The two had received their commendations from Mayor Carlucci himself, which had caused their photographs to be plastered all over the front pages of all the newspapers in Philadelphia except the Ledger, and thus effectively burning them from further duty as undercover narcs.
It wouldn't have been fair, under those circumstances, to send the two of them out to a district to turn off fire hydrants in the summer, transport prisoners, and do the other things that other rookies with an out-of-the-Academy undercover narcotics assignment usually did after they were burned.
Chief Inspector Dennis V. Coughlin had arranged for their assignment to Highway Patrol, considered the elite of the uniformed force. Normally, police officers couldn't even apply for transfer to Highway unless they had at least five very good years on the job elsewhere.
They'd taken the examination for detective as soon as they were eligible. Martinez had placed two spots below Matt Payne, and McFadden two spots above the cutoff point at the bottom on the rankings.
They had to be considered outstanding young police of ficers, Staff Inspector Weisbach thought. And while there was no question in his mind that they were both straight arrows, there was something very disturbing to him in their matter-of-fact acceptance that it was perfectly acceptable-if admittedly illegal-police procedure to take drugs from evidence with the intention of using them to pay informers. That the end, so to speak, justified the means.
He was not morally outraged-he had been a policeman too long for that-but it bothered him.
"You think something like that happened, McFadden?" he asked.
"I don't think anybody, any dirty cop, starts out by saying, 'Fuck it, today I start being dirty.' They have to have some reason, something that makes it all right. Tell themselves, for example, 'Just this one time, when I make this car payment, that'll be the end of it. I'll never do it again.' "
"If you're right, and I think you may be, that doesn't explain how the whole Five Squad went bad," Weisbach said.
"Are we sure they're all dirty?" Martinez asked.
"If they're not all actually involved," Washington said, "I find it difficult to accept that anyone on Five Squad is not fully aware of what the others are doing."
"Cops don't snitch on other cops?" McFadden replied.
Washington nodded.
"Not unless their option is, their own innocence aside, going down with the others," Tony Harris said. "Maybe the way to get into this is to find the one guy-if there is one-who is not dirty."
"How do we find him, Tony?" Weisbach asked.
"Easy. He's the one who doesn't have money he shouldn't have," Harris said.
"Well, that's where we're going to begin. With money," Weisbach said. "We're going to see if anybody on the Five Squad has been spending-or saving-more money than seems reasonable on what the department is paying him. Frankly, I would be surprised if we can quickly, or easily, come up with something. If, on the first go-around, we can find anything suspicious at all."
"I don't understand, Inspector," Matt Payne said.
"I think one of the things we all have to keep in mind, Payne, is that although Internal Affairs hasn't been given this job specifically, that doesn't mean they're incompetent, or stupid. They're always looking for signs of unusual affluence, and I would suspect they look closest at cops in jobs where taking bribes, or doing something else illegal, would be more likely. I'm sure they routinely check Narcotics people, is what I'm saying. And they didn't find anything suspicious, or else they would have started their own investigation. Chief Coughlin tells me Internal Affairs was not conducting any kind of a specific investigation of anybody in Narcotics before we got this job.
"What I think that could mean is-presuming some members of Five Squad are dirty-that they are also too smart to go out and buy a new Buick in their own name, or a condo at the shore, or put money in their own bank account. You still with me?"
"Yes, sir."
"Well, we-and by 'we' I mean McFadden and Jesus and Tiny-are going to go through the motions of looking for unexplained amounts of money. I expect a thorough job. I would be delighted if they don't find unexplainable money and prove me wrong. Call that the first go-around. And while they're doing that, Payne, you're going to come up with a database of names of people in whose names Buicks and condos, et cetera, could be bought. Still with me?"
"No, sir. Sorry."
"Relatives. Friends. A brother-in-law. You want to buy a condo at the shore and you don't want to attract Internal Affairs attention, so you give your brother-in-law or your uncle Charley the money, and he buys the condo at the shore. Or you put the money in his bank account. Got it?"
"Where do I start?"
"Start with personnel records. Sergeant Sandow can set that up for you. At night, Elliot. I don't want it to get out that somebody from Special Operations or Ethical Affairs is checking personnel records."
"Yes, sir," Sergeant Sandow said.
"That'll give us some names to start with," Weisbach went on. "I don't want to start ringing doorbells until we have to. We can't afford to have somebody say, 'Hey, Charley, there was a cop here asking questions about you.' "
"Yes, sir," Payne said.
"Your first job, though, Payne, is the tapes. We need them transcribed, the sooner the better. Sandow will see that everybody gets a copy. Then I want everybody, individually, to try to make sense of them. Then we'll get together and brainstorm them. I want a brainstorm session every day or so. We all have to know what everybody else is doing, and maybe somebody will be able to make sense out of something the other guy doesn't understand."
He looked around the room.
"Any questions?"
No one had any questions.
SEVEN
When, accompanied by a discreet ping, one of the buttons on his telephone lit up, a look of mingled annoyance and resignation flickered on and off the face of Brewster Cortland Payne II.
The telephone would not have, as he thought of it, pinged, had not Mrs. Irene Craig, his silver-haired, stylish, fiftyish secretary, been quite sure he would want to take the call. Irene had been his secretary-and confidante and friend-from the moment he had joined his father's law firm fresh from law school. She had been the first employee of B. C. Payne, Lawyer, when he had started out on his own, and their law offices had been two small and dark rooms in a run-down building on South Tenth Street.
The law offices of Mawson, Payne, Stockton, McAdoo amp; Lester now occupied all of the eleventh floor and most of the twelfth floor of the Philadelphia Savings Fund Society Building on Market Street, east of Broad, and as befitted the executive secretary to the managing partner of what had arguably become Philadelphia's most prestigious law firm, Mrs. Craig's annual compensation exceeded that of seventy percent of the lawyers in Philadelphia.
She had other duties, of course, but she-quite correctly-regarded her primary function as the management of her employer's time, which included putting only those telephone calls through to him that she believed he not only would want to, but should, deal with himself.
A half hour before, she had been asked to bring him a pot of coffee and then to see that he wasn't disturbed. Under that circumstance, Mr. Payne knew Mrs. Craig would normally put through only a call from the president of the United States offering to nominate him for the position of chief justice of the United States Supreme Court, or from his wife. Everybody else would be asked if he could return their call.
He picked up the telephone.
"Brewster Payne," he said.
"Sorry to bother you," Mrs. Craig said, "but Armando C. Giacomo, Esquire, is on the line, begging for a brief moment of your time."
"The Colonel's not here?"
"I tried that. Manny wants to speak with you."
The Colonel was J. Dunlop Mawson, Esq., the other founding partner of Mawson, Payne, Stockton, McAdoo amp; Lester, who had served as a lieutenant colonel, Judge Advocate General's Corps, U.S. Army, and loved the sound of that rank.