The mayor looked at Wohl for a moment and then said. “Okay. If you say so. You say they’re harassing Payne? How? What’s going on with him?”
“He has an apartment on the top floor of the Delaware Valley Cancer Society Building on Rittenhouse Square. There’s an underground garage with a Holmes rent-a-cop at the entrance, and, during the day, there’s a Holmes rent-a-cop in the lobby. There’s a pretty good burglar alarm system. We have an officer wearing a Holmes uniform, replacing the Holmes guy, in the garage at night.”
“That’s all?”
“And we have somebody with Payne all the time.”
“Two of them are those kids from Narcotics who ran down the punk who shot Dutch Moffitt,” Chief Inspector Coughlin said. “McFadden and Martinez. They’re friends, and in regular clothes. We don’t want to give the impression that we’re—”
“Baby-sitting a cop, huh?” the mayor interrupted. “I get the point.”
“They call him, these sleaze-bags,” Wohl said, “every fifteen minutes or so. Say something dirty, and hang up. No time to trace the call.”
He took a tape cassette from his pocket and held it up.
“What’s that?”
“A recording of the calls,” Wohl said. “I’m going to take it to the lab.”
“That sounds as if we’re chasing our tails,” the mayor said. “What do they hope to find?”
“We’re trying everything we can think of, Mr. Mayor,” Wohl said.
“Sometime yesterday afternoon, they got to his car,” Coughlin said. “Slashed the tires, and did a job with a knife or a key, or something on the paint job.”
“And nobody saw anything?” the mayor said, unpleasantly.
“All we can do is guess,” Wohl said.
“So guess.”
“Somebody came in the front door during business hours, rode the elevator down to the garage, slashed the tires, etcetera—the car is parked right by the elevator, it wouldn’t have taken more than thirty seconds, a minute, tops—got back on the elevator, rode back to the lobby floor and walked out.”
“The rent-a-cop in the garage didn’t see anything?”
“He can’t see where the car is parked.”
“I don’t suppose anybody bothered to check the car for prints, call the lab people?”
“I did, Mr. Mayor,” Wohl said. “They took some pictures, too. Should I have them send you a set?”
“No, Peter, thank you. They would just make me sick to my stomach. I don’t like these people thumbing their noses at the cops.”
They all knew Jerry Carlucci well enough to recognize the signals of an impending eruption, and they all waited for it to come. It was less violent, however, than any of them expected.
“Okay. Now I’ll tell you what’s going to happen,” he said, and pointed his finger at Dennis V. Coughlin. “You, Denny—and this should in no way be construed as a suggestion that Wohl isn’t doing the job right, but he’s a Staff Inspector and you’re a Chief—are going to go to Intelligence and Organized Crime and light a fire under them. I said before and I’m saying now that these clowns didn’t
wake up one morning and say, ‘Okay, today we’re the Islamic Liberation Army, we’re going to go out and make fools of the police and incidentally stick up a furniture store.’ They came from somewhere, and I want to know where, and I want to know who the other ones of them are, the ones issuing these goddamned press releases.”
“Yes, sir,” Coughlin said.
The mayor turned to Matt Lowenstein. “You’re the Chief Inspector of Detectives. Get out there and detect. Whatever you’re doing now isn’t working.”
Lowenstein’s face flushed, but he didn’t reply.
“And you, Peter: I won’t start telling you how to run Special Operations. If you’re comfortable having a guy who beats up on his wife and has paranoid ideas about Bob Holland in charge of protecting the only goddamned witness we have, okay. I’m sure you’re smart enough to understand that it’s your ass if this goes wrong.”
“Yes, sir, I understand.”