Men In Blue Read online

  Less nobly, he realized that a piece of ass would probably be just what the doctor would order for what ailed him. Seeing Dutch slumped dead against the wall had affected him more than he liked to admit. And looking down Louise Dutton’s dressing gown, even if she had caught him at it, and made an ass of him, had aroused him. Whatever else could or would be said about the TV lady, she really had a set of perfect teats.

  He had been driving without thinking about where he was going. When he oriented himself, he saw he was on Market Street, west of the Schuylkill River, just past Thirtieth Street Station. That wasn’t far from Barbara’s place.

  What the hell am I doing ? I really don’t want to see her any more tonight.

  He was also, he realized, just a couple of blocks away from the Adelphia Hotel.

  There was a bar off the lobby of the Adelphia Hotel, in which, from time to time, he had found females sitting who were amenable to a dalliance; often guests of the hotel who, he supposed, were more prone to fool around while in Philadelphia than they would back in Pittsburgh; and sometimes what he thought of as Strawbridge & Clothier women, the upper crust of Philadelphia and the Main Line, who, if the moon was right, could as easily be talked out of their fashionable clothing.

  And even if there were no females, the bar was dark, and he was not known to the bartenders as a cop, and there was a guy who played the piano.

  He would see what developed naturally. The worst possible scenario would be no available women. In which case, he would have a couple drinks and listen to the guy play the piano and then do what he probably should have done anyway, go home. He really did have to remember to get his uniform out of the zipper bag in the closet and get it pressed tomorrow.

  His eyes had barely adjusted to the darkness of the bar when a male voice spoke in his ear. “Can I buy you a drink?”

  He turned to see who had made the offer. The face was familiar, but he couldn’t immediately put a name, or an identification, to it.

  “It is you, Inspector? I mean . . . you are Inspector Wohl, aren’t you?”

  It came together. Dutch’s nephew. He had met the kid that afternoon, outside Dutch’s house.

  “Let me buy you one,” Wohl said, smiling and offering his hand. “Matt Moffitt, right?”

  “Matt Payne,” the boy said. “I was adopted.”

  “Yeah, I heard something about that,” Wohl said. “Sorry.”

  “No problem,” Matt said.

  The bartender appeared.

  “I don’t know what he wants,” Wohl said, “but Johnnie Red and soda for me.”

  “The same,” Matt said.

  “You old enough?” the bartender challenged. “You got a driver’s license?”

  Matt handed it over. The bartender eyed it dubiously, then asked Matt for his birth date. Finally he shrugged, and went to make the drinks.

  “They lose their licenses,” Wohl said. “You can’t blame them.”

  When the drinks came, Matt laid a twenty on the bar.

  “Hey, I’ll get these,” Wohl said.

  “My pleasure,” Matt Payne said. He picked up his glass, raised it, and said, “Dutch.”

  “Dutch,” Wohl repeated, and raised his glass.

  “I just came from the Moffitts’,” Matt said. “After that, I needed this.”

  “I was supposed to be there. But I got tied up,” Wohl said. “I couldn’t get away. I’ll go by Marshutz & Sons, to the wake, tomorrow.”

  “It was pretty awful,” Matt said.

  “Why do you say that?” Wohl asked.

  “The kids, for one thing, my cousins,” Matt said. “Losing their father is really tough on them. And my grandmother was a flaming pain in the ass, for another. She was a real bitch toward my mother.”

  “What?” Wohl asked. “Why?”

  “My grandmother thinks what my mother should have done when my father got killed was turn into a professional widow, like she is. Instead, she married my stepfather. “

  “What’s wrong with that?”

  “Out of the church,” Matt said. “Mother married one of those heathen Protestant Episcopals. And then Mother converted herself, and took me with her. And then let my stepfather adopt me.”

  “German Catholic mothers of that generation have very positive ideas,” Wohl said. “I know, I’ve got one of them. She and Gertrude Moffitt are old pals.”

  “You weren’t at the house,” Matt said, and Wohl wasn’t sure if it was a question or a challenge.

  “I also have a German Lutheran father,” Wohl said, “who went along with her until he suspected, correctly, that a priest at Saint Joseph’s Prep was trying to recruit me for the Jesuits. Then he pulled me out of Good Ol’ Saint Joe’s and moved me into Northeast High. She still has high hopes that I will meet some good Catholic girl, who will lead me back into the fold.”

  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 hit, 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 sonsofbitches 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 stan
dards, 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 embarrassed.

  ****

  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.

  God, 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 shit 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 damned,” 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 assigned 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 hell 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 hell 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 passed 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 undershirt, naked. There were more wounds than Wohl could conveniently count on his back, his buttocks 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 assigned 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.
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  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 assignment to Homicide, but he was also a loud-mouthed, crude sonofabitch whom Wohl disliked, and whom he avoided whenever possible.

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

  “Somebody carved up the fag,” 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 faggot 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 fuck 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 fuck 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 bullshit, 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 fuck yourself.