Men In Blue (Badge of Honor 1)

A shrink would say that he had gotten drunk as a delayed reaction to seeing Dutch Moffitt slumped dead against the wall of the Waikiki Diner. So, for that matter, would his boss, Chief Inspector Dennis V. Coughlin. And so, he realized, would his father. His father had known he would not be at the wake, and why.

There was no way either Denny Coughlin or his father would hear about it. There had been no other cops in the Hotel Adelphia, and he had managed to get home without running over a covey of nuns or into a fire hydrant.

God, Peter Wohl thought, takes care of fools and drunks, and I certainly qualify on both counts.

The red light on his telephone answering machine was glowing a steady red. If there had been calls, it would have been blinking on and off”.

He went into the kitchen, opened the refrigerator, and drank most of a twelve-ounce bottle of soda water from the neck, which produced a booming belch.

Then he went to his bedroom, and remembered (which pleased him) about getting his uniform out of the zipper bag so that he could have it pressed in the morning. He had just laid the bag on an upholstered chair and started to work the zipper when the phone rang.

He looked at his watch. It was almost two in the morning. Neither his mother nor Barbara would be calling at this hour; it was therefore safe to answer the phone. He picked up the phone beside the bed.

“Wohl,” he said.

“I hope I didn’t wake you, Inspector.” Wohl recognized the voice of Lieutenant Louis Natali of Homicide.

“I just walked in, Lou,” Wohl said.

“Well, if you heard it over the radio, I’m sorry, but I thought you would want to know.”

“I didn’t have a radio,” Wohl said. “What didn’t I hear?”

He’s calling to tell me they caught the little shit who killed Dutch; that was nice of him.

“I’ll try to give it to you quick,” Natali said. “Hobbs and I were down in the Third District . . . checking out a report that Gerald Vincent Gallagher had been seen, About one o’clock, we heard a radio call of a stabbing and hospital case at Six-C Stockton Place. A little while later, I called Homicide and found we had a job there. Lieutenant DelRaye is on the scene. The deceased is a guy named Jerome Nelson.”

“Christ, I met him this afternoon,” Wohl said. “Nice little . . .”He stopped himself and ended, “Guy.”

“The female who called it in is your friend Louise Dutton.”

“I’ll be damned,” Wohl said. “She lives upstairs.”

“I was told she was hysterical and locked herself in her apartment. DelRaye just called for a wagon to transport her to Homicide. I think he’s talking about taking her door if she doesn’t come out.”

“Jesus!”

“You didn’t get this from me, Peter,” Natali said.

“I owe you,” Wohl said, broke the connection with his finger, and dialed from memory the number of the Homicide Division. A detective answered.

“This is Inspector Wohl,” he said. “Lieutenant DelRaye is at a homicide scene on Stockton Place. Please get word to him that I am en route, and he is not to, not to, take the door until I get there.”

At 2:03 a.m., One-Ninety-Four, a patrol car assigned to the Nineteenth District, went on the air and reported that he was in pursuit of an English sports car proceeding eastward on Lancaster Avenue just past Girard Avenue at a high rate of speed.

At 2:05 a.m. One-Ninety-Four went back on the air: “One-Ninety-Four. Disregard the pursuit. It was a Three-Six-Nine.”

Three-Six-Nine is the radio code used to identify a police officer.

The officer in One-Ninety-Four was naturally curious why a man carrying the tin of a staff inspector was going hell for leather down Lancaster Avenue in an English sports car at two in the morning, but he had been on the job long enough to understand that patrol officers were wise not to ask staff inspectors what the hell they thought they were doing.

Stockton Place was crowded with police vehicles when Peter Wohl, holding his badge in one hand, weaved the Jaguar through them to the door of Number Six.

There were two cars from the Sixth District, what looked to Wohl to be three unmarked detective cars, the crime lab van, and a Sixth District wagon.

And the press was there, on foot behind the crime scene barriers, and on the roofs of two vans bearing television station logotypes.

Wohl had put his identification away when he’d passed the last uniform barring his way to Number Six Stockton Place, but he had to take it out again to get past another uniform keeping people out of the building itself.