The Witness Read online

  Matt got as far as the outer door when Captain Quaire called his name. Matt turned.

  “Yes, sir?”

  “If you manage to find him,” Quaire said. “Give our regards to Mr. Harris. Tell him we miss his smiling face around here.”

  “Yes, sir,” Matt said. “I’ll do that.”

  On the way to the lobby in the elevator, Matt thought first, If they didn’t like me, they would not tease me. Teasing, he had learned, was not the police way of expressing displeasure or contempt.

  And then he thought, Shit, I’ll be out all night looking for Harris.

  And then a solution to his problem popped into his mind. He crossed the lobby to the desk and asked the corporal if he could use the telephone.

  “Business?”

  “No, I’m going to call my bookie,” Matt said.

  The corporal, not smiling, pushed the telephone to him. Matt dialed, from memory, the home telephone of Detective Jason Washington.

  SEVEN

  Detective Jason Washington was sitting slumped almost sinfully comfortably in his molded plywood and leather chair, his feet up on a matching footstool, when the telephone rang. The chair had been, ten days before, his forty-third birthday gift from his daughter and son-in-law. He had expected either a necktie, or a box of cigars, or maybe a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black. The chair had surprised him to begin with, and even more after he’d seen one in the window of John Wanamaker’s Department Store with a sign announcing that the Charles Eames Chair and Matching Footstool was now available in Better Furniture for $980.

  A glass dark with twelve-year-old Scotch rested on his stomach. Whenever anything disturbing happened, it was Jason Washington’s custom to make himself a drink of good whiskey. He would then sit down and think the problem over. During the thought process, he never touched the whiskey. The net result of this, he sometimes thought, was that he wasted a lot of good whiskey.

  “Hello,” he said to the telephone. He had a very deep, melodious voice. When she was little, his daughter used to say he should be on the radio.

  “Mr. Washington, this is Matt.”

  Officer Matthew M. Payne had the discomfiting habit of calling Detective Washington “Mr.” At first, Washington had suspected that Payne was being obsequious, or perhaps even, less kindly, mocking him in some perverse manner known only to upper-class white boys. He had come to understand, however, that Matt Payne called him “Mr.,” even after being told not to, as a manifestation of his respect. Washington found this discomfiting too.

  “Hello, Matt.”

  “I hate to bother you at home, but I have a little problem. Is this a bad time for me to call?”

  I am sitting here alone with a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black Label, just hoping for something to brighten my day.

  “What is it, Matt?”

  “The feds are going to try the two guys who carved up Jerome Nelson.”

  What the hell is he talking about?

  “Run that past me again?”

  “The inspector and I had lunch with the FBI SAC, Mr. Davis. He told the inspector the feds are going to try the doers of the Nelson job for kidnapping. He asked the inspector for what we have on the job. The inspector told me to Xerox everything we have in the files, what Homicide has, and to check with Mr. Harris. I just left Homicide. I can’t find Harris. The inspector wants it all on his desk first thing in the morning.”

  The first thought Jason Washington had was, Has Wohl lost his mind? If Czernich finds out he has been slipping material to the FBI, he’ll be on the phone to Jerry Carlucci two seconds later, and ten seconds after that, Wohl will be teaching “Police Administration” at the Academy.

  This was immediately followed by the obvious rebuttal: Either Czernich is in on this, or Wohl has his own agenda; the one thing Peter Wohl is not is a fool.

  And then: Interesting, the way he calls the FBI guy “Mr.”; Wohl “the inspector”; and, the first time, Harris “Mr.” But that title of respect dropped off the second time he got to Tony. Since he knows that Tony is a first-rate detective, it has to be something else. A little vestigial Main Line snobbery, because Tony dresses like a bum? Or has the kid figured out that Tony has a bottle problem? One possibility is that he called Tony at home—if a furnished room can be called a home—and Tony was incoherent, and he’d rather not deal with that.

  “Why don’t you bring what you have here, Matt? I’ll have a look at it; see if it’s all there.”

  “Yes, sir,” Matt Payne said. “Thank you. I’m on my way.”

  Washington broke the connection with his finger and dialed Tony’s number. There was no answer.

  Meaning he’s not there. Or that he’s there, passed out.

  He took a well-worn leather-bound notebook from his pocket, found the number of the Red Rooster, Tony Harris’s favorite bar, and dialed it. Tony wasn’t there. Washington left word for him to call him at home. It was possible, even likely, that Wohl would want to see him in the morning. Wohl, being Wohl, probably knew all about Tony’s bottle problem, but it would not do Tony any good if Wohl saw him with the shakes.

  He hung up, looked at the drink he had left sitting on the table beside his chair, and took the first swallow from it.

  Jason and Martha Washington lived in an apartment on the tenth floor of a luxury building on the parkway. A wall of ceiling-to-floor windows in the living room gave them a view of the Art Museum, the Schuylkill River, and West Philadelphia.

  Martha Washington was a commercial artist who made just about as much money as he did. Now that their daughter, Barbara, was gone, married to a twenty-five-year-old electronics engineer at RCA, across the Delaware in Jersey, who made as much money as his in-laws did together, the Washingtons were, as Jason thought of it, “comfortable.”

  Not only did they have the condo at The Shore, but Martha had a Lincoln; the furniture in the apartment was all they wanted; and Martha was starting to buy (and sell at often amazing profit) art. It had been a long time, he thought, since there had been an angry or hurt look in Martha’s eyes when he walked in wearing a Tripler or Hart, Shaffner & Marx new suit.

  They no longer had to think about the costs of getting Barbara a good education. That need had been removed from the financial equation when the graduate student of engineering had snatched her from her cradle the week before he graduated and RCA started throwing money at him.

  Ten minutes later the doorman announced that a Mr. Payne was calling.

  “If he’s wearing shoes, send him up, please.”

  Washington timed his walk to the door precisely; he opened it as Matt got off the elevator.

  “Sorry to bother you with this at home,” Matt said.

  “Come on in, Matt. I am drinking from the good stuff; make yourself one.”

  “What’s the occasion?”

  “Let me see what you have,” Washington said, putting out his hand for the manila envelope. “You know where the booze is.”

  Matt headed for the liquor cabinet.

  He is, with the possible exception of Peter Wohl, the only one of my brothers in blue who is not awed and/or made uncomfortable by this apartment.

  Washington sat down on a leather upholstered couch and took the photocopies from the envelope and went through them. Payne sat in an armchair watching him.

  “I think everything’s there, Matt,” Washington said, finally.

  “Thank God,” Matt said. “Thank you.”

  “You couldn’t find Tony, you said?”

  “He didn’t answer the radio—twice, and he didn’t answer the phone at his apartment.”

  “You ever been to his apartment?”

  Matt shook his head no.

  Then he hasn’t found Tony mumbling incoherently into his booze. Moot point, he will learn eventually.

  “Anything interesting going on at Homicide?”

  “They had a murder of a guy during a robbery at a furniture store on South Street.”

  “I heard the call,” Washington said.<
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  The officer needs assistance shooting hospital case call had been on the air when he switched on the police radio in his unmarked police car as he came off the Benjamin Franklin Bridge into Philadelphia from New Jersey. By the time he reached the parkway, he had heard Matt Lowenstein calling in that he was at the scene. That too was very interesting. The chief of the Detective Division would ordinarily not go in on a robbery, or even a murder. Neither was uncommon in Philadelphia. He finally decided that Lowenstein had coincidentally been somewhere near without anything else important to do.

  The car issued to Jason Washington by the Philadelphia Police Department was a new, two-tone (blue over gray) Ford LTD four-door sedan. It had whitewall tires, elaborate chrome wheel covers, and powder blue velour upholstery. There were only eight thousand odd miles on the odometer, and the car still even smelled new.

  Detectives (like corporals, only one step above the lowest rank in the Police Department hierarchy) are not normally given brand-new cars to drive, much less to take home after work, but Jason Washington was not an ordinary detective.

  Until recently, he had been able to take more than a little pride in his reputation of being the best detective in the Homicide Bureau, which was tantamount to saying that he was arguably the best detective in the entire Philadelphia Police Department, as it is generally conceded that the best detectives are assigned to Homicide.

  Washington had not willingly given up his assignment to Homicide. He had been transferred (he thought of it as “shanghaied”) to the just-then-formed Special Operations Division over his somewhat bluntly stated desire not to be transferred.

  There had been a number of advantages in being assigned to Homicide. There was of course the personal satisfaction of simply knowing that you were a Homicide detective. That satisfaction was of course buttressed if you could believe that you were probably the best Homicide detective in the Bureau.

  Jason Washington was not plagued with extraordinary humility. While he was perfectly willing to admit there were a number of very good detectives in Homicide, he could not honestly state that he knew of any who were quite as professionally competent as he was.

  And the money was good, because of overtime. As a Homicide detective, he had taken home as much money as a chief inspector. Chief inspectors, he knew, often put in as many hours as he did, but under Civil Service regulations, they didn’t get paid for it; they were given “compensatory time off” that they never seemed able to find time to take.

  And chief inspectors (and other Police Department supervisors) spent a good portion of their time handling administrative matters that had little to do with catching critters, marching them through the judicial process, and seeing them sentenced and packed off to the pokey.

  In Homicide, all Jason Washington had had to do was catch critters, either on jobs that had come to him via the Wheel, or on jobs that the Wheel had given to others, but on which he had been asked to “assist.”

  (The Wheel wasn’t really a wheel, but rather a piece of lined paper, on which, at the beginning of each tour, each Homicide detective’s name was written. As each homicide came to the attention of the Homicide Bureau, the job was given to the detective whose name was at the head of the list. He would not be given another job until every other detective listed on the Wheel had, in turn, been given one.)

  While Jason Washington was at least as good as any other Homicide detective while working the crime scene, and certainly at least as knowledgeable as any other Homicide detective in the use of the high-tech techniques now available to match fibers, determine that a particular bullet had been fired from a particular weapon, and so on, his real strengths, he believed, were psychological and intellectual.

  He believed, with more than a little reason, that he had no peers in interrogation. He could play, with great skill, any number of roles when interviewing a suspect. If the situation demanded it, Washington, who stood well over six feet and weighed 220 pounds, could strike terror into the heart of most human beings who had previously believed they were not afraid of the Devil himself. Or, with equal ease, he could assume the role of sympathetic uncle who understood how, through no fault of his own, the suspect had found himself in a situation where striking the deceased in the forehead with a fire axe had seemed a perfectly reasonable thing to do under the circumstances, and that the decent thing to do now was put the whole unfortunate incident behind him (or her) by making a clean breast of it.

  Intellectually, Washington believed that both by natural inclination (perhaps genetic) and by long experience, he had no equal in discovering anomalies. An anomaly, by definition, is a deviation, modification, mutation, permutation, shift, or variation from the norm. If there was one tiny little piece of the jigsaw puzzle that didn’t fit, Jason Washington could find it.

  He had, in other words, been perfectly happy as the acknowledged best detective in Homicide when Jerome Nelson had been found in his apartment on Society Hill dead of multiple wounds probably inflicted by one of his own matched set of teak-handled Solingen kitchen knives.

  The Wheel had assigned the case to Detective Anthony C. “Tony” Harris, who was not only a good friend of Washington’s, but, in Washington’s judgment, the second-best detective in Homicide. As soon as the case had come in, and as soon as Jerome Nelson’s position in society had become known, Jason Washington had felt sure that he would soon be involved with it himself. Tony certainly would want some help, and would naturally turn to Jason Washington, or Captain Henry C. Quaire, who commanded the Homicide Bureau, would order him to work with Tony.

  It hadn’t happened quite that way. The Honorable Jerry Carlucci, mayor of the City of Brotherly Love, had taken the job away from the Homicide Bureau and given it to the newly formed Special Operations Division. Jason Washington’s initial reaction to that had mirrored that of Captain Quaire and Chief Inspector Matt Lowenstein, who commanded the Detective Division that included the Homicide Bureau: righteous indignation that once more The Dago had put his goddamn nose in where it had no business.

  Mayor Carlucci’s notorious penchant for issuing orders directly to various divisions (for that matter, to individual officers) of the Police Department, instead of letting the commissioner run it, was, in a sense, understandable. Before winning, in his first bid for elective office, the mayoralty, The Dago had been police commissioner. He had, in fact, held every rank in the Philadelphia Police Department except police woman. He therefore believed that he knew at least as much about running the Police Department as anyone else. And he had read the statutory functions of the mayor, which quite clearly stated that he was responsible for supervising “the various departments of the city.”

  On a secondary level, his parochial indignation as a Homicide detective aside, Jason Washington had thought that he understood The Dago’s game plan, and that it would work. The Dago had turned out to be a better politician than anyone ever thought he would be.

  Jason Washington and Jerry Carlucci went way back together. Carlucci had done a year in Homicide as a lieutenant, before he passed the captain’s examination and moved to Highway Patrol. It was only fair to acknowledge that Carlucci had been a good lieutenant—he had been an all around good cop, no one ever denied that—one proof of which being that even back then he had been smart enough to exercise only the barest minimum of supervision over Detective Jason Washington.

  When, rarely, they bumped into each other, Washington could count on a bear hug and being greeted either by his Christian name or as “Ol’ Buddy,” or both. Jason Washington, who did not like to be hugged by anyone except his wife and daughter, and disliked being called “Ol’ Buddy” by anyone, always smiled and referred to The Dago as “Mr. Mayor.”

  The way Washington had seen the assignment of the Nelson job to Special Operations seemed to make sense. Carlucci had just set up Special Operations. It was his. What had become a big deal murder in the newspapers, because of the victim, was actually just a routine homicide. The odds were that the job would be
closed in a week or two by Homicide. But that would not earn The Dago any favorable space in the newspapers. That’s what Homicide was supposed to do, solve homicides.

  But if Jerry Carlucci’s Special Operations solved the Nelson job, His Honor the Mayor could, and would, claim the credit.

  And Washington had seen that The Dago had carefully hedged his bet: Special Operations was commanded by Peter Wohl, who not only had been a sergeant in Homicide, but was, in Washington’s judgment (and that of a lot of other knowledgeable people), one of the smartest cops in the Department. Before The Dago had formed Special Operations and given it to Peter Wohl, Wohl had been the youngest (ever) staff inspector in the department.

  Staff inspectors ranked immediately above captains. With the exception, now, of Wohl, they operated within the Internal Affairs Division, and were charged with, primarily, investigations of corruption within and outside the Police Department. Wohl, just before being given Special Operations, had sent two judges and a city councilman to the state penitentiary for some rather imaginative income augmentation.

  Washington had reasoned that Carlucci had decided that Wohl would have no trouble finding who had punctured Jerome Nelson so thoroughly, and that Special Operations—thus the mayor—would get the credit.

  Washington had underestimated both Carlucci and Wohl. To make sure that Wohl did indeed catch the critters who had punctured Nelson with his own imported butcher knives, he gave him blanket authority to transfer to Special Operations anybody he thought he needed. Wohl had immediately decided that he needed Detectives Washington and Harris, and over howls of protest from the chief inspector of the Detective Division, the commanding officer of the Homicide Bureau, and Detectives Harris and Washington, they had been transferred to Special Operations.

  Wohl was not only a good cop, but a good guy, and he had assured both Washington and Harris that he would see they could make as much overtime money as they had in Homicide, and done other things to soothe their ruffled feathers. They would work directly for him (and his deputy, Captain Mike Sabara) rather than under some sergeant, and had even arranged for the both of them to draw brand-new cars (normally reserved for at least captains) from the Police Garage.