The Witness (Badge of Honor 4)

“Okay. Switchblades aren’t much good for stabbing tires, particularly high-quality tires like the Pirelli’s on Payne’s car. They’re slashing instruments. The blades are thin. You try to stab something, like the walls of tires, the blade tends to snap. Payne’s tires were stabbed, more than slashed. The contour of the penetration, the holes, shows that the blade was pretty thick on the dull side. A lot of switchblades are just thin pieces of steel sharpened on both sides. Hence, a collapsible knife of pretty good quality. Six inches long or so because there’s generally a proportion between blade width and length. The same instrument because we found particles of tire rubber in the scratches in the paint. And, for the hell of it, the size and depth of the scratches indicates a blade shape, the point shape, confirming what I said before.”

“I am dazzled,” Wohl said.

“Now all you street cops have to do is find the knife, and there’s your doer. There can’t be more than eight or ten thousand knives like that in Philadelphia. Forensics is happy to have been able to be of service.”

Wohl slid photographs out of the folder and looked at them.

“I hate to think what it’s going to cost to have that car repainted,” he said.

“Well, I have a nice heel print of who I suspect is the doer,” Lomax said. “Heel and three clear fingers, right hand. Maybe you can get him to pay to have it painted.”

Wohl looked at him curiously.

“It’s in a position suggesting that he laid his hand on the hood, left side, when he bent over to stick the knife in the ninety-dollar tire,” Lomax said, and then pointed to one of the photographs. “There.”

“Well, when we have a suspect in custody,” Wohl said, “I’m sure that will be very valuable.”

Lomax laughed. Both knew that while the positive identification of an individual by his fingerprints has long been established as nearly infallible—fingerprints are truly unique—it is not true that all you have to do to find an individual is have his fingerprint or fingerprints. Trying to match a fingerprint without a name to go with it, with fingerprints on file in either a police department or in the FBI’s miles of cabinets in Washington, and thus come up with a name, is for all practical purposes impossible.

“What’s on here?” Lomax asked, picking up the cassette tape.

“I don’t know. I didn’t hear it. I don’t think anybody has. They’re calling there every fifteen minutes or so, so McFadden—one of the guys sitting on Payne—fixed it so that the machine worked silently.”

“You want to hear it?”

“Not particularly,” Wohl said, and then reconsidered. He looked at his watch. “Maybe I’d better,” he said. “Let me have the phone, will you, please, Warren?”

Lomax pushed a telephone to him, and Wohl dialed a number.

“This is Inspector Wohl. Have Detective Harris call me at 555–3445.”

When he had put the phone down, Lomax asked, “He getting anywhere with the Magnella job?”

“Not so far.”

“How’s he doing?”

“If you mean, Warren, ‘is he still on a bender?’ he better not be. Christ, is that all over the Department?”

“People talk, Peter.”

“The word is gossip, and cops do it more than women,” Wohl said.

“I was having my own troubles with good ol’ Jack Daniel’s for a while,” Lomax said. “I’m sympathetic.”

“I sometimes wonder if people weren’t so sympathetic if the people they feel sorry for would straighten themselves out.”

“He’s a good cop, Peter.”

“So I keep telling myself,” Wohl said. “But then I keep hearing stories about him waving his gun around and getting thrown in a holding cell to sober up.”

“You heard that, huh?”

“Let’s play the tape.”

Lieutenant Lomax had methodically made notes on seventeen recorded messages when his telephone rang. He answered it, then handed it to Wohl. “Tony Harris.”