Badge Of Honor: The Victim Part 2

Four young men, one much younger than the other three, each with a revolver concealed somewhere under their neat business suits, stood around a filing cabinet in the outer office of the Police Commissioner of the City of Philadelphia, drinking coffee from plastic cups and trying to stay out of the way.

Two of them were sergeants, one was a detective, and one-the young one-was an officer, the lowest rank in the police hierarchy.

Both sergeants and the detective were, despite their relative youth, veteran police officers. One of the sergeants had taken and pa.s.sed the examination for promotion to lieutenant; the detective had taken and pa.s.sed the examination for sergeant; and both were waiting for their promotions to take effect. The other sergeant had two months before being promoted from detective. The young man had not been on the job long enough even to be eligible to take the examination for promotion to either corporal or detective, which were comparable ranks, and the first step up from the bottom.

They all had comparable jobs, however. They all worked, as a sort of a police equivalent to a military aide-de-camp, for very senior police supervisors. Their bosses had all been summoned to a meeting with the Commissioner and the Deputy Commissioner of Operations, and for the past hour had been sitting around the long, wooden table in the Commissioner's conference room.

Tom Lenihan, the sergeant who was waiting for his promotion to lieutenant to become effective, was carried on the books as "driver" to Chief Inspector Dennis V. Coughlin, generally acknowledged to be the most influential of the fourteen Chief Inspectors in the Department, and reliably rumored as about to become a Deputy Commissioner.

Sergeant Stanley M. Lipshultz, who had gone to night school at Temple, had pa.s.sed the bar exam a week before his promotion to sergeant. He was "driver" to Chief Inspector Robert Fisher, who headed the Special Investigations Division of the Police Department.

Detective Harry McElroy, soon to be a sergeant, was carried on the books as "driver" to Chief Inspector Matt Lowenstein, who was in charge of all the detectives in the Philadelphia Police Department.

Officer Matthew W. Payne, a tall, muscular young man who looked, dressed, and spoke very much like the University of Pennsylvania fraternity man he had been six months before, was carried on the manning charts as Special a.s.sistant to Staff Inspector Peter Wohl, who was Commanding Officer of the newly formed Special Operations Division.

It was highly unusual for a rookie to be a.s.signed anywhere but a district, most often as one of the two officers a.s.signed to a radio patrol wagon, much less to work directly, and in civilian clothes, for a senior supervisor. There were several reasons for Officer Matthew Payne's out-of-the-ordinary a.s.signment as Special a.s.sistant to Staff Inspector Wohl, but primary among them was that Mayor Jerry Carlucci had so identified his role in the Department to the press.

What Mayor Jerry Carlucci had to say about what went on within the Police Department had about as much effect as if Moses had carried it down from a mountaintop chiseled on stone tablets.

The mayor had spent most of his life as a cop, rising from police officer to police commissioner before running for mayor. He held the not unreasonable views that one, he knew as much about what was good for, or bad for, the Police Department as anybody in it; and two, he was the mayor and as such was charged with the efficient administration of all functions of the city government. It wasn't, as he had told just about all the senior police supervisors at one time or another, that he "was some G.o.dd.a.m.ned politician b.u.t.ting in on something he didn't know anything about."

Officer Payne had been a.s.signed, right out of the Police Academy, to Special Operations before his status as Special a.s.sistant had been made official by Mayor Carlucci, and it could be reasonably argued that that a.s.signment had been blatant nepotism.

The a.s.signment had been arranged by Chief Inspector Coughlin, and there had been a lot of talk about that in the upper echelons of the Department. Officer Payne had grown up calling Chief Inspector Coughlin Uncle Denny, although they were not related by blood or marriage.

Chief Inspector Coughlin had gone through the Police Academy with a young Korean War veteran named John Xavier Moffitt. They had become best friends. As a young sergeant, while answering a silent burglar alarm at a West Philadelphia service station, John X. Moffitt had been shot to death.

Two months later his widow had been delivered of a son. A year after that she had remarried, and her husband had adopted Sergeant Moffitt's son as his own. Denny Coughlin, who had never married, had kept in touch with his best friend's widow and her son over the years, serving as sort of a bridge between the boy and his natural father's family.

The bridge had crossed a stormy chasm. Johnny Moffitt's mother, Gertrude Moffitt, whose late husband had been a retired police captain, was known as Mother Moffitt. She was a devout Irish Catholic and had never forgiven Patricia Sullivan Moffitt, Johnny's widow, for what she considered a sinful betrayal of her heritage. Not only had she married out of the church, to an Episcopalian, a wealthy, socially prominent attorney, but she had abandoned the Holy Mother Church herself and acquiesced to the rearing of her son as a Protestant, and even his education at Philadelphia's Episcopal Academy.

When Mother Moffitt had lost her second son, Captain Richard C. "Dutch" Moffitt, commanding officer of the Highway Patrol, to a stickup vermin's bullet six months before, she had pointedly excluded Patricia Sullivan Moffitt Payne's name from the family list for seating in St. Dominic's Church for Dutch's funeral ma.s.s.

The day after Captain Dutch Moffitt had been laid to rest, Matthew W. Payne went to the City Administration Building and joined the Police Department.

Chief Inspector Dennis V. Coughlin had been nearly as unhappy about this as had been Brewster Cortland Payne II, Matt's adoptive father. It was clear to both of them why he had done so. Part of it was because of what had happened to his Uncle Dutch, and part of it was because, weeks before he was to enter the Marine Corps as a second lieutenant, they had found something wrong with his eyes disqualifying him for Marine service.

The Marines, in other words, had told him that they had found him wanting as a man. He could prove to himself, and the world, that he was indeed a man by becoming a cop, in the footsteps of his father and uncle.

It was not, in Denny Coughlin's eyes, a very good reason to become a cop. But he and Brewster C. Payne, during a long lunch at the Union League, had decided between them that there was nothing they could, or perhaps even should, do about it. Matt was a bright lad who would soon come to his senses and realize (possibly very soon, when he was still going through the Academy) that he wasn't cut out for a career as a policeman. With his brains and education, he should follow in Brewster C. Payne's footsteps and become a lawyer. But Matt Payne had not dropped out of the Police Academy, and as graduation grew near, Dennis V. Coughlin thought long and hard about what to do about him. He had never forgotten the night it had been his duty to tell Patricia Sullivan Moffitt that her husband had been shot to death. Now he had no intention of having to tell Patricia Sullivan Moffitt Payne that something had happened on the job to her son.

Shortly before Matt was to graduate from the Police Academy, at the mayor's "suggestion" (which had, of course, the effect of a papal bull), the Police Department organized a new unit, Special Operations. Its purpose was to experiment with new concepts of law enforcement, essentially the flooding of high-crime areas with well-trained policemen equipped with the very latest equipment and technology and tied in with a special arrangement with the district attorney to push the arrested quickly through the criminal-justice system.

Mayor Carlucci, a power in politics far beyond the city limits, had arranged for generous federal grants to pay for most of it.

The mayor had also "suggested" the appointment of Staff Inspector Peter Wohl as commanding officer of Special Operations. Peter Wohl was the youngest of the thirty-odd staff inspectors in the Department. Staff inspectors, who rank immediately above captains and immediately below full inspectors, were generally regarded as super detectives. They handled the more difficult investigations, especially those of political corruption, but they rarely, if ever, were given the responsibility of command.

There was muttering about special treatment and nepotism vis-a-vis Wohl's appointment too. A division the size of the new Special Operations Division, which was to take over Highway Patrol, too, should have had at least an inspector, and probably a chief inspector, as its commander. Wohl, although universally regarded as a good and unusually bright cop, was in his thirties and only a staff inspector. People remembered that when Mayor Carlucci was working his way up through the ranks, his rabbi had been August Wohl, Peter Wohl's father, now a retired chief inspector.

It was also said that Wohl's appointment had more to do with his relationship with Arthur J. Nelson than with anything else. Nelson, who owned the Philadelphia Ledger and WGHA-TV, had put all the power of his newspaper and television station against Jerry Carlucci during his campaign for the mayoralty. And it was known that Nelson loathed and detested Wohl, blaming him for making it public knowledge that his son, who had been murdered, was both h.o.m.os.e.xual and had shared his luxury apartment with a black lover. Right after that had come out, Nelson had had to put his wife in a private psychiatric hospital in Connecticut, and Peter Wohl had made an enemy for life.

Those who knew Jerry Carlucci at all knew that he believed "the enemies of my enemies are my friends."

Denny Coughlin was one of Peter Wohl's admirers. He believed that the real reason Wohl had been given Special Operations was because Jerry Carlucci thought he was the best man for the job, period. He was careful without being timid; innovative without going overboard; and, like Coughlin himself, an absolute straight arrow.

And Denny Coughlin had decided that the safest place to hide young Matt Payne-until he realized that he really shouldn't be a cop-was under Peter Wohl's wing. Wohl didn't think Payne was cut out to be a cop, either. He went to work for Wohl, as sort of a clerk, with additional duties as a gofer. It would be, Denny Coughlin believed, only a matter of time until Matt came to his senses and turned in his resignation.

And then Payne got the Northwest Philadelphia serial rapist. While he was delivering a package of papers to Wohl's apartment in Chestnut Hill late at night, he had spotted, by blind luck, the van everybody was looking for. The driver had tried to run him down. Payne had drawn his pistol and fired at the van, putting a bullet through the brain of the driver. Inside the van was a naked woman, right on the edge of becoming the sc.u.mbag's next mutilated victim.

The first car (of twenty) to answer the radio call-"a.s.sist officer, police by phone. Report of shots fired and a hospital case"-was M-Mary One, the mayoral limousine, a black Cadillac. Jerry Carlucci had been headed to his Chestnut Hill home from a Sons of Italy banquet in South Philly and was five blocks away when the call came over the police radio.

By the time the first reporter-Michael J. "Mickey" O'Hara of the Philadelphia Bulletin, generally regarded as a friend of the Police Department-arrived at the crime scene, Mayor Carlucci was prepared for him. In the next edition of the Bulletin there was a four-column front-page picture of the mayor, his arm around Officer Matt Payne and his suit jacket open just wide enough to remind the voters that even though he was now the mayor, His Honor still rushed to the scene of crimes carrying a snub-nosed revolver on his belt.

In the story that went with the photograph, Officer Payne was described by the mayor as both the Special a.s.sistant to the commanding officer of Special Operations and "the type of well-educated, courageous, highly motivated young police officer Commissioner Czernick is a.s.signing to Special Operations."

Matt Payne, who was perfectly aware that his role in the shooting was far less heroic than painted in the newspapers, had been prepared to be held in at least mild scorn, and possibly even contempt by his new peers, the small corps of "drivers." He had known even before he joined the Department that the "drivers," people like Sergeant Tom Lenihan, who was Denny Coughlin's driver, had been chosen for that duty because they were seen as unusually bright young officers who had proven their ability on the streets and were destined for high ranks.

Working for senior supervisors, drivers were exposed to the responsibilities of senior officers, the responsibilities they, themselves, would a.s.sume later in their careers. They had earned their jobs, Matt reasoned, where he had been given his, and there was bound to be justifiable resentment toward him on their part.

That hadn't happened. He was accepted by them. He thought the most logical explanation of this was that Tom Lenihan had put in a good word for him. Tom obviously thought that Denny Coughlin could walk on water if he wanted to, and could do no wrong, even if that meant special treatment for his old buddy's rookie son.

But that wasn't really the case. Part of it was that it was difficult to dislike Matt Payne. He was a pleasant young man whose respect for the others was clear without being obsequious. But the real reason, which Payne didn't even suspect, was they were actually a little in awe of him. He had found himself in a life-threatening situation-the Northwest Philly serial rapist would have liked nothing better than to run over him with his van-and had handled it perfectly, by blowing the sc.u.mbag's brains out.

Only Sergeant Lenihan and Detective McElroy had ever drawn their Service revolvers against a criminal, and even then they had been surrounded by other cops.

The kid had faced a murderous sc.u.mbag one-on-one and put the son of a b.i.t.c.h down. He had paid his dues, like the two kids from Narcotics, now also a.s.signed to Special Operations, Charley McFadden and Jesus Martinez, both of whom had gone looking on their own time for the sc.u.mbag who'd shot Captain Dutch Moffitt. They had found him, and McFadden had chased him one-on-one down the subway tracks until the sc.u.mbag had fried himself on the third rail.

No matter how long they'd been on the job, it wasn't fair to call kids like that rookies; doing what they had done had earned them the right to be called, and considered, cops.

The door to the commissioner's conference room opened, and Chief Inspector Matt Lowenstein-a short, barrel-chested, bald-headed man in the act of lighting a fresh, six-inch-long nearly black cigar-came out. He did not look pleased with the world. He located Detective McElroy in the group of drivers, gestured impatiently for him to come along, and marched out of the outer office without speaking.

"Why do I suspect that Chief Lowenstein lost a battle in there?" Sergeant Tom Lenihan said very softly.

Sergeant Lipshultz chuckled and Officer Payne smiled as Chief Inspectors Dennis V. Coughlin and Robert Fisher and Staff Inspector Wohl came into the outer office.

Coughlin was a large man, immaculately shaved, ruddy-faced, and who took pride in being well dressed. He was wearing a superbly tailored glen-plaid suit. Fisher, a trim and wiry man with a full head of pure white hair, was wearing one of his blue suits. He also had brown suits. He had three or four of each color, essentially identical. No one could ever remember having seen him, for example, in a sport coat or in a checked, plaid, or striped suit.

Matt had heard from both Coughlin and Wohl that Chief Fisher believed that entirely too many police officers were wearing civilian clothing when, in the public interest, they should be in uniform.

Coughlin walked over to the drivers and shook hands with Sergeant Lipshultz.

"How are you, Stanley?" he asked. "You know where I can find a good, cheap lawyer?"

"At your service, Chief," Lipshultz said, smiling.

"Matthew," Coughlin said to Matt Payne.

"Chief," Matt replied.

"Let's go, Tom," Coughlin said to Lenihan. "Chief Lowenstein had a really foul one smoldering in there. I need some clean air.''

"We could smell it out here, Chief," Lenihan said, and went out the door to the corridor.

Chief Inspector Fisher nodded at Matt Payne, offered his hand to Coughlin and Wohl, and then walked out of the room. Sergeant Lipshultz hurried after him.

"Say good-bye to the nice people, Matthew," Inspector Wohl said dryly, "and drive me away from here. It's been a long afternoon."

"Good-bye, nice people," Matt said obediently to the others, the commissioner's secretary, his driver, and the other administrative staff.

Some chuckled. The commissioner's driver said, "Take it easy, kid."

The commissioner's secretary, an attractive, busty woman in her forties, said, "Come back anytime, Matthew. You're an improvement over most of the people we get in here."

Officer Matt Payne followed Staff Inspector Wohl out of the office and down the corridor toward the elevators.

There was no one else in the elevator. Wohl leaned against the wall and exhaled audibly.

"Christ, that was rough in there," he said.

"What was it all about?"

"Not here," Wohl said.

He pushed himself erect as the door slid open, and walked across the lobby to the rear entrance of the building, stopping just outside to turn and ask, "Where are we?"

Payne pointed. There were four new Ford four-door sedans, one of them two-tone blue, parked together toward the rear of the lot. When they arrived at the roundhouse, Payne had dropped Wohl off at the door and then searched for a place to park.

There were five s.p.a.ces near the roundhouse reserved for division chiefs and chief inspectors, and one of them was empty, but Matt had learned that the sign didn't mean what it said. What it really meant was that the s.p.a.ces were reserved for chief inspectors who were also division chiefs, and that other chief inspectors could use the s.p.a.ces if they happened to find one empty. It did not mean that Staff Inspector Wohl, although he was a division chief, had the right to park there.

None of this was written down, of course. But everyone understood the protocol, and Matt had learned that the senior supervisors in the Department were jealous of the prerogatives of their rank. He had parked the unmarked two-tone Ford farther back in the lot, beside the unmarked cars of other senior supervisors who, like Wohl, were not senior enough to be able to use one of the parking s.p.a.ces closest to the building.

Unmarked new cars were a prerogative of rank too. Senior supervisors, Matt had learned-chief inspectors and inspectors and some staff inspectors-drove spanking new automobiles, turning them over ("When the ashtrays got full," Wohl had said) to captains, who then turned their slightly used cars over to the lieutenants, who turned their cars over to detectives.

When Special Operations had been formed and had needed a lot of cars from the police garage right away, the system had been interrupted, and some full inspectors and captains hadn't gotten new cars when they thought they were ent.i.tled to get them, and they had made their indignation known.

When they got to the two-tone Ford and Matt started to get behind the wheel, Wohl said, "I think I'm going to go home. Where's your car?"

"Bustleton and Bowler," Matt said. "I can catch a ride out there."

Special Operations had set up its headquarters in the Highway Patrol headquarters at Bustleton and Bowler Streets in Northeast Philadelphia.

"No, I have to stop by the office, anyway. I just didn't know if you had to go out there or not," Wohl said, and got in the pa.s.senger seat.

Matt drove to North Broad Street and headed north. They had traveled a dozen blocks in silence when Wohl broke the news. "There are allegations that-I don't have to tell you that you don't talk about this, do I?"

"No, sir."

"There are allegations that certain Narcotics officers have had a little more temptation than they can handle put under their noses and are feeding information to the mob," Wohl said.

"Jesus!"

"Several arrests and confiscations that should have gone smoothly didn't happen," Wohl went on. "Chief Lowenstein told Commissioner Czernick what he thought was happening. Maybe a little prematurely, because he didn't want Czernick to hear it anywhere else. Czernick, either on his own or possibly because he told the mayor and the mayor made the decision, took the investigation away from Chief Lowenstein."

"Who did he give it to?"

"Three guesses," Wohl said dryly.

"Is that why Chief Lowenstein was so sore?''

"Sure. If I were in his shoes, I'd be sore too. It's just about the same thing as telling him he can't be trusted."

"But why to us? Why not Internal Affairs?"

"Why not Organized Crime? Why not put a couple of the staff inspectors on it? Because, I suspect, the mayor is playing detective again. It sounds like him: 'I can have transferred to us anybody I want from Internal Affairs, Narcotics, Vice, or Organized Crime'-theoretically routine transfers. But what they're really for, of course, is to catch the dirty cops-presuming there are dirty cops-in Narcotics."

Wohl then fell silent, obviously lost in thought. Matt knew enough about his boss not to bother him. If Wohl wanted him to know something, he would tell him.

Several minutes later Wohl said, "There's something else."

Matt glanced at him and waited for him to go on.

"On Monday morning Special Operations is getting another bright, young, college-educated rookie, by the name of Foster H. Lewis, Jr. You know him?"

Matt thought, then shook his head and said, "Uh-uh, I don't think so."

"His a.s.signment," Wohl said dryly, "is in keeping with the commissioner's policy, which of course has the mayor's enthusiastic support, of staffing Special Operations with bright, young, well-educated officers such as yourself, Officer Payne. Officer Lewis has a bachelor of science degree from Temple. Until very recently he was enrolled at the Temple Medical School."

"The medical school?" Matt asked, surprised.

"It was his father's dream that young Foster become a healer of men," Wohl went on. "Unfortunately young Foster was placed on academic probation last quarter, whereupon he decided that rather than heal men, he would prefer to protect society from malefactors; to march, so to speak, in his father's footsteps. His father just made lieutenant. Lieutenant Foster H. Lewis, Sr. Know him?"

"I don't think so."

"Good cop," Wohl said. "He has something less than a warm, outgoing personality, but he's a good cop. He is about as thrilled that his son has become a policeman as yours is."

Matt chuckled. "Why are we getting him?"

"Because Commissioner Czernick said so," Wohl said. "I told you that. If I were a suspicious man, which, of course, for someone with a warm, outgoing, not to forget trusting, personality like mine is unthinkable, I might suspect that it has something to do with the mayor."

"Doesn't everything?" Matt chuckled again.

"In this case a suspicious man might draw an inference from the fact that Officer Lewis's a.s.signment to Special Operations was announced by the mayor in a speech he gave last night at the Second Abyssinian Baptist Church."

"This is a colored guy?"

"The preferred word, Officer Payne, is black."

"Sorry," Matt said. "What are you going to do with him?"