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General: 0653 06/30/73 From Commissioner
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"I'll be in touch," Chief Coughlin said to the telephone, and hung up. He turned to Wohl, smiling.
"You don't seem very surprised, Peter," Coughlin said.
"I heard."
"You did?" Coughlin said, surprised. "From who?"
"I forget."
"Yeah, you forget," Coughlin said, sarcastically. "I don't know why I'm surprised."
"I don't suppose I can get out of this?" Wohl asked.
"You're going to be somebody in the Department, Peter," Coughlin said. "It wouldn't be much of a surprise if you got to be Commissioner."
"That's very flattering, Chief," Wohl said. "But that's not what I asked."
"Don't thank me," Coughlin said. "I didn't say that. The mayor did, to the Commissioner. When the mayor told him he thought you should command Special Operations."
Wohl shook his head.
"That answer your question, Inspector?" Chief Coughlin asked.
"Chief, I don't even know what the hell Special Operations is," Wohl said, "much less what it's supposed to do."
"You saw the teletype. Highway and ACT. You were Highway, and you've got Mike Sabara to help you with Highway."
"I don't suppose anybody asked Mike if he'd like to have Highway?" Wohl asked.
"The mayor says Mike looks like a concentration camp guard," Coughlin said. "Dave Pekach, I guess, looks more like what the mayor thinks the commanding officer of Highway Patrol should look like."
"This is a reaction to that'Gestapo in Jackboots' editorial? Is that what this is all about?"
"That, too, sure."
"TheLedger is going after Carlucci no matter what he does," Wohl said.
"His Honor the Mayor," Coughlin corrected him.
"And after me, too," Wohl said. "Arthur J. Nelson blames me for letting it out that his son was… involved with other men."
Arthur J. Nelson was Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer of Daye-Nelson Publishing, Inc., which owned theLedger and twelve other newspapers across the country.
" 'Negro homosexuals,' " Coughlin said.
It had been a sordid job. Jerome Nelson, the only son of Arthur J. Nelson, had been murdered, literally butchered, in his luxurious apartment in a renovated Revolutionary War-era building on Society Hill. The prime suspect in the case was his live-in boyfriend, a known homosexual, a man who called himself "Pierre St. Maury." A fingerprint search had identified Maury as a twenty-five-year-old black man, born Errol F. Watson, with a long record of arrests for minor vice offenses and petty thievery. Watson had himself been murdered, shot in the back of the head with a.32 automatic, by two other black men known to be homosexuals.
Wohl believed he knew what had happened: It had started as a robbery. The almost certain doers, and thus the almost certain murderers, were Watson's two friends. They were currently in the Ocean County, New Jersey jail, held without bail on a first-degree murder charge. Watson's body had been found buried in a shallow grave not far from Atlantic City, near where Jerome Nelson's stolen Jaguar had been abandoned. When the two had been arrested, they had been found in possession of Jerome Nelson's credit card, wristwatch, and ring. Other property stolen from Jerome Nelson's apartment had been located and tied to them, and their fingerprints had been all over the Jaguar.
The way Wohl put it together in his mind, the two critters being held in New Jersey had gotten the keys to the Nelson apartment from Watson, probably in exchange for a promise to split the burglary proceeds with him. Surprised to find Jerome Nelson at home, they had killed him. And then they had killed Watson to make sure that when the police found him, he couldn't implicate them.
But the two critters had availed themselves of their right under theMiranda Decision to have legal counsel. And their lawyer had pointed out to them that while they were probably going to be convicted of the murder of Watson, if they professed innocence of the Nelson robbery and murder, the Pennsylvania authorities didn't have either witnesses or much circumstantial evidence to try them with.
It was a statement of fact that sentences handed down to critters of whatever color for having murdered another critter tended to be less severe than those handed down to black men for having murdered a rich and socially prominent white man. And if the two critters in the Ocean County jail hadn't known this before the State of New Jersey provided them with free legal counsel, they knew it now.
Their story now was that they had met Watson riding around in a Jaguar, and bought certain merchandise he had for sale from him. They had last seen him safe and sound near the boardwalk in Atlantic City. They had no idea who had killed him, and they had absolutely no knowledge whatever of a man named Jerome Nelson, except that his had been the name on the credit card they bought from Errol Watson/Pierre St. Maury.
Ordinarily, it wouldn't have mattered. It would have been just one more sordid job in a long, long list of sordid jobs. The critters would have gone away, even if the New Jersey prosecutor had pleabargained Watson's murder down to second-degree murder or even firstdegree manslaughter. They would have gotten twenty-to-life, and the whole job would have been forgotten in a month.
But Jerome Nelson was not just one more victim. His father was Arthur J. Nelson, who owned theLedger, and who had naturally assumed that when Mayor Jerry Carlucci and Police Commissioner Taddeus Czernick had called on him immediately after the tragedy to assure him that the full resources of the Philadelphia Police Department would be brought to bear to bring whoever was responsible for this heinous crime against his son to justice, that the Police Department would naturally do what it could to spare the feelings of the victim's family. That, in other words, the sexual proclivities of the prime suspect, or his racial categorization, or that he had been sharing Jerome's apartment, would not come out.
Mayor Carlucci had seemed to be offering what Arthur J. Nelson had, as the publisher of a major newspaper, come to expect as his due; a little special treatment. Commissioner Czernick had even told Nelson that he had assigned one of the brightest police officers in the Department, Staff Inspector Peter Wohl, to oversee the detectives in the Homicide Division as they conducted their investigation, and to make sure that everything that could possibly be done was being done.
That hadn't happened.
Mr. Michael J. O'Hara, of theBulletin, had fed several drinks to, and stroked the already outsized ego of, a Homicide Division Lieutenant named DelRaye, which had caused Lieutenant DelRaye to say something he probably would not have said had he been entirely sober. That resulted in a front page, bylined story in theBulletin announcing that " according to a senior police official involved in the investigation" the police were seeking Jerome Nelson's live-in lover, who happened to be a black homosexual, or words to that effect.
Once Mickey O'Hara's story had broken the dam, the other two major newspapers in Philadelphia, plus all the radio and television stations, had considered it their sacred journalistic duty to bring all the facts before the public.
Mrs. Arthur J, Nelson, who had always manifested some symptoms of nervous disorder, had had to be sent back to the Institute of Living, in Hartford, Connecticut, said to be the most expensive psychiatric hospital in the country, after it had come out, in all the media except theLedger, that her only child had been cohabiting with a Negro homosexual.
Mr. Arthur J. Nelson had felt betrayed, not only by his fellow practitioners of journalism, but by the mayor and especially by the police. If that goddamned cop hadn't had diarrhea of the mouth, Jerome could have gone to his grave with some dignity, and his wife wouldn't be up in Hartford again.
Peter Wohl had been originally suspected by both Arthur J. Nelson and the mayor as the cop with the big mouth, but Commissioner Czernick had believed Wohl's denial, and found out himself, from Mickey O'Hara, that the loudmouth had been Lieutenant DelRaye.
When Mayor Carlucci had called Mr. Nelson to tell him that, and also that Lieutenant DelRaye had been relieved of his Homicide Division assignment and banished in disgrace- and in uniform-to a remote district; and also to tell him that Peter Wohl had been in on the arrest of the two suspects in Atlantic City, what had been intended as an offering of the olive branch had turned nasty. Both men had tempers, and things were said that could not be withdrawn.
And it had quickly become evident how Arthur J. Nelson intended to wage the war. Two days later, a young plain-clothes Narcotics Division cop had caught up with Gerald Vincent Gallagher, the drug addict who had been involved in the shooting death of Captain Dutch Moffitt. It had been a front-page story in all the newspapers in Philadelphia, the stories generally reflecting support for the police, and relief that a drug-addict cop-killer had been run to ground. TheLedger had buried the story, although factually reported, far inside the paper. TheLedger editorial, headlined"Vigilante Justice?" implied that Gerald Vincent Gallagher, who had fallen to his death under the wheels of a subway train as he tried to escape the Narcotics cop, had instead been pushed in front of the train.
The most recent barrage had been the"Jackbooted Gestapo" editorial. Arthur J. Nelson wanted revenge, and apparently reasoned that since Mayor Carlucci had risen to political prominence through the ranks of the Police Department, a shot that wounded the cops also wounded Carlucci.
"What is he doing," Wohl asked, "putting me between him and theLedger?"
"Peter, I think what you see is what you get," Coughlin said.
"What I see is me," Wohl said, "who hasn't worn a uniform or worked anywhere but headquarters in ten years being put in charge of Highway, and of something called ACT that I don't know a damned thing about. I don't even know what it's supposed to do."
"The mayor told the Commissioner he has every confidence that, within a short period of time-I think that means a couple of weeks-he will be able to call a press conference and announce that his Special Operations Division has arrested the sexual deviate who has been raping the decent women of Northwest Philadelphia."
"Rape is under the Detectives' Bureau," Wohl protested.
"So it is," Coughlin said. "Except that the Northwest Philly rapist is yours."
"So itis public relations."
"What it is, Peter, is what the mayor wants," Coughlin said.
"Matt Lowenstein will blow a blood vessel when he hears I'm working his territory."
"The Commissioner already told him," Coughlin said. "Give up, Peter. You can't fight this."
"Who's in ACT? What kind of resources am I going to find there?"
"I've sent you three people," Coughlin said, "to get you started. Officers Martinez and McFadden. They've been ordered to report to you at eight tomorrow morning."
Officer Charley McFadden was the plainclothes Narc theLedger had as much as accused of pushing Gerald Vincent Gallagher in front of the subway train; Officer Jesus Martinez had been his partner.
Wohl considered that for a moment, then said, "You said three?"
"And Officer Matthew Payne," Coughlin said. "Dutch's nephew. You met him."
After a moment, Wohl said, "Why Payne? Is he through the Academy?"
"I had a hunch, Peter," Coughlin said, "that Matt Payne will be of more value to you, and thus to the Department, than he would be if we had sent him to one of the districts."
"I'm surprised he stuck it out at the Academy," Wohl said.
"I wasn't," Coughlin said, flatly.
"What are you talking about? Using him undercover?" Wohl asked.
"Maybe," Coughlin said. "We don't get many rookies like him. Something will come up."
"The only orders I really have are to do something about this rapist?" Wohl asked.
"Your orders are to get the Special Operations Division up and running. That means trying to keep Highway from giving theLedger an excuse to call them the Gestapo. And it means getting ACT up and running. There's a Sergeant, a smart young guy named Eddy Frizell, in Staff Services, who's been handling all the paperwork for ACT. The Federal Grant applications, what kind of money, where it's supposed to be used, that sort of thing. I called down there just before you came in and told him to move himself and his files out to Highway. He'll probably be there before you get there. Czernick told Whelan to give you whatever you think you need in terms of equipment and money, from the contingency fund, to be reimbursed when the Federal Grant comes in. Frizell should be able to tell you what you need."
"The mayor expects me to catch the rapist," Wohl said, and paused.
"That's your first priority."
"Who am I supposed to use to do that? Those kids from Narcotics?" He saw a flash of annoyance, even anger, on Coughlin's face. "Sorry, Chief," he added quickly. "I didn't mean for that to sound the way it came out."
"The initial manning for ACT is forty cops, plus four each Corporals, Sergeants, and Lieutenants; a Captain, four Detectives, and of course, you," Coughlin said. "I already sent a teletype asking for volunteers to transfer in. You can pick whoever you want."
"And if nobody volunteers? Or if all the volunteers are guys one step ahead of being assigned to rubber gun squad or being sent to the farm in their districts?"
Coughlin chuckled. "Being sent to the farm" was the euphemism for alcoholic officers being sent off to dry out; the rubber gun squad was for officers whose peers did not think they could be safely entrusted with a real one.
"Then you can pick, within reason, anybody you want," Coughlin said. "Making this thing work is important to the mayor; therefore to Czernick and me. You're not going to give me trouble about this, Peter, are you?"
"No, of course not, Chief," Wohl said. "It just came out of the blue, and it's taking some getting used to."
Chief Coughlin stood up and put out his hand.
"You can handle this, Peter," Coughlin said. "Congratulations and good luck."
He had, Peter Wohl realized as he put out his hand to take Coughlin' s, not only been dismissed but given all the direction he was going to get.
"Thank you, Chief," he said.
Wohl went to the parking lot, opened the door of his car, and rolled down the windows, standing outside a moment until some of the heat could escape. Then he got in and started the engine, and turned on the air conditioner. He cranked up the window and shifted into reverse.
Then he changed his mind. He reached over to the glove compartment and took out the microphone.
"Radio, S-Sam One Oh One," he said.
"S-Sam One Oh One, Radio," Police Radio replied. They didn't seem at all surprised to hear the new call sign, Wohl thought.
"Have you got a location on Highway One?" Wohl asked.
The reply was almost immediate: "Out of service at Highway. "
"What about N-Two?" Wohl asked, guessing that Dave Pekach, who was, now that he had been promoted, the second-ranking man in Narcotics, would be using that call sign.
"Also out of service at Highway, S-Sam One Oh One," Police Radio replied.
"If either of them come back on the air, ask them to meet me at Highway. Thank you, Radio," Wohl said, and put the microphone back in the glove compartment. Then he backed out of the parking space and headed for Highway Patrol headquarters.