse at 7th and Race and walked purposefully toward the building.

  There are four anomalies vis-à-vis Sergeant Dolan and his photographs.

  One, Dolan had told me that he and his partner had been trailing the Detweiler girl and had trailed her to the parking garage. There were no photographs of Penelope Detweiler; they were all of Anthony J. DeZego. Why?

  Two, there were no photographs of Matt Payne and his girlfriend in the Porsche. If he thought Matt was dealing drugs, there should have been.

  Three, there were only thirteen photographs in the stack Dolan showed me. Thirty-five millimeter film comes in twenty-four- and thirty-six-exposure rolls. Ordinarily almost every frame on a roll of film is exposed, and ordinarily every exposed frame on a roll is printed. And since it is better to have too many photographs than too few, it seemed likely that Dolan would have taken far more than thirteen photographs during the time he had been watching DeZego. Probably a roll at the hotel, and then afresh one, starting from the moment DeZego left the hotel. Probably a thirty-six-exposure roll, so he wouldn’t run out at the wrong time. That’s what I would have done.

  Four, he suddenly turned obliging at the end. He would call a pal in the photo lab and have his pal make a set of prints and send them to me. Had he suddenly joined the Urban League and vowed to lean over backward in the interests of racial harmony and/or interdepartmental cooperation? Ordid he want to control what pictures the lab sent me to include in my report?

  Three guys were on duty in the photo lab. One of them seemed less than overjoyed to see Detective Jason Washington. Washington consequently headed straight for him.

  “Morning!” he said cheerfully.

  “I just this minute got off the phone,” the lab guy, a corporal, said. “With Dolan, I mean.”

  “Good,” Washington said. “Then you know why I’m here.”

  “I’ll get to it as soon as I can,” the corporal said. “You want to come by about two, or do you want I should send them to you?”

  “I want them now,” Washington heard himself say. “Didn’t Sergeant Dolan tell you that?”

  “What do you mean, ‘now’?”

  “Like, I’ll wait,” Washington said.

  “It don’t work that way, Washington, you know that. Other people are in line ahead of you.”

  “No,” Washington said. “I’m at the head of line.”

  “The fuck you are!”

  “Well, you can either take my word for that or we can call Inspector Wohl and he’ll tell you I’m at the head of the line.”

  “Wohl don’t run the photo lab,” the corporal said.

  This Irish bastard is sweating too. What the hell have I found here?

  “Well, you tell him that.”

  “What I am going to do is find the lieutenant and ask him what to do about your coming in here like Jesus Christ Almighty. Who the fuck do you think you are, anyway?”

  “Let’s go see him together,” Washington said.

  “I’ll go see him,” the corporal said. “You read the fucking sign.” He pointed to the sign: AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY IN THE LAB.

  “I’m surprised,” Jason Washington said as he ducked inside the counter, “that an experienced, well-educated police officer such as yourself hasn’t learned that there is an exception to every rule.”

  “You lost your fucking mind or what, Washington?”

  That’s entirely possible. But the essence of my professional experience as a police officer is that there are times when youshould go with a gut feeling. And this is one of those times. I have a gut feeling that if I let you out of my sight, that roll, or rolls, of film are going to turn up missing.

  What the hell are these two up to?

  The corporal turned surprisingly docile when they were actually standing before the lieutenant’s desk. His indignation vanished.

  “Sir,” he said, “Detective Washington has an unusual request that I thought you should handle.”

  “Hello, Jason,” the lieutenant said. “Long time no see. How are things out in the country? Do you miss the big city?”

  “I would hate to think the lieutenant was making fun of our happy home at Bustleton and Bowler,” Washington said. “Where the deer and the antelope play.”

  “Who, me?” the lieutenant chuckled. “What can we do for you?”

  “I’m working the DeZego job,” Washington said.

  “So I heard.”

  “Sergeant Dolan of Narcotics shot a roll of film. I need prints this time yesterday.”

  “You got the negatives?” the lieutenant asked the corporal, who nodded. “You got it, Jason. Anything else?”

  “I want to take the negatives with me.”

  After only a second’s hesitation the lieutenant said, “Sign a receipt and they’re yours.”

  “And I may want some blown up specially,” Washington said. “Could I go in the darkroom with him?”

  “Sure. That’s it?”

  Since your face reflected a certain attitude of unease when you heard that I want to go into the darkroom with you, Corporal, and that I’m taking the negatives with me, I will go into the darkroom with you and I will take the negatives with me. What the hell is it with these photographs?

  y “Yes, sir. Thank you very much.”

  “Anytime, Jason. That’s what we’re here for.”

  The corporal became the spirit of cooperation, to the point of offering Washington a rubber apron once they entered the darkroom.

  If I were a suspicious man, Washington thought, or a cynic, I might think that he has considered the way the wind is blowing, and also that if anything is amiss, he didn’t do it, or atleast can’t blamed for it, and has now decided that Dolan can swing in the wind all by himself.

  There was only one roll of film, a thirty-six-exposure roll.

  “Hold it up to the light,” the corporal said. “Or, if you’d like, I can make you a contact sheet. Take only a minute.”

  “A what?”

  “A print of every negative in negative size on a piece of eight-by-ten.”

  “Why don’t you just feed the roll through the enlarger?” Washington asked.

  Jason Washington was not exactly a stranger to the mysteries of a darkroom. Years before, he had even fooled around with souping and printing his own 35-mm black-and-white film. That had ended when Martha said the chemicals made the apartment smell like a sewage-treatment station and had to go. He had no trouble “reading” a negative projected through an enlarger, alt
hough the blacks came out white, and vice versa.

  The first negative projected through the enlarger showed Anthony J. DeZego emerging from his Cadillac in front of the Warwick Hotel. The second showed him handing money to the doorman. The third showed him walking toward the door to the hotel cocktail lounge. The fourth showed him inside the cocktail lounge; the view partially blocked by a pedestrian, a neatly dressed man carrying an attaché case who was looking through the plate-glass window into the cocktail lounge. That photograph had not been in the stack of five-by-sevens Sergeant Dolan had shown him.

  Next came an image of DeZego inside the bar, the pedestrian having moved on down the street. Then there were two images of DeZego’s car as the bellboy walked toward it and got in it. The pedestrian was in one of the two, casually glancing at the car. He was not in the second photograph. Dolan had shown him a print of the bellman and the car, less the pedestrian.

  What’s with the pedestrian?

  The next image was of DeZego’s Cadillac making a left turn. And the one after that was of the pedestrian crossing the street in the same direction. Dolan’s stack of prints hadn’t included that one, either.

  Is that guy following DeZego’s car? Who the hell is he?

  The next shot showed the chubby bellboy walking back to the hotel, apparently after having parked DeZego’s Cadillac. Two frames later the pedestrian with the attaché case showed up again. Then came a shot of the bellboy giving DeZego his car keys, and then, no longer surprising Jason Washington, the pedestrian came walking down the sidewalk again.

  “Go back toward the beginning of the roll, please,” Jason Washington said. “The third or fourth frame, I think.”

  “Sure,” the corporal said cooperatively.

  The image of the well-dressed pedestrian with the attaché case looking into the Warwick Hotel cocktail lounge appeared.

  “Print that one, please,” Washington said.

  “Five-by-seven all right?”

  “Yeah, sure,” Washington said, and then immediately changed his mind. “No, make it an eight-by-ten. And you better make three copies.”