"Stop, Foster!" Mrs. Lewis said. "Not one more word!"
"What's the matter with you?"
"You know damned well what's the matter. You are not going to needle him the rest of his life about not being a doctor! He wants to be a cop. What's wrong with that? I'm married to a cop. You should be proud that he wants to do what you do!"
Lieutenant Lewis looked at Officer Lewis.
"The lady used profane language, Officer Lewis. Did you pick up on that?"
"Yes, sir. I heard her."
"I guess that means she's serious, huh?"
"Yes, sir, I guess it does."
"Then maybe you and I better get another beer and go in the living room until she calms down, what do you think?"
"I think that's a fine idea, sir."
"Don't try to make a joke of it, Foster. I meant every word I said!"
"I somehow had the feeling you did," Lieutenant Foster said.
When Chief Inspectors Dennis V. Coughlin and Matthew Lowenstein and Staff Inspector Peter Wohl filed into the Commissioner's Conference room at eight-ten the next morning, The Honorable Jerry Carlucci, Mayor of the City of Brotherly Love, was already there, his back to them, looking out the window, supporting himself on both hands.
Commissioner Taddeus Czernick, holding a cup of coffee in his hands, stood by the open door to his office. Coughlin, Lowenstein and Wohl stood behind chairs at the table, waiting for the Mayor to turn around.
He took his time in doing so, prompting each of them, privately, to conclude that the first psychological warfare salvo had been fired.
Finally, he turned around.
"Good morning," he said. "I'm aware that all of you have busy schedules, and that in theory, I should be able to get from Commissioner Czernick all the details of whatever I would like to know. But since there seems to be some breakdown in communications, I thought it best to ask you to spare me a few minutes of your valuable time."
"Good morning, Mr. Mayor," Lowenstein said. "I'm sure I speak for all of us when I say I'm sorry you fell out of the wrong side of the bed this morning."
Carlucci glared at him for a moment.
"Oh, for Christ's sake, sit down, all of you," he said. "I know you' re doing your best." He looked at Czernick. "Can we get some coffee in here, Tad?"
"Yes, sir. There's a fresh pot."
"I was reading the overnights," the Mayor said. "Did you notice that some wiseass painted'Free The Goldblatt's Six' on a wall at the University?"
"Those villains we have," Coughlin said.
"No kidding?"
"The railroad cops caught three of them doing it again on the Pennsy Main Line right of way. You know those great big granite blocks where the tracks go behind the stadium? They had lowered themselves on ropes. Two they caught hanging there. They squealed on the third one."
"Who were they?"
"College kids. Wiseasses."
"The judge ought to make them clean it off with a toothbrush," Carlucci said. "But that's wishful thinking."
"Mike Sabara told me when I called him just before I came here that there's 'ILA' painted all over North Philadelphia," Wohl said. "I don' t think that's college kids, and I would like to know who did that."
"What do you mean?"
"How much of it is spontaneous, and how much was painted by the people who issued those press releases."
"Let's talk about the ILA," Carlucci said. "Now that it just happened to come up. What do we know today about them that we didn't know yesterday?"
"Not a goddamn thing," Coughlin said. "I was over at Intelligence yesterday. They don't have a damned thing, and it's not for want of trying."
"They're harassing Monahan. And for that matter, Payne, too. Telephone calls to Goldblatt's from the time they open the doors until they close."
"What about at his house?" Carlucci asked.
"Telephone calls. The same kind they're making to Matt Payne's apartment."
"Driving by Monahan's house? Anything like that?"
"Nothing that we've been able to get a handle on. Nobody hanging around, driving by more than once."
"What have you got on Monahan, at his house?"
"Three uniformed officers in an unmarked car. One of the three is always walking around."
"Supervised by who?"
"A lieutenant named Jack Malone. He came to Special Operations from Major Crimes."
"Where he got the nutty idea that Bob Holland is a car thief," the mayor said. "I know all about Malone. Is he the man for the job, Peter? This whole thing would go down the toilet if we lose Monahan as a witness, or lose him, period. Christ, what that bastard Nelson and hisLedger would do to me if that happened."
"Malone strikes me, Mr. Mayor, as a pretty good cop who unfortunately has had some personal problems."
The mayor looked at Wohl for a moment and then said. "Okay. If you say so. You say they're harassing Payne? How? What's going on with him?"
"He has an apartment on the top floor of the Delaware Val ley Cancer Society Building on Rittenhouse Square. There's an underground garage with a Holmes rent-a-cop at the entrance, and, during the day, there's a Holmes rent-a-cop in the lobby. There's a pretty good burglar alarm system. We have an officer wearing a Holmes uniform, replacing the Holmes guy, in the garage at night."
"That's all?"
"And we have somebody with Payne all the time."
"Two of them are those kids from Narcotics who ran down the punk who shot Dutch Moffitt," Chief Inspector Coughlin said. "McFadden and Martinez. They're friends, and in regular clothes. We don't want to give the impression that we're-"
"Baby-sitting a cop, huh?" the mayor interrupted. "I get the point."
"They call him, these sleaze-bags," Wohl said, "every fifteen minutes or so. Say something dirty, and hang up. No time to trace the call."
He took a tape cassette from his pocket and held it up.
"What's that?"
"A recording of the calls," Wohl said. "I'm going to take it to the lab."
"That sounds as if we're chasing our tails," the mayor said. "What do they hope to find?"
"We're trying everything we can think of, Mr. Mayor," Wohl said.
"Sometime yesterday afternoon, they got to his car," Coughlin said. " Slashed the tires, and did a job with a knife or a key, or something on the paint job."
"And nobody saw anything?" the mayor said, unpleasantly.
"All we can do is guess," Wohl said.
"So guess."
"Somebody came in the front door during business hours, rode the elevator down to the garage, slashed the tires, etcetera-the car is parked right by the elevator, it wouldn't have taken more than thirty seconds, a minute, tops-got back on the elevator, rode back to the lobby floor and walked out."
"The rent-a-cop in the garage didn't see anything?"
"He can't see where the car is parked."
"I don't suppose anybody bothered to check the car for prints, call the lab people?"
"I did, Mr. Mayor," Wohl said. "They took some pictures, too. Should I have them send you a set?"
"No, Peter, thank you. They would just make me sick to my stomach. I don't like these people thumbing their noses at the cops."
They all knew Jerry Carlucci well enough to recognize the signals of an impending eruption, and they all waited for it to come. It was less violent, however, than any of them expected.
"Okay. Now I'll tell you what's going to happen," he said, and pointed his finger at Dennis V. Coughlin. "You, Denny-and this should in no way be construed as a suggestion that Wohl isn't doing the job right, but he's a Staff Inspector and you're a Chief-are going to go to Intelligence and Organized Crime and light a fire under them. I said before and I'm saying now that these clowns didn't wake up one morning and say, 'Okay, today we're the Islamic Liberation Army, we're going to go out and make fools of the police and incidentally stick up a furniture store.' They came from somewhere, and I want to know where, and I want to know who the other ones of them are, the ones issuing these goddamned press releases."