getting noisily concerned about-problem, and Congress had reacted in its usual way by throwing the taxpayers’ money at it.
Cash grants were made available to local police departments to experiment with a new concept of law enforcement, This was called the Anti-Crime Team concept, which carried with it the acronym ACT. It meant the flooding of high-crime areas with well-trained policemen, equipped with the very latest equipment and technology, and teamed with special assigned prosecutors within the District Attorney’s Office who would push the arrested quickly through the criminal justice system.
The grants were based on need. Philadelphia qualified on a need basis on two accounts. Crime was indeed a major problem in Philadelphia, and Philadelphia needed help. Equally important, the Hon. Jerry Carlucci was a political force whose influence extended far beyond the Mayor’s office. Two Senators and a dozen or more Congressmen seeking continued employment needed Jerry Carlucci’s influence.
Some of the very first, and most generous, grants were given to the City of Philadelphia. There was a small caveat. Grant money was to be used solely for new, innovative, experimental police operations, not for routine police expenditures. So far as Mayor Carlucci was concerned, the Special Operations Division was new, innovative and experimental. The federal grants could thus legally be, and were, expended on the pay of police officers transferred to Special Operations for duty as Anti-Crime Team police, and for their new and innovative equipment, which of course included new, specially equipped police cars. Since it was, of course, necessary to incorporate the new and innovative ACT personnel and equipment into the old and non-innovative Police Department, federal grant funds could be used for this purpose.
Until investigators from the General Accounting Office had put a stop to it, providing the Highway Patrol, in its new, innovative, and experimental role as a subordinate unit of the new, innovative, and experimental Special Operations Division, with new cars had been, in Mayor Carlucci’s opinion, a justifiable expenditure of federal grant funds.
More senior police officers, lieutenants and above, usually, the “white shirts,” who understood that money was money, and that if extra money from outside bought Special Operations and Highway cars, then the money which would ordinarily have to eventually be spent for that purpose could be spent elsewhere in the Department, were not as resentful. But this rationale was not very satisfying to a cop in a district whose battered radio patrol car wouldn’t start at three o’clock in the morning.
Detective Payne went to a row of eight new, unmarked Ford sedans, which so far as the federal government was concerned were involved in new, innovative, and experimental activities under the ACT concept, and got in one of them. It was one of four such cars assigned to the Investigation Section. Sergeant Jason Washington had one, and Detective Tony Harris the second, on an around the-clock basis. The two other cars were shared by the others of the Investigation Section.
He drove out of the parking lot and headed up Castor Avenue toward Hunting Park Avenue. He turned off Hunting Park Avenue onto Ninth Street and off Ninth Street onto the ramp for the Roosevelt extension of the Schuylkill Express way, and then turned south toward the Schuylkill River.
At the first traffic light, he took one of the two microphones mounted just about out of sight under the dash.
“Mary One, William Fourteen.”
“You have something for me, Fourteen?” Lieutenant Jack Fellows’s voice came back immediately.
“Right.”
“Where are you now?”
“Just left Special Operations.”
There was a moment’s hesitation as Lieutenant Fellows searched his memory for time-and distance.
“Meet us at the Zoo parking lot,” he said.
“On the way,” Matt said, and dropped the microphone onto the seat.
Then he reached down and threw a switch which caused both the brake lights and the blue and white lights concealed behind the grille of the Ford to flash, and stepped hard on the accelerator.
The Mayor is a busy man. He doesn’t have the time to waste sitting at the Zoo parking lot waiting for a lowly detective. This situation clearly complies with the provisions of paragraph whatever the hell it is of Police Administrative Regulations restricting the use of warning lights and sirens to those clearly necessary situations.
There were a number of small pleasures involved with being a policeman, and one of them, Matt Payne had learned, was being able to turn on warning lights and the siren when you had to get somewhere in a hurry.
He had thought of this during dinner the previous evening, during a somewhat acrimonious discussion of his- their-future with Miss Penelope Detweiler.
It was her position (and that of Mr. and Mrs. Chadwick Thomas Nesbitt IV, who allied themselves with Miss Detweiler in the Noble Cause of Talking Common Sense to Matt) that it was childish and selfish of him, with his education, potential, and background, to remain a policeman, working for peanuts, when he should be thinking of their future.
He had known that it would not have been wise to have offered the argument “Yeah, but if I’m not a cop, I won’t be able to race down Roosevelt Boulevard with the lights on.” She would have correctly decided that he was simply being childish again.
There were other satisfactions in being a policeman, but for some reason, he seemed to become instantly inarticulate whenever he tried to explain them to her. In his own mind, he knew that he had been a policeman long enough so that it was in his blood, and he would never be happy at a routine job.
He reached the Schuylkill River, crossed it, and turned east toward Center City. Then he reached down and turned off the flashing lights. The traffic wasn’t that heavy, and if Mary One, the mayoral limousine, beat him to the Zoo parking lot, he wasn’t entirely sure if the Mayor would agree with his decision that turning on the lights was justified.
From what he’d heard of the Mayor’s career as a police man, he’d been a really by-the-book cop.
When he got to the Zoo parking lot, he stopped and picked up his microphone.
“Mary One, William Fourteen, at the Zoo.”
“A couple of minutes,” Lieutenant Fellows’s voice came back.
Matt picked the envelope off the floor, and got out of the car and waited for the Mayor.
Two minutes later the limousine pulled up beside him. Matt walked to the front-seat passenger door as the window whooshed down and Lieutenant Fellows came into view.
“Good morning, sir,” Matt said, and handed him the envelope.
“Thank you, Payne,” Fellows said, and the window started back up. Then the rear window rolled down and he heard the Mayor of the City of Philadelphia order:
“Hold it a minute, Charley,” and then the rear door opened and the Mayor got out.
“Long time no see,” the Mayor said, offering his hand. “How are you, Matt?”
“Just fine, Mr. Mayor. Thank you.”
“Good to see you, Matt,” the Mayor said. “And say hello to your mother and dad for me.”
“Yes, sir. I will. Thank you.”
The Mayor patted his shoulder and got back in the limousine, and in a moment it rolled out of the parking lot.
EIGHT
Matt got back in the unmarked Ford and drove out of the Zoo parking lot, wondering where the hell he was going to find a drugstore and buy the razor he had been ordered to buy.
It had been nice of the Mayor, he thought, to get out of his car to say hello. It was easy to accuse the Mayor of being perfectly willing to wrap his arm around an orangutan and inquire as to the well-being of his parents if that would get him one more vote, but the truth, Matt realized, was that after he had wrapped his arm around your shoulder, it made you feel good, and you were not at all inclined to question his motives.
While it was said, and mostly believed, that the Mayor knew the name of every cop in the Department, this
