Badge Of Honor: Men In Blue Part 15

I wonder why I told him that?

"Then you do know," Matt said.

"The reason I didn't go to see Jeannie Moffitt tonight was because I didn't want to," Wohl said. "And I figured if Dutch is really looking down from his cloud, he would understand."

Matt chuckled. "You were pretty close?"

"I knew him pretty well, all our lives, but we weren't close. Dutch was Highway Patrol, and that's a way of life. They don't think anybody else really is a cop. Maybe Organized Crime, or Intelligence, but certainly not a staff inspector. I guess, really, that Dutch tolerated me. I'd been in the Highway Patrol, even if I later went wrong."

"You were there, where he was shot, I mean. I heard that."

"I was nearby when I heard the call. I responded."

"I don't understand what really happened," Matt said. "He didn't know he was shot?"

"The adrenaline was flowing," Wohl said. "The minute he went to work, his system was all charged up. I'm sure he knew he was. .h.i.t, but I don't think he had any idea how bad."

"You ever been shot?" Matt asked.

"Yes," Wohl said, and changed the subject. "How come you're in here? As opposed to some saloon around the campus, for example?"

"I heard they're going to close it and tear it down," Matt said, "so I thought I'd come in for a drink for auld lang syne."

"They're going to tear it down? I hadn't heard that." "They are, but that wasn't a straight answer," Matt said.

"Oh?"

"When I left the Moffitt house," Matt said, "I had two choices. My fraternity house, or a saloon near the fraternity house. There would be two kinds of people in both, those who felt sorry for me-''

"That's understandable," Wohl said.

"Not because of my uncle Dutch," Matt said. "They didn't know about that. Because I failed my precommissioning physical examination, and am now officially exempt from military service. I didn't want sympathy on one hand, and if one more of those sonsofb.i.t.c.hes had told me how lucky I was, I think I would have punched him out."

"Why'd you flunk the physical? Did they tell you?"

"Something with my eyes. Probably, they said, I'll never have a moment's trouble with them, but on the other hand, the United States Marine Corps can't take the chance that something will."

"I guess I'm with those who think you were probably lucky," Wohl said. "I did a hitch in the army when I finished high school. I wasn't going to be a cop like my old man. So I joined the army and they made me an MP. You didn't miss anything."

"I wanted to go," Matt said. "My father was a marine. My real father."

"He was also a cop," Wohl said. "I've been thinking about that, too," Matt said. "I've seen the ads in the papers."

"The reason those ads are in the paper is because they don't pay a starting-off police officer a living wage," Wohl said. "A guy just out of high school can go to work for Budd, someplace like that, and make a lot more money. So they have to actively recruit to find a guy who meets the standards, and who really wants to be a cop, even if it means waiting for the city council to come across with long-overdue pay raises."

"I don't need money," Matt said.

"Everybody needs money," Wohl said, surprised at the remark; it sounded stupid.

"I mean, I have more than enough," Matt said. "When my father ... I think of him as my father. My real father was killed before I was born. When my stepfather adopted me, he started investing the money my real father had left, the insurance money, the rest of it, for me. My father is a very clever guy. He turned it into a lot of money, and when I turned twenty-one, he handed it over to me."

"What would he say if you joined the police department? What would your mother say?"

"Oh, they wouldn't like it at all," Matt said. "My father wants me to go to law school. But I don't think they would say anything. I think he would sort of understand."

The booze is talking, Peter Wohl decided. The kid lost his uncle. His father got killed on the job. He just came from Dutch's house, where Denny Coughlin and my father, and maybe the commissioner and maybe even the mayor, plus a dozen other cops were standing around, half in the bag, recounting the heroic exploits of Dutch Moffitt. And this kid's father. In the morning, if he remembers this conversation, this kid will be embarra.s.sed.

I am not fall-down drunk, Peter Wohl thought, as he put the key in his apartment door. If I were fall-down drunk, I would have tried to put the Jaguar in the garage. I am still sober enough to realize that I am too drunk to try to thread that narrow needle with the nose of the Jaguar.

He had stayed at the bar in the Hotel Adelphia nightclub far longer than he had intended to stay, and he had far more to drink than he usually did. He had all of a sudden realized that he was drunk, shaken Matt Payne's hand, collected his change, reclaimed the Jaguar, and driven home.

A shrink would say that he had gotten drunk as a delayed reaction to seeing Dutch Moffitt slumped dead against the wall of the Waikiki Diner. So, for that matter, would his boss, Chief Inspector Dennis V. Coughlin. And so, he realized, would his father. His father had known he would not be at the wake, and why.

There was no way either Denny Coughlin or his father would hear about it. There had been no other cops in the Hotel Adelphia, and he had managed to get home without running over a covey of nuns or into a fire hydrant.

G.o.d, Peter Wohl thought, takes care of fools and drunks, and I certainly qualify on both counts.

The red light on his telephone answering machine was glowing a steady red. If there had been calls, it would have been blinking on and off".

He went into the kitchen, opened the refrigerator, and drank most of a twelve-ounce bottle of soda water from the neck, which produced a booming belch.

Then he went to his bedroom, and remembered (which pleased him) about getting his uniform out of the zipper bag so that he could have it pressed in the morning. He had just laid the bag on an upholstered chair and started to work the zipper when the phone rang.

He looked at his watch. It was almost two in the morning. Neither his mother nor Barbara would be calling at this hour; it was therefore safe to answer the phone. He picked up the phone beside the bed.

"Wohl," he said.

"I hope I didn't wake you, Inspector." Wohl recognized the voice of Lieutenant Louis Natali of Homicide.

"I just walked in, Lou," Wohl said.

"Well, if you heard it over the radio, I'm sorry, but I thought you would want to know.''

"I didn't have a radio," Wohl said. "What didn't I hear?"

He's calling to tell me they caught the little s.h.i.+t who killed Dutch; that was nice of him.

"I'll try to give it to you quick," Natali said. "Hobbs and I were down in the Third District . . . checking out a report that Gerald Vincent Gallagher had been seen, About one o'clock, we heard a radio call of a stabbing and hospital case at Six-C Stockton Place. A little while later, I called Homicide and found we had a job there. Lieutenant DelRaye is on the scene. The deceased is a guy named Jerome Nelson."

"Christ, I met him this afternoon," Wohl said. "Nice little . . ."He stopped himself and ended, "Guy."

"The female who called it in is your friend Louise Dutton."

"I'll be d.a.m.ned," Wohl said. "She lives upstairs."

"I was told she was hysterical and locked herself in her apartment. DelRaye just called for a wagon to transport her to Homicide. I think he's talking about taking her door if she doesn't come out."

"Jesus!"

"You didn't get this from me, Peter," Natali said.

"I owe you," Wohl said, broke the connection with his finger, and dialed from memory the number of the Homicide Division. A detective answered.

"This is Inspector Wohl," he said. "Lieutenant DelRaye is at a homicide scene on Stockton Place. Please get word to him that I am en route, and he is not to, not to, take the door until I get there."

At 2:03 a.m., One-Ninety-Four, a patrol car a.s.signed to the Nineteenth District, went on the air and reported that he was in pursuit of an English sports car proceeding eastward on Lancaster Avenue just past Girard Avenue at a high rate of speed.

At 2:05 a.m. One-Ninety-Four went back on the air: "One-Ninety-Four. Disregard the pursuit. It was a Three-Six-Nine."

Three-Six-Nine is the radio code used to identify a police officer.

The officer in One-Ninety-Four was naturally curious why a man carrying the tin of a staff inspector was going h.e.l.l for leather down Lancaster Avenue in an English sports car at two in the morning, but he had been on the job long enough to understand that patrol officers were wise not to ask staff inspectors what the h.e.l.l they thought they were doing.

Stockton Place was crowded with police vehicles when Peter Wohl, holding his badge in one hand, weaved the Jaguar through them to the door of Number Six.

There were two cars from the Sixth District, what looked to Wohl to be three unmarked detective cars, the crime lab van, and a Sixth District wagon.

And the press was there, on foot behind the crime scene barriers, and on the roofs of two vans bearing television station logotypes.

Wohl had put his identification away when he'd pa.s.sed the last uniform barring his way to Number Six Stockton Place, but he had to take it out again to get past another uniform keeping people out of the building itself.

"Where's Lieutenant DelRaye?" he asked.

"Ground-floor apartment," the uniform told him.

Jerome Nelson was lying on his stomach on an outsize bed in his mirrored bedroom. He was, save for a sleeveless unders.h.i.+rt, naked. There were more wounds than Wohl could conveniently count on his back, his b.u.t.tocks and legs, and the bed was soaked with darkening blood. There was the sweet smell of blood in the air, competing with the smell of perfume.

Lieutenant Edward M. DelRaye, a large, balding man who showed vestiges of having been a very handsome man in his twenties and thirties, was standing with his arms folded on his chest, watching a photographer from the crime lab taking pictures of the body with a 35-mm camera.

"DelRaye," Wohl said, and DelRaye turned around and looked at him. He didn't say anything.

"Radio relay my message to you?" Wohl asked.

DelRaye nodded. "What's going on, Inspector?" he asked.

Edward M. DelRaye had been a detective when Peter Wohl had entered the academy. He had not liked Peter Wohl from the time they had met, when Wohl had been a plainclothes patrolman in Civil Disobedience. He had still been a detective when Wohl made corporal, equivalent in rank to a detective, and they'd had a couple of run-ins, jurisdictional disputes, when Wohl had been a Highway Patrol corporal and then sergeant. When Wohl had been a.s.signed to Internal Affairs, DelRaye had run off at the mouth more than once about how nice it must be to have a Chief Inspector for a father, who could arrange your career for you, see that you got good jobs.

DelRaye had made sergeant about the time Peter Wohl had made captain, and had only recently been promoted to lieutenant, long after Wohl had become a staff inspector. He was a good detective, from what Wohl had heard, and which seemed to be proved by his long-time a.s.signment to Homicide, but he was also a loud-mouthed, crude sonofab.i.t.c.h whom Wohl disliked, and whom he avoided whenever possible.

"You want to tell me what you have, Lieutenant?" Wohl said.

"Somebody carved up the f.a.g," DelRaye said, jerking his thumb toward the bed.

"I'm interested in the witness," Wohl said.

"Are you really, now?"

"Take it from the top, DelRaye," Wohl said, evenly, but coldly.

"Well, in case you didn't know, her name is Louise Dutton. The same one that was with Dutch Moffitt this afternoon when he got blown away. She come home from work about half past twelve, quarter to one, and found the door, his door, open. So she went in, and found the f.a.ggot in here, and called it in. I was up, so when the radio notified us, I rolled on it. I heard what she had to say, and told her I was going to take her to the Roundhouse for her statement, and to let her look at some mug shots, and she told me to go f.u.c.k myself, she wasn't going anywhere."

"You were, I'm sure, your usual tactful, charming self, DelRaye," Wohl said.

"I don't like drunken women, and I especially don't like dirty-mouthed ones," DelRaye said.

"Then what happened?" Wohl asked.

"I turned around, and she was gone, and the Sixth District cop in the foyer, or the lobby, outside the apartment, said she went up in the elevator. So I went upstairs, and knocked on her door, and told her who I was, and she told me to go f.u.c.k myself again. Then I called for a wagon. I was going to have her door forced. She's acting like she could be the doer, Wohl."

That's bulls.h.i.+t, DelRaye. You know as well as I do she didn't do it. But there is now a Staff Inspector on the scene, who knows that while you can batter down the door of a suspect, you can't go around busting open witnesses' doors without a better reason than she told you to go f.u.c.k yourself.

"You really think she could be the doer, Lieutenant?" Wohl asked, dryly sarcastic, and then, without waiting for an answer, asked, "She's still upstairs? You didn't enter her apartment?"

"I got your message, Inspector," DelRaye said. "She can't go anywhere. I got two cops trying to talk sense to her through the door.''

"I know her," Wohl said. "I'll try to talk to her."

"I know," DelRaye said. "When she's not screaming at me to go f.u.c.k myself, she's screaming that she demands to see Inspector Wohl."

"Really?" Wohl asked, surprised.

"Her exact words were, 'Get that sonofab.i.t.c.h down here!' " DelRaye said. "Don't you think you ought to tell me what's going on with you and her?"

"I was in on the a.s.sist when Dutch Moffitt was shot," Wohl said. "When the commissioner heard that the eyewitness was Miss Dutton, and who she was, he decided it was in the best interest of the department to treat her with kid gloves, and since I was there, told me to take care of it."

"Something going on between her and Dutch? Is that what you're saying?"

"I'm saying that when a woman goes on television twice a day, it doesn't hurt to have her think kindly of the police department," Wohl said.

"Yeah, sure."

"And that's what I'm going to do now," Wohl said. "I'm going to go charm the h.e.l.l out of her, if I can, and apologize for you, if it seemed to her you weren't as understanding as you could have been."

"f.u.c.k understanding," DelRaye said. "My job is to catch the guys who done in the f.a.ggot."

"And my job is to do what the commissioner tells me to do," Wohl said. "I'm going to go talk to her. You make sure there's a car outside when, if, I bring her down the stairs. Get those TV people, and the other reporters, away from the door.''

"How'm I going to do that, Inspector?" DelRaye asked sarcastically. "It's a public street."

"No, it's not Lieutenant," Wohl said. "It's a private street. Technically, anybody on Stockton Place who hasn't been invited is trespa.s.sing. Now get them away from the door, if you have to do it yourself.''

"Yes, sir, Inspector," DelRaye said, his tone of voice leaving no question what he thought about the order, about Staff Inspector Peter Wohl, or Peter Wohl being a Staff Inspector.