The Witness (Badge of Honor 4)

“Yes, sir. I couldn’t run Mr. Harris down, but I asked Mr. Washington to have a look at it, and he said I found everything they’d want.”

“Leave it on my desk. Maybe I’ll have time—I’ll have to make time—to look at it before eleven-thirty. You have to be damned careful what you hand the FBI. Call them, and tell them they’ll have it this afternoon.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And see if you can get word to Washington to be there at half past eleven.”

“Just Mr. Washington?”

“Just Mr. Washington” Wohl repeated, and hung up.

Matt called Ca

ptain Sabara, Captain Pekach, Detective Washington—now Sergeant Washington—and finally the FBI office. He got through to everybody but SAC Davis, who was not available to come to the telephone. Matt left word that the material Inspector Wohl was sending would be there that afternoon.

Then he went to the Special Operations dispatcher and asked for a car. When he had the keys, he went and looked for Lieutenant Malone.

ELEVEN

The building at Frankford and Castor Avenues, according to what was chiseled in stone over the front door and on a piece of granite to the left of the door, had been built in 1892 as the Frankford Grammar School.

Plywood had been nailed over the glass portion of the doors and many of the ground-floor windows, the ones from which, Matt Payne decided, the local vandals had been successful in ripping off the wire mesh window guards.

The front doors were locked with two massive padlocks and closing chains looped around the center posts of the door. When Matt finally managed to get one padlock to function, he turned to Lieutenant Jack Malone.

“Why don’t we just stop here and go back and tell the inspector that a detailed survey of these premises has forced us to conclude they are unfit for human habitation?”

“They obviously are, but we are talking about police habitation,” Malone said. “The standards for which are considerably looser.”

Matt jerked the door open. It sagged and dragged on the ground; the top hinge had pulled loose from the rotten frame.

He bowed and waved Malone past him.

Malone chuckled. From what he had seen of Payne, he liked him. He was not only a pleasant kid, but he’d already proven he was a cop. And Malone had heard the gossip. He knew that Payne’s father had been a sergeant, killed on the job, and that he had a very important rabbi in Chief Inspector Dennis V. Coughlin.

Not that he needed one, Malone thought, as close as Payne was to Inspector Wohl. Wohl was a powerful man in the Department. In his present uncomfortable circumstances, that could mean he could get his career back on track, or begin thinking of leaving the Department as soon as he had his twenty in, or maybe even before.

And since Payne was close to Wohl, the same thing applied to him. He could help, or he could hurt. Malone had waked up wondering what kind of trouble he was already in, thanks to that zealous Highway cop who had spotted him keeping an eye on Holland’s body shop.

Wohl hadn’t said anything to him about keeping his nose out of Auto Squad’s business now that he was assigned to Special Operations. Malone knew that he was supposed to be smart enough to figure that out himself. There was little chance that Wohl hadn’t heard about it, however.

They didn’t send me to Special Operations without talking to Wohl about Poor Jack Malone, who has personal problems, and who incidentally had somehow acquired the nutty idea that Robert L. Holland, respectable businessman and pal of everybody important from Mayor Jerry Carlucci down, was a car thief.

The smart thing for me to have done was just forget the whole damned thing and make myself useful around Special Operations. A good year on this job, and the word would get around that I had gotten through my personal problems and could now, again, be trusted not to make an ass of myself and the Department. That word, coming from Wohl, would straighten everything out.

The worst possible scenario would be for the Highway cop, McFadden, he said his name was, to tell his lieutenant that he had checked out a suspicious car parked near Holland’s body shop and found the new lieutenant, Malone, in it. If that happened, there was a good chance that the lieutenant would “mention” that to either Sabara or Pekach. Or maybe to Inspector Wohl himself. In any event, Wohl would hear about it.

At that point, Wohl would have to call me in and tell me to straighten up and fly right or find myself another home. Wohl was not about to put himself in a position where the brass would jump on his ass for letting Poor Jack Malone run around making wild accusations about a friend of the mayor’s.

I think I could probably talk myself out of the first time. Yes, sir. I’m sorry, sir. I realize I was wrong, sir. It won’t happen again, sir.

And I couldn’t let it happen again, which would mean that sonofabitch would continue to get away with it.

That’s the worst possible scenario. That doesn’t mean it will go down that way. For one thing, the odds are, because McFadden probably walked away thinking he had made a fool of himself, that he had walked into, and almost fucked up, a stakeout where he had no business, that McFadden won’t mention what happened to anybody, least of all his lieutenant.

That, I suppose, is the best possible scenario. What will really happen is probably somewhere in between. Whatever it is, since I can’t do a fucking thing about it, there’s no point in worrying about it.

That puts me back to what I do next. The smart thing to do obviously, since I nearly got caught doing something that really threatens my career, is don’t do that no more.