Special Operations (Badge of Honor 2)

“Because I am the commanding officer, and that sort of thing is beneath my dignity,” Wohl said, solemnly.

Pekach smiled.

“I’ll charm the pants off the lady, boss,” he said.

“Figuratively speaking, of course, Captain?”

“I don’t know. What does she look like?”

“I don’t know,” Wohl said.

“Then I don’t know about the pants,” Pekach said. “I’ll let you know how well I do.”

“Just the highlights, please, Captain. None of the sordid details.”

SEVENTEEN

Captain David Pekach was tempted to go see both the Captain of Northwest Detectives and the Captain of the Fourteenth District before going to call on the Peebles woman, but finally decided against it. He knew that his success as the new Highway Captain depended in large measure on how well Highway got along with the Detective Bureau and the various Districts. And he was fully aware that there was a certain resentment toward Highway on the part of the rest of the Department, and especially on the part of detectives and uniformed District cops.

He had seen, several times, and as recently as an hour before, what he thought was the wrong reaction to the Ledger editorial calling Highway “the Gestapo.” This morning, he had heard a Seventh District uniformed cop call “Ach-tung!” when two Highway cops walked into the building, and twice he had actually seen uniformed cops throw a straight-armed salute mockingly at Highway Patrolmen.

It was all done in jest, of course, but David Pekach was enough of an amateur psychologist to know that there is almost always a seed of genuine resentment when a wife zings her husband, or a cop zings another cop. After he had a few words with the cop who had called “Ach-tung,” and the two cops who had thrown the Nazi salutes, he didn’t think they would do it again. With a little luck, the word would quickly spread that the new Highway Commander had a temper that had best not be turned on.

He understood the resentment toward Highway. Some of it was really unjustified, and could be attributed to simple jealousy. Highway had special uniforms, citywide jurisdiction, and the well-earned reputation of leaving the less pleasant chores of police work, especially domestic disputes, to District cops. Highway RPCs, like all other RPCs, carried fire hydrant wrenches in their trunks. When the water supply ran low, or water pressure dropped, as it did when kids turned on the hydrants to cool off in the summer, the word went out to turn the hydrants off.

David Pekach could never remember having seen a Highway cop with a hydrant wrench in his hand, and he had seen dozens of Highway cars roll blithely past hydrants pouring water into the streets, long after the kids who had turned it on had gone in for supper, or home for the night. That sort of task, and there were others like it—a long list beginning with rescuing cats from trees and going through such things as chasing boisterous kids from storefronts and investigating fender-benders—was considered too menial to merit the attention of the elite Highway Patrol.

The cops who had to perform these chores naturally resented the Highway cops who didn’t do their fair share of them, and Highway cops, almost as a rule, managed to let the District cops know that Highway was something special, involved in real cop work, while their backward, nonelite brothers had to calm down irate wives and get their uniforms soaked turning off fire hydrants.

So far as the detectives were concerned, it was nearly Holy Writ among them that if Highway reached a crime scene before the detectives did, Highway could be counted on to destroy much of the evidence, usually by stomping on it with their motorcyclists’ boots. Lieutenant Pekach of Narcotics had shared that opinion.

One of his goals, now that he had Highway, was to improve relations between Highway and everybody else, and he didn’t think a good way to do that would be to visit Northwest Detectives and the Fourteenth District to ask about the Peebles burglaries. They would, quite understandably, resent it. It would be tanamount to coming right out and saying “since you ordinary cops can’t catch the doer in a third-rate burglary, Highway is here to show you how real cops do it!”

And, David Pekach knew, Peter Wohl had already been to both the Fourteenth District and Northwest Detectives. Wohl could get away with it, if only because he outranked the captains. And Wohl, in Pekach’s judgment, was a good cop, and if there had been anything not in the reports, he would have picked up on it and said something.

But Pekach did get out the reports, which he had already read, and he read them again very carefully before getting into his car and driving over to Chestnut Hill.

Number 606 Glengarry Lane turned out to be a very large Victorian house, maybe even a mansion, sitting atop a hill behind a fieldstone-pillar-and-iron-bar fence and a wide expanse of lawn. The fence, whose iron bars were topped with gilded spear tops, ran completely around the property, which Pekach estimated to be at least three, maybe four acres. The house on the adjacent property to the left could be only barely made out, and the one on the right couldn’t be seen at all.

Behind the house was a three-car garage that had, Pekach decided, probably started out as a carriage house. The setup, Pekach thought, was much like where Wohl lived, except that the big house behind Wohl’s garage apartment had been converted into six luxury apartments. This big house was occupied by only two people, the Peebles woman and her brother, and the brother was reported to be in France.

All three garage doors were open when Pekach drove up the driveway and stopped the car under a covered entrance portal. It was not difficult to imagine a carriage drawn by a matched pair of horses pulling up where the blue-and-white had stopped, and a servant rushing off the porch to assist the Master and his Mistress down the carriage steps.

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No servant came out now. Pekach saw a gray-haired black man, wearing a black rubber apron and black rubber boots, washing a Buick station wagon. There was a Mercedes coupe, a new one, and a Cadillac Coupe de Ville in the garage, and a two-year-old Ford sedan parked beside the garage, almost certainly the property of the black guy washing the car.

Pekach went up the stairs and rang the doorbell. He heard a dull bonging inside, and a moment or two later, a gray-haired black female face appeared where a lace curtain over the engraved glass window had been pulled aside. And then the door opened.

“May I help you?” the black woman asked. She was wearing a black uniform dress, and Pekach decided the odds were ten to one she was married to the guy washing the Buick.

“I’m Captain Pekach of the Highway Patrol,” David said. “I’d like to see Miss Peebles, please.”

“One moment, please,” the black woman said. “I’ll see if Miss Peebles is at home.”

She shut the door.

Pekach glanced around.