The Victim Read online

  He had just showered and shaved and an hour before had come out of Vinny’s Barbershop, two blocks away at the corner of Bancroft and Warden Streets in South Philadelphia, freshly shorn and reeking of cologne.

  The room he had shared with Anthony all of his life was small and dark and crowded. When they had been little kids, their father had bought them bunk beds, and when Joe was twelve or fourteen, he had insisted that the beds be separated and both placed on the floor, because bunk beds were for little kids. They had stayed that way until Joe came home from the Army, when he had restacked them. There was just not enough space in the room to have them side by side on the floor and for a desk too.

  The desk was important to Joe. He had bought it ten months before, when he was still in the Police Academy. It was a real desk, not new, but a real office desk, purchased from a used furniture dealer on lower Market Street.

  His mother told him he was foolish, that he really didn’t need a desk now, that could wait until he and Anne-Marie were married and had set up housekeeping, and even then he wouldn’t need one that big or—for that matter—that ugly.

  “I already bought and paid for it, Mama, and they won’t take it back,” he told her.

  There was no sense arguing with her. Neither, he decided, was there any point in trying to explain to her why he needed a desk, and a desk just like the one he had bought, a real desk with large, lockable drawers.

  He needed a place to study, for one thing, and he didn’t intend to do that, as he had all the way through high school, sitting at the dining-room table after supper and sharing it with Anthony from the time Anthony was in the fourth grade at St. Dominic’s School.

  The Police Academy wasn’t school, like South Philly High had been, where it didn’t really matter how well you did; the worst thing they could do to you was flunk you and, if it was a required course, make you take it again. The Police Academy was for real. If you flunked, they’d throw you out. He didn’t think there was much chance he would flunk out, but what he was after was getting good grades, maybe even being valedictorian. That would go on his record, be considered when he was up for a promotion.

  Joe had not been valedictorian of his class at the Police Academy; an enormous Polack who didn’t look as if he had the brains to comb his own hair had been. But Joe had ranked fourth (of eighty-four) and he was sure that had been entered on his record.

  And he was sure that he had ranked as high as he had because he had studied, and he was sure that he had studied because he had a real desk in his room. If he had tried to study on the dining-room table, it wouldn’t have worked. Not only would he have had to share with Anthony, but Catherine and his mother and father would have had the TV on loud in the living room.

  And when the guys came around after supper, his old gang, and wanted to go for a beer or a ride, it would have been hard to tell them no. With him studying at the desk upstairs, when the guys came, his mother had told them, “Sorry, Joseph is studying upstairs, and he told me he doesn’t want anybody bothering him.”

  The Army had opened Joe Magnella’s eyes to a lot of things, once he’d gotten over the shock of finding himself at Fort Polk, Louisiana. And then ’Nam, once he’d gotten over the shock of being in that godforsaken place, had opened his eyes even more.

  He had come to understand that there were two kinds of soldiers. There was the kind that spent all their time bitching and, when they were told to do something, did just enough to keep the corporals and the sergeants off their backs. All they were interested in doing was getting through the day so they could hoist as much beer as they could get their hands on. Or screw some Vietnamese whore. Or smoke grass. Or worse.

  The other kind was the kind that Joe Magnella had become. A lot of his good behavior was because of Anne-Marie. They were going to get married as soon as he came home from the Army. She was working at Wanamaker’s, in the credit department, and putting money aside every week so they could get some nice furniture. It didn’t seem right, at Fort Polk, for him to throw money away at the beer joints when Anne-Marie was saving hers.

  So while he didn’t take the temperance pledge or anything like that, he didn’t do much drinking. There was no temptation to get in trouble with women at Polk, because there just weren’t any around. And when he got to ’Nam and they showed him the movies of the venereal diseases you could catch over there, some of them they didn’t have a cure for, he believed them and kept his pecker in his pocket for the whole damned time.

  How the hell could he go home and marry Anne-Marie, who he knew was a decent girl and was saving herself for marriage, if he caught some kind of incurable VD from a Vietnamese whore?

  The first thing he knew, he was a corporal, and then a sergeant, and a lot of the guys who’d gone into the boonies high on grass or coke or something had gone home in body bags.

  Joe had liked the Army, at least after he’d gotten to be a sergeant, and had considered staying in. But Anne-Marie said she didn’t want to spend their married life moving from one military base to another, so he got out, even though the Army offered him a promotion and a guaranteed thirty-month tour as an instructor at the Infantry School at Fort Benning if he reenlisted.

  A week after he got home, he went to the City Administration Building across from City Hall and applied for the cops, and was immediately accepted. He and Anne-Marie decided it would be better to wait to get married until after he graduated from the Police Academy, and then they decided to wait and see if he really liked being a cop, and because her mother said she would really feel better about it if Anne-Marie waited until she was twenty-one.

  He really liked being a cop, and Anne-Marie was going to turn twenty-one in two months, and the date was set, and they were already in premarital counseling with Father Frank Pattermo at St. Thomas Aquinas, and in two months and two weeks he could move himself and his desk out of the room and let Anthony finally have it all to himself.

  Joe had laid his underwear and uniform out on the lower bunk—Anthony’s—before going to take a shower and shave. He pulled on a pair of Jockey shorts and a new T-shirt, and then pinned his badge through the reinforced holes on a short-sleeved uniform shirt, and then put that, his uniform trousers, and a pair of black wool socks on.

  He took one of his three pairs of uniform shoes from under the bed and put them on. He had learned about feet and shoes, too, in the Army, that it was better for your feet and your shoes if you always wore wool socks—they soaked up the sweat; nylon socks didn’t do that—and never wore the same pair of shoes more than one day at a time, which gave them a chance to dry out.

  Some of the cops were now wearing sort of plastic shoes, some new miracle that always looked spit-shined, but Joe had decided they weren’t for him. They were plastic, which meant that they would make your feet sweaty, wool socks or not. And it wasn’t all that much trouble keeping his regular, leather, uniform oxfords shined. If you started out with a good shine on new shoes and broke them in right, it wasn’t hard to keep them looking good.

  He strapped on his leather equipment belt, which had suspended from it his handcuff case; two pouches, each with six extra rounds for his revolver; the holder for his nightstick; and his holster. His nightstick was on his desk, and he picked that up and put it in the holder and then unlocked the right top drawer of the desk and took out his revolver.

  He pushed on the thumb latch and swung the cylinder out of the frame and carefully loaded six 168-grain lead round-nose .38 Special cartridges into it, pushed the cylinder back into the frame, and put the revolver in the holster.

  He didn’t think much of his revolver. It was a Smith & Wesson Military and Police model with fixed sights and a four-inch barrel, the standard weapon issued to every uniformed officer in the Police Department.

  It had been around forever. There were a lot better pistols available, revolvers with adjustable sights, revolvers with more powerful cartridges, like the .357 Magnum. If Joe had his choice, he would have carried a Colt .45 automatic, lik
e he’d carried in the Army in ’Nam after he’d made sergeant. If you shot somebody with a .45, they stayed shot, and from what he’d heard about the .38 Special, that wasn’t true.

  He’d heard that people had kept coming at cops after they’d been shot two and even three times with a .38 Special. But department regulations said that cops would carry only the weapon they were issued, and that was the Smith & Wesson Military and Police .38 Special, period. No exceptions, and you could get fired if they caught you with anything else.

  It probably didn’t matter. The firearms instructor at the Police Academy had told them that ninety percent or better of all cops went through their entire careers without once having drawn their pistols and shot at somebody.

  Finally Joe Magnella put on his uniform cap and then examined himself in the mirror mounted on the inside of the closet door. Satisfied with what he found, he closed the door and left the bedroom and went downstairs.

  “You sure you don’t want something to eat before you go to work?” his mother asked, coming out of the kitchen.

  “Not hungry, Mama, thank you,” Joe said. “And don’t wait up. I’ll be late.”

  “You really shouldn’t keep Anne-Marie out until all hours. She has to get up early and go to work. And it doesn’t look good.”

  “Mama, I told you, what she does is take a nap when she gets off work. Before I go there. And who cares what it looks like. We’re not doing anything wrong. And we’re engaged, for God’s sake.”

  “It doesn’t look right for a young girl to be out all hours, especially during the week.”

  “I’ll see you, Mama,” Joe said, and walked out the front door.

  His car was parked at the curb, right in front of the house. He had been lucky when he came home last night. Sometimes there was just no place to park on the whole block.

  Joe drove a 1973 Ford Mustang, dark green, with only a six-cylinder engine but with air-conditioning and an automatic transmission. He owed thirty-two (of thirty-six) payments of $128.85 to the Philadelphia Savings Fund Society.

  The Mustang was one of the few things in life he really wanted to have, and Anne-Marie had understood when they looked at it in the showroom and said, go ahead, make the down payment, it’ll be nice to have on the honeymoon, and if you buy a new car and take care of it, it’ll be cheaper in the long run than buying a used car and having to pay to have it fixed all the time.

  There was bird crap on the hood, on the passenger side, and on the trunk, and he took his handkerchief out and spit on it and wiped the bird crap off. Somebody had told him there was acid in bird crap that ate the paint if you didn’t get it off right away.

  He opened the hood and checked the oil and the water, and then got in and started it up and drove off, carefully, to avoid scraping the Mustang’s bumper against that of the Chevy parked in front of him.

  He turned right at the corner and then, when he reached South Broad Street, left, and headed for Center City. He came to City Hall, which sits in the center of the intersection of Broad and Market Streets; drove around it; and headed up North Broad Street. There was no better route from his house to the 23rd District Station, which is at 17th and Montgomery Streets.

  He found a place to park the Mustang, locked it carefully, and walked a block and a half to the station house and went inside. He was early, but that was on purpose. It was better to be early and have to wait a little for roll call than to take a chance and come in late. He was trying to earn a reputation for reliability.

  At five minutes to four he went into the roll-call room and waited for the sergeant to call the eighteen cops on the squad to order and take the roll.

  Nothing special happened at roll call. The sergeant who conducted the inspection found nothing wrong with Joe’s appearance, neither the cleanliness of his uniform and pistol, nor with the length of his hair. Joe privately thought that some of the cops on the squad were a disgrace to the uniform. Some of them were fat, their uniforms ragged. Some of the cops in the squad had been there for ten years, longer, and wanted nothing more from the Department than to put in their time and retire.

  Joe wanted to be something more than a simple police officer. He wasn’t sure how far he could go, but there was little doubt in his mind that he could, in time, make at least sergeant and possibly even lieutenant or captain. He was prepared to work for it.

  There was nothing special when the sergeant read the announcements. Two cops, both retired, had died, and the sergeant read off where they would be buried from, and when. There had been reported incidents of vandalism on both the Temple University and Girard College campuses, both of which were in the 23rd District. There were reports of cars being stripped on the east side of North Broad Street.

  The Special Operations Division was still taking applications from qualified officers for transfers to it. Joe would have liked to have applied, but he didn’t have the year’s time on the job that was required. He wasn’t sure what he would do, presuming they were still looking for volunteers once he had a year on the job.

  On one hand, Special Operations, which had been formed only a month before, was an elite unit (not as elite as Highway Patrol, which was the elite unit in the Department, but still a special unit, and you couldn’t even apply for Highway until you had three years on the job), and serving in an elite unit seemed to Joe to be the route to getting promotions. On the other hand, from what he’d heard, Special Operations was pretty damned choosy about who it took; he knew of three cops, two on his squad, who had applied and been turned down.

  It would seem to follow then, since Special Operations was so choosy, that it would be full of better-than-average cops. He would be competing against them, rather than against the guys in the 23rd, at least half of whom didn’t seem to give a damn if they ever got promoted and seemed perfectly willing to spend their lives riding around the 23rd in an RPC (radio patrol car).

  When roll call was over, Joe went out in the parking lot and got in his RPC. It was a battered, two-year-old 1971 Ford. But that, having an RPC, made him think again that it might be smart to stay in the 23rd for a while rather than applying for Special Operations when he had a year on the job.

  He had been on the job six months. He was, by a long-established traditional definition, a rookie. Rookies traditionally pull at least a year, sometimes two, working a radio patrol wagon.

  RPWs, which are manned by two police officers, serve as a combination ambulance and prisoner transporter. In Philadelphia the police respond to any call for assistance. In other large cities the police pass on requests to assist injured people, or man-lying-on-street calls to some sort of medical service organization, either a hospital ambulance service or an emergency service operated by the Fire Department or some other municipal agency. In Philadelphia, when people are in trouble they call the cops, and if the dispatcher understands that the trouble is a kid with a broken leg or that Grandma fell down the stairs, rather than a crime in progress, he sends a radio patrol wagon.

  In addition to the service RPWs provide to the community—and it is a service so expected by Philadelphians that no politician would ever suggest ending it—“wagon duty” serves the police in conditioning new officers to the realities of the job. When a cop in a car arrests somebody, he most often calls for a wagon to haul the doer to the district station. This frees him to resume his patrol and gives the rookies in the wagon a chance to see who was arrested, why, and how.

  Joe Magnella had worked an RPW only three months before the sergeant took him off and put him in a car by himself. That was sort of special treatment, and Joe was pretty sure he knew what caused it: It was because he had come home from ’Nam a sergeant with the Combat Infantry Badge.

  Captain Steven Haggerman, the 23rd District Commanding Officer, had been a platoon sergeant with the 45th Infantry Division in Korea. Lieutenant George Haskins, the senior of the three lieutenants assigned to the 23rd District, had served in ’Nam as a parachutist and lieutenant with the 187th Regimental Combat Team
. Two of the 23rd’s sergeants had seen service, either in ’Nam or Korea. An infantry sergeant with the CIB is not regarded as an ordinary rookie by fellow officers who have seen combat.

  It was nothing official. It was just the way it was. Army service, particularly in the infantry, was something like on-the-job training for the cops. So when one of the guys on the squad had put his retirement papers in after twenty years and they needed somebody to put in his RPC, the supervisors had talked it over and decided the best guy for the job, the one it seemed to make more sense to move out of wagon duty, was Magnella; he was new on the job but had been an infantry sergeant in Vietnam.

  So in that sense, Officer Joe Magnella reasoned as he started up the RPC and drove out of the parking lot, he had already been promoted. He had been on the job only six months, and they had already put him in an RPC by himself, instead of making him work a wagon for a year, eighteen months, two years.

  He turned right on Montgomery Avenue, waited for the light on North Broad Street, then crossed it and drove East to 10th Street, where he turned right and began his patrol.

  TWO

  When Anthony J. DeZego, a strikingly handsome man of thirty years and who was tall, well built, well dressed, and had a full set of bright white teeth, came out of the warehouse building at 2184 Delaware Avenue just after half past five, Victor and Charles were waiting for him, parked one hundred yards down the street.

  DeZego, who was jacketless and tieless, opened the rear door of a light brown 1973 Cadillac Sedan de Ville and took from a hanger a tweed sport coat and shrugged into it. Then, when he got behind the wheel, he retrieved a necktie from where he had left it hanging from the gearshift lever and slipped it around his neck. He slid into the passenger seat, pulled down the mirror on the sun visor, and knotted the tie. Then he slid back behind the wheel, started the engine, and drove off.

  Victor put the Pontiac in gear and followed him. “What you said before,” Victor said, “I think you were right.”