Part 10 (1/2)
”They want you in homicide, Payne,” he said. ”Right now.''
”Yes, sir,” Matt said.
”You know where it is?”
All too well, Matt thought. When I was questioned by Homicide detectives after I killed the rapist, it had been only after three hours of questioning and a twenty-seven-page statement that someone finally told me it had been a ”good” shooting.
”Yes, sir.”
Matt turned and started toward the stairwell. The body of the man who had had half his head blown off was still where Matt had first seen it, slumped against the concrete block wall of the stairwell.
It was horrible, and Matt felt a sense of nausea. He pushed open the stairwell door and started down them. The urge to vomit pa.s.sed.
And I didn't faint, Matt thought, not without a sense of satisfaction. When I saw the mutilated body of Miss Elizabeth Woodham, 33, of 300 East Mermaid Lane, Roxborough, I went out like a light and looked like an a.s.s in front of Detective Was.h.i.+ngton.
Detective Jason Was.h.i.+ngton, acknowledged to be the best Homicide detective in the department, had been transferred, over his bitter objections, to the newly formed Special Operations Division. When the state police had found a body in Bucks County meeting the description of Elizabeth Woodham, who had been seen as she was forced into a van, Was.h.i.+ngton had gone to the country to have a look at it and had taken Matt with him. Not as a fellow police officer, to help with the investigation, but as an errand boy, a gofer. And Matt hadn't even been able to do that; one look at the body and he'd fainted.
Was.h.i.+ngton, a gentleman (he perfectly met Matt's father's definition of a gentleman: He was never seen in public unshaven, in his unders.h.i.+rt, or with run-down heels; and he never unintentionally said something rude or unkind), hadn't told anyone that Matt had pa.s.sed out and had gone much further than he had to, trying to make Matt feel better about it.
But the humiliation still burned.
When Matt reached the street, at the entrance ramp a taxi was discharging a pa.s.senger with a distracted, I'm-in-a-hurry look on his face. Matt ran to the cab and got in, thinking that if the man getting out had parked his car in the garage, he was about to find something he could talk about when he got home.
”You're not going to believe this, Myrtle, but when I went to get the car from the garage, the G.o.dd.a.m.n cops wouldn't let me have it. They had some kind of crime in there, and they acted as if I had something to do with it. Can you imagine that? I had to come home in a cab, and I don't have any idea when I can get the car back.''
”The Roundhouse,” Matt told the cabdriver.
”Where?”
”The Police Department Administration Building at 8th and Race,” Matt answered.
”You a cop?” the driver asked doubtfully.
”Yeah.”
”I saw the badge,” the driver said. ”What's going on in there?”
”Nothing much,” Matt said.
”I come through here twenty minutes ago, and there was cop cars all over the street.”
”It's over now,” Matt said.
The cab dropped him at the rear of the administration building. There is a front entrance, overlooking Metropolitan Hospital, but it is normally locked.
At the rear of the building a door opens onto a small foyer. Once inside, a visitor faces a uniformed police officer sitting behind a heavy plate-gla.s.s window.
To the right is the central cell room, in effect a holding prison, to which prisoners are brought from the various districts to be booked and to face a magistrate, who sets (or denies) bail. Those prisoners for whom bail is denied, or who can't make it, are moved, males to the Detention Center, females to the House of Correction.
The magistrate's court is a small, somewhat narrow room separated from the corridor leading to the gallery where the public can view arraignment proceedings. This, a dead-end corridor, is walled by large sections of Plexiglas, long fogged by scratches received over the years from family, friends, and lovers, pressing against it to try to get closer to the accused as they are being arraigned.
The arraignment court, as you look down on it from the gallery, has a bench on the left-hand side where the magistrate sits; tables in front of the bench where an a.s.sistant district attorney and a public defender sit; and across from them are two police officers, who process the volumes of paperwork that accompanies any arrest. The prisoners are brought up from the bas.e.m.e.nt detention unit via a stairway shaft, which winds around an elevator. All the doors leading into the arraignment court are locked to prevent escape.
To the left. is the door leading to the main foyer of the Police Department Administration Building. The door has a solenoid-equipped lock, operated by the police officer behind the window.
Matt went to the door, put his hand on it, and then turned so the cop on duty could see his badge. The lock buzzed, and Matt pushed open the door.
He went inside and walked toward the elevators. On one wall is a display of photographs and police badges of police officers who have been killed in the line of duty. One of the photographs is of Sergeant John Xavier Moffitt, who had been shot down in a West Philadelphia gas station while answering a silent burglar alarm. He had left a wife, six months pregnant with their first child.
Thirteen months after Sergeant Moffitt's death, his widow, Patricia, who had found work as a secretary-trainee with a law firm, met the son of the senior partner as they walked their small children near the Philadelphia Museum on a pleasant Sunday afternoon.
He told her that his wife had been killed eight months before in a traffic accident while returning from their lake house in the Pocono Mountains. Mrs. Patricia Moffitt became the second Mrs. Brewster Cortland Payne II two months after she met Mr. Payne and his children. Shortly thereafter Mr. Payne formally adopted Matthew Mark Moffitt as his son and led his wife through a similar process for his children by his first wife.
”Can I help you?” the cop on duty called to Matt Payne as Matt walked toward the elevators. It was not every day that a young man with a police officer's badge pinned to the silk lapel of a tuxedo walked across the lobby.
”I'm going to Homicide,” Matt called back.
”Second floor,” the cop said.
Matt nodded and got on the elevator.
The Homicide Division of the Philadelphia Police Department occupies a suite of second-floor rear offices.
Matt pushed the door open and stepped inside. There were half a dozen detectives in the room, all sitting at rather battered desks. None of them looked familiar. There was an office with a frosted gla.s.s door, with a sign, CAPTAIN HENRY C. QUAIRE, above it. Matt had met Captain Quaire, but the office was empty.
He walked toward the far end of the room, where there were two men standing beside a single desk that faced the others. Sitting at the desk was a dapper, well-dressed man in civilian clothing whom Matt surmised was the watch officer, the lieutenant in charge.
As he walked across the room he noticed that one of the two ”interview rooms” on the corridor side of the room was occupied; a large, blondheaded man in a sleeveless T-s.h.i.+rt was sitting in a metal chair, his left wrist encircled by a hand-cuff. The other handcuff was fastened to a hole in the chair. The chair itself was bolted to the floor.
He saw Matt looking at him and gave him a look of utter contempt.
As Matt approached the desk at the end of the room the mustached, dark-skinned man sitting at it saw him coming and moved his head slightly. The other two men turned to look at him. Matt saw a bra.s.s nameplate on the desk, LIEUTENANT LOUIS NATALI, whom Matt surmised was the lieutenant in charge.
”My name is Payne, Lieutenant,” Matt said as he reached the desk. ”I was told to report here.”
No one responded, and Matt was made uncomfortable by the unabashed examination he'd been given by all three men. The examination, he decided, was because of the dinner jacket, but there was something else in the air too.
”He's all yours,” Lieutenant Natali said finally.
”Let's find someplace to talk,” the smaller of the two detectives said, and gestured vaguely down the room.
There was an unoccupied desk, and Matt headed for it.
”Let's use this,” the detective called. Matt stopped and turned and saw that the detective was pointing to the second, empty interview room. That seemed a little odd, but he walked through the door, anyway.
The two detectives followed him inside. One closed the door after them. The other, the one who had suggested the use of the interview room, signaled for Matt to sit in the interviewee's chair.
Matt looked at it with unease. There was a set of handcuffs lying on it, one of the cuffs locked through a hole in the chair.