The Victim boh-3 Read online

  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'reengaged, 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 sixcylinder 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 23^rd District Station, which is at 17^th 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 23^rd 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 wasthe elite unit in the Department, but still aspecial 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 23^rd, 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 23^rd 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 23^rd 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-onstreet 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 23^rd District Commanding Officer, had been a platoon sergeant with the 45^th Infantry Division in Korea. Lieutenant George Haskins, the senior of the three lieutenants assigned to the 23^rd District, had served in 'Nam as a parachutist and lieutenant with the 187^th Regimental Combat Team. Two of the 23^ rd '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 10^th 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."

  "What did I say before?"

  "About him probably fucking somebody he shouldn't have," Victor said. "Those really good-looking guys are always getting in trouble doing that."

  "Not all of us," Charles said.

  Victor laughed.

  Two minutes later he said, "Oh, shit, he's going right downtown."

  "Is that a problem?"

  "The traffic is a bitch," Victor said.

  "Don't lose him."

  "If I do, then what? We know where he lives?"

  "We do. But I don't want to do it there unless we have to."

  Victor did not lose Anthony J. DeZego in traffic. He was a good wheelman. Charles knew of none better, which was one of the reasons he had brought Victor in on this. They had worked together before, too, and Charles had learned that Victor didn't get excited when that was a bad thing to do.

  Thirty minutes after they had picked up DeZego-the traffic was that bad-DeZego pulled the Cadillac in before the entrance to the Warwick Hotel on South 16^th Street in downtown Philadelphia, got out of the car, handed the doorman a bill, and then went into a cocktail lounge at the north end of the hotel.

  "A real big shot," Victor said. "Too big to park his car himself."

  "I'd like to know where it gets parked," Charles said. "That might be useful."

  "I'll see what I can see," Victor said.

  "You'll drive around the block, right?"

  "Right."

  Charles got out of the Pontiac and walked past the door to the cocktail lounge. He saw DeZego slip into a chair by a table right by the entrance, shake hands with three men already sitting there, and jokingly kiss the hand of a long-haired blonde who wasn't wearing a bra.

  I hope she was worth it, pal, Charles thought.

  The Cadillac de Ville was still in front of the hotel entrance when Charles got there, engine running. But he hadn't walked much farther when, casually glancing over his shoulder, he saw it move away from the curb and then make the first left. A heavily jowled man in a bellboy's uniform was at the wheel.

  Charles crossed the street, now walking quickly, to see if he could-if not catch up with it-at least get some idea where it had gone.

  Heavy traffic on narrow streets helped him. He actually got ahead of the car and had to stand on a corner, glancing at his watch, until it passed him again. Two short blocks farther down, he saw it turn into a parking garage.

  He waited nearby until, a couple of minutes later, the jowly bellboy came out and waddled back toward the hotel. Charles followed him on the other side of the street and, when the bellboy came close to the hotel, timed his pace, crossing the street so that he would be outside the cocktail lounge. He saw the bellboy hand DeZego the keys to the Cadillac, then saw DeZego drop them in the pocket of his jacket.

  He walked back to the parking garage and stood near the corner, examining the building carefully. Somewhat surprised, he saw that the pedestrian entrance to the building was via a one-way gate, like those in the subways in New York, a system of rotating gates, ceiling-high that turned only one way, letting people in but not out.

  He thought that over, wondering how the system worked, how a pedestrian-or somebody who had just parked his car- got out of the building. Then he saw how it worked. There was a pedestrian exit way down beside the attendant's booth. You had to walk past the attendant to get out. The system, he decided, was designed to reduce theft, at least theft by people who looked like thieves.

  He walked to the garage and passed through the one-way gate. Inside was a door. He pushed it open and found two more doors. One had ONE painted on it in huge letters, and the other read, STAIRS. He went through the ONE door and found himself on the ground floor of the garage. The door closed automatically behind him, and there was no way to open it.

  DeZego's Cadillac was not on the ground floor. He went up the vehicular ramp to the second floor. DeZego's car wasn't there, either, but he saw that one could enter through the door to the stairwell. He walked up the stairs to the third floor. Same thing. No brown Cadillac but he could get back on the stairs. He found the Caddy on the fourth floor. Then he went back into the stairwell and up another flight of stairs. It turned out to be the last; the top floor was open.

  He walked to the edge and looked down, then went into the stairwell again and walked all the way back to the ground floor. The attendant looked up but didn't seem particularly interested in him.

  I don't look as if I've just ripped off a stereo, Charles thought.

  He walked back to South 16^th Street and stood on the corner catty-corner to wait for Victor to come around the block again.

  Then he saw the cops. Two of them in an unmarked car parked across the street from the hotel, watching the door to the cocktail lounge.

  Were they watching Brother DeZego? Or somebody with him? Or somebody entirely different?

  Victor showed up, and when Charles raised his hand and smiled, Victor stopped the Pontiac long enough for Charles to get in.

  "The Caddy's in a parking garage," Charles said.

  "Penn Services-I saw it," Victor said.

  "There," Charles said.

  "I also saw two cops," Victor said. "Plainclothes. Detectives. Whatever."

  "If they were in plainclothes, how could you tell they were cops?"

  "Shit!" Victor chuckled.

  "I saw them," Charles said.

  "And?"

  "And nothing. For all we know, they're the Vice Squad. Or looking for pickpockets. Take a drive for five minutes and then drop me at the garage. Then drive around again and again, until you can find a place to park on the street outside the parking garage. You can pick me up when I'm finished."

  "How long is this going to take?"

  "However long it takes Lover Boy to leave that bar," Charles said, and then, "How would I get from the garage exit to the airport?"

  "I'm driving," Victor said.

  "I'm toying with the idea of driving myself in Lover Boy's car," Charles said. "I think I would attract less attention from the attendant if I drove out, instead of carrying the bag."

  "Then leave the bag," Victor said.

  "I've already walked out of there once," Charles said. "He might remember, especially if I was carrying a bag the second time. I'm not sure what I'll do. Whatever seems best."

  "And if you do decide to drive, what do you want me to do?"

  "First, you tell me which way I turn to get to the airport," Charles said.

  "Left, then the next left, then the next right. That'll put you on South Broad Street. You just stay on it. There'll be signs."

  "If you see me drive out, follow me. As soon as you can, without attracting attention, get in front of me and I'll follow you."

  " Okay," Victor said.

  Victor then doubled back, driving slowly through the h
eavy traffic until he was close to the Penn Services parking garage. Then he pulled to the curb and Charles got out. He opened the rear door, took out his carry-on bag, held it over his shoulder, and crossed the street to the pedestrian entrance to the garage, where he went through the one-way gate.

  There is a basic flaw in my brilliant planning, he thought as he walked up the stairs to the fourth floor. Lover Boy may send Jowls the Bellboy to fetch his Caddy.

  When he reached the fourth floor, he saw that there were windows from which he more than likely could look down at the street and see who was coming for the car.

  If Jowls comes for it, I'll just have to walk down the stairs and get to the hotel before Jowls does, or at least before Lover Boy leaves the bar to get into the car, and follow him wherever he goes next. If the attendant remembers me, so what? Nothing will have happened here, anyway.

  Charles took his handkerchief out and wiped the concrete windowsill clean, so that he wouldn't soil his Burberry, and then settled down to wait.

  ****

  Four young men, one much younger than the other three, each with a revolver concealed somewhere under their neat business suits, stood around a filing cabinet in the outer office of the Police Commissioner of the City of Philadelphia, drinking coffee from plastic cups and trying to stay out of the way.

  Two of them were sergeants, one was a detective, and one-the young one-was an officer, the lowest rank in the police hierarchy.

  Both sergeants and the detective were, despite their relative youth, veteran police officers. One of the sergeants had taken and passed the examination for promotion to lieutenant; the detective had taken and passed the examination for sergeant; and both were waiting for their promotions to take effect. The other sergeant had two months before being promoted from detective. The young man had not been on the job long enough even to be eligible to take the examination for promotion to either corporal or detective, which were comparable ranks, and the first step up from the bottom.

  They all had comparable jobs, however. They all worked, as a sort of a police equivalent to a military aide-de-camp, for very senior police supervisors. Their bosses had all been summoned to a meeting with the Commissioner and the Deputy Commissioner of Operations, and for the past hour had been sitting around the long, wooden table in the Commissioner's conference room.