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Three days later Matthew M. Payne had walked into the City Administration Building across from City Hall, taken the exam, and joined the cops.
There was nothing that either Brewster C. Payne or Chief Inspector Dennis V. Coughlin could do about it. The two, who over the years had become friends, had a long talk over lunch at the Union League Club. They agreed that Matt’s motives were fairly obvious: The fact that his Uncle Dutch had been killed obviously had a lot to do with it, and so did the results of a physical examination that found something wrong with his eyes and would keep him from becoming a second lieutenant in the Marine Corps when he graduated from the University of Pennsylvania.
He could prove his challenged masculinity by becoming a cop, in the footsteps of his real father, uncle, and grandfather.
Adoptive father and godfather agreed that what Matt really should do was go on to law school, but they also agreed that he was just as hardheaded as his mother when he wanted to do something, and could not be talked out of joining the cops.
It was to be hoped that when the emotions caused by Dutch’s death and the Marine Corps rejection had time to simmer down, he would come to his senses. They were both agreed that Matt was a more levelheaded kid than most. With a little bit of luck that would happen before he was close to graduating from the Police Academy.
It didn’t happen. He did well in the Academy.
Dennis V. Coughlin, as a sergeant, had gone to Patricia Moffitt’s apartment to tell her that her husband had just been shot to death. He had no intention of going to Patricia Moffitt Payne to tell her her son had just been killed as a cop. The most influential of the seven chief inspectors had a word with the chief of Personnel, and Officer Payne was assigned to Special Operations.
There, after Denny Coughlin had a quiet word with Peter Wohl, Officer Payne was assigned duties as a sort of clerk/driver, the hope now being that when he saw what police work was really like, he would finally come to his senses, quit the cops, and go to law school.
What Jason Washington hadn’t already known of Matt Payne’s background had been filled in by Peter Wohl when he gave him Payne as a gofer. The investigation of the Northwest Philadelphia serial rapist/murderer had become very intense. Washington needed someone to run errands, make telephone calls, and otherwise save his time.
Payne had gone with Washington to Bucks County, where the body of the latest victim had been found. Washington had gotten a description of the man, his van, the license plate number, and had made plaster casts of the van’s tire tracks. Within hours, they would know who they were looking for.
Washington had sent Payne back to Philadelphia with the tire casts and orders to tell Peter Wohl of the latest developments before he quit for the day. Payne had dropped off the tire casts at the laboratory in the Roundhouse, and then turned in the unmarked police car he had been driving at Special Operations headquarters at Bustleton and Bowler Streets.
In his own car, on the way to Wohl’s apartment in Chestnut Hill, Payne had spotted the van. There was no way he could call for backup. In the very first time he
had ever attempted to exercise his authority as a police officer, Payne had walked up to the van.
The driver had then tried to run him over. Payne had jumped out of the way, but the van had wiped out the rear end of Payne’s Porsche 911 and then raced away.
Payne had fired five shots, all the cylinder of his snub-nosed Smith & Wesson Undercover held. One bullet, in what Jason Washington believed (and, more importantly, Payne realized) was blind luck, had struck the van driver in the back of the head.
The van had crashed into a tree. When Payne jerked the door open, he found the looney-tune’s next intended victim, already stripped naked and trussed up like a Christmas turkey, under a tarpaulin in the back.
When Police Radio had put out the beep beep beep, assist officer, shots fired, hospital case the second response had been “M-Mary One in on the shots fired.”
M-Mary One was the radio call assigned to Jerry Carlucci’s official Cadillac. The mayor had been on the way to his Chestnut Hill home after speaking at a dinner in South Philadelphia.
The lifelong cop in Jerry Carlucci could no more resist responding to an assist officer shots fired than he could pass up a chance to speak to a group of potential voters. Then, too, he sensed that there were a lot of voters out there who liked to see pictures in the newspapers, or on television, of their mayor at a crime scene, personally leading the war against crime.
Mickey O’Hara had also been working the streets that night. The next morning’s Bulletin had a three-column picture of Mayor Carlucci, standing so that the snub-nosed revolver on his belt was visible under his jacket, with his arm around Officer Payne’s shoulder. In the accompanying story by Michael J. O’Hara, Bulletin Staff Writer, Officer Payne was described by the mayor as both “administrative assistant” to Peter Wohl and as “the type of well-educated, dedicated, courageous young police officer” now, under his direction, being recruited for the Police Department.
The mayor’s description of Matt Payne as Wohl’s administrative assistant had erased any notions Wohl might have had to transfer Officer Payne someplace else.
He had joked about it to Washington: “Thank God for our mayor. I didn’t even know what an administrative assistant was, and now I have one.” But Washington sensed that Wohl was really not at all displeased.
For one thing, a “driver,” analogous to an aide-de-camp for a general officer in the military services, was a perquisite of inspectors, chief inspectors, and deputy commissioners. Wohl was only a staff inspector, but he was also the only division commanding officer who was not at least an inspector. Before the mayor’s off-the-cuff designation of Matt Payne as his “administrative assistant,” Wohl had not had a driver, and there would have been cracks about delusions of glory from the corps of inspectors and chief inspectors, more than a few of whom thought they should have been given command of Special Operations, if he had asked for one.
But most important, Washington thought, was that Wohl needed not only a driver, but one like Matt Payne. It may have sounded like bullshit when The Dago said it for the papers, but Washington could find nothing wrong with the notion of young police officers who were in fact well educated, dedicated, and courageous.
“Detective D’Amata said it was ‘high noon at the OK Corral’ at the furniture store,” Matt Payne said.
There he goes again. “Detective D’Amata,” said with respect, instead of just D’Amata, or for that matter “Joe.” Joe D’Amata would not be at all annoyed to be called by his first name by Matt. So far as D’Amata’s concerned, Matt stopped being a rookie when he shot the serial rapist.
“Meaning what?”
“He said the doers really shot the place up. He said they found twenty-six bullets.”
“There was a gun battle?”
“No. That’s what he said was interesting. They just shot off their guns. Not even the victim had a gun.”
