Things were getting pretty close to the end, and he didn’t want to blow the whole damned thing because one of the Vice scumbags-they were, after all, cops-spotted the unmarked Ford on the street, or in the alley behind the Bellvue-Stratford, where he had planned to leave it, and started wondering what it was doing around the hotel at that hour of the night.
Tony Harris was not a very impressive man physically. He was a slight and wiry man of thirty-six, already starting to bald, his face already starting to crease and line. His shirt collar and the cuffs of his sports jacket were frayed, his tie showed evidence of frequent trips to the dry cleaners, his trousers needed to be pressed, and his shoes needed both a shine and new heels.
He enjoyed, however, the reputation among his peers of being one of the best detectives in the Philadelphia Police Department, where for nine of his fifteen years on the job he had been assigned to the Homicide Unit. It had taken him five years on the job to make it to Homicide-an unusually short time-and he would have been perfectly satisfied to spend the rest of his time there. Eighteen months ago, over his angry objections, he had been transferred to the Special Operations Division.
He had mixed emotions about what he was doing now. Bad guys are supposed to be bad guys, not fellow cops, not guys you knew for a fact were-or at least had been-good cops.
On one hand, now that he had been forced to think about it, he was and always had been a straight arrow. And just about all of his friends were straight arrows. He personally had never taken a dime. Even when he was fresh out of the Academy, walking a beat in the Twenty-third District, he had been made uncomfortable when merchants had given him hams and turkeys and whiskey at Christmas.
Taking a ham or a turkey or a bottle of booze at Christmas wasn’t really being on the take, but even then, when he was walking a beat, he had drawn the line at taking cash, refusing with a smile the offer of a folded twenty-dollar bill or an envelope with money in it.
There was something wrong, he thought, in a cop taking money for doing his job.
What these sleazeballs were doing was taking money, big-time money, for not doing their jobs. Worse, for doing crap behind their badges they knew goddamned well was dirty.
That was one side-they were dirty, and they deserved whatever was going to happen to them.
The other side was, they were cops, brother officers, and doing what he was doing made him uncomfortable.
When Tony had been on the sauce, brother officers had turned him loose a half-dozen times when they would have locked up a civilian for drunken driving, or belting some guy in a bar and making a general asshole of himself.
It wasn’t, in other words, like he was Mr. Pure himself.
Washington, Sergeant Jason Washington, his longtime partner in Homicide, and now his supervisor, was Mr. Pure. And so was Inspector Wohl, who was running this job. About the only thing they had ever taken because they were wearing a badge was the professional courtesy they got from a brother officer who stopped them for speeding.
And the kids he was supervising now were pure too. Payne would never take money because he didn’t have to, he was rich, and Lewis was pure because he’d got that from his father. Lieutenant Foster H. Lewis, Jr., was so pure and such a straight arrow that they made jokes about it; said that he would turn himself in if he got a goober stuck in his throat and had to spit on the sidewalk.
Tony knew that what he was doing was right, and that it had to be done. He just wished somebody else was doing it.
He entered the Bellvue-Stratford Hotel by the side entrance on Walnut Street, into the cocktail lounge. He stood just inside the door long enough to check for a familiar face at the bar, and then, after walking through it, checked the lobby before walking quickly across to the bank of elevators. He told the operator to take him to twelve.
He tried the key he had to 1204, but it was latched-as it should have been-from inside, and he had to wait until Officer Foster H. Lewis, Jr., who was an enormous black kid, six three, two hundred twenty, two hundred thirty even, came to it and peered through the cracked door and then closed it to take the latch off and let him in.
When he opened the door, Lewis was walking quickly across the room to the window, a set of earphones on his head still connected by a long coiled cord to one of the two reel-to-reel tape recorders set up on the chest of drawers.
“What’s going on, Tiny?” Harris asked, and then before Lewis could reply, “Where’s Payne?”
Tiny replied by pointing, out the window and up.
Harris crossed the room, noticing as he did a room-service cart with a silver pot of coffee and what looked like the leftovers from a room-service steak dinner.
Payne, of course. It wouldn’t occur to him to take a quick trip to McDonald’s or some other fast-food joint and bring a couple of hamburgers and some paper cups full of coffee to the room. He’s in a hotel room, call room service and order up a couple of steaks, medium rare. Fuck what it costs.
Detective Tony Harris looked out the window and saw Detective Matthew M. Payne.
“Jesus H. Christ!” he exclaimed. “What the fuck does he think he’s doing?”
“The lady opened the window,” Officer Lewis replied, “which dislodged the suction cup.”
“Did she see the wire?” Harris wondered out loud, and was immediately sorry he had.
Dumb question. If she had seen the wire, Payne would not be standing on a twelve-inch ledge thirteen floors up, trying to put the suction cup back on the window.
“I don’t think so,” Tiny said.
“Did we get anything?”
“If we had a movie camera instead of just a microphone, we would have a really blue movie,” Tiny Lewis said.
“Is he crazy or what, to try that?”
“I told him he was. He said he could do it.”
“How did he get out there?”
“There have been no lights in Twelve Sixteen all night. Two doors down from Twelve Eighteen. He said he thought he could get in.”
“You mean pick the lock?” Harris asked, and again without giving Officer Lewis a chance to reply, went on. “What if someone had seen him in the corridor?”
“For one thing, from what was coming over the wire before the lady knocked the mike off, we didn’t think the Lieutenant was quite ready to go home to his wife and kiddies, and for another, Matt’s wearing a hotel-maintenance uniform, and says he doesn’t think the Lieutenant knows him anyway.”
“Yeah, but what if he had?”
“He’s got it!” Lewis said.
He took the earphones from his head and held them out to Tony Harris.
Harris took them and put them on.
The sounds of sexual activity made Harris uncomfortable.
“I’ve been wondering if the fact that I find some of that rather exciting makes me a pervert,” Tiny said.
“We’re trying to catch him with one of the mobsters, not with his cock in some hooker’s mouth.”
“Unfortunately, at the moment, all we have is him and the lady. Maybe Martinez and Whatsisname will get lucky when they relieve us,” Tiny said, and then added: “He’s back inside. I agree with you, that was crazy.”
“Your pal is crazy,” Harris said.
“I think he prefers to think of it as devotion to duty,” Tiny said. “You know, ‘Neither heat, nor rain, nor thirteen stories off the ground will deter this courier…’”
“Oh, shit,” Harris said, chuckling. “I’d never try something like that.”
“Neither would I. But I don’t want to be Police Commissioner before I’m forty.”
Harris looked at him and smiled.
“You think that’s what he wants? Really?”
“I don’t know. Sometimes I think he’s just playing cop…”