The Victim (Badge of Honor 3)

"Certainly."

When Matt was at the sink, Chief Wohl got up and followed him.

"They may not get away with it," he said. "I have just decided that if I tell you something, it won't go any further. Am I right?"

"Do you think, after the trouble I've caused, that I am any judge of my reliability?"

"I think you can judge whether or not you can keep your mouth shut,particularly since you have just learned how you can get other people in trouble."

"Yes, sir," Matt said after a moment. "I can keep my mouth shut."

Chief Wohl met his eyes for a moment and then nodded.

"There is a set of rules involving the Mob and the police. Nobody talks about them, but they're there. I won't tell you how I know this, but Vincenzo Savarese got word to Jerry Carlucci that the Mob-Mobs, there's a couple of them-had nothing to do with the shooting of that Italian cop… what was his name?"

"Magnella. Joseph Magnella," Matt furnished.

"We believe him. The reason he told us that is not because he gives a damn about a dead cop but because he doesn't want us looking for the doer, doers, in the Mob. We might come across something else he doesn't want us to know. Since we're taking him at his word, that means we can devote the resources to looking elsewhere. You with me?"

"Yes, sir."

"Okay. The DeZego hit is different. Ordinarily we really don't spend a lot of time worrying about the Mob killing each other. If we can catch the doer, fine. But we know that we seldom do catch the doers, so we go through the motions and let it drop. The DeZego hit is different."

"Because of Penny Detweiler?"

"No. Well, maybe a little. But that's not what I'm talking about. The one thing the Mob does not do is point the finger at some other Mob guy and say he's the doer, go lock him up. That violates their Sicilian Code of Honor, telling the police anything about some other mafioso. If a Mob guy is hit, it's one of two ways. It was, by their standards, a justified hit, and that's the end of it. Or it was unjustified and they put out a contract on the guy who did it. This was different. They pointed us, with that matchbook Savarese gave Dave Pekach, at the pimp."

"He was black."

"More important," Chief Wohl said, a tone of impatience in his voice, "he didn't do it."

"Yeah," Matt said, chagrined. "Maybe they wanted him-the pimp, I mean-killed for some other reason."

"Could well be, but that's not the point. The point is that Savarese tried to play games with us. Two things with that. One, we wonder why. Two, more important, that breaks the rules. He lied to us. We can't have that."

"So what happens?"

"The first thing we think is that if he lied to us about the pimp, he's probably lying to us about not knowing who killed the Italian cop. So that means we can't trust him."

"So you start looking around the Mob for who killed DeZego and who killed Magnella."

"Yeah," Chief Wohl said. "But before we do that, to make sure that he knows we haven't broken our end of the arrangement, we let him know we know he broke the rules first."

"How?"

Chief Wohl told him. And as he was explaining what was going to happen-in fact, hadalready happened, thirty minutes before, just after ten P.M., just before Chief Inspector Wohl, retired, had shown up at the apartment-a question arose in Matt's mind that he knew he could never raise: whether the chief had been a spectator or a participant.

****

When Mr. Vincenzo Savarese's Lincoln pulled to the curb in front of the Ristorante Alfredo right on time to pick up Mr. Savarese following his dinner and convey him to his residence, a police officer almost immediately came around the corner, walked up to the car, and tapped his knuckles on the window.

When the window came down, Officer Foster H. Lewis, Jr., politely said, "Excuse me, sir, this is a no-parking, no-standing zone. You'll have to move along."

"We're just picking somebody up," Mr. Pietro Cassandro, who was driving the Lincoln, said.

"I'm sorry, sir, this is a no-standing zone," Officer Lewis said.

"For chrissake, we'll only be two minutes," Mr. Gian-Carlo Rosselli, who was in the front seat beside Mr. Cassandro, said.