Men In Blue Read online

  “Yes, sir,” McFadden said.

  “Thank you, Brother DeConti,” Hobbs said. “It’s always a pleasure doing business with you.”

  “I just hope you catch the bastard,” DeConti said.

  ****

  The Wackenhut Private Security officer did not raise the barrier when the blue Ford LTD nosed up to it, nor even when the driver tapped the horn. He let the bastard wait a minute, and then walked slowly over to the car.

  “May I help you, sir?”

  “Raise the barrier,” Wohl said.

  “Stockton Place is not a public thoroughfare, sir,” the security officer said.

  Wohl showed him his badge.

  “What’s going on, Inspector?” the security officer said.

  “Nothing particular,” Wohl said. “You want to raise that thing?”

  Louise Dutton’s old yellow Cadillac convertible, the roof now up, was parked three-quarters of the way down the cobblestone street.

  When the barrier was raised, Wohl drove slowly down the street and pulled in behind the convertible. Wohl looked around curiously. He hadn’t even known this place was here, although his office was less than a dozen blocks away.

  Stockton Place looked, he thought, except for the cars on the street, as it must have looked two hundred years ago, when these buildings had been built.

  He got out of the car, then crossed to the nearest doorway. There was no doorbell that he could see, and after a moment, he saw that the doorway was not intended to open; that it was a facade. He backed up, smiled more in amusement than embarrassment, and looked at the doorways to the right and left. There were doorbells beside the doorway on the left.

  There were three of them, and one of them read DUTTON.

  He saw that the door was slightly ajar, and tried it, and then pushed it open.

  There was a small lobby inside. To the right was a shiny mailbox, and more doorbell buttons, these accompanied by a telephone. Beside the mailboxes was a door with a large brass “C” fixed to it, and a holder for a name card. Jerome Nelson.

  There were three identical doors against the other wall. They each had identifying signs on them: stairway, elevator, service.

  If “C” was the ground floor, Wohl reasoned, “A” would be the top floor. He opened the door marked elevator and found an open elevator behind it. He pushed “A”. A door closed silently, faint music started to play, and the elevator started upward. It stopped, and the door opened and the music stopped. There was another door in front of him, with a lock and a peephole, and a doorbell button. He pushed it and heard the faint ponging of chimes.

  “Whoever that is, Jerome,” Louise Dutton said, “send them away.”

  Jerome walked quickly and delicately to the elevator door, rose on his toes, and put his eye to the peephole. It was a handsome, rather well dressed, man.

  Jerome pulled the door open.

  “I’m very sorry,” he said, “but Miss Dutton is not receiving callers.”

  “Please tell Miss Dutton that Peter Wohl would like to see her,” Wohl said.

  “Just one moment, please,” Jerome said.

  He walked into the apartment.

  “It’s a very good-looking man named Peter Wohl,” he told Louise Dutton, loud enough for Wohl to hear him. A smile flickered on and off Wohl’s face.

  “He’s a policeman,” Louise said, and walked toward the door.

  Louise Dutton was wearing a bathrobe, Wohl saw, and then corrected himself, a dressing gown, and holding both a cigarette and a drink.

  “Oh, you,” she said. “Hi! Come on in.”

  “Good afternoon, Miss Dutton,” Wohl said, politely.

  She was half in the bag, Wohl decided. There was something erotic about the way she looked, he realized. Part of that was obviously because he could see her nipples holding the thin material of her dressing gown up like tent poles—it was probably silk, he decided—but there was more to it than that.

  “I’m glad that you got home all right,” Wohl said.

  “Thank you for that,” Louise said. “I was more upset than I realized, and I shouldn’t have been driving.”

  “I just made her take a long soak in a hot tub,” Jerome said. “And I prescribed a stiff drink.” He put out his hand. “I’m Jerome Nelson, a friend of the family.”

  “I’m Inspector Peter Wohl,” Wohl said, taking the hand. “How do you do, Mr. Nelson?”

  “You certainly, if you don’t mind me saying so, don’t look like a policeman,” Jerome Nelson said.

  “That’s nice, if you’re a detective,” Wohl said. “What would you say I do look like?”

  Jerome laid a finger against his cheek, cocked his head, and studied Wohl.

  “I just don’t know,” he said. “Maybe a stockbroker. A successful stockbroker. I love your suit.”

  “Miss Dutton, they’re ready for you at the Roundhouse,” Wohl said.

  “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning, I’d like you to come down there with me. They want your statement, and I think they’ll have some photographs to show you. And then I’ll see that you’re brought back here.”

  “Will whatever it is wait five minutes?” Louise said. “I want to see what Cohen’s going to put on.”

  “I beg your pardon?” Wohl asked.

  “It’s time for ‘Nine’s News,’ “ she said.

  “Oh,” he said.

  “Can I offer you a drink?” Jerome asked.

  “Yes, thank you,” Wohl said. “I’d like a drink. Scotch?”

  “Absolutely,” Jerome said, happily. Louise opened the door of a maple cabinet, revealing a large color television screen. She turned it on and, still bent over it, so that Wohl had a clear view of her naked breast, looked at him as she waited for it to come on.

  “The guy on ‘Dragnet,’ “ Louise Dutton said, “Sergeant Joe Friday, would say, ‘No ma’am, I’m on duty.’“

  “I’m not Sergeant Friday,” Wohl said, with a faint smile.

  She’s bombed, and unaware her dressing gown is open. Or is it the to-be-expected casualness about nudity of a hooker?

  That’s an interesting possibility. She’s obviously not walking the streets asking men if they want a date, but I don V think she’s making half enough money smiling on television to afford this place. Is she somebody’s mistress, some middle-aged big shot’s extracurricular activity, who was taking a bus driver’s holiday with Dutch?

  And who’s Jerome? The friend of the family?

  The picture suddenly came on, and the sound. Louise turned the volume up, and stepped back as Jerome touched Wohl’s shoulder and handed him a squarish glass of whiskey.

  The screen showed Louise Dutton’s old convertible with a cop at the wheel leaving the Waikiki Diner parking lot. A female voice said, “This is a special ‘Nine’s News’ bulletin. A Philadelphia police captain gave his life this afternoon foiling a holdup. ‘Nine’s News’ co-anchor Louise Dutton was an eyewitness. Full details on ‘Nine’s News’ at six.”

  The Channel Nine logo came on the screen. A male voice said, “WCBL-TV, Channel 9, Philadelphia. It’s six o’clock.”

  Another male voice said, as the “Nine’s News” set appeared on the screen, “ ‘Nine’s News’ at six is next.”

  The “Nine’s News” logo appeared on the screen, and then dissolved into a close-up shot of Barton Ellison, a tanned, handsome, craggy-faced former actor, who had abandoned the stage and screen for television journalism, primarily because he hadn’t worked in over two years.

  “Louise Dutton isn’t here with me tonight,” Barton Ellison said, in his deep, trained actor’s voice, looking directly into the camera. “She wanted to be. But she was an eyewitness to the gun battle in which Philadelphia Highway Patrol Captain Richard C. Moffitt gave his life this afternoon. She knows the face of the bandit that is, at this moment, still free. Louise Dutton is under police protection. Full details, and exclusive ‘Nine’s News’ film, after these messages.”

  There follow
ed twenty seconds of Louise being escorted to her car at the Waikiki Diner, and of the car, with a policeman at the wheel, following a police car out of the parking lot. Then there was a smiling baby on the screen, as a disposable-diaper commercial began.

  “That sonofabitch!” Louise Dutton exploded. She looked at Wohl. “I had nothing to do with that.”

  “I don’t understand,” Wohl said.

  “I never told him I was under police protection,” Louise said.

  “Oh,” Wohl said. He could not understand why she was upset. He took a sip of his scotch. He couldn’t tell what brand it was, only that it was expensive.

  The diaper commercial was followed by one for a new motion picture to be shown later that night for the very first time on television, and then for one for a linoleum floor wax which apparently had an aphrodisiacal effect on generally disinterested husbands.

  Then Louise reappeared. She looked into the camera.

  “Moments before he was fatally wounded,” she said, “Police Captain Richard C. Moffitt said, ‘Put the gun down, son. I don’t want to have to kill you. I’m a police officer.’

  “Moffitt was meeting with this reporter over coffee in the Waikiki Diner in the sixty-five-hundred block of Roosevelt Boulevard early this afternoon. He was concerned with the image his beloved Highway Patrol has in some people’s eyes . . . ‘Carlucci’s Commandos’ is just one derogatory term for them.

  “He had just started to explain what they do, and why, and how, when he spotted a pale-faced blond young man police have yet to identify holding a gun on the diner’s cashier.

  “Captain Moffitt was off duty, and in civilian clothing, but he was a policeman, and a robbery was in progress, and it was his duty to do something about it.

  “There was a good thirty-second period, maybe longer, during which Captain Moffitt could have shot the bandit where he stood. But he decided to give the bandit a break, a chance to save his life: ‘Put the gun down, son. I don’t want to have to kill you.’

  “That humanitarian gesture cost Richard C. Moffitt his life. And Moffitt’s three children their father, and Moffitt’s wife her husband.

  “The bandit had an accomplice, a woman. She opened fire on Moffitt. Her bullets struck all over the interior of the diner. Except for one, which entered Richard C. Moffitt’s chest.

  “He returned fire then, and killed his assailant. “And then, a look of wonderment on his face, he slumped against a wall, and slid down to the floor, killed in the line of duty.

  “Police are looking for the pale-faced blond young man, who escaped during the gun battle. I don’t think it will take them long to arrest him, and the moment they do, ‘Nine’s News’ will let you know they have.”

  A formal portrait of Dutch Moffitt in uniform came on the screen.

  “Captain Richard C. Moffitt,” Louise said, softly, “thirty-six years old. Killed . . . shot down, cold-bloodedly murdered ... in the line of duty.

  “My name is Louise Dutton. Barton?”

  She took three steps forward and turned the television off before Barton Ellison could respond. Peter Wohl took advantage of the visual opportunity offered.

  “That was just beautiful,” Jerome Nelson said, softly. “I wanted to cry.”

  I’ll be goddamned, Peter Wohl thought, so did I.

  He looked at Louise, and saw her eyes were teary.

  “That bullshit about me being under police protection cheapened the whole thing,” she said. “That cheap sonofabitch!”

  She looked at Wohl as if looking for a response.

  He said, “That was quite touching, Miss Dutton.”

  “It won’t do Dutch a whole fucking lot of good, will it? Or his wife and kids?” Louise said.

  “Do you always swear that much?” Wohl asked, astounding himself. He rarely said anything he hadn’t carefully considered first.

  She smiled. “Only when I’m pissed off,” she said, and walked out of the room.

  “God only knows how long that will take,” Jerome Nelson said. “Won’t you sit down, Inspector?” He waved Wohl delicately into one of four identical white leather upholstered armchairs surrounding a coffee table that was a huge chunk of marble.

  It did not, despite what Jerome Nelson said, take Louise Dutton long to get dressed. When she came back in the room Wohl stood up. She waved him back into his chair.

  “If you don’t mind,” she said, “I’ll finish my drink.”

  “Not at all,” Wohl said.

  She sat down in one across from them, and then reached for a cigarette. Wohl stole another glance down her neckline.

  “What’s your first name?” Louise Dutton asked, when she had slumped back into the chair.

  “Peter,” he said, wondering why she had asked.

  “Tell me, Peter, does your wife know of this uncontrollable urge of yours to look down women’s necklines?”

  He felt his face redden.

  “It’s probably very dangerous,” Louise went on. “The last time I felt sexual vibrations from a cop, somebody shot him.”

  With a very great effort, which he felt sure failed, Staff Inspector Peter Wohl picked up his glass and took a sip with as much savoir faire as he could muster.

  ****

  The telephone was ringing when Peter Wohl walked into his apartment. He lived in West Philadelphia, on Montgomery Avenue, in a one-bedroom apartment over a four-car garage. It had once been the chauffeur’s apartment when the large (sixteen-room) brownstone house on an acre and a half had been a single-family dwelling. There were now six apartments, described as “luxury,” in the house, whose new owner, a corporation, restricted its tenants to those who had neither children nor domestic pets weighing more than twenty-five pounds.

  Peter nodded and smiled at some of his fellow tenants, but he wasn’t friendly with any of them. He had rebuffed friendly overtures for a number of reasons, among them the problems he saw in associating socially with bright young couples who smoked cannabis sativa, and probably ingested by one means or another other prohibited substances.

  To bust, or not to bust, that is the question! Whether ‘tis nobler to apprehend (which probably would result in a stern warning, plus a slap on the wrist) or look the other way.

  Or, better yet, not to know about it, by politely rejecting invitations to drop by for a couple of drinks, and maybe some laughs, and who knows what else. They believed, he thought, what he had told them: that he worked for the city. They probably believed that he was a middle-level functionary in the Department of Public Property, or something like that. He was reasonably sure that his neighbors did not associate him with the fuzz, the pigs, or whatever pejorative term was being applied to the cops by the chicly liberal this week.

  And then there was the matter of his having two of the four garages, which meant that some of his fellow tenants had to park their cars on the street, or in the driveway, or find another garage someplace else. He had been approached by three of his fellow tenants at different times to give up one of his two garages, if not for fairness, then for money.

  He had politely rejected those overtures, too, which had been visibly disappointing and annoying to those asking.

  The apartment looked as if it had been decorated by an expensive interior decorator. The walls were white; there was a shaggy white carpet; the furniture was stylish, lots of glass and white leather and chrome. He had been going with an interior decorator at the time he’d taken the apartment, and willing to acknowledge that he knew next to nothing about decorating. Dorothea had decorated it for him, free of charge, and got the furniture and carpet for him at her professional discount.

  Dorothea was long gone, they having mutually agreed that the mature and civilized thing to do in their particular circumstance was to turn him in on a lawyer, and so was much of what she had called the “unity of ambience.”

  A men’s club downtown had gone under, and auctioned off the furnishings. Peter had bought a small mahogany service bar; two red overstuffed leather armcha
irs with matching footstools; and a six-by-ten-foot oil painting of a voluptuous nude reclining on a couch that had for fifty odd years decorated the men’s bar of the defunct club. That had replaced a nearly as large modern work of art on the living room wall. The artwork replaced had had a title (!! Number Three.), but Peter had taken to referring to it as “The Smear,” even before Love in Bloom had started to wither.

  Dorothea, very pregnant, had come to see him, bringing the lawyer with her. The purpose of the visit was to see if Peter could “do anything” for a client of the lawyer, who was also a dear friend, who had a son found in possession of just over a pound of Acapulco Gold brand of cannabis sativa. Dorothea had been even more upset about the bar, the chairs, and the painting than she had been at his announcement that he couldn’t be of help.

  “You’ve raped the ambience, Peter,” Dorothea had said. “If you want my opinion.”

  When Peter went into the bedroom, the red light was blinking on his telephone answering device. He snapped it off and picked up the telephone. “Hello?”

  “We’re just going out for supper,” Chief Inspector (Retired) August Wohl announced, without any preliminary greeting, in his deep, rasping voice, “and afterward, we’re going to see Jeannie and Gertrude Moffitt. Your mother thought you might want to eat with us.”

  “I was over there earlier, Dad,” Peter said. “Right after it happened.”

  “You were?” Chief Inspector Wohl sounded surprised.

  “I went in on the call, Dad,” Peter said.

  “How come?”

  “I was on Roosevelt Boulevard. I was the first senior guy on the scene. I just missed Jeannie at Nazareth Hospital, but then I saw her at the house.”

  “But that was on the job,” August Wohl argued. “Tonight’s for close friends. The wake’s tomorrow. You and Dutch were friends.”

  “It won’t look right, if you don’t go to the house tonight.” Mrs. Olga Wohl came on the extension. “We’ve known the Moffitts all our lives. And, tomorrow, at the wake, there will be so many people there ...”

  “I’ll try to get by later, Mother,” Peter said. “I’m going out to dinner.”

  “With who, if you don’t mind my asking?”