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“Do we know who?”
“Somebody special you wanted?”
“Detectives McFadden and Martinez,” Matt said.
“Mutt and Jeff?” Quaire asked. “Dignitary Protection isn’t quite their specialty, is it?”
Detective Jesus Martinez, who was of Puerto Rican ancestry, and who was five feet eight inches tall and weighed just over one hundred thirty pounds, and Detective Charles T. McFadden, who was six feet two and outweighed Martinez by a hundred pounds, had been partners since they had graduated from the Police Academy.
The first assignment for nearly all academy graduates was to a district, and almost always to a district wagon, where for their first year or so on the job, they learned the nuts and bolts of being a police officer on the street by responding with the wagon to assist other officers in everything from hauling Aunt Alice to the hospital after she’d fallen in her bathtub, to hauling drunks and other violators of the peace and dignity of the City of Brotherly Love to the district lockup.
Almost routinely, however, two brand-new police officers were assigned to work undercover in the Narcotics Division. McFadden and Martinez were chosen for the assignment in the hope that few drug dealers would suspect either the small, intense Latino or the large, open-faced South Philadelphia Irishman of being police officers when they tried to make a buy of controlled substances.
McFadden and Martinez quickly proved themselves to be very adept at what they were assigned to do. But their superiors realized it was only going to be a matter of time until they became known to the drug trade generally-in other words, their appearance in court to testify against the drug dealers- and would lose their usefulness.
At this point, it was expected the young officers would be assigned to a district and start driving the district wagon.
Something else happened: McFadden and Martinez had- on their own, off-duty-joined the citywide search for the junkie who had shot Captain Dutch Moffitt, of Highway Patrol, to death. In the belief that Gerald Vincent Gallagher would be somewhere in the area, they staked out the Bridge and Pratt Street terminal of the subway.
When Gallagher had finally shown up, he refused to obey their order to halt and had run off down the subway tracks. McFadden and Martinez-already known as “Mutt and Jeff,” after the cartoon characters-had chased him, ignoring the danger, down the tracks until Gallagher fell against the third rail and then got himself run over by a subway train.
In the movies, or in cops-and-robbers programs on TV, with the mayor and assorted big shots beaming in the background, the commissioner would have handed them detective badges and congratulations for a job well done. But this was real life, and promotions to detective in the Philadelphia police department came only after you had taken, and passed, the civil service examination. Martinez and McFadden hadn’t been on the job long enough even to be eligible to take the examination.
And their sudden celebrity-their faces had been on the front pages of every newspaper in Philadelphia, and on every TV screen-had of course completely destroyed their usefulness as undercover Narcotics officers.
It had looked as if their reward for catching the junkie who’d shot Captain Dutch Moffitt-something the rest of the police department hadn’t been able to do for an embarrassingly long period-was going to be reassignment to driving a wagon in a district.
It didn’t seem fair, but who said a cop’s life was fair? Life’s a bitch, and then you die.
At the same time, Cadet Matthew M. Payne, Captain Moffitt’s nephew, had been about to graduate from the Police Academy. In the opinion of then-Chief of Patrol Chief Inspector Dennis V. Coughlin, the chances that Matt Payne would last six months on the job-much less that the police department would be his career-ranged from zero to zilch.
Coughlin believed that Matt-whom he had known from the day of his birth-had reacted to (a) the death of his uncle and (b) his failure of the U.S. Marine Corps’ Pre-Commissioning Physical Examination by applying for the police department to (a) avenge his uncle and (b) prove his manhood.
It was understandable, of course, but the bottom line was that a summa cum laude graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, who had been raised not only in wealth but as the adopted son of a Philadelphia Brahmin, was very unlikely to find happiness walking a police beat. Worse, he was liable to get hurt.
Sergeant Dennis V. Coughlin had knocked at the door of his best friend’s pregnant wife to tell her that Sergeant Jack Moffitt had been killed responding to a silent alarm at a gas station in West Philadelphia.
Chief Inspector Coughlin had no intention of knocking at the door of Mrs. Patricia Moffitt Payne to tell her that her son-Jack’s son, his godson-Matt, had been killed in the line of duty.
And all of this had coincided with the formation, at the “suggestion” of the then-mayor of the City of Philadelphia, the Hon. Jerome H. “Jerry” Carlucci, of the Special Operations Division of the police department.
Mayor Carlucci, who boasted that he had held every rank in the Philadelphia police department except for policewoman, had not been at all bashful about making suggestions about the department to then-Police Commissioner Taddeus Czernich.
Mayor Carlucci had also “suggested” to Commissioner Czernich that he consider Staff Inspector Peter F. Wohl, then assigned to Internal Affairs, to be the commanding officer of the new Special Operations Division. Commissioner Czernich had immediately seen the wisdom of the suggestions, and issued the appropriate orders.
Peter Wohl was then the youngest staff inspector-ever- in the department. It was well-known that his father, Chief Inspector (Retired) August Wohl, had been Jerry Carlucci’s rabbi as the mayor had risen through the ranks. But it was also well-known that Peter Wohl was a hell of a good cop, an absolutely straight arrow, and smarter than hell, so the cries of nepotism were not as loud as they might have been.
Coughlin, the then-chief inspector, had solved the problem of what to do with Officers Martinez, McFadden, and Payne by ordering their assignment to Special Operations.
In a private chat with then-Staff Inspector Wohl, he suggested that in his new command Wohl would probably be able to find places where Officers Martinez and McFadden could be useful in plainclothes, and that Officer Payne could probably make himself useful as Wohl’s administrative assistant, until he realized the mistake he had made by coming on the job, and quit and got on with his life.
Wohl had accepted Coughlin’s suggestions with as much alacrity as the commissioner had accepted the mayor’s suggestions. He was wise enough to know that he had very little choice in the matter. His rabbi had spoken.
Finding useful employment for Martinez and McFadden had posed no problem. Wohl had been pleasantly surprised how well they had performed in interviews with suspects. Between them, they had seemed to know when they were not being told the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, and then one or the other of them had been able to get it.
When they played Good Cop/Bad Cop, Martinez had been very effective as the frightening arm of the law, and McFadden, despite his size, as the kindly young Irishman who understood what had happened and wanted only to help.
Officer Payne had, not surprising Wohl, been an efficient administrative assistant-sort of a male secretary-from the first day. Wohl, who agreed with Chief Coughlin that Payne would leave the job just as soon as he realized that he really belonged in law school, as the next step on the ladder to an eventual partnership in Mawson, Payne, Stockton, McAdoo amp; Lester, arguably Philadelphia’s most prestigious law firm, was surprised to realize that he was actually going to miss him when he was gone.
