W.E.B Griffin - The Victim

"Maybe anIrish police official," Carlucci said. "The Irish are supposed to be good at politics. An Irishman could have told Detweiler about his daughter with a little Irish-what is it you call your bullshit, Denny, the kind you just tried to lay on me?-blarney."

"Sir," Wohl said, "it could have been worse."

"How the hell could it have been worse?" the mayor snapped. "Do you have any idea how much Detweiler contributed to my last campaign? Or phrased another way, howlittle he, and his friends, will contribute to my next campaign unless we put away, for a long time-and more importantly, soon-whoever popped his daughter?"

"We have information that Miss Detweiler was involved with Tony the Zee, Mr. Mayor. He may not know that. Payne didn't tell him."

The mayor looked him, his eyebrows raised in incredulity.

"Oh,shit!" he said. "How good is your information?"

"My source is Payne. He got it from the Nesbitt boy-the Marine?who got it from the Browne girl," Wohl said.

"Then it's just a matter of time until Detweiler learns that too," the mayor said.

"Even if that's true, Mr. Mayor," Dennis Coughlin said, "I don't see how he could hold that against you."

The mayor snapped his head toward Coughlin and glowered at him a moment. "I hope that's more of your fucking blarney, Denny. I would hate to think that I have a chief inspector who is so fucking dumb, he believes what he just said."

"Jerry, for chrissake," Chief Inspector Matt Lowenstein said. It was the first time he had spoken. "Denny's on your side. We all are."

Carlucci glared at him, then looked as if he were going to say something but didn't.

"I really don't see, Jerry," Coughlin said reasonably, "how he could hold his daughter's problems against you."

"Okay," Carlucci said, his tone as reasonable, "I'll tell you how. We have a man who has just learned his daughter is into hard drugs. And, according to Peter, here, is about to learn that she has been running around with a guinea gangster. What's your information, Peter? What does 'involved with' mean? That she's been fucking him?"

"Yes, sir. Payne seemed pretty sure it was more than a casual acquaintance."

"Okay. So what we have here is a guy who is a pillar of the community. Hiswife is a pillar of the community. They have done everything they could for their precious daughter. They have sent her to the right schools and the right churches and seen that she associates with the right kind of people- like young Payne, for example. And all of a sudden she gets herself popped with a shotgun, and then it comes out that she's a junkie and fucking a guinea gangster. How can that be? It's certainly nother fault, and it's certainly nottheir fault. So it has to be society's fault. And who is responsible for society? Who is supposed to put gangsters and drug dealers in jail? Why, thepolice are. That's why wehave police. If thepolice had done their job, there would be no drugs on the street, and if thepolice had done their job, that low-life guinea gangster would have been put in jail and would not have been getting in precious Penny's pants. That's what Detweiler called his daughter last night, by the way: 'precious Penny.' Is any of this getting through to you, Denny?"

"Yeah, sure," Coughlin said resignedly. "It's not fair, but that's the way it is."

"Nothing personal, Denny, but that's the first intelligent thing you've said so far this morning," the mayor said. He let that sink in a moment, then turned to Peter Wohl. "What I told Detweiler last night-not knowing, of course, that his precious Penny was fucking DeZego-was that we were close to finding the man who had shot her. How much more of an asshole is that going to make me look like, Peter?"

"We may be on to something," Wohl said carefully.

"Christ, I hope so. What?"

"Dave Pekach had dinner with his girlfriend-"

"The Peebles woman? That one?"

"Yes, sir."

"I'm going off on a tangent," the mayor said. "What about that? Is that going to embarrass the Department?"

"No. I don't think so," Wohl said. "Unless a police captain acting like a teenager in love for the first time is embarrassing."

The mayor was not amused. "She has friends in very high places," he said coldly. "Do you think maybe you should drop a hint that he had better treat her right?"

"I don't think that's necessary, Mr. Mayor," Wohl said. "Dave Pekach is really a decent guy. And they're really in love."

The mayor considered that dubiously for a moment but finally said, "If you say so, Peter, okay. But what we don't need is any more rich people pissed off at the Department than we already have. Arthur J. Nelson and Dick Detweiler is enough already. So he had dinner with her

…"

"At Ristorante Alfredo," Wohl went on. "He had made reservations. When he got there, Vincenzo Savarese was there. He gave him- I'm cutting corners here."

"You're doing fine," the mayor said.

"A little speech about being grateful for a favor Dave had done for him-nothing dirty there, just Dave being nice to a girl he didn't know was Savarese's granddaughter. You want to hear about that?"

"Not unless it's important."

"Savarese said thank you for the favor, and then Ricco Baltazari gave Dave a matchbook, said Dave dropped it. Inside was a name and address. Black guy named Marvin P. Lanier. Small-time. Says he's a gambler. Actually he's a pimp. And according to two of Dave's undercover cops-Martinez and McFadden, the two who caught the junkie who killed Dutch Moffitt-Lanier sometimes transports cocaine from Harlem."

"You've lost me," the mayor said. "What's a nigger pimp got to do with precious Penny Detweiler?"

"Last night Martinez and McFadden saw Lanier. They had been using him as a snitch. Lanier told them, quote, a guinea shot Tony the Zee, unquote."

"He had a name?" the mayor asked.

"He was supposed to come up with one by four o'clock this afternoon," Wohl said.

"You think he will?"

"Lanier got popped last night. Five shots with a.38," Wohl said. "Do you know Joe D'Amata of Homicide?"

"Yeah."

"He got the job. Because there was a Highway car seen at the crime scene, he came out to Bustleton and Bowler first thing this morning to see what we had on Lanier."

"Which was?"

"Nothing. Martinez and McFadden were in the car. Working on their own."

"I'm having a little trouble following all this, Peter," the mayor said, almost apologetically.

"When McFadden and Martinez saw Lanier, they took a shotgun away from him. Joe D'Amata said Lanier had a shotgun under his bed. So I thought maybe there was a tie-in-"

"How?"

"Savarese pointed us to this guy. DeZego was popped with a shotgun. Lanier had two. Lanier gets killed."

"What about the shotgun? Shotguns?"

"I sent them to the lab."

"And?"

"I can call. They may not be through yet."

"Call."

Less than a minute later Wohl replaced one of the mayor's three telephones in its cradle.

"Forensics," Wohl announced, "says that the shotgun-shell cases found on the roof of the Penn Services Parking Garage were almost certainly, based on the marks made by the ejector, fired from the Remington Model 1100 shotgun D'Amata found under Lanier's bed."

"Bingo," Dennis V. Coughlin said.

"You're saying the pimp shot DeZego?" the mayor asked.

"I think Savarese wantsus to think Lanier shot DeZego," Matt Lowenstein said.

"Why?" the mayor asked.

"Who the hell knows?" Lowenstein said.

"Check with Organized Crime," the mayor said. "See if they can come up with any reason the mob would want DeZego dead."

"They're working on that, Jerry," Lowenstein said. "I asked them the day after DeZego got popped; they said they'd already been asked to check by Jason Washington.

If there was a rebuke in Lowenstein's reply, the mayor seemed not to have noticed.