The Witness (Badge of Honor 4)

“I’d like to, Matt,” Mickey said.

Lowenstein pursed his lips. A surprisingly loud whistle came from between them. A dozen people turned to look, including the uniformed cop guarding access to the Goldblatt crime scene.

“He’s okay,” Lowenstein said, pointing to Mickey O’Hara.

“Thanks,” Mickey said.

“Sylvia said if you can watch your filthy mouth, you can come to dinner.”

“When?”

“How about tonight?”

“Fine. What time and what can I bring?”

“Half past six. You don’t have to bring anything, but take a shave and a shower.”

“Didn’t The Dago tell you you were supposed to cultivate the press?”

“No. But I’ll tell you what I did hear: You finally found some girl willing to be seen in public with you. Bring her, if you want.”

“Okay. I was going to anyway,” Mickey said, and touched Lowenstein’s arm and walked past the cop into Goldblatt & Sons Credit Furniture & Appliances, Inc.

As Michael J. O’Hara walked into Goldblatt & Sons Credit Furniture & Appliances, Inc., on South Street, four blocks away, on 11th Street, near Carpenter, three law enforcement officers in civilian clothing were having their lunch in Shank & Evelyn’s Restaurant.

They were Staff Inspector Peter Wohl and Officer Matthew Payne of the Philadelphia Police Department, and Walter Davis, a tall, well-built, well-dressed (in a gray pin-striped, three-piece suit) man in his middle forties, who was the special agent in charge (the “SAC”) of the Philadelphia Office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Shank & Evelyn’s Restaurant was not the sort of place Walter Davis had had in mind when he had telephoned Wohl early that morning to ask if he was free for lunch. Davis had had in mind the Ristorante Alfredo, in downtown Philadelphia, in part because the food was superb and the banquettes would provide what he considered to be the necessary privacy he sought, and also because he thought it would provide an opportunity to needle the management a little.

There was no question in Davis’s mind (or for that matter in the minds of any peace officer with the brains to find his rear end with both hands) that Ristorante Alfredo was owned by persons connected with organized crime, otherwise known as “the Mob” and sometimes as “the Mafia.”

Davis was sure that there would be someone in the restaurant who would recognize him and Wohl, whom Davis believed to be as bright and competent a Philadelphia cop as they came, and note and report to his superiors that they had been taking lunch together.

If that had caused Ricco Baltazari, who held the restaurant license for Ristorante Alfredo, or Vincenzo Savarese, “the businessman” who actually owned it, some uncomfortable moments wondering what the head of the FBI and the head of Special Operations were up to, together, that would have added a little something to the luncheon.

But that had not come to pass. Wohl had accepted the invitation, and said that since he would be at the Roundhouse at about lunchtime, he would just stop by the FBI office when he was finished with his business and pick Davis up.

The Administration Building of the Philadelphia Police Department, at 8th and Race Streets, was universally called “the Roundhouse” because its architect had been fascinated with curves, and everything in the building was curved, right down to the elevators.

Wohl’s own office was at Bustleton and Bowler Streets in Northeast Philadelphia, from which he commanded the Special Operations Division, which consisted of the Highway Patrol and a newly formed, somewhat experimental unit of above-average uniformed and plainclothes cops.

The original idea was that Special Operations, which like the Highway Patrol had city-wide responsibility, would move into high-crime areas of the city, and overwhelm the problem with manpower, special equipment and techniques, and an arrangement with the district attorney to hustle the arrested through the criminal justice procedure.

That was being done, but politics had inevitably entered the picture almost immediately. First, there had been the murder of Jerome Nelson, whose father, Arthur J. Nelson, was chairman of the board of the Daye-Nelson Corporation, which owned (among other newspapers and television stations) the Philadelphia Ledger and WGHA-TV.

When a Homicide Division lieutenant, Edward M. DelRaye, had been truthfully tactless enough to inform the press that the police were looking for a Negro Male, Pierre St. Maury, a known homosexual known to be living with young Nelson in his luxury Society Hill apartment, in connection with the killing, the Ledger and its publisher had declared war on both the Police Department and the Hon. Jerry Carlucci, mayor of the City of Philadelphia.

Mayor Carlucci had “suggested” to Police Commissioner Taddeus Czernich that the investigation of the Nelson murder be turned over to Peter Wohl’s Special Operations Division.

The case had more or less solved itself when two other Negro Homosexual Males had been arrested in Atlantic City in possession of Jerome Nelson’s Visa and American Express cards, and had been charged by New Jersey authorities with the murder of Pierre St. Maury, whose body had been found near Jerome Nelson’s abandoned Jaguar in the wilds of New Jersey.

SAC Davis knew that, for reasons that could only be described as political, Mayor Carlucci had “suggested” to Commissioner Czernich that Peter Wohl’s Special Operations Division be given responsibility for three other situations that had attracted a good deal of media attention, much of it (all of it, in the case of the Ledger) unfavorable.

The first of these, a serial murder-rapist in Northwest Philadelphia, had been resolved, to favorable publicity, when a police officer assigned to Special Operations had not only shot the murder-rapist to death, but done so when the villain actually had his next intended victim tied up, naked, in the back of his van.

The other two highly publicized cases had not gone at all well. One was the apparently senseless murder of a young police officer who had been on patrol near Temple University. A massive effort, still ongoing, hadn’t turned up a thing, which gave Arthur Nelson’s Ledger an at least once-a-week opportunity to run an editorial criticizing the Police Department generally, Special Operations specifically, and Mayor Carlucci in particular.

Davis was sure that the pressure on Wohl to find the cop killer must be enormous.