The Investigators

by W. E. B Griffin

  But the feeling Harry had then was not the feeling he had now. Now he knew something wrong was going on at the NIKE site, and he knew that it was something more than somebody talking his girl into going into one of the buildings with mutual criminal intent to violate the still-on-the-books statutes prohibiting fornication.

  And Cronin didn’t think it was dope. Dope dealers need a reasonably discreet location to serve their clientele. A string of people making their way through the hurricane fence from the street to the buildings and then back out would attract unwanted attention.

  Philadelphia police officers had no authority inside the fence, but the moment someone walked back out through the gate in the fence, with that day’s supply of joints, or whatever, they would again fall under Philadelphia police authority.

  What went on inside the hurricane fence with the now-getting-a-little-rusty “U.S. Government Property. Trespassing Forbidden Under Penalty of Law” warning signs attached at twenty-five-foot intervals to the fence was absolutely none of Detective Harry Cronin’s business, and he knew it.

  Having reminded himself of all this, he decided to go with his gut feeling, even if that meant he would be a little late getting home and Patty would sniff his breath the minute he walked in the door.

  He slowed even further, and made a U-turn and drove back to the gate in the hurricane fence.

  When he got out of the car and opened the gate, it occurred to him that, in the eyes of the feds, he was probably an illegal trespasser. And with his luck, some overpaid federal bureaucrat, to make a little overtime, would make one of his twice-a-year four-hour detailed inspections of the property right about now.

  That meant he would drive past the place probably faster than Harry had, without stopping. That would be four hours on his overtime time sheet.

  Harry almost had second thoughts.

  But there was a place scraped free of rust on the gate hinges.

  Somebody’s been in here, and recently. Fuck it. If I don’t go in, I’ll be up all night wishing I had.

  He drove slowly around the compound, flashing his flashlight into dark corners, wishing that he had with him the six-cell flashlight he carried in his unmarked car, rather than the little two-celler he kept in the glove compartment of the Chevrolet.

  Zilch.

  But then the headlights, not the flashlight, picked up tire tracks in the mud. The mud hadn’t had a chance to dry completely.

  Harry deduced, Some son of a bitch has been in here, and in the last couple of days.

  Probably the bureaucrat.

  But maybe not.

  He stopped the Chevrolet and got out and examined the tire tracks sufficiently to determine they were truck tires, light truck tires. From a pickup truck, not passenger tires.

  What the hell is going on around here?

  He walked to the nearest building and shone his light on the exposed hinges of the steel door. Bright scratches in the rusted metal told him the door had recently been opened.

  He pushed the door open and went inside.

  He walked down the corridor.

  The smell of feces and urine assailed his nostrils.

  Some fucking bum is in here. Or was in here. I hope was. The last thing I want right now is to find some dead bum in here. I’d never get home tonight. What a smart man would do would be turn around and get his ass out of here.

  There were three doors opening off the corridor. Two of the doors were open.

  In one of the rooms, his nostrils found the source of the smell of feces.

  And a pile of clothes.

  Nice clothes. Not a bum’s clothes.

  What the hell is going down in here?

  The third door was closed, with latches that reminded Cronin of his time as Fireman First Class, USN.

  The last time he had been in here, all the doors had been open.

  Harry worked the levers and pushed the door inward.

  Somebody’s taken a dump in here, too.

  What the fuck is that?

  “Listen, we have to talk!” a naked man sitting against the wall with an overcoat over his shoulders said plaintively. “Please, let’s talk!”

  “I’m a police officer,” Harry said. “Everything’s going to be all right.”

  “Thank God!” the man said.

  “You want to tell me what happened?”

  “You’re a policeman?”

  “Detective Cronin, South Detectives.”

  “Look, all I want to do is go home. Where’s my clothes?”

  “What did you say your name was?”

  “All I want to do is go home.”

  “I don’t think that’s going to be possible right now,” Harry said. “Now, what did you say your name was?”

  “I don’t have to tell you a goddamn thing!” the naked man said with absolutely no confidence, but a certain desperation, in his tone.

  What the fuck do I do now? I’m off-duty. I’ve got no authority inside that fucking fence. And, since I’m in my own car, I don’t even have a goddamn radio to call this in!

  Matt Payne, who had been watching a program of television commercials interrupted by three-minute segments of a John Wayne leading the cavalry against the Chiricahua Apache movie, jumped out of bed when there was a knock at the door, went to it, stood behind it, and pulled it open first a crack, then all the way.

  “It’s not that I am not delighted to see you, but does your mommy know where you are, little girl?”

  “I hope not,” Susan said. “Would it be too much to ask you to put your shorts on?”

  “Don’t trust yourself, eh?”

  “Oh, God!”

  “What did you do, sneak out?”

  He went to the chest of drawers, found a pair of Jockey shorts, and pulled them on.

  “Okay?”

  “Thank you.”

  “Under the circumstances, I suppose a blow—”

  “I’ve heard that before, Matt—my God, you can be vulgar!—and I don’t think it’s funny.”

  “Why do I have this unpleasant feeling that we are about to have a very serious conversation?”

  “Because we are,” Susan said. “I’ve been thinking.”

  “Pure, asexual thoughts only, obviously.”

  “I’ve been thinking about what you said at lunch.”

  “I said a lot of things at lunch,” Matt replied. “You mean about letting me arrest Jennifer?”

  Susan nodded. “Would that work?”

  “It’s iffy, honey,” Matt said now serious. “Starting with the first premise, that she can get away from Chenowith.”

  “She met me alone the last time. Behind a restaurant in Doylestown. And she had their baby with her.”

  “And if she doesn’t bring the baby this time?”

  “Matt, this was your idea in the first place.”

  “I’m trying to think of all the things that can—and probably will—go wrong.”

  “Tell me what will happen from the moment you arrest her.”

  “Well, I put the cuffs on her—and there’s problem one, because I don’t have any handcuffs.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “My handcuffs are in Philadelphia. When you first go on the job, you carry your handcuffs with you all the time. After a while, you realize (a) that not only aren’t you using them very much—in my case, never—and (b) that they’re uncomfortable to carry around, so you start leaving them at home, which is where mine are.”

  “Is that important?”

  “Yeah, it’s important. From what you tell me, Jennifer is not going to go to the slammer willingly. I’m going to have to immobilize her.”

  “Can you buy a pair of them here?”

  “I don’t know. I’ll have to do something.”

  “And then what?”

  “Well, I could put her arm behind her back, and physically restrain her—which isn’t as easy as it looks in the movies—until I can get on the radio and call for the local cops. I’m not sure, problem two, if the
Doylestown cops are on one of my frequencies. We’d have to play that by ear.”

  “I’m confused.”

  “Presuming she will meet you in Doylestown, we won’t know if I can call the cops on the radio until we get there and I can try it. Let me put it this way. Best possible situation. I put handcuffs on her, throw her in the back of the car, and drive her to the Doylestown Police Station. They’ll hold her for me—I think—if I identify myself as a Philadelphia cop who has made an arrest in their jurisdiction. . . .”

  Matt stopped, obviously having had another, distressing, thought.

  “What?” Susan asked, picking up on this.

  “If the Doylestown cops, or the state police, see you, they’ll wonder who you are. So we can’t let them see you. And . . .”

  He stopped again, and then, after a long moment, shrugged.

  “What’s that shrug of resignation all about?” Susan asked.

  He met her eyes.

  “My orders are quite clear,” he said. “I am not to do anything but inform the FBI when I think you are about to go meet any member of the Chenowith Group. I am not supposed to try to make the collar by myself. I’ve been told that by everybody but the mayor.”

  “So you’ll be in trouble?”

  He nodded.

  “And you don’t want to do it, now that you’ve thought it over?”

  “I didn’t say that,” he said. “What we’re doing now is talking. The money is another problem. My priority is to get you out of this mess. I’m trying to figure the best way to do that. And the thing we have to keep in mind is what Lincoln said.”

  “What Lincoln said?”

  “ ‘You can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time,’ ” Matt quoted. “We’ll be dealing here with some very bright people. We—”

  “You’re talking about the cops?”

  He nodded. “And the FBI. Most of what really will have happened is going to come out. Right now, they can’t prove—although I’m sure they suspect—that you’ve been holding the money for them. Maybe throwing the money in the river is the best thing to do with it. You would have to lie under oath—or at least claim the Fifth Amendment—that you never had it.”

  “I’m not a very good liar.”

  “You’re better than you think you are,” he said. “On the other hand, we could try this. . . .”

  He stopped, and visibly considered what he was about to say until Susan’s curiosity got the best of her.

  “What, Matt?”

  “It’s closer to the truth. Hell, it is the truth. Our story is that I made you realize the error of your ways. I convinced you that holding the money for these people was the wrong thing to do, and that your only chance was to cooperate with the authorities—me—and you (a) turned the money you had been holding over to me, and (b) arranged for me to meet, and thus be able to arrest, Jennifer, in exchange for me offering you immunity from prosecution.”

  “Can you do that?”

  “I wish I could. No, I can’t. But cops have lied before, to get information they want, and if a lawyer can make the jury feel sorry for the accused, because she—you—were lied to, they might go a little easier on you. Maybe, knowing they were facing a damned good lawyer, the U.S. Attorney might decide to nol pros that one charge. It’s unlikely, but possible. He’s got other charges against you—meeting Chenowith in the Poconos, for one example—that he’s not going to have any trouble proving.”

  “I am going to prison, aren’t I?”

  “It looks that way,” Matt said almost idly. “But going with this repentant-sinner line, let me think out loud a little more. Are you sure you know where Chenowith is?”

  “I know where they were living, if that’s what you mean.”

  “You could lead someone there?”

  “I’m not going to lead the FBI there, if that’s what you’re suggesting, not with Jennie and the baby in the house. He’s not just going to give up, and you told me he’s got a machine gun. I don’t want Jennie or the baby shot.”

  “How do you feel about this?” Matt asked. “We meet Jennie. She has the baby. I arrest her. We take the money—hers and yours—and turn it over to the FBI. Who you then lead to Chenowith’s house. It seems to me that a good lawyer just might be able to convince a jury that the repentant sinner was really trying to make things right, and was a nice person, to boot. She didn’t want to tell the FBI where Chenowith was until she was sure the other misguided innocent, Jennifer, and her appealing babe-in-arms, were safe from danger from both the wicked Chenowith and the noble forces of law and order. But once she was sure the—”

  “I don’t like you very much when you sound so cynical,” Susan said.

  “Oh, Jesus!”

  “Sorry.”

  “While we were talking about this—you being repentant and wanting to make amends—the situation was unexpectedly brought to a crisis when Jennifer called, announced she wanted to get away, in fear of her life, from the monster Chenowith, and we had to act.”

  Susan looked at him, her lips pursed, for a long moment.

  “How did we act?” she asked finally.

  “I call Jack Matthews, and tell him I have to talk to him. He meets us in the restaurant. In Doylestown. While we are explaining to Jack how you have decided to do the right thing, Jennifer shows up—so far as Matthews is concerned—much earlier than she is supposed to. There is no time for Matthews to summon the Anti-Terrorist Group, or, for that matter, the local cops. We arrest Jennifer. You tell her not to say a word to anybody about anything until she’s talked to a lawyer.”

  “She might not listen to me. As far as she is concerned, I will have betrayed her. Which is what I would have done.”

  “Get it through your head, goddamn it, that neither of you is going to walk on this. All we can do is cut our losses. If Jennifer insists on being a revolutionary heroine, that’s her choice. And once she does that, you shift into your save-my-own-ass mode. Otherwise, you’re going down the toilet with her.”

  “Maybe that’s what’s going to happen anyway,” Susan said.

  “What about us? Does this nutty bitch mean more to you than I do?”

  She met his eyes, then shook her head.

  “You know better than that,” she said.

  “There’s something I think I should tell you,” Matt said. “I was thinking about this too, watching that stupid cowboys-and-indians movie. And my solution to this problem—and I had damned near made the decision, before you knocked at the door—was to go out to your house, get your father out of bed, tell him all about the fucking mess you’re in, and tell him that as far as I’m concerned, the best thing he can do for you is to convince you that your only chance to keep from going to jail for a long, long time is to go to the FBI right now and not only show them where Chenowith is, but cooperate with everything they ask you to do.”

  “You mean, without considering Jennifer and the baby at all?”

  “Who’s more important, what’s more important? Us, or Jennifer?”

  She looked into his eyes but said nothing.

  “Honey, I don’t want you to go to jail,” Matt said. “I want to spend my life with you.” His voice broke. “I love you, goddamn it!”

  She touched his face.

  “Oh, Matt!”

  “Honey, I’ve been in women’s prisons. Jesus Christ, I don’t even want to think of you being in one of them.”

  “I don’t want to go to prison,” she said. “But I can’t just—cut Jennifer loose. I just can’t!”

  “Even if it fucks us up once and for all?”

  “Can we at least try to help Jennie and her baby?” Susan asked.

  “And if it doesn’t work? And I have to tell you, I don’t think it will.”

  “I would have tried,” Susan said.

  “Is it that important to you?”

  She nodded.

  “I wish it wasn’t,” she sa
id.

  “Okay,” Matt said. “We’ll give it a shot.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  Lieutenant Daniel Justice, Jr., reputedly the smallest, and without question the most delicate-looking White Shirt in the Philadelphia Police Department, was sitting at the lieutenant’s desk in South Detectives when Detective Harry Cronin walked in.

  “Danny the Judge,” as he was universally known, was connected by blood and marriage to an astonishing number of police officers, ranging from a deputy commissioner to a police officer six months out of the Academy. It was said that his mother needed help to raise her left wrist, on which she wore a charm bracelet with a miniature badge for each of her relatives on the job, including her husband, Detective Daniel Justice, Sr., Retired, known of course as “Big Danny.”

  The only scandal ever to taint the name of the Justice family occurred when “Danny the Judge,” in hot pursuit of a sixteen-year-old car thief he had detected trying to break into an automobile, slipped on the ice and broke his wrist.

  “To what do we owe the honor of your presence, Cronin, at this hour of the morning?” Danny the Judge asked.

  “I need a favor, Lieutenant,” Harry Cronin asked.

  Danny the Judge could see in Cronin’s face that whatever it was, it was important.

  “What?” he asked.

  “Call my wife and tell her I’m working,” Harry Cronin said.

  “Are you?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Doing what?”

  “I’d appreciate it if you’d call my wife first, Lieutenant,” Harry said.

  Danny the Judge looked at him a moment, then consulted a typewritten list of the home phone numbers of all the detectives in South Detectives, found Cronin’s number, and called it.

  “Patty? Dan Justice. Harry asked me to call. He’s on the job and can’t tell right now when he’ll get home.”

  There was a pause as Mrs. Cronin replied.

  “Patty, I wouldn’t do that. When I tell you Harry’s on the job, he’s on the job. As soon as he can find a minute, I’ll have him call you himself.”