Men In Blue Page 7

  “Come? Of course, I’ll come.”

  “I thought I had the duty to tell you,” Gertrude Moffitt said, and hung up.

  Patricia Payne, her eyes full of tears, pushed the handset against her mouth.

  “You old bitch!” she said bitterly, her voice on the edge of breaking.

  Mrs. Newman’s eyebrows rose, but she said nothing.

  ****

  When Karl and Christina Mauhfehrt, of Kreis Braunfels, Hesse-Kassel, debarked from the North German Lloyd Steamer Hanover in New York in the spring of 1876, Christina was heavy with child. They were processed through Ellis Island, where Karl told the Immigration and Naturalization officer, one Sean O’Mallory, that his name was Mauhfehrt and that he was an uhrmacher by trade. Inspector O’Mallory had been on the job long enough to know that an uhrmacher was a watchmaker, and he wrote that in the appropriate blank on the form. He had considerably more trouble with Mauhfehrt, and after a moment’s indecision entered “Moffitt” as the surname on the form, and “Charles” as the given name.

  Charles and Christina Moffitt spent the next three days on the Lower East Side of New York, in a room in a dark, cold, and filthy “railroad” flat. On their fourth morning in the United States, they took the ferry across the Hudson River to Hoboken, New Jersey, where they boarded a train of the Pennsylvania Railroad. Three hours later they emerged from the Pennsylvania Station at Fifteenth and Market Streets in Philadelphia.

  An enormous building was under construction before their eyes. Within a few days, Charles Moffitt was to learn that it would be the City Hall, and that it was intended to top it off with a statue of William Penn, an Englishman, for whom the state of Pennsylvania was named. Many years later, he was to learn that the design was patterned after a wing of the Louvre Palace in Paris, France.

  He and Christina walked the cobblestone streets, and within a matter of hours found a room down by the river. He spent the next six days walking the streets, finding clock- and watchmakers and offering his services and being rejected. Finally, hired because he was young and large and strong, he found work at the City Hall construction site, as a carpenter’s helper, building and then tearing down and then building again the scaffolding up which the granite blocks for the City Hall were hauled.

  Their first child, Anna, was born when they had been in Philadelphia two months. Their first son, Charles, Jr., was born almost to the day a year later. By then, he had enough English to converse in what probably should be called pidgin English with his Italian, Polish, and Irish co-workers, and had been promoted to a position which was de facto, but not de jure, foreman. He made, in other words, no more money than the men he supervised, and he was hired by the day, which meant that if he didn’t work, he didn’t get paid.

  It was steady work, however, and it was enough for him to rent a flat in an old building on what was called Society Hill, not far from the run-down building in which the Constitution of the United States had been written.

  And he picked up a little extra money fixing clocks for people he worked with, and in the neighborhood, but he came to understand that his dream of becoming a watchmaker with his own store in the United States just wasn’t going to happen.

  When Charles, Jr. turned sixteen, in 1893, he was able to find work with his father, who by then was officially a foreman in the employ of Jos. Sullivan & Sons, Building Contractors. But by then, the job was coming to an end. The City Hall building itself was up, needing only interior completion. Italian master masons and stonecutters had that trade pretty well sewn up, and the Charles Moffitts, pere et fils, were construction carpenters, not stonemasons.

  When Charles, Jr. was twenty-two, in 1899, he went off to the Spanish-American War, arriving in Cuba just before hostilities were over, and returning to Philadelphia a corporal of cavalry, and just in time to take advantage of the politicians’ fervor to do something for Philadelphia’s Heroic Soldier Boys.

  Specifically, he was appointed to the police department, and assigned to the ninety-three-horse-strong mounted patrol, which had been formed just ten years previously. Officer Moffitt was on crowd-control duty on his horse when the City Hall was officially opened in 1901.

  He had been a policeman four years when his father fell to his death from a wharf under construction into the Delaware River in 1903. He was at that time still living at home, and with his father gone, he had little choice but to continue to do so; there was not enough money to maintain two houses.

  Nor did he take a wife, so long as his mother was alive, partly because of economics and partly because no woman would take him with his mother part of the bargain. Consequently, Charles Moffitt, Jr. married late in life, eighteen months after his mother had gone to her final reward.

  He married a German Catholic woman, Gertrude Haffner, who some people said, although she was nearly twenty years younger than her husband, bore a remarkable resemblance to his mother, and certainly manifested the same kind of devout, strong-willed character.

  He and Gertrude had two sons, John Xavier, born in 1924, and, as something of a surprise to both of them, Richard Charles, who came along eight years later in 1932.

  Charles Moffitt was a sergeant when he retired from the mounted patrol of the police department in 1937 at the age of sixty. He lived to be seventy-two, despite at least two packages of cigarettes and at least two quarts of beer a day, finally passing of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1949. By then his son John was on the police force, and his son Richard about to graduate from high school.

  ****

  Patricia Payne leaned her head against the wall and put her hand on the hook of the wall-mounted telephone, without realizing what she was doing.

  A moment later, the phone rang again. Pat Payne handed the handset to Mrs. Newman.

  “The Payne residence,” Mrs. Newman said, and then a moment later: “I’m not sure if Mrs. Payne is at home. I will inquire.”

  She covered the mouthpiece with her hand.

  “A gentleman who says he is Chief Inspector Coughlin of the Philadelphia Police Department,” Mrs. Newman said.

  Patricia Payne finished blowing her nose, and then reached for the telephone.

  “Hello, Denny,” Patricia Payne said. “I think I know why you’re calling.”

  “Who called?”

  “Who else? Mother Moffitt. She called out here and asked for Mrs. Moffitt, and told me Dutch is dead, and then she said I would be welcome at the funeral.”

  “I’m sorry, Patty,” Dennis V. Coughlin said. “I’m not surprised, but I’m sorry.”

  She was trying not to cry and didn’t reply.

  “Patty, people would understand if you didn’t go to the funeral,” he said.

  “Of course, I’ll go to the funeral,” Patricia Payne said, furiously. “And the wake. Dutch didn’t think I’m a godless whore, and I don’t think Jeannie does either.”

  “Nobody thinks that of you,” he said, comfortingly. “Come on, Patty!”

  “That old bitch does, and she lets me know it whenever she has the chance,” she said.

  Now Dennis V. Coughlin couldn’t think of anything to say.

  “I’m sorry, Denny,” Patricia Payne said, contritely. “I shouldn’t have said that. The poor woman has just lost her second, her remaining son.”

  Dennis V. Coughlin and John X. Moffitt had gone through the police academy together. Patricia Payne still had the photograph somewhere, of all those bright young men in their brand-new uniforms, intending to give it to Matt someday.

  There was another photograph of John X. Moffitt around. It and his badge hung on a wall in the Roundhouse lobby. Under the photograph there was a now somewhat faded typewritten line that said “Sergeant John X. Moffitt, Killed in the Line of Duty, November 10, 1952.”

  Staff Sergeant John Moffitt, USMCR, had survived Inchon and the Yalu and come home only to be shot down in a West Philadelphia gas station, answering a silent burglar alarm.

  They’d buried him in Holy Sepulcher Cemetery, following a high ma
ss of requiem celebrated by the cardinal archbishop of Philadelphia at Saint Dominic’s. Sergeant Dennis V. Coughlin had been one of the pallbearers. Three months later, John Xavier Moffitt’s first, and only, child had been born, a son, christened Matthew Mark after his father’s wishes, in Saint Dominic’s.

  “Patty?” Chief Inspector Coughlin asked. “You all right, dear?”

  “I was thinking,” she said, “of Johnny.”

  “It’ll be on the TV at six,” Denny Coughlin said. “Worst luck, there was a Channel 9 woman in the Waikiki Diner.”

  “Is that where it happened? A diner?”

  “On Roosevelt Boulevard. He walked up on a stick-up. There was two of them. Dutch got one of them, the one that shot him, a woman. Patty, what I’m saying is that I wouldn’t like Matt to hear it over the TV. You say the word, and I’ll go up there and tell him for you.”

  “You’re a good man, Denny,” Patricia said. “But no, I’ll tell him.”

  “Whatever you say, dear.”

  “But would you do something else for me? If you don’t want to, just say so.”

  “You tell me,” he said.

  “Meet me at Matt’s fraternity house—”

  “And be with you, sure,” he interrupted.

  “And go with me when I, when Matt and I, go see Jeannie.”

  “Sure,” he said.

  “I’ll leave right now,” she said. “It’ll take me twenty-five, thirty minutes.”

  “I’ll be waiting for you,” Chief Inspector Coughlin said.

  Patricia hung up, and then dialed the number of Matt’s fraternity house. She told the kid who answered, and who said Matt was in class, to tell him that something important had come up and he was to wait for her there, period, no excuses, until she got there.

  Then she went upstairs and stripped out of her skirt and sweater and put on a black slip and a black dress, and a simple strand of pearls. She looked at the telephone and considered calling her husband, and decided against it, although he would be hurt. Brewster Payne was a good man, and she didn’t want to run him up against Mother Moffitt if it could be avoided.

  After ten months of widowhood, Patricia Stevens Moffitt had arranged with her sister Dorothy to care for the baby during the day and went to work as a typist, with the intention eventually of becoming a legal secretary, for the law firm of Lowerie, Tant, Foster, Pedigill and Payne, which occupied an entire floor in the Philadelphia Savings Fund Society Building on Market Street.

  Two months after entering Lowerie, Tant, Foster, Pedigill and Payne’s employ, while pushing Matthew Mark Moffitt near the Franklin Institute in a stroller, Patricia Moffitt ran into Brewster Payne II, grandson of one of the founding partners, and son of a senior partner, who was then in his seventh year with the firm and about to be named a partner himself.

  Young Mr. Brewster, as he was then known, was pushing a stroller himself, in which sat a two-year-old boy, and holding a four-and-a-half-year-old girl at the end of a leash, connected to a leather harness. They walked along together. Within the hour, she learned that Mrs. Brewster Payne II had eight months before skidded out of control coming down into Stroudsburg from their cabin in the Poconos, leaving him, as he put it, “in rather much the same position as yourself, Mrs. Moffitt.”

  Patricia Stevens Moffitt and Brewster Payne II were united in matrimony three months later. The simple ceremony was performed by the Hon. J. Edward Davison, judge of the Court of Common Pleas in his chambers. Mr. Payne, Senior, did not attend the ceremony, although his wife did. Mr. Gerald Stevens, Patricia’s father, was there, but her mother was not.

  There was no wedding trip, and the day after the wedding, Brewster Payne II resigned from Lowerie, Tant, Foster, Pedigill and Payne, although, through a bequest from his grandfather, he owned a substantial block of its common stock.

  Shortly thereafter, the legal partnership of Mawson & Payne was formed.

  John D. Mawson had been two years ahead of Brewster Payne II at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. They had been acquaintances but not friends. Mawson was a veteran (he had been an air corps captain, a fighter pilot) and Brew Payne had not been in the service. Further, Payne thought Mawson was a little pushy. It was Jack Mawson’s announced intention to become a professor of law at Pennsylvania, specializing in Constitutional law. Jack Mawson was not, as Brewster Payne II thought of it, the sort of fellow you cultivated.

  Mawson had exchanged his air corps lapel pins for those of the judge advocate general’s corps reserve when he passed his bar examination, and three months later had gone off to the Korean War as a major. He had returned as Lieutenant Colonel J. Dunlop Mawson, with a war bride (a White Russian girl he had met in Tokyo) and slightly less lofty, if more practical, plans for the resumption of his civilian law practice.

  He had earned the approval of his superiors in the army with his skill as a prosecutor of military offenders. He had liked what he had been doing, but was honest enough with himself to realize that his success was in large part due to the ineptitude of opposing counsel. Very often, he was very much aware that if he had been defending the accused, the accused would have walked out of the courtroom a free man.

  Odette Mawson had already shown that she had expensive tastes, which ruled out his staying in the army. He would have been reduced in grade in the peacetime army to captain, and captains did not make much money. About, J. Dunlop Mawson thought, what a district attorney in Philadelphia made. District attorneys do not grow rich honestly.

  That ruled out transferring his prosecutorial skills to civilian practice.

  But it did not rule out a career in criminal law. While ordinary criminal lawyers, dealing as they generally do with the lower strata of society, seldom make large amounts of money, extraordinary criminal lawyers sometimes do. And they increase their earning potential as the socioeconomic class of their clientele rises. An attorney representing someone accused of embezzling two hundred thousand dollars from a bank can expect to be compensated for his services more generously than if he defended someone accused of stealing that much money from the same bank at the point of a gun.

  When J. Dunlop Mawson, who had made it subtly if quickly plain that he liked to be addressed as “Colonel,” heard that Brewster Payne had had a falling-out with his father over his having married a Roman Catholic cop’s widow with a baby, a girl who had been a typist for the firm, he thought he saw in him the perfect partner.

  First of all, of course, Brewster Payne II was a good lawyer, and he had acquired seven years’ experience with a law firm that was good as well as prestigious. And he was also Episcopal Academy and Princeton, Rose Tree Hunt Club and the Merion Country Club—without question a member of the Philadelphia Establishment.

  Brewster Payne II was not a fool. He knew exactly what Jack Mawson wanted from him. And he had no desire whatever to practice criminal law. But Mawson’s arguments made sense. Times had changed. Perfectly respectable people were getting divorced. And the division of the property of the affluent that went with a divorce was worthy, in direct ratio to the value and complexity of the property involved, of the talents of a skilled trust and estate lawyer. He would handle the crooks, Jack Mawson told Brewster Payne, and Payne would handle the cuckolded.

  Payne added one nonnegotiable caveat: Jack could handle anything from embezzlers to ax murderers, so long as they were, so to speak, amateurs. There would be no connection, however indirect, with Organized Crime. If they were to become partners, Payne would have to have the privilege of client rejection, and they had better write that down, so there would be no possibility of misunderstanding, down the pike.

  Five months after Mawson & Payne opened offices for the practice of law in the First National Bank Building, across from the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel and the Union League on South Broad Street, Patricia Stevens Payne found herself with child.

  Brew Payne, ever the lawyer, first asked if she was sure, and when she said there was no question, nodded his head as if she had just given him
the time of day.

  “Well, then,” he said, “we’ll have to do something about Matthew.”

  “I don’t know what you mean, honey,” Patricia said, uneasily.

  “I’d planned to bring it up before,” he said. “But there hasn’t seemed to be the right moment. I don’t at all like the notion of his growing up with any question in his mind of not being one of us. What I would like to do, if you’re agreeable, is enter a plea for adoption. And if you’re agreeable, Patricia, to enter the appropriate pleas in your behalf with regard to Amelia and Foster.”

  When she didn’t immediately respond, Brewster Payne misunderstood her silence for reluctance.

  “Well, please don’t say no with any finality now,” he said. “I’m afraid you’re going to have to face the fact that both Amy and Foster do think of you as their mother.”

  “Brewster,” Patricia said, finding her voice, “sometimes you’re a damned fool.”

  “So I have been told,” he said. “As recently as this afternoon, by the colonel.”

  “But you are warm and kind and I love you very much,” she said.

  “I hear that sort of thing rather less than the other,” he said. “I take it you’re agreeable?”

  “Why did Jack Mawson say you were a damned fool?”

  “I told him I thought we should decline a certain client,” he said. “You haven’t answered my question.”

  “Would you like a sworn deposition? ‘Now comes Patricia Payne who being duly sworn states that the only thing she loves more than her unborn child, and her husband’s children, and her son, is her husband’?”

  “A simple yes will suffice,” Brew Payne said, and put his arms around her. “Thank you very much.”

  That was her sin, which had made her a godless whore, in the eyes of Gertrude Moffitt: marrying outside the church, living in sin, bearing Brewster’s child, and allowing that good man to give his name and his love to a fatherless boy.

  Patricia was worried about her son. There had been, over the past two or three weeks, something wrong. Brewster sensed it too, and suggested that Matt was suffering from the Bee Syndrome, which was rampant among young men Matt’s age. Matt was driven, Brewster said, to spread pollen, and sometimes there just was not an adequate number, or even one, Philadelphia blossom on which to spread it.