Final Justice boh-8 Read online

  Brewster C. Payne in the flesh.

  The last time I saw him was on Monday in Washington, in the Senate Dining Room. He was the “something really important has come up” reason our distinguished senior senator was sorry he couldn’t have lunch with me.

  What’s his connection with Detective Payne?

  When Dianna Kerr-Gally came to the lectern to hand him the three-by-five cards from which he would speak, he motioned her close to him and whispered, “The tall WASP in the back of the room?”

  She looked and nodded.

  “His name is Brewster Payne,” she whispered back.

  “I know who he is. Ask him if he can spare me a minute when this is over.”

  She nodded.

  “If I may have your attention, ladies and gentlemen?” the mayor began, raising his voice so that it could be heard over the hubbub in the room.

  The next time we do something like this, there should be a microphone.

  “I realize you’re a busy man, Mr. Payne,” the mayor said, as Dianna Kerr-Gally ushered Brewster Payne into his office. “But I did want to say hello. I don’t think we’ve ever actually met, have we?”

  “I don’t believe we have. But didn’t I see you in Washington on Monday?”

  “Across the dining room,” the mayor said, waving him into a chair. “I need a cup of coffee. Do you have the time?”

  “Thank you very much,” Payne said. “I’d love one.”

  “Dianna, please?”

  “Right away, Mr. Mayor.”

  “Would it be impolitic for me to ask what you and the senator seemed to be talking so intently about?”

  “My firm represents Nesfoods,” Payne said. “The senator chairs the Agricultural Subcommittee. We were talking about tomatoes, United States and Mexican.”

  Nesfoods gave me one hundred thousand for my campaign. I wonder how much they gave to the senator?

  “The tomato growers here are concerned about cheap Mexican tomatoes?”

  “That issue has been resolved by the Free Trade Agreement. What I hoped to do-what I think I did-was convince the senator that it’s in everybody’s best interests for the Department of Agriculture to station inspectors in Nesfoods processing plants in Mexico, so that we can process the tomatoes there, and ship the pulp in tank trucks to the Nesfoods plants here and in California. That will both save Nesfoods a good deal of money and actually increase the quality of the finished product. Apparently, the riper the tomato when processed, the better the pulp.”

  “And what was the problem?”

  “As hard as it is to believe, there are those who are unhappy with the Free Trade Agreement,” Payne said, dryly, “and object to stationing Agriculture Department inspectors on foreign soil.”

  “But after you had your little chat, the senator seemed to see the light?”

  “I hope so, Mr. Mayor.”

  Dianna Kerr-Gally came into the office with a silver coffee service and poured coffee.

  When she had left them alone again, the mayor looked over his coffee cup and said, “I wasn’t aware until this morning that your son was a policeman.”

  “I think of it as the firm’s loss is the city’s gain,” Payne said. “Actually, Matt’s my adopted son. His father-a police sergeant-was killed before he was born. I adopted Matt before he could walk.”

  “You’d rather he would have joined Mawson, Payne, Stockton, McAdoo and Lester?” the mayor asked.

  “Wouldn’t your father prefer to see you in a pulpit?” Payne responded.

  “Whenever I see him, he shakes his head sadly,” the mayor said. “I don’t think he’s given up hope that I will see the error of my ways.”

  “Neither have I given up hope,” Payne said. “But in the meantime, I am as proud of Matt as I daresay your father is of you.”

  “I like to think public service is an honorable, even noble, calling.”

  “So does Matt,” Payne said. “He thinks of the police as a thin blue line, all that separates society from the barbarians.”

  “Unfortunately, he’s probably right,” the mayor said.

  Payne set his cup down.

  “I don’t want to keep you, Mr. Payne,” the mayor said. “But I did want to say hello. Could we have lunch one day?”

  “I’d be delighted,” Payne said. “And thank you for the coffee.”

  He stood up, shook hands with the mayor, and walked out of the room.

  Commissioner Mariani told me that if I didn’t send that young man to Homicide as promised I could expect trouble from the Fraternal Order of Police. He didn’t tell me that the FOP would be represented, pro bono, by Mawson, Payne, Stockton, McAdoo amp; Lester.

  The Hon. Eileen McNamara Solomon, Philadelphia’s district attorney, devoutly believed that at least seventy percent of the nurses under fifty in the surgical department of the hospital of the University of Pennsylvania would rush to console Benjamin A. Solomon, M.D., the moment he started to feel sorry for himself because his wife-the-D.A. had become careless about her appearance.

  So, although she was always too busy to waste a lot of time in a beauty parlor, she made it to Cathleen’s Coiffeurs every Tuesday at 8:00 A.M., watched what she ate, and, weather permitting, jogged on the Parkway for an hour starting at 7:00 A.M. Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.

  The result was a rather tall, lithe forty-nine-year-old, who wore her blonde hair cut stylishly but short, and whose husband had no reason to see if the grass was greener in someone else’s bedroom.

  After graduation-third in her class-from the University of Pennsylvania School of Law, and passing the bar examination, Eileen McNamara had declined offers to join any of the several more or less prestigious law firms because she suspected she was going to become the Token Female.

  Instead, she took a job with the Public Defender’s Office, which had the responsibility of providing legal counsel to the indigent. She had quickly proven herself to be a highly competent courtroom lawyer.

  But she had always been a little uncomfortable after she had convinced a jury that there was reasonable doubt that some miserable sonofabitch had actually pistol-whipped a grandmother while in the process of robbing her corner grocery, or some other miserable sonofabitch had actually been pushing drugs on grammar school kids.

  And she had been unhappy in the company of her colleagues, who almost universally believed that having been born into poverty, or to a drug-addict mother, or of Afro-American /Puerto Rican/Latin/Outer Mongolian/Whatever parentage was an excuse to commit robbery, rape, and murder, and to meanwhile support oneself in outrageous luxury by selling what were known as “prohibited substances” to others.

  So she had changed sides. Philadelphia’s district attorney was delighted to offer Miss Eileen McNamara a position as an assistant district attorney not only because she was a good-looking blonde, but also because her record of successfully defending people his assistant D.A. s had prosecuted unsuccessfully had made them look even more incompetent than they actually were.

  She had been somewhat happier in the D.A.’s office, but not much. The cases she would have liked to prosecute seemed to get assigned to the “more experienced” of her fellow assistant D.A. s, and the cases she was assigned to prosecute were-she quickly figured out-the ones her fellow assistant D.A. s didn’t want because the cases were either weak or politically dangerous or both.

  But she did her best with the cases she was given, and managed to convince one jury after another that not only was there not any reasonable doubt that some miserable sonofabitch had done what the cops had said he or she had done, but that he or she had done it with full knowledge of what he or she was doing, and in the belief he or she was going to get away with it, and therefore did not deserve much pity from the criminal justice system.

  Assistant District Attorney McNamara quickly discovered- as something of a surprise-that as a general rule of thumb, she liked the cops. By and large, they were really what they considered themselves to be, a thin blue line protecting
society from the barbarians.

  What surprised her in this regard was that they seemed to genuinely share her concern for what she thought of as the other group of innocent victims of a criminal act. The first group was of course those who had been robbed/beaten/ murdered by the criminal. The second group was the wives/ parents/children of the miserable sonofabitch who had committed the crime.

  Eileen McNamara had been an assistant district attorney almost three years when she first ran into Benjamin Solomon, M.D., F.A.C.S. More accurately, when Ben ran into her, rear-ending her Plymouth with his Cadillac as she was looking for a parking place in South Philadelphia.

  Ben hadn’t been going very fast, just not paying attention, but fast enough to do considerable damage to her trunk and right fender. The accident had taken place within, if not the sight, then the hearing, of Officer Martin Shaugnessy.

  Officer Shaugnessy had trotted to the scene. He pretended not to recognize the good-looking blonde assistant D.A. who had once made mincemeat out of the public defender who had decided that the best way to get his client off the hook was to paint arresting Officer Shaugnessy as an ignorant, prejudiced police thug who took an almost sexual pleasure in persecuting young men of Puerto Rican extraction.

  “How much have you had to drink, sir?” was his first question now to Dr. Solomon, who had just given Miss McNamara his effusive apologies and insurance card.

  “Drink? It’s eight-thirty in the morning! I haven’t even had my breakfast!”

  “People who speed and drive as recklessly as you obviously were, sir, are often driving under the influence. Would you please extend your right arm, close your eyes, and try to touch your nose?”

  “Officer, I don’t think the doctor has been drinking,” Miss McNamara said. “I think this was just a simple fender bender.”

  “You sure?” Officer Shaugnessy asked, dubiously.

  “I’m sure,” Miss McNamara said. “And I’m sure the doctor and I can work this out between us.”

  “Well, if you say so, ma’am.”

  “Thank you,” Miss McNamara said.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Officer Shaugnessy said. He filled out the Form 75–48, which the insurance companies would need, and then went back to walking his beat.

  While they were waiting for the wrecker, Eileen became aware that the doctor kept stealing looks at her. For some reason, it didn’t make her uncomfortable; usually when men did that, it did.

  As the wrecker hauled her Plymouth away, Dr. Solomon looked directly at her. His eyes on hers did make her uncomfortable.

  “What was that with the cop all about?” Dr. Solomon asked. “You know him?”

  “I know a lot of cops,” Eileen said. “That one looked familiar. But do I know him? No.”

  “How is it you know a lot of cops?”

  “I’m an assistant D.A.”

  “Really? An assistant D.A.?” Ben had asked, genuinely surprised. “Good-looking blondes don’t come to mind when I hear that term.”

  “On the other hand, you do look like a doctor,” Eileen heard herself say, adding quickly, “What kind?”

  “Chest-cutter,” Ben had said. “Thoracic surgeon. What do you mean, I look like a doctor?”

  “Your eyes,” Eileen said. “You have intelligent, kind eyes.”

  When she heard what she had said, she blushed.

  “So do you,” Ben had said, softly, after a minute. “Can I buy you breakfast?”

  “Breakfast?”

  “And lunch, and dinner, and whatever else you want to eat for the rest of your life?”

  “You’re sure you haven’t been drinking?”

  “I don’t drink,” he said. “If I sound a little strange, I was at the table all night-until about an hour ago. And then I met you.”

  Benjamin Solomon, M.D., and Eileen McNamara, L.L.D., were united in matrimony not quite a month later, which caused varying degrees of joy and despair within their respective Eastern European Hebraic and Irish Roman Catholic communities.

  They had been married three years when Eileen told Ben the strangest thing had happened the previous afternoon. She had been asked if she would be interested in running for judge in a special election called by the governor to fill two vacancies caused by the incarceration of two incumbent jurists.

  “I think you should,” Ben had said after a moment. “You’ve been on both sides of the fence, and I think you’d do a good job straddling the middle. And you already have the name. Judge Solomon the Second.”

  She won the election handily, primarily, she believed, because nobody had ever heard of her, and there was general contempt for those whose names were known to the voters.

  And she liked the bench, at least trying to keep things fair and just.

  They hadn’t been able to have children-Ben’s fault, the gynecologists said, probably because he’d worn Jockey shorts all of his life-and she really regretted that. But she told herself that a child whose parents both had independent careers could not have gotten the attention it deserved, and that made being childless a little easier to bear.

  She had been on the bench six years when a delegation of pols came to her and proposed that she run for district attorney. The incumbent had been elected to Congress. Her service as an assistant D.A. and her six years on the bench had taught her that there was considerable room for improvement in the Office of the District Attorney.

  She talked the offer over with Ben. She was sure that she would make a hell of a good D.A., but she hadn’t been at all sure that she could win, and if she lost, she would be out of a job. She couldn’t run for reelection to the bench and for D.A. at the same time.

  Ben said she should give it a shot; she would always regret it later if she didn’t. And, Ben said, it wasn’t as if they were going to have to sell the dog to make the car payments if she found herself unemployed. That was a reference to the fact that Ben’s scalpel earned more than ten times as much money for them as the government paid her to wield her gavel.

  She ran, and won with fifty-two percent of the vote. The first time she ran for reelection, she got fifty-eight percent, and the last time, she’d garnered sixty-seven percent of the vote.

  Eileen McNamara Solomon had two cellular telephones, which, when she was there, she placed in rechargers on her desk beside the office phone with all its buttons. One of the cellulars, which buzzed when called, was her official phone. She made herself available with it around-the-clock.

  The second Nokia cellular had a green face, and when it was called, it played “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling.” This was her private line, its number known to very few people. It had been a gift from Ben, who said that, believe it or not, he had a busy schedule, too, and didn’t like to be put on hold.

  When the green phone began to play “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling” she thought it was probably Ben, and wondered if he was about to ask her to lunch.

  “Hi,” she said to the telephone.

  “You busy, Eileen?” a female voice inquired. She knew the voice.

  “Never too busy for you, Martha. How are you?”

  Eileen McNamara and Martha Peebles had met in Art Appreciation 101 at the University of Pennsylvania, and the tall, then sort of skinny eighteen-year-old Irish girl and the seventeen-year-old slight, short WASP with an acne condition had been immediately comfortable with each other.

  Eileen had told Martha all about her family, then taken her home to meet “King Kong”-her brother-and her father, both bricklaying subcontractors, and her mother. Martha had been visibly reluctant to talk about her family, except to say that her mother had died and she lived with her father and brother, who was a would-be actor.

  Martha had not offered to take Eileen home with her, and Eileen wondered if she was maybe ashamed of her father, or her home, and went out of her way to make sure Martha understood she didn’t care if her father “had problems” or what her house looked like, or how much money there was.

  It was four months before Martha finally took Eileen
home, on a Saturday, and Eileen got to meet the brother, Stephen, who was light on his feet, and her father, Alexander.

  Martha had shown her around the house and property, which had taken a little time, as there were twenty-eight rooms in the turn-of-the-century mansion set on fourteen acres behind stone walls on Glengarry Lane in Chestnut Hill, plus a guest house, a hothouse, and stables for Alexander Peebles’s polo ponies.

  “I never saw anything like this,” Eileen had confessed, as they left the stables. “Not even in the movies.”

  Martha had looked at her.

  “I really don’t want this to change things between us,” Martha said. “You’re the best friend I ever had.”

  Eileen had never forgotten the frightened look in Martha’s eyes.

  “Don’t be silly.”

  “And don’t tell anybody else, please.”

  “Why should I?”

  Eileen had never had a best friend in high school, and neither, Martha said, had she. They became and remained best friends and stayed best friends. Martha was the first person Eileen had told about Ben, right after he rear-ended her. And Martha had been her only bridesmaid when she married Ben.

  And Eileen really worried about Martha, particularly after her father died, cutting the queer brother out of his will, and leaving everything to Martha. Everything included the Tamaqua Mining Corporation, which owned, among other things, somewhere between ten and twelve percent of the known anthracite coal reserves in the United States.

  There had been no man; there never had been one in Martha’s life seriously. There were several reasons for this, Eileen thought, the primary reason being that Martha, aware that she was no great beauty, suspected that what few suitors she had had were primarily interested in her money, followed closely by Martha’s comparison of her young men with her father, and finding that none of them came close to matching up.

  Eileen really thought that maybe her best friend was losing it when she began to complain that her house was being burgled on a more or less regular basis, and that the police weren’t paying attention.

  Eileen called Denny Coughlin and told him she would appreciate it if he would lean on the commanding officer of the Fourteenth District and get him to send enough uniforms around to 606 Glengarry Lane often enough to convince the inhabitant that her property and person were being adequately protected.