Final Justice Read online

  What the hell is going on?

  “I’m delighted, Detective Payne,” Inspector Wohl said, sarcastically, “that you have managed to squeeze time for us into your busy schedule.”

  “There’s one bastard I would really like to see shuffling around in shackles,” Captain Hollaran said, handing something to Captain Pekach.

  “You’d like to see him in shackles?” Captain Sabara replied. “I’d like to see him fry. I’d strap him in the chair myself.”

  Despite his somewhat menacing appearance, Captain Michael Sabara was really a rather gentle man. Matt was surprised at his vehemence.

  “Fry”? “I’d strap him in the chair myself”?

  Who are they talking about?

  “You were saying, Detective Payne?” Inspector Wohl went on.

  “Sorry, sir. I had to change my clothes,” Payne said.

  “When was the last time you got a postcard, Dave?” Commissioner Coughlin asked.

  “I get one every couple of months,” Pekach replied. “The one before this was from Rome. This one’s from someplace in France.”

  “Probably from where he lives,” Coughlin said, shaking his head. “The sonofabitch knows the French won’t let us extradite him.”

  “Unless it had something to do with Monsignor Schneider, I don’t think I want to hear why you had to change your clothes,” Inspector Wohl said.

  “Nothing to do with the monsignor, sir.”

  “Good,” Inspector Wohl said. “I presume everything went well at the meeting?”

  “Everything went well at the meeting,” Matt said. “I e-mailed you, sir.”

  “So you did,” Wohl said. “And I was delighted to hear that you think you’re in love, but wondered why you thought you should notify me officially.”

  “You’re in love, are you, Payne?” Captain Pekach asked.

  “No, sir, I’m not.”

  “Then why did you tell Inspector Wohl you were, and as part of your official duties?” Commissioner Coughlin asked.

  “It was a little joke, sir,” Matt said.

  Jesus, why the hell did I do that?

  And damn it, I sent it to his personal e-mail address, so it wasn’t official.

  “You have to watch that sort of thing, Matty,” Commissioner Coughlin said, his tone suggesting great disappointment in Matt’s lack of professionalism.

  “Who are you in love with, Payne?” Captain Sabara asked.

  “There was a girl at the meeting,” Matt said. “I . . .”

  “The sort of girl you could bring home to dinner with your mother?” Sabara pursued.

  “Or to dinner with my Martha?” Captain Pekach asked.

  Martha was Mrs. Pekach.

  “Sir?”

  “More important,” Sabara asked, “what makes you think this female is in love with you?”

  I am having my chain pulled. Just for the hell of it? Or is there more to this?

  “Actually, sir, I knew she was in love with me from the moment she saw me. I seem to have that effect on women.”

  There were smiles, but not so much as a chuckle.

  “Let me put it to you this way, Matty,” Commissioner Coughlin said, very seriously. “The one thing a detective—or a newly promoted sergeant—doesn’t need is a reputation as a ladies’ man . . .”

  What did he say—“or a new sergeant”?

  “. . . it tends to piss off the wives of the men they’re working with,” Coughlin finished.

  Now there was laughter.

  “Congratulations, Matty,” Coughlin said. “You’re number one on the list.”

  He stood up, went to Matt, shook his hand, and put his arm around his shoulders.

  “I’ll be damned,” Matt said.

  “Damned? Probably, almost certainly,” Wohl said. “But for the moment, we’re all proud of you.”

  “Yeah, we are, Matt,” Pekach said. “I don’t think even our beloved boss was ever number one on a list.”

  “Yeah, he was,” Coughlin corrected him. “Peter was number one on the lieutenant’s list.”

  Officer O’Mara appeared at the door with a digital camera, lined them all up, with Matt in the middle, and took four pictures of them.

  “There’s a dark side to this,” Pekach said. “Matt, you know Martha’s going to have a party for you.”

  “She doesn’t have to do that,” Matt said.

  “She will want to,” Pekach said.

  “I’ve got to go back to work,” Coughlin said. He looked at Hollaran. “Frank and I would have been out of here long ago if Detective Payne hadn’t found it necessary to take a bath in the middle of the morning.”

  “It was a matter of absolute necessity,” Matt said.

  “So we’ll leave just as soon as Matty calls his father and mother and lets them have the good news.”

  “Sir?” Wohl asked, confused.

  “You don’t mind if I borrow him for a couple of hours, do you, Peter?”

  “No, sir.”

  “I’ll wait for you outside, Matty,” Coughlin said.

  “Yes, sir.”

  There was a round of handshakes, and in a moment Matt and Wohl were alone in the office.

  “Sit down, have a cup of coffee, and call,” Wohl said. “You seem a little shaken.”

  Matt said aloud what he was thinking.

  “I thought I was going to pass,” he said. “Not number one, but pass. But now that it’s happened . . . Sergeant Payne?”

  “You’ll get used to it, Matt,” Wohl said, poured him a cup of coffee, and pointed to the couch, an order for him to sit down.

  “Coughlin will wait,” he said. “Prepare yourself for another ‘what you need is a couple of years in uniform’ speech.”

  “Another? You know about the first?”

  Wohl nodded. “And for the record, Matt, I think he’s right.”

  “I don’t want to be a uniform sergeant,” Matt said.

  “You need that experience,” Wohl said. “End of my speech.”

  “Thank you,” Matt said, sat down, took out his cellular, and started pushing autodial buttons.

  It didn’t take long.

  Mrs. Elizabeth Newman, the Payne housekeeper, said:

  “I thought you knew, Matt, your mother went to Wilmington overnight.”

  Goddamn it, I did know!

  “Thanks, Elizabeth. I did know. I forgot.”

  On the second call, Mrs. Irene Craig, Executive Secretary to Brewster Cortland Payne, Esq., founding partner of Mawson, Payne, Stockton, McAdoo & Lester, arguably Philadelphia’s most prestigious law firm, said, a certain tone of loving exasperation in her voice, “I left two messages on your machine, Matt. Your dad went to Washington on the eight-thirteen this morning, and is going to spend the night with your mother in Wilmington.”

  And I got both of them, too, goddamn it!

  “I’m sorry to bother you, Mrs. Craig. Forgive me.”

  “No, I won’t. But I love you anyway.”

  On the third call, a nasal-voiced female somewhat tartly informed him that Dr. Payne would be teaching all day, and could not be reached unless it was an emergency.

  “Thank you very much. Tell Dr. Payne, please, that unless we have her check within seventy-two hours, we’re going to have to repossess the television.”

  “Amy always teaches all day on Monday,” Inspector Wohl said.

  Inspector Wohl knew more about Dr. Payne’s schedule than her brother did. They were close friends, and on-and-off lovers.

  Matt looked at him but said nothing.

  “Low-ranking police officers should not keep Deputy Commissioners waiting,” Wohl said. “You might want to write that down.”

  “Yes, sir. Thank you very much, sir.”

  Deputy Commissioner Coughlin was standing on the stairs to the building waiting for him.

  “You drive, Matty,” he ordered. “Frank had things to do. You can either drop me at the Roundhouse later, or I’ll catch a ride somehow.”

  “Yes
, sir. Where are we going?”

  “The Roy Rogers at Broad and Snyder,” Coughlin said. “You heard about that?”

  “Yes, sir. I ran into Tony Harris at the Roundhouse this morning. Did they get the doers?”

  “Not yet,” Coughlin said. “We will, of course. We should have already. I’d like to know why we haven’t.”

  And en route, I will get the speech.

  I really hate to refuse anything he asks of me.

  And he’s right—and Peter made it clear he agrees with him—I probably would learn a hell of a lot I don’t know and should if I went to one of the districts as a uniform sergeant.

  But I don’t want to be a uniform sergeant, spending my time driving around a district waiting for something to happen, getting involved in domestic disturbances, petty theft, and all that.

  I like being a detective. I like working in civilian clothing.

  And I didn’t come up with that ruling that the high-five guys get their choice of assignment. They offered that prize, and I won it, fair and square, and I want it.

  That’s what I’ll tell him.

  When all else fails, tell the truth.

  “What did your mother have to say?” Commissioner Coughlin asked.

  “My father went to Washington,” Matt replied. “He’s going to meet Mother in Wilmington, and they’ll spend the night. So I’ll have to wait until they get back to tell them. And I couldn’t get Amy on the phone; she teaches all day on Monday.”

  “Is he still pushing you to go to law school?”

  Here it comes: “Maybe you should think about it, Matt.”

  “With great subtlety and even greater determination.”

  “He means well, Matty,” Coughlin said.

  “I know.”

  “What’s Peter got you working on?” Coughlin asked.

  I’m not supposed to tell you. But on the other hand, you’re Deputy Commissioner Coughlin. You have every right in the world to ask.

  “A cop-on-the-take question. Captain Cassidy, of the Eighteenth, is driving to his new condominium at Atlantic City in his new GMC Yukon XL. He gave his old one—last year’s— to his daughter, who is married to a sergeant in the Eleventh. They also have a condo at the shore.”

  “Peter got it from Internal Affairs?” Coughlin asked.

  “Until just now, I thought he got it from you,” Matt said. “Either you or Chief Lowenstein. He said he wanted answers before Internal Affairs got involved.”

  Chief Inspector Matthew L. Lowenstein was chief of detectives.

  “And have you? Come up with any answers?”

  “Not so far.”

  “What have you got so far?”

  “His major expense is the condo,” Matt said. “The payment on the mortgage—$325,000—is about $2,400 a month. They furnished it from scratch, and the furniture payment is $323 a month. The Yukon—”

  “What’s a Yukon?” Coughlin interrupted.

  “I’m not really sure. What Cassidy has—and the old one, too, that he gave to his daughter—is the big GMC. Until I started this, I thought they called them ’Suburbans.’ ”

  “Okay,” Coughlin said.

  “Anyway, he bought the new Yukon—no trade-in—with no money down, on a four-year note. That’s $683 a month. That’s about—”

  “Thirty-four hundred a month,” Coughlin interrupted. “Which is a large chunk out of a captain’s pay.”

  “His house is paid for,” Matt said. “He lives in Northeast Philly, not far from Chief Wohl.”

  “I know.”

  “He has two kids in school, one in Archbishop Ryan High School and the other in Temple. I don’t know yet what that costs.”

  “It’s not cheap.”

  “On the income side, in the last nine months, his mother, who lived with him, died. And so did a brother. An unmarried brother, in Easton. There was some insurance—I’m working on how much—and some property. I’m working on that.”

  “Gut feeling?”

  “I don’t think he’s on the take,” Matt said. “Not the type.”

  “You think you can tell by looking, do you, Matty?”

  “The Black Buddha told me that just because you can’t take your gut feeling to court, doesn’t mean you should ignore it,” Matt said.

  “You better get out of the habit of calling him that, if you’re going to Homicide.”

  “It doesn’t make him mad,” Matt argued. “He told me that Buddha was a very wise man, and ‘God knows, I’m black.’ ”

  Coughlin chuckled.

  “Have you thought what Lieutenant Washington is going to think if you go to Homicide?”

  That’s two “if you’re going to Homicide”s. Come on, Uncle Denny. Get the speech over with.

  “Sure,” Matt said.

  “Aside from the fact that Captain Patrick Cassidy is an affable Irishman who is good to his wife and daughter, and probably has a dog named Spot, why aren’t you made suspicious by his sudden new affluence?”

  “There could be a number of explanations for it.”

  “I’m all ears.”

  “He cared for his mother for years. She could have left him money. Or the brother. Even if they didn’t, I can hear his wife saying, ‘Okay, that’s over. Your mother’s gone. I want a place at the shore.’ ”

  “Even if they can’t afford it?”

  “I hope to find out they can,” Matt said. “I was going to go to Easton today to check the brother’s will.”

  “Was?”

  “Here I am, at your orders,” Matt said.

  “We won’t be at the Roy Rogers long,” Coughlin said. “I just wanted a look around after the crime scene people did their business. I thought you might want to have a look, since you may go to Homicide.”

  That’s two “if”s and a “may.” Where’s the speech?

  “I would. Thank you.”

  They rode in silence for a minute or two, and there was no speech, which both surprised and worried Matt.

  There has to be a hook in the two “if”s and a “may.”

  What’s he done? Had a word with the commissioner, who will call me in and say that while I’m certainly entitled to go to Homicide, “the department has a real problem. They really need a sergeant with your experience in the Special Victims Unit and you’ll certainly understand that the needs of the department are paramount, and I give you my word that you’ll get to Homicide one day.”

  If that’s what he’s done, he certainly won’t tell me.

  Shit!

  “Who were they talking about when I walked in?” Matt asked.

  “Who’s who?”

  “The ‘bastard’ Frank Hollaran said he’d really like to see in shackles, that Mike Sabara wants to personally strap in the electric chair.”

  “Isaac ‘Fort’ Festung. The sonofabitch keeps sending Pekach postcards.”

  “Who is he?”

  “You really don’t know?” Coughlin asked, his surprise evident in his voice.

  “No, I don’t,” Matt confessed. “The name sounds familiar . . . but no, I really don’t know. What did he do?”

  “How old are you, Matty?”

  “Twenty-seven.”

  “I guess that’s why you never heard of him. When you were seven years old—no, six; she was in the trunk for a year—Fort Festung beat his girlfriend to death, stuffed her body in a trunk, and put the trunk in a closet. When they finally found her, her body was mummified.”

  “Jesus! And he sends Dave Pekach postcards from prison?” Matt asked, and then, remembering, added, “I thought Dave said from France.”

  “He did,” Coughlin said. “Festung never went to prison. After Dave got a search warrant, found the body, and arrested him, his lawyer, now our beloved Senator Feldman, got him released at his arraignment on forty thousand dollars bail, and he jumped it.”

  “He was charged with murder and got out on bail?” Matt asked, incredulously.

  “Yeah, that’s just what he did,” Coughlin said, �
�and he’s been on the run ever since. A couple of months ago, they found him in France.”

  “And now he’ll be extradited and tried?”

  “He’s already been tried. The only in absentia trial I ever heard about. The jury found him guilty, and Eileen Solomon sentenced him to life without possibility of parole.”

  “The D.A.?” Matt asked, surprised.

  The Hon. Eileen McNamara Solomon had just been reelected as district attorney of Philadelphia, taking sixty-seven percent of the votes cast.

  “Before she was D.A., she was a judge,” Coughlin said. “And no, Matty, it doesn’t look as if he’ll be extradited. He’s got the French government in his pocket. And knows it. And likes to rub it in our faces, especially Dave Pekach’s. That’s what the postcard was all about. He’s still thumbing his nose at the system.”

  “I’ll be damned,” Matt said.

  “Get the case out and read it. It’s interesting,” Coughlin said, and then, nodding out the windshield, “I wonder if they’re just slow, or they got something.”

  Matt followed his glance. The crime scene van was parked on Snyder Street, fifty yards past the Roy Rogers restaurant.

  “I think there’s a place to park right in front of the van,” Coughlin said. “You can drop me here.”

  “You want me to come in?” Matt asked, as he pulled to the curb.

  “That’s the idea,” Coughlin said, as he got out of the car. “If you’re going to Homicide, you might find this educational.”

  That’s three “if”s and a “may.”

  [THREE]

  Matt had to show his badge to the uniform standing outside to get past him into the Roy Rogers, and then was surprised to find Coughlin waiting for him just inside the door.

  The restaurant was empty except for a man Matt guessed was the manager, sitting with a cup of coffee at one of the banquettes near the door, and a forensic technician trying to find—or maybe lift—prints from a banquette at the rear of the restaurant, by the kitchen door.

  And then the kitchen door opened, and Detective Tony Harris came through it, and saw Coughlin. He walked up to him.