Pekach shook his head no, then asked with raised eyebrows if Wohl wanted him to close the door. Wohl nodded that he did.
"I just finished talking to Chief Coughlin and the Commissioner," Wohl said, deciding in that moment not to mention Mayor Jerry Carlucci.
"I thought maybe they would call," David Pekach said, dryly.
"In addition to everything else," Wohl said, "they both seem personally concerned and very upset with me about whatever the hell is going on with this Peebles woman. She was burgled again last night."
"I heard."
"I put your two hotshots, McFadden and Martinez, on the job. They're looking for-"
Pekach's nod of understanding told Wohl that Pekach knew about that, so he stopped. "The way they tackled the job, unless I am very wrong, was to take young Payne out there down to the FOP and get him fallingdown drunk."
"I don't know," Pekach said, loyally. "They were always pretty reliable."
"They didn't find the guy-the actor, the boyfriend of the Peebles woman's brother-that I know," Wohl said.
"You want me to talk to them?"
"No. I'll talk to them. I want you to go talk to Miss Peebles."
"What?"
"You go over there right now," Wohl said. "And you ooze sympathy, and do whatever you have to do to convince her that we are very embarrassed that this has happened to her again, and that we are going to take certain steps to make absolutely sure it doesn't happen again."
"What certain steps?"
"We are going to put-call it a stakeout team-on her property from sunset to sunrise."
"You lost me there," Pekach confessed. "Where are you going to get a stakeout team? I mean, my God, if it gets in the paper that you're using manpower to stake out a third-rate burglary site…"
"Martinez, McFadden, and Hungover Harry out there," Wohl said, "The wages of sin are death, David. I'm surprised you haven't learned that."
Pekach chuckled. "Okay," he said.
"And you will tell Miss Peebles that a Highway Patrol car will drive past her house not less than once every half hour during the same hours. Then you will tell your shift Lieutenant to set that up, and to tell the guys in the car that they not only are to drive by, but they are to drive into the driveway, making a lot of noise, and slamming the car doors when they get out of the car, so that Miss Peebles, when she looks in curiosity out her window, will see two uniformed officers waving their flashlights around in the bushes."
"That'd spook the guy who's doing this to her," Pekach argued.
"I hope so," Wohl said. "I don't want another burglary at that address on the Overnight Report on the Commissioner's desk tomorrow morning."
"Okay," Pekach said, doubtfully, "you're the boss."
"I'm not going to tell Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson this, David," Wohl said. "But I think they're right. I think the doer is the brother's boyfriend. When they're not sitting outside her house, I want them to keep looking for him. Got the picture?"
"Like I said, you're the boss. You're more devious than I would have thought…"
"I'll interpret that as a compliment," Wohl said. "And as devious as I am, I will frankly tell you that the success of this operation will hinge on how well you can charm the lady."
"Then why don't you go charm her?"
"Because I am the commanding officer, and that sort of thing is beneath my dignity," Wohl said, solemnly.
Pekach smiled.
"I'll charm the pants off the lady, boss," he said.
"Figuratively speaking, of course, Captain?"
"I don't know. What does she look like?"
"I don't know," Wohl said.
"Then I don't know about the pants," Pekach said. "I'll let you know how well I do."
"Just the highlights, please, Captain. None of the sordid details."
SEVENTEEN
Captain David Pekach was tempted to go see both the Captain of Northwest Detectives and the Captain of the Fourteenth District before going to call on the Peebles woman, but finally decided against it. He knew that his success as the new Highway Captain depended in large measure on how well Highway got along with the Detective Bureau and the various Districts. And he was fully aware that there was a certain resentment toward Highway on the part of the rest of the Department, and especially on the part of detectives and uniformed District cops.
He had seen, several times, and as recently as an hour before, what he thought was the wrong reaction to theLedger editorial calling Highway "the Gestapo." This morning, he had heard a Seventh District uniformed cop call"Achtung!" when two Highway cops walked into the building, and twice he had actually seen uniformed cops throw a straight-armed salute mockingly at Highway Patrolmen.
It was all done in jest, of course, but David Pekach was enough of an amateur psychologist to know that there is almost always a seed of genuine resentment when a wife zings her husband, or a cop zings another cop. After he had a few words with the cop who had called" Achtung," and the two cops who had thrown the Nazi salutes, he didn't think they would do it again. With a little luck, the word would quickly spread that the new Highway Commander had a temper that had best not be turned on.
He understood the resentment toward Highway. Some of it was really unjustified, and could be attributed to simple jealousy. Highway had special uniforms, citywide jurisdiction, and the well-earned reputation of leaving the less pleasant chores of police work, especially domestic disputes, to District cops. Highway RPCs, like all other RPCs, carried fire hydrant wrenches in their trunks. When the water supply ran low, or water pressure dropped, as it did when kids turned on the hydrants to cool off in the summer, the word went out to turn the hydrants off.
David Pekach could never remember having seen a Highway cop with a hydrant wrench in his hand, and he had seen dozens of Highway cars roll blithely past hydrants pouring water into the streets, long after the kids who had turned it on had gone in for supper, or home for the night. That sort of task, and there were others like it-a long list beginning with rescuing cats from trees and going through such things as chasing boisterous kids from storefronts and investigating fenderbenders-was considered too menial to merit the attention of the elite Highway Patrol.
The cops who had to perform these chores naturally resented the Highway cops who didn't do their fair share of them, and Highway cops, almost as a rule, managed to let the District cops know that Highway was something special, involved inreal cop work, while their backward, non-elite brothers had to calm down irate wives and get their uniforms soaked turning off fire hydrants.
So far as the detectives were concerned, it was nearly Holy Writ among them that if Highway reached a crime scene before the detectives did, Highway could be counted on to destroy much of the evidence, usually by stomping on it with their motorcyclists' boots. Lieutenant Pekach of Narcotics had shared that opinion.
One of his goals, now that he had Highway, was to improve relations between Highway and everybody else, and he didn't think a good way to do that would be to visit Northwest Detectives and the Fourteenth District to ask about the Peebles burglaries. They would, quite understandably, resent it. It would be tantamount to coming right out and saying"since you ordinary cops can't catch the doer in a thirdrate burglary, Highway is here to show you how real cops do it!"
And, David Pekach knew, Peter Wohl had already been to both the Fourteenth District and Northwest Detectives. Wohl could get away with it, if only because he outranked the captains. And Wohl, in Pekach's judgment, was a good cop, and if there had been anything not in the reports, he would have picked up on it and said something.
But Pekach did get out the reports, which he had already read, and he read them again very carefully before getting into his car and driving over to Chestnut Hill.