W.E.B Griffin - The Murderers

There were a number of small pleasures involved with being a policeman, and one of them, Matt Payne had learned, was being able to turn on warning lights and the siren when you had to get somewhere in a hurry.

He had thought of this during dinner the previous evening, during a somewhat acrimonious discussion of his-their-future with Miss Penelope Detweiler.

It was her position (and that of Mr. and Mrs. Chadwick Thomas Nesbitt IV, who allied themselves with Miss Detweiler in the Noble Cause of Talking Common Sense to Matt) that it was childish and selfish of him, with his education, potential, and background, to remain a policeman, working for peanuts, when he should be thinking of their future.

He had known that it would not have been wise to have offered the argument “Yeah, but if I’m not a cop, I won’t be able to race down Roosevelt Boulevard with the lights on.” She would have correctly decided that he was simply being childish again.

There were other satisfactions in being a policeman, but for some reason, he seemed to become instantly inarticulate whenever he tried to explain them to her. In his own mind, he knew that he had been a policeman long enough so that it was in his blood, and he would never be happy at a routine job.

He reached the Schuylkill River, crossed it, and turned east toward Center City. Then he reached down and turned off the flashing lights. The traffic wasn’t that heavy, and if Mary One, the mayoral limousine, beat him to the Zoo parking lot, he wasn’t entirely sure if the Mayor would agree with his decision that turning on the lights was justified.

From what he’d heard of the Mayor’s career as a police man, he’d been a really by-the-book cop.

When he got to the Zoo parking lot, he stopped and picked up his microphone.

“Mary One, William Fourteen, at the Zoo.”

“A couple of minutes,” Lieutenant Fellows’s voice came back.

Matt picked the envelope off the floor, and got out of the car and waited for the Mayor.

Two minutes later the limousine pulled up beside him. Matt walked to the front-seat passenger door as the window whooshed down and Lieutenant Fellows came into view.

“Good morning, sir,” Matt said, and handed him the envelope.

“Thank you, Payne,” Fellows said, and the window started back up. Then the rear window rolled down and he heard the Mayor of the City of Philadelphia order:

“Hold it a minute, Charley,” and then the rear door opened and the Mayor got out.

“Long time no see,” the Mayor said, offering his hand. “How are you, Matt?”

“Just fine, Mr. Mayor. Thank you.”

“Good to see you, Matt,” the Mayor said. “And say hello to your mother and dad for me.”

“Yes, sir. I will. Thank you.”

The Mayor patted his shoulder and got back in the limousine, and in a moment it rolled out of the parking lot.

Matt got back in the unmarked Ford and drove out of the Zoo parking lot, wondering where the hell he was going to find a drugstore and buy the razor he had been ordered to buy.

It had been nice of the Mayor, he thought, to get out of his car to say hello. It was easy to accuse the Mayor of being perfectly willing to wrap his arm around an orangutan and inquire as to the well-being of his parents if that would get him one more vote, but the truth, Matt realized, was that after he had wrapped his arm around your shoulder, it made you feel good, and you were not at all inclined to question his motives.

While it was said, and mostly believed, that the Mayor knew the name of every cop in the Department, this was not true. There were eight thousand policemen in the Department, and the Mayor did not know the name or even the face of each of them. But he did know the faces and sometimes the names of every cop who was someone, or who had ever done something, out of the ordinary.

Matt qualified on several counts. One of them was that the Mayor knew his parents, but the most significant way Matt Payne had come to the Mayor’s attention was as a cop.

Shortly after the formation of Special Operations, as Detective Washington was getting close enough to the Northwest Serial Rapist to have a cast of his tire tracks and a good description of his van, Mr. Warren K. Fletcher, thirty-one, of Germantown, had attempted to run down Matt with his van when he approached it.

That gave Matt (although he was so terrified at the time that this legal consideration had not entered his mind) the justification to use equal-deadly-force in the apprehension of a suspect. He had drawn his service revolver and fired five times at the van. One of the bullets found and exploded Mr. Fletcher’s brain all over the windshield of his van.

It didn’t matter that finding what looked like it could possibly be the van could be described only as blind luck, or that when Matt had fired his revolver he had been so terrified that hitting Mr. Fletcher had been pure coincidence. What mattered was that Mr. Fletcher, at the time of his death, had Mrs. Naomi Schneider, thirty-four, of Germantown, in the back of his van, stripped naked, trussed neatly with telephone wire, and covered with a tarpaulin, and shortly before their trip was interrupted had been regaling her with a description of what he had planned for them as soon as they got somewhere private.

What also mattered a good deal was that Matt Payne was assigned to Special Operations. Even the imaginatively agile minds on the editorial floor of the Ledger building had trouble finding Police Department incompetence in the end of Mr. Fletcher’s career. The Ledger just about ignored the story. The other papers gave it a good deal of play, most of them running a front-page picture of the Mayor at the shooting scene with his arm wrapped cordially around the shoulder of Special Operations Division plainclothes officer Matthew M. Payne.

Several months after that, following a robbery, brutal assault, and senseless murder at Goldblatt’s Furniture Store in South Philadelphia, the Special Operations Division was asked by the Detective Bureau to assist them in the simultaneous arrest of eight individuals identified as participants in the robbery murder.

The eight, who identified themselves as members of something called the Islamic Liberation Army, were at various locations in Philadelphia. Seven of them, in what the press-save again the Ledger -generally agreed was a well-planned, perfectly carried out maneuver, were placed in custody without incident. The eighth suspect, in trying to escape, drew a. 45 Colt pistol and attempted to shoot his way through officers in an alley. In the process, he wounded a police officer, who drew and fired his service revolver in self-defense, inflicting upon Abu Ben Mohammed (also known as Charles D. Stevens) several wounds which proved to be fatal.

And again there were photographs of Officer Matthew M. Payne on the front pages of the Daily News, the Inquirer, and the Bulletin (but not in the Ledger), this time showing him with his face bandaged in a hospital bed and Mayor Carlucci’s approving arm around his shoulders.

It was said at the time by senior white shirts that, considering the favorable publicity he had engendered for the Special Operations Division, and thus the Mayor, the young police officer had found a home in Special Operations. The only way he was going to get out of Special Operations was when he either retired or was carried to his grave. Or resigned, when he tired of playing cop.

Matt had heard the stories at the time, but had not been particularly concerned. He planned to take, as soon as he was eligible, the examination leading to promotion to detective. He was reasonably confident that he would pass it, and be promoted. And since the only places that detectives could be assigned within the Police Department were in one of the subordinate units of the Detective Division, that’s where they would have to assign him. In the meantime, he liked working for Staff Inspector Wohl as his administrative assistant.