The Witness (Badge of Honor 4)

“What’s the occasion?”

“Let me see what you have,” Washington said, putting out his hand for the manila envelope. “You know where the booze is.”

Matt headed for the liquor cabinet.

He is, with the possible exception of Peter Wohl, the only one of my brothers in blue who is not awed and/or made uncomfortable by this apartment.

Washington sat down on a leather upholstered couch and took the photocopies from the envelope and went through them. Payne sat in an armchair watching him.

“I think everything’s there, Matt,” Washington said, finally.

“Thank God,” Matt said. “Thank you.”

“You couldn’t find Tony, you said?”

“He didn’t answer the radio—twice, and he didn’t answer the phone at his apartment.”

“You ever been to his apartment?”

Matt shook his head no.

Then he hasn’t found Tony mumbling incoherently into his booze. Moot point, he will learn eventually.

“Anything interesting going on at Homicide?”

“They had a murder of a guy during a robbery at a furniture store on South Street.”

“I heard the call,” Washington said.

The officer needs assistance shooting hospital case call had been on the air when he switched on the police radio in his unmarked police car as he came off the Benjamin Franklin Bridge into Philadelphia from New Jersey. By the time he reached the parkway, he had heard Matt Lowenstein calling in that he was at the scene. That too was very interesting. The chief of the Detective Division would ordinarily not go in on a robbery, or even a murder. Neither was uncommon in Philadelphia. He finally decided that Lowenstein had coincidentally been somewhere near without anything else important to do.

The car issued to Jason Washington by the Philadelphia Police Department was a new, two-tone (blue over gray) Ford LTD four-door sedan. It had whitewall tires, elaborate chrome wheel covers, and powder blue velour upholstery. There were only eight thousand odd miles on the odometer, and the car still even smelled new.

Detectives (like corporals, only one step above the lowest rank in the Police Department hierarchy) are not normally given brand-new cars to drive, much less to take home after work, but Jason Washington was not an ordinary detective.

Until recently, he had been able to take more than a little pride in his reputation of being the best detective in the Homicide Bureau, which was tantamount to saying that he was arguably the best detective in the entire Philadelphia Police Department, as it is generally conceded that the best detectives are assigned to Homicide.

Washington had not willingly given up his assignment to Homicide. He had been transferred (he thought of it as “shanghaied”) to the just-then-formed Special Operations Division over his somewhat bluntly stated desire not to be transferred.

There had been a number of advantages in being assigned to Homicide. There was of course the personal satisfaction of simply knowing that you were a Homicide detective. That satisfaction was of course buttressed if you could believe that you were probably the best Homicide detective in the Bureau.

Jason Washington was not plagued with extraordinary humility. While he was perfectly willing to admit there were a number of very good detectives in Homicide, he could not honestly state that he knew of any who were quite as professionally competent as he was.

And the money was good, because of overtime. As a Homicide detective, he had taken home as much money as a chief inspector. Chief inspectors, he knew, often put in as many hours as he did, but under Civil Service regulations, they didn’t get paid for it; they were given “compensatory time off” that they never seemed able to find time to take.

And chief inspectors (and other Police Department supervisors) spent a good portion of their time handling administrative matters that had little to do with catching critters, marching them through the judicial process, and seeing them sentenced and packed off to the pokey.

In Homicide, all Jason Washington had had to do was catch critters, either on jobs that had come to him via the Wheel, or on jobs that the Wheel had given to others, but on which he had been asked to “assist.”

(The Wheel wasn’t really a wheel, but rather a piece of lined paper, on which, at the beginning of each tour, each Homicide detective’s name was written. As each homicide came to the attention of the Homicide Bureau, the job was given to the detective whose name was at the head of the list. He would not be given another job until every other detective listed on the Wheel had, in turn, been given one.)

While Jason Washington was at least as good as any other Homicide detective while working the crime scene, and certainly at least as knowledgeable as any other Homicide detective in the use of the high-tech techniques now available to match fibers, determine that a particular bullet had been fired from a particular weapon, and so on, his real strengths, he believed, were psychological and intellectual.

He believed, with more than a little reason, that he had no peers in interrogation. He could play, with great skill, any number of roles when interviewing a suspect. If the situation demanded it, Washington, who stood well over six feet and weighed 220 pounds, could strike terror into the heart of most human beings who had previously believed they were not afraid of the Devil himself. Or, with equal ease, he could assume the role of sympathetic uncle who understood how, through no fault of his own, the suspect had found himself in a situation where striking the deceased in the forehead with a fire axe had seemed a perfectly reasonable thing to do under the circumstances, and that the decent thing to do now was put the whole unfortunate incident behind him (or her) by making a clean breast of it.

Intellectually, Washington believed that both by natural inclination (perhaps genetic) and by long experience, he had no equal in discovering anomalies. An anomaly, by definition, is a deviation, modification, mutation, permutation, shift, or variation from the norm. If there was one tiny little piece of the jigsaw puzzle that didn’t fit, Jason Washington could find it.